"Zungus! Zungus!"
The singsong shouts of children echo among mud-brick, thatch-roofed huts as we walk into the village of Namitete.
They spring toward us as if the ice cream truck has driven up.
The Chichewa word for white people is Muzungus, zungus for short.
We are a novelty here, two American men with digital cameras, a reporter's notepad and a tape recorder.
Dozens of children scurry about us, brushing our waists like birds' wings.
We line them up for a Polaroid snapshot. As the image emerges, they crowd around and explode with shrieks of delight.
It is the first time they have seen themselves in a photograph.
Malawians are friendly and warm. They invite us into their huts.
The children are barefoot and dressed in hand-me-down shirts. Their cut-offs and dresses are caked with dirt and riddled with holes and patches. A few shirtless boys have the telltale signs of malnutrition. Their distended bellies swell above skeletal bodies. Their knees resemble tumors atop sticks.
Boys dig in anthills and inch forward, on hands and knees, along a grassy clearing, picking at something unseen. It looks at first like child's play, but it is hunger that drives them to hunt for bugs and insects to eat.
This is how they pass their day. It is late morning, and they are not in school. Throngs of these wandering wraiths -- perhaps they are orphans -- appear from the rows of maize to inspect the zungus.
It is the rainy season, and the maize fields that didn't wither from drought or wash away in floods are a tall, emerald carpet.
It will be months until the ears of maize are ripe.
If it rains enough -- but not so much that it floods -- and steadily, the harvest may be adequate to feed Malawi.
It takes only slight changes in weather to upset the fragile balance. A few years ago, 2 million Malawians teetered on the brink of starvation during a drought. Catastrophe was averted by an infusion of aid by foreign donors.
It's hard to wait for the harvest when your empty belly aches with hunger.
There is a newspaper account of a 24-year-old man who was so hungry he stole green maize from his village's fields and ate it. Shamed, he hanged himself.
We are traveling light, but we've brought along a few dozen packs of chewing gum and 100 or so No. 2 pencils. We quietly give these things to the children.
It's a minuscule offering, a bandage on a hemorrhage.
