I can't believe I didn't post about this before...
Meet my agogo, Ellen. She was born and raised in South Africa, met her Malawian husband while working as an au pair, and then moved back to Malawi with their newly built family. She has lived in Malawi ever since since 1950-something.
Doesn't she look like Mother Teresa? :) She may as well be dubbed Mother Ellen! She has been my greatest source of support since I've stepped into Malawi. She's one of the very few people I trust in my community, whose company I thoroughly enjoy. I spend every Saturday (when I'm not busy with other things) sitting outside her house at the tap, washing and scrubbing my clothes for 2 hours while chatting it up about food, South Africa, Malawi, history, culture, hardships, and all that good stuff, but mostly about food. :)
She has shown incredible strength that I've never seen in an 82-year-old. She has watched 9 of her 11 kids die from malaria, yet she keeps fighting to live with meaning in her life. She still works as hard as any other 20-something-year-old would. She wakes up before dawn everyday to sweep the ground and clean up the mission's house. And then she farms until all the weeds have been pulled up. And (keeping in my mind gender equality is still an issue here) she cooks for her grandson(s) 2-3 times a day. As embarrassing as it is for me to admit this, she's also the one I turn to when I want a chicken killed and gutted... :/ But if it weren't for her, I wouldn't be getting my monthly intakes of soysauce chicken! She's my lifesaver!
Meeting her has made me realize how incredibly undervalued our grandparents are, because I think they have a wealth of knowledge about culture and history that we can really gain from. I didn't live close to my grandparents at all to learn much from them, but from the few times I've learned about their history - from fighting with the British in World War II to hiding in the moutains with the guerrilla to escaping Communism - I've always wished that I could learn about their whole history and record it.
I'm also starting to realize more and more how incredibly spoiled our generations have become. We've been untouched by war and poverty that once plagued our great-grandparents, grandparents, and even some of our parents' lives, so we take all the things we have for granted and are never happy with what we have. How did materialism and greed take such reign of our lives? We now expect to get a car in high school, a free college education, and the latest iphone. Sometimes I wonder if it's even a good thing for developing countries to learn about the things we have, because then they'd think "Why can't we have that?" when the options are readily available to us, and I want to tell them, "Because that's not going to save your life." Other times I wonder if perhaps we, the West, are better off living in poverty so we'd actually appreciate each day we live, each bite we eat, and each thing we own. But on the contrary, I think that even poverty cannot teach us the most important values in life. I've been baffled by why the youths in Malawi feel so entitled to nice clothes, expensive (and unhealthy) food, Western music, etc. and spend all their time complaining about their poverty but not appreciating their education or the value of hardwork and self-sufficiency.
It's been interesting for me to interact with people from different generations and trying to understand the reasons and justifications for these dichotomies. I think a huge part has been the influence of development, which may have a worse influence on developing countries than we'd like to think. A lot of us volunteers always agree that it is so hard to "help those who don't want to help themselves". That has been one of the greatest struggles for me as well, partly in fault because of the way a certain NGO has worked here.
Anyway, I think I'll stop here, because it's starting to become one of those emails where I just draw out my thoughts incoherently and prolong the conclusion. But I'll send another email in a few days to update you of my projects! I'm at the Peace Corps office to work on a few proposals, so I'll be using the free internet while I can! :)
