Those two years in Northern Malawi as a VSO volunteer in 1999/2000 had been special. I was about to return after 15 years. At the time we were living in Kampala, Uganda. Over Christmas 2015 we had spent a great holiday in Zanzibar. At Dar es Salaam airport Cath and the boys headed back to Kampala and I took an internal flight down south to Mbeya. My flight to Mbeya landed in the late afternoon and by 9 pm I was in Kyela near the Malawi border town of Songwe. As we drove through the green hills of southern Tanzania the sun was setting orange. In the dark I could see the outlines of people on the road side and lights from houses and small shops. I sat back and thought about my upcoming adventure. It had been a long day, so after a quick plate of bus station rice and beans and a bucket of cold water over my head, I settle into my room at the Yondo Guest House. The bar next door is playing very loud music but as soon as my head hits the pillow it stops. When I get up Kyela is still closed. I jump in a shared taxi to the border. The driver is very keen to get going. He was obviously too keen as a few miles down the road he runs out of fuel. We sit back, laugh and wonder how this could happen. The driver runs off up the road with his jerry can to find just enough to limp into the nearest petrol station. It is early and the border has just opened. The immigration officials are very efficient and I am soon out of Tanzania, walk across the bridge over the Songwe River and arrive at Malawi immigration. The once free tourist visa now costs $75. The Malawi immigration is less efficient but I eventually get my $25 change.

‘Monile Mose’ and the mini bus passengers all greet me and smile back. I am back and we are off to Karonga. I get down at the new tarmac roundabout that greets you in Karonga. It all looked very different from 1999 when it was a dirt road all the way. I wanted some ‘yellow buns’ and a Fanta for some reason, and after some searching found them. I decided to look for my old home the ‘Enikani’ Guest House down by the community football ground. I set off through ‘Old Karonga’ but it was nowhere to be found. The 2004 floods had damaged it and the owner sold it to be renovated. I found myself down at the lakeshore and started talking to a man called ‘Wales’. I was to spend most of the day with him and his family. He was busy doing what he does every day. He buys small fish from the fishermen in the early morning for 1000 kwacha. He then goes home, dries them in the sun and later cooks them on his oil drum fire. He has a technique of cooking the older fish to make them look fresher. Once cooked he walks to the market in the new part of Karonga and sells his fish for 1000 kwacha profit. Many people do a similar thing to support their families in these hard times. He has another money making enterprise in his yard where his wife makes and sells a local beer that is very popular with fishermen it seems. He makes about 3000 kwacha per day. He saves 1000 kwacha at the bank every day he tells me. His wife and three children survive like this. Wales tells me how Karonga has suffered over the past fifteen years. The North Rukuru River flooded badly in 2004 and most of Karonga was submerged in over a metre of water. Lots of mud buildings were destroyed and crops ruined that year. In 2009 there was an earthquake that did damage to houses.

The weather patterns over recent years have affected farming. There is less rain these days in the Karonga area and Wales tells me that Chitipa district being at a higher altitude is helping to feed Karonga with maize these days. A disease also killed off all Karonga’s banana crops recently. It sounded like Karonga had been suffering more than most at a time when Malawi as a whole was going through bad times.

After independence in 1964 Malawi had been ruled autocratically but benevolently by Hastings Kamuzu Banda for thirty years. In 1994 a new era started with multi party politics. In my time it was Bakili Muluzi as President. I found out that during those years as well as some degree of corruption Muluzi managed to get money circulating in the economy so people were making a living. In 2004 Bingo Mutharika assumed power and in his first five year term the people say he did well for Malawi. However after 2009 things went from bad to worse it seems, culminating in the ‘Cashgate’ scandal when 577 billion kwacha went missing from government departments. Officials at all levels were literally walking out of work with ‘bags of dollars’ it seems. The whole accounting system between the government departments and the Reserve Bank had collapsed. It was chaos and in this period of chaos Mutharika died. His Vice President was Joyce Banda but during her term she had spilt with the ruling party to form her own People’s Party. Constitutionally she was still Vice President and by law had to assume power. She did and began to uncover the financial mess and through her ignorance people say got caught up in it and in 2015 was forced to flee Malawi into exile in South Africa as pro-Mutharika party people made life hard for her in an attempt to clear the name of Bingo Mutharika the former President. As Joyce Banda refuses to come back to clear her name, she is an easy target for blame. The new President is none other than Professor Arthur Peter Mutharika, the former leader’s brother. Since around 2011 and the ‘Cashgate’ scandal, international donors have refused to give the Malawian government any direct funding as they have been unable or unwilling to account for the money, prosecute people and put in place the financial measures requested by the donor community. Previously 40% of Malawi’s budget was made up of donor funds. This had hit Malawi very hard and makes the provision of public services by the government almost impossible these days. Aid agencies still continue to fund projects but through NGO’s.

I had returned to Malawi in 2016 at a time when people were telling me that conditions for ordinary people were a lot worse than in 2000. I sat and had two ‘Carlsberg Green’ in the new style bottles and from the new style fancy fridges and wondered what had really changed for the better. I wanted to find my old friend BAM Sibwakwe. I walked to his old school Karonga CDSS and saw a huge pile of old desks and chairs outside. I thought back to the days when he used to sit outside his school, probably on one of these old desks, seemingly doing nothing all day. He had died some years ago and the person who told me of this described him as a ‘lecherous womaniser’.

In 1999 it would take four or five hours if you made it at all to travel the 101 kilometres from Karonga to Chitipa. The Chinese government as part of its expansion into Africa provided a grant and between 2009 and 2011 the road was finally tarmacked. The now 93 kilometres takes an hour and a half. The route is plied by many minibuses now, a distant memory from the one truck that might leave in the early morning from the roundabout. Chitipa has finally joined the rest of Malawi and it seems to be doing well.

A big Australian managed uranium mine has been established off the road. In the deal Malawi gets 25%. My thoughts turned to the story of Niger and its French controlled uranium business and I shook my head. I was told the Chinese have just won the new contract on the mine. The people on the overcrowded and speeding minibus didn’t look very happy as they clutched their mobile phones and shouted into them. We stopped at an immigration check point. I was asked to show my passport which I was able to do. There was a young girl from Burundi, with her travelling companion, a Congolese man but they were unable to do this and were taken off the bus for questioning. This had all been conducted in the mist but as we approached Chitipa the skies cleared and the sun came out.

In Chitipa I found Alan Mkondjiri, the ex-sports teacher from Euthini CDSS and now the MASSA Divisional Chairperson for the north and teaching at Yamba CDSS (the current 2015 MASSA national football champions). He remembered those days fondly and told me ‘my legacy was still alive and well’. He is obviously the man to ask around these parts. He tells me that the MASSA programme we established back in 1999 involving secondary school sports continues to this day. Schools can progress from zone competitions, through district finals to divisional finals and finally at national level. These days I think for financial reasons once the competition gets to the national finals it becomes a ‘select team’ from the division with the winning school team ‘beefed up’ by using other players. Boy’s football is sponsored by Coca Cola at U18 level and Airtel sponsors boys and girls football at U15 level. School Netball has struggled to find sponsors in the last five years and is in decline it seems, however the National Team is ranked 3^rd in the world. The North has continued to do well at national level. We were National Champions in 2005/6 and most recently in 2014/15. The sports committee system is alive and well and elections are held every four years. A comprehensive budget is finalised every year for the Divisional Education Manager’s approval. Now included are decent teacher allowances, something I failed to do in my time. The 2016 sports budget totals £8000. The 195 secondary schools each contribute about 30,000 kwacha each at the start of the year. MASSA in the north even has its own bank account. It all made me feel very proud.

That evening I met Mr. Nyasulu, the old Chitipa SS sports master and Mr. Thomson Phiri, the netball referee from Chitipa Model Primary and a success story from one of our training courses. He is now a Primary Education Adviser. There was real warmth in our meeting as we told stories of our shared history. I found out why a lot of people back in 1999 thought my name was ‘Bottoman’. It is a name from the Lilongwe area and it started as the name for people who guarded beer bottles. I told my friends that the ‘Bottomer’s’ in England were the people who put the bottom on beer barrels. In my time I had always pushed for District Sports Officers to support our work but this always fell on deaf ears. In 2005 the Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture split into the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and the Ministry of Sports and Culture. From that time there was no longer a Divisional Sports Officer in Mzuzu but District Sports Officers were posted under the new Sports and Culture Ministry (linked with the National Sports Council). I met Mr Rowland Harawa in this post and we agreed to keep in touch. Chitipa had changed but I was reminded of the old days by a lot of things still there but a little faded now. I spent the night in my old favourite ‘Nachitipa Lodge’. ‘Chibuku’ is still very popular at the ‘Cool Your Throat’ bottle store but the ‘Booze Clinic’ is no more.