An interview with a missionary in 1990s Malawi

Sarah and I had grown up in the church. We had married at 19, never left Europe, and, from the outside, we were everything you would expect from moderate 26-year-old Christians living in England’s South East. It was, however, the 1990s, and like many of our peers we had fallen in love with the idea of living overseas. It was our minister who first asked if we had considered being missionaries.

What followed was a tumble of logistics, paperwork and six months of preparatory training supposed to equip us with the religious basics we’d need. It was a whirlwind of a time and when the day came for us to be allocated we were told: “three years in Malawi.”

We knew we wouldn’t be able to afford our own tickets home during that time so packing our life’s belongings into three plastic shipping barrels felt very one-way. But as we stepped off the plane into the great unknown I remember excitement batting my nervousness away. It took us most of that first day to reach Malindi, our small village on the edge of Lake Malawi, but finally we had arrived.

My first impression of the village was just the incredible depth of the dark. There was no moonlight, no streetlights, and no electricity – it turned out the village had been cut off for not paying its bills – and the only things we could sense that evening were a fire in the distance, the silhouettes of small huts, and the sound of waves rippling.

In those early days, we established our work was not always on matters of faith. I managed the village workshop which dealt with infrastructure and odd jobs, and Sarah taught at the local school. I was also put in charge of the village pottery and its nineteen employees, which felt optimistic considering I had no prior artistic training. Yet aided by the ‘Chichewa’ language classes we had before we left England, we all learned to muddle through.

One word in particular – mzungu – meaning ‘white man’ followed us from the moment we arrived. The day people stopped shouting mzungu and started calling out ‘Friswello’, an affectionate play on our surname ‘Friswell’, was the day we knew we had been accepted into village life.

Of course there were times when it was difficult. We missed friends and family and wrote over 1,000 letters home, and then there were the days when the electricity would suddenly cut out or the night when someone tried to break into our home. This was one of those surreal evenings, because we had the only car in the village. So while the robbers ran off we drove to pick up the police, and it didn’t take long to catch up with the thieves or for the officers to restore the peace.

During our time in Malawi, I also developed Coeliac disease but it took going down to a specialist practice in South Africa – and losing three and a half stone in seven months – before we could receive the diagnosis. Looking back though, I remember the water pump was often my biggest source of grief. I would be called to fix the pump whenever the connection was lost to the village, two schools or medical clinic.

One day, diving in the lake to unblock the main pipe of reeds, I came up for air to find a hippo a foot away, staring straight at me. I knew that more people are killed by hippos in Africa than any other animal, so I didn’t have to think. I just dropped my tools and made for the shore. The problem was, the water still wasn’t fixed. When I returned, I was joined by men from the workshop, each armed with a small pile of stones. They assured me they would scare away the hippos, and the alligators – and at times like these you really felt a long way from home.

Despite the trials, Malindi became part of me and coming back to the UK was definitely harder than leaving. We cringed at the supermarkets stuffed with food and the way the English waste so many things. In Malawi we had a rubbish pit that was three foot cubed, and I don’t think it ever got more than two inches deep. Whenever we put something in, someone would fish it out, and the next thing you know your rubbish was part of some new contraption or play thing.

Today, the mainstream churches in the UK have pretty much stopped sending people overseas. While I understand it’s important to acknowledge our colonial history, sometimes it seems odd that we also have to stop so many positive things. Our friends in Malawi ask why the church no longer sends missionaries to help them. They say there is still a great need, and I think it’s true that there is a lot of good in living among, and working with, different cultures. We can learn a lot through reciprocity.

As to whether we were successful in bringing people into the faith – I guess that’s harder to say. I couldn’t give you a list of all those who have since been baptised or committed their lives to Christ since our visit but I don’t know if that was the point. We were there to serve the needs of the local church and our community, and for us, that was what was most important.

As told by Dave Friswell