Climb every mountain...gulp.

On a lighter note, I had a bit of an adventure last weekend that I thought I’d share with you. Livingstonia is village on top of a mountain by the lake, where the first missionaries settled and built a hospital and a church in 1898. Its beauty is legendary throughout Malawi, but its notoriously difficult to get to and ‘transport is a big problem’. I made a friend through my brother Julius with a man in our village that grew up there, and agreed to escort me if I wanted to go and see the place. His name is Horace, he’s 24 and one of the local football stars, and is now a close friend of mine. He helps his uncle run the maize mill at an estate down the road, and has 21 tenants that rent from them.
We had planned to set off early in the morning, but he was delayed because one of the tenants had stolen some things and run off. He was upset because this particular tenant had been a close friend, and he felt much betrayed by this, understandably so.
So it was a two hour minibus ride to the lake side, in a direction I hadn’t traveled yet, so I thoroughly enjoyed seeing more of the countryside. You must get tired of hearing about it, but the beauty of this country never ceases to enthrall me, and if I ever feel down, I just try and spend some time out drinking it in.

So the minibus dropped us at the end of a dirt road with a sign posted: Livingstonia 15km
Horace looked at me nervously and said, if we wait for transport it could be 3 o’clock before something comes. It was then 11am. I’m like, alright lets walk, we can do it! 10 minutes up the slow and steady incline I’m huffing and puffing like an overweight smoker and Horace is barely breaking a sweat. Holy embarrassing batman. He explains to me that there’s 21 bends in the road, but there’s a few shortcuts we can take as we reach bend 21 (they count down). I think I made it to bend 18 before needing to stop and rest, lol. The shortcuts were too steep for me to handle really, especially with the hot sun beating down so after the first couple we stuck to the bends.
The conversation was great though, we talked about all sorts of things (between my huffs and puffs) and got to know each other better. He explained to me many people make this treck up and down every day to buy and sell fish, or bread etc. The locals can even do it, taking all the rocky shortcuts, in the middle of the night!
Many short breaks later, we reached bend 5, and between bend 4 and 5 there’s this slightly hidden spring in the side of the mountain, with this amazingly cold water, and as we sat there collecting ourselves,(Horace was a little tired by this point) with the monkey’s playing in the trees overhead and the lake stretched out in front of us, I was so very grateful there had been no transport, or I would have missed that entire experience.
Before you actually get to Livingstonia there’s this amazing waterfall set back in the forest that drops over the side of the mountain into this valley that stretches out to the lake. Bloody breathtakingly beautiful.
Two and a half hours later we actually enter the village/town, and everyone is greeting Horace. Not only is this where most of his family lives, and he grew up, but he is well known throughout the area for his football talents, and his nickname is ‘Ironman’ for the way he runs so fast in his bear feet. We walk around the town, check out the church and the stone house the missionaries built, and grab some lunch, by this time it’s almost 3pm though, and there doesn’t look to be any transport going back down for the day. Not wanting to take the 2 hour treck back down that day only to have a two hour minibus ride back in the dark to mkombezi (not the safest thing), we decided to stay the night, which also meant Horace could play football with his friends and spend the night at his father’s house. I hung out watching the football, making some notes for work, we had dinner together at a local restaurant where we met some aid workers who were heading down the other side towards Rumphi the next day and offered to take us as far as they were going in their vehicle (sweet deal), and then he dropped me off at a resthouse.
The next morning we met the aid workers, who had a Canadian girl working with them through WUSC and students without borders from BC. It was pretty awesome chatting with someone from home again, and comparing experiences. They dropped us at the village where they were running a session on AIDS prevention and behavior change, and we continued on through the back roads and shortcuts that Horace knew to the next spot where we might find transport. It was awesome seeing some of the crops grown in this area, that I hadn’t seen before like coffee, bamboo, and macadamia nut trees. I never thought I could get so excited about agriculture, lol, but it’s actually really interesting to actually understand where your food comes from.
An hour later we’re hanging out at the nearest trading post, chatting, hoping and waiting for the next vehicle passing through that might get us home in time for the afternoon football match. As luck would have it, a safari vehicle with a white couple comes trucking through and stops for another volunteer just arriving, so we run up and ask if we can get a lift too. They have tons of crap in the back, so in order to fit I literally have to sit on top of Horace, but we’ll take it, who knows when the next vehicle will come. They’re a couple from Britain although the man’s originally from New Zealand, that have taken a year off work to drive through Africa tip to tail and back again, and the other volunteer is a peace core teacher here for 2 years with her husband, whose 7 months into the placement. Obviously, conversation was super interesting and left me really feeling like it’s completely possible to design your own future – especially when you’re white, well educated, and have money. Lol, I make a statement like that, and I immediately want to jump in to discussions about power, and privilege and feeling the responsibility of being in such a position to contribute to making positive change in the world, in whatever context possible. But I’ll refrain, I hate sounding preachy.
I’ll leave it at: they dropped us in Mkombezi, and it was good to be home again. It was great to feel like I’d made a solid friend in Horace, outside the family and neighbors, and to have had what could have been a bit of a let down as a tourist experience, as an absolutely unforgettable experience seeing this place through his eyes.

I’ll try to be a bit more regular about posting in the last month or so now. Again, any questions or topics you’d like me to comment on are welcome, its difficult to know what people are interested in hearing about, and sometimes I feel like I could talk forever, and other times I don’t know where to start. Hope you’re all well, take care, until next time ~m 

A woman's work is never done...

So I kind of fell of the face of the planet for a bit eh? Lol, sorry folks, didn’t mean to be so MIA, the last month has been…well… hard to explain, thus the lack of posts.

I’ve been putting a lot of effort into trying to understand the way RUFA works and how I can have some positive impact on the organization, which has been challenging but I’ve been learning and growing a whole bunch.

First of all I wanted to respond to some questions my good friend colleen asked me recently (miss you girl). In our EWB workshops we’ve talked a lot about gender roles, and how important they are to consider when attempting development work. Specifically the question was do women actually feel discriminated against, and do they want to see change?
So I’m not going to claim to have the answer to that question, but I can talk about some of the experiences I had and things I’ve seen here.
So let me tell you about my sister Chrissy. She’s the wife of my host mother’s eldest son Maduna, who both live with us, and is my best friend here. She’s the one who’s helped me figure out how to do everything (ie. hand wash all my clothes), explains what’s going on at home when I’m all kinds of confused, and has helped me form relationships with other women in the community. She’s a year younger than me, but is already a wife and a mother, so while we’re at different points in our lives, we get along great and laugh and joke together. When I’m home, I help out as much as I can with the daily chores as well as looking after the baby Jessica. The family hierarchy is such that most of the grunt work falls to Chrissy as the female in-law. What does that mean? That means sweeping around the house, fetching water from the borehole down the street, preparing most of the meals for the entire household (7 adults – not exactly light work), doing all the dishes, doing all the laundry for her husband, herself, and Jessica, and being 100% responsible for caring for Jessica, which means unless myself or one of my brothers are around to hand her off to, Chrissy’s doing all these things with Jessica strapped to her back. She hopes to one day attend the training center in a neighbouring village to become a carpenter, which is pretty cool, and I think a little unconventional. Before that can happen though she must wait until her and Maduna are financially independent, have their own home, and have enough extra income for the school fees.
This is what it means to be a woman in the village. And let me tell you, its bloody hard work. Add in things like preparing the maize for the maize mill (about a four day process), or in areas where there is no maize mill pounding the maize into a flour by hand, raising 2 or 3 toddlers, and fetching firewood from god knows how far, and you start to get a bigger picture. Now imagine you husband’s passed away, or left you as is increasingly the case for Malawian women, and you’re now responsible for growing or buying enough food to feed your family and providing the basic necessities, and if possible, generating enough extra income for school fees for the children. Or maybe your sister has died from AIDS and now you’ve got 7 children instead of 3 to provide and care for. Or the youngest one has malaria but you don’t have the money for the medication, the doctor’s fees, or the transport to reach the doctor.
I’m not saying men don’t work hard too, especially farmers, but the onus is on the women to create a functioning household. This is why many development projects focus on making these tasks easier, or are directed at providing more opportunities for women. But I’m taking it a bit too big picture; let’ take it back to direct experiences.

I’ve asked various people what gender equality means to them, and why they think it is important. The answers and attitudes towards this topic have surprised me in a lot of situations, and I don’t want to generalize too much, but a common response is that it will make development happen faster, or that the developed countries tell us its important and they must know, because they’re developed. From what I’ve seen it’s not tied to human or civil rights, it’s seen as an externally driven, necessary step to being considered civilized. And these responses are from women as well as men.

I should note here, that most of this is based on experiences in a rural setting, and I think things are a little different in an urban setting. In a village though, most women marry during or just after secondary school, so it’s difficult to distinguish between being a woman and being a mother.

I could talk for a long time about a lot of factors related to this subject, and the things I’ve seen or heard about here, so feel free to follow up with me when I get back. A big question I have though: is that if you change these well defined and understood roles for men and women, or more accurately husbands and wives, how much would you destroy the culture itself, and what kind of gaps do you create in the social infrastructure.
I feel full of questions about what it means to be a woman anywhere in the world, and more specifically what it means to be a mother.
The deep respect I have for Malawian mothers, however, is something I will carry with me, and my hope in the future is that to be one is not such a struggle for so many.