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!