Miracle Money

This past week I have been in the south of the country, visiting some of our projects and meeting with our partners. First in a place called Blantyre, considered the ‘commercial hub’ of the country, meaning that there are a few more tall buildings and the population more packed together (4 million, compared to Lilongwe’s 6 million, but in a much smaller area); and then Zomba, the former capital of the country. Blantyre was one of the first populated areas, as it was where the British (actually Scottish Presbyterian) missionaries settled in what was then British Central Africa.

It took four hours to drive from Lilongwe, and at one point we were so close to the Mozambique border that I received a text message from that country’s mobile network provider welcoming me to Mozambique! My colleagues pointed out the bullet scarring on buildings – homes and shops – along the border, a reminder of the decades long civil war in Mozambique that is again threatening to erupt. Already there are a few thousand Mozambique refugees who have crossed the border trying to escape the rumbles of war.

There were five of us in the car.  Me, two national staff, my Kenyan boss and a local driver.  

Usually, whenever I am a passenger in a car, especially when driving through beautiful countryside, I find myself staring out the window and zoning out. I think it started back when I was travelling through Indonesia in the 90s, cramped in buses and minibuses with unrelentingly curious people, as a way to get a bit of privacy.  In any case, it still happens now and I often have to remind myself to engage with the people I am travelling with. This journey, however, I didn’t need to remind myself, as a few minutes after we climbed in the car and staked our claim to space, one of my colleagues said: “So, shall I tell you the story about the miracle money?”

And who could resist such a telling?!

It happens that the colleague telling the story, D., who holds a senior position in the organization, is a member of the Enlightened Christian Gathering Church. This in itself is not remarkable, as all Malawians are regular and dedicated church-goers. Several of my colleagues are even ordained pastors. However, this particular church is infamous due to its charismatic but quite controversial leader, Shepherd Bushiri.

Bushiri is in his 30s, always smartly dressed in well tailored suits, and is fabulously wealthy. He owns three private jets, mineral mines in South Africa and even an oil well in Saudi Arabia. Recently, he lent money to the country of South Sudan and was feted by that country’s foreign minister, at the same time as he was decried as a ‘false prophet’ by South Sudan’s influential Council of Bishops. 

The man also claims to perform miracles. He can create photo images just by thinking about them (I wasn’t quite sure how this worked, but apparently he did it on TV so it must be true) and he can also conjure up the ‘miracle money’ my colleague was talking about. For the last couple of years, Bushiri has been inviting his congregation to pray and ask for money (there’s even a youtube video). And lo and behold, some of them are receiving varying cash deposits in their bank accounts. One woman, D tells us, bought a car, and was paying it off in installments. But every month, the installment failed to be debited from her account. Finally, she contacted the car dealership, and they said they had no knowledge of her buying a car from them, so there was no payment to be collected. A miracle, D says. 

I am quietly sceptical. Not everyone who asks gets the money, and even though D had been joining his brethren in praying for money every Sunday, he hadn't received the much talked about cash deposit. Until that morning. On his way to work, D says, he stopped at an ATM to check his balance, and there it was, 250,000 kwacha, which is about 250 GBP and quite a bit of money here. 

I asked him what his statement said, as surely that would indicate who deposited the money. But he claimed the money had been deposited by angels. Have you ever given money to the church through your bank account, I ask, leaving the obvious conclusion hanging there. He leaves it hanging.  It is not my place as an atheist westerner to really question his belief, so I am thankful when everyone else in the car does. The driver, the least educated out of all of us, calls Bushiri a scam artist who is clearly laundering money for criminals. Another colleague tells how his cousin had given up a good job as a lawyer to be part of Bushiri's following, and subsequently plummeted his family into financial ruin.  Another colleague wants to know how Bushiri’s love of money and fiscal prosperity sits with the Bible’s teaching that rich men will find it hard to get into heaven. D quotes Bushiri, who has been criticised for his excessive lifestyle by the Malawian press, that Jesus was not against financial profits, as even he found money in the mouth of a fish, a version of 'miracle money' he says. 

And on they go, quoting lines from the Bible to support their argument for and against Bushiri and his methods. I ask some more colleagues later how they feel about Bushiri, and the oft repeated phrase is ‘false prophet’. Why isn’t he investigated I ask, but it seems that as Church his finances are beyond the government’s remit.  And in the end, he will be exposed as either a man of god or a wolf in sheep’s clothing (another Bible scripture), I am told, even if that end is when he stands before God.

I find this ‘everything is in God’s hands’ attitude a little frustrating, and rather ironically, reminiscent of the wonderful and equally frustrating Arabic phrase “Inshallaah” (God willing) which basically absolves everyone from ever taking responsibility or ever being pro-active about change.  

So, in the meantime while we wait for the final adjudicator’s decision, Bushiri goes on drawing thousands to his church with the hope that they too will be recipients of Miracle Money. D offers to take me to his church so I can also have the opportunity to pray for miracle money. I smile, I'll just wait until payday, I say.

One week in

So my highlight of the week: the Lilongwe Wildlife Centre, where I went on an hour-long tour of the sanctuary here in Malawi’s capital. The centre was set up in 2007 to rescue and rehabilitate abused and orphaned animals. Some animals were rescued from zoos or circuses in other countries, such as the two lions – Bella (from a zoo in Romania) and Simba (from a circus in France) while others are indigenous to Malawi or the continent - victims of the illegal trade in exotic pets, or fearful villagers (a spotted owl was stoned by villagers who believed it was linked to witchcraft). As well as the lions, a serval cat, a 4-metre long python and scores of monkeys, baboons and antelope are housed in the sanctuary’s 180 hectares of shady woodland, and while most of them were sleeping during my tour, a few of the primates did come out to have a look at the humans watching them.

The Malawian vervet monkeys will, eventually, be released back into the wild – in large groups only so that they are able to defend their territory – but the international ones will have to remain in captivity, as they would never be accepted by the local tribes. They wouldn’t survive anyway, our guide tells us, as most are either disabled in some way – their tails are often cut in zoos to prevent them escaping - or they have never developed skills to survive in the wild. They are kept inside large enclosures protected by electric fencing, which for the most part stops the rescued monkeys from getting out before they are ready (some don’t know how to climb), but it does not prevent the locals getting in. We watched one such interloper sit in the bush just on the other side of the fence munching on a stolen ear of corn, while a rescuee from inside the fence sat and watched him. I wondered what they communicated to each other (you can just see him to the left).

A strange coincidence that day, a woman I met while on safari in Zambia a few years ago now works at the wildlife centre, and as I was on my tour, she strolled by. I think she was more struck by seeing me than I her, but we agreed to meet up the following weekend for Burns night and a lounge by the pool.

Lilongwe is sprawling, but quiet, there are few buildings more than a couple of stories high and everywhere is bursting with foliage and drenched in sunlight; cars drive slowly along the single lane roads while cyclists struggle up the red dirt paths alongside them. My temporary accommodation is a small hotel, set in a lush garden with cane chairs on the porch, a pool and omelettes for breakfast. On a run this morning, the only sounds were my feet hitting the tarmac, the occasional snap of a twig as I landed on it, and the birds in the trees. As delightful as all of this sounds, the problem with it feeling so much like a holiday is that I am not on holiday. And so I am having a bit of an internal struggle every morning with getting ready for work, when really what I would like to do is sit on my porch with a coffee and my book and glance from time to time at the trees. 

Luckily I have a driver who picks me up each morning at 7:45, Maxwell, so I do have to be ready. It’s about a 25-minute drive to the office, on the opposite side of town, and Maxwell often likes to play Christmas songs (I like the beat, he tells me). Luckily, this first week has been interspersed with all-staff workshops, which has given my head a break from absorbing project information, but also provided an opportunity to meet a wide range of staff (there are 432 employees of SCI Malawi) and see how they interact with one another. Some take aways from the past few days: they like quoting the Bible during speeches; women love to dress up in bright, tight dresses and four-inch heels and men in suit jackets and occasionally ties (I think they’ve accepted me as an anomaly); they are super competitive, and passionate and creative about the work they do (when everyone was asked to write down their pledge for children for the next year, the head of logistics wrote a poem); and slightly worrying, one of their biggest concerns is the ‘witchhunting’ that goes on in the office.

My project, Keeping Girls In School, has two main components, a cash transfer of £7 a term for girls who remain in school, and a holistic approach to improving the school environment by working with head teachers, female teachers and mothers groups to help them to better understand the challenges girls face, not just in school, but in every day life, and how this impacts on their schooling.

This was brought home when on Thursday at a workshop to launch Save the Children’s new campaign: “Every Last One” (meaning we are going to be focusing on the most marginalised children), a number of school children joined us to talk about their experiences and what they thought was important. Through the use of drawings, they talked about how they were often pulled out of school to fetch water, to look after smaller children (both boys and girls), how they were beaten for being late to school, for being late home, for not accepting a man’s advances.  One small girl, she must have been 10, told a story about how she had been raped by a family friend, who had promised her £0.20 in return. Of course she didn’t really understand what he wanted to do, but she said she felt the family needed the money. These are stories the children chose to tell us. And by no means are they the exception. According to UNICEF, 2 out of 3 children experience violence at home or school. 

I'm off to the south next week to meet with our partners and see the trainings of teachers. Hopefully, I'll be able to meet with some school girls.

Oh, and to end on a high: I found a shop that sells ryvita!