You are what you Read. Or are you?

It is a Friday. A cold Friday, or so I think. If it is not, I am probably harboring some unwanted bacteria and viruses which are making me feel funny today. Nevertheless, I dragged myself to work for a number of reasons and having found a bit of a breather, I have found myself writing this post. Again, for a number of reasons.

In recent days and weeks, I almost made a resolution to abandon this blog and stop writing because I felt like it was hardly of any benefit. The readership has dropped drastically from the peak of over 150 views per article to a very miserable number I will not mention. If you have been reading, you would understand that a drop in the number of hits on an article is not enough to keep my fingers on the keypad considering how busy my brain can get at the end of the week. That brings us to the actual reason I wanted to do this. I have always used the blog as a hole in my brain; a vent through which thoughts, toxic and “non-toxic” alike would go through, nourishing others with wisdom on a rare occasion. Venting out my frustrations and sorrows through writing used to feel good, but of late I have lost the urge to do the same.

I spent the last two weeks in which I was absent from the scene thinking of writing an article aimed at disseminating the results of my abandoned social experiment. I however did not write it because I felt like I had not built up enough anger that would make the words come out in the best of arrangements. After a bit of introspection, I realized that the reason the anger did not come in was that it was not necessary in the first place. There we go, then. The results of the abandoned social experiment will never go to the masses and that will be three weeks of research wasted. That is not important, but the main point is just that I have lost the urge to vent. For a number of reasons.

The place I work in has a health and safety team that advises us on a number of issues that range from how to sneeze in the cold weather to how to extinguish a fire. My favorite from them is the advice on how we should not remain seated on the desk for too long, and how we should walk about in the office space in what they call health breaks. Naturally, I am the kind of person that can hardly remain seated in one place for more than an hour. Luckily, I am a Catholic and our mass service provides a bit of room for standing and kneeling which means I do not have to sit still through all the three hours of a high mass. At work, health breaks mean I can disturb a bunch of friends. On one of those episodes, last week something caught my attention when I visited a friend’s desk. He has a book with a title that suggested that we are what we read. Now that was something, because someone suggested that we are what we eat in those years. I am thinking that the contexts of these might be different, so I will let it slide and focus on humans being what they read.

I have always been a fan of reading. This, I think was sparked by the opening of a library at our primary school back in 2002. Now, this was not your typical urban primary school. This was a pure rural school that people liked to call Kapeya after the village in which it was built. Having a library there was pretty exciting and I began to read books on a whole lot of different topics; human geography books that described the lives of Eskimos in detail and the growing of rubber in Malaysia, fictional books, science books, life skills and pretty much anything people have been insane enough to put into a book. Just not poetry, though.

My reading culture continued when I crossed over to St Patrick’s, Mzedi. The place had a library which was stocked with books from old curricula along with a load of magazines and other books that had little if anything to do with school. In those days, they used to allocate periods for library reading on the time table and that was our time to enjoy the comic series “Tales from the Trigan Empire” from the nicely bound “Look and Learn” Magazines. Useless things, but we enjoyed them, anyway. And then we had the stories from the Step Ahead English language books that we had. By the time I was in my third term I had finished reading all the stories in all the books in the series. The other reads on the menu were the magazines from what we called the Chaplain’s library, a small library full of religious material (ironically one Harry Chikasamba was librarian in this one; if you know him, you know). Point? I continued to read widely in secondary school.

The reading culture was thrown under the bus when I joined the medical school. There the only non-academic thing I allowed myself to read was a text from my girlfriend but otherwise it was all anatomy, physiology, medicine, proctology, ophthalmology and things of that sort. But then college went and once again I was at it.

Having known a lot of people who were sitting under motivational speakers or were motivational speakers themselves, I had a lot of “good books” pass through my recommendation basket. I managed to read through a few of them and I liked the idea of reading about personal goal setting and financial planning. Guess what I liked more? Watching a movie and then going on to read a 300-page book about it. Over the years post-graduation, I have read a few books many of which have little to do with my work in clinical research and I think that is what makes reading fun. It reminds me of how I, at some point found myself reading about the murder at Sarajevo when I had a French exam on the next day and history wasn’t part of my subject list. I can be that careless with what I read.

My current research job demands that I stay up to date by reading the latest in the world of research. I have no issues with that and I pick up papers on what I could call a good interval. On the other hand, I find myself enjoying reading the Donald Trump Presidential Twitter Library (by Trevor Noah) or the World According to Clarkson. That sort of material can be captivating to read, if you know what I mean. That bring me to the other reason I read that widely. One person once mentioned that a person who never reads loses his ability to write and I think that is a vital point. I need to write so I need to read.

I was talking about how I wanted to drop this article of feeding a few readers with articles. Well. I got three reminders from people who were very eager to read what was going on through my mind today. They probably thought I was going to write about Suleiman or Mtambo, but those issues are too topical for me. I may not like to vent anymore, but I sure like to keep my writings more personal than topical. Here I am, writing article that will probably add no value to the two ladies and one gentleman who pestered me for it.

My ladies, my lord. You are what you read. Is this article worth it? Were your hostile text messages worth it?

All in all, the last thing I could say is that we all need to develop a  reading culture. And if the "you are what you read" statement is anything to go by, you need to choose your books wisely... and follow this link.

Have a Cypress weekend, everyone.

From my Memories: Frozy

Greetings.

It feels good to get back to writing ways after a week of absence. The circumstances that kept me from swinging the pen have been dealt with and I am back now. My only worry is that this article may not have the patronage it needs as I will not be able to share it on usual platform namely WhatsApp. Again, I have dealt with the reasons I am not on WhatsApp currently and my absence on the popular social network is just a matter of choice. It is good to take breaks from some social platforms, however inconvenient that may be.

I happened to be looking at my social feed earlier today. For some reason, Facebook has decided to give us an opportunity to revisit our memories from way back by recycling our posts. Probably one of the nicest features and one of the reasons I still find FB relevant to date.

So… What did I see? You are probably cooling down with a Fanta or Thumbs Up as you are reading this but you might remember the time that one drink took the market by storm. Yeah. Frozy. It was in 2016 when the drink made its debut on the market and quickly dislodged the traditional soft drinks as the best-selling drink. The reasons were simple, really. “Fulo” was an affordable drink which made it relatable to many. Who doesn’t like a cheap drink? And then there was the packaging. A nice 500 ml plastic bottle which could easily be reused to package a good dose of thobwa. The distribution? Well. It was as easy and straightforward as it could get. People could easily import it from Mozambique through whichever border and supply to vendors at their local trading center. Just like that and people from all walks of life were able to enjoy a nice drink from or neighbor in different flavors.

For some time, I had been skeptical to take the drink. My first time with it came when I met one Joe Wire (also known as Dr Joseph Mkandawire or Bambo Mkandawire) who was visiting a lonely soul in Lunzu. This was the time when we were transitioning from being medical students to being doctors. Long boring “holiday”, that was. Joe, for some reason was feeling hot after a long walk in the October sun and he couldn’t resist the urge to buy the two of us “Frozy wa green”. If my memory serves me right, he did not finish his drink and he ended up giving half of it to a kid who was passing by. For security reasons, I will not mention what happened to mine. Long story short, I managed to have a taste of the drink.

I was talking about what I saw on my Facebook memories feed this morning. Pepani, but I just had to introduce the issue before talking about the memories. I will continue digressing so that the memories can tie it all together. Shortly after the introduction of this Mozambican drink on the market, there were calls by the Malawi Bureau of Standards to ban it. Issues? Incorrect labelling and unsafe quantities of citric acid in the drink. Sounds familiar, right? Same here. Following the ban, MBS instructed all wholesalers and retailers to declare the amount of the drink in their custody for collection and proper disposal. Having known the trail from the manufacturer to the user, I doubted there were any people who made such declarations and that there was a single bottle of Frozy that was disposed through the bureau.

Following the ban, many took it to the social media to express their anger; the first group towards the ban of the drinks and the second towards the first group. The reason this came out for me is that there were three people from three different professions that commented on the drinks issue. Everyone drinks, anyway.

I will start with the programmer (or systems developer, as he may like to identify himself). He argued that the whole ban was a joke. In his view, MBS is not accredited on the international scene and had no say on such a thing as a Mozambican drink. Whether that line of reasoning was right or not should be left for another day, but to add some humor to it, he went on to say that what the bureau had done was more like an ugly guy calling an ugly girl ugly. Whatever that means. Hypocrisy, maybe.

Then came the other two who were in support of the ban, first the journalist (who I am told is on his way to the bar (judiciary thing, eti?) He came in and drummed support for the bureau of standards arguing that the guys are the ones who have been protecting us from substandard foods all along; and that if they said there was something wrong with the drink, then there was something wrong. He went on to say that if we needed some soft drinks, we could go on and buy the Fanta we had all been drinking for the past few “centuries”. To finish off, he called on MBS to ban Manica and Impala alcohol brands from Mozambique. We cannot be sure as to whether he was sober when drafting the post or whether he would own it to date, but he wrote what he wrote and somehow it made sense. We can argue as to whether MBS really protect us this evening when ESCOM loan us back the power we deserve.

The most relevant person to comment on this happened to be a nutritionist and ironically it happened to be the shortest of them all. In his two sentences, he talked of how MBS was only there to protect the lives of Malawians. He concluded by lamenting on how Malawians failed to grasp a thing or two about something as simple as food standards.

Despite some noises (there were no demonstrations and petitions, then), the ban remained sustained and the drink was taken off the market. People made video clips that showed them mourning the demise of Frozy, but that was all. Carlsberg Malawi raised the prices of soft drinks but with no competing Mozambicans sales remained relatively stable. It was later in February, 2017 that the ban on the drink was lifted, probably following adjustments to the labelling and citric acid content. The drink, however, did not bounce back with the same momentum it had initially come with on the market initially. That was probably due to the love of citric acid and other harmful chemicals in beverages by the local Malawians.

From my memories, I brought you a story of the politics and safety surrounding food and other products on the Malawian market. If you follow the activities of the bureau, you could also talk about the issue of selective application of regulations. I will not talk about that but this sort of relates to the last article on facts and opinions. It also related to the many times that I have used this pulpit to preach standards. Eeetu. Probably the most lesson deficient article in recent memory, but it has its own relevance. Looking at a couple of online articles I have learnt a few things on business, regulation, politics and safety. I cannot share those but I will leave it to you to figure them out.

Have a lovely weekend and for the few of you that will get this article through whichever means, do share it with others.

From the stone age (where there is no WhatsApp), I bring you dear reader… Frozy!