
Ample antelope in Malawi
In past posts I’ve written about the power of coincidence and also mentioned my own writings about synchronicity.
Because I’ll be traveling to South Africa within days, I thought it appropriate to mention past writing related to Africa.
The following is a chapter named ‘Malawi,’ from a little known book I wrote (one of two) about coincidences, titled The Synchronous Trail—Enlightening Travels. This second chapter highlights how notable coincidences can catch our interest. The rest of the book, essentially a travelogue, explains the search for—and discovery of—what ‘meaning’ these events may have in our lives. Chapters in the book are named after locations (such as Colorado, England, Dubai, Guatemala). This chapter begins with a quote from an autobiography written by actor Michael Caine. I took all photos below during three years spent as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi.
“Nothing in Africa is without its purpose, if you look deep enough.”
What’s It All About?
by Michael Caine

Encounter with roadkill
For years after the accident at the Flatirons I often criticized my interest in coincidences. To link tenuous connections together and declare they had ‘meaning’ was nonsensical. Or was it? As time slipped by it turned harder to deny the obvious. Since that day at the Flatirons, the relevance of such events in my life grew difficult to ignore. Much of this awareness came during three years that I spent living and working in the small Central African country named Malawi.
At eleven o’clock each Saturday morning, a British Airways flight from London touches down at Malawi’s International Airport outside the city of Lilongwe. The plane’s final approach throws a massive shadow over green maize stalks below. From inside the plane I looked down at the countryside, mesmerized by the contrast between the sight of simple mud huts and the technological complexity of the aircraft that carried us.

Looking down from Mount Mulanje
After touchdown our group of Peace Corps volunteers paced through muggy air, across tarmac and into the terminal building. For the next two years this little known nation was to be our home. Smaller than the surrounding countries of Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia, Malawi was packed tight with generous people and strange surprises. This nation of eight million citizens had only two traffic lights. The ruling ninety year old dictator—Hastings Kamuzu Banda—had spent decades working as a medical doctor in both the United States and England before he returned to rule his homeland. The Malawian people both despised and loved Kamuzu. Though they dreaded his iron–fisted rule, they danced and sang eulogies to him whenever a helicopter delivered this leader to villages and towns throughout the nation.
Lush, mountainous, and the fourth poorest country on earth, Malawi was steeped in such paradoxes. Yet the land of rolling green hills stayed tranquil as Tumbuka, Ngoni, Yao, and Chewa tribes maintained a guarded peace among themselves. Over eighty five percent of Malawians lived in rural villages, from lowlands scrunched against massive Lake Malawi—the third largest lake in Africa—to pine coated highlands of the Vipya plateau. Though poor, the nation was clean, orderly, and safe.

Myself center, friends Dave on the right and Cathy on left
I was sent to work in the northern ‘city’ of Mzuzu. Living in this small highland town with its British infrastructure, temperate climate and hills was a dream come true. Once there I was assigned to manage the construction of small water supply schemes for rural areas. The work combined organizing local work crews and traveling through lush mountains. With Mzuzu as a base, I untucked my shirt, laced up both boots and began to build pipelines in the bush. For years our work crews hiked over mountain trails and plodded through rivers—surveying, designing, and working to supply villagers with water.
During these years in Malawi, surprising coincidences wrapped themselves around my life like a shawl. My determination to unravel their essence turned into a personal detective story, an esoteric fascination that few others understood. Each such encounter triggered a feeling of richness, a sense that I was somehow playing catch with magic. The more I dwelled on each of these events, the more intriguing each grew. Though I tried to analyze where these scenarios came from, my crowbar of logic never pried these events open to understanding. This left me to speculate on what purpose, if any, such events might serve. These included the following.
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Medicine men – or Gule Wamkuli
One day in the Capital Hill sector of Lilongwe city I sat inside the United States Information Service library. I was turning pages of a Harpers magazine when another volunteer named Fred trudged through the doorway. Fred was short and burly and had eyelashes that seemed to swim when he laughed. For reasons I never understood, he constantly encouraged me to become a writer, a ‘beat reporter,’ and to follow in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac.
I watched Fred select a thick red book from a shelf. He then sat down across from me at the same varnished table. I spied the title of the book he opened: Poems by Alan Ginsberg – 1947 to 1980. He tilted it my way and pointed to a poem titled ‘Howl.’
“Masterpiece,” he said. “Kerouac, Ginsberg and Cassidy—the Beat Generation. Rode the railways together. Hitchhiked west. Saw life from a different angle than everyone around them. This poem is Ginsberg’s masterpiece—you have to read it.”
With little conviction, I nodded at Fred and then flipped to the next page of Harpers magazine. I stared in shock: there were the opening lines of the poem ‘Howl,’ followed by an interview with Alan Ginsberg.
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Looking off Mount Mulanje into clouds
Mike, a British friend who lived in the town of Mzuzu, met and married a woman named Sylvia from the country of Sierra Leone. Several of us attended their wedding celebrations on a hillside above Mzuzu. Weeks later, Sylvia became ill. When her sickness worsened she was admitted to St. John’s hospital, a compound of simple brick buildings run by missionary staff. Sylvia soon went unconscious with a rare and severe case of Hepatitis–B. Though Mike kept vigilant by her bedside throughout a long and harrowing weekend, Sylvia remained in a coma. Word of her condition floated throughout town, paralyzing the reverie that we volunteers usually celebrated our weekends with.
Sylvia died on a Monday night. Her sister, the only other person I ever met from Sierra Leone, remained by Sylvia’s bed with Mike. After learning the news at the hospital the next morning, I left the grounds remorsefully, bid farewell to an Irish priest who provided her with last rites, and drove my motorcycle home. Once there I sat on a small concrete porch shaded by a skinny paw–paw tree. I sipped Malawian tea from a cheap green plastic cup and opened a pile of mail. One letter was from a friend in Chicago. She had not written in over a year. On the second page of her letter she apologized that the first page was only a copy of a general letter she had written to her landlord the same day. He now lived, she wrote, in Sierra Leone.
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Northern Region motorcycle tour with then girlfriend (and still a good friend)
One afternoon, while sitting at home down Kaningina Drive, I remembered a short story I had written months earlier. It was about time spent living in Ireland as a boy. The piece described hiking above thrashing waves of the Irish Sea and along the Cliff Walk in County Wicklow. It contained dialog between myself and a friend named Koenraad. After remembering this short story, I searched through folders, found the piece, and spent hours editing paragraphs. I added a new line that described the harbor in the town of Greystones, located where the Cliff Walk begins its coastal ascent toward the town of Bray—five miles to the north. While editing the syntax, I remembered Koenraad. It had been over a year since he last wrote. I had given up hope of hearing from him in the near future.
Later that day I received two letters, both from Ireland. One was from Koenraad. The other was written by a friend named Susan. She sent me a Christmas card. The cover showed a picture of Greystones harbor.
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Natural jewelry
Several days after this event, a group of volunteer friends stopped at my house to spend the night. They were driving north from the capital city of Lilongwe toward Nyika National Park, where they planned to spend days hiking over highland acres and spying Roan and Sable antelope. They pitched tents on the small lawn behind my house or unrolled their sleeping bags on the floor of my home. On the porch, a woman named Laura started reading a book. I asked her its name.
She tilted the cover toward me: Matryona’s House.
“By Solzhenitsyn,” she said.
Another volunteer standing nearby—Michelle—chirped in. “I started reading the same book yesterday, without knowing Laura had a copy. Isn’t that wild?”
“Some coincidence,” Laura agreed.
A third volunteer stood near to us. She added, in a deadpan voice: “My mother sent me that book last week.”
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‘Strate perm’ hairstylist in Chitipa
Even as an engineer on the cold–blooded trail of logic in life, I recognized something amiss about these events. None tallied with the diet of cause and effect I had been weaned to believe in. An unknown energy seemed to lasso these events together, though how or why I had no idea. Trying to guess the cause of these events was confusing, though I began to suspect that reality’s fabric might be more pliable than most of us are aware of.
Just as a geologist discerns patterns in granite to help reveal the earth’s history, I wanted to inspect features associated with coincidences to learn more of how they operated. I hoped that doing this might improve my understanding of the surrounding world.

Tea fields at the bast of Mount Mulanje
My fascination with coincidences derived from intuition, not logic. During my years in Malawi I wielded the engineering tools of physics, mathematics and empirical friction loss equations on the job. At the same time I was immersed in a sea of inexplicable phenomena in which events, images and people often seemed attracted to each other for no apparent reasons. When I switched off the inner babble of work details and took the time, instead, to wonder what was taking place around me, I noticed more and more coincidences. It seemed as though an open mind actually amplified the recognition of their occurrence.

Antelope on Nyika Plateau
The more I thought about these bizarre events, the more mysterious they turned. During evenings I often paced down a dirt road behind Mzuzu and onto a trail that crossed three short wooden bridges over Lunyangwa River. One evening during this walk I realized that what bothered me the most about coincidences was not that they existed, but that so few people noticed them.
Something bizarre yet important was going on in the world—a simple phenomenon with potentially massive power—that few others considered relevant. It was as though I had dreamed of a wheel in a wheel–less world. Only when I read about other people’s fascination with coincidences did I feel that my curiosity might one day be vindicated.
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Just saying hi
In his book The World The World, the author Norman Lewis wrote of a surprising incident that took place during the 1940s. He had arranged to have proofs of his new book Within the Labyrinth sent to the address of a friend in London.
“It was to this address that I arranged for the proofs of Within the Labyrinth to be sent so that I could correct them before leaving. The proofs, however, failed to arrive, so I rang up the publisher and was told that by mistake they had been sent to 4 Gordon Square. This was about a hundred yards away so I walked across to collect them, only to discover that a second Norman Lewis lived at this address, and that he, too, was a Cape author who had recently completed a hugely successful updated version of Roget’s Thesaurus. Unfortunately, I was told, the second N.L. had left the country only two days before, and was presumed to have taken my proofs with him. Three days later I stepped down from the Air France plane at Beirut, where Oliver awaited me. ‘We’re having a little party for you at the embassy,’ he said, and minutes later I suffered a surprise from which I have never wholly recovered, for the first introduction was to the man with whom I shared names, who had also stopped off at Beirut on his way to some Eastern destination. It was a circumstance that further encouraged Oliver’s fascination with the paranormal, and inspired him to begin a work to be entitled The Mechanisms of Coincidence, although the book was never finished.”

A little known bay on Lake Malawi in the northern region
In another book, titled One in a Million: The World of Bizarre Coincidences, Philip Schofield described another example of someone being reunited with their text.
“Actor Anthony Hopkins agreed to play a leading role in the 1974 film of the novel The Girl from Petrovka by George Feiffer. His attempts at acquiring a copy of the book to give him an insight into the story were not successful. After trawling the London bookshops he went to catch a tube train at Leicester Square and noticed a book discarded on a platform seat. It was a copy of the novel he had been searching for. Someone had scribbled notes in the margin, but he was pleased to have found it at last.

Well worn tennis shoes on the Viphya Plateau, Northern Region
“When Hopkins finally went abroad to start filming, he met George Feiffer for the first time. The author complained that he had lost his own copy of the novel which he had annotated. Apparently, a friend had borrowed it and mislaid it in London. The actor produced the copy he had found at Leicester Square. It was Feiffer’s lost book.”
In his autobiography What’s it all About? the actor Michael Caine describes how he first met and fell in love with his wife. He was watching a television commercial about Maxwell House coffee that was filmed in Brazil. Caine thought that one of the women dancing in the commercial was beautiful. He felt so attracted to her that he immediately wanted to fly to Brazil to meet her. Instead, he discovered from a friend that she lived just down the road from him in London. After sharing telephone calls and then meeting, a romance between the two soon blossomed. He and Shakira were soon married. After describing this in his autobiography, Caine wrote: “Coincidence is a funny thing. I have been writing these last few pages on 14 February 1992, St. Valentines Day, and Shakira called me a little while ago to watch television for a few minutes, as they were playing that commercial and telling the story of how I met her.”

Paddling youngster on Lake Malawi
In her book Out of Africa, the author Karen Blixen described how a bad train of fortune disturbed her life on a farm in Kenya. She then reflected on the wave of events.
“All this could not be, I thought, just coincidence of circumstances, what people call a run of bad luck, but there must be some central principle within it. If I could find it, it would save me. If I looked in the right place, I reflected, the coherence of things might become clear to me. I must, I thought, get up and look for a sign.
“Many people think it an unreasonable thing, to be looking for a sign. This is because of the fact that it takes a particular state of mind to be able to do so, and not many people have ever found themselves in such a state. If in this mood, if you ask for a sign, the answer cannot fail you; it follows as the natural consequence of the demand.”

Usisya village on Lake Malawi (I designed that white house on the hill)
Blixen described how she walked outside and witnessed the spectacle of a chicken pecking the tongue out of a lizard’s mouth. This action ensured that the lizard would die a slow, labored death from hunger. Blixen interpreted this event as a sign, an arrow that pointed toward her future. She suspected that bad harvests would continue to ruin the livelihood of her farm, causing it economic death, as slow and painful as that suffered by the lizard. She then decided to leave the farm. She believed that the coincidental timing of her searching for a sign and the unfolding of this scenario reflected the truth that she was ready to leave Kenya.

Fishing for ‘usipa’ fish on Lake Malawi at Usisya
These stories make amusing anecdotes. The problem is that the only rational way to explain coincidences is to attribute them to sheer chance. Believing that coincidences might be anything else butts heads against the thought processes that built the dams, bridges and highways pictured on the walls of the engineering college in Colorado where I spent five years studying. Most of the professors who drilled calculus, physics, mechanics and thermodynamics lessons into my head would probably have labeled my interest in coincidences as wacky. For them, looking for ‘meaning’ in such events would likely ring with the sound of mysticism.
While I wrestled with the truth that I stayed intensely curious about something illogical, coincidences kept dropping all around me, like leaves in autumn.
Excerpt From The Synchronous Trail – Enlightening Travels, by T. Mullen. Roundwood Press.
Thanks for reading Roundwood Press again! Please also check out posts from my wine blog: Vino Voices.
My latest Forbes posts are here, and include three fresh pieces posted yesterday, about Italian wine, Azorean tours and Bordeaux dining.