Too Much Tyson

It's dark, it's late, we're tired, our car is broken, and we have no idea how to fix it. At the mechanics' direction, we rolled the dormant hunk of metal to a dirt area in front of a general store about twenty yards off the road.

Now, I think I was the one in the group most bothered by our situation in front of this general store, which is why I've been charged with writing this post. I admit that I tend to get a little paranoid, but I think objectively, this was not a good scene.

When we pulled up, there were a number of guys hanging around the general store drinking a local brand of firewater called Tyson. A handful of these was clearly drunk. One guy was doing a hip gyrating dance on the steps of the store. Another guy was stumbling around in a daze and slurring his speech.

We were now positioned inside a community of residences and little stores. The surrounding structures made us invisible from the road. So there we were from about 9:00 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.: a group of five muzungus -- one of which of Chinese heritage, which is even more exotic to Malawians -- in our fancy car with all of our money, passports, and other gear in the back, with a broken engine affording us no way to leave, in a tiny community about five miles outside a small town in a remote area of Northern Malawi, one of the five poorest countries in the world, surrounded by a number of guys who were getting piss drunk off of a local firewater, and situated in a spot where no one could see us from the road. What's the expression: like a keg of gun powder? I always screw up idiomatic expressions.

Anyway, I was comforted by the fact that we had Moya in our corner, who was very good with people. However, I feared that he could be easily overwhelmed. I had already gotten the sense that some people didn't take kindly to the fact that he was helping us. When we were still up on the side of the road, one guy came over to ask for money and Moya told him to keep on walking or something to that effect. While the guy was walking away he yelled to Moya in broken English (so that the rest of us could understand) something about how Moya thought that us white people were god. That exchange was in the forefront of my mind while I was watching Moya calm down a drunk guy who started jarring with one of the mechanics.

Luckily, nothing precipitated out of this potentially dangerous situation, but I was on edge the whole time. At one point, one of the drunk guys came to sit down on the step next to Mellissa and Katy. His balance failed him and he fell off the ledge. When Mellissa declared "too much Tyson," he asked her to repeat what she said. So she said it again. He started busting up laughing like this was the funniest thing he had ever heard in his whole life. Good. He's happy drunk.

So back to the car. The mechanics couldn't figure out what was wrong. They poked and prodded and turned the ignition but to no avail. Eventually they figured it was an electrical problem. Well, they weren't trained in electrical work but they knew a guy in town who was. Around 10:00 p.m. they gave this guy a call.

He showed up about forty-five minutes later with a crew of another three or four. They all looked at the car but couldn't figure out what was wrong. So we devised a plan: all of us except Dan would go back with the electrical mechanic's crew to find a place to stay in Rumphi for the night. One of the mechanics was going to grab a tow bar and return to tow the Hilux back to the mechanic's shop for more tests the next morning. Like the good captain of a sinking ship, Dan stayed behind with the car.

So Katy, Mellissa, Moya, Jon, and I hopped in the bed of a truck and headed back up the road to Rumphi.