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! 

Returning to the blog …

It's been a long time since I wrote on this blog, over two years now. First it was because I couldn't. BBC rules were so strict about what employees could post on social media, and everything had to be scrutinised by the legal department, that I really didn't see how I could write anything real.

Then the conflict in South Sudan happened. I was evacuated at the end of 2013, but returned to Juba in early 2014. But writing about what had happened; I just didn't know where to start.

I left South Sudan at the end of 2014, and for the past year I have been working in London, at Save the Children UK's head office. It was a very admin-heavy job, but I was able to travel out to Ethiopia quite a lot and work on some fantastic projects and really see change, which just reinforced my belief that I wasn't ready to give up field work just yet. So, as much as I loved living in London, with access to the theatre, my flat in wonderful Greenwich, friends and family, and my sweet cat, I started to look for another overseas job. And that's what I got. A two-year positing with Save the Children in Malawi.

Malawi? you ask? Where's that, or what's going on there? You may do a quick google search and see that it's southern Africa, squeezed on all sides by Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique. You may also see that the biggest news item about Malawi is a corruption case, known locally as "Cashgate", in which 70 government officials have been arrested for embezzling some $32m of donor funds meant for fighting HIV/AIDS.

Other top headlines include accusations that women from neighbouring Mozambique are hustling in on the free 'family planning resources' at clinics meant for Malawian women, and that China is backing Malawi's 'stop wildlife crime' campaign. Heady stuff, but nothing quite like the high octane, parent worrying destinations of Afghanistan and South Sudan.

So, you think, surely she must mean Mali, where terrorists, tragedy and militants fill the headlines.

But, no, it's true, I am going to Malawi, and believe me, this change of course caused a lot of soul searching. I like to be in the thick of things, on the front lines, part of history (once a journalist, always a journalist), so I questioned whether Malawi would satisfy me. But, as a good friend said, maybe, just maybe, if you are not always worrying if you are going to be shot, blown up or evacuated, you might enjoy life a bit more, and even be better at your job. Wise words.

Oh, and did I mention that one third of the country is a natural lake, where you can dive, and that there are lions and elephants and giraffe?!

I'll be working for Save the Children as the Team Leader, or, as the role is called in our quirky development vernacular, the Chief of Party, for a Girls Education project which is called, rather originally, Keeping Girls in School (KGIS). I'm still not sure how we enunciate the acronym ..Kay Gis; Ke Gis; Kay Gee Eye Ess? but I am sure I will find out.

And perhaps, when I am not on safari, or diving, or hiking in the mountains, I may have time for writing. So I thought I would try to relaunch the blog. It may not be as tragic as South Sudan, or as edgy as Afghanistan, but there are animals, and who can resist a photo of a big cat?

An Afghan Refugee

Back in February when I first arrived in Juba, I was contacted on skype by an Afghan woman I used to work with -- we will call her Shakila -- who told me she had recently fled Kabul with her husband as she feared for her life in Afghanistan. She was in Germany, she said, and asked my help. I reached out to everyone I knew and several  friends, and friends of friends and friends of people I didn’t even know, made efforts to help her, providing names and numbers of lawyers, refugee agencies in Germany, and eventually in Sweden where she fled to next. I did the only thing I knew how to do; I wrote letters and I tried to get a story published, in fact the story below. But I was told by one news agency that it wasn’t “a cracking enough read”. Last week Shakila contacted me to say that she had been granted asylum in Sweden. 

Thank you to all who helped. Below is the story that was never printed. 

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Shakila (not her real name) was just a girl, living in Kabul with her family, when the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 1996, but her memories of that time when women were not allowed to work, go to school or leave the house without a male escort are not easily forgotten.   

“I was home all the time, I couldn’t go out because women weren’t allowed to go out. I do not want that again.”

Sixteen years later, at the age of 26, Shakila exemplifies more than a decade of battles between conservative forces within Afghan society and Afghan women’s advocates and their Western allies. She is educated, liberated, married to a man she loves, and was working as a senior finance manager at an NGO in Kabul. But, with the United States and its allies winding down their support in Afghanistan and the Taliban on the verge of a comeback, Shakila’s refusal to relinquish those hard-won freedoms is now putting her life in danger.

“Right from the start, my father wanted me to marry my cousin – his brother’s son – but I refused. I married a doctor,” Shakila says by skype from Sweden, where she is seeking asylum after a months-long harrowing escape that took her through Iran, Turkey and Germany. 

“But my cousin, he threatened me and my husband, and said he will kill us if I don’t marry him.”

Marriage between first cousins is not uncommon in Afghanistan, because in a country beset by decades of inter-communal conflict, marriage is seen as a way to strengthen bonds. Refusals are not taken lightly. Last December, a teenage girl was beheaded in northern Kunduz province, apparently for refusing to marry a first cousin.

Shakila and her husband ignored the threats and then, just over a year ago, Shakila became pregnant. Her father, and her cousin who lives in Logar province, began to press her to give up work, sending text messages warning her to leave her job or be punished. “My parents never liked the fact that I work and provide for myself and the family. But when my parents also began receiving threatening messages (from conservatives), they turned against me.”

Her husband’s family also tried to get her to stay at home. She says she was beaten by her in-laws, conservative Pashtuns who live in Kandahar, the spiritual home of the fundamentalist Taliban. “They would tell me that I was putting their lives in danger because I wouldn’t give up work,” she says.

The abuse was not just over her job. Shakila says her mother-in-law used to beat her to force her to do the housework when she visited Kandahar. “It is a common practice,” she says, when asked if other Afghan woman suffer the same violence from their mother-in-law. According to one recent study, more than 90 percent of Afghan women are beaten on a regular basis, by either their in-laws or their husbands. Most, like Shakila, think it’s a normal practice. “They hurt me a lot,” she says.

At first her husband tried to protect her. “My husband, he fought with his parents when he found out that they hurt me … but later, when we both realized how serious these threats were, even he got scared, and said that we don’t have any other choice but to leave.”

It took them a week to reach Iran, to the west of Afghanistan, where millions of Afghans have fled since the Soviet occupation of the country in 1979. The Iranian government estimates there are about 2.5 million Afghans legally in the country, and another million or so who are there illegally.

Life for Afghan migrants, legal or not, is not easy in Iran. Shakila and her husband stayed seven months, long enough for Shakila to give birth to their son, but they never felt they could relax. Shakila stayed at home while her husband worked as a painter’s assistant. “We thought we could build a life there. But we were afraid, what if they (their families) found us; what if they came and got us? It was too dangerous for us there, so we found a smuggler.”

They paid $25,000 for new passports and visas. The smuggler agreed to take them as far as Turkey and put them on a plane for Germany, where they had friends who would help them. But when it was time to leave, the smuggler insisted it would be safer if Shakila and her husband travelled in separate vehicles. Shakila took her baby boy, climbed into a minivan with another woman and her daughter and waved goodbye to her husband. It was the last time she saw him.

The van crossed from Iran into Turkey, where Shakila waited for her husband to show up. He never did. “The stupid smuggler said he was caught by the police, but I don’t know.  If he can, he will try to find us, because he loves me and his little baby a lot … but I hope he is somewhere safe in Iran and not in Kandahar, because I am afraid they will kill him.”

Shakila and her son remained with the smuggler in Turkey for three months before it was considered safe to fly to Germany, to Munich, where she spent some weeks with friends.  But they warned her that it was too difficult to get asylum in Germany, and that she would have better luck in Sweden.

“I am afraid they (immigration) will say this is a family problem and send me home. I can’t go home, they will kill me.”

Shakila’s story reflects a growing fear among women in Afghanistan that the rights they have struggled so hard for are now being traded away by their government and Western allies as a way to negotiate peace with the Taliban. In a 2011 survey, the NGO AactionAid found that 86 percent of the 1,000 Afghan women polled were worried that a Taliban-style government could return. 

After more than a decade of state and peace building by the international community, Afghanistan still has the world’s highest number of asylum seekers. In 2011, 35,700 Afghans claimed asylum in 44 industrialised nations, an increase of 34 percent on 2010, according to the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency. Sweden saw a 74 percent increase in Afghan asylum seekers in 2011, from 2,400 to 4,100. No hard statistics are available about what percentage of them are women, or specifically unaccompanied women.

The IOM, the UN’s migration arm, uses statistics from the UN’s Population Fund that show women make up 43.6 per cent of Afghan migrants, but that figure hasn’t changed since the 1990s. The UNHCR says it has no data on the sex of Afghan migrants, though it recognises that Afghan women are at risk if they are divorced or widowed.

Last year, the UNHCR flew 15 Afghan women – three widows and 12 female heads of household – and their children from Iran to a resettlement centre in Slovakia. The UNHCR said their situation as widows or divorcees meant they would be at further risk of abuse or exploitation if they were to return to Afghanistan.

While there may be no statistics about the number of women fleeing Afghanistan, there are many stories and anecdotes. Najia Haneefi, whose flight to Canada was the subject of a documentary some years ago, says she has several friends, parliamentarians and activists, who have left Afghanistan in the past three years because their lives were in danger. They now live in “troubled conditions” in India, waiting for their applications to be processed, she says.

Lauryn Oates, project director at Canadian Women for Afghan Women, a Toronto-based NGO, says embassies in Kabul are seeing a “spike” in the number of women applying for asylum compared with five years ago.

She says many Afghan women are preparing for an exit based on a “perception of what is to come. Some try to get invited on scholarships or to training opportunities overseas, and seek out family members who can sponsor them if it comes to that.”

Paradoxically, it is the same women who have pushed women’s rights onto the agenda who are now trying to leave the country, she says.  “Educated women have more to lose with a regime change,” -- but these are just the women who are needed in Afghanistan to ensure that women have a voice in future discussions with the Taliban.

Women have indeed made huge strides since the fall of the Taliban: women’s rights to work and education are now enshrined in the constitution, some three million girls are in school, and women have key roles in government; 27 percent of parliamentarians are women.

But many of these gains have been the result of pressure by the West and of aid tied to women’s inclusion, and are still not accepted practice by much of the country. While three million girls are indeed in school, another three million are not, and female parliamentarians report continued harassment and death threats.

Three weeks after her first message, Shakila confessed her sense of desperation. She said she was worried she could not provide the type of "strong documentation" her immigration lawyer said was needed to prove her life really was in danger in Afghanistan. “I am really afraid and scared about what will happen," she wrote. "I can't stay here illegally, it is a big risk."  

But a few days later, her son fell very ill and she was forced to come out of hiding and approach immigration so that she could get him to a hospital. In a final message, written hastily on a computer after she had registered her case formally, she said had no idea what would happen next. However, she did not regret taking the risk. “I just couldn’t jeopardise my baby’s future.”