Back to Blighty

Here we are then – the end of the road for me in Malawi. It’s exactly 1 year (to the day) that I have spent in Malawi, and I’ve been back a week. The two main questions I’ve been getting asked are “How was it?”, and “Is it weird being back?” For me, the most important question is – what did I learn?

So ‘ow was it then? Yeah it was ‘mazing. Totes Amazeballs (yup, I can’t really pull saying that off). It’s always hard to sum up an entire year. When you’re here and someone else has gone to somewhere exotic sounding for an extended period, it sounds like a holiday, like every day was hot and beachy and full of laughs. But we all know that once you’re there for any time longer than a couple of months, it’s just like life – there are good days and bad days and challenges to get over and problems to solve.

There’s something about Africa whereby it’s hard for people to disassociate their preconceptions from the reality. The first visual frame of reference most people have is Comic Relief and BBC news. This causes problems in explaining what day to day life was like, because it’s often a whole lot more mundane that you might remember from that tragedy you saw on the news. It’s similar to the way most people understand Israel. It’s not a warzone, but lots of people think that it is. If there was a full on intifada happening in Jerusalem, people in Tel Aviv would just be getting on with their lives.

When it comes to daily life, the majority, as far as possible, are basically just trying to get on with their lives, support their families and be good people. (For a great loosely related campaign on this sort of thing, click here) Of course, some people are assholes, and like any asshole, they try to take advantage of people they perceive to have more than them, (or, come to think about it, have less than them as well), but some people will always be assholes anywhere in the world, in any village or town or city.

The projects we set up at the school seemed to be going OK when I left. We were happy with how they were going, but if you ask me am I proud of what I’ve done, I’ll say ask me in 3 years time. Long term sustainability is the goal – you can build towers of diamonds and gold, but if they fall over in 3 weeks, all anyone has as a result is pictures and faded, disappointed memories. And also no gold. Or diamonds. The projects we are setting up are aim to contribute to supporting young people on the path to improving their lives and achieving their goals, and so they need to be long term. It’s by their longevity that their success should be judged.  

Coming home has been an interesting experience. There is a beautiful 1 week grace period in between landing and slipping back into London life where I still feel a little like an outsider, and that means I get to notice interesting things.

Firstly, and from a personal perspective, everybody looks the bloody same. I’m not sure if it’s because my cross racial recognition is all confused, (Malawians find it near impossible to tell the difference between vaguely similar looking white people), or because I’m used to walking through a village where I know most people, but everybody who is white looks irritatingly familiar and similar. I feel like I’ve met everyone before somewhere but can’t quite place where or when.

2nd. People are trying to look cool and sexy, all the time. Walking down the street and seeing the hairstyles, make up, dress senses, shoes and heels and jeans and jewellery and all the rest of it has actually been quite intense. It’s not that Malawians in Nkhata Bay don’t want to look good, but women would rather look beautiful than sexy, and lots of men want to look wealthy rather than cool – or at least, they amount to the same thing. I’m not saying this in a judgemental way, but the way it seems to me is that loads of people, particularly anyone who is vaguely fashionable, appears striking and almost coquettish. I am sure this perception too will fade, but walking through Liverpool Street today was positively frightening, so many were the confusingly familiar looking throngs of well turned out and dressed up people.

Lastly, and perhaps related, is the way spaces where we spend our time are far more contrived than in Nkhata Bay. Even the tourist oriented bars and lodges in Nkhata Bay are built using local materials, decorated on the whole with locally created artwork and furniture. Buildings have an earthy feel to them, and everything is done mostly done outside in fresh (albeit sweat inducingly humid) air. In London, you walk off the street into a coffee shop and you find yourself in a world created to present you with a particular atmosphere, way of thinking and mood. Decoration and design in different bars and coffee shops is designed to attract certain types of people with particular likes and dislikes. Hipsters go to hipster bars, businessmen go to places that describe themselves as “lush” or “glamorous”, and everyone else goes to Starbucks, a space designed and contrived to be as trend neutral as possible.

It’s the implicit stylisation and branding of absolutely everything, including ourselves, that comes off very strong having come from somewhere like Malawi, where adverts are hand painted and thousands of dollars are not spent  researching what colour certain people of certain ages respond to best.

So, cultural observations aside – what did I learn? Perhaps the one thing that has come off very strongly is that you can’t generalise about “Africa”. I’ve spent time in two African countries now, and while there are similarities, they are also incredibly different. People in Nkhata Bay do not behave the same as people in Accra, or Lilongwe, or Soweto, or anywhere else. When you start a sentence with “Africa is…” one thing or another, you’re well on your way to making specious generalisations about millions of people. Even the way people experience and understand their poverty is different – come to think of it, the poverties themselves are different. While some people may have decent sources of food, they might not have sources of healthcare, and vice versa. When we talk about “poverty”, we’re already generalising, since poverty can be financial, physical, social, educational or any number of words ending in “ic” or “al”.

Perhaps the other thing is that you can’t learn everything you need to know about a country, or even a village, in a year. In a society where family ties run both broad and deep, and social relationships are fundamental to the way people live, you can’t hope to understand the power imbalances and perceived inequalities across even a small community, unless you’ve lived there a very, very long time. This is particularly so as the Mzungu – from the outset, physically, you’re different. Then there’s your culture, background, financial circumstances – all of these make it very difficult to integrate and to really understand what’s going on in a community. You will remain, on the whole, an outsider – perhaps a welcome one, but an outsider nonetheless.  

The upshot is that if you really want to drive positive change, you need the process to be driven by people who live in and know the community. You need people who can manipulate the politics of who likes who and why and how much – things that can only be learned by living in a place and really truly understanding its culture. When we hear about big western organisations turning up to set up “development” projects, I can’t help but think of the parallels of colonialists coming to “civilise the natives”. Ultimately, like their intrepid forbears, they will fail, because they can’t hope to understand enough about where they are to really change it. Change, rather unsurprisingly, has to be driven by people who want it. As foreigners who want to help, or even feel like we owe Africans our help, our role is not to tell people what they need (like jobs, or better economies, or healthcare or women who work) and to carve it out for them. It’s to find out what people actually want and to help them to achieve it in whatever way that might be, through government, through aid, through their own projects, even through protest or revolution if necessary. If poverty and politics in Africa is a situation that our western history has created (and probably sustains), then we owe it to the communities (and the sub-communities within them) that we visit to let them lead the change that they want. That might mean that development goes off in a direction we don’t know, and perhaps don’t like. Gandhi once said (OK he didn’t actually say it, but it suits my point..) “be the change you want to see in the world”. He didn’t say, “go and tell people the change you would like to see in their world”. 

So there it is. The last post on this blog. We’ve had a few laughs, there has been a good deal of moralising and ranting (I’d like to both thank and apologise: The Malawian Government, The IMF, the World Bank, Malawian politicians, the local witchdoctor, all Malawian men, and one enthusiastic turquoise clad preacher). There will, I think, be other blogs of a different nature, watch this space, and thanks for reading. 

Something of an Oversight

OK people hold on to your righteous senses of indignation because certain things need to be got off ones chest this evening…

As the world worries and frets over whether the Americans can control their suicidally democratic freedom loving fundamentalist crazies that they somehow allowed to get elected to represent actual people, Malawi is having its own crises. The biggest one, It’s becoming clear, is this: No one really seems to care about actual Malawians. Let’s have a look at some of the key players.

The Malawian Government

Scandal and drama this week, as President Joyce Banda sacks her entire cabinet after it has emerged that a worrying amount of politicians and good dose of the civil service have been looting public finances. Using the state of the art “Integrated Financial Management System”, elected representatives and their cronies have managed to steal billions of Kwacha, disguising the lost money as expenses on work trips or payouts to fake companies owned by Malawian MP’s and officials. This comes not long after Paul Mphwiyo, the national budget director, got shot three times in the face a week before he was to release a report that was going to name some big names as corrupt thieves. Strangely enough, while he lies recovering in a South Africa hospital, Mphwiyo has himself been implicated in corruption, creating some sort of public pillaging based double agentry and intrigue. 

It’s easy to praise President JB (as she’s known) for making such a bold move – sacking the cabinet certainly makes a statement. But prasie is harder to give when you consider that she was the vice-president while her predecessor, Bingu Mutharika, raided 60 billion over several years from the public purse. To claim that she had no idea what was happening, or how, means that she was so out of the loop no one would trust her, or so in the loop that she has been forced to  acquire a useful corruption amnesia. What’s more, her continued refusal to declare her (many, many) assets indicate a certain opaqueness that doesn’t really fit with the drive to transparency she claims to support. There is definitely something uncomfortable about seeing the president roll into town with her 35 strong SUV based entourage for a “development” (read: campaign) rally before pitching up at her palace in Mzuzu.

Don’t be too hard on the politicians though. It’s hard to understand the plight of the common people when the currency you tend to think in, and save your cash in, is dollars, which aren’t affected by the travails of a crashing exchange rate. Also, when you live in a massive house, have lots of businesses and send one of your house-boys to buy your food and cook your meals, any sense of realism is hard to find.

The IMF

Ah so, we meet again, shady political forces of international capitalism. It was the International Monetary Fund who, after the death of Mutharika, saw an opportunity to forcefully suggest (read: impose) their classic economic prescriptions on Malawi. After Mutharika managed to piss off just about every international donor with his dictatorial tendencies (11 protestors got shot last year), and by just being really rude about the donors, the aid money dried up, followed consequently by the oil in the fuel tankers and the goods on the supermarket shelves. President JB, stepping up the plate by default, the darling of western donors apparently only because she happened to be female (it’s not like she was elected), accepted budget support from the IMF on condition that she devalued and the floated the currency, the Malawi Kwacha as quickly as possible. Now when you float the currency of a country that has very little industry and exports very little (Malawi actually imports more than it exports), that currency crashes. Very Very quickly. The long and short of it is that if the currency crashes, your money is worth less compared to other countries money. In the average Malawian’s case – 50% less, in 6 months. Practically, that means that the cost of everything has doubled, but no one is getting paid any more to compensate for the loss.

So for your average Malawian earning less than $2 a day (a good proportion earning less than this), that has very real implications. When you spend more than 60% of everything you earn on food, and suddenly food is twice as expensive, that means you and your family eats less. It also means less going to school, less treatment for the kids Malaria, or less HIV medication for the 30% or so living with the disease.

Even if rapidly devaluing the currency made economic sense in the long run (I think we’ve established at this point that I think that it doesn’t), for the majority of Malawians, it’s a disaster. Without social services or goverment supported welfare, the residents of one of the poorest countries in the world have, in real terms, now become 50% poorer, thanks to the heartfelt economic advice of the IMF and the western companies and countries that support it.

Donor Governments

Turning back to the current corruption scandal, the response of governments like Norway or the EU has been to cut funding (Norway – about 18million Euros, the EU, about 26 Million). Donor governments provide about 40% of Malawi’s budget – if this money stops coming, basic health services just stop working. That means teachers won’t get paid, leading to more strikes and the ruining of a years worth of education. The already stretched health system, with its constant medicine shortages and a tendendecy to prescribe Panadol for any illness whatsoever, is likely to collapse. Power, water, fuel supplies, food supplies, all of them are going to struggle in a country where power, water, fuel and food are already scarce or unobtainably expensive.

There’s an obvious counter here – of course governments don’t want to give their money where it’s going to be stolen, but that also makes the assumption that all of it is being wasted – which is unfair. Corruption is happening in many aid-dependent countries, and western governments must have known it’s been happening elsewhere and in Malawi at least since Mutharika’s thieving emerged, if not before. So why pull the plug on everything now, the good and the bad, at the beginning of the hungy season, just when most Malawians are really starting to feel the pinch. Yes, use this as an opportunity to review your funding and put better anti-corruption measures in place, but don’t condemn those who are dependent on the benefits of good aid to suffer because their inept and selfish leadership can’t get it together.

Big International NGO’s (BINGO’s)

Bit controversial this one, but since NGO’s starting taking their money direct from donor governments, they’re implicated too. Their goals, set by the agendas of international organisations (think Millennium Development Goals and Education 4 All targets), are limited by western set targets and not the actual needs and wishes of the Malawian people. The MDG’s are all very nice, but they don’t actually address what people in developing countries really want.

In fact, it’s hard to hear the voices of any on-the-street Malawians at all, so drowned are they by the clamour of peeved donors and the sound of their meagre savings losing all value day after day. When the Consumers Association staged days of protest at the rising prices, the only people that really benefitted were the civil servants and established middle classes, who secured themselves 70% pay rises. For the 80% of Malawians working in informal jobs or working their own land, no benefit was seen and their complaints have been left unheard or ignored. The voices of the BINGO’s and the middle class civil society organisations are so loud that the grassroots organisations of the towns and villages have little say in anything that matters.

All of the economic recovery plans and fallouts over who stole what money from whom and when seem to have a major oversight. That of the average, working (or not working) Malawian. The ones that don’t have several million Kwacha of stolen taxpayers money stashed under their beds.

Ok, rant over. Comments welcome. 

Women

It continually strikes me as to how positively shit it is to be a woman in this country. 65% of women are likely to have a child before they are married, for whom they are responsible, and 50% will have a child before the age of 18.  Girls are less likely to go to school, less likely to do well in exams,  employed less, paid less, respected less. But anyone can get the statistics – it’s the anecdotal stories which give the picture a grimmer countenance.

For example, I’ve heard stories of mothers in the south making their daughters “available” to their own fathers, in order to deter their culturally male polygamous instincts. The mind bending anti maternal instinct of this is so baffling that it must only be the sheer desperation of HIV and/or poverty that encourages mothers to go along with it. I am fairly sure the daughters opinions are rarely heard.

Or that hospital workers have told me that on the whole Malawian men have never really had an eye for foreplay or romance or condoms. It’s probably likely that a worrying number of women are raped at some point, probably before the age of 18, and decent proportion of those are then forced into marriage so they can care for the child. Particularly, the lack of foreplay, sexually disappointing as it sounds, means that internal injuries are much more likely, greatly increasing the risk of HIV and STD transmission.

And yet, the pressure on women to have children and marry and have a family is so great that they are willing to do things we can’t really understand to go along with all this. Up near the school there is a locally famous witch doctor, whose speciality appears to be helping women to get pregnant. His shtick is to sleep with women who are not getting pregnant with their husbands, claiming that he is giving them a “jump start”. No one knows if he’s ever been tested with HIV, and he has the dubious advantage of being able to say that people who don’t get pregnant after seeing him are “doing something wrong” or “are cursed” or “unnatural” or some other such nonsense. Of course, when someone does get pregnant, it’s another success for him.

There seems to be lots of different things to take from all of this.

My gut feeling is often is to react with horror. I wonder sometimes how women in Malawi deal with it. There’s definitely something I’m missing, because my 17-year-old-and-has-3-kids neighbour, Chimwemwe, always seems perfectly cheerful cooking and cleaning and washing. Its not as simple as – “women are oppressed”, its complex and its worth admitting that I don’t understand the relationships between men and women as Malawians understand them.

But what to take from these anecodotes? The first thing is that these perceptions are no way going to change in a short time. Anyone who likes to claim that all poverty can be ended in 25 years if only we just gave out enough money or fixed economies or institutions or trade balances and so on is grossly underestimating the fact that poverty creates, and is fundamentally bound up with, its own self reinforcing cultures. New traditions get created and embedded for generations, and become part of the cycle of poverty itself. It’s all very well changing the size of peoples bank balances, but that’s not going to change their collective psychology.

Second, and related aspect to this is that if you try to drive rapid change, the benefits often tend to be appropriated by those already holding the power in their hands. Rapid income rises may look nice on paper, but we also always have to look to the minutae in any given context of who gets that income, how they spend it, where they spend it, and so on. In a society where men hold the most powerful positions, that matters a lot. By way of example, fishing is a good source of income around Nkhata Bay. Surprisingly, fisherman actually do pretty well for themselves compared to the average home farmers. But they are also much more likely to spend their earnings drinking, smoking and sleeping with prostitutes, meaning that their on average higher incomes don’t necessarily translate into schooling for the kids and clean water for the family.

From another angle, it’s worth engaging with how exactly African women want change to happen.  The development community in the last 10 years or so has very much woken up to the fact that women are vitally important for an economy. Raising, feeding and educating children always falls to the women, and failing to welcome them into the workforce is basically under-utilising 50% of your countries potential. So tonnes of funding goes into women’s education, job promotion, women’s rights – all of the things that we in the western world would like to see – women’s economic equality and entry into the productive economy.

But while we spend our time talking about goals and targets and data and comparing it over time, we might be missing that some (obviously by no means all) women culturally value their right to stay at home and be mothers. African Feminist movements often talk about the African woman as primarily a mother, not a worker. So while western NGO’s and governments preach the idea of welcoming women in the way that we understand, the reaction of African women like Chimwemwe could be quite the opposite – “why should we work in office jobs when our cultural responsibility is and should be to take pride in the raising and nurturing of our children from home”. (If you’re interested in the feminisms debate, read this http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=35366#.UiSn7pL6QVc – main point, that African feminisms could be more about “taking the gentle approach rather than ripping women from the family bosom and setting them on their own pedestal as so many people feel Western feminism has done”).

Sometimes, when you hear organisations talk about “empowering women”, what they really mean is “getting it so that women are like they are in the west.” That’s not empowerment. Now that doesn’t mean that women shouldn’t have the vote, or equal education, or social protection, or the right not to get constantly taken advantage of. But it does mean that we have to listen sensitively and carefully to the voices of African women, and accept that we might not philosophically agree with what we hear.

Sponsor a Pig!

Ok folks, you knew this one might be coming, so here it is in all of its maximum piggy fundraisy glory.

You may or may not know that the school I’m working at is managed by a Malawian trust, which is funded by a group called Masambiro in the UK. Since 2004, Masambiro have taken the school from rented accomodation with 3 teachers and 20 students, to a now well known campus in Nkhata Bay with over 240 students, science and IT labs and a school hall.

Not only that, but about 25% of the students are subsidized, meaning that some of the poorest students in Nkhata Bay are receiving some of the very best education. The teachers here are giving the students a real chance at a high quality education, and that alone deserves recognition.

But we want to get bigger, and better, and work not just for students but for the wider community as well. In the future, we want to build hostels for students so they don’t have to walk 2 hours to school each day, train our graduates with vocational skills so they can find jobs, and help the local community generate more income for themselves and their families.

So in the name of raising even just a small amount of money for this to happen – Welcome to the Masambiro Sponsor a Pig campaign!

I’ve hinted for a long time that the school was going to be getting its own pigs for an income generation project to help the schools finances. Pig Farming is a great way of raising money here – the meat is really popular and demand is high, as are prices. The problem for most is getting the capital together to build a piggery,  buy the pigs and pay for the right medicines and foods to support the little oinkers need and so on.

Here at Kunyanja we are now the proud guardians are 5 piggies, 4 girls and a boy (the lucky  bastard), and in return for a donation of an amount you choose, you will become the proud sponsor of an income generating pig. You’ll get to contribute to the naming of the pig, and since lots of you might like to sponsor, pigs may have the joy of having several names chosen by good folk like yourselves.

Pig 1

Sex: Male

Age: 6 months

Breed: Large White

Likes: Hasidic Literature, Playboy Magazine, ACDC.

Dislikes: Rats, the nickname “big-nose”, being disturbed while he’s on the loo.

Special Talents: Is a real player and yes, he does get to ahem, get it on with all of the girls. Think of him as a sort of piggy Hugh Heffner.

Pig 2

Sex: Female

Age: 6 months

Breed: Large White

Likes: It’s all about Essex, Candy Crush Saga, Babe: Pig in the City, Harry Potter, Minimal Techno, Ketamine

Dislikes: The colour blue, anything ever written by Dan Brown

Other Details: Has occasionally worked with computer hacker group “Anonymous” on  their corporation busting Alogrythms. Her hacker name is “porkster”.

Pig 3:

Sex: Female

Age: 3.5 months

Breed: Large WHite

Likes: Collecting didactic folk tales from various cultures, story telling, West Ham Football Club, singing “if I had a Hammer” but only saying “Ham”, instead of “Hammer”,

Dislikes: Caviar, Carlsberg, the word “moist”.

Favourite Moment: Advising Sam Allardyce recently on his seasonal strategy for the squad. She is personally a fan of solid, defensive minded football. 

 Pig 4:

Sex: Female

Age: 3.5 months

 Breed: Black Spotted

Likes: Her collection of revolutionary literature, Das Kapital, Che Guavara, Animal Farm

Dislikes: David Cameron, Ayn Rand, Neoclassical Economics

Special Talent: Can recite The Communitst Manifesto from memory and is working towards a history PHD on the life of Karl Marx, entitled “Marx: A man of Contradictions – How Marx’s rejection of Judaism and Capitalism began with a Ham and Cheese Sandwich”.

 

Pig 5

Sex: Female

Age: 3.5 Months

Breed: Spotted

Likes: Knitting, Cups of Tea, The book – “3 cups of Tea”, Jeremy Kyle

Dislikes: Smoking, Electronic Music, Change

Special Talent: Is currently working as a body double for Angelina Jolie.

So, if you want to help us to do bigger and better things, Sponsor a Pig! Your donation will go via Masambiro and through to Kunyanja School Trust. Since I am the only member of staff and since my office is the storage room at the back of the IT lab,  I can promise your money will go 100% towards income generating projects, and will be helping us to reach sustainability – the golden egg of all development projects.

Send me an email or leave a reply on the blog detailing the name you would like to bestow on your pig and how much you would like to donate, and I will send you pictures of your chosen pig, details of how to donate and a very very big thank  you. 

Top 4 – continued

 

Alright alright, so that last post was a bit whiney. You can grant me a bit of a rant every so often, since they’re easier to write and much funnier. Anyway, in line with my more positive mood today, below are my top 4 things about living in Malawi. Now it’s easy to get corny about countries in Africa, and blather on about red sunsets and colourful dresses and stuff being carried on people’s heads and “the natural grace of the people” and the cuteness of the children and the charming hospitality of rural folk, and while all that may be true, I tend to think all that’s overblown and exaggerated bollocks. Our own countries (wherever you happen to be reading this from) also have beautiful sunrises and sunsets, cute children and charming hospitable country folk (with accents so thick they might as well be speaking Swahili at you), it’s just we’re so used to it and are trained to believe that its poor form to wax lyrical about our own countries good qualities that we never admit it in public. That said, I can continue.

1. Hand painted adverts – I hate adverts. I intensely dislike how companies have taken over public space with signs containing garish art work and crude sexualised messages. Yes, some of them are witty and clever, but in the end, their only purpose is to make you buy stuff. Now to be fair, I can appreciate the fact that they add colour to the landscape and give you something to look at, but what makes them so soulless is that they’re mass produced and glued on mostly in places some advertising executive thinks will make them most effective. There’s nothing personal about bits of paper printed out in a factory and rolled onto a sign by a JCDecaux employee. But in Malawi, especially in the smaller towns, adverts are often hand painted onto the side of a shop wall. To me at least, it makes all the difference – to know that someone from the local area was paid to spend time painting that advert, making sure it was perfect. It wasn’t rolled out of a factory and glued on – someone’s living really depended on painting that advert, and that fact that its painted makes it all the more personal. Sometimes, you even see a whole row of small shops, each with a different advert for soap or washing powder, and it really does look like art. It’s not just adverts either, but the names of bars, shops, NGO’s – all hand painted. I like that.

 

1. The ability to arrange a game of football, with whoever is around, at whatever time of day, including referee with whistle and probably someone making at least a half hearted effort to be a linesman. Its magical, you’ll be invited to play because they value playing with someone from a different continent with different skills (as if I have any skills!), and regardless of how heated it gets on the pitch, at the end everyone is laughing and joking and taking the piss out of each other. In Nkhata Bay in particular, the prison guards from the prison across the road have no problem with one of the prisoners making up a team or playing as the referee for a bit.

 

Coupled with this is my admiration of the attempt of teams to play the world’s most beautiful football on the world’s most horrific pitches. No hoofing it up field, no booting it out at the first sign of danger – African pub teams play real football despite the fact that a pitch full of sand makes the ball bobble like it has been cursed by the witch doctor.. Its … (and excuse the patronising tone) – hopelessly impractical at times, but makes for much more exciting playing and watching.

 

1. The lake. Just, the lake. Everything about it. It has its own temperament – it seems to change its mood each day. The lanterns on the boats at night that give it its name – “the lake of stars”. The unique fish it has in it. The fish eagles that eat the unique fish. The fact that its calm, clear, blue and fresh. It has provided food and livelihoods for thousands and years and if we’re careful, could go on doing so for many more. Its lush, green scenery, even when it’s dry. There I go – I’ve broken my own rule of lyrical, exaggerated, and fluffy scenic descriptions… but it really is something special.

 

1. The fact that Malawians don’t seem to get worked up about anything, and laugh at anyone who does. I have lost the key to my office, so currently have to go in the awkward back way that goes through the science chemical store. Today I got all hot and bothered (figuratively and literally) because I couldn’t get the key to work and I really really needed to get into my office. Exasperated, I went to the deputy head, Mr Muyire, who couldn’t really understand why I was getting so worked up and helped me get the key to work (it was actually fine) with a bemused smirk on his face. There have been many other occasions where I’ve both myself and others openly sniggered at for tripping, falling or getting flustered about anything.

 

 It’s something that’s both outrageously frustrating (see last post), but also very refreshing. Once you realise that you’re not being laughed at because you’re a Mzungu (although it does provide a lot more ammunition), but that everyone is open to the same treatment, you realise how inhibiting having too much pride, or the feeling of taking yourself too seriously can be.

So that’s the top 4. Perhaps what makes me like these things (except the lake one), is the personal touch. The painting, the football, the laughing at everyone and everything – they have a quality about them that feels a bit more genuine and warm than at home. I don’t know if we ever had it in the UK (I have a hunch that we did), but that warmth feels, to me at least, to add weight to the in truth often repeated idea  that something very important may have been lost in lives driven by the possession of cool stuff that flashes a lot, and the furthering of our own careers. 

Top 4

OK people. There are some frustrations to get off my chest. Bourne out of social and cultural conditioning and most likely a deep seated misunderstanding of entire situations, these are my top 4 things that sometimes (well actually quite often piss me off) about living in Malawi.

1. People calling out Mzungu at me in the street, all day, every day, wherever I am. This one especially applies to children. It means “white man”, it’s not supposed to be insulting. But it is annoying. On the bus yesterday, a guy calls Mzungu, I turn around, and he just stares and looks at me. What did he really expect from me? “Yes, Hello! Thank you for noticing that I am, in fact, White! How observant of you, let’s be friends!”

And what exactly is the correct response? And believe me, I’ve tried a few. Replying with “Mfipa!” (black man) yields mixed results of surprise, amusement or insult, depending on age. Or there’s the awkward Englishman’s smile nod and wave, the retort of choice for anyone who just wants to get to work unbothered at 6 in the morning before coffee, but which still reaffirms the strangeness and otherness that the call “Mzungu” implies in the first place.

2. People expecting you to buy them stuff because you’re white. Not a politically correct thing to say, but it does happen. Ok I know in general Malawians have a different approach to “stuff” and material goods than we do, but I was on the bus yesterday (yup,  same one), and I share my bottle of water with the woman next to me and her baby, both of whom apparently speak no English, which we finish. 3 hours later, we stop, and she calls over a man selling bottled water to buy some, taps me on the shoulder and rediscovers her English to say “don’t have money”, and waits for me to buy it. So I buy it, I drink a little bit, then she downs the whole bottle, puts the empty in her bag, and doesn’t say a word – no thank you, nothing. I’m all for sharing, but come on, seriously.

 3. The tendency of Malawians to openly laugh at you, in another language, in public. This doesn’t hurt anything other than pride, and they laugh at each other too, but it’s still frustrating and the only  thing you can do is smile and pretend you’re in on it. Which you’re not.

 4. The inferiority complex deeply ingrained into Malawians, a combination of Christianity and grandfathers tales, that tells them that whites must be blessed, otherwise how could they be so successful? Whites work harder, are clever, have “woken up”, or variations on that theme. No acknowledgement of the fact that western success was built on brutal slavery and (ongoing) colonial tendencies at the expense of Malawian empowerment and development. Coupled with this is the belief that life in London is better, and that they should all go there to work, because in England everyone has money.

 What did colonial officials do here that so dominated peoples experience OK that they feel this way? Why must many (but certainly not all) Malawians continue to believe that they are weaker, cursed, slower and sleepier than anywhere else? Part of the answer surely lies in the portrayal of David Livingstone as a great liberator from slavery, but it somehow isn’t very satisfying.

I think all of these are frustrating because they highlight my otherness, how little I know about society here and the way it functions. But worse, I think they are frustrating because they force me to ask whether mine, and other NGO presences here (and across Africa), reinforce these messages. Walking around town waving at people with my hat on and my shirt tucked in trying to be nice and integrated, do I, and the other carefree travellers rolling around spending money on frivolities, do we reinforce this message? That white people are here to pull the inferior Africans out of trouble, and that we all have money and God’s blessing? And if we do achieve some measure of development here (however you define that), will it be at the cost of confirming a societal debt to the “white man” that can never be erased, similar to cultural British antipathy to European influence. That’s the source of my frustration, and I don’t know if it will ever go away.

Blogging for who?

SO you might have noticed that there has not been much blogging recently. To be blunt, this blog has been having something of an existential crisis. You see, having a few somewhat nerdish tendencies, I spend a not insignificant amount of time reading blogs about politics, extremely geeky picture based blogs about Communism (www.cosmarxpolitan.tumblr.com) and international development. What to blog about follows trends that tear through these blogs like fashion trends across, well … an issue of cosmopolitan.

So what was I to do when a wave of highly critical blog posts came out about volunteers and workers blogging about their experiences in developing countries. In short, these posts argue that blogging about where you are and what you’re doing is a)  mostly an excercise in “humbragging” – humble bragging. That is, where you’re bragging about all the cool shit you might be getting upto whilst still trying to sound humble and save-the-worldy, like a superman comic which after explaining how the hero has stuffed his enemies mouth with popcorn and buried him under the surface of the moon and ends with him wistfully casting his eyes to the side and saying, “oh, it’s nothing, it’s all in a days work”. Even worse, you could be glamourising the poverty of the people around you just to make yourself look cool.

Or b) Humiliating and degrading to the people you purport to be working to get out of the cycle of humiliation and degradation – a pale westerner sitting there at your laptop claiming some special knowledge of the culture of where you are, based on a few drumming sessions in the hostel bar and that time you got invited back for some Nsima by a local guy. Basically, it makes you not much better than a colonial officer sending letters home to his family about how he is “civilising the natives”.

First there was this post… http://stuffexpataidworkerslike.com/2011/04/11/44-blogging-for-the-folks-back-home/. A few choice quotes …

“When setting up a blog for the folks back home, you’ll want to make the title some clever variation of your name and the place where you are posted during this first overseas EAW-type job or experience” – Erm … guilty as charged?

“When blogging for the folks back home, the important thing is to prove you are blending in well with your new surroundings. You also want to reassure worried parents that you are fine and that yes, you are in Africa, but no, you’re not living in range of Somali pirates and that Ivory Coast is actually on the other side of the continent, so you’re not at risk from the conflict there (if anyone’s actually heard that there is a conflict there… if not, just skip over that, it will needlessly worry them)” – I’m pretty sure I’m guilty of this one, even if its subconsciously.”

But the most damning critique came from here – http://www.whydev.org/hey-aid-worker-its-not-about-you/ .  In listing types of bloggers, “You have the development worker who blogs like she is a travel writer”, or “you have those unoriginally ironic “my life is tough” photos, posted from the poolside, with a cocktail and a laptop placed side-by-side on a table. Bonus points if there’s a sunset in the background. Usually, such a photo will be accompanied by a caption saying something along the lines of “my office for the afternoon” or “all in a day’s work.”

The question being posed was – what are you blogging for anyway? Are you blogging to raise awareness, show off your surroundings, or is it all just a (not so) elaborate grab for attention at the expense of the dignity and voice of others. All this when enhancing dignity and empowering people is supposed to be the name of the game.

So it’s with all this in mind the motivation to blog ground to a halt. There were some damning points to consider. Is it just about showing off? Or pretending to be a travel writer? How do the people, rich or poor, around me, feel about my blithe philosophising and pontificating on their traditions and customs?  So in the spirit of participation and to assuage my self-doubt, I asked some of my friends how they felt about my blogging in this way.

Mary, our project officer, thought it was positively hilarious. On having pictures taken in mudhuts in a village, she said that “villagers would love to see their face on the computer”. After she read the post on religion, she was more interested in giving me a history lesson on Christianity in Malawi than chastising me for my half baked theories. (For her, the religion thing is basically just a result of history. People worship white Jesus because David Livingstone brought him here and he stopped the slave trade in Malawi. It’s just history).

Webster, one of the teachers at the school, also though nothing of it. He told me about how he went to Zambia and found himself writing down all of the things that were different about it – he could understand why someone might want to tell their friends about it. He did point out something interesting though – he said that a lot of people did not want their picture taken because they understood that white people have a tendency to bring fancy cameras, walk around taking pictures and then using those pictures to make money – (I assume by sending them into photojournalism competitions or newspapers. Or maybe they have seen more than a few Save The Children ads, in which desperately poor and miserable looking children are used to get your attention, sympathy and cash.) Apart from that though, most people find the idea that white people want to take their picture quite exciting – it’s a novelty more than anything else.

Nick, a student at the school and a pretty mean wood carver, also laughed at me for asking. He said he didn’t really mind people taking pictures of him or me writing about things I came across in Malawi. He thought it was good that I was telling people about poverty here.

So far, so positive. OK OK, you’re right – these people are my friends – it’s unlikely they are going to tell me about how my blog undermines their dignity just because I ask them about it straight up, but they certainly didn’t seem particularly put out by it either. They seemed to regard Mzungu blogging as either a curiosity Mzungu’s do, or a more elaborate form of status update – understandable, but essentially irrelevant.

My conclusion is that it’s probably OK to blog, as long as I don’t find myself committing the sins of humbragging, making unfounded assumptions about “the locals” and their needs and wants, or posting pictures of people in their most undignified and embarrassing moments. Most us tend to grow up in fairly limited environments. Painting a picture and expressing wonder and confusion at a world that is full of difference, variation and idiosyncrasy does not seem to me be something to be ashamed of, regardless of whether you are a traveller, oil executive or development worker.

The aim in this blog, I think, is to wonder, aloud, about how and why people adapt to their different situations, to apply a little bit of international development based thinking to it all, and to show some support for my pet belief that underneath all the cultural quirks and confusions, most people are basically the same, hoping to be listened to, and understood. In this, I may find that I am wrong, which is OK too.

Nick and his Sister, Anna, at school.

Also, I’ve added a new section called “development chatter”, which will have more analytical stuff, book reviews and “articles” – There’s already something in there. Cool! Comments, discussion and criticisms encouraged. This may also include righteous indignation at the behaviour of  governments and large corporations.

I do not apologise for this.

Preacher Man

6pm, Blantyre, and I am boarding the bus for the 12 hour journey back to Nkhata Bay. I’ve been researching vocational training colleges (more on that in another post), and the thought of a 12 hour night journey crammed in with a couple of chickens and several cry-tastic babies is not particularly appealing. “Premier Buses” are not that bad, as African public transport goes, but they still like to pack ‘em in tight, so it’s going to be a cosy journey. I have acquired the last seat on the bus – better than standing, but not quite the window seat I was hoping for.

As I step over the threshold, a gentle looking man in a beige suit jacket, faded striped shirt and a flamboyantly turquoise tie blocks my path, turns, smiles, and pats me on the back as I pass. I climb over the suitcases and wayward sticking out feet toward the back of the bus, and collapse on the cushioned but still weirdly hard seat, psyching myself up for the journey and swapping the usual greetings in Chichewe with those around me.

Meanwhile, flamboyant turquoise tie man has begun to talk, quietly at first, but soon getting into the rhythm of his words. He is preaching, and it’s not the first time I’ve seen it. Soon the finger waving begins, and the preacher is in full swing. It’s all in Chichewe, of course, except for one moment about 5 minutes in where a pocket bible comes out, and in carefully pronounced but still distinctly Malawian English, the man reads “therefore for their deeds they were cast into the fires of hell!”, before launching into an even more animated spiel. I can’t really understand what he is saying, but “sin”, “Satana” and “bible quote-e” are repeated a lot. He has a thing for rhetorical flourishes – I can make out the repeated sentences and dramatic pauses despite the language gap. Turquoise tie man is sweating now, his suit jacket pulled awkwardly to one side as he pulls out an equally flamboyantly turquoise (surely not coordinated?) towel, wiping his forehead with one hand as his finger points and waves with in fervent religious passion with the other. I look around. I would love to say that the bus was rapt with attention, the congregation ready to repent their sins with tears in their eyes. But … they weren’t – as a baby cried and everyone shifted around uncomfortably, the look on the faces of most was more that of “look mate, it’s gonna be a long journey yeah, so piss off and save it for the church or something yeah?”. Saying that though, as he finishes the preach and his face reverts to the friendly one that I had met just 15 miunutes earlier, preacher man walks down the bus and collects money for his efforts from some of the passengers.

It’s a funny experience to get my head around, because religion in Malawi is something I don’t think I will ever understand. Apart from the 20% Muslim community, everyone else is a Christian, and almost everyone goes to church. Biblical arguments are commonly used in the newspapers, and each staff meeting, group meal or long journey routinely begins with a short prayer. It’s pretty common for people to ask which church you go to when having a getting to know you conversation, and believe me, there is a lot of choice. Lutherans, Pentecostal, 7^th Day Adventist, Catholic, CE, various other more or less extreme born again groups,  (one sect leads people on trips up the biggest hill in the area for all night praying sessions that can last upto 3 days.)  – a whole range of versions of Christianity are available, and they all differ on what people can eat, drink, smoke, and variously accuse each other of being influenced by Satan or betraying the faith or other such assertions. Walk past some services and you can hear all the wails and shouting and singing that you might hear at one of those mid-west American marquis type deals with superstar preachers and people speaking in tongues. Others have beautiful choral singing, and sometimes on my way home from work I can hear a perfectly harmonised village choir practising outside… (yes, I like to pretend they are serenading me home). One thing they can all agree on though … Jesus is very definitely the white European long haired surfer dude we all know from white European paintings of him.

To me, that’s odd. Why oh why would Malawians still choose to worship in front of a picture of Jesus that is not only inaccurate (he was probably arab-ish, if anything), but with the single picture of his white, noble, pained and crucified face belies the fact that Christianity never had anything to do with Africa until the Mzungu came to conquer it. It doesn’t make sense to me that people would choose as the token of their spiritual engagement with the world a symbolic face that’s history has none in Africa save, pretty much, for that of slavery, colonialism and many other bad, bad things.

It would be wrong, I think, to try to provide an explanation for this, based on only casual passing experience. Many people clearly get a lot from their Christianity and it makes sense, superficially at least, that people living in poverty would turn to a religion in which humility and poverty were praised as a way to explain and understand their situation. Indeed, the South American experience showed how powerful churches can be in fighting against poverty and oppression (check out Liberation Theology, if you’re interested!). But it does make you wonder how the influence of imposed and now accepted Christianity, with its basis in European Philosophy and values, has affected the way Malawians see their history, white people and each other. Even more to wonder – how have these values clashed with other ingrained indigenous ideas, like approaches to family life and relationships?

These aren’t the sort of questions you can really Wikipedia an answer to – but any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

Killer Tomatoes

Tomatoes. Tomatoes on everything, tomato sauce, tomato ketchup, grated tomato, fried tomato, very tomato-ey Shakshuka, Tomatos in the stew, tomatos in the salad – the two vegetables/fruits that you can always guarantee you can find in Nkhata Bay, Tomatos and Onions. The fruit and vegetable market consists pretty much of lots of different market stalls, all selling loads of tomatos, maybe with some other stuff sandwiched in between. And yet, there’s still high demand for tomatoes. The prices are massively inflated mostly because most people don’t actually grow tomatoes in the area. During the rainy season at least, most vendors go and buy them at wholesale prices and pay the very high transport costs to get them down the market in Nkhata Bay. Why do I say during the rainy season? Mostly because planting tomatoes in the rainy season is asking for trouble – the rain can be too heavy and wash away the best bits of the soil you need them to grow, there could be not enough rain in which case they don’t grow properly, fertilizer for tomatos is  expensive, and many different types of pests and diseases plague even the smallest group of tomato trees.

So here we are at the school, where we thought we’d go for it and grow about 200 odd tomato trees. We think we can get away with it because unlike most, we have the cash (yeah check out my blinging fertilizer y’all) at the beginning to make sure we can get the fertilizer and pesticides and other necessary stuff to see us through. If we can pull it off, then it’s a win-win for everyone. Like the other things we grow in our income generating garden, we sell at cheap prices and we’re closer enough to town that vendors can take what they buy in a wheelbarrow rather than pay for the transport, pushing their margins up, and bringing in cold hard cash for the school.

Except… its looking a bit dodgy. The last week saw 5 days of fairly constant rain, as well as one properly epic storm that had most people cowering underneath their  bedsheets until it passed, unless they were unlucky enough to have their roof blown off. Rain is good, but not when it looks like its seeping inside the currently green growing tomatoes, stunting their growth and putting the whole crop into question. They also appear to have something called “blossom drop” (which I rather like the name of), which means the tomatos just won’t grow! And now, for the first time, I have a small taste of what it’s like to be living in uncertainty over our (at the moment) only source of income. If we weren’t a school, and were a family, we’d be watching our cash crop (i.e. the crop that sends the kids to school and pays for medicines) for the rest of the season and fretting. Fretting rather a lot, actually. If the crop does fail, then yes, it is our fault for planting at an awkward time, and yes, we can diversify and plant other things (bring on the sweet potatoes!) and even have another go at tomatoes again in the next couple of months  … but that doesn’t change the fact that if growing stuff through agriculture is the base of your economy, then you’re always going to be, to some extent, a slave to the weather.

Now there are some positives to smallholder farming – basically growing stuff in your back garden and selling it. Some plants (but not all!) are just better managed when they are done small scale – cocoa trees and coffee, for example – they take up a lot of space and need a bit of TLC. That means that big nasty farming corporations and supermarkets can’t just buy you out and make you work for them (usually with few rights and crap wages). Second, if you get organised, it’s a bit harder to get screwed over by aforementioned farming corporation or supermarket, because they need each individual and their trees, and because you can unite with all your neighbours that grow the same things and have a bit of community power behind you. (Fair Trade Chocolate basically works on this principle – the farmers unite together in a co-operative to give them some power when it comes to selling their cocoa – they guarantee themselves a fair price. The Mango company in northern Ghana started a co-operative so big that their selling power affected the world price of Mangos!).

But on the other hand, if you can’t get organised, then it’s hard to get good tools and equipment, you have to work for longer, and there isn’t much support for you if things go wrong. If you live in poverty, then planting other stuff just isn’t an option because it’s too difficult to get good seeds (droubt or disease resistant, for example). As we’re finding out, the downsides mean committing a decent part of your income to a not insignificant amount of chance. Too much rain, or too much sun, or not enough sun, or too many insects or not enough insects, and it’s going to be a stressful year.

And no. I’m not sure how to spell tomatoes/tomatos.

The Long Con?

Every so often when I’m feeling particularly lazy, I will hang out at the house of the guys who run the diving school / nice hotel type place and order take out from an Indian owned restaurant nearby. It’s a pretty good restaurant, and given the circumstances (i.e unpredictable shortages of various vegetables) they do a pretty good Tikka Masala and a mean Chappati. The same guys also owned a supermarket next door, which sold a few bits and pieces (chocolate fucking chocolaaaaaaate) that you couldn’t get at the other supermarket in town. I would wave at them as I walked in, and a couple of times they gave us some tasters to try at the restaurant.

There are quite a few Indians in Malawi, and increasingly a lot of Chinese expats too, bringing foreign money that is worth more and setting up successful businesses nearby. With their contacts back home they can often arrange imports of stuff that local shop-owning Malawians just can’t get hold of or afford. The eponymously named “Chinese Supermarket”, in Mzuzu (the nearest big town), is full of crap you can’t get anywhere else, including bathroom essentials such as breast enhancement cream (“tested scientific formula!”), all manner of 80’s style radios and alarm clocks and a colourful, random and yet surprisingly popular selection of photograph frames. You can decide for yourself whether this is a good thing or not (provision of goods and services you can’t get locally vs. The fact that most of the profits after investment leave the country) – this post is about something different.

So anyway, it turns out that this week, the Indian owner of said restaurant and supermarket upped and left town overnight. With an accumulated $500 000 of cash that he had borrowed from numerous people around town, apparently without any intention to return it. That’s a lot of money anywhere in the world, let alone in Malawi, where that kind of money leaving the local economy in one go may, (and I’m just guessing here), have a measurable impact on the local economy. But what’s worse about the whole thing is that this guy turned up, set up 2 apparently successful businesses, built relationships, got to know people and got known as someone trustworthy enough to lend money to – and then screwed everyone for personal gain.  I don’t know what his story is, but I can’t think of much that could ever justify behaviour that appears so calculated and outrageously callous.  I wonder if it was something about Malawi that made him go from apparently legit business owner to communal burglar, or whether it was always part of the plan – a sort of Indian take away based international hustle. He certainly couldn’t have done it alone – perhaps other Indian expats helped him move the money, change it into other currencies and make his escape plan.

Vulnerability is a big buzz word in “development” – individuals, families and communities living “in poverty” (whatever that means) are generally more vulnerable to disease, floods, fires, war, crop failures and crime. But I have never really understood how an entire community could be vulnerable to theft until now. Who is going to go looking for the perpetrator here? The victims have had all their money stolen. The local community has neither the skill nor resources to do much about it, the same as the police, who are busy enough with local issues, let alone international fraud. The national government, cash strapped as it is, and (again educated guessing) probably hoping for Indian national aid or investment worth millions at some point soon are unlikely to make a fuss, and the Indian government certainly aren’t going to go hunting for a stolen poxy $500,000 which is to their gain anyway. Perhaps the NGO’s may get involved, but really, the odds of anyone getting back that money are slim at best.

I would also be willing to bet that this isn’t the first time this has happened in numerous other busy but otherwise relatively skint towns, apparently asking to be taken advantage of. There is a sense, also, that I am somehow complicit, being one of the many white tourists that made it attractive for him to set up a business here in the first place. On the other hand, I am reminded of something a fairly seasoned Canadian student/volunteer I knew in Ghana advised me on my first week when I was there. He said “I know this is your first week and it’s a small community and because of that and because you’re a fresh new volunteer you’re going to want to get to know everyone and be nice and shake everyone’s hand wherever they are from and learn their language, and that’s all really nice and you should definitely try to do that. But wherever you are and wherever you go, just remember, no matter how nice you try to be, some people are just assholes, simple as that.”

Often, from the sheltered perspective of my life in England, I have – perhaps naively –  stubbornly refused to let myself understand that statement. This week, from the flaming perspective of my moral outrage, it seems clearer than ever.