Greetings from your favorite mzungu!

Written Oct 30. I finally got the pictures up! See you all soon!

Today is the 2-week mark of my time here in Malawi, and life is good. I live in an electricity-free beach camp with 8 other volunteers ranging in age from 22-30, plus Liz and Geoff Furber, the English couple who run Ripple Africa. We have a solar-powered fridge, a wood-fired cookstove, and a cold-water bathroom block (which is actually really nice). We sleep 2 to a chalet, and my chalet-mate is a feisty little South African girl called Robyn. I have found my match in the sweet-tooth department—she has been known to eat six chocolate bars in a single sitting, and we are hot chocolate buddies (around here, that means half a scoop of cocoa, hot water, and some sugar).
To be fair, the nearest real chocolate is an hour and a half’s walk away, so you have to grab it while you can! Robyn and I have the best chalet, about 10 yards from the beach, and we get the most gorgeous sunrise views from our porch (when there are no electric lights, you tend to go to bed at 8:00 or 9:00 and get up around 5:00).

Lest I make life here sound frightfully rustic, I will mention that we have two women who do our laundry every day (Martha and Geddes, some of the sweetest women worldwide) as well as two cooks, Harry and Nephia, who make our dinners each night. I thought coming here might be a bit of a ‘fat camp’ type experience, and definitely there are days when there isn’t much to eat during the day, but the evening meal is always really nice. We are all learning to appreciate plain rice for lunch!


Though malaria is very common among the villagers here, none of the volunteers have caught it yet, and to be honest, the mosquitoes here are nowhere near as bad as they were in SE Asia. I’ve heard it said, though, that it’s not a matter of if you get malaria, but when—even if you’re taking meds like doxycycline, which we all are. So I guess I’ll keep my fingers crossed!

Here are more things I love about Malawi so far:
1. The children (when they’re not pestering me for money, empty bottles, or pens). When we’re walking along, they’ll run up to us, grab our hands, and stare adoringly up at us. They start helping around the household at a really young age (I’ve seen 3 and 4-year-olds leaving the borehole with heavy buckets of water on their heads), so they generally don’t get a lot of affection. We have small-group reading sessions at the school in the afternoons, and they are generally really happy times for me, with little kids running after me to carry my chair, my book, my water bottle, or whatever else I may have in my hands, and then they sit in the dust in front of me smiling and participating as much as they can understand. (Children get taught exclusively in English from standard 5 and up, but their comprehension is often very very low. The native language is called Chitonga, and mzungu is what they call white people—not derogatory.)

2. The lake. It’s nearly the size of Malawi itself, so living next to it feels like camping at the ocean. It’s nice to be able to swim whenever we want and to listen to the waves, and there’s a big deck overlooking the water where we sometimes eat dinner and I often do a bit of sunrise yoga. So it’s a very peaceful place to live.

3. The other volunteers. They come from England, Switzerland, Australia, South Africa, and the US, and I really like them all. After these past nomadic months, it’s so nice to settle in with some friends.


Okay, so here are some things I don’t like about Malawi so far:
1. The flies. They are everywhere and are disgusting. The worst is to see them land on children’s noses or lips or eyeballs, and the kids don’t even flinch. It’s like National Geographic around here with those damn things.

2. Women do, almost without exception, all the work. In the villages, it is rare to see men doing anything besides sitting around, and it irritates me to no end. And this is subsistence farming country, so it’s not like there are proper jobs to be had (unless you are employed by Ripple). So the work that needs to be done are things that feed a family and keep a household running, which falls to the women. And they all work so so hard. It’s a different culture, of course, but I blatantly cannot stand the male-dominatedness of this place. Women do all the work and men have all the power. Men won’t wear condoms and women with more children than they can handle already take birth control in secret (if they can get it) because it’s a sign of the husband’s virility to have loads of kids. If they get caught, they are beaten and raped. In the national newspaper you see front-page headlines like “Sex-starved man in for injuring wife,” a story about a “poor local man” whose wife wouldn’t sleep with him (because she’d given birth two months prior) so he “allegedly injured her private parts.” It is appalling, and actually probably surprising that the husband had any punishment at all. The good news among all of this is that part of what we’re doing here is setting up systems that are multi-pronged (like projects that empower women, positively affect the environment, and allow people to go into business for themselves), and many of them get people to work that would otherwise be sitting around. So hopefully, on some level, we can change the customs a bit so women aren’t the only ones working around here! And the power balance… well, that’s something that will probably just take time.

In terms of the projects that we’re working on, here is a list of my favorites (if you didn’t know what a little list-lover I am, you do now!):

1. Mboulas. These are small clay ovens that cook more efficiently and use less wood than the traditional open-air fires. Mboulas use one-third the amount of wood than an open-air fire, a fact which is incredibly relevant in Malawi these days. Deforestation is a major problem around here. The population is rapidly growing, trees aren’t getting replanted, women are walking over 3 km each way to get enough wood for the day, and the distance between their villages and the trees is growing each year. When the rainy season starts, women have to light the day’s fire inside their huts, and the amount of lung-related illnesses seen in the health clinics, especially in children, explodes. Mboulas create less smoke and can be set just outside under the eaves during the rain, eliminating this problem. Ripple sets up mboula workshops in the villages where local women have expressed a desire to start a business. The charity pays for a kiln to fire the mboulas in as well as a shed where they can lock them up. The women collect the clay, make the mboulas, fire them, and sell them in the villages. I am so in love with this solution to four major problems: women can make their own money (which is much much more likely to go towards a family’s needs than money a man makes), Malawi’s trees are cut down less frequently, since everyone is using one third the wood they normally would, health issues are sidestepped during the rainy season, and a self-sustaining business is created.

2. Tree nurseries. Each village, at the request of its chief, can have a tree nursery set up by Ripple. The charity buys the seedlings for the trees and the villagers plant them when they are ready, take care of them, and are paid with any profit they may make from the fruit from them. I don’t know quite as much about this project as I do about the others, but I know the nursery next to the beach plants a mixture of softwood trees, which are fast-growing and can be used for firewood and building, as well as fruit trees.

3. Vegetable gardens. Enterprising Malawians contact Ripple about setting up a vegetable garden. If they seem up for the task, the charity sets them up with seeds, a couple of watering cans, some garden hoes, and leaves them to it. We visited some the other day and were majorly impressed. Thriving gardens generate income for their owners from the fruit and vegetables grown and support themselves in years to come. We’re also hoping to address issues of nutrition with this project—many people live on a diet of nsima, which is a dough-like dish made from cassava flour. Very occasionally they’ll have fish, and more often they will collect and eat lake flies (more on that later). So though fruit and veg are kind of a new idea, we’re hoping to get some demonstrations going in the markets of how to prepare them, so hopefully the people will learn to like them and their health will improve.

4. Fish ponds. The fish population in Lake Malawi can’t keep up with the rising demand of the growing human population, and fishermen that used to catch fish near the shores are having to paddle over an hour into open water to catch anything. Because the fish population is decreasing, the lake fly population is exploding. Usually lake flies lay their eggs on the surface of the lake, where the fish eat many of them before they hatch. Now there are way too many lake flies, and it’s actually happened that fishermen have been suffocated when the eggs hatch and the flies swarm around them. There are days when you can look out at the lake and see a gigantic black cloud that actually looks like an approaching thunderstorm, but it’s actually a zillion lake flies. People collect giant baskets of lake flies and make patties of them to eat because they can’t afford fish anymore. Ripple is just beginning a fish pond project, where we’ll help enterprising villagers set up the ponds, the fish will breed, and they’ll be sold in the villages. More farmed fish equals cheaper, more available fish, more fish in the lake, and fewer lake flies. (This is, selfishly, one of my favorite projects because when we eat dinner on the deck we get absolutely infested with lake flies. We don’t even bother picking them out of our food and drink anymore.)

This has already been such an eye-opening experience for me. If I had three suggestions to give to people at home, who would probably never come to Africa but are interested in helping, I would tell them this:

1. Don’t be ignorant. Learn about African issues, talk to people about them, and vote for people and issues that share your views. If you are interested, act like it. And be aware that money is not always the answer. Big NGOs, for all their good intentions, have all but created a culture of dependency in Africa. People expect handouts because that’s what they’ve been given all through their lifetimes. Throwing money at the problem does more harm than good. (Parenthetically, I would advise people to not donate clothes intended for African people. The whole garment and textile industry has collapsed because of cheap imports—an entire portion of their culture—and everyone dresses in western rags. I actually saw a kid the other day wearing a ratty t-shirt with the Dairy Queen logo, except that it said “Drama Queen—San Francisco.” Funny at the time, but sad in the end.)

2. If you do want to send money, be very aware of who you are giving it to and how it is being spent. Corruption is a way of life in Africa, and often money stops with corrupt government officials and not a cent gets to its intended recipients.

3. Recognize that we cannot fundamentally change African culture, and nor should we aspire to. This will probably never be a place with a chicken in every pot, at least not in our lifetimes. The key is not to aim for running water, paved roads, and cable television for each Malawian, but to help them help themselves in the ways that they want help (a hand up, not a handout, as the Ripple saying goes). If you ask 10 children what they like best about living in Malawi, 8 of them will say nsima, the food they eat morning, noon, and night (the other 2 will say soccer). They don’t sit around wishing they could live in New York City—they are happy here. But these post-colonial countries with slim to no healthcare, virtually no natural resources, and exploding human populations need help setting up systems in which they can support themselves.

I know it kind of sounds like I’ve been drinking the kool-aid over here, but you can’t spend time here without feeling first extreme frustration at the seeming futility of trying to do anything in this place and then looking for practical ways to improve it. It’s a beautiful country with really beautiful people, and most of them are extremely happy. I’m just so glad I can be here to help further projects that really seem like they can make a difference in the manner of living that Malawians want.

On a lighter note, we have adopted a little kitten, who Geoff saved from the malicious intentions of a spitting cobra he found in his backyard (and yes, I did say spitting cobra… apparently its venom will blind you if it gets in your eyes!). We’ve named the little guy Johnny Durex (because for the first week of his life he drank milk from a nipple fashioned out of a condom), and, though he cries an irritating amount, he’s very cute (when he’s sleeping).

Miss you all! Love, Sheri