What makes your blood boil the hottest: corruption, AIDS, infant mortality, witchcraft, or that guy who always lets someone else pick up the tab?

This post is extremely long, and it’s taken me over a month to get through it. You know how when you start something, and then realize you’ve bitten off way more than you though you were going to have to chew, but then you just can’t bring yourself to do a half-assed job of it? Welcome to everything I ever do.

To those of you who get through the whole thing (and especially those who gain access to the bonus material, which requires an extra step), I extend my preemptive congratulations. That is particularly so because of the scattered and confused nature of it. It doesn’t flow well: It’s a reflection of what’s been going down with me over here for the last 5 weeks or so, and “flowing” is definitely not how I would describe that time. There’s frustration, confusion, amazement, and everything in between. So don’t expect it to make any more sense than people’s emotions normally do. Thanks for your interest and patience!

One final note: I’ve decided that, in all stories I’ll tell, conversations and events that took place in Chichewa will be presented with the original dialogue because I feel it captures the story better, whether it makes it more interesting, funny, or weird. It may seem pretentious to post stories with dialogue in a language that most of you don’t understand, but it’s not. Trust me.

It has been a while since I posted, but it’s not for lack of interesting stories. I’ve been really busy with work, and it seems I entered Freshwater in a time when they can use all the help they can yet. The end of the year has been looming, which means stacks of donor reports (of course, each donor wants a totally different set of difficult to obtain data), attempts to plan for the following year, Christmas, and other project deadlines spawning from it being just too tempting to say “by the beginning of 2009, this project will have accomplished…” Stack on top of this the nitty gritty water point construction and maintenance work that is also our responsibility and you get a schedule with more than enough tasks and not enough time to do them all.

In any case, my goal for this post is to tell you a few interesting stories that might help capture some the reasons why one needs to tread so lightly in the field of international development, and also just to get some of this stuff off my chest and share it with whomever is interested. These stories don’t relate directly to ID implementation, no, but they might be interesting data points for anyone trying to understand the world in which on-the-ground development exists. And also the world in which I am living right now. They have definitely been interesting for me, anyway.

Making friends or something like that:

The first weekend I was here, I met someone named Odala Banda. On the Sunday afternoon of that weekend I had decided to go look around to try to find a place to stay. I had left the main road and started walking into the heart of one of the villages surrounding Chileka, the town I live in. I had been walking up a hill when I realized that I was on a private path that led to someone’s home. One of the people from the house was sitting on the front steps, and he looked at me with a justifiably suspicious kink in his eye. Who was this white guy coming up to see him at his home?

“Mwaswera bwanji!” I said, meaning “How did you spend the day?”

“Ndaswera bwino, kaya inu?” he replied. This means “I spend the day well, how about you”, but it was said is sort of an “I’m fine, but, who are you and what do you want?” tone.

“Ndikufuna kuyenda, kuona…”. I said, which means, “I want to walk, to see…”, my half-assed attempt at trying to explain that I just wanted to walk around the village and check it out. Luckily for me, someone happened to be walking along the path that was behind he, and he called to me. I was relieved because he was speaking English and I could actually communicate with him. So I turned around to greet him. I told him what I was doing, and he explained to the person from the house who’d I almost walked into.

His name was Odala, and he and I got to talking. He brought me back to his home, where we sat out front on a mat. Odala has a beautiful view of Chileka. This region of Malawi has gorgeous mountains around, and as Odala’s place is on a hill he gets a bird’s eye view of it all. He says he loves his home because of his view. His father, a man of almost 80 years who walks with a limp, was (and I think still is) a welder, he said. He helped Odala get on his feet by building him that home. Odala is married, and has two children, a young girl of about 3, Patience, and a boy of about 1, Moses.

We talked about a few different things, including our relationships, life in Malawi, differences between Malawi and Canada. Eventually he asked me what I was doing in Malawi, and I explained that I work for a Engineers Without Borders, and I am partnered with Freshwater to help them advance their capacity to achieve their goals. He told me that he also volunteers: Odala is the Chairman of the South Lunzu Post Test Club (SLPTC). This is a volunteer group that was formed about 4 years ago in Machinjiri, Odala’s home town. The group does public outreach work in the area to try to get everyone possible to know their HIV status. They feel they are battling with fear because people are afraid to talk about and admit to the reality of HIV/AIDS in their lives. Because of this fear, many people just choose not to go for voluntary testing. In addition, the group helps HIV victims get a hold of counseling services if they find out they are HIV positive. Many people feel their lives are over once they test positive, so the SLPTC wants to help people realize that they have options. Anti retro viral drugs, for example, are apparently available free or subsidized from the government, according to Odala.

Odala went on to say how his organization had so many challenges and obstacles to success. And then he asked me for money. This happens a lot here, when you meet someone and begin to talk to them it is quite common that they will eventually ask you for money. I was disappointed because I thought I’d found a friend but was left thinking I was just an opportunity to him. At this point, weeks later, I am not so matter-of-fact about this. But I am still wondering about it. Does Odala value me as a friend, really? There’s a question on this at the bottom of the post. I’m truly struggling on this one.

Anyway, I told him I couldn’t help him financially because as an EWB volunteer I don’t make any more than the people I work with. I don’t have a large amount of dispensable income that I can give out on a whim simply because I am an azungu, I told him (this was my first weekend in Chileka, too, and I’d just met Odala 30 minutes ago). So, he said fine, if I can’t help him financially, I could just help them with capacity building so that I can show them how to get funding. Again, I had to decline. I am here to help enhance Freshwater’s capacity, and I can’t take on a second job trying to do the same thing. It’s just not realistic. I want to help everyone and do everything, but I can’t. So I told him this, and then told him that, even though I wasn’t able to offer my help in to him in this way, I hoped we could still be friends. Yes, yes, of course we can, was his response.

We continued talking, and eventually I asked him how he got involved with the SLPTC. Though my cross-cultural communication skills are still lacking, I still was able to sense that he felt a pang of something when I asked this. I’m not sure what is was. Pain? Hesitation? That weird feeling you get when talking about something deeply personal and you wonder how others will react? Whatever it was, I’m sure it made sense somehow.

Odala told me that he’d lost his brother to AIDS about 4 years ago. He told me it was extremely painful to lose his brother, and when that happened he decided that he was always going to be involved with the fight against AIDS, no matter what happens, for the rest of his life. I found out in later conversations that Odala had lost another brother, a sister, and 5 or 6 nieces and nephews (he wasn’t sure which), to TB, waterborne diseases, and others. I never got too much detail from Odala on this and don’t plan to dig much further.

A couple of weeks ago, Odala invited me to go to Machinjiri with him, which as I mentioned before is his hometown. He seems to go there quite often to visit his mother and his nieces. I am not totally sure of the situation (I find Malawian family trees remarkably difficult to follow), but I am fairly certain that his nieces who live with Odala’s mothers are the daughters of one of Odala’s deceased siblings. The plan had been to have lunch with Odala’s family when we got to Machinjiri, but when we were there, he told me that his mother had no flour to make nsima because she did not have money. To give you an idea, a bag of nsima flour that’s enough to make at least 4 or 5 meals costs around 2 Canadian dollars.

The Lunzu River runs directly through Machinjiri, and Odala and I went to see it. This “river” is more of a creek by my definition, but apparently when the rains really pick up the river follows suit. I took a few photos while I was there. It’s really quite beautiful in this part of Malawi. Look at the photos below. One of them is rotated the wrong way for some reason.

As Odala and I sat on the rocks, we talked as we always do when we see each other. I never know what to make of our conversations. Sometimes I feel as though we’re at that point in a relationship when you can just be silent and it’s not weird. Uma Thurman’s character in “Pulp Fiction” had a great line about this: something to the effect of “Why do people always feel as though they have to talk about bullshit to feel comfortable? I think it’s great if two people can just sit and say nothing.” In any case, it sometimes feels like we can just sit and chill out, and that’s just fine. But at other times it’s strange: forced conversation, questions about Canada and Malawi in the hopes of finding a talking point, that type of forced and relieved laughter that comes out when an uncomfortable conversation stumbles upon something you feel like you might both be able to laugh at. Maybe this is just the way it goes when you are getting to know some people. I certainly would be lying if I said that every time I meet someone in Canada that the words flow like wine and everything just clicks. But at the same time, rarely would I meet someone I can with whom there exists the strange feeling that I get between Odala and I, but who still somehow seems really eager to be your friend.

Aside: any alarm bells raised yet? If I were telling this story to anyone at work, they’d undoubtedly make the point at this stage that Odala must be trying to suck money out of me: “he sees an azungu and he sees dollar signs, so he will try to take advantage of that” is what they’d say…
They tell me that this is a big problem for azungus in Malawi, and it’s just the way it is.
I am not willing to take this as reality without a grain of salt at this point. I am choosing to give all the relationships I build here the benefit of the doubt. I am assuming the best and hoping it will be consistent with reality. So far it’s going questionably. Not terribly, certainly not well, but questionably. If what my coworkers warn me of turns out to be true of my relationship with Odala, and indeed true of so many of the relationships I seem to be ending up in here in Malawi, I will be more than a little heartbroken. I am lonely enough as it is.

Our conversation eventually led, as it often does, into talking about work. Odala doesn’t have a job: he does what’s called ganyu labour (casual labour when he can find it), grows maize, and occasionally sells bricks that he makes with clay from the sand. Check out the photo below. These are some of Odala’s bricks which he sells to people for about 1.5 to 2 kwacha a piece if someone’s building a house (1 kwacha is around 1.1 Canadian cents). Check out the photo below.

Odala had mentioned to me before that he used to show movies to make money. He said he’d bought a TV and a DVD player and would rent DVDs from the library to show to people. He’d charge 5 kwacha a head to watch the movies and he did quite well, he told me, until his property was stolen, causing him to lose out on this source of income. He’d mentioned to me before that he wanted to start this up again, so as we sat on the rocks in Machinjiri, I asked him how it was going. He told me that it wasn’t going well and that he wouldn’t be able to do it unless he found a business partner. Ah, I said, and how was he going to go about trying to find one? His response was as I predicted, and he asked me to be his business partner because it would be hard to find anyone else. Sigh. My response to him was that I wouldn’t know where to start in terms of finding a place to show such movies or how to go about doing it. He said it would be fine. My theory was that, as his “business partner”, I would basically just finance the whole cost. So, I told Odala that I would only invest in any type of project if I saw a sound business plan with some real consideration put into how it is going to succeed. With that, I offered to help Odala put together this plan. He has since done some research on the costs of inputs, and about week later we sat down and formed a spreadsheet together looking at how much he need for startup costs, what his maintenance costs will be, and how much revenue he expects, so that we could see under what conditions he will make money and in what timeframe. Odala found this to be really useful (he says), and I was happy to be able to help him with this. We’ve since revised the plan based on some new activities Odala is working on, and at this point our plan should see him starting his movie showing business sometime in February or March, in theory.

Now, my relationship with Odala, as I have said, is confusing to me. I lent him money for fertilizer which I haven’t seen and he hasn’t mentioned. When he sees me he uses the talk time on my phone as if it doesn’t matter at all. He still wants me to front the money for the DVD business, though I’ve told him I can’t afford to do that (we don’t make much money here as EWB volunteers. I only get paid about $15 a day). When we went to Machinjiri I paid for the bus ride there and back for both of us, and when I asked Odala if he had any cash on him he said no as if he was surprised that I would even ask. He assumed I would pay for both of us and didn’t even mention it. That bus ride cost the equivalent of 1/3 of a day’s pay for me. That’s not trivial. I have told Odala that I don’t make an azungu salary in Malawi just because I’m an azungu, but I’m not convinced he has gotten the message. In addition, Odala called me on Christmas, then told me to call him back, and then asked me what I had prepared for him. I told him, “Nothing! What have you prepared for me for Christmas?”, to which he just laughed and said “Nothing!”. So what the hell is going on?

So here’s the situation: Odala has seen so much pain in his life and has lost many people. He is poor and he struggles to get by. I am his “friend”, but I don’t know what that means to him. He assumes I can afford to fund our friendship and help him financially. He assumes I will do that without issue, and I feel like a request for money is always on the way every time we interact. He helped me find the place where I am staying now, which was great, and I am willing to help with this business plan. I feel for him because I know he struggles. But I can’t help everyone in Malawi personally. I feel terrible when I think of what he has lost and the worries he has for his own children, but am I helping him out of guilt or because I really want to? Even though I don’t make much here as an EWB OVS, I do have some money in my account. And, really, I could afford to give him a lot of money by his standards with minimal effects to my personal finances in the long term. So he’s not as wrong as I tell him he is when I say “I can’t afford it.” Quite possibly, I’m just full of shit.

Is it his right to assume that I will fund him the way he wants me to? Is it my right to feel pissed off when he calls me his “friend” but I suspect he just wants me as his money tree? Am I giving him the benefit of the doubt or I am doing the opposite? Would I feel different if he didn’t seem like such a happy guy? If I lost my brother, sister, and 6 nieces and nephews, I would be an emotional disaster. And if I were poor and knew someone I believed to be rich and able to help me, would I be as forward and presumptuous as Odala is being? What would need to happen for me to value that person as a true friend? I really don’t know! It’s so confusing.

Well, that’s the deal with Odala right now. Can you tell I’m frustrated and confused?

The power of prayer – Enough to save your kids from their Halloween costumes or from true evil?

Onto the next story. Later in the afternoon, after returning from Machinjiri, I decided to attend the interdenominational church service that is conducted each Sunday at the Freshwater Resource Centre. At the time, the Resource Centre was where I was living as I was looking for a new place. This building is a totally separate structure from that of the Freshwater office, and the resource centre is actually used primary for religious activities (this surprised me when I got here).

The previous Sunday I had meant to attend the service but didn’t because I wasn’t sure what was going on, when it started, etc. This time, since I wanted to learn more about the community and about this Resource Centre, the function of which I still don’t fully understand, I was determined to attend the service. The people from work who were there with me know I that I’m not a Christian and that I don’t go to church, but appreciated that I wanted to check it out. It turned out to be some of the craziest, most unexpected stuff I have seen since I’ve been here.

The service began beautifully. Sarah, the receptionist from Freshwater, started the service off by leading us all in song.

“Hallelujah!” she would shout.

“Amen!” the group would respond.

“Hallelujah!” she’d repeat in sort of an “I can’t HEAR YOU!” way.

“Amen!” the group would respond again, along the lines of, “we SAID, Amen!” in tone.

Then, Sarah led is in song. It was beautiful. She sings wonderfully, and the group was following along: everyone knew the words except me. As we reached the chorus, the group would sing together and Sarah would sing a bridge for us between musical phrases. It was wonderful.

Next, Sarah led us all in prayer. She asked that people testify in front of the group to share the amazing things that have happened to through the power of prayer. People obliged and received healthy applause after they shared. After about 30 minutes of this, the preacher showed up, and it was time for the real ceremony to start. He introduced to the group what was going to happen in the day’s service. Alex (the Freshwater Operations Manager with whom I’ve been working) tried to explain to me what was going on. It was hard for me to grasp exactly what he meant, but what he told me was that the preacher was saying he had helped to stop a wizard from performing magic. I was as confused as you might expect when he told me this, but there was a church service in progress so I didn’t ask him to clarify.

A few minutes later I was asked to go over the computer that had been set up so that I could help with the projector slideshow. I obliged, though I didn’t expect to be part of the service like that. Before the preacher began his energetic service, he asked me to introduce myself to the group. He said something in Chichewa that I was pretty sure had meant “please greet the group”, but I wasn’t sure and wasn’t about to risk it, so I kind of just stood there. Then he said it in English, prompting me to stand up and say ‘hi’.

”Mwaswera bwanji”, I said, which was met with predicable laughter.

"Dzina langa ndi Mike. Ndikuchokera ku Canada, ndikugwira nchito ku Freshwater ndi Alex. Ndikufuna kuphunzira Chichewa. Zikomo Kwambiri", I continued, which was met with huge laughter and some applause. It seems that, the fewer mistakes I make when speaking Chichewa, the funnier people seem to think it is.

Translation: My name is Mike. I come from Canada. I work at Freshwater with Alex. I want to learn Chichewa. Thank you very much.

Then the preacher said something else, and Alex told me that he was saying "go greet her", pointing to an elderly woman who was sitting in the front row. I had absolutely no clue what was going on, but I got up and went to greet this lady with "Muli bwanji amayi" (How are you, madam?)

I sat back down, and everyone seemed quite interested and intrigued with what I had just done, but it seemed to me that I had simply said hello to someone in the church. I was told to start the slideshow, and as photos came of this lady talking to the preacher with jars of different herbs in front of her, and with Alex explaining what the preacher was saying, I eventually realized what was going on.

This woman had been practicing witchcraft. This must have been what Alex meant when he told me that the preacher had stopped a wizard from performing magic. As I switched the power point slides on command and had Alex translating for me, I learned more and more about what was going on. Apparently, this woman had killed 5 people by her own admission, and the last person she killed was her son. She had sent him to go pick something up from the store in their car, and when he pulled up to the house she was sitting on the steps waiting for him. As her son got out of the car and walked toward her, she magically transported herself into the car and ran him down, killing him instantly. I asked Alex what her motive could have been, but he simply told me that it’s just what witches do: evil has no sensible motive. There was also an explanation of each her different medicines: there were ones that can kill someone by the end of the day if you have a dispute with them, ones that can summon children, ones that can make her invisible, ones that can control people’s thoughts, ones that can make people do what you want them to. According to Alex, she had repented because she felt guilty for killing those 5 people and for practicing evil magic.

After his presentation was over, the preacher called her up, placed his hand on her forehead, and led the group in prayer for her soul. Malawian prayer is loud, deliberate, and long. Everyone was praying at the same time but saying different things. After some time, 3 children were called up who had apparently been trained in witchcraft! You could feel it in the air: people were united in prayer for a purpose. The pastor placed his had his hand on the forehead of one of the young girls and began shouting a prayer that was clearly audible (though, to me, not understandable) even above the roar of the crowd’s prayers. Everyone had their eyes closed, but I sneakily opened mine to take a peak, and sure enough, the girl whom the pastor was clutching was sneaking a peak, too.

One of the things I’ve always noticed and been amazed at in every country I’ve been to is the way that kids are just kids everywhere. Regardless of culture or circumstance, a child is humanity in its purest and unsullied form. And this one was being a kid, too, giving me the side eye as her soul was being prayed for. "What is this all about, and what are you doing here anyway?" is what I understood her side eye to be saying to me. She was probably about 7 or 8 years old.

After the three children had been saved, it was time for people to get out of their chairs apparently, because that’s what they all did. It seemed that it was mostly, if not exclusively, women who partook in this next part. To be honest I can’t be quite sure because it’s all such a blur, what happened next. As these women all stood up, the pastor began blasting a prayer once more with even more conviction and energy than he had before. The women were standing at his feet, eyes close, arms placed in front of them with their palms facing the ceiling and praying passionately. The pastor, his booming words directed at God dwarfing those of the dozen or so women who were praying, began doing the rounds. He placed his palm on the forehead of one of the women, and before long she began crying hysterically as she prayed. Her legs began to shake, and convulsions soon took over her body. The power of God had entered her body, and her body was reacting accordingly. The convulsions intensified, and the prayer being delivered by the pastor followed suit. The woman began to stumble, shuffling backwards as she lost her balance. Mercifully someone came to her rescue at her back, and when she finally lost the ability to stand under her own power, she fell backwards into the arms of one of the parishioners.

At the risk of killing all the suspense, I’d like to take a brief interlude to talk about the domestic roles of women in Malawi. This is something I of course am not completely familiar with and never really will be, but my time living in the village and simply observing what people do has given me at least some perspective. Women are genuine multi-taskers here, as they are everywhere in the world. But here, it’s quite remarkable. It’s not uncommon to see a woman selling bananas from a basket on her head while carrying an infant on her back using a multi-purpose length of cloth called a chitenge. She might even be walking at the same time, undoubtedly heading somewhere to do some other activity that’s her responsibility. And, though I don’t think I have seen this yet, I would not have to rub my eyes or do a double take if I saw such a woman breastfeeding at the same time, because that’s another one of the tasks that the woman does. When I go to the borehole in my village, I see woman, not to mention girls, little girls, carrying buckets of water on their small heads with infants strapped to their backs with a chitenge. Perhaps you get the picture: women carry infants on the backs all the time and still go about the other activities they are required to do throughout the course of the day without missing a beat.

Getting back to the story, you may have guessed by now that one of the activities that women do with infants on their backs is go to church. And, of course, that means that one of the activities that women do with infants on their backs is pray, standing up, eyes closed, palms to the ceiling, and with the pastor palming them on the forehead, causing them to convulse madly as I have already explained. So, this is what happened at the church, but of course the infants had no clue what’s going on: all they saw was their mother’s shaking violently with a room full of shouting. If you were less than a year old, what would you do in that situation?

Screaming babies. Crying, praying women who’ve fallen to the ground, the babies having been narrowly rescued from their backs by bystanders as their mothers were collapsing to the ground. The pastor shouting the word of God above it all. And me, sitting there with my mouth half open. By the end, probably 10 or 12 women were lying on the ground, curled up, praying, and weeping, with their infants in hysterics. The prayer was deafening. And finally, as the pastor completed what he had to say, people helped each other up, dried the tears from their eyes, and went back to smiles and chatting. Everything was back to normal. To me, the end of the service felt as if a tornado had just torn through the room and then left with nobody noticing except me. People chatted with the pastor and made small talk with each other, and the parishioners left the hall as if everything was normal. I say “as if” because, to me, it wasn’t normal. But that’s my life right now. I’m the odd one out. To everybody else, that service was business as usual. And business as usual in Malawi sometimes looks like madness to me. I guess that means I have a lot to learn.

Democracy rules, man. Power to the people. Right?:

If you’re still reading, congratulations on making it this far! This next story relates to elections, more specifically primary elections, here in Malawi. The primary elections are the elections that take place in an area to select which candidate will represent a party in the upcoming federal election. While this story is not quite the Hillary versus Barack epic, it’s still saucy enough for me to choose not to post it on the internet.

EWB people have been kicked out of countries before (actually this happened only once as far as I know, but still). So, I’m not going to do anything stupid and post such madness on the internet. If you are interested in the state of democracy in Malawi and would like to read this story, it’s really easy for you to see it. All you have to do is take one little extra step, and either leave a comment at the bottom of this post saying you’d like me to email you the story, or send me an email at mikekang@ewb.ca. That’s it, piece of cake!

****Censored. Email Mike if you want to see the goods****

Can everyone’s reality been real at the same time? If so, which one counts?

Chambers once again. I think I’ll end up owing that guy some money by the time this blog reaches the end of its lifetime.

So you’ve heard the story of Odala. In addition, with the family I’m living with in the village, despite our original agreement, keeps expecting me to spend more and more money on them for things we had agreed they’d pay for. The floor in the house I am supposed to be staying in was supposed to be finished 4 weeks ago, and I procured about 300 kg of sand the day I found the place so that they could do it. They promised they’d buy cement, but now they want be to spend about 8000 Kwacha (75 bucks or so) on cement, even though I am only supposed to be paying 1,500 a month for rent, from which the cost of sand I bought is supposed to be deducted. That agreement has already been rolled over and I have just bought the sand. And fertilizer. And rice for Christmas.

I was talking to Alex, someone I work with, about this the other day. Everyone in the office has warned me about the way the azungu will be treated in the village. So I knew what I was getting into, but I thought it would be different somehow. Alex was telling me that many people in Malawi ask for money from azungus because they can’t afford not to. There’s so little stability in their lives that, even if they are getting by, they need to take every opportunity they can because they never know what can happen. The family I am staying with is fairly well off I think: they have chickens, doors and glass on their house, and the father has a job in town. Yes, they are doing OK, but I know that if the father got sick or injured and couldn’t work, they would be completely screwed. They have no other source of income except for a small maize field as far as I know. So, maybe this is their reality: we are OK, but we could fall into destitute poverty at any point. Here is a foreigner, and I know foreigners have money that they don’t spend all at one time, and I know he has at least enough of it to come to Malawi, use his laptop, and wear nice running shoes. He has given us money when we ask, and he’s living in our house, so let’s just make the most of this. I don’t know if this is their reality, but maybe it is.

The other day, I was talking with Alice, one of the girls who live in the house with me. I have been giving the kids at the house computer lessons (in Chichewa… yikes. Check out the diagram below that I drew for the kids).

That evening, I asked her if she’d like to do a computer lesson again soon.

“Eee, koma lero ndatopa.” Yes, but today I’m tired

“Oh, ok. Mwachita chiyani lero?” Ok. What did you do today?”

“Ndapita ku maliro”. I went to a “maliro”. (I didn’t understand this word, “maliro”).

“Oh. Marlira ichi chiyani?” What’s a “maliro”?

“Funeral”.

“Oh. Ndani?” Oh. Who?

“Mwana.”

Mwana means child.

On that day, Alice had gone to a funeral for a child from the area who had died. This is something that happens a lot in Malawi. About 1 in 5 or 1 in 7 (depending on which statistic you read) children die before the age of 5 in Malawi. They die because they succumb to waterborne disease or diarrhea. They die because they are orphans and nobody can take care of them. They die during childbirth or are stillborn because their mothers get malaria, which is extremely dangerous for both mother and child when a woman is pregnant.

I sat there without saying anything for at least 5 minutes before I eventually got up and went to my room. I swept my floor and got my clothes ready for work the next day. And I thought and thought, and I’m still thinking. That one word, “mwana”, shattered my heart and made me feel guilty for being lonely and sad that I have lost my girlfriend, and for being frustrated that I have trouble finding friends here because I feel like people see me as an opportunity. Who am I to complain? If I have kids in Canada, they will be almost guaranteed to see their adult lives.

I have been trying to relate people’s behavior here towards me to something I can imagine from my perspective to try to make sense of it. And I’m starting to realize that this is impossible. I am never really going to understand what it’s like to have a child’s funeral be a somewhat regular occurrence in my life and in the lives of my people. No matter how long I stay here or how many people I meet and befriend, I don’t think I’ll ever get it.

Recall the frustration and confusion I mentioned in the story about Odala. It’s still there, but now it’s even more confusing. And, to be honest with my friend the internet, I’ve been crying sometimes the last while when thinking about that mwana. Who was he? What was her name? Is this the reason I came here? To help Freshwater succeed so that they can help communities have safe water and sanitation so that other ana (plural of mwana) can avoid that waterborne disease and perhaps make it to teenage years? If so, is it going to make any difference?

My life here is hard. I’m not sure I’ve ever been as challenged and stressed as I am now, personally, professionally, emotionally, mentally. But I didn’t come here because it’s easy. I just hope beyond hope that I do something worthwhile with my presence here. And I hope that that mwana’s mother never again has to carry a child with her who will leave her before her age reaches the double digits. That’s just not fair.

Questions for thought and comment:

- Does this story get you down? Or does it bring you up? Does it make you care more or less about development, or neither? What impact would it have on your average Canadian? Would they care? Do they see it within their sphere or influence to do anything about it?

- As I was writing this, it occurred that there’s a hidden question in the title. I asked “which makes your blood boil the hottest”. And when I look at that question and disconnect it from the context of the post, I see that my clear first answer is infant mortality. But, really, thinking about it, haven’t I gotten way more pissed off when my team loses a game of hockey than ever have about any of the injustices of development I’ve ever read about or seen?

So I suppose the hidden question is: what really motivates people? What’s the difference in terms of people’s motivations and passions between the “here and now” (goal going into our net in OT for us to lose the game) and the “over there are sometime” (that mwana, whoever she was, wherever he was, whenever she died, not making it to her 5^th birthday)?

Thanks for reading.