Greetings

Muli Bwanji (the first greeting I have learned in Chichewa)

These past couple of weeks, I’ve been living in a different guesthouse; just 5 minutes drive from the office, and half the price of my old one.  It’s pretty here, and I have the most extraordinary room, with a four poster bed and chaise lounge; balcony that is large enough for me to do yoga on, and which overlooks a trellis of hyacinth; two walk-in cupboards that seem excessive for my eight hangers’ worth of clothes and a bathroom the size of most single rooms.

It’s also got a beautiful courtyard with a towering tree rising up through the middle, and it’s here where I sit in the morning to have my poached eggs and fruit salad, or write this blog; leaves occasionally falling onto my plate, or keyboard, with such force you’d think it was a nut. There is also a pool, although so small that you could probably reach the other side in two strokes, a gym, with rusty and dilapidated equipment and a spa (where it professes to do massage and pedicure, but I have yet to see anyone working there).

What is also different about this hotel is the clientele. Where Ufulu Gardens, or home number 1, as my taxi driver Andrew calls it, was full of families (small children) searching for a home, Madidi (home number 2), where I am staying now, draws a different crowd, mostly travellers pouring over their “Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi” Lonely Planet, as they sup on the local brew, Green Carlsburg (yep, there’s brewery here). They stumble down stairs for breakfast as I’m just about to leave for work, and there’s a tang of envy I can taste, of their freedom. Not that I don’t love what I do, but really, who enjoys going into an office each day? And when surrounded by national parks teeming with wildlife just a few hours away, can you blame me for wanting a bit of freedom to explore?

But overall, work is going well. I now remember about 80% of the names of the 100 plus staff in the Lilongwe office, mostly because I have to greet everyone by name, every time I see them for the first time. So every morning, in the office, it’s “Good, morning Cassie, how are you? Me: I’m good thank you, how are you (Lexon, Prefer, Bester, Felix, Mervis, Masford, Kalako, Angel, Snowden, and my particular favourite .. Elvis)?” Sometimes I forget. The other day, my friend came to pick me up in a taxi we regularly use. As soon as I got in the car, she and I launched into a long discussion about her last day at work. When we had finished, Andrew, the taxi driver says: “Cassie, you haven’t greeted me, yet!”

But it’s the same on the street; men cycling up the narrow paths will call out, “Hello Madam, how are you?”; women selling pineapples by the side of the road will call me over and first ask, “Hello madam, how are you?” before launching into the price negotiation; even the beggar, sitting with twisted legs by the side of the dusty road wants me to first ask how he is before he hits me up for some spare kwacha.  

Cultural sensitivities. They also mean that it’s hard for me to criticise anyone, or point out what they are not doing/should have done, without risking a full on sulk, or refusal to work (if they don’t complain to my boss about me that is). I’ve spoken at length to some expats about it, and it’s a common enough trend. One person who has been here a couple of years, says the best advice she has to offer is that you have to spend a lot of time praising local staff, and then you can add in one negative comment for every four good things you say.

Sheesh. This posting will teach me patience, if nothing else.

Women and the work we do

My week started well.

Monday, I was in the office kitchen making a cup of tea, when in walked, P, who is head of finance. We’ve had a rather tetchy relationship since I started (yes I know, I’ve only been here three weeks!), as one of her staff is supposed to be working 100% on my project, but isn’t, and I have said I will not pay 100% of his salary unless he does (this is a common stand off in our industry). We gave each other a strained smile, and then I glanced at her shoes. ‘Wow P, those look amazing,’ I said. They were about four inches high, black, with a Louboutin-style platform, and studded. ‘They look designer. But how do you walk in them?’ She grinned, and replied. ‘I was thinking the same thing … about your stomach. How is it so flat?’

On Tuesday, I bought a car. Save’s staff drivers poured over it, running the engine while poking about under the bonnet, taking it for a test drive three times, each time with someone else driving. ‘It needs new tyres, alignment and new ball joints,’ they announced. I had the expat woman selling it knock another $500 off the price.

On Wednesday, I looked at houses. As lovely as the hotel where I am staying is, with its pool and leafy green garden, I am getting a little tired of living out of a suitcase. Plus it’s on the other side of town from the office and that 25-minute commute each morning is killing me (will I ever be able to return to London-length commutes?). There are four main property companies here, and I have gone out with all of them except K’s. K is Indian, but has lived in Lilongwe for 25 years. My driver the other day told me that 10 years ago, the Indians used to run all the small shops, but now it’s the Chinese and the Indians have moved up to corner the housing market. K picked me up from my office in her Mercedes Benz, and we navigated the back roads of Area 9 to a see a three-bedroom, stand alone house. I had been told by a number of people – including one who runs a security company – that Area 9 was a bit sketchy, and has had several house break ins and car jackings (no casualties). K, however, insisted Area 9 was fine. She has lived there for 25 years. The house was massive: 3 bedrooms, each with their own en-suite, a lounge with fire place, a dining room and a weird porch like area that the previous tenant had used as a gym. There was a separate house for laundry, and another separate house for ‘your staff’. It was too big, and I would feel very isolated (plus, I really don’t want to live in Area 9).  So we see another house in Area 3, a more popular area with expats, and closer to the office. The garden is a jungle with a massive acacia tree stooping over the house, fruit trees, a vegetable garden and an army of bushes and flowers that cascade down on three levels. I love the garden, but the house is old, dated, run down and very dark. I don’ think it’s for me either.

Thursday, I drove out to Salima (one of our implementing districts, about 1.5hrs from Lilongwe) with two education advisers from DfiD, the UK government’s aid arm, and our donor for this project. Although I lead the project, DfiD is effectively the big boss, and they need to know if we are making good use of their money (well, your tax money, good UK people!).

Save’s Keeping Girls in School project has two main branches that together holistically address a multitude of barriers which keep girls from attending school, or staying there and learning. A cash transfer of £7/term per girl supports them to buy school items, exercise books, uniform, shoes etc. While school itself is nominally free (tuition is free, but there are exam fees and a ‘registration fee’), school items can sometimes be the reason that children don’t go to school. Uniforms get handed down from sibling to sibling until they are in tatters. For the little ones, this is not a problem. For a girl in adolescence, having to wear a uniform that barely covers her thighs or is ripped in the wrong places, can be enough to keep her at home. With no shoes, the walk to school (2km each way at least) can be painful and deter any child from going to school. Without exercise books, how will a child learn, or study?

The second branch addresses what happens to a girl at school and what support she gets from teachers, parents and the community. 

Up until about the fourth year of primary school, Malawi has achieved gender parity. In fact, there are often more girls in the first few years of primary than boys. But at 14/15, this is when we see the change. In Primary 4, for example, a school may have 135 girls. By primary 7, that has fallen to 30. In secondary school we are looking at a handful only.

Early pregnancy, early and forced marriage, additional domestic chores that cause a girl to miss school or slip behind with school work are all influencing factors. At school, as they see their peers drop away to get married and start families, it becomes harder and harder for a girl to retain motivation to stay on, especially if they aren’t doing well and even more so if school is a place of constant harassment, bullying and often mental, physical or sexual violence.

Being a girl is hard.

So one of our ‘interventions’ is to train female teachers to be role models and mentor and champion girls. It sounds common sense, that a woman who overcame obstacles to finish her education and gain a certificate as a teacher would mentor or support a girl to overcome those same challenges.

But apparently it’s not that obvious. After observing the first training, where a male facilitator is making the women memorise the characteristics of a good mentor, I ask if I can ask the women a question. Most urban/peri-urban people here speak English, and English is the medium of school instruction for kids over 14/15, so the trainings are all in English.

What is it, I ask the group of about 40 women (female teachers from all 16 schools in the zone), that makes you the perfect role model for girls? Each woman who answers, dressed in a glorious riot of colour and flounces, some with babies strapped to their backs, stands up to answer me. Some shyly, some with more force. “Because we are female teachers”; “Because we model good behaviour”; “Because we are close to the girls and they tell us their problems.”

All good points I say. But what, more than anything, makes you the best person to support, counsel and advise these girls when they come to you with a problem?” No one answers.

So I tell them: “Because you were once girls; you know these problems the girls face, you know how to overcome them, because look, here you are now!” A murmur goes round the group and everyone nods and I hear, ‘that’s right’.

Luckily, I had already highlighted to DfID my concerns about some of the facilitators; that they were teaching in abstracts; that there wasn’t enough of a link to what we wanted them to do. What we wanted was not to have female teachers memorise what a mentor does but to think about how they could support girls to achieve their educational and life aspirations.

This is a direct result of the education system, where learning does mean memorising what’s in a textbook. Repeating, repeating and repeating until you regurgitate word for word, without ever really understanding what you are learning. I have seen this in so many countries where I have worked; where I am constantly pushing people to tell me what their understanding of something is not just to repeat a line from a  textbook or manual (some of you might say I'm like that in my social life as well :-)). What we are asking is for people to be critical thinkers, to analyse something, to give it context rather than just repeat it. But this is  not something that we can change overnight.

We see two more trainings. The second is better than the first, more participatory, and the facilitator (another man) is very engaging, but still it’s about what it says in the manual, and when he talks about problems for girls, I feel there’s something missing.

At the third training, the female facilitator is brilliant. She has the women performing role plays; getting them to act out different scenarios where the girl is in trouble, and a female teacher mentors or supports her. She also has the women singing a Keeping Girls in School song (there isn’t one, but she made it up), clapping and dancing (‘who wants to come to school and listen to lectures all day long; women/girls they want to dance’). The conversations around girls' problems and how to help them is vibrant, and there’s a, dare I say it, powerful sense of sisterhood. When we leave, the three of us (me, and my two female DfID colleagues) literally skip out of the room, beaming. One of the DFID advisers leans over to me and says, ‘I guess this confirms every gender bias we have’.

On Friday, I find a house I like.

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.