Planting Malawi - October edition

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NL :: deze brief in het nederlands :: NL

crazy reality, super vision

Came across some unbelievable statistics that help paint a picture of the poverty here. This is the state of the education system here in Machinga District, the investment into the next generation of Malawians on who the future of this nation depends.

• 40% of schools are temporary grass shelters
• classroom-pupil ratio is 1:105, so many classes are under trees
• 1 pit latrine (outhouse) for every 170 students
• pupil-desk ratio is 1:8.75 (4 desks per 35 students)
• only 7 schools have libraries
  
• 50% of teachers are unqualified
• teacher to student ratio is 1:97
• 12 secondary schools with high dropout rate because of poverty, distance to school, early marriage, family responsibilities, orphaned
• 51% of population has never attended school

Right below all these statistics on the bulletin board I was reading was the following highly ambitious statement:

By the year 2020, Malawi as a God-fearing nation will be secure, democratically mature, environmentally sustainable, self reliant with equal opportunities for and active participation by all,having social services, vibrant cultural and religious values and being a technologically driven middle-income economy.

- Malawi Vision 2020

Desirable, ambitious, yes. Attainable, not likely.
Want to come and help?

our girls and their friends

Some great pictures of our girls playing with their friends from down the road and a little photoshoot at the Mulunguzi Dam up on Zomba Plateau where our drinking water comes from (it was very hard choosing which photos to upload because there are over 200 of them just of the girls, and many of them are really good, or at least we think so, but here are 33 of them).

Liwonde National Park

Last Saturday we visited Liwonde National Park. We saw lots of antelope, baboons, warthogs, birds, two elephants, and some distant hippos -- definitely a very beautiful place that we will be visiting again... care to join us?

Not much for wildlife near home, other than some monkeys down the road (and sometimes you'd think our girls were monkeys too) and some geckos in the house. Seen my first snake on the road yesterday.

This is Malawi

A few things that we've noticed as newcomers and we're getting used to:

1. To turn on a light, flick the switch down. If there are two switches beside the bathroom door, for example, and you want to turn on the light in the bathroom, the one furthest from the door is probably the one you need. When there’s two switches, one is up and one is down, and you want to turn the light off, no matter how conscious you are of the fact that up is off, we still get it wrong 90% of the time – weird.
2. When they turned the single lane paved road from Blantyre to Zomba into a double-lane highway a few years ago, instead of adding a lane on one side or the other, they added half a lane on both sides, but because of poor construction and settling, the sides of the road are very bumpy. That may account for people driving down the centre of the road – that and the fact that there’s usually a solid line of foot traffic and bicycles carrying loads of firewood or other oversized loads.
3. When you stop your truck anywhere in town, you will have people at your window almost immediately, either trying to sell you some product, ranging from strawberries to newspapers, or just asking for money. People come to our door asking for jobs, selling wood carvings or paintings, asking for financial help; walking to or from the office someone might try to sell me something or tells me they’re hungry. We want to help people but it’s hard because you can’t help everyone. And there are only so many wood carvings you can buy too.
4. Whereas in Canada the most common form of currency is the $20 bill, the most common form of currency here is the MK500 bill, which is worth about C$3.75. When you’re exchanging USD, you become rich very quickly, or at least it looks that way when you look at the figures and the stack of bills in your hands.
5. Interestingly, one of the grocery stores here in Zomba actually uses a western marketing technique and will sell stuff for 499.99 kwacha. Considering that even 1 kwacha is only ¾ of a cent, it’s ridiculous to think in fractions of kwachas.
6. As expatriates we are expected to employ local people as guards, gardeners, and house help. Unemployment rates are very high so people are fortunate if they have a job. For us as missionaries it’s kind of a social welfare project, providing people with an income and hopefully being the light of Jesus to them. The going wage is MK200-250/day, or about $1.50/day
7. Gardeners will endlessly sweep the driveway, the lawn, and the dirt with their brooms, which consist of a bundle of branches. They wear out many a broom over the course of a month. Luckily they only cost about $0.25, plus it actually gives them something to do on the job. The lawn is cut with a machete/sickle, which is why we do need help with the upkeep of our home because without the machines we have in the developed world, we would be spending half our time moving the lawn and doing laundry.
8. All household appliances have to be imported from South Africa. The majority of Malawian households do not have the luxury of a stove, fridge, or washing machine. We are fortunate to have the first two, but we do our laundry by hand (with help). We have the option of buying a washing machine or hiring someone to help with such labour-intensive household duties (laundry isn’t the only thing, most everything here requires more work here).
9. Because we do not have house help yet, we’ve been fortunate to have our day guard/gardener wash our laundry. But let me introduce you to the mango fly: it likes to lay its eggs in the beautifully moist garments hanging from the line in the backyard; then when you put these garments on and you hatch the eggs with your body heat, the larvae like to burrow under your skin. For some reason I don’t think my body was meant to be a mango fly nursery, so because we don’t kindly take to such an invasion, we attack the mango fly in its most helpless state and all our clothes meet the iron. Yes, everything needs to be ironed, especially your underwear and socks (wait a second, we don’t wear socks here). And because we don’t have house help yet, we (Alex) have been doing lots of ironing.
10. The local driving school likes to use our street for all its lessons so we have lots of new drivers under instruction on our road. What’s really frustrating is that they drive really really slow and are constantly waving their arm out the window, even in corners or with oncoming traffic. Why are these new drivers always waving for us to pass? Turns out they’re not. They’re just practicing their hand signals with a lot of enthusiasm. Apparently the hand signal for slowing down is moving your arm up and down and the signal for turning left is turning the arm in a reverse circular motion, but from behind you can’t tell the difference. Someone should really invent a different system, maybe some lights on the back of the truck that turn red when you brake?
11. Ever stop to think where you would get crushed gravel without machinery? Just down the road from us there’s a “gravel pit.” Actually it’s a piece of rocky property along a dry streambed. Every day there are two guys there pounding rocks with a hammer. One guy takes very large rocks and pounds on them with a sledge hammer to break it up into large chunks of rock to sell. There’s another guy with a hammer that sits with a pile of gravel between his legs and makes gravel, one rock at a time. I walk by them every day and these guys are a highlight. They always stop their work to wave and say, “Hello, how are you?” With such backbreaking monotonous work for long hours, it’s amazing how happy and high-spirited they are. I will definitely have to get a picture someday.

Okay, there's lots more, but that gives you a little taste...

statistics

I was looking at some statistics the other day for Malawi and the area I am working in, Machinga. Mind boggling.

• According to a report by the World Bank, 6.7 million Malawians live below the national poverty line and “2.7 million Malawians, about one in every five people, lives in such dire poverty that they cannot even afford to meet the minimum standard for daily-recommended food requirement.” The poverty line: 16,165 Malawi Kwacha (MK) per person per year, or 44.3 MK per person per day (US$180/yr or US$0.50/day at the time of the report). The difference between the poor and the ultra-poor: living on 50 cents/day verses living on less than 30 cents/day!!
• I read in a report somewhere that the child mortality under age 5 is 250/1000, which is totally unbelievable, but then I read it again in a book the other day. I just checked and in the last 15 years, child mortality under 5 has decreased from 234 to 133 deaths per 1000 live births.
  
• In Machinga District 45% of the population aged 5 and over attended primary school, 3% attended secondary education or higher. 51% of the population has never attended school!! No wonder people are stuck in poverty.
• Before I came to Malawi I knew that 13% of Malawians were Muslims, but driving through this area there are Muslims and mosques everywhere. It turns out that the Machinga District has the highest proportion of Muslims in the country, in part because it was home to the former president who Muslim-friendly. And apparently there’s an Islamic Trust that determined to build a mosque at every 10km of road – that explains the very strong visible presence of Muslims here! Statistically, 35% are Christians, 62% are Muslims.

Locked in! (good story at our expense)

I was changing some of the door locks in the house because they had been installed backwards and didn’t close properly. After changing the door latch in our bedroom, I turned the key to make sure it lined up with the door jam, which it did. Problem was, it wouldn’t unlock again. What made it even more complicated is that Alex also happened to be in the bedroom at the same time and because all our windows are barred, it’s impossible to just climb out a window. So there we were, locked in our bedroom, and the girls on the other side of the door. After trying a few things we called Lara over for her to try the key from the outside; when that didn’t work, we called our gardener over to try to help us out, but to no avail. Finally Alex convinced me to let Lara get the cell phone and pass it through the window so we could call for help. We called Mike; he had a good laugh of course. Getting the door unlocked wasn’t going to be easy – we tried wiggling, wedging, different keys, etc. So Sarah also came over and took the kids to her house. We tried everything we could to get the door open. Then I set to work on the hinge pins. They had been painted over many times, they were bent, and I had no tools other than what my gardener kept passing through the window to help: an iron bar, an axe (should’ve just chopped a hole through the door), a few nails, a screwdriver, some rocks. Getting the top pin out was a lot of work but eventually it made its way out. The bottom pin was a different story – no proper tools, lots of paint and rust, and too close to the floor to hit the screwdriver properly with my iron bar. Then Alex had the bright idea to use some vegetable oil to lubricate the pin, that sure helped. Eventually got the pins out, so now it was stand back and let Mike kick the door in. It took a lot of kicking and pushing to get some movement, but eventually we were freed, with only one hole in the door to show for it. We were locked in our bedroom for 2 hours just because I wanted to fix the door latch. Not exactly how we had planned to spend our Saturday morning, but I guess it makes for a good story.

Like Alex's aunt said, we discovered that maybe

"Yes, those bars on the windows are for keeping desperate people in - not desperate people out!"