Tuesday 24 August: Mbayani and maize mill

On this day we visited Mbayani, an urban village (which is defined as not having land and agriculture; it's like a small city, though this one in particular is an impoverished slum).



We received a warm welcome. I wondered throughout the coming days, who taught children in villages to pose for cameras?



There was a large program full of singing, dancing and dramas before we toured the village. These two women below were sitting very close to me. I thought they were really beautiful.



Touring Mbayani was difficult. I think I was better prepared to see the poverty and struggles than most of my team-- I've been studying and reading about the region for quite a few years now. It's not that I was unaffected. I was definitely moved by the hardships these people face, I just knew roughly what I was going to see before I saw it.



Above is a household we visited and gave some groceries (cooking oil, rice, tea, soap, candles and matches, etc.). Amazingly minor staples in my kitchen at home, but a very moving gift for this family. The girl on the left is the head of the household. She's 17. She has AIDS. Where will her younger siblings go when her time comes? We visited two other homes, one which was also child headed, and one which was headed by an older woman who is also ill. We delivered some groceries to them as well. All three families were chosen by their neighbors to receive our visits. That's one of the things I really love about Villages in Partnership-- they enable development and aid projects to occur, but leave a lot of the decisions about priorities in the villagers' hands. I love how even though the neighbors may have so, so little, they still knew they had more than these kids.

I learned most of my Chichewa on this day. A boy named Patrick, age 14, walked throughout Mbayani with the team, helping carrying things. He would say a phrase and expect me to get it the first time, forcing me to practice greetings and introductions and instructions with everyone we passed by. In theory, Chichewa is not very hard for an English speaker to learn. Since it was British colonists who first wrote the language down, it makes phonetic sense. There are a few tricks though that made it difficult to pick up instantly. I wasn't used to listening for the different between the "r" and "l" sounds... there really isn't much of one. It's very subtle and I miss it almost every time. I think I'm decent at pronouncing all of the unfamiliar consonant combinations though, lots of "nd" and "mb" and so on. Patrick wrote many phrases down for me, but there was just so much to take in as we walked around Mbayani that I found myself stressed out when he would walk me up to an older woman and demand I ask her, in Chichewa, for her name (Zinalako ndani?), or having me ask a group of children if I may take their picture (Ndikujambure?). However, I was fortunate that this was my most challenging experience in my visit to Malawi so far. The lessons did pay off when I was able to say to everyone as I left, "Ndapita. Ndizabweranso!" (I am going. I will come back again!)

Later, we visited one of the Machinjili's maize mills.

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This was amazing to me. Maize is an important staple in Malawi, used to make nsima, porridge and thobwa (this warm beverage made from water, corn flour and millet. It's often used as a meal substitute, to give energy until dinner. It was grainy and not the most pleasant thing that I would try during my trip). Serah grew up in the village and could describe the labor involved in grinding corn into flour. They would start at dawn and finish around lunch time. Half the day spent just preparing the food-- it still needed cooking! Then we watched some people run their maize through the mill. It took only a few minutes.

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One of the projects Villages in Partnership is getting going is bringing a maize mill and the electricity infrastructure it requires to the village. Can you imagine how life changing it will be? The women will have so many more hours free in a day, to go to school, to cultivate other/more foods, to pursue other business ventures, to take care of themselves. It's incredible.

We finished the day by going out for Chinese food with the Machinjili family. It seemed a bit odd, but it was very good. And everyone was very amused when I followed through on Liz's dare to speak Chinese to the workers. Thank goodness for my semester and a half of Mandarin!