Leaving Home

Leaving Home is a 2008 novel intended for middle-grade readers written by Jan Michael, a white English author who makes her home in Amsterdam. Relying on Michael’s experiences visiting various African countries when she was a student, the novel tells the story of a newly orphaned boy in Malawi who is forced to adapt to life in the bush after growing up in a city. Through him, readers are given a chance to get to know modern Malawi and to consider how large-scale conditions, like the AIDS crisis and its effects on children who lose their parents, look from a narrow, personal point of view.

Ten-year-old Sam Sangala has spent his whole life in the city of Blantyre, in the country of Malawi. Because Sam is an only child, his loving parents have doted on him almost to the point of spoiling him. His firmly middle-class life includes never having had to share a room, always buying new clothes and cool sneakers, and getting to use a computer to play games or do schoolwork. Although he knows that he has an aunt and cousins that still live in the village where his mother was born, he has never visited them in the bush – Sam’s parents have always tried to downplay the family’s connections to this rural, less developed place.

For the last three years, since Sam’s father died, it has been just Sam and his amai, his mother, Innocence. Then, Innocence contracted the HIV virus, which eventually developed into full-blown AIDS. As Sam watched, she grew thinner and thinner, then started being wracked with horrible coughing fits, and finally, she wasted away and died. When the novel opens, a shell-shocked Sam stares into the black hole that will be his mother’s grave.



After the service, Sam overhears relatives discussing what the options are for Sam. He could go to an orphanage in the city, or his mother’s sister Mercy and her family could take him in. This second option seems better – at least Sam would be with family. Nevertheless, it is clear that the move to the country will be hard on the city boy, who doesn’t fully understand exactly how different life there will be. When one relative mentions concerns about the lack of pencils in the village school, Sam’s internal response is, “No problem, I’ll just type straight onto the computer.”

Aunt Mercy takes Sam to the Malawi countryside, where his cousins, for the most part, welcome him warmly (the only holdout is the angry MacDonald who doesn’t appreciate Sam’s city ways). Still, the culture shock is intense. He must now live in a one-room mud hut, where he, his aunt, his cousins, and a few other orphans that Mercy has taken in, all live together. His bed is now a mat on the floor, food is cooked on an open fire outside the hut, and the bathroom is an outdoor latrine without privacy. There is nowhere for Sam to put any of his things – aside for a few nails in the wall that serve as clothes hangers, the hut has no storage places. He worries about what will happen to his brand new blue sneakers with flashing lights in the heels – they are objects that stand out all the more because, in the village, other children almost never wear shoes of any kind. Most importantly, Sam realizes, because he no longer has a mom, there are no more bedtime stories or goodnight snuggles.

As the days go on, Sam gets to know the area around the hut. He visits the Protestant mission hospital run by Danes – the only building in town that gets electricity, and the enclosure that surrounds the government compound which holds the village’s few cars. His cousins tell him about the places that are superstitiously forbidden. Sam also gets to know some of the town’s colorful residents. He is impressed by Allan Poot, a mixed-race teenager who has a Malawian father and Dutch mother, and who rides around on a shiny black motor-bike.



Sam is crushed by how much he misses his mother, especially since he can’t even go see her grave because she was buried far away in the city. After some time, he decides that he can no longer stand her absence from his life. He leaves the village to search for his amai’s spirit. However, this adventure can only have one outcome, and eventually, Sam is forced to return to Aunt Mercy’s house.

After he comes back, Sam learns life lessons from Brown, a one-armed disabled man who has also contracted HIV. Brown talks to Sam about how to best adjust to his new life, telling him that in order to fully fit into the place, Sam will have to “make a sacrifice. What is precious to you, you have to give away. And when you have given them away, you must speak no more of them. Those blue shoes…Give them away. They are only things. They bring you trouble. Let another wear them.” The problem, of course, isn’t the shoes themselves, but what they represent. As long as Sam clings to them, he will never really accept that he can have a good life in the village just as he did in the city. It will be different, but it can be happy.