Alleluia! Ilala is Back—Survivor

MV ILALA: A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

What do floods in the Shire Valley, earthquakes in Karonga and the disappearance of MV Ilala in Likoma have in common?

They are all humanitarian crises which cause untold misery to populations in need of lasting solutions to long-standing effects of their geographical disadvantages.

LOST HER ALL IN A PERILOUS BOAT: ALLELUIA

Ever since the country’s largest passenger ship broke down on June 30 2012 , Likoma and its sister island Chizumulu have been frantic with risky but uninsured boats not only trying to make profit but also to keep about 11 000  lives on the cutaway localities surrounded by Mozambican waters.

To the locals, the boats are a matter of life and death.

“The boats sustained lives and businesses at a time we were destitute due to the breakdown of Ilala, but they were expensive, slow and risky,” said Alleluia Machira, 42.

On the island, the resident of Munyanje Village at Makulawe is not a woman like any other.

Having been saved from the jaws of a hefty crocodile two years ago, the mother of five was among 14 people on the brink of death when a boat, branded Limani, nearly capsized on a voyage from Nkhata Bay to Likoma this year.

To save lives on the stormy trip a few months ago, those on board had to throw away their most prized possessions—the business commodities they had bought in Nkhata Bay.

Counting her losses, Machira vividly remembers losing her capital and profit in that swim-or-sink scenario when she was forced to throw three bags of maize earmarked for sale on the island where agriculture is almost non-existent.

Battling tears, she recalled: “Around Martyrs Day on March 3, I went to Nkhata Bay to sell fish worth around K14 000. The sales were below expectation and I was on the mainland town for days until the lot was cleared.

ILALA'S SUBSTITUTE: MV MALUNGO

“As usual, on my way back, I bought cassava and bags of maize to resell at Likoma, but instead of the desired profit, I incurred a total loss as we threw our buys into the water to survive stormy mwera winds which were rocking our misfiring boat around 3pm on the fateful day.”

Machira recalled that as MV Limani left Nkhata Bay amid a vuma scare—a notorious easterly, according to sailors—around 9am a passenger tried to persuade the crew to return to the jetty but they feared worse things would happen on their way back.

According to her, the storm appeared to be over around 3am, only to return in the form of a devastating mwera southerly when Chizumulu came into sight hours later.

“Tides were flooding the boat. It was swerving dangerously. Both the boat engine and water pump were dead. I prayed. My colleagues and I didn’t have to wait for orders to start emptying the water spills and throwing away goods. We could have done anything to save our lives,” she narrated in an exclusive interview.

The survivor was speaking for the first time to the press after the accident which was widely covered by newspapers and radio stations at the mainland.

Like some of her colleagues, she feels the boat, which has since been grounded at Likoma, was overloaded.

However, Likoma Police in-charge Gray Chimphepo, while disclosing that over 200 bags of maize were ejected during the single most horrifying scene in a Likoma Island without Ilala, said investigations had revealed that it was due to natural phenomenon—the devastating winds.

NEED NEW SHIP

Whatever the cause and your take of her K20 000 loss, Machira sums up her fate in one word: “I lost everything, except life.”

By that, she means the business died, life in her household worsened as they had lost a major source of income, their two children who are in secondary school nearly dropped out.

A visit to her home in her baobab-fringed Munyanje village is an encounter with a grass-thatched hut, made of sun-burnt bricks reinforced by mud mortar. 

Completing a portrait of poverty besetting her homestead are sights of children wearing ragged clothes that need soap as a matter of urgency.

 

WHERE ALLELUIA SURVIVED CROC'S JAWS

On the playground is a fireplace for drying fish as she and her husband are trying to pick up the pieces and triumph over adversity.

As Alleluia’s husband Sitiya Machira says, the family is trying to make do with consolation tokens from relatives and soft loans from well-wishers. But life has not been the same, he says.

“We have been through tough times,” said her husband, a fisher.

“First, she was attacked by a crocodile on January 20 2010. Now she lost everything that brought meaning in our lives,” he lamented.

In their words, she was six months pregnant and coming from registering her marriage at St Michael’s Anglican Church when a crocodile grabbed her leg and left her with complicated fractures on the left thigh and arm. The tragedy happened just 100 metres from her hut.

Thanks to Gabriel, a boat belonging to the Anglican Diocese of Northern Malawi, she was rushed to Nkhata Bay District Hospital after spending two nights at Likoma’s lone healthcare facility: St Peters Hospital.

MEMBERS OF ALLELUIA'S HOUSEHOLD

When her pregnancy was eight months old, she was referred to Mzuzu Central Hospital where she gave birth to a son, Stephano.

Having survived croc’s jaws and faced a storm in the eye, Machira does not only sing ‘Alleluia’.

Like her husband and most islanders, she is happy to see Ilala back on the waters after a long break, saying: “Unlike the wind-prone boats, it carries more, the fares are cheaper and the trips safer.”

Above all, she supports the widespread view that the ship, re-commissioned in 1972, is too old to continue being the deciding factor when it comes to the lives of people of Chizumulu and Likoma.

She said: “It’s too long we have been relying on Ilala; to give us a real break from the dangerous boats, government must give Ilala a break by buying a new ship.”