I am now the proud mother of “Hey you” (or more like “Hey Kitty”)!
I received a new child amonth ago,but after twenty minutes, she (or is it he?) ran away after I left her with my friend. I thought all hope was lost because she didn’t come back (maybe she ran the whole 8 km home?), but the next morning, I woke up and heard a small meowlng. Lo and behold! There was my cat! Little did I know what was coming. Who knew parenting would be so hard? She wouldn’t stop crying (meowing) and I didn’t know the first thing about taking care of a baby (cat). I still don’t. I also didn’t know cats were so clingy! (Or maybe it’s just this one.) Or how difficult it is to potty-train! She keeps defecating in all the wrong places – even though the litter box sits there quite unused. After having this cat, I think I’ve given up on parenthood altogether.“Hey you” slowly evolved into “Cleopatra” (don’t ask me how I came up with that name; I just did). Or “Cleo” if she is actually a he. But after talking to my brother who so kindly said, “After 3 weeks, that was the best you can name her?!”, I decided to resort to “Hey Kitty” again. (Hey, I wasn’t the one who named our white rabbit “Butterscotch”! I really wanted “Snow White”. Love you Eric! J) Then, he told me about a person named “Bacon” - “Here Bacon, have some fish!”… Nah. I actually wanted to name her “Nala”, you know, like from Lion King, because she looks so cute and adorable – just like Nala! J Of course my brother had to go and ruin it with “But EVERY cat looks like Nala!” So he suggested an African name – “What does ‘Nala’ mean in Chichewa?” Well… “ng’ala” (you gotta roll the tongue a bit there, like nnnnny) means “eye cataract” in Chichewa. No way. O.K., I guess I’ll try to find out what “Mighty Rat Killer” in Chichewa is even though it would be an 18-syllable name.
This bewildering experience with my cat has epitomized my wondering and confusion of “Exactly what am I doing here in Malawi?” It seems everything in my life has been put on hold – pause – that I’m really starting to wonder if I will accomplish anything. Time goes backward. Actually, time’s not a concept here. (When you mention time, they’ll point at the sky – that’s noon.) It’s like… Let’s…wait… how… about…tomorrow….. next week..… next month… actually……. Maaaayyyyyybeeeee neeeeeeeext year? Oh, you mean, like after I leave Malawi? I got pretty frustrated because a lot of my plans kept being postponed always because of some unknown scheduled events. I’ve gotten accustomed to hearing my supervisor respond to my scheduling inquiries with “no known activities yet”.
And sometimes I wonder if it’s really at all possible to introduce anything sustainable in Malawi. The whole Peace Corps jargon of “capacity building”, “technical assistance”, “sustainability” seems to be empty words to Malawians. What I hear is, “Where’s the money?”, “Why can’t you just give us money?”, “Give me money!”
They’ve convinced me. Money is the answer for everything.
How sad but true. How is it that I escaped from the materialism and greed of America only to find the very same tribulations in Malawi? I hate that. I hate that money is at the forefront of everyone’s mind, and all they can think about is $$$ka-ching$$$money$$$kwachas.
I know as an American citizen, I’ll never (knock on wood) understand poverty (mostly thanks to welfare) and experience the effects of poverty – hunger, lack of basic needs and resources, inability to provide for health care, etc. – but is money really more important than knowledge, education, faith?
I know that as a 24-year-old volunteer with no masters or PhD, I’m oblivious to numerous factors that contribute to this beggar phenomenon in Malawi. I think the best thing to do now is to major in sociology, anthropology, economics, business, political science, development studies, and maybe even international studies, then maybe I’ll actually begin to understand. Maybe. But there are a few things that I do know:
There’s a dichotomy between foreign aid actually assisting the poor and actually creating helplessness (and laziness for others). NGOs come into Malawi (and other third-world countries as well) thinking that they know what’s best which actually ends up harming them more than they do good. And that’s just to give them a butt-load amount of money so that they can keep begging and asking for more money instead of learning how to work for it. How about teaching them new knowledge and skills? Giving them resources? Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that NGOs are not doing any of that because they definitely are doing a lot to help the Malawians, especially in stemming the tide of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
But when I wanted to teach my fellow health workers about nutrition and counseling mothers with malnourished children with food preparation skills, their first question was, “Will there be an allowance?” I didn’t know what to say, because I knew the first words out of my mouth would have been more than a mouthful. But thankfully, my Malawian counterpart intervened to explain that as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I only get “just enough [allowance] to survive” and that my role here is solely to provide “technical assistance” and not money. And I was appeased a bit when the supervisor of the health workers told them that the knowledge from the training in itself should be beneficial, and that as health workers, they should be trying to help these children – not just caring about how to gain money. But how funny that after I told them “no allowance”, they seemed to have lost all interest in my training.
What’s truly disturbing me is also how their beggar mentality can actually create more harm than thought possible. The previous volunteer before me had tried to implement a nutrition program in one of the villages teaching them how to use their locally available food in their homes and gardens to nourish their children properly. But it was a complete failure (the mothers failed to properly nourish their children). Why? Because they said, why can’t you just give us the food and money? Since they were used to an NGO giving them money and supplying them every time, they refused to learn this incredibly useful and sustainable skill that could nourish their children and make them healthy beings!
And I think the problem is just this: NGOs are so filthy rich that sometimes they seem to make rash decisions or plans that are not beneficial to the recipients. In a passing conversation with an employee from a NGO, I discovered that though it puts a lot of its donors’ money to good use, thousands of dollars were “lost” and not accounted for. That’s just how filthy rich they are.
And so they decide to create a divergence in the economics of Malawi by making all things (and jobs) foreign great and all things Malawian poor. For example: a ground worker (gardener) who works for an NGO makes almost 50% more money than a secondary school principal would. A counselor working for an NGO can have a starting salary of MK45,000 while the very same position in a government hospital provides a starting salary of MK7,000.
Hmm.
Well, gee, no wonder everyone wants to work for an NGO. So you can forget about working for the government of Malawi.
Sometimes, I just don’t get it. Why can’t NGOs match the needs of the economy rather than increase the standards that Malawi cannot match? One way would be to working hand-in-hand with the government to improve the salaries and knowledge of the health workers rather than developing their own work anomalies. I guess one way that can somewhat depict what I mean is this: a health worker attending a training workshop (i.e., home-based care, Village AIDS Committee, etc.) would receive MK2,000 in one day, whereas they receive MK5,000 salary in one month. Is it just me or is there something seriously wrong with that? No wonder the health workers wanted an allowance from my training workshop. So, now every worker’s goal is to attend these workshops so that at the end of the day, they can collect their 2 weeks’ “salary”. So much for encouraging them to gain this knowledge so they can be more efficient workers, which I’ve found doesn’t happen. At all. They don’t work. O.K., that may be an overstatement, because I admit there are a few who work hard and I do admire them because they take on so much baggage for other people. BUT out of the 19 health workers at my site, I’d say that only 6 of them actually work hard and only one of them is female.
I’m so frustrated by this whole experience. I can’t even begin to describe adequately what I’m seeing with my very own eyes the detrimental effects I’ve seen that some NGOs have on the villages. But of course nothing is ever plain black and white. I have to actually consider – do their benefits actually outweigh the costs? I mean, they really are producing a lot of benefits and improvements in ARV treatment for HIV/AIDS, development of HIV/AIDS education programs, etc. But should they really do it at the cost of hurting their economy and creating unsustainable development programs while creating a dependency on external assistance? So you can see what I have to constantly battle in my own mind. I have much I want to say about this paradigm, especially regarding how we can address these problems by changing the infrastructure of the NGOs’ approaches through monitoring and evaluating and accountability. Perhaps I will save it for next time… or maybe for a thesis paper.
So I thought I’d end this overbearing long update with an exciting news: I’m adopting Madonna’s niece!! Just kidding. I’m not adopting a kid anytime soon – especially not after having this “kitty/bacon/nala/eyecataracts/mightyratkiller”. But it sounds like my family might come to visit Africa (albeit not Malawi) in April or May! If this plan really goes through, it sounds like they’ll probably be my only visitors during my stint in Malawi! :)
P.S. K-Ci and Jojo are coming to Malawi! What in the world?! Oh the good ol' days...
