Mural

Breakfast at the guesthouse was too extensive. Boiled cassava, a second but unidentified tuber, chicken gizzards, salad, eggs, bread, sausage, fruit and juice. Obviously, I dined until I could ingest no more. Which was a disappointing amount because habitually I skip breakfast and drink coffee until lunch and by evening time have a gargantuan appetite.

In the evening I walked past a long wall with multiple murals forming part of a public health campaign. In such wide swaths of the world, if not everywhere, sexual violence against women is so normalised and commonplace. In Lichinga these murals depict rural women crying and pleading ‘don’t violate me’ and reminding the townsfolk that ‘there is no excuse for sexual violence’.

What can we say other than that we live in hope of a world where no woman has to live with this fear.