What One Does With a Geography Major

Back in the States

2005-10-06T23:19:00.000+02:00

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the long absence. I returned safely to the US at the beginning of September and have been busy with so many different plans and activities since then I've barely had a moment to catch my breath! However after two weeks of visiting at home in central Pennsylvania, a three-week whirlwind tour of the northeast, and another week or so back at home, I'm happy to say that I'm finally unpacked and rested up. Which means... it's time to start packing again!

Yes, on October 13th I will once again depart for points south, this time back to Latin America for a ten-month volunteer position based in Lima, Peru with the healthcare-rights organization Partners In Health (PIH). There, I will be designing a pilot project based on my work in Malawi, using sustainable agriculture to support people living with HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

Many of you may have already noticed the quotes from PIH founder Dr. Paul Farmer sprinkled throughout this website-- I've been a tremendous admirer of the work of PIH for years and it has long been a dream of mine to work with them. Their mission and philosophy has greatly informed my own, and I'm amazed this dream has come true so quickly! If you're interested in learning more about PIH, you can do so at their website:

www.pih.org

There is also an excellent book out about PIH and its remarkable founder, Dr. Farmer: Mountains Beyond Mountains. The book is very engagingly written and has recently become popular material for discussion groups, including school groups, religious groups, and community reading and book clubs. It is a tremendously empowering, and challenging, read.

While in Peru I'll have much better access to communications, including phone and internet connections, so I hope we can have a bit more interactive discussion through this website on some of the issues we've covered here. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to post with comments or questions! Additionally, I'll also be available through email on a regular basis. Hooray! It's been a somewhat brief recharge-stop here in the US, so I do hope that the increased communication will make things easier in Peru.

I'm still in the US until next Thursday, so please do get in touch with me if you'd like to chat. More organized thoughts and pictures to follow shortly.

Yours truly

Katie G

Primary Health Care

2005-08-13T22:01:00.000+02:00

Some months ago I met a British traveler in the tea room of Livingstonia’s guest house, the old limestone mansion of the mission’s Scottish founder. Like many other tourists I’ve met in Malawi, this young man was eager to share his own personal theory on which particular deficiencies of the Malawian character were responsible for the country’s current poverty. Laziness, greed, and stupidity were his vices of choice, and he expounded upon these themes with an animation I once thought reserved to the great race theorists and social Darwinists of yore. He supported these claims with numerous examples drawn from personal experience, having already spent a full two weeks in the country.

He had, however, made a rather unfortunate choice of debate partner.

“There are more Malawian doctors practicing in England than in Malawi,” the visitor observed gleefully, tucking into a heaping plate of chicken, corn porridge, and greens the house cook had just laid before him.

“There are also more English doctors practicing in England than in Malawi,” I replied.

This seemed to derail his train of thought sufficiently to induce him to follow mine.

“Well… of course there are more English doctors in England than in Malawi,” he said, his words coming as a rapid tumble somewhere between a laugh and a stutter. “I mean, that’s only natural. I mean, that doesn’t prove anything. I mean, people here have a responsibility to look out for themselves. If they won’t do that they can’t very well expect us to come rushing in and sort out their own problems, now, can they?”

“I would argue that we who have had the privilege of growing up in wealthy countries, and will always have the unquestioned privilege of returning to them, have the greater responsibility to assist people living in poverty,” I said flatly, struggling to maintain eye contact as he attacked his chicken with somewhat excessive ferocity. “Especially since much of our wealth was originally taken from their hands.”

England, of course, was the colonial ruler of Malawi, or Nyasaland as they preferred to call it. After imposing upon their subjects an arbitrary set of national boundaries, a series of large plantation estates, a doctrine of racial and cultural inferiority, a system of national parks including Nyika, the forced cultivation of corn, and an authoritarian government based on exploitation and corruption, the British withdrew from the country in 1969, leaving the leaders of newly-independent Malawi to sort out their own problems.

“Oh come on, that’s ancient history,” he sputtered. “The point is, doctors in such a poor country should be grateful to have that kind of education. They should want to stay and better their own people. Anyway,” he added with a snort, “we certainly don’t need them in England.”

My temper was boiling and I struggled to keep my voice even. “Nobody gets to choose where they’re born. But a doctor born in England or the States can choose to spend their whole life working in an environment where they’re well-paid, well-supplied and well-supported, without ever having to defend their entitlement to those privileges, while a doctor born in Malawi has to struggle much more to get an education, works in a hospital that is understaffed, underfunded and undersupplied, and gets paid about $5,000 a year. And if he chooses to leave for the better situation available in another country, he’s considered ungrateful.”

There was a substantial pause, during which my companion ingested about half his chicken in three large forkfuls. Then he replied: “So, I guess you don’t support the war in Iraq, either, huh?”

I smiled tersely and stood to leave. “I’m also a vegetarian. Enjoy your meal.”

* * *

I understood the man’s point—it is unfortunate that so many professionals from Malawi and other poor regions of the world leave their homes for a more comfortable and secure future elsewhere. But I don’t agree that people who happen to be born in a poor country or a poor family incur some kind of karmic debt for any opportunity that allows them to alter their economic status. It’s one thing to expect a young doctor to be a competent and responsible professional; it’s another to expect him or her to be a saint.

Too often, those of us who are accustomed to conditions of privilege view the good opportunities that come to us as entitlements earned through our own hard work, while viewing the good opportunities that come to a poor person as extravagant gifts that dangle from strings—whether that person is a young Malawian going to medical school or a young American from a poor urban or rural family going to an elite university.

Speaking of which, $5,000 also happens to be the amount I received from Dartmouth College grants, to cover my project and living expenses during the eight months I will spend in Malawi: me, a healthy young person, single and with no dependents.

* * *

“There are exactly three hundred doctors in Malawi,” Dr. Maureen Stevenson remarks, looking up from the district heath report she’s reading. It’s evening, and we’re sitting together in the living room of our big house, sipping tea.

As the meaning of her words sinks in, I feel my hands grow cold around the warm mug. The statistic was already familiar to both Maureen and I, but made no less horrifying through repetition. Three hundred doctors. For eleven million people.

This grim ratio helps explain a few other health statistics outlined in the report. In Malawi one out of every five children will die before reaching their fifth year. One out of every 120 women will die in childbirth. And nearly 15% of the adult population is infected with HIV. All told, the average life expectancy for Malawians is only 35 years—one of the lowest in the world.

With such an imbalance—one doctor for every 36,000 people—the security of quality medical care for a country becomes highly dependent on a handful of personalities. And most of them are foreigners—less than 2% of Malawians graduate from high school, and Malawi’s only medical school currently has twelve students. If the doctor is out, or busy, or tired, or lazy, or stationed two hundred miles away, a health center or an entire hospital may rely on the judgment of an uncertified nurse, or medical assistant with only two years of formal training.

The mission hospital at Livingstonia serves approximately 65,000 people, stretched over 1,300 square kilometers accessible only by dirt roads and narrow footpaths. The hospital and its four rural health centers are staffed by seventeen nurses, four medical assistants, two clinical officers (similar to nurse practitioners), and exactly one practicing physician: Maureen.

No pressure.

* * *

In a situation where emergency medical care is unreliable or inaccessible—due to lack of transport, lack of money, or lack of information—preventative care becomes especially critical. And in a situation of extreme poverty and depravation, agricultural and economic development are essential components of preventative care. For many people in Khondowe—especially those burdened by the stigma of AIDS—the Livingstonia Primary Health Care center is their only safety net. Which is why the activities of the Livingstonia PHC range from distributing clothing and food to orphans, to constructing irrigation systems for farmers’ clubs, to training HIV-positive people in small business management.

My own work at PHC has given me the opportunity to wear many different hats: over the last two months, I’ve assisted with a project promoting vegetable gardens for malnourished children, compiled a pamphlet identifying locally-available foods beneficial to people living with HIV/AIDS, established four fruit tree nurseries for widows and families caring for orphans, and helped design a website for the hospital. I might go out in the morning to make compost with a village farmers’ club, then be back at PHC teaching computer classes to hospital staff in the afternoon.

I was circling back to my original objective in Malawi: developing agricultural resources that support the needs of people living with AIDS. I spoke with Mr. Freighton Malakata, my coworker in PHC’s food security program, many times about my overall goals, but eventually realized I would need to propose a specific plan to move forward.

“What about a tree nursery?” I asked him several weeks into my work at PHC. The idea had been brewing for some time, and in fact I had purchased seeds during my trip to Lilongwe in June. “We could grow nutritional, medicinal, and nitrogen-fixing trees and distribute them to HIV-positive people and the mothers of malnourished children.”

Mr. Malakata is a thoughtful and respected gentleman in his late sixties, who worked with the Ministry of Agriculture for many decades before joining PHC. He answered in his usual measured tone. “In fact, I think this can be a good idea.”

“But where could we put it?” The PHC building is wedged between the hospital campus and staff housing, with almost every square inch of land nearby occupied or heavily traversed by foot traffic. I had raised this question many times when discussing the possibility of a medicinal garden with various PHC staff, and they always answered with a sigh or a shrug.

Now, however, Mr. Malakata replied, “Perhaps we can use the PHC farm.”

This was news to me. “The PHC farm?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes,” Mr. Malakata replied slowly. “Perhaps we should go and see the place.”

* * *

The PHC farm turned out to be 30 acres of land just off the main road to Livingstonia, about a mile’s walk from PHC and the hospital. The setting was beautiful, tucked into a shallow valley cut by a stream, and the land had obviously been worked intensively at one time: evidence of terraces and ridges remained, along with several building foundations and five large hand-dug ponds.

Ten years ago, Mr. Malakata explained, this land was a demonstration farm run by PHC. It was started by another young muzungu with an interest in healthcare and agriculture, and was very productive during his tenure at Livingstonia, raising cows, pigs, goats, ducks, chickens, and several varieties of fish in its ponds. The animals were distributed at low cost to farmers’ clubs for rearing and multiplication, or harvested to feed malnourished patients at the hospital.

“But since he left,” he said, “the animals have all died. Now the ponds are just filling up with mud.”

I was taken aback. “But how could it fall apart so quickly?”

Mr. Malakata gazed at a point somewhere over my head, his tone becoming vague. “Perhaps because of lack of funds.”

That didn’t make sense to me. The maintenance costs for a pasture-raised cow or a pond full of fish couldn’t be very high. And in rural Malawi, animals are walking bank accounts—valuable assets to be cashed in when the need for money arises. If there had been as many here as the foundations suggested, this farm had once possessed a great deal of wealth.

I looked around again, imagining the land dotted with grazing animals and lush with gardens—and seeing only the dull brown sheen of the lifeless ponds and the sapling pine forest gradually acidifying the soil. This looks just like what I would have done, I thought. Just like what I would have done—and it’s already failed.

“Is anything growing here now?” I asked somewhat desperately.

“Yes,” Mr. Malakata replied slowly, “We have some chickens in that building. And Mr. Msiska is growing his coffee there.”

“So the chickens and the coffee are for the hospital?” That didn’t seem likely.

“Ah, no. The chickens we will sell. The coffee is for Mr. Msiska.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “That has nothing to do with primary health care.”

“No,” Mr. Malakata replied quietly.

Despite rumors I had heard about corruption at PHC, I had always trusted and respected Mr. Malakata. Now I felt sick at heart. “So where did all the money go? This place couldn’t just run out of funds so quickly.”

For the first time since we had arrived, Mr. Malakata met my gaze. “It is a good question,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “I was stationed at Tchalo when the farm was going.” He shook his head and sighed.

“By the time I came to Livingstonia, everything was already gone.”

* * *

The discovery of the PHC farm discouraged me more than anything I had yet experienced in Malawi. It seemed a living confirmation of everything I had heard and refused to believe about Malawians: laziness, greed, dishonesty, myopia. I searched intently for other explanations, drawing upon my background in cultural geography: Could the farm have been deliberately destroyed as an expression of dissatisfaction with its white director? No, many people assured me, he had been a kind and humble man, well-liked and understood—“just like you,” a friend said, rather disconcertingly.

But perhaps the farm managers didn’t have the knowledge needed to maintain the farm after he left? That didn’t seem likely; wealthier farmers in Malawi have long raised goats and cows. Then maybe the farm had not been appropriate to the needs of people in Khondowe? Maybe farmers here didn’t really want their own chickens or fishponds? This theory elicited only the amused chuckle Malawians use when we crazy azungus say something exceptionally foolish.

My mind was spinning. Past frustrations I had previously seen as the everyday challenges of working in a situation of extreme poverty suddenly appeared as a pattern of failure and disappointment. Rather than being a catalyst, providing a small input of advice or encouragement to help others identify and address the problems they face, I felt like a lone speck of vision and motivation, futilely struggling with an inert and overwhelming burden. What was the point of even trying, if everything was just going to fall apart after I was gone?

Watch it, warned the voice of my geography training from the back of my mind. You are treading on dangerous ground.

* * *

A bit wearily, I turned my attention to distributing the donations collected through this website for schoolchildren in Khondowe: colored pencils, tote bags, toothbrushes, and over $800 in cash. In allocating these resources, I took the advice of Michael Mavumbanya, who felt that donating to only to Nkhota School—just one of Khondowe’s many impoverished schools—would create rifts in the community. I also sought to honor the request of the Nkhota School parents’ committee, who wanted the funds to be used to develop a long-term source of income for their school.

The answer to these concerns came from Hudson Chisambo, an energetic young beekeeper in Livingstonia with a strong dedication to community development—he grew up in Nkhota himself—and a passion for beekeeping at times bordering on obsession.

“Bees are the way forward for Malawi,” he told me. “Our future is honey.”

As a card-carrying member of the Malawi Beekeepers’ Association, Hudson had the facts to back up his claim. Beekeeping had long been part of household food production in northern Malawi, he told me, but industrial buyers were currently importing large quantities of honey due to the small scale of local production. However, potential for a domestic market was great. Hudson showed me a list of Malawian food processors who had agreed to purchase and collect honey from Malawian producers who could guarantee a steady large-scale supply.

The Beekeepers’ Association had already established a cooperative in Khondowe, and the more members they could add, the more likely they were to secure a contract with a commercial buyer. The commercial price for honey in Malawi is favorable for the farmer, at around a dollar per kilogram, and honey stores and transports well. For once, the remote location of Khondowe was an advantage, its hills and forests providing the ideal environment for beekeeping.

“Nkhota has a great future in bees,” Hudson declared, an excited spark in his eyes.

Thus was born the school beekeeping project, with Hudson providing the supervision, the parents of Nkhota, Mahuwi, Manchewe, and Chakaka Primary Schools providing the labor, and the donations raised through this website providing the materials. Each school would receive instruction in large-scale beekeeping and the materials needed to construct five beehives. The parents’ committees would construct the hives under Hudson’s supervision, and would then be responsible for maintaining the hives and bringing the honey to the Livingstonia cooperative, which would assist them with processing and marketing. Each beehive could produce enough honey to pay a local teacher’s salary for two months out of the year, and the schools could also use some of the profits to construct new hives.

Michael Mavumbanya’s brother Henry, chairman of the Mahuwi School parents’ committee, volunteered his farm for the workshop. For the next two weeks his home was overtaken with the sounds of exuberant industry: men sawing, planeing, and hammering hand-hewn planks; women measuring, painting, and preparing food; Hudson running between groups offering detailed instructions and occasionally expounding further upon the virtues of honey. One of the Nkhota parents brought along his battery-powered radio, and so the work was scored to the crackly voice of Malawi National Radio, playing its usual eclectic mix of folk songs, military bands, and Malawian reggae.

* * *

For two weeks, the Nkhota School committee made the five-mile trek over steep terrain down to our workshop, often arriving before their colleagues from communities just down the road. They completed their beehives in a few days, then stayed to help the other schools. Mahuwi School sent fewer representatives, but they were tremendously dedicated, pausing for lunch only after the others yelled for them to sit down so they could say grace.

The Manchewe School committee never showed up. Only one person from the village came to help, the teenage son of a committee member. Hudson worked beside him, but by the end of the first week they had finished only one hive. I was still stewing over the PHC farm, and had no sympathy for this added disappointment. We gave the materials for Manchewe’s other hives to Nkhota and Mahuwi.

By the end of the workshop, each of the participating schools had seven new beehives. During our closing ceremony, the parents asked me to convey their sincere gratitude to all who contributed, and thanked me for organizing the funding. “Of course, this is only a start,” a Mahuwi committee member added. “You must continue to support us so we can keep up this project. We cannot do it ourselves.”

I felt my jaw tighten. Yes you can, I wanted to shout. That was what we emphasized throughout this entire workshop. That was the whole point of this project. You’ve been given enough to make it self-sustaining. How can you be so ungrateful?

As this last thought passed through my mind, I flashed back to my earlier conversation with the obnoxious tourist in the guesthouse. Suddenly, I realized what I’d been forgetting in my frustration over the last few weeks. The parents didn’t see this project as some great gift generously bestowed from on high. It was just a small and very partial step toward ensuring access to decent primary education for their children, a basic human right.

A little can go a long way in Malawi. But for most people here, after the little is gone there is still a long, long way to go.

I took the man’s outstretched hand and smiled. “I wish you the best,” I said.

* * *

I feel sad every time I walk past the PHC farm, its soils turning to acid and ponds filling with mud. I still haven’t uncovered the full story of why it fell apart, and at this point I’ve stopped asking. But I also try to keep it in perspective, remembering that selfishness and shortsightedness are pretty universal human traits, and that what I am seeing is an example of relatively powerful people taking advantage of the poor, not the other way around.

I continue to be inspired by the vision and dedication of the Nkhota School committee, and Michael Mavumbanya, and Hudson, and Mr. Malakata, and countless other Malawians I’ve met. They provide a powerful antidote to cynical dismissals of Malawians character. But that’s not the point.

Malawians aren’t saints. But they shouldn’t have to be to get decent health care or education or means of supporting their families. We call those things human rights, and all you have to do to be entitled to them is be human: quirky, eager, obstinate, passionate, loving, selfish, flawfully and beautifully human, just like all the other crazy humans running around.

Martin Luther King Jr. said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, and he was right. Human rights are the concern of humans. All of them. And insisting on recognition for your own rights—and for the rights of others—is perhaps the most primary primary health care of all.

Scenes from the Road and Beyond 7/9/05

2005-07-10T05:26:00.000+02:00

My dear friend Macdonald Harawa and (from left to right) his mother, brother-in-law, sister and nephew at home. After I left Lukwe, Macdonald, a small, energetic man, took me by the hand and led me to the head of the mission station, insisting he find a position for me in Livingstonia. Macdonald is also one of the founders of the Tewetani Women's Club, whose members run a garden that provides supplemental food for widows and orphans in their village of Vunguvungu.

The pavillion behind Macdonald's relatives is their kitchen, standing empty as their maize harvest is already used up and the cassava harvest is not yet ready. Like many poor farmers in the region, Macdonald and his family's maize crop failed this year because they could not afford to purchase fertilizer. Now, they chew pieces of sugar cane (the green stalk on the ground) to quell their hunger. The small stools on which they are seated are their only furniture.

Maureen's truck heading down one of the tight switchback turns along the back road to Livingstonia. This road, which travels gradually down the back slope of northern Malawi's high plateau, is much less scary than the main Livingstonia road. Unfortunately, the road's clay soils make it impassible during the rainy season. Even during the dry season, it's full of baked ruts and jagged stones, making it pretty demanding on a vehicle. The Malawi government has been planning to pave the road for years, but funds for the project have remained elusive.

The small village of Junju, located in the foothills of the Nyika escarpment along the back road to Livingstonia, blends in to the surrounding landscape.

Another invisible village, this one on the rolling plains of central Malawi.

The sphinx-like Mpamphala Mountain rises abruptly from the surrounding plains, a few dozen miles south of Mzuzu.

In the market town of Jenda, located about halfway between Mzuzu and Lilongwe, farmers proffer neat stacks of tomatoes, buckets of potatoes, and huge piles of cabbages to passing motorists.

An enterprising young man positioned along the highway peddles the catch of the day: mice on a stick. Of course, small mammals and insects are an excellent and frequently overlooked source of protein, and tastes are culturally subjective. For example, many rural Malawians find the concept of drinking cow's milk repulsive.

Still... Mice. Fuzzy. Eew.

Sustainability

2005-06-27T18:10:00.000+02:00

Shortly after committing myself to a life of solidarity with the poor and downtrodden of the world, I took a three-week vacation to Lilongwe. To be fair, that wasn’t my intention. The original plan was to spend three weeks designing and planting a medicinal garden for a small village clinic along the central Malawian lakeshore—my last outstanding commitment from my work with Lieza. Upon arrival, however, I learned she had already been there and I was no longer welcome. Reeling, I continued south to Lilongwe to spend a few days visiting friends and getting my head together. There, I promptly came down with dysentery. So vacation it was.

I was back in the world of international development: ice cream, maid service, rugged 4x4s that rarely leave the tarmac.

It was a pleasant and necessary relief. The everyday indignities of the rural Malawian poor are grueling just to observe: elderly women in tattered clothes pounding maize for five or six orphaned grandchildren; tiny tots chewing sugar cane to quell their hunger; men chopping firewood with blunt axes, hoes, machetes. I had been feeling a bit exhausted, and was ready for a few days of mindless consumerdom among my countrymen.

Even from the vantage point of Lilongwe, the poverty and isolation of rural Malawi remains difficult to imagine. Lilongwe has its poor neighborhoods, of course, but they lie tucked away in the flood-prone lowlands or set back from the main thoroughfares (as they do in most centrally-planned cities of the world). Invisible, like the mud-brick and thatch-roofed houses of the rural poor, which blend seamlessly into the landscape of dry grass and baked earth from which they were devised. A passing glance from the window of one of those massive 4x4s whizzing along the paved road might yield only a view of a beautiful, if desiccated, countryside, without recognizing the village clinging to survival in its midst.

Taking full notice of the poor is invariably a time-consuming and painful experience. To really begin, just begin to understand, you have to actually go inside one of those invisible houses and spend some time in careful observation: the packed clay floor bare except for a grass sleeping mat, a bucket and a small wooden stool; the worn cloth schoolbag containing two small filthy notebooks and a pencil; the only light filtering in through the holes in the thatched roof. Then you have to imagine trying to keep your maize harvest and your malarial child warm and dry in the middle of a rainstorm—without enough blankets, with only one plastic bucket, without a change of clothes. Good reason to keep chugging by at a hundred kilometers an hour.

* * *

Despite my persistent fears that I would tumble over the ‘big edge’ of poverty into hopelessness and obscurity, muzungu privilege continued to work in my favor. Heading north from Lilongwe, I easily caught a ride with an Irish missionary, Dr. Maureen Stevenson. She had just come back from sabbatical and was returning to work at the mission hospital in Livingstonia. We were both thrilled to discover we’d no longer be lone muzungu on the plateau, and quickly became friends. Maureen invited me to live with her in the mission doctor’s house at Livingstonia—the same old colonial mansion where I’d stayed that first weekend after leaving Lieza’s place.

Malawian friends had already made housing arrangements for me in Livingstonia, a one-room dwelling—with tin roof and electricity—on the far side of the plateau. The place was tiny but sound, and—at eight dollars a month—the rent was very reasonable. In preparation for the simple, self-contained life I expected to lead there, I had done some shopping in Lilongwe, procuring such necessities as a hot plate, a plastic basin, and a bottle of Amarula liqueur.

But Maureen’s offer was tantalizing. I could stay with her for free, enjoying such extraordinary luxuries as hot water, upholstered chairs, and an occasionally functional telephone line. Maureen had a stove, a refrigerator, and a cook—all courtesy of her employer, the Presbyterian Church of Ireland, which had learned from years of experience that these conveniences help ensure that missionaries stick out their full terms of service in such a remote area. Maybe they were on to something, I thought. The possibility of hot showers and fresh-baked bread could go a long way toward my own sustainability.

So when we reached the top of the Livingstonia escarpment, we unloaded our armloads of foodstuffs and supplies into the house’s enormous kitchen, assisted by the night watchman. It had been an eventful journey: halfway up the escarpment road, we realized Maureen’s rickety old pickup had no functional handbrake. To get around the tightest switchback turns without rolling over the edge, I would run to the far side of the truck and stretch my foot through the driver’s side door to press the accelerator, while Maureen kept her own two feet on the brake and the clutch—a maneuver she called “the three-footed turn.” Muzungu privilege or not, this was still the wide wild north. We were back.

* * *

Northern Malawi in the dry season. Each daybreak arrives heralded by the crow of roosters and the crackle of morning fires. As the brilliant sun makes its lazy journey from east to west, it streams down on a vast panorama—in the north, on the forested swells of the Nyika Plateau; to the east, on the glistening waters of Lake Malawi; all around, on the patchy maize fields harassed by wayward goats. When night falls, the scattering of kerosene lamps across the plateau provide no contest to the brilliant stars suspended overhead, as I fall to sleep tucked under blankets and an immediate sky.

“It’s so beautiful here,” I used to remark periodically when I first arrived.

The setting seemed so tranquil: the ancient grandeur of the Nyika escarpment, the homesteads ingeniously assembled from natural materials, the easy pace of a landscape experienced on foot—all appealed to my environmentalist sensibilities. With a little romanticism and a squint, Khondowe appeared a timeless country idyll: man and beast and amber waves of grain, producing and reproducing in harmonic balance, their days an unremarkable passing in the ebb and flow of life. I knew of course that poverty was there, but it was a strikingly picturesque poverty, the bare patches of ground blending with the walls of mudbrick houses and the tattered clothing of children, a scene filtered through the color of earth.

Pastoral. Agrarian. Quaint.

My friends would shake their heads and laugh wearily in the typical Malawian fashion, wondering at the existence of a person who could be so blind to the suffering etched into the landscape all around her. For subsistence farmers in Khondowe, its steep fields and dramatic dropoffs are not an interesting geographical feature, but a barrier to selling their crops and sending their children to high school.

Isolated. Eroded. Unforgiving. Desperate.

Even the Nyika Plateau, now a national park closed to all but paying visitors, has its place in this landscape of suffering. Nyika was once homeland to many current inhabitants of Khondowe, but its inhabitants were forcibly removed to make room for Nyika National Park. Today, the environmental refugees from Nyika inhabit the most marginal lands around Khondowe—Nkhota, for example—increasing local pressure on shared resources like firewood and water. The escarpment looms above them now, an everyday monument to pain and memory in a difficult land.

Poverty can be hidden in so many ways. After a while I stopped paying homage to the landscape, in deference to its inhabitants.

* * *

Last year during the rainy season, a series of landslides devastated the mountainous area of Chakaka, nestled the foothills of the Nyika escarpment west of Khondowe. The landslides killed six people, displaced several villages, and wiped out the dirt road that connected Chakaka to the outside world, cutting off access to markets, medicine, and other vital materials. This year’s rainy season has triggered further landslides, damaging fields and pathways and increasing the isolation of Chakaka people.

The immediate cause of the landslides was the severe deforestation of Chakaka’s steep slopes by villagers cutting trees for firewood. On the surface, this seems like a prototypical “African environmental problem”: ignorant peasants selfishly racing to claim scarce resources for their own. In fact, the landslides at Chakaka are the kind of event that many Western environmental and development experts use to illustrate the necessity of preserving land in national parks, in order to protect Africa from the Africans.

One such ecological preserve, Nyika National Park, is situated on the Nyika Plateau just slightly uphill from Chakaka. The park was founded to sustain its unique grassland ecosystems, lush with wildflowers and herds of zebras. But far from being a model of ecological sustainability, the park has had devastating environmental and social consequences—among them, the Chakaka landslides.

I haven’t yet been up to the Nyika Plateau, but I’ve been wanting to go. The park is a popular weekend getaway for many development workers in northern Malawi, and everyone says it’s incredibly beautiful. Early Western explorers of Nyika were struck by its rolling verdant fields, which, they wrote, reminded them of Scotland. This unexpected token of home in an otherwise alien land gave the colonialists and missionaries of Livingstonia a familiar retreat, and Nyika became a favorite destination for holiday expeditions during the period of British rule in Malawi. In order to save this remarkable Anglican landscape from the mindless destructiveness of Africans, the Nyika Plateau was incorporated as a national park by the colonial government. The people living within the park’s boundaries were gradually evicted, and Nyika has been closed to all but paying visitors for the last thirty years.

Today ecotourists fly to Nyika from all over the world, assembling in convoys of Land Rovers, swathed in layers of DEET and nylon, celebrating their environmental sensibility by driving all over the pristine wilderness. The income generated by entrance fees is mostly reinvested into the park, so that more roads and more tourist camps can be built, so that more tourists will be attracted, so that more fees will be collected, presumably so that more roads can be built. In this way the preservation of the wilderness is ensured.

Meanwhile, the refugees from Nyika National Park struggle to make their livelihoods in places like Chakaka, Nkhota, and other remote villages invisible from the road. After being evicted from the park, they were forced on to the only unclaimed lands in Khondowe: those that were considered too marginal for settlement. The evidence of their suffering is sometimes dramatic, like the landslides at Chakaka. More often it passes quietly, like the silent sacrifice of a young mother who goes hungry so her children can have a meal.

This process goes by the name “sustainable development,” a popular development catchphrase used to promote ecological sensitivity in developing countries. The rationale for sustainable development is based on the premise that developed countries wrecked their environments during the course of industrialization, and countries that are currently becoming more industrialized should not be allowed to repeat the mistake. In Malawi, as elsewhere in Africa, the sustainable developers have promoted ecotourism as a “clean” industry, tied to environmental preservation in game reserves and national parks.

But what, exactly, is being sustained by such development?

Certainly not the people of Nyika, who were forced from their homeland on to the most marginal land in Khondowe. Certainly not the forests and streams of Khondowe, which were already heavily utilized before the arrival of the Nyikan refugees intensified the pressure—leading, for example, to the deforestation at Chakaka. Certainly not the ecosystems of Nyika National Park, now crisscrossed by dirt roads and dotted with camps for “ecotourists.”

At Nyika, as in many cases, the purpose of sustainable development is not to sustain people or ecosystems, but rather the development itself. More tourists. More roads. More camps. More tourists.

The people of Nyika were robbed of their land and forced into poverty, precipitating tremendous human and environmental disaster—all in the name of sustainability. Now their children run along the roadside in their tattered clothes, stretching out their hands to passing Land Rovers and shrieking, “Give me money!” “Give me pen!” “Give me sweets!” The ecotourists inside roll up the windows and turn on the AC, shaking their heads at the crass materialism of the poor.

* * *

Some days, I feel I am just an exceptionally slow-moving ecotourist. Living in my giant wooden house, equipped with my computer, my hot water, my bags full of groceries, I surround myself with material comforts I consider necessary for my own personal “sustainability.”

Like most other muzungus in Malawi, I choose to spend money on vacation to cities, national parks, and resorts in the name of sustainability. Like most other muzungus, I choose to eat costly imported food transported by truck or plane over long distances in the name of sustainability. Like most other muzungus, I choose to consume dozens of times more than the average Malawian does—all in the name of sustainability.

Though my standard of living in Khondowe is lower than would generally be considered comfortable by Western standards, it is still astronomically higher than that of everyone else around me. Understandably, this means I receive requests for money very frequently—from friends, neighbors, complete strangers, all with long and compelling stories and needs that require long-term solutions. But of course, just giving money to poor people isn’t an effective way of dealing with poverty. Begging leads to dependency, and dependency is inherently unsustainable, so in the long view it’s better not to give. Or so I have been told.

* * *

And so we come to the gruesome irony of sustainability: like so many other ideologies, it is simultaneously used to justify wealth for some people and poverty for others. In evaluating the true sustainability of any development, we have to ask: Sustainability for what? Sustainability for whom?

In northern Malawi, the “sustainable development” of the Nyika Plateau has deprived a few thousand people of their land and productive livelihoods, and increased population pressure on several thousand more, making it more difficult for everyone to survive. But densely settled populations do not inevitably face shortage and disaster: they can and do exist in comfortable conditions—in the cities and suburbs of my native northeastern America, for example. The people of Khondowe could be supplied by truckloads of supplemental food, firewood, and medical supplies brought in from other parts of the country, or other parts of the world for that matter. Of course, that would be unsustainable.

Even as my own rapacious culture consumes the resources of our planet at a rate unprecedented in human history, the world’s poor are denied access to many of its more worthwhile developments—higher education, telecommunications, modern medicine—because allowing them to do so would be “unsustainable.” Allowing them to do so… and people try to tell me that development isn’t just the latest incarnation of colonialism. What does it mean if the “sustainability” of my own culture is predicated on the continued subordination of people, cultures, ecosystems?

Those of us who have had the privilege of living among the comforts of the developed world have a special responsibility to attend to the needs of the world’s poor. Not as saviors, not as guardians, but as attentive and respectful servants—for that is the only way to avoid the mistakes of Nyika and so many other well-intentioned disasters.

After six months in Malawi, I believe that what we, as Westerners, must learn to sustain is our attention to the conditions of the world’s poor, and the role of our own actions in creating and perpetuating those conditions. We must sustain our commitment to seek out and listen to experiences of suffering, even though what we hear may cause us pain. And we must sustain one another in making these difficult and dignified choices, for the support we can give each other provides much greater comfort than any material possession ever could.

In the end, no indicator of development is more important than a people’s ability to choose with dignity. Nothing is so unsustainable as inequality.

Update from Malawi 6/3/05

2005-06-04T05:14:00.000+02:00

Another spectacular sunrise over Lake Malawi, viewed from a thousand meters overhead on the Livingstonia Plateau.

Joshua Kachulu, permaculturist, soccer captain, and general rascal, at our last health training together.

Participants list concerns of vulnerable people in the community (widows, orphans, people living with HIV/AIDS) and community members who could offer support (chiefs, church elders, teachers) in this workshop on connecting community health resources, run by Joshua, Michael, and myself.

Gertrude Mkandawire (right), a volunteer for Khondowe Home-Based Care program for people living with HIV/AIDS, and Chimwemwe Nyirongo, a volunteer for Mtende Orphan Care program in Khondowe, share a moment of friendship during tea break at the health training. These two beautiful women, who are both subsistence farmers facing their own struggle to feed their families, give freely of their limited time to prepare meals, clean houses, tend crops, and give baths to people afflicted by AIDS and other chronic illnesses.

"Chimwemwe" is a common name for both men and women in Tumbuka culture. Like many Tumbuka names, it is a reflection of the parents' emotions upon the birth of their new child. These names speak volumes about the powerful love parents have for their children in this very family-oriented culture: other common names include Tiwonge ("We are thankful"), Atupele ("Cherished Gift"), and Blessings. Chimwemwe simply means "happiness." Here, Chimwemwe nurses her own daughter.

The combination of malaria, AIDS, malnutrition, tuberculosis, and a host of impoverishing factors leave many children orphaned throughout Malawi and southern Africa. Even for children whose parents are still alive, or who have guardians, resources are scarce. Necessary goods for the healthy development of children, such as high-protein foods, clothes in good repair, and soap for clothing and bathing are out of reach for many families. This young girl stays at the home of a family friend, as her own family cannot afford to feed her.

And this is part of the reason why. A recent rainfall exposes the garish red sores of Chakaka, a mountainous area that has been ravaged by landslides in recent years. The population of the Chakaka area grew dramatically after Nyika National Park (just to the right of this view) was closed to human habitation and its residents were forced out into surrounding areas. The result was increased human need for trees as a source of cooking fuel and building materials, which led to severe deforestation and a devastating series of landslides. These have cut off the villages of the area from the main road, making everything more difficult for the residents of Chakaka. Joshua is in Chakaka at the moment, leading a training on HIV/AIDS and investigating the possibility of starting a reforestation project here.

Yours truly, on the path to the village of Thunda far below. The edge behind me is not really a true big edge, but it's biggish.

The Big Edge

2005-05-26T11:19:00.000+02:00

Across the far side of Lake Malawi, the sun is rising. Its first bold rays define the jagged mountain peaks of Tanzania, gild the underbellies of the pregnant cumulus suspended in this morning’s immensity of sky.

From the wooden front porch of an old colonial home in Livingstonia town, I am watching the sunrise over Lake Malawi from above for the first time. Back when I lived at Lieza’s place, my tent was wedged into an east-facing slope, and I was never up on the road early enough to catch the day’s first hour. But yesterday I left Lieza and the Lukwe Permaculture Project for the last time, struggling up the steep path to Livingstonia with all my belongings stuffed into my backpack and guitar case. I had only the full moon for light and company.

I have been awake for some hours already this morning, summoned from sleep by an impatient rooster in an hour of indisputable darkness, and barred from returning, as has been the case lately, by an unrelenting tumble of thoughts. Inside the house, my friend Stephanie Richards, a medical student from the UK on rotation at Livingstonia Hospital, is still sleeping—after all, it’s Saturday. She is only a guest in this old mansion herself, but has offered to take me in for the weekend, as I am now without a place to stay. Hopefully by Monday I’ll have found some other living arrangements, or be ready to leave Khondowe altogether.

Now that I have been fired from the Lukwe Permaculture Project—cut off, it seems, from the work and people I have come to love in these last months—I find it hard to imagine that I could stay in this area much longer. In this confused morning, my heart flutters with the tremulous uncertainty of the moment before daybreak. Today I feel no confidence in dawn.

The early morning cacophony of Livingstonia’s farmyards falls silent. As a drop, then a sliver, the great fireball slips into the world. The tall grass lining the escarpment leans eastward over the dropoff, and I too find myself pulled forward, straining to make shape of the liquid orange fire sizzling against the horizon, drawn ever closer to the edge.

The proud beauty of dawn strikes my eyes with a ferocious and unapologetic burn. Quietly, I turn away.

Sometimes, the only way forward is to take a few steps back.

* * *

The story of how I came to be fired from the Lukwe Permaculture Project, I believe, is best told backwards. Backwards, upside-down, and inside-out—since that’s how I feel when I think about it. In the free-fall of emotions I’ve experienced since leaving the Project, I’ve struggled to write about what happened between Lieza and I, struggled to be true to my own feelings while also being as fair and honest I can. Still, hindsight has a way of streamlining the truth, and the mind often makes serious distortions in the effort to provide a neatly packaged narrative.

All I can say, looking back over my shoulder, is it went down something like this.

* * *

Johnny Msiska, a young susbsistence farmer with a winning smile and one eye askew, is playing the part of a very wealthy man. He dons a neon blue knit cap and a beat-up shoulder bag to illustrate this point (northern Malawi is one of those places where items that are generally considered indicators of poverty in the West are actually symbols of wealth). He is showing off his fortune—represented by a handful of neatly stacked green leaves—by giving money for a breakfast of chips and soda to his son, played by another man a few years older than Johnny.

“Stay out all day and spend as much as you want,” the wealthy father calls carelessly as his son runs off to school.

Meanwhile, Madalitso Mkalira’s mother is praying over her. She holds the kneeling young woman’s face against her chest, bows her head and speaks in a low voice: “Oh God, you know my daughter and I are very poor people. Still, we thank you that we are not suffering from hunger, and that we have each other. Oh God, I pray you will look after my daughter at school today, that you will bless her, and bless this little food I have to give her.”

Madalitso’s mother—played by her real-life mother, as it happens—then raises the young woman’s face and regards her with a sad smile. She hands her an imaginary bundle and apologizes, “Oh my daughter, I am sorry, I don’t have fancy food for you, only this avocado and bananas. But still you will not be hungry, and try not to be ashamed.”

The scene changes and we see the two young people together at school, being quizzed by their teacher on addition. The boy who ate only chips and soda cannot concentrate and misses all the answers, while the poor girl sits quietly and gives the correct responses—much to the pleasure of the assembled audience, composed mainly of subsistence farmers. After school, Madalitso goes to join her mother selling fruit in the market. There, they meet the wealthy father and his son, who is now holding his stomach and crying.

Mrs. Mkalira and her daughter rush to help, asking the father what could be the problem. “I don’t know,” he replies anxiously, “my son is often sick in this way.” When Madalitso’s mother learns that the boy eats only chips and soda, she bows to the wealthy man, then carefully explains the importance of a diversified diet including plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables—touching on most of the key points Joshua and I covered earlier today during this course on nutrition and health. In gratitude the wealthy man buys her entire basket of avocadoes, and the audience shouts and claps with enthusiasm as the players take their bows.

Joshua and I have always included small skits like this one, or “dramas” as they’re called in Malawi, in the many training courses we’ve run over the last two months. They are immensely popular, and participants often share the stories with friends afterwards, making them a very useful way of disseminating information. The difference with this drama, and the others performed before it, is that they were written not by us, but by the members of this group—the Bale Farmers’ Club—themselves.

Next week, the Club will perform these dramas publicly at the fruit tree planting ceremony for Mahuwi School, as part of our effort to encourage the school community to use the fruit to feed their children, rather than sell it for the pittance paid by wholesale buyers. I’m unsure how successful this effort will ultimately be, but for today, we are all feeling quite proud of ourselves.

Michael Mavumbanya, chairman of the club, venerable elder, and close friend, walks to my side and places a hand on my shoulder. “This would not have been possible without you, Kathryn,” he says, smiling. I smile back and blush from head to toe.

* * *

Later in the same week, Stephanie and I meet for a walk to the waterfall at Manchewe, the dramatic plunge that forms the source of the Manchewe gorge about a mile uphill from Lieza’s place. Spending time with Stephanie is a twofold relief: it’s nice enough that we enjoy each other’s company, but lately I also need some time away from Lieza.

In the last few months, the small projects I’ve undertaken through Lieza’s organization have been remarkably successful; I’ve also made many good friends and achieved a fair amount of personal popularity in the area. But increasingly, I find the enthusiasm and energy I feel after a good day out with the farmers is met with cynical dismissal back at Lukwe. I know that Lieza has struggled for years to establish herself in Khondowe, and that her work has helped to make my successes possible. But when I try to express my gratitude for this, it seems to only heighten the feeling of hostility.

I’m explaining all this to Stephanie as we follow a narrow footpath along the rim of the gorge into the forest. A few feet to the side of the trail, the land falls away steeply, but through the undergrowth it’s not clear exactly how dramatic the dropoff is. The roar of the waterfall ahead is muted by the dense canopy around us, and overlain by the vigorous chatter of forest birds.

Thinking back to my last months at college, I remember the phrase “falling off the edge of the earth” came up constantly when I thought about my future, like some kind of real-life foreshadowing. Now, as I look to the far side of the gorge, I realize I am living in a landscape of edges: high plateaus, plunging valleys, fields steep enough that farmers have been known to fall out of them. Some of these slopes are gradual, their summits accessible by broad paths, while others are sheer walls of rock, edges of earth that one truly could fall off and never return. Big edges, in my mind.

I comment that lately, with Lieza, I feel I’m constantly creeping along a big edge, worried that I’ll do or say something wrong and set off her formidable temper, which I’ve experienced a few times already. But she seems to find my successes most threatening of all, and I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with my apparent inability to do anything right. The walk, and Stephanie’s company, are helping me gain some much-needed perspective.

”She sounds like a complete loony,” Stephanie observes.

The trail veers toward the mouth of the gorge, and abruptly we emerge from a tangle of vines onto an outcrop of bare rock. Suddenly there is nothing but the vast expanse of sky overhead, the great plunge before us, and the resumption of forest far, far below. From across the gorge, the powerful churn of the waterfall reaches out to fill all the space inside my mind. Cautiously, we shuffle a few steps further and peer downwards. Our eyes follow the silhouettes of birds skimming the treetops a thousand feet below.

“That’s a big edge,” I gasp, and Stephanie nods. The roar of the waterfall drowns the possibility of more profound reflection.

* * *

In retrospect it seems I should have seen it coming. The offense itself was minor: I disagreed with Lieza over how we should distribute our supply of agroforestry tree seeds, arguing that Nkhota School should be included in the share. But the disagreement represented a fundamental difference in the way we view our Malawian neighbors and our relationship to them, initial assumptions that would inevitably lead us on divergent paths.

Joshua and I had become involved with Nkhota School on his initiative, not Lieza’s, and she disbelieved the Nkhotans’ claim that they constructed and operated their school independently, even after multiple people outside the school community assured me that this was the case. In her view, I was foolish and naïve to believe Malawians could accomplish such a feat on their own.

Malawians are stupid people, Lieza once told me, stupid people who need our help. Offering the Nkhotans assistance without explicit approval from her was reckless; insisting on recognition for their effort and ability to help themselves was tantamount to treason.

“Lieza, you don’t give people the respect they deserve,” I said desperately, weeks of buried frustration rising to the surface.

She looked at me as though I’d struck her. I knew I had crossed the boundary of what politeness and restraint could cover, that things were over between us.

Lieza is a forceful and passionate woman who has often chosen the more difficult road for reasons that are deeply important to her. She has chosen to work independently in an extremely isolated and unforgiving environment. She has faced cultural, political, and financial barriers to her goals, and has still met with some success. But it seems I came into her life in a moment of severe burnout, and my eagerness to see my Malawian friends as equals was profoundly threatening to her.

I know, because I know this feeling from my own experience in Paraguay. Sometimes it’s just too painful to take in the continued suffering around you and believe that the people you’re seeing could just as easily be your own mother, brother, loved one, that there is not some fundamental difference between us and them that makes it all somehow more tolerable.

“I used to think very much like you do,” Lieza said bitterly, and through the anger and accusation in her voice I felt a note of sadness, of regret.

* * *

When I arrived at Mahuwi School that same morning with three baskets of fruit tree seedlings and a bag packed for the weekend, I was two hours late for the tree planting ceremony we’d been planning for weeks. The school parents and the drama troupe from the Bale Farmers’ Club had already gone home, and classes were nearly finished for the day. I now had to face the deeply disappointed teachers and school committee, who had set aside this morning for our program and waited for me until the last possible minute.

“It’s my fault; it’s my responsibility; I’m sorry,” I apologized over and over, worried they would blame Joshua, who had been waiting for me on the road. Malawians usually take the blame in such situations, because it’s assumed they are incapable of arriving on time. I mentioned nothing of what had passed between Lieza and I, not wanting to touch off a furious round of gossip. But the teachers and committee members perceived more than I could have guessed. The school committee chairman, an older man and brother of Michael Mavumbamya, regarded me with a kind expression and spoke.

“No, we understand what has happened here,” he said, indicating my bag and cocking his head in the direction of Lukwe. “This was not your fault.” The teachers and committee conferred quietly for a few moments in Tumbuka. Then the headmaster turned to me and said, “Would you like us to go and help you collect your belongings?”

The distance from Mahuwi to Lukwe is more than five miles, over hills and streams, down steep forest pathways and slippery slopes. I looked at the people standing before me, barefoot, wearing ill-fitting clothes and worried expressions, and started to cry.

“Don’t cry, Katie,” Joshua told me, his face wrinkled with concern as I leaned on his shoulder and sobbed. “Don’t cry, or I myself will also start crying.”

* * *

In the days that followed I migrated to Livingstonia, where I watched many sunrises while lost in thought. Lieza had commanded me to leave the area, and I couldn’t imagine staying on in Khondowe without her support. But it was so wrong and so unfair; it meant leaving all the people I’d come to know in the last months with yet another set of bitter memories and unfulfilled promises. I resolved to stay in Khondowe for two more weeks to fulfill all the commitments I’d made, and postpone the inevitable decision to come.

I went back to Mahuwi School to plant the last set of fruit trees, made rounds among the farmers’ clubs to say my goodbyes, spent a few hours negotiating with local hotheads who wanted to stage a protest against Lieza. I went to see the head of the mission station at Livingstonia, who offered me his assistance in finding another position, possibly at the local Primary Health Care center. I met with friends and community leaders who urged me to stay, offering me meals and lodging in their homes while apologizing for their own lack of running water and electricity.

I spent many hours lying in bed, listening to music played much too loud. Searching for another soul struggling to keep faith alive in a chaotic and overwhelming world, I turned to Ravel, Piazzolla, Jars of Clay, and, ultimately, the Dixie Chicks.

I went on vacation with Stephanie to our favorite lakeside resort town, Nkhata Bay, where I met a few muzungus running charitable projects and drank far too much Malawi Gin. On the day we left, I was offered a position with a small organization that supports school gardens and women’s craft unions, both in Nkhata Bay and across the lake in Mozambique. The offer was tempting.

Life in Nkhata Bay would include many more muzungu comforts, including reliable phone and internet access, indoor plumbing, and electricity (equals refrigeration, equals cheese). It would mean living in a youth hostel, where I could always retreat from the inconveniences and annoyances of living in a poor country, and would entail a much less personal level of commitment to the communities I worked with. It would mean plenty of other white people around to engage in intellectual conversation, offer connection to the outside world, and cover my insecurities with praise. It would mean not having to deal with Lieza again.

It would also mean ditching Joshua, Nkhota School, and the Bale Farmers’ Club. I took stock of the situation and despaired of making the right choice.

Many questions about the viability of life in Khondowe remained unanswered. Where would I stay? What would I do, and how would I do it in a way that its impact would continue after I leave? How would I get supplies from Mzuzu up the escarpment—or would I have to settle for eating only maize porridge and beans cooked over an open fire, like most Malawians? And after the time needed for cooking and other daily chores—fetching water, collecting firewood, washing clothes by hand—would I have any energy left for anyone else?

Most frightening of all was the prospect of being lone azungu in a culture foreign to my own. I felt isolated enough in Khondowe when I was staying with Lieza and Auke. Now that I truly was isolated from muzungu society, who would guide me in community interactions and interventions? Who would I withdraw to when I needed a little First World-style pampering? Who would look after me if I became sick?

I felt myself once again teetering along a big edge, one I have approached, retreated from, and feared for years, knowing that true personal commitment to justice and equity inevitably leads to its unfathomable precipice, and the great uncertainty I now faced. What would become of me if I was to live at the level of the world’s poor, with them, among them, not just as an alien ‘helper,’ but as an interdependent friend and equal?

And, having lived in this way, how, how could I ever return to a life of casual luxury while my friends still struggle to feed their families, purchase soap, send their children to school?

Or course I would not truly be living at the level of the Malawian poor. The poor of Malawi do not eat pasta, use toothbrushes, listen to Debussy or B.B. King. They do not own backpacks, and they do not receive mail—they cannot afford a post office box or stamps, and neither can anybody else they know. Still the question of commitment loomed—not merely rhetorical, but one of daily consequence, perhaps for the rest of my life.

I knew I could not avoid this trial and judgment of the heart. No course lay open to me but to plunge forward, or turn back in retreat.

* * *

Daybreak. Three weeks after that first inscrutable morning, the sun is again rising over Lake Malawi. From my new home on the southeastern edge of the Livingstonia plateau, I watch as its first rays shower the earth in a warm glow, transforming the waters into a sea of crystal and light.

I’m brushing my teeth. Today is the first meeting of a three-day course Joshua, Michael, and I are leading on community health support for the poor and vulnerable. We have planned and discussed this course for months, nearly since I first arrived, and I’m thrilled that it’s finally coming to fruition.

Soon I’ll be starting my work with the Primary Health Care center and its Home-Based Care program for people living with AIDS in Khondowe. There, I’ll be able to focus more closely on the project I’ve wanted to do all along, promoting food security, independence, and dignity for AIDS patients though home and community gardens. The job will surely bring new challenges, and will introduce me to a host of new working orders and personalities. For today, though, I’m looking forward to teaching with Joshua and Michael—people I know well, and good friends.

As I move through my morning routine, I’m aware that, scattered throughout the landscape around me, the participants for this course are going through much the same motions as I am, preparing for their day—in the brick homes of Livingstonia town, farmsteads nestled at the base of the plateau, small villages distant beyond sight. I look over my notes while buttoning my shirt, readying myself for our gathering and all we hope it will bring.

First, though, comes the walk to our meeting place near Michael’s home, the five-mile trek across the plateau, down the escarpment, and through the vast rolling valleys beyond. Taking a deep breath, I survey the course before me, eyes passing from familiar landmarks and well-worn paths to unknown horizons. I fasten my sandals and set off.

Sometimes, the only way forward is over the big edge.

Nkhota School appeal

2005-05-13T07:52:00.002+02:00

And now, friends, a special appeal to those who were moved by the story of Nkhota School:

Last week Joshua and I went back to Nkhota with thirty fruit trees, and learned that one of the school's three teachers has left the school to care for a sick relative. With the advent of AIDS in northern Malawi, as well as the high rate of diseases like tuberculosis, pneumonia, and malaria, this kind of departure is an all-too-common occurrence. As a result, some of the children who were taught by that teacher are now traveling two hours up and down mountains to go to school in Livingstonia; the rest are currently not receiving any schooling.

The school committee is actively searching for a new teacher, but it is unlikely they will find someone qualified to teach from within the Nkhota community, and bringing in a teacher from one of the surrounding towns (eg Livingstonia) means paying them a salary. (The teacher who left was a volunteer, who lived with relatives and received nominal remuneration from the community. "Salt and soap," Joshua told me, when I asked what the people of Nkhota were able to contribute to their volunteer teachers.)

Yesterday the committee secretary hand-delivered a letter from the school asking for my assistance in raising the necessary funds to support a teacher, about $50 per month. I have discussed the matter with leaders throughout Khondowe, and they all agree that the school is truly in need and the committee can be trusted to manage the money properly.

In one week I will meet with the school committee to offer the first month's salary for a new teacher, as well as assistance establishing a few beehives at the school and a partnership with the local honey producers' cooperative, as an income-generating project. But the bottom line is that no child should go without education simply because their family or community is poor, and at the moment Nkhota School needs emergency help.

Since many of you have been asking how you can help support the needs of people in Khondowe, I thought I'd offer this opportunity, which hopefully will be the first of many chances to contribute directly to established, worthwhile, and effective programs in need. For fifty bucks you can send fifty kids to school for a month. Financially and karmically, that's a pretty good rate of return.

My family has graciously volunteered to coordinate fundraising. At least, I know they will once they read this. So if you're interested in offering support, in whatever amount, please contact my mother, Barbara Greenwood, at bosakgreenwood@hotmail.com and she can send you our home address in fair Harrisburg, PA. Checks should be made out to me and mailed to my parents' address in the US. They will deposit them, and I'll withdraw the money here in Malawi. Modern technology makes this possible, but as always, love and compassion make it happen. Please don't forget to send your mailing address as well so the Nkhota kids and I can send you a thank you note.

Also, here are a few lightweight, valuable, easily packable, and (mostly) legal things to send directly to Malawi through the mail:

*Seeds! For vegetables, herbs, and fruits, as well as trees. I'm especially looking for raw nuts that could be planted (eg almonds, hazelnuts, cashews, walnuts, etc)-- you can find them at the Hanover Food Coop, for example-- and instructions on growing these trees, probably available somewhere on the internet. Medicinal herbs like lavender, sage, mint, chamomile, basil, fennel, sweet Annie (it cures malaria!), etc grow well but are totally unavailable for purchase here. If someone can provide seeds and instructions for growing vanilla, I will weep with joy. They might even grow from the dried seed pods you can find in fancy grocery stores. A few that we don't need--easily available here-- are eneric varieties of tomatoes, pumpkins, peanuts, and of course field maize; though if anyone can find seeds of the following varieties I will personally kiss your feet upon return:

Big Beef tomatoes
Favorita cherry tomatoes (the best ever; you have to try them in your own garden)
Silver Queen sweet corn
Hungarian white peppers (not sure what they're called exactly, the light-green ones)
Romaine and red-leaf lettuces, and other high-vitamin greens like chard, spinach, kale, etc.
Jewel strawberries

Best to seal them in a ziploc bag before sending to deter dampness and customs dogs. Also, we can use the bags!

*Toothbrushes! Toothbrushes, toothbrushes, toothbrushes. Dentists get them in bulk and minimally packaged in plastic sleeves, making them more compressible than that boxed nonsense you find in supermarkets for 4 dollars a pop. Proposition your local tooth-yanker and see what you can arrange. Always useful, and we can distribute them through local maternal and child health clinics.

*Vitamins. Actually, it's probably not worth it to send vitamins through the mail, but you could send money and I can buy them here. Are vitamins useful in a country with high rates of malnutrition and infectious disease? Why yes, yes they are.

*Colored pencils, stickers, and children's books are pretty much nonexistent in Malawi and would be greatly treasured for years to come. Collecting these would be a feel-good job that you could actually feel good about. Notebooks, pens, pencils, etc are available here, so it's better just to send money rather than pay for postage and I'll purchase them locally.

These items can be sent directly to:

Katie Greenwood
c/o Postmaster
Livingstonia
Rumphi District
MALAWI
CENTRAL AFRICA

(Note: boxes are charged with import taxes; padded envelopes are not. Goods are taxed based on the declared value, hint hint.)

Due to the high cost of postage and the importance of not putting local retailers out of business it's better to buy most other things here, but any other creative talents you all have could easily be turned into US-based fundraisers! After four months here I feel reasonably confident that I can direct these resources to where they are needed, so go! go! go!

And as always,

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!

Much love,
Katie

Fruit tree planting at Mahuwi Primary School.

Kids and fruit trees, kids and fruit trees; Oh my God: I have the best job in the world.

Mahuwi School pictures

2005-05-13T07:13:00.000+02:00

Fruit tree planting at Mahuwi Primary School, a small village school serving grades 1-5.

Mahuwi School, built with support from the European Union, stands out as a lone tin-roofed building among the foothills of the Nyika Plateau.

The tiny houses and steep slopes of Nkhota lead up to the edge of the Nyika Plateau, viewed from the summit of Nkhota Hill. The boundary of Nyika National Park is clearly visible where the treeline begins. This extremely steep, marginal farmland becomes infertile due to topsoil erosion after just two or three years, forcing families to move constantly in search of new land.

A view to the lakeshore along the Livingstonia Road. Watch your step!

Exposed layers of multicolored clay, found in a gully along the Livingstonia
Road.

Nkhota Farms

Another view of the fields around Nkhota. If current practices continue, this extremely marginal land will only be productive for a few years; then farmers must beg for another piece of land.

Another view of Khondowe

2005-04-30T17:20:00.000+02:00

“We should go slowly slowly,” Joshua Kachulu advises, as we begin our ascent to the village of Nkhota, high in the hills above Livingstonia. By we he means me. Joshua has no need for such admonitions—he lives on top of a mountain nearly as high as the one we’re about to climb.

It’s my first time to Nkhota. The old dirt road that follows a nearly 30-degree course along the spine of the hill has been impassable by truck for two years now, meaning that anyone or anything that’s going into the area has to get there by foot. The climb only takes about two hours, Joshua tells me, but it’s pretty much straight up. We’re going all the way to the summit of Nkhota, where, according to Joshua, we will find a most remarkable school.

Built a few years back when the road could still be driven, apparently from little more than the sheer will of community leaders, Nkhota School today serves nearly a hundred and fifty children in one of the poorest pockets of the region around Livingstonia. The school has three teachers—one of whom is officially retired, the other a volunteer—and together they have been able to offer their students an eight-classroom mud brick building, instruction in first to seventh grades, a safe and (relatively) flat space to play soccer, and—most relevant to our purposes—a fledgling forest of fruit and firewood trees, which currently provide the school’s main source of income.

The problem with Malawians, I often hear from other muzungu, is that they have no initiative. Now, however, as Joshua makes his way up the steep path in his oversized suit jacket and worn flip flops, at a pace he considers slowly slowly, I wish very much that he would show a little less initiative—at least long enough for me to take a water break. An early morning thunderstorm has already blown past, and the sun is becoming uncomfortably hot. I have to keep my eyes on my feet to make the ascent, and the leached red soil reflects the midday glare into my face as I squint and stumble my way up the hill.

The road cuts through a yearling forest, land abandoned by maize and cassava farmers after only a few seasons of cultivation due to severe soil erosion. To one side, a lone tree reaches tall enough to provide a human-sized spot of shade, and I quickly move to take advantage of it. Joshua joins me without complaint. Both of us are sweating and breathing heavily, though we’re only carrying our light daybags, and I wonder how on earth the residents of Nkhota are able to carry building supplies, blankets, milled maize, and other weighty essentials from the market in Livingstonia to their homes.

“Did you bring your camera?” Joshua asks.

I look up, noticing the view for the first time. From this point I can see down the slope we’ve just climbed, back to the main (dirt) road that connects Livingstonia with the small villages where Joshua and I usually work—Manchewe, Vunguvungu, Mahuwi—and traverses successive tiers of the plateau until it plummets over the Livingstonia escarpment, eventually connecting to Chitimba on the lakeshore. Looking eastward, my eyes travel easily across brilliant green fields of maize and tobacco situated on patches of level ground—these extend nearly to the escarpment’s edge. Below the cliff face, hazy in the distance, the broad curve of Chitimba Beach defines the shore of Lake Malawi, its small fishing villages and rice fields indistinct but traceable along the two-lane paved road that follows the lakeshore all the way to the border with Tanzania—Malawi’s main national highway, only twenty-some kilometers away.

Turning southward, I see we are already looking down on the shady eucalyptus groves of Livingstonia, itself perched on a rise above the eastern plain. A glare from one of the town’s many tin roofs catches my eye, and I take a moment to notice the distribution of these prominent indicators of relative prosperity. Scattered points of light are visible all along the Livingstonia road, but increasingly far apart as the land recedes southward into fields and footpaths. Small clusters of buildings mark village centers: churches, chiefs’ residences, homes of wealthier farmers. Between are homes of clay and mud brick, with roofs of loosely packed thatch and black plastic, ranging in appearance from modest to comfortable to squalid. Livingstonia town, with its many mission buildings and residences, practically glows in the midday sun.

[Let me here note that I recognize it is obnoxious to include this description of the landscape without an accompanying picture. Please accept my most sincere apologies, along with the promise of proper photographic documentation as soon as possible.]

“Unfortunately not,” I say—foolishly, as this vantage point offers an unparalleled perspective on the land my feet have come to know in the last two months. “Joshua, is there a name for this whole area? For all of the towns and villages around Livingstonia?”

“Khondowe,” Joshua answers.

I’m surprised: I’d been told that the name of Khondowe had died along with the authority of the last village chief by the same name, back when the missionaries first moved in a hundred years ago. A few maps I’ve seen from the early post-independence days use the old Tumbuka name for the town of Livingstonia, but this is now considered a common ‘error’ of early Malawian cartography.

“Khondowe,” Joshua repeats, as I continue to stare out at the immense, varied, thoughtfully constructed landscape displayed before us. “We call it Khondowe.”

* * *

After another half hour of my plodding and Joshua’s patience, we mount a final rise and suddenly find ourselves at the summit. For the first time this morning, the westward view is clear. What looks like a grand mountain looms before us, beyond a shallow valley covered in a patchwork of maize and cassava fields. In fact, this is only the eastern edge of the Nyika Plateau, which stretches another thousand meters up and fifty miles across, west to the Zambian border. (If Haiti is mountains beyond mountains, Malawi is mountains upon mountains.) Over the last forty years most of the plateau has been incorporated into Nyika National Park, and the boundary of the preserve is clearly visible on the slope facing us: halfway up the Nyika escarpment, the straggly rows of cassava end and the forest begins. The landscape changes abruptly from red to green.

To make way for Nyika National Park, Joshua explained to me, the people whose families had always lived on the Nyika Plateau had to be moved out. Malawi being a fairly densely settled country, there was not much flat or fertile land available for these environmental refugees. With little tradition of settled cultivation in their own cultural history—the Nyikans were able to forage and hunt most of their food on the high grasslands of the plateau—they were pushed into areas where no one else would farm: steep hillsides, undercut banks of streambeds, narrow gorges that receive the sun’s glow for a scant few hours each day.

The land before us is nowhere flat, but rolls ever upward as the foothills of Nyika; these slopes must provide all the food for the many families living in this isolated area. Tiny mudbrick houses dot the valley, connected to each other and the overgrown road only by narrow footpaths. Small human figures move in the distance, but I see no cows or goats, not even a chicken house. Scanning the vista, my eyes find no piercing light to mark the presence of a tin roof. I realize at this moment the relative prosperity of the area around Livingstonia and its main road—an area whose conditions previously appeared to me as representing severe poverty.

The Nyikan refugees were offered some financial remuneration from the government for their loss of their land and livelihood, and a German development agency invested a few years in teaching standardized agricultural methods. But from where I now stand, it is painfully obvious that this has not been nearly enough.

“It is a very poor area,” says Joshua, characteristically succinct.

* * *

The school committee is waiting to meet us as we enter the campus—otherwise empty as it is Easter holiday. From the moment we come into sight of the school, I hardly dare to believe my eyes. Two large buildings in good repair, each with four classrooms, stand at one end of an open field that has been converted to a football pitch. The roofs are thatch, the walls are mudbrick, the floors a fine gray clay that must have been carried up by the bucketload from the Manchewe River far below.

To either side of the school, the hillside drops away dramatically, and I immediately notice the sapling pine and eucalyptus trees planted as a windbreak along these edges—useful, among other purposes, for keeping the roof on the building in the absence of nails. After introductions, the headmaster points out a grove of lower-growing guava trees behind the pines, as well as the orderly rows of pineapple bushes and the two avocado trees. The buildings appear sturdy and well maintained, in stark contrast to many of the homes we’ve passed on our walk up.

We go to the office, where handwritten attendance sheets, two wooden rulers, and a map of Central America decorate the mudbrick walls. The headmaster presents me with a letter, carefully scripted on notebook paper, which details the history of the school: founded in 1999 by the village chief and school committee, built in the same year to offer primary education to an area that had no school, financed entirely by the community. An initial donation of agroforestry trees, including pine and eucalyptus, as well as the few guavas, was provided by a local Malawian community development organization.

The guavas, avocadoes, pineapples, and various flowering plants around the school grounds are propagated and maintained by the students and their families. Whenever possible, mothers gather the fruit they bear and carry it to Livingstonia market. The earnings are used to buy materials the school could not otherwise afford—pens, for example, or 24-page notebooks, or chalk. Though the community’s investment and attention is impressive, I recognize that the harvest cannot be very great: guavas are among the cheapest of village fruits, and avocadoes the most undervalued compared with their nutritional worth.

“We have not received any support from outside,” the headmaster tells me. “We just ask the families to contribute what they can.” Often, he explains, it’s difficult for families in this area even to contribute their children for the day—the maize and cassava fields in the Nyika foothills require everyone’s attention to make the harvest enough to keep the family alive. Most children who do attend the school are the first in their families to receive any formal education, so it’s hard for supportive parents to offer their children assistance with their lessons. And if children are needed to work in the home, they are even more needed to work out of the home: school attendance drops off sharply after the age of thirteen years, when children start to be married, and are thereafter responsible for managing their own fields and households.

We leave the office and tour the school grounds, visiting the primary school classrooms with their low wooden benches, the sixth and seventh grades furnished with wooden desks and built-in seats, the eighth grade classroom—currently used for storage as there are no pupils, but expecting its first students in the coming year. We discuss the needs of the school and the community, the role of nutrition in children’s physical health and neurological development, the possibility of establishing a papaya tree nursery so papaya seedlings can be given to children who improve their attendance. I offer an assortment of agroforestry and fruit trees, asking if the community can prepare compost-enriched holes for planting in a sheltered area within the next few weeks, before the rains end.

The committee is enthusiastic, assuring me that with proper care even warm-climate crops such as papaya or mango can thrive at this altitude. “It is possible, it is possible,” the village chief repeats with a smile, after each of my queries. “We already know how to do this.”

“It is an honor to work with people who show so much love for their children and foresight for their community,” I tell the school committee later that morning. “I will be glad to assist you in whatever way I can.” They place their hands together and lower their heads to me, offering the Malawian bow of gratitude and respect. I follow by bowing lower still, feeling I cannot bow long enough.

Joshua and I shake hands with the committee and plan to meet again in three weeks—this time at the bottom of Nkhota Hill, so the students can help us carry up the first seedlings for their new fruit tree orchard.

* * *

My eyes are stinging again as Joshua and I begin our descent, but this time not from the glare of the pale red earth crumbling under my feet. I have been touched; that is to say, I have been moved, inspired, blessed, to know the efforts and aspirations of the Nkhota school community, and to find, in my own heart, resonance, and a path that leads us forward together. Seeing the dedication of the Nkhota school community has reinforced my faith in my own work, and my conviction that we can and should expect to accomplish a great deal, even in a setting of extremely limited resources. My respect for their accomplishments leads me to consider with great wonder the strange course of events that has positioned me, at the age of twenty-four, with the ability to choose a life of “service,” my hands reaching downwards in support rather than upwards in supplication.

My skin and my background endow me with a power I did not choose and do not deserve, and (more often than not) a natural alliance to the wrong side. And yet, despite the vast divide between myself and the Nkhotans, there seems a small, temporal opening for real solidarity, for hands to reach across and offer each other strength, as best they can. My heart leaps within me. For a moment, in a world of ambivalence and confusion, I feel the universe has let sound a reverberant yes to the life I have chosen.

I continue walking, nearly overwhelmed, touched in the depths of my soul by the feeling that we are moving toward common ground, guided by a force tremendously creative, powerful, ancient and profound. Truth, perhaps, or something like it?

Manchewe pictures

2005-03-28T18:40:00.000+02:00

Manchewe Home: This picturesque home in Manchewe Village is built with traditional home-fired mud bricks and thatched roof, but also includes concrete floor and glass windows˜- expensive luxuries in this remote area.

my tent: My living quarters at the Lukwe Permaculture Project. The shelter is built into the side of the slope, making it a remarkably wind-proof and leak-proof little structure. Tent is good for keeping out mosquitoes, in addition to snakes, scorpions, and the occasional wayward baboon.

Composthands: Kids at the Manchewe Primary School experience the beauty of fully decomposed compost. The school is now preparing their own compost piles in preparation for their new fruit tree orchard.

Tumbuka lessons for young muzungu

2005-03-26T09:59:00.000+02:00

Upon arriving in Mzuzu, I made my way to the regional Peace Corps office—closed for the weekend—gave the gatekeeper a plausible and reasonably honest explanation why I should be permitted to enter, and quickly appropriated a small but invaluable piece of U.S. government property: the Peace Corps’ Tumbuka language training manual. Thirty minutes and a few thousand Malawian kwacha later, I had my own photocopy of the only printed instruction material for learning Tumbuka, the dominant language in northern Malawi.

I returned the original without incident and rejoiced inwardly, already formulating interview questions for the surveys I hoped to conduct in the area around Livingstonia: history of land use and agricultural practices, knowledge of wild foods and remedies, beliefs about the role of traditional medicine and juju—spiritual interventions that affect the fortunes of others—in sickness and healing.

Three weeks later, I am still a consistent source of amusement to my Malawian neighbors as I regularly mix the morning and afternoon greetings Mwawuka uli? (How did you wake up?) and Mwatandala uli? (How have you spent the day?), and my vocabulary has not expanded significantly beyond “I am sorry, but I understand very little Tumbuka”—a phrase I have had ample opportunity to practice. Fortunately, Joshua Kachuro, my energetic partner in the fruit tree enterprise, speaks English and Tumbuka as well as Chichewa, all quite fluently and at tremendous speed, omitting unnecessary syllables and inventing original abbreviations in a never-ending struggle to make his words keep pace with his thoughts.

Through the tutelage of Joshua, I have learned a few other useful words, including several ways of saying thank you, terms for greeting elders respectfully, and, naturally, terms for greeting or discussing one’s friends and acquaintances with varying degrees of disrespect. But the word I hear more frequently than any other is the Tumbuka term for “foreigner,” or white person: azungu (plural muzungu). Cries of “Azungu! Azungu!” are a ubiquitous part of my daily experience, shouted by Malawians repeatedly upon sighting with what sounds like a mixture of surprise, curiosity, and, quite possibly, alarm.

* * *

Muzungu like myself have been in the area around Livingstonia since the late nineteenth century, when a large Presbyterian mission was founded in what was then the small village of Khondowe (an apparently unsuitable name, somehow implicated in predisposing heathenistic tendencies). Perched at the edge of the thousand-foot escarpment, the British missionaries found the site was easily defensible and relatively free of malaria. They haven’t left since.

The resident muzungu of greater Livingstonia were my first source of information on local natural and political history, as well as Tumbuka culture. From them I learned which common muzungu mannerisms were Tumbuka faux pas, how to respectfully decline the affections of a drunken chief, and where to buy peanut butter. However, I soon found listening to their voices to be a tiresome exercise in cognitive dissonance, with grains of truth swathed in overtones of meaning and motive, the key information buried in these cross-cultural harmonics.

For example:

“I was once told by a Malawian who was highly educated and well-traveled that she had never encountered anywhere else in the world such a nation of liars, thieves and cheats.”

And:

“In that area the people are really violent, they will punch their best friend in the face for nothing, but really hard, and throw rocks and things at each other, and then in another hour you see they are best friends again. In that way they are really just like children. You know, they have cannibalism in their history until quite recently, and you can see this in the way they act today.”

And:

“The Malawians are really very simple people; they know nothing other than planting maize and cassava, and they can’t think for themselves, you always have to give strict instructions. But they’re happy with so little; in a way one shouldn’t try to change them.”

And:

“The Tumbuka are lazy people because they’re used to growing maize, and maize is such an easy crop to grow: you just throw the seeds on the ground and a couple of months later you’ve got all the food you need. So they’ve never had to work hard, and they’re not interested in getting ahead. But generally they are healthy and happy.” (This last response from a resident medical doctor in response to my question about the possible link between malnutrition and the high prevalence of AIDS in northern Malawi.)

These comments come from people who consider themselves allies of the Malawians and speak with horror about the ignorance and elitism of the colonialists and their modern-day counterparts in the business world, people whose vocations and credentials incline me toward trust, whose statements I often don’t find troubling until sifting through my impressions long after our conversations have finished. Even then, part of me is hesitant to question too quickly. After all, what the hell do I know? I can’t even tell you the time of day.

Of course I am no dispassionate observer, not by a long shot. In my view, it’s not difficult to see whose interests are served by portraying Malawians as unfeeling simpletons requiring careful supervision, given the country’s slave-state economy (primary export crops: tea, coffee, tobacco, cotton). Still, I tried to be a well-tempered academic and recognize the validity of multiple truths, honor competing narratives, etc. But eventually I realized the muzungu were depressing me. And I’m counting on naïveté to get me through a few more months, at the least.

Besides, I reasoned, if they are right and I ignore them, the worst possible outcome is that I fail. But if they are wrong and I listen to them, the worst possible outcome, for people who could have been helped by my project and any impacts associated with it, could be quite grim.

Eventually I decided I don’t have time for that kind of bullshit and went back to work.

* * *

Michael Mavumbanya, retired primary school teacher, pillar of his community, and leader of the Bale Farmers’ Club, turns his benevolent gaze to the task of apportioning fruit trees to his group. We don’t have as many to distribute as we should—it’s been difficult to find enough seedlings—and the numbers of each variety are not evenly divisible among the members present. We’ve just spent two hours discussing the importance of Vitamins A and C, for which mango and guava are among the best sources, but we only have one mango tree, and seven households are represented. There are six guavas, eleven tangerines, four apples promised but not yet delivered. Michael, whose English is deliberate and nuanced, speaks quietly to the group members in their shared native language of Tumbuka.

They quickly agree, after learning this morning about the effects of childhood Vitamin A deficiency, that the member who lives near the most young children should have the mango, provided that he foregoes the guava and plants mango seeds for the other members once the tree bears fruit. He bows to the group and happily claims his small green prize. Tangerines are shared next, the less-sweet oranges accepted as a substitute if doubled. The apples, still unarrived, are not added to anyone’s tally: Malawians are all too familiar with unfulfilled promises.

After a brief and amicable discussion everyone goes home with five trees. Everyone, that is, except for Michael, who left himself two shy. He has already invested years in developing his own orchard, and reasons he doesn’t need this extra help as much as the rest of the group.

“Our primary goal must always be the alleviation of the suffering of the community,” he says by way of explanation, his eyes smiling.

The members of this Club are well-educated and relatively well-off financially. Many of them are teachers, church leaders, respected elders. They apprehend the nutrition concepts I present quite easily and are eager to share this new knowledge with their communities. Soon they are offering me pointers on my facilitation style. Joshua and I agree to return to the group in two weeks to conduct a more in-depth session so the members can become trainers as well.

It’s quite a contrast to last week, when I watched Lieza struggling intensely to explain the importance of compost manure, leguminous trees, and contour banks to a much poorer farmers’ group, people who have never had the opportunity to learn about microorganisms, chemical elements, or sea level. I could never have imagined how difficult it is to arrive at a common interpretation of events when scientific education is so limited. How to teach about micronutrients in such conditions without being pedantic, without simply demanding, as the missionaries did, memorization and blind faith?

* * *

Michael’s insistence on reserving the minimum number for himself also contrasts with the attitude of teachers at the nearby primary school, whose only questions following my presentation on the benefits of a school orchard were whether I could fund construction of new teachers’ houses and if they could each have a tree to take home for themselves. “So we can be an example for others in the community,” was their explanation.

“You said no, of course,” Lieza retorts that evening, as I relate the days’ events.

But I said yes. Yes, mostly because I was full of enthusiasm and good feeling at that moment, happy in the thought of healthy young children gaining nourishment, appreciation for tree crops, and a taste for good fruit all at the same time under bowers of orange blossoms and ripening avocadoes. Swept up in the role of the giver—which can be a tremendously destructive force in community work, if empowerment is the true goal—I only wanted to make everybody happy, especially myself Not long after leaving the school, I realized what I had done and crashed emotionally, feeling tremendously guilty and irresponsible the whole walk home—which at eight kilometers was a fair slice of time.

It wasn’t appropriate. It wasn’t sustainable. It was a bad example. I should have been firm.

I was once told by a Malawian who was highly educated and well-traveled that she had never encountered anywhere else in the world such a nation of liars, thieves and cheats.

Anyway, they were getting fruit trees for the school, and as teachers they had a much more secure income than most of their neighbors. How dare they be demanding, when I was already bringing them so much?

The Malawians are really very simple people; they know nothing other than planting maize and cassava, and they can’t think for themselves. But they’re happy with so little; in a way one shouldn’t try to change them.

But really it was my fault, and having promised them each one tree, I knew I should keep my word. I set my jaw and vowed not to repeat the mistake.

It wasn’t until I was buying an additional load of trees the next day for fifty kwacha each that the absurdity of this whole process hit me. Fifty kwacha is less than fifty cents. How much have I been given without asking, and how much have I been able to appropriate for myself without asking, because of the accident of my birth in a comfortable setting and a set of white skin? I trespass on government property and infringe upon copyright restrictions and it’s a cute story; my Malawian neighbors ask to have a fruit tree for their home and they are dirty crooks.

* * *

Which got me thinking about structural violence. “Structural violence” is a term from liberation theology, used to describe the broad political and economic forces that constrain the ability of individuals to live happily, healthily, free from fear. Bad roads, limited education, and miserably inadequate healthcare are all obvious sources of structural violence in the life of most Malawians. High national debt, an export-driven economy, and the power of international agribusiness companies are obscured behind these proximate causes, but no less directly implicated. And this understanding is critical.

Because I understand the feelings of the muzungu. Many of them have been here long enough to see well-intentioned initiatives fail: money gets misused, organizations sputter out, people given specialized training leave for South Africa. And the gap between what muzungu think they’re teaching, and what the community is actually learning, can be severe. (“What will happen in my garden in five years’ time if I leave it alone?” Lieza asked the farmers’ group during training, trying to illustrate a point about soil erosion and natural succession. The farmers’ answer was quick and unanimous: “Everyone will chop down all the trees for firewood.”) Over time, the tendency—which I’ve experienced enough myself to know—is to either blame yourself and give up, or lower your expectations and blame the people you’re supposed to be serving. (They’re drunks. They’re cheats. They’re simpletons.)

Viewing the everyday dramas of a place like Malawi through the lens of structural violence can help prevent that kind of burnout, because it offers not just an explanation, but an epistemology for coherent solidarity. If I hold a training and no one shows up—someone is too tired, someone forgot the date, someone’s daughter is sick—I may feel personally insulted and ask why Malawians are so lazy, unmotivated, and unreliable. But if I consider the impacts of structural violence, I will rather ask why the paths are so slippery and dangerous, why most people cannot afford a calendar, why the community is ravaged by illness. I will ask why Malawians are not taught at school about the benefits of good nutrition and crop diversification, why there have been so many unfulfilled promises and disappointments, why most people have never been justly rewarded for the hard work and initiative they have offered throughout their lives. And this can actually fuel my desire to continue.

Sure, maybe it’s just as subjective as any other possible interpretation of events. But a subjectivity that keeps me from wasting my energy making excuses for others, that shows the place of my small efforts in a world full of challenges, that causes failure to strengthen my resolve? That takes the blame off the shoulders of poor people and makes us allies in the fight against global forces of greed, power, ignorance? I can live with that.

Our primary goal must always be the alleviation of the suffering of the community.

The fact is that the deck is completely stacked against us, and so just because we fail once, twice, a hundred times doesn’t mean we’re wrong, or that we should stop trying, or that we’ve lost. To the contrary: the only way we really lose is if we stop trying and give up altogether. Otherwise, even if we are failing again and again, there is always hope, because we know are struggling against the weight of some mighty powerful and determined forces. And success, when it does come, is that much more easily seen for the joy and the blessing that it is.

If what we’re doin’ is wrong, babe
Then I don’t want to be right

Who sang those lines? James Brown? James Taylor? Jesus? Somebody like that.

Till next time, a very good morning to you all.

Love,

Katie

PS:

Katie Greenwood
PO Box 20
Livingstonia
Rumphi District
MALAWI
CENTRAL AFRICA

Kafinyengo village

2005-03-06T12:42:00.000+02:00

A view to the village across the gorge, slightly upslope from my living area.

Livingstonia road

2005-03-06T12:41:00.000+02:00

Fifteen kilometers to Livingstonia, ten of them straight up the escarpment, visible in the distance.

Immersion

2005-03-04T16:50:00.000+02:00

“Are you quite a scared person, Katie?” Lieza du Preez asks me shortly after we meet in the dusty northern Malawian town of Mzuzu.

Given the context—me having just traveled independently halfway around the world to the most remote region of an obscure country where I knew no one, to work in infectious disease—I’m uncertain how to answer.

Three hours later, I am peering a few hundred feet down over the all-too-close edge as we round yet another of the twenty-one narrow switchbacks on the Livingstonia Road, borne by Lieza’s vintage model Land Rover (complete with crank start). I grip the seat for stability and the door handle in case of the need for emergency bail-out, and am acutely aware of the answer to Lieza’s question. I am quite a scared person. As a matter of fact, I am a terrified person. Beyond even that: at this particular moment, I am very possibly the most completely and thoroughly terrified person on the planet.

The generously-named Livingstonia Road is a rocky, washed-out, unbelievably steep track that winds its way hastily up the Livingstonia Escarpment, gaining 1000 meters of elevation in less than 10 kilometers. It’s in worse condition than any track I saw during my time in Canyonlands National Park, where cattle trails turned into 4WD tracks offer the adventurous off-roader the chance to motor several hundred feet up apparently sheer slickrock canyons. Unlike the desert environment of Canyonlands, thankfully, northern Malawi is covered in forest during the rainy season, so I can’t see the rusting carcasses of those unfortunate vehicles that failed to make the one of the hairpin turns and sailed downward over the edge, toward an earlier geologic age. However, my imagination is more than capable of filling in the gap.

When we arrived at the top, ten kilometers and an hour and a half later, I gazed down at the small towns along the edge of Lake Malawi some three thousand feet below and felt my anxiety only intensify. Lieza turned off the road, which had broadened and stabilized as we reached the plateau’s surface, and on to a smaller unmarked track, advising me I should hold on as we were coming to a steep bit. We rolled slowly downwards through the trees, following the track to its end a few hundred feet later, and disembarked in the middle of the forest. Lieza’s husband, Auke, was waiting to greet us and help carry the next month’s supply of flour, peanut butter, and Kuche Kuche brand Malawian beer back to their house.

Oh my God, I thought. I could not live like this. I could not live like this.

Then, I realized, in fact, I am going to live like this. For the next six months, as a matter of fact.

I unloaded my large backpack and followed Lieza and Auke along a small footpath, down a slope, across two streambeds, past a few beehives and terrace gardens, and up along the edge of a gorge to the door of a two-person tent sheltered under a small pavilion with a roof of thatched grass. I put down my pack and looked around. From the west came the constant roar of the Manchewe River as it plummets over the escarpment edge to form Manchewe Falls; from the east, the bright glow of kerosene lamps being lit as the sunlight faded. Overhead, the unsettling rumble of an approaching storm. My new home.

* * *

I consider myself to be a reasonably brave person, but I’ll admit I have my share of phobias, sensitivities, and fears. Death is one of them. Particularly violent, untimely, meaningless death—when I do eventually meet my fate, let it at least be in some bold final stand against nuclear proliferation or the corporatization of the global seed supply.

Closely following (and associated, in my mind) are phobias relating to heights, snakes, animals that predate on humans, drug-resistant strains of infectious diseases, nighttime intruders, isolation, and of course the sinister presence of mushrooms—my one truly irrational phobia. After my first tent-bound experience of a northern Malawian thunderstorm, I can also add landslides and electrocution to the list.

In all cases, northern Malawi offers a course in total immersion therapy. During my initial days at the Lukwe Permaculture Project, every waking moment—and there were plenty of these, at night as well as during the day—I was essentially scared shitless. Lieza and Auke, who are kind and thoughtful people, sought to reassure me as best as they could.

“Don’t worry; no one will bother you here,” they told me. “They are all much too afraid of the snakes.”

The snakes?

The term phobia becomes problematic in an environment such as rural northern Malawi. For instance, is my fear of snakes still considered a phobia if it is gradiated between nonpoisonous snakes, poisonous snakes, and poisonous snakes for which there is no antivenin? For it was only my second day at Lukwe when I observed a representative of this third category—the innocuously-named twig snake—swallowing a juvenile black mamba (category number two) as I hung my laundry on the line.

Holy fucking shit, I thought. I am not going to make it to the end of the week here, one way or the other.

* * *

Lieza’s excellent cooking was the first indicator that I might, in fact, be able to survive the next few months. One definite advantage to living with permaculturists: they tend to have a strong affinity for quality food. Corn chowder, home-baked bread, and of course lovely fresh greens from the garden, all prepared over one small charcoal stove in the middle of the bush, left me walking home to my tent with a full—if persistently nervous—stomach. The snakes and storms did not make an appearance for the next few days. And the dramatic landscape surrounding Lukwe—the deep gorge cut by twin waterfalls, the high peaks of the Nyika Plateau in the west, the thunderclouds passing in the distance over the lake, too far off to hear their thunder—gradually seemed less threatening and exotic, and more beautiful and inspiring, as I began to settle in at Lukwe.

For further encouragement, I turned to Edward Abbey. A life in the wilderness—with all the welcome and unwelcome elements of the natural world fully present, the fragility and temporality of human life laid bare, and long stretches of solitary company—is a good life, a correct life, a thoroughly alive life. Or so I read in Desert Solitaire.

Morally and spiritually fortified by the writings of such clear-sighted and noble humans as Abbey, Paul Farmer, and J.R.R. Tolkien, I began planning for my introductory meeting with the farmers’ groups around Lukwe. For my first month, Lieza had suggested, I should focus on a project unrelated to the sensitive issue of AIDS. She offered me the chance to implement a project she’d been developing for some time, planting fruit tree orchards at schools, community centers, and private lands in the area. Lieza’s established relationship with the farmers, and their high level of organization and initiative, should make the orchard project a smooth introduction.

The meeting went well, and as of today there are seven groups participating in the project. Many have already begun preparing planting stations, and as soon as Lieza can round up a sufficient quantity of seedlings—tangerines, mangoes, oranges, papayas, avocadoes, lemons, and apples, in addition to indigenous fruits—we’ll begin planting. Of these fruits, nearly all contain Vitamin C, and avocadoes provide a much-needed source of fats. The first four are also excellent sources of Vitamin A, which is essential in immune function and commonly deficient in young children of Malawi. Unlike water-soluble vitamins such as the Bs or C, Vitamin A is stored in bodyfat, so that a single bountiful season of mango or papaya fruit can supply an entire year’s requirements of this essential nutrient. Papaya leaves and seeds also have many medicinal properties, including deworming effects.

My Malawian partner in this enterprise is Joshua, a young permaculture trainer from the area interested in crop diversification, soccer, and opening a medicinal soap business in Manchewe. Together, we’ve prepared the program for a few training and tree-planting ceremonies for the groups, commissioning a song explaining how to make compost in the Tumbuka language, initiating a contest at the local elementary schools for writing and reciting why fruit trees are important, and developing role-playing scenarios around problems that are likely to arise for group members.

“‘What do you do if your husband says the fruit trees and compost piles will attract baboons?’” I propose.

“Just tell him, eh, it’s you who are the baboon!” suggests Joshua, who is always in a jovial mood. We laugh uproariously together, along with everyone else in earshot.

* * *

Two weeks after my arrival I return from a long day on the road—this time by foot—to find Lieza has prepared hot water for bathing. A joyous discovery: since coming to Lukwe, ritualistic bathing has become my favorite form of religious practice. A long hose runs from the natural spring further up the gorge into a blackened 55-gallon drum, beneath which glows a warm charcoal fire. I run a further line of hose out to the bathing area, open on all sides except for the reed wall Lieza and I built the day before to provides privacy from her house. As a cold mist settles in and the evening rain begins, I sit naked in the metal tub at the edge of the Livingstonia escarpment, enthusiastically dousing myself in warmth with a large tin cup. Around me, the evening sounds of frogs, birds, and monkeys filter in between the raindrops; no longer threatening but familiar, I cluck my tongue in imitation and pour another cupful over my head. Never have I had so much fun in two inches of water.

When the water finally becomes undeniably cool, I emerge at last from the metal tub, physically, psychically, spiritually cleansed. I feel fully prepared to face whatever the rest of the day may bring—especially if it is a good night’s sleep. First, though, dinner, and perhaps another round with Mr. Abbey.

For now, at least, I am quite a content person.

Senga Bay

2005-02-10T22:06:00.000+02:00

A view from Senga Bay on Lake Malawi, later in the day as fishers bring in their dugout canoes and twin thunderstorms pass by. The water is warm, the bottom sandy, and crocodiles few and far between, making Senga Bay an ideal vacation spot.

Lilongwe Central Hospital

2005-02-10T22:05:00.001+02:00

Patients staying in Lilongwe Central Hospital receive treatment for free, but may only be visited by a nurse once or twice in a week. Families are responsible for feeding, bathing, and clothing patients during their stayhence the laundry flying from the upper floors. The building is in need of major repairs, and one obvious way to improve the quality of life here would be to purchase ceiling or floor fans for the wards, which are quite crowded with patients and their caretakers and have poor ventilation. Anyone interested in doing some fundraising?

Along the highway

2005-02-10T22:05:00.000+02:00

On the way to Lake Malawi, the M5 national highway winds through many small towns, and bicycle and pedestrian traffic is high. The landscape is quite lush at this time of year, and I loved watching storms roll across the spectacular mountains.

Fishing in the reservoir

2005-02-10T22:04:00.000+02:00

Fishers at work in Lilongwe's water reservoir.

Arrivals, departures

2005-02-10T22:03:00.001+02:00

Lilongwe International Airport offers visitors information on domestic and international departures, occasionally corresponding to actual flights.

Overlooking Lilongwe

2005-02-10T22:03:00.000+02:00

Lilongwe is situated on the rolling hills of a river valley, and this view from the outskirts of town shows the distant city center (large buildings on the left) from the vantage point of a typical middle-class urban neighborhood (small houses made of brick, some with electricity and/or running water). The Reserve Bank of Malawi is visible in the distance on the far left, which at 10 stories is Lilongwe's tallest skyscraper. Look at how green the landscape is!

The Malawi Permaculture Network

2005-02-10T19:33:00.000+02:00

“At our house we’re growing over 150 plants indigenous to Malawi that can be used as foods or medicines. We’ve also compiled many printed materials relevant to nutrition, agriculture, and HIV during our eight years here. You’re welcome to stay with us while you’re here in Lilongwe, if you’d like.”

Such was my introduction to Stacia and Kristof Nordin, garbled through the crackly phone connection at the Lilongwe youth hostel. That easily, and openly, the Nordins welcomed me to their extensive network of colleagues and wealth of accumulated knowledge in Malawi. I was so relieved I could barely speak. Passage to Malawi could be obtained easily enough through a generous contribution to British Airways, but passage into the world of like-minded and hearted people and their projects scattered throughout the country was not something I could expect to secure on my own. For the next nine months, I knew, my life, work, and studies would depend on the strength and generosity of this web of strangers, known to me only as the Malawi Permaculture Network.

I chose to go to Malawi after spending the better part of a year searching for anyone in the world addressing the ways sustainable agriculture could support the needs of people living with AIDS. After many fruitless months I came across Stacia Nordin posting on an international listserv on nutrition and HIV. An American nutritionist working for the Peace Corps, Stacia emphasized the ecological and cultural benefits of achieving nutritional sufficiency through diversified indigenous agriculture, rather than dependency on expensive fortification and supplementation programs. She sounded like my kind of woman. I wrote to her, she wrote back, and within two weeks I had submitted a proposal to my college requesting funding for a nine-month research project.

I had been nervous about going to Malawi without the support of an organization. Prior to departure, I scoured the library and the internet for history, photographs, field guides, anything that might help prepare me for the work I was soon to begin. I collected a meager handful of relevant information and resigned myself to pre-arrival ignorance. Friends asked over and over again who I would be working with, what I expected to do, what I would eat, where I would sleep. I could only offer vague responses, accompanied by a smile and a shrug. It was all a very tenuous arrangement. From the first moment I met Stacia, Kristof, and their two year-old daughter Khalidwe, however, I knew I had landed in good hands.

* * *

When I first contacted Stacia, about a year ago, she was eager to facilitate but didn’t have work for me in Lilongwe. She referred me to a woman living in the far north of the country who works closely with Malawian farmers to develop indigenous food and medicinal gardens. Lieza Dupreez, Stacia told me, was a hardworking, independent African homesteader and member of the Permaculture Network who had established a tremendously productive garden on the side of the Livingstonia escarpment, essentially a cliff face. I was intrigued.

“Lieza can only access email in the town of Mzuzu, though, and she only goes there about once a month,” Stacia wrote me, “so be sure to give her plenty of advance notice.”

Lieza and I exchanged emails over the course of the next several months, and it seemed to be a good match. However, when I departed for Malawi in early January nothing was finalized, and I hadn’t heard from her in quite some time. I wasn’t totally surprised, then, when I called her from Lilongwe and discovered she had no idea I was still planning on coming—apparently the last several emails I’d sent never went through. For my part, I had no idea she was five months pregnant.

Lieza was undaunted.

“You can still come, but you’ll have to give me some time to get ready for you. I’ll have to build you a pavilion so you have a place to sleep, but I think we can get it up and find the grass to thatch the roof fairly quickly. Call me again in two weeks.”

The connection was rather spotty, so we left the details until later. At any rate, it seemed I would be staying a bit longer than expected in Lilongwe.

* * *

A few days later, reading at the Nordin’s house, I copy the following words from an article by Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement and winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize:

People without culture feel insecure and are obsessed with the acquisition of material things, which give them a temporary security that is in itself a delusional bulwark against future insecurity… Communities without their own culture, who are already disinherited, cannot protect their environment from immediate destruction or preserve it for future generations. Since they are disinherited, they have nothing to pass on.

In Kenya, Maathai’s Green Belt Movement seeks to restore the sense of cultural ownership needed for people to recognize, claim and protect their inheritance: an environment resilient enough sustain itself while providing for human needs, for generations to come. A few hundred miles southward, Stacia and Kristof Nordin and the members of the Malawi Permaculture Network are undertaking very similar goals.

Permaculture is a contraction of the words permanent and agriculture, and is one of many design approaches to sustainable agriculture. To me, its name conveys both a sense of year-round abundance with no season of shortage, and a cultural ethic of patient and sustained attention to the design of agricultural ecosystems, such that each element in a system strengthens the system as a whole. When permaculturists understand the many roles each element can play in the system and design accordingly to maximize the total benefit, the result is an agro-ecosystem that actually becomes more productive over time, while requiring progressively less human management. Throw in a few medicinal plants, and it’s not hard to see why permaculture could be uniquely appropriate in an environment where a quarter of the farmers are HIV-positive.

Permaculture offers a powerful role for humans as well, one that has become increasingly rare in the last century: rather than taking thoughtlessly from our environment, minimizing harm, or ignoring our own needs, we can be creative and intelligent designers, caring for and enriching the vitality of our world even as we provide for human needs. This is the culture aspect of agriculture: a set of values, knowledge, and practices that seek to sustain human life and everything needed to sustain us, which is to say, everything. As the name says: permaculture. Permanent agriculture, permanent culture, of the sort our most recent Nobel Peace Prize winner says is vital to the survival of our species.

Basically, it’s just like what industrialized agriculture does, except the opposite.

* * *

“When did maize come to Malawi?” Stacia asks a room full of nutritionists and community health workers at a home for AIDS orphans in Lilongwe. It is the first morning of a two-day training session she’s conducting as a representative of the Permaculture Network, entitled “HIV, Nutrition and Agriculture.” No one ventures a guess.

“It wasn’t that long ago. It was just in the last century that maize was introduced from North America, and at first people in Malawi didn’t like it. They were growing all kinds of other foods all year round, and maize was only good at one time of year. But the foreigners who controlled Malawi’s government at that time liked to eat maize, and so they made laws that everyone must grow maize, and taught people that maize was the best kind of food.”

I cringe as Stacia tells the rest of the story. Following independence, Malawi’s dictator—Dr. Hastings Banda—acceded to pressure from international lending institutions to focus the country’s agricultural production on two export crops—tea and tobacco—and a national staple: maize. Banda stepped up legal enforcement of maize production, and Malawians who refused to grow the crop were beaten, jailed, and in danger of losing their access to land. High-yielding hybrid strains of maize introduced during the Green Revolution gave unprecedented returns during the first few years—but at a cost.

“How are the harvests now? What do your agogos say about the way the harvests were when they were children?”

Everyone quickly agrees—the maize harvests are diminishing every year, even with increasing inputs of expensive, imported chemical fertilizers. Malawi’s soils are rapidly becoming as exhausted as those in my native America. Several days later, while reading the findings of the Malawi National Micronutrient and Health Survey, I learn that the average height of Malawian women has decreased steadily over the last forty years.

* * *

In addition to trainings, longer courses, and demonstration projects throughout the country, the Malawi Permaculture Network publishes and distributes a quarterly newsletter, edited by Kristof and Stacia. I leaf through a stack of back issues, surveying the contents. Most of the articles are of the practical, technical nature common to agricultural bulletins: Preserving grains with Tephrosia leaves; Solar water purification; Drying fruits for year-round Vitamin A. There are also a number of essays of a more political nature, however: Genetic pollution and biopiracy; Good health doesn’t need to be imported; Is the hungry season a state of mind? Reviews of recent permaculture initiatives, contact information for new members, and occasional contests round out each issue.

The most recent edition includes this contribution from a member, on the subject What am I doing to end hunger in Malawi?

In 2001 I helped to form the Medical Mobile Team based at Malomo Health Centre. My main task was to teach the community on how they can start practicing Permaculture Nutrition. I was also assisting some of the patients in using medicinal herbs in their treatments.

In the 2001-02 growing season I also started teaching the community and we opened a garden at Gonodo Village where we planted several different crops using Permaculture methods. This is also the same year that the country experienced the shortage of food. The garden helped the community and it helped to save the lives of those people.

From that time until now, the garden is still in use. This year, the harvest will all be donated to the Malomo Health Centre. I am planning to extend the programmes to other areas around Malomo Village. That’s what I have done to end hunger in Malawi.

Forty years ago, this man could have been arrested or tortured for advocating crop diversification. Today, the same message is enforced at the village level through social stigma: Dissent is dangerous. Looking out from Lilongwe, the grassroots efforts of the members of the Malawi Permaculture Network appear not just creative or visionary, but heroic—though Wangari Maathai might simply say, they are people who have found their culture.

* * *

This weekend, if all goes well, I will depart for northern Malawi. I’ll get my visa extension with no trouble in Mzuzu and will not be kicked out of the country. My living quarters at the Lukwe Permaculture Project will be inhabitable, the secondhand cell phone I purchased will continue to function most of the time, and I’ll get off on the right foot with my new coworkers despite the fact that they’ve only been expecting me for two weeks.

Why not be an optimist? So far, everything has worked out just fine.

Till next time,

Katie

An introduction to Malawi

2005-01-28T13:27:00.000+02:00

Hello friends,

Sorry this is both so long and so long in coming. I'm just about through with my time in Lilongwe and will be heading north on Sunday, January 30. I hope you all are well and look forward to hearing from you-- feel free to respond on the blog, but it's more likely that I'll be able to read your messages if you email them to me directly as well.

An introduction to Malawi

My first night in Malawi, I can’t sleep. Having survived the three-day, ten thousand-mile, eight-time-zone journey and resolved not to let myself nap too much on the first day, I promptly collapse around 2pm. I drag myself out of bed for dinner, managing to stay up until the respectable hour of 7:30, when I brush my teeth—body code for nighttime—and turn out the light. Flashlight, of course, as the power, along with the water and telephone, was not working the day I happened to arrive in Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital city.

I wake again around one AM in the dormitory room I’ve rented to find I’m now sharing it with a young man from the UK. An overland traveler making his way from Cape Town to Nairobi, he is sleepless as well, though for more troubling reasons than mine. Shortly after crossing over from Zambia into Malawi, he was traveling by minibus—southern Africa’s most common form of quasi-public transportation—when a bicyclist swerved into the roadway—possibly to avoid one of the many massive potholes dotting the road—and connected with the bus at 110 kilometers per hour.

“I watched him go under the front bumper,” he said, his words coming quickly. “We came to a halt as the windshield was smashed; glass was everywhere. The cyclist looked really bad. Some guys came over and dragged him to the side of the road, and started walking away; he was moaning. I said you’re not just going to leave him there, they said, he’s just waiting to die.”

The traveler flagged down a passing pickup, lifted the injured cyclist into the back and paid their fare to the nearest clinic—some distance away—where he left the man. “But he still wasn’t looking good. I expect he was going to die shortly. Then later I realized my hands were cut up too, from the glass, and here I am covered in his blood. Now I don’t know what I’ll do—maybe I’ve got that awful virus.” His voice slowed, burdened by the immensity of this new concern.

I think of the tragedy of the cyclist’s death, and the way such tragedies rapidly compound in the lives of the desperately poor: how the loss of a provider, of a protector, of hard-earned transportation, of debts incurred for medical treatment that would not save his life, cannot be absorbed by a family already precariously perched on the edge of disaster; how these losses can quickly lead to additional losses of income, harvest, and health.

“You did the right thing,” I say to my companion. I reassure him slightly with the knowledge that HIV has a very low transmission rate for people who are otherwise healthy and well-fed—less than one in a thousand.

“God, I hope so. It was bloody, bloody awful.”

* * *

As Paul Farmer, doctor to Haiti’s impoverished peasants, is fond of saying: Accidents happen—but not every bad thing that happens is an accident. Malawi’s citizens live in the third poorest country on earth. The roads they drive on are potholed beyond belief, the shoulders washed out more often than not. They learn to ride bicycles in village childhoods, where cars are scarce and reduced to slow speeds by thick mud, deep ruts, and the occasional stray goat; when economic necessity or landlessness compels them to the urban centers, their knowledge of roadway safety is limited, the high speeds of some drivers unimaginable. Clinics are few and far between, and though they are theoretically free for the poor, the quality of care is correspondingly low. First aid training is nonexistent, as are the police and emergency services outside of the capital city, and even within the capital, so far as I can tell, there are no working streetlights. In Malawi, I am learning, safety is not a public good supported by the police force or hospitals, but a luxury derived from hired guards, private cars, Western doctors—in short, from money. To recontextualize another saying: safety is no accident.

This story has Biblical echoes, but there is no moral to this kind of tragedy, in part because—as it usually plays out, on hundreds of roads with hundreds of cyclists daily across Africa and around the world—it seems no one in the position to draw a moral conclusion and act upon it is paying attention. The following day I learn that the British Embassy in Lilongwe offers UK citizens free emergency HIV prophylaxes, which block the HI virus from taking hold in the body following exposure. Similar prophylaxes, which would also block HIV transmission from a mother to an unborn or nursing baby, are not widely accessible for African people in Malawi, whose HIV prevalence rate is estimated between 25 and 30 percent. I pass this information on to my fellow traveler shortly before checking out of the youth hostel. He is unimpressed; the accident has already become an afterthought.

* * *

My first night is followed by my first introduction to the expatriate community in Lilongwe: international aid workers ensconced in small compounds where the intrusion of Malawian presence is vigorously kept at bay with generous application of guard dogs and Lysol. The talk is of parties, pedicures, the Packers. The security situation here compares favorably with Kabul, but shopping is nothing like it was in Uganda. They are polite, friendly, and quite generous to me—nice people, on the whole. Someone mentions attending the recent celebration of USAID’s 44th year of service to Malawi. My jaw nearly drops. USAID has been here for fourty-four years already? Then why is no one at this party drinking water from the tap?

* * *

I am not here to purify Lilongwe’s drinking water, fund repair of Malawi’s national highway or develop its police force. I am not even here to work in a school, distribute medications, or teach bicycle safety. I am here to plant gardens. Why on earth do I feel this is an appropriate response to the conditions of daily poverty throughout Malawi, which I am only just coming to know?

Malawi is a lush, beautiful country in the middle of the rainy season. Even in summertime, the weather is remarkably temperate, with a constant breeze and dappled clouds relieving the bright sunlight. Nearly any plant from the great span of the tropics grows prolifically here, along with many from cooler climates, and the main limiting growth factor—lack of water in the dry season—seems rather less daunting when one considers that the country’s dominant geographic feature is a 400 mile-long lake. Yet Malawians suffer from food insecurity, hunger, undernutrition, and stunted growth in stunningly high numbers—for the last twenty years, growth stunting caused by severe childhood undernutrition has held steady at around 50 percent of the population.

Malawi’s natural resources include a tremendous wealth of indigenous food and medicinal plants, both domesticated and wild, all of which are well adapted to the varying environmental conditions throughout the country. There are also many introduced food plants from similar bioregions that thrive in Malawi and have become integrated with ecosystems here through centuries of adaptation. But the diverse natural riches of edible Malawian flora have been dramatically reduced in the last century, and with them, the strength and health of the Malawian people. The last nationwide nutritional survey found evidence that overall nutrition and healthy growth of people in Malawi has gone down significantly from where it was forty years ago, when a succession of revolutions began in Malawi: industrial, political, economical. Today’s Malawi, however, is deep in the throes of the Green Revolution, covered in field after field of cornrows—and the health of its people and its environment are suffering the consequences of these policies.

Anyone from Pennyslvania, where I come from, can tell you corn is a fussy crop. Too little rain and it won’t produce; too much and it rots. If planted alone, corn quickly uses up the soil’s store of nitrogen, leading to declining harvests each year—even after adding expensive and potentially dangerous chemical fertilizers. These characteristics make it a challenging crop even in environments that have reliable rainfall and deep stores of nitrogen, as in the central American ecosystems where corn was first domesticated. As it happens, Malawi, along with most of southern Africa, has neither.

Nutritionally, corn contributes simple sugars to the body—and little else. No single food can provide all the necessary nutrients to the human body, and corn on its own provides very little to support and sustain healthy development. Unlike true grains such as wheat, rice, or the native African sorghum and millet, corn does not contain high levels of B-vitamins and protein. These elements, along with Vitamins A, C, and E, and the micronutrients selenium, iron, and zinc, are particularly important in maintaining the immune system and guarding one’s body against infection, including infection from HIV and related illnesses. Though corn is not a good supply of these nutrients, there are many hundreds of indigenous foods in Malawi and throughout southern Africa that are, most of which are also much easier on both the laborer and the soil!

The World Health Organization now recognizes that enhanced nutrition, through access to a greater variety of foods, higher quality foods, and foods that support the specific nutritional needs of people infected with HIV, can extend the lives of people living with the virus and help prevent infection in the first place. Since most of the 2 million or so people living with HIV or AIDS in Malawi are still financially barred from receiving drug therapy, nutritional interventions can help to prolong and improve people’s lives even as we continue to fight for lowering of drug costs and equal access to full treatment for all people in need.

By promoting access to healthy, nutritious food, Malawi’s people and environment become more resilient, more self-sufficient, more independent. With any luck, we will be able to extend and enhance the lives of people infected with the HI virus so they can eventually access the medical treatment they need, while also improving some of the conditions that have led to the high rate of AIDS and other infectious diseases in tropical Africa in the first place. I believe these to be worthy goals. The geographer in me is comforted by the thought that it’s pretty hard to make economically, culturally, or ecologically disastrous mistakes by planting indigenous crops.

* * *

As a privileged person from a privileged culture, I recognize that I have to be cautious about what I do and say. I am accustomed to hearing, and often respecting, voices of authority. I am accustomed to using my voice with authority. I am accustomed to having my voice of authority be heard and respected.

I am now living in a culture where people know the voice of authority only as a hand around their neck.

This is painfully obvious as I talk with Malawian neighbors. I make a statement and they are so quick to agree I feel like I shouted an insult. Thus the delay in this first update. I waited, edited, re-edited this essay in an effort to be fair and honest, to avoid only seeing what I want and expect to see. For now, at least, I’m comfortable with my remaining dissastisfactions.

As far as I can tell, an honest, self-critical commitment to reality and its attendant contradictions is a prerequisite for being a good person, even more so for a person doing development-related work in an unfamiliar culture. I am currently struggling to cultivate this quality in myself. I imagine I’ll probably get back to the moral condemnations eventually, but for now I’m trying to content myself with Stephanie Boone’s advice, that learning is about developing an appetite for confusion.

Confusion it is.

From Malawi, best wishes.

Katie