No matter how foreign and lonely the world outside, the books always reminded me of home.
Whatever you want to do, if you do it with all your heart, it will happen.
Think of your dreams and ideas as tiny miracle machines inside you that no one can touch. The more faith you put into them, the bigger they get, until one day they’ll rise up and taken you with them.
I didn’t have a drill, so I had to make my own. First I heated a long nail in the fire, then drove it through a half a maize cob, creating a handle. I placed the nail back on the coals until it became red hot, then used it to bore holes into both sets of plastic blades.
Although Geoffrey, Gilbert and I grew up in this small place in Africa, we did many of the same things children do all over the world, only with slightly different materials. And talking with friends I’ve met from America and Europe, I now know this is true. Children everywhere have similar ways of entertaining themselves. If you look at it this way, the world isn’t so big.
Cool! Where did you get such an idea?” “The library.
After a few days of rain, the seedlings will push through the soil and unfold their tiny leaves. Two weeks later, if the rain is still good, we then carefully apply the first round of fertilizer, because each seedling requires love and attention like any living thing if it’s going to grow up strong.
I remembered a parable that Jesus told to the disciples, the one about the sower of seeds. The seeds planted along the road get stepped on and damaged, those planted in rocky soil can’t take root, and the ones planted in the thorns get tangled in the barbs. But the seeds planted on fertile soil live and prosper.
So many things around you are reusable. Where other see garbage, I see opportunity.
My grandmother Rose was a tough woman, so tough she’d built the family home with her own hands while my grandpa worked as a tailor in the market. She’d even built the furnace and molded the bricks herself, which is not an easy job, and even today, not the job of a woman.
If it weren’t for the great Scottish missionary David Livingstone, the Yao and Chewa might still be at odds today. Livingstone helped end slavery, opened Malawi to trade, and built good schools and missions. Young men became educated and earned money, and once these economic opportunities were available to all, our two tribes had little reason to fight. Today we consider the Yao our brothers and sisters. My.
Where the world sees trash, Africa recycles. Where the world see junk, Africa sees rebirth.
Touring the city, I began to wonder how Americans could build a skyscraper in a year, but in four decades of independence, Malawi couldn’t even bring clean water to a village. We could send witch planes into the skies and ghost trucks along the roads, but we couldn’t even keep electricity in our homes. We always seemed to be struggling to catch up. Even with so many smart and hardworking people, we were sill living and dying like our ancestors.
Maize is just another word for white corn, and by the end of this story, you won’t believe how much you know about corn.
A man in the trading center was caught trying to sell his two young daughters. The buyer had informed the police. People were becoming desperate.
When you go to see the lake, you also see the hippos.
Everyone has the same hunger, son. We must learn to forgive.
I did become homesick, and whenever that happened, I’d hide away in the school library, where the books filled rows and rows of shelves. I’d find a chair and study my lesson books in geography, social studies, biology, and math. I’d lose myself in American and African history, and within the colorful maps of the world. No matter how foreign and lonely the world was outside, the books always reminded me of home, sitting under the mango tree.
Grandpa says that once a lion gets a taste for human blood, it won’t stop until it’s eaten an entire village.
Whatever I decided to do, this lesson would always stay with me: If you want to make it, all you have to do is try.