I just wanted to write a quick note to say Happy New Year and to express what a wonderful time I had visiting all my friends and family in Canada.
I got alot of questions while i was back home regarding water and sanitation and I got in trouble for not writing enough… so I thought I would attached a link to an article that I wrote awhile back for the Canadian Water Network http://www.cwn-rce.ca/index.php?fa=Media.EWB4.
I hope you all have a healthy, happy and inspired 2008.
Brett
There are two big questions that I get when I talk to my friends and family:
“What is it like?”
and
“What are you doing anyway?”.
I want to focus on the first question for this time because I feel like my last blog post was misleading and entirely unrepresentative of my time here and of where my heart, mind and soul are really at. One of the things I find difficult here is that I want to reach out to my friends when I am sad and lonely but when I am happy and cruising, it doesn’t seem like such a necessity. I realize this is a terrible habit to get into…so its going to stop …………..right……about….now!
So what is my world? I think most of you read my first blog post about my home in Chilomoni which was written right after I first got here. I am still in love with my home and my life there. I have however started a second home in another district because of my work demands…I’ll get to that later though…
Chilomoni is a beautiful, beautiful place. A small township on the outskirts of the commercial center of Blantyre; it is real, it is natural, it is simple. It is nestled in the mountains and has a village feel despite its proximity to the city. It is a vibrant place full of activity. There are bars pumping music throughout the township 24 hours a day. Kids running around playing with toys made from random objects like old tires, wire, bags, plants…Always people moving up and down and every which way. There is a busy market, with local vegetables, food and miscellaneous items from all corners of Malawi. I love the local nature of everything and how easy it is to trace everything you eat back to its source. The market is also a place where the disparities of my Canadian and Malawian worlds are accentuated. Where women make a living selling packages of peanuts for 5 Kwacha a bag (there is 140 Kwacha to 1 Canadian dollar right now…you can do the math).
The houses in Chilomoni are simple, not more than anyone needs. The roads are dirt, warm and welcoming. Women wear brightly pattern pieces of cloth called “chitenges” (like a sarong), and walk barefoot with babies on their backs. Men cut the grass with big “panga” knives, women draw water from the communal water taps and carry it to their homes on their heads. Which actually when you think about is a pretty efficient way to carry a heavy load like that. Sometimes, however, I see people carrying really strange things on their heads too though, like a bar of soap or a pen or even a back pack. And sometimes I swear they are defying physics with what they can carry, like garbage bags from home full of tomatoes??? Its impressive.
Lovely Emma modelling a chitenge
Lovely Emma modeling the head carrying technique with her suitcase
As the only “mzungu” (white person) in the town, I naturally get a lot of attention and people always stop what they are doing when I come by. If I don’t verbally greet people, I make sure I acknowledge them with a nodding upwards of the head (not downwards….that was counter-intuitive for awhile…) and the lifting of my eyebrows. I am always careful to ration my smiles and delay until I greet a person so that I can make sure everyone gets their own. The kids from the neighborhood after seven months still get a real kick out of the mzungu visitor. They jump up and down, laugh and scream out “OW r YU?” repeatedly even after I have answered them 3 times each.
“HOW DID YOU GET A MZUNGU?, “I WANT A MZUNGU!” is something my host parents, Mr. and Mrs Soko often hear from their friend’s and family who are jealous of their visitor. From their perspective, I appeared out of thin air. Mr. Soko is fond of simplifying it down to “God’s will” that brought me here. This makes me laugh because my mind pictures the stork from the old fables that delivers babies to deserving parents.
The Sokos are lovely, lovely, lovely. They support me, laugh with me, dance with me. Try, the 10 year old daughter and I will often just lay on my bed, chat, listen to music, draw. Chizzy the 4 year old from next door likes to run around in her new earmuffs (yes, I said earmuffs) that came out of a second hand clothing bundle from Canada. Most of all I love the fact that we can just “be” together. I have found it difficult in the last few months because I have been traveling so much and I am not around very much. The Sokos appreciate the time that I can give them and I try to reciprocate by making that time my very best. Somehow I get stuck in this mental rut that friendships need time. But now I realize they really need thought and quality energy more than anything. Making sure people know how you feel when you are with them.
Chizzy Sporting her earmuffs
Try also sporting the earmuffs
Mrs Soko
Mr Soko
I recently moved to a village in a mountainous District called Dedza. The move was the result of an impulsive decision one day, as I was sitting in a hotel motivated partially by work necessity and partially by a need for me to get out of the city. I had been spending increasingly more time sitting in impersonal hotel rooms and less time with my family in Chilomoni. I went for a run into the mountains the next morning. I stopped and chatted with a lady on the road and in typical Malawian style, I had me a new place within an hour.
So I have my own little house all to myself in the middle of a village. The walls are made of earth, the floors of concrete. I basically have a living room and a bedroom. The landlady is the sweetest thing. I came home after a few days away and she gave me a running hug. it was pretty adorable. She tells me to consider her my mother, except she is 26 just like me.
My house is on the main road of the village but I have hedges surrounding it giving me a false semblance of privacy, since people can actually see in better from the outside than I can see them. I have a spacious back yard full of maize crops which looks out on to the mountains. There is no electricity, and alot of darkness… During the day, I sit on my back step and marvel at the beauty of the mountains and at night, I sit on my back step and marvel at the beauty of the sky. its all very romantic really.
My village is about a 30-40 minute walk from work, along a dusty dirt road that takes me into the mountains. I like the walk, it gets me outside in the sun, following the footprints made by bare feet of those who traveled along before me.
I counted on my way home the other day….I greeted 42 people and waved at least another two dozen. Greetings in a village setting are more formal than in Chilomoni and are fairly lengthy. They consist of the following:
Person 1: Mwa Sewera Bwanji?
Person 2: Nda Sewera Bwino. Kaya Inu?
Person 1: Nda Sewera Bwino. Zikomo/
Person 2: Zikomo Kwambiri.
These words are accompanied by a small curtsy and a clapping of the hands. Originally this was a source of stress for me, having to go through the whole ritual with each person individually. You can imagine how time consuming it is when a whole pack of Malawian women are coming my way, the 30 minute walk to work was easily turning into an hour as I stood there curtseying and clapping my hands. I am becoming more efficient though thanks to my good friend Danny here, the keeper of all useful knowledge, (another EWB volunteer) who told me how to greet multiple people at once and my commute is now back down to half an hour.
Living in the village has been excellent for learning the local language, Chichewa.
It is an easy language to learn to be bad at but I feel like it would take me a lifetime to become eloquent. There are over 6 classes of nouns, that each get treated differently. And the funnest part is that there isn’t really any hard and fast rules on what nouns go into what class. Native speakers just “know” what to do, I however, don’t, and am left to making it a guessing game. Chichewa is also a very implicit language, with the way people are saying things often being more important than the words they are using. This is partially because the language can be vague and open to interpretation with multiple-use words. For example, they have the same verb for sit, stand and stay and one for buy, tie and make. Confusing? Yes, indeed it is.
They also use a lot of English words but they “chichewasize” them and spell them according to their own vernacular tendencies. I find this to be an endless source of surprise and amusement when I am trying to read documents. Here, we’ll do a quiz and see if you can guess what words these are:
1. Puresidente.
2. Buledi
3. Fokolo
4. lipoti
5. Bletti
Give up?… Try President, Bread, Fork (?), report and you guessed it Brett). In fact in most of my Malawian circles, my name has officially changed to Betty because Bletti just didn’t seem that attractive or feminine…not that Brett ever was either.
So now that I am in the village, life consists of me waking up really early in the morning ~5. When you don’t have electricity, your life becomes ruled by the sun. I am now one of those women sporting a colorful chitenge and carrying water on my head from the communal tap. I light my charcoal stove, to heat water for a bath (and for coffee…mmm…). I have not kicked my love for coffee since I have come here. In fact, I think it may have deepened. Malawian coffee is fantastic. Though I find it hilarious because none of the locals drink it. They prefer instant coffee from South Africa…I haven’t really figured that one out yet.
Though my skill set is limited, I am learning some rudimentary techniques in Malawian cookery. I don’t think anyone other than me would ever want to eat what I create however. I am reveling in it because I have finally escaped the fat laden, meat driven meals that are common place at the Sokos. Here I can get back to my base nature of being a vegetarian.
Learning to Cook…
I have also gone through a few hair experiments since I have come here. I don’t know if you guys know this…it was news to me… but African women and all their fancy hair- dos…its not real! They have these wig deals that they sew into their hair. For fun, I tried one out one time. I looked pretty ridiculous but it was a lot of fun and made the people at work roar with laughter, so it was well worth it. I also learned through the experience that I like my hair dark…so when I took the extensions out I decided to go brown, which is new, fun and exciting or at least it was two months ago when I did it. Now its strangely normal.
The hair evolution
This ended up being a really long entry but I think it covers a lot of ground. I really really really want to start sharing my work experiences with you guys as well. I find it all very inspiring and very fun and I think that most of my close friends (and others) would be really interested. So… that will be what the next blog is focused on and hopefully it will be quite soon.
Well thanks for reading, you are probably a real close friend if you managed to make it this far through this epic novel. To all my friends and family at home, thank you, thank you, thank you for all of your love and support. It is very difficult to be so far away when all kinds of exciting and important things are happening at home. I think of you every day and wish I was there during your big life events. I want to acknowledge that I am especially sad to have missed the following key key happenings:
the spreading of Grandpa’s ashes.
Vic, Curtis and Casey’s babies (they are BEAUTIFUL)
My dear friend Janini’s wedding (this coming weekend!!!!!!!!)
Steve and Jenny’s wedding (Congratulations!)
Candice’s engagement
Thanks guys.
Me
I wake up in the dead of the night to the ringing of my cell phone. When I put the phone to my ear, I hear “Brett, the counter-offer is in”. The drowsiness of sleep suddenly vanishes and I feel a flash of anticipation through my body. However, as the terms of the new offer are explained to me, the excitement dissipates and my heart drops to the floor. It is not enough, not nearly enough. I lay in bed, with my mind cycling through my various options and pondering the sequence of events that led me to this point.
You see my house in Newfoundland has been up for sale since October and the going has been pretty tough. We bought it just over a year ago now and the market has seen considerable decline since. I’m not particularly keen on getting into the details of my finances on such a public forum as the world WIDE web…but losses borne on the sale of the house will amount in the tens of thousands dollars and a good part of my life savings. When I was working as an engineer in the oil industry such a loss would have seemed manageable. But now this loss is compounded with the financial insecurity offered by my current “volunteer” position and unknown career path, and to be honest it scares the shit out of me.
After several minutes of mental hyperactivity, I decide there is no more sleeping for today and get out of bed. Its 3:30 AM, not really that far off from my usual 5AM wakeup. I go into the kitchen, pull out the small charcoal stove that we use to do all of our cooking and light a fire. This morning just like almost every other morning, the tap spurts and gurgles as the pipes have run dry. Thankfully, we keep storage drums in the kitchen for just such an occasion. I scoop some water out and transfer it to the pail that is on the charcoal stove.
“Should we take the offer?” I ask myself as I sit by the stove. My mind races as it calculates my future. “What if I want to go back to school?”, “What if I can’t find a job when I return to Canada?”. I put my hand in the water and it feels hot to the touch. I carry the pail to the bathing room, pour the water in the bathing bucket and just as I take off my clothes…the lights cut.
I have become used to this, as the power has been on and off (mostly off…) for the last 3 days. But today given my circumstances, it seems more difficult. I stand there, in absolute darkness, naked and discouraged. I lift my hand to touch the nearest wall and feel my way around to the corner where the matches and candle are kept (once again for just such an occasion). I laughingly call my self the “super-adaptor” because my selective observation skills and continuous flexibility make it easy for me to transition into new lifestyles without really being phased. This has been very useful in past travels as it allows me to implicitly accept the nature of things without continuously comparing them to what I already know.
But this time, as I light the candle, I am filled with a sense of wonder as I see my physical space and my life in a new light. Suddenly I focus on the cracks in the bare concrete walls and the unevenness of the bare concrete floor and it strikes me for almost the first time how different my surroundings are to a bathroom back home. I am amazed by the pure functionality of it, no decorations or paint on the walls, no soft bath mats to dry your feet, no mirror to check your hair.
I think back to a recent visit to the rural areas where I was sitting in a group of villagers. All of a sudden, the music started. My toe was tapping, my head was bobbing and…. I couldn’t help myself, I had to get up and dance. The women of the village start to sing. I sighed with contentment as my soul moved with the joyful rhythm and powerful African voices. It was a truly amazing experience.
Underneath the beauty of the music however the women were actually singing to educate their peers about important hygienic messages. These women were smiling and laughing, singing about how they now have a washroom and clean water to drink… All of a sudden it dawned on me to try and equate this to my past experiences. I tried to envision my own mother or my friends singing about washing their hands as if it were a wonderful gift. At home, these are considered part of the norm, things we are entitled too.
I live in parallel worlds and my day to day thoughts, life and love are invested in my Malawian reality. This is the world where the electricity goes out and the water runs dry almost every day… and we are always prepared because it is just a fact of life. This is a world where I make $11/day which by my Canadian standards would be nothing. Yet in this world, I pay $35/month in rent and I sleep in the same house with someone who makes $11/month.
my kitchen in newfoundland and my kitchen in Malawi
My bathroom in Canada and in Malawi
My house in Canada, my house in Malawi
My living room in Canada and in Malawi
So on a day like this when my Canadian world crashes into my Malawian one, I can’t help but feel the absurdity of life. The money I am risking to lose on my house, it is more money than my Malawian family can dream about… and they are by no means hurting by Malawian standards. I read in a Concern Universal report that 50% of Malawians are living below the poverty line of $0.11/day. Can you imagine what 1% of the amount of my losses would do a for rural Malawian?
To say that “this is just the way life is”, that’s unfair and it’s not good enough. I surround myself with these people everyday and am continuously amazed at their generosity and warmth. In the essence of life, these people are no different than my friends and family at home. How can I separate myself from them and say that I deserve this money and they don’t? So this morning as I stand in the middle of the candle lit bathing room, looking around once again at the cracks in the walls and the uneven concrete floor, I feel ashamed.
It has been 2 months since I first came to Malawi. Time passes so fast and my life here has become so familiar to me. Every once in awhile, while I am walking down the street on my way to or from work…letting my mind wander wherever it likes… I catch myself smiling unintentionally. This is when I realize how happy I am here.
Still there are times when I start to get a glimpse of what poverty really means and the understanding of what I am here for sinks deep into my being. I become burdened with sadness and question everything I know. Yet often as my eyes fill up with tears, I step back a little and a smile also starts to creep across my face. I realize that this is the start of my real, tangible and emotional connection with poverty. When it comes right down to the core; that is why I am Africa; to learn how to really care.
I made it out of St. John’s just in time. The day after my departure on January 20th, the snow started falling like rain and according to my fellow Newfoundlanders it really hasn’t stopped much since. I am visioning in my head the familiar 10 foot snow piles covering every sidewalk and driveway. At any other point in my life, I would have shuddered at this image, however as I sit cooking in the heat of the Malawian sun, I feel that its possible that I could actually start missing it.
The Engineers without Borders crash course in international development officially ended March 7th. Six weeks of intensive development training including a myriad of subjects ranging from culture, gender, rural livelihoods to agriculture. During training, I met the 8 other volunteers that are also undertaking year-long placements in Africa ( for a pic of us all check out www.ewb.ca). Because my education background involved mostly engineering and technical industry courses this training was like a breath of fresh air. Clean beautiful air that filled me with a new understanding of the world we live in and expanding my own borders to include the complex, wonderful continent of Africa.
Africa at First Glance
Before I had started training, I am embarassed to admit how undefined and fuzzy my understanding of Africa was. Though I had never been to Africa before, many of the 8 other volunteers had. Because of this much of the training was enriched with the personal experiences of my fellow volunteers especially from those who had done previous placements with EWB in Ghana.
After training and living vicariously through my fellow volunteers that had been to West Africa I began to develop a vision in my head of what Africa could look like. It included people dressed in bright flashy clothing, smiling warmly, laughing, singing, dancing. I expected to be engulfed in dirt from the roads and to be overwhelmed by the chaotic self-organization of the city. My taste buds were craving all of the plentiful and delicious street food. Thus I learned experientially that though we often talk about Africa as if it were one big uniform country, the reality couldn’t be farther from the truth.
The People of Malawi.
Oh the people. They are definitely not the loud boisterous beings that I expected but more reserved and quieter creatures. No one cat calls and yells out “White person!!!!” like they do in the streets of Ghana. In fact, there is a barrier of hesitancy as the Malawians approach you with a shy, cautious smile.
This barrier however is not hard to break. If you look Malawians in the eye and smile, their faces light up with grins and they become your friends for life.
If I had to describe Malawians with one word, I would say “warmth”. In Canada, if you asked a stranger for directions, a person would most likely point you in the right path and if you are really lucky draw you a map. In Malawi, when I ask someone on the street for directions, 9 times out of 10 that person will take me full circle. They will drop whatever they are doing, grab me by the hand, escort me to where I am going and assist me with any transactions or business I may have in that place. They will then ask me for my phone number and invite me to visit their home.
Needless to say, building a social network in Malawi is not hard. Friends are to be found everywhere, the minibus….the street corner….the store…..and any other venue you can think of.
The Place
I am now in Blantyre, the commercial center of Malawi and the place that I will most likely be staying for the next year. It is nestled beautifully in the mountains and is miles away from my expectations. The roads are smoothly paved and men in suits are walking down the street. The buildings are modern, not necessarily sky scrapers but 4 story flashy glass buildings. The traffic is well controlled by traffic circles and street lights. There is manicured lawns, flower beds and big gated homes everywhere with large yards.
I was really taken aback at first by Blantyre and felt somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of living here. This was not the real Malawi that 90% of its citizen experience on a daily basis as Malawi has one of the lowest Human Development Indexes in the world. I knew that what I was seeing was atypical hotspot of concentrated wealth. It made me feel over-priviledged and unsettled knowing that I would be spending my time in such a comfortable place where I could access all of these amenities when so few others could.
I was relieved when I found Chilomoni, which is a high-density township on the outskirts of Blantyre. I fell in love with its small town community feel with kids running around and playing in the streets. I felt a smile creep across my face as I stood on the rutted dirt roads full of people walking to and from the market with live chickens in their hands.
The people who live in Chilomoni have diverse ways of earning their livelihoods. A few commute into Blantyre on the packed minibuses (and I mean packed) that spew out gusts of black smoke. They are the lucky few that have found work with the government, non-governmental organizations or businesses in town. Others travel to their farms outside of the city and grow maize (corn). Many however, I have been told, do not have work at all and struggle to make ends meet. Running water and electricity are commodities found in only some of the homes. There is a watering hole where many line up every morning to fetch water from a mystery pipe from which no one even knows the source of the water.
My New Home.
Meet Thomas.
Thomas is the first person I met in Chilomoni. He was the first person I met in Chilomoni. After meeting in a chance encounter, he invited me to his home, introduced me to his family and prepared lunch for me. He proceeded to introduce me to half of the town (many of which he is related to), took me through the market and showed me his church.
Thomas is a retired accountant who has lived in Chilemoni his entire life. His family of seven lives in a 2 bedroom home. I am now living with the Sokos, a family who is renting the extra house on Thomas’s property. Mr. Soko works for the Malawian Revenue Agency and Mrs. Soko is a teacher at a local school.The picture on the left is of me and the Soko’s only child, a 10 year old girl named Tryness. The picture on the right is of Chisomo (Grace), Thomas’s 3 year old grandaughter. Both girls are nothing short of precious.
Much to my surprise and pleasure, Thomas’s family also has a cat. For those of you who know me well, I think you will understand how excited I was to make this discovery. The family thought I was very strange when I asked what their pet’s name was because apparently they don’t name pets here. Therefore, I came up with the insipid and unoriginal name of “Stripes”. See Stripes below:
Our house is simple, sweet and welcoming. I have been living here just under two weeks and already feel at home. Concrete floors and walls span the whole house and it is capped by a corrugated metal roof. I love it when it rains because the water echoes off of the metal and it sounds like the whole heavens are coming down. I sleep under the halo of my mosquito net and wake up to Gospel music on the TV. I am living in relative luxury in the home of the Sokos. They have running water, electricity and there is four of us in a 3 bedroom house.
The Sokos use their television for only two things. Mr. Soko will sit and watch gospel music videos for hours. These videos have an infectious beat (which I am fond of dancing to) and Africans bobbing around on the screen.
The second thing that the Sokos use their TV for (which I find incredibly interesting) is the presidential ceremonies. Every time the president of Malawi travels to a different part of the country, a massive ceremony is held to greet him. The people dress in cloth bearing the president’s portrait and they dance, sing and cheer for him. Since I moved to the house a week and a half ago, there has been no less than FOUR of these ceremonies. Mr. Soko will spend his entire Sunday afternoon watching the ceremony.
The Sokos tell me on a daily basis how surprised and over-joyed they are to have a visitor from Canada. They tell me that it is god’s plan that I unexpectedly showed up on their doorstep and consider me to be part of the family. I am an oddity in Chilomoni, there is no doubt about that. I have still not seen another white person in the area yet. There are all kinds of curious visitors gracing our steps. On occasion, I meet young children that have never seen the likes of someone like me and it causes them to cry. This is a little disheartening and I hope in time they will become accustomed to my presence. Tryness and her friends make up for this discomfort however by providing an onslaught of hugs every time I return home.
Let’s all laugh at the Muzungu
Though I believe my mother did an excellent job raising me (Thanks mom!), I do feel that there was a distinct gap in the domestic skills department. My experiences in Malawi have been especially good at highlighting this. After Malawian women are done cleaning and cooking they proceed to clean and cook some more followed most likely by cleaning and cooking. The first few times I mopped the front walkway of the house, I drew a pretty big crowd both because of the unusualness of the event and because of my ineptitude for mopping.
The national dish here is called nsima which is a dough like porridge that is made from maize. It is usually served with a vegetable which they call relish and some sort of meat. Yesterday, I was given the task of cutting pumpkin leaves (similar in shape to romaine lettuce) into small pieces with only a knife and no cutting board…I was completely perplexed. Mrs. Soko had a good laugh at me. She laughed even harder however when she decided that I was going to help her make chicken.
The “In-Canada” Brett is pretty well a vegetarian and has a retardedly strong fear of eating animal fat. I also until yesterday, still lived in a fantasy world where meat came in pre-wrapped packages allowing me to dissociate my food from live beings.
The journey outside of my comfort zone started when I had to carry a live, breathing chicken home from the market from its feet. I was even more out of my comfort zone when I held the bird as Mrs. Soko cut-off its head. I then proceeded to be even more uncomfortable when I had to cut it into pieces and cook every single part of the bird (everything but the stomach). I ended by tiptoeing dangerously close to my anxiety danger zone when I was required to eat miscellaneous chicken parts deep-fried in its own fat for dinner. I am particularly excited because apparently this tasty little bird will last us another two full meals.
My name is Brett Stevenson and I am a 26 year-old chemical engineer. I was born and raised in the Yukon, lived in Calgary for several years and recently moved to St. John’s, Newfoundland. I like to say that I am a child of Canada as I am hesitant to call any specific part of Canada my home. This blog will chronicle my 13-month placement in Malawi volunteering for Engineers Without Borders Canada. Starting March 2007, I will be embarking on a new partnership with a large international non-governmental organization called Concern Universal (CU). Feel free to check out their website at www.concern-universal.org.
This blog is my life-line to Canada and my main means of staying connected to all of my friends and family. I hope that you will be interested in sharing my learnings and growing with me as I experience life in Malawi. This will be a space for me to discuss culture, development and the world as I see it.
The last thing that I want this blog to put forth is a “World Vision”-esque vibe pulling at your heart strings with pity-seeking pictures of poor Africans. My goal is to show you both the truth and balance of their lives as I best as I can see it. I want to open my blog as a forum for exploring the reasons for global disparity and to help celebrate the humanity that exists inside all borders. Feel free to post replies or email me anything you wish. Discussions are most welcome. To start things off, I invite you to visit the site http://www.gapminder.org/downloads/presentations/human-development-trends-2005.html.
Concern Universal focuses on empowering local people to create opportunities for choice and a way forward in which communities collectively express their priorities in development. My role will be within CU’s water and environmental sanitation department. This department implements projects that enable communities to gain access to clean water and promotes sanitation and hygiene. The desired impact of these projects is to decrease the incidences of water related diseases in rural areas.
According to Concern Universal, Malawi is the11th poorest country in the world. 54% of the population lives below the national poverty line of US$0.11/day. Based on the Water Poverty Index (established by the World Water Council in 2002) Malawi is ranked the fifth lowest in the world based on access, recources, capacity, use and environmental impact.
