Annie

I was tired when we arrived, hot, ill-tempered and now all the more irritated at our tardiness in getting back to the car. "Just one more home visit," said one of the ladies I was walking with, a local volunteer serving the children in this village. I resigned my irritation to a sigh and said, "It'll have to be a quick one." I knew I wasn't at my best, walking between the mud walled straw roofed huts that characterise all these Malawian villages. I pictured the team of Americans I was hosting waiting by the car in the sweltering heat, checking their wristwatches as they ate through the crumbs of their packed lunches. Still, I pulled myself together as best I could and we reached our destination, a hut that had all but collapsed, the roof in tatters and the door off its hinges. I had to step over a young man stretched out drunk on the ground outside, some filthy rag steeped across his face to protect him in his stupor. One of the ladies uttered a sad but kindly 'tut' that seemed more maternal than judgmental. At the entrance to the home there was a brief exchange I didn't understand with a very aged woman who appeared to live there. She cast me confused and not overly welcoming glances as she spoke, after which the care worker turned to tell me that the girl we came to visit was not around. I took that as signal to leave, but I was wrong. The care workers indicated that I sit down whilst they bounded off to fetch the absentee girl. Thirty minutes passed in awkward tedium as children appeared tentatively to view the out of place 'mzungu' (white man), a spectacle I always think must be as bizarre as finding a baboon in an English garden. With each minute I grew more anxious and irritable until, at last, the care workers appeared. I saw at once the cause of their delay, and with it my agitation turned to shame. In their arms they supported a girl no more than fifteen, crippled in both legs and unable to bear the weight of her body as she slumped herself beside me. Her name was Annie.

As we spoke her expression seemed etched in pain, her inner wounds lined like scars on her face. Perhaps she had cried so long and so hard that in time she had simply adopted a countenance of agony. It didn't take long to understand why. Annie had no one. The inhospitable old lady that had eyed me upon our arrival was Annie's grandmother, with whom she shared a mat and a thin blanket, and the young man in the drunken stupor outside was her brother. I was told that regularly he would beat Annie (I wondered if her invalidity was his work), and the grandmother does little to stop him, other than forcing him to sleep outside. "Tell me about your life," I brought myself to ask. With that pained expression not permitted to lift for an instant, Annie told me her story. At sunrise every morning Annie gets up and drags herself on crippled legs to a mango tree three kilometres from her home. There in the shade of the mango tree she sits until the sun sets, eating the fruit that falls to the ground, weeping and praying. That is Annie's day; day after day. This day, when I met Annie, mango season was all but over, and I asked her what she would eat when the fruit stopped falling. She wept.

I glimpsed something that day that I hope to never forget. At some point I said something I don't recall and, for the briefest moment, a smile swept her face. It was the most beautiful smile I'd ever seen, beautiful for its rarity. And then she smiled again, and again, every one lasting only a second before it was stolen away, as if she was ashamed of it as her face returned again to pain. That day I told Annie that we were going to make a deal. I would promise to pray for her every day, and she had to promise to smile, once at least, every day. I told her that to rob the world of her smile would be a great injustice. I told her that now she had a brother, albeit a white one. She laughed. And I told her that I would see her again.

3 months passed before I returned to Malawi and, as soon as the opportunity arose, made my way to Annie's village. Something was different. The customary attention I received walking amidst a village white feet rarely tread was not the same as usual. I never heard the word 'mzungu'. In fact, people were calling to me by name, children whispering 'Adam' as they peered tentatively at me from their doorways. I exchanged puzzled pleasantries with the market sellers as they greeted me by name, like I was only another villager making the daily hike home. Others repeated some indistinct ChiChewa phrase I didn't recognise. Asking the care workers I walked with what they were saying, they laughed; "Here everyone knows who you are. They are calling you 'the brother of Annie'." With a growing crowd in our wake we arrived at Annie's home, and once again she wasn't there. But this time she appeared instantly, as did her smile. As we spoke she told me through tears that she had since tried to throw herself in the river, but her care worker had rescued her before she had the chance to jump. I asked her what would ever push her to do such a thing. She told me that people had come to her home to encourage her to kill herself, telling her that she had nobody and nobody would miss her, that she was more a burden than a blessing. As we prayed together a grin once again swept her face and she told me through that gorgeous smile, "I have prayed for a brother for so long, and God gave me you." I spent hours at Annie's home that day. I asked her if she had kept her side of the deal, as I had kept mine. She only smiled. We laughed and prayed and blessed one another and then, for the second time, with an aching heart, I left.

The brother of Annie. It dawns on me as I rattle down the dirt track out of Annie's village that this is at once the highest honour, and the greatest responsibility, I have ever received. The highest honour, because beneath Annie's mango tree a crippled and lonely young girl prayed through tears for a family, or a brother at least, and God in his wild and incalculable ways sent her me. A responsibility, because all that is demanded of family, all the love and care and commitment that makes it the most prized and precious gift, God demanded of an ill-tempered and irritated mzungu when walking around a corner he discovered Annie. The most catastrophic story, the bearer of the most beautiful smile, my friend and by God's design, my sister.

You are God's answer to the prayer of a broken world.