There are a few new highways around Mzuzu, Malawi, which are well paved and smooth, but they won’t take you all the way to remote villages where the needs are the greatest.
To get there, you have to get off the paved road, often down into a short steep ditch and then up again just as sharply, and onto a hard packed dusty path just wide enough to take your vehicle.
The shape and consistency of these paths changes regularly, based on usage and rain. In the rainy season the dust turns to mud. In the dry season the mud packs into hard bumps. At any given moment, all four of your tires may be at different levels. You find yourself in dry creek beds, your vehicle pointed down then up at sharp angles. You need a sturdy sport utility vehicle with a strong suspension, otherwise you will find yourself stranded.
But this is what must be traversed to meet with the women and men and children who live miles from the city centres, who are suffering from HIV/AIDS in one way or another, whose collective income is often less than a dollar a day.
To provide them training or counselling, to give them food or seeds to grow, to give them encouragement, social workers, nurses and many others travel through the dust and mud. They have to.
