Egads, how the time passes. Two weeks in far-flung corners of the world, and no blogs to show for it. I have half-finished posts from Paris and from Busia, Kenya. (They're coming...) But this one was...urgent.

Yesterday I left the IPA Malawi office in around 3pm because I was delirious and falling asleep in my chair. I hadn't slept in 34 hours due to the outrageous timetables that define international travel within Africa, and so I was aiming for the hotel bed, for a nap before dinner. In the end I didn't get any sleep because of what I saw on the minibus (a larger version of a Ghanaian trotro). It kept playing through my head and chasing away the sandman. So I chased it away by writing it down:

The oldest woman in the world rides the minibus from Old Town, Lilongwe to Likuni, sitting in the back row. She wears a yellow print cloth wrapped around her waist for a skirt, and a red hand-sewn blouse with puffy yellow shoulders. Out of its short sleeves emerge the oldest arms in the world, skinny bones leading to jagged wrists, spanned by ropy veins like the woody vines of an ancient jungle, and paper-thin leather stretched over it all like the skin on a cup of instant coffee left out since last night.

The oldest woman in the world has a piece of plain green cloth around her waist for a belt. In its cinched knot hide a number of old, dark coins. More are hiding in the twists of a triangular brown cloth shawl whose corners are tied in front of her chest. Her head is wrapped in a red cloth. All I can see is a few small yellow-gray bushes of wiry hair at her temples. There are bits of charcoal and sand in the hollows of her ears.

She has exactly no teeth. Her voice is the breaking of dry twigs, the hot, dry air of the oven, and the creaking of an old wooden door, or a rusty pile of scrap metal ribbons.

The oldest hands in the world are bigger than you might think. They used to be reptilian, but their shiny, scaly skin and their claws are dull now from 48,000 years of kneading sharp gravel. They are gnarled from being twisted in the spokes of an ancient wagon wheel. The left thumb-nail is like the blade of a shovel: squared off, pitted and embossed with dirt, the edge bent under.

There is a walking-stick, both ends of it bashed out soft and flat like the head of a railroad stake that has known the nine pound sledge. Its length is knobby and worn smooth as driftwood.

I would like to tell you about the face of the oldest woman in the world, but in truth I barely got to see it. From the moment I sat down beside her until the moment I got up to leave, she was turned away from me, making faces at a baby girl perched on its mother’s lap in the next seat.