Friday, February 12, I was back to Ntcheu to check in at the water office where I had been working from July to December. Progress of anything around coordination, monitoring and evaluation had been slow while I was there, and I wasn’t able to drum up much momentum for improvements for the Ntcheu office. That resulted in me spending most of my time there working on other things that weren’t related to the district, and is why I left in December and am now based in Lilongwe. We did decided, though, that EWB wants to maintain some contact there, since the district will be working next year to pilot a national monitoring and evaluation system for waterpoints. EWB has been very involved in developing this system and we want to help it roll out well. So I was visiting mostly on a foot-in-door-maintaining mission.

The office. I worked in the 2nd building.

The day itself was frustrating (as had been Thursday), and reminded me of all of the reasons I wasn’t there still. One person was at the office at all, and only about half of the day. And again, I spent most of my time working on non-Ntcheu-related things. The highlight of my being there, from the point of view of the water office, was that I transferred, on request, a database of waterpoints from one computer onto a CD so it could be brought to another computer – which actually has some corrupting virus that prevents the file from being read or opened but might be fixed (I also heard that 4 months ago). And it’s not exactly irrelevant that the database itself isn’t something I’d want to spread as a resource. It is based on 2008 information which has changed considerably. It also uses some pretty shaky grounds to calculate statistics on water services, which will be over-quoted given how much meaning they actually should hold (which is, not much). So I’m not convinced that transferring the database is even slightly a good thing (sigh), and I don’t know how to bring the office to something better, which is doubly frustrating.

But, that’s not the point of the story. This is about an awesome 3 days!

So Friday work-day ended on a frustrating note, but led into Friday evening. During which I met up with another volunteer from JICA (who arrived in Ntcheu just as I was leaving), and we went to some “concert.” We weren’t sure what it would be going into it, but it turned out to be basically a church concert put on for and by the kids at one of the local private schools, with the assistance of a reggae-style band hired for the occasion. It was kind of like an elementary school assembly – about 300 kids sitting on the floor in front of a low stage, and a steady rotation of students coming up to sing with the band. The audience alternated between appreciative listening, enthusiastic dancing, and loud prayer. Before and after, we had some interesting conversations-turn-debates with the neighbour who had invited us along, about religion, why the foreigners in the audience (aka us) should not be introduced as objects of interest, and then the finer points of nsima-cooking. It ended with supper of rice and spicy chicken, and then a late walk back through town – a definite advantage of small-town Malawi over Lilongwe. All around, a nice evening with new friends in an old town.

Saturday, I detoured across town to spend the day with the family who has been my hosts in Ntcheu for the past 7 months. All through town, as with Thursday and Friday, I was greeted by name, rather than “Azungu!”, and my family was happy to see me and hear stories of life in the big city (and exclaim on the strange happenings in Lilongwe). We then wandered to their field, where the corn has grown tall, to pick pumpkin leaves for lunch. Which left me happily crashing around in a healthy field of corn stalks, pumpkin vines, bean tendrils and chattering Chichewa I didn’t understand for two hours under a gorgeous sun with a slight breeze and bees, and collecting a bag full of leaves (kind of like spinach). And some Marco? (Polo!) -style yelling to gather up again and head home with our leaves and ripe mangoes from the trees. All around, a magical morning where my hosts bragged about my attempts at Chichewa and agriculture to passersby, I got to see signs of a good harvest for my friends, and I generally felt like I’d never left.

Ntcheu - green hills, blue skies, tall maize, friendly faces.

After an easy trip back to Lilongwe, I was again reminded of the best of all of my worlds. Alyssa had brought back mail from Canada for me, and I got slightly sappy thinking about the friends and family from home I miss terribly and who know me so well to send such sweet messages. And then catching up with her, and other friends from town, and Sunday jazz music on the grass in a park and then a loud and long football game in a pub and thinking about how much I love my job and my friends and my life here too.

All of which got me thinking. A thousand little things made these days wonderful, and I’m just listing a few highlights. But it pointed to me one bigger theme. I have two amazing homes – an awesome substitute family here in my co-workers, assorted other friends who show me new sides of Malawi, and a comfort exploring this strange and familiar place – along with wonderful people and places and conversations in Canada who I will be so happy to return to one day. I feel like the luckiest girl in the world.

It’s not my favourite greeting (particularly if you are over the age when I expect you to know better), but I don’t have much choice other than to tolerate it. And, it is technically accurate. Some of my friends (and occasionally me, despite blue eyes, curly hair, and red sunburns) are called “China”, and being of Asian but not Chinese decent, are bothered by it. “China China China!!” come the shouts, usually a little less excited and a little more mocking  than the “Azungu” cries.

And sometimes “China” is followed by “Ching Chang Chong!” which small children seem to think are actual words that mean something and shout hoping for a reply.

The other day, I got what must be the English equivalent of “ching chang chong” – some kids ran down the road after me shouting “Blah bleh a blah bleh!” repeatedly. One laugh did escape, but I held the rest in to try not to encourage them.

So Bleh blah a bleh blah to you all.

More seriously, racism sucks. More than this picture. (A badly timed out-the-bus-window shot.)

And between us, the WatSan team has complained enough about the evils of allowances to fill encyclopedias. Alas, working in Malawi I am not immune from this horrible disease either, and, like most of my EWB colleagues, have accidentally received an allowance.

Once.

(How can you accidentally receive money? Keep reading. But once you have that money put in your hand, it’s a debate about whether or not to raise a fuss and confuse a lot of folks and potentially project a lot of “I’m better than you” and “I’m so amazingly rich that I reject your money” attitude to give it back. Most of us don’t, and instead blush and clench our teeth and then note exactly what happened and make sure we don’t walk into the trap again.)

This isn’t the story of the time I received an allowance, because that story was kind of dull. Instead, here’s a story about a near miss.

~~~

One day in Ntcheu, I tagged along with several staff from the district, including the water, health, planning, agriculture, and forestry offices, who were joining with an NGO to visit some communities in the south of the district to talk about how things were going with their water supply. The NGO had some funding to do projects in that area, and was interested to learn about the current challenges the communities were facing with their boreholes and gravity-fed taps and shallow wells.

It was a neat day. Representatives from four village water committees had been called to the house of the Group Village Headman to meet with the district and NGO staff and discuss their challenges and needs and successes. I couldn’t understand most of the conversation, and so instead watched the set-up and context and dynamics and attitudes and style of conversation and how problems were resolved. In other words, I learned things, but contributed exactly nothing to the whole event (aside from my glowing presence – and that’s a pun* so you should laugh). And they fed us lunch, which was very nice of them.

Conversations under a tree. (Have I mentioned lately how beautiful Malawi is?)

While we were driving back, one of the NGO staff started making a list documenting exactly who had been present at the meeting, and our contact information, and then started passing it around for signatures. This isn’t uncommon – often, attendance sheets are kept as “proof” of a meeting having happened, which justifies the expenditure on fuel for the donors to the NGO. But then, out of the corner of my eye just before the sheet got to me, I saw money change hands.

Aha! Allowances.

It wasn’t a lot of money, but not a small amount either. 750 MWK is a little under $5, and buys a pretty nice meal. Multiplying that by everyone at the meeting adds up quickly. And again, I had contributed exactly nothing – I had asked to come along to see what was happening.

So I didn’t sign the sheet. Signing the sheet would mean acknowledging I had received my allowance – again, proof for an NGOs auditor of cash having been spent properly. And I didn’t want to receive “my” allowance. They asked me why, and I explained that I wasn’t “allowed” to receive allowances, that I was paid by EWB for my work, that I hadn’t contributed anything and had invited myself. They didn’t really get it, rolled their eyes a bit. In the end, someone else “signed” for me, and took the “extra” money. Meaning my refusal didn’t save the NGO money, and perhaps encouraged the falsification of evidence. But, it did give me a tiny platform to say that allowances don’t make sense, and I only felt half as guilty as I would have if I took the money myself.

* It’s actually a pun twice: once because it was hot in the sun & I was sweaty and sunscreen-covered; and twice because my white skin sticks out worse than glow-in-the-dark paint at community meetings like this, and it’s awkward, so I laugh  : )

The bananas I bought.

They were being sold just down the street from my house, and were probably grown in a nearby backyard or possibly a banana grove a few kilometers away. I paid 100 MWK for these bananas – about 60 cents.

Buying the same amount of bananas in Canada – where bananas don’t grow in backyards and instead travel for hundreds and hundreds of kilometers to reach you – would cost about the same.

One of these prices isn’t right. And I didn’t get ripped off.

Note 1: I’m not judging anyone for buying bananas, I also buy them in Canada. I’m just pointing out that there’s something wrong with the picture.

Note 2: This is part of an ongoing series of posts about money in Malawi. If you missed the others, you can look here, here, and here.

Important: I don’t want to give the impression that all of my conversations are scripted, or that all Malawians speak the same ideas all the time – these are just the basic questions that people often ask in early interactions, or which take the place of Canadian discussions about the weather, which is pretty consistent from day-to-day right now.

“Where do you live?”

This isn’t usually about the city, town, or area of town where you live. This is about which house, specifically, do you live in, and I’ll come and find you there. I sometimes debate whether this is a safety liability, but if we face facts, I stick out in a crowd anyways, so it would only require a tiny amount of persistence, or asking around town, to figure out where I live. Might as well save them the trouble, and just tell them directly.

On the other hand, when I don’t want to answer because someone is being particularly obnoxious, there are two convenient exit strategies. First, there aren’t really street addresses in most of Malawi, and certainly not in Ntcheu, so I can avoid being specific if I want – “I live in the house near [landmark that lots of houses surround]“. Second, “Just here” is often an acceptable answer, where ‘here’ can refer to anyplace within a 20km radius.

“What is your phone number?”

I don’t like this one as much. In Malawi, receiving calls or text messages is free, but sending is expensive, so people have learned to ‘flash’ someone (call and then quickly hang up to show up as a missed call) to ask to be called back. Practical. But not pleasant if you’re receiving repeated phone calls in the middle of the night, or if you really don’t want to talk to someone (“Why didn’t you call me? I flashed you [4 billion times last week].”). Fake numbers don’t work, since people immediately want to call you so you also have their number. Not having a phone is so obviously a lie that it is offensive. Lisa, however, learned an excellent trick to avoid giving out a phone number. “I’m sorry, my phone is a work phone. It is only for work.” This sometimes takes a couple repetitions, but usually is satisfactory – provided you instead tell them where you live.

“Which church do you belong to?”

This one could be straight-forward, but as a non-religious person, isn’t. Not belonging to a church is pretty rare in Malawi, and can be confusing or unbelievable. There also isn’t the same social rules about not discussing religion, so people are sometimes quite enthusiastic to try and convert the azungu to their particular church. Sometimes I can just list the last church service I attended and get away with it. Other times, it turns into a longer dialogue:

I don’t think this is technically a lie – I know the world to be an amazing place, and life to be awesome, and though I don’t attribute this to God, it’s more or less the same intention. Plus it might help me avoid a conversation meant to convert me, which descends (either slowly or very fast depending on how much energy I have for what can be an interesting discussion and how persistent my conversation partner is) to a point where the only reasonable course of action is to smile and nod politely until it is over.

 (A variation on the previous question) “Do you go to church?”

Somehow, this seems to be the opposite of going to church… and unless I’m in a city and holding a drink in my hand, I’ll lie.

It isn’t common for Malawian women to drink, and certainly not for them to go out to a bar or bottle store (pub). If I say I do drink, it is either leading to judgment by that individual (“scandalous, drinking!”), or an invitation (“we will go out together”), which leads to judgment by a significant proportion of the community (“scandalous, drinking! And with that man!” -because it’s always a man.)

Interestingly, nearly every time I say I do not drink, and ask the same question back, the other person doesn’t drink either – even if they’ve told me previously that they do. Looks like I’m not the only one wary of being judged for alcohol consumption.

 “Are you married? Do you have children?”

Hm. Well, since “Because?” isn’t really an answer, that would end up being a long story. And I usually don’t really feel like trying to explain. So instead I opt for a very definitive “I will get married in 10 years,” stated with as much certainty as I can manage. This answer is both appreciated (at least I have an answer, and a plan! Which of course isn’t actually true), and absurd (waiting 10 years makes me way too old to get married in Malawi and so is nearly impossible to believe. But it does occasionally have the benefit of deterring marriage proposals – if I’d wait that long, I am clearly not serious).

“Be my wife. Take me to Canada.”

 “Be my friend?”

-

Allowances are cash given to people to do things. Go to a meeting? Attend a training? Enter data? Get an allowance! Everyone likes cash. And allowances work across the whole spectrum of the population – rural villagers get allowances for learning how to maintain their waterpoint, senior government officials get allowances to show up and make a 2 minute speech at a meeting or conference. They do have a place – for those who do have jobs, salaries are low and aren’t enough to cover travel expenses for meetings. For those who rely on farming, attending meetings means time away from tending to crops for the next harvest. But allowances have gone beyond a basic compensation for costs incurred, and become an actual salary supplement that people use to make ends meet, and also a distraction from people’s “real” jobs.

There are two related problems with allowances, and I see one way out.

Allowances originated and are most associated with NGOs. If azungus have money, NGOs must have tons, since they fly people halfway across the world and then pay them to give things away for free. NGOs might as well be a money tree. Because many organizations have to work with international salary classifications, many NGO workers earn far more than is reasonable given the purchasing power of their money in Malawi, and far more money than government officials, perpetuating the idea. NGOs also need to show results. If they have told a donor that they will train 500 teachers on gender equality in the classroom, or sensitize 10,000 people on HIV AIDS transmission, they have to follow through. To do that, they sometimes need to pay people to attend. If I’m feeling cynical, people have figured out that NGOs need their participation so badly that they are willing to bribe participants, and so they refuse to come without the bribe. If I’m feeling slightly less cynical, it makes sense to pay people the same rate to do the same thing. If you’re paying one of your staff to attend a meeting, and you want others there as well, shouldn’t they also be paid, to be fair?

But this creates the first problem. Paying people to do a side job takes them away from their own job. If offered the opportunity to stay at the office and continue working for the same steady salary, or to skip out for an hour, a day, or a week, and be paid either significantly more or a nice extra bonus for doing so, it makes sense to leave work and get the allowance. Getting paid to leave work obviously creates all kinds of problems, and I’ll leave you to think about what effect that would have on your workplace. This also gets expensive, very quickly. If two meetings are on the same date, the one with higher allowances is likely to win – and if the NGO needs to report on “community engagement” and “participation” at the meeting, they need to offer enough to outbid the other meeting and make sure they have the attendance to put in their progress report to send to New York or Geneva or London.

Which leads into the second problem. Since people are then paid extra to do work for NGOs, if an employer wants to keep people around the office doing their job, they sometimes have to provide extra incentives. Your job description might include data entry, but to get you to actually do this, you might ask for an receive an allowance – to compensate, since you aren’t attending something else where you could get an allowance, or since its particularly dull work, or since an NGO paid you an allowance to do data entry last week, or … And suddenly, a whole system is running off extra payments. And it needs to, for NGO work and government work and all other work to happen.

It’s maddening.

So what is the way out? I wish I had a magic wand. If government and all NGOs stopped giving allowances, that would be the first step. Or switched to a system of absolute bare minimum compensation for costs incurred to attend a meeting. Lunch doesn’t cost 2,000 MWK, so don’t pay that as an allowance. Anyone can buy themselves quite a nice lunch for 500 MWK, so that can be the lunch allowance. Travel and accommodation allowances can be similarly adjusted. Then, to compensate for the low salaries people will be left with sans allowances, the extra cash from the NGOs can be put into a fund that pushes up the salaries a bit and keeps the whole system moving.

Sadly, I don’t have a magic wand (or the teleporter and time machine I’m also trying to figure out), so I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does. But we’re trying, and in the meantime trying to make the best of a bad situation and mitigate the awfulness and not contribute to making it worse and even more entrenched.

A meeting we managed to run and have attendance at without allowances. Much easier said than done, and to be determined whether it will be repeatable.

EWB is in the final days of it’s annual peer-to-peer fundraising campaign! I am really grateful to those wonderful folks who have helped me reach my goal of $1000 for EWB’s work. Its not too late though, if you would like to learn more or make a donation check out the links in the menu on the right side of the page.

A few weeks ago, I was home in Ntcheu on a weekend just after my host family had decided that the rainy season had indeed started, and it was time to plant their fields. So I asked to tag along and “help” with planting. (Most of what I do around the house gets quotation marks.)

The garden (more of a field) is about 3km down the road from the house. Other family members live right beside the fields, but the ever-extending family had outgrown this first cluster of houses, and now I stay with a set of grandparents and 4 sets of parents closer to town. Going to the garden always starts very early in the morning, even by Malawian standards. I was told to be ready to go at 5:00am, meaning I had to wake up at 4:30 to be even semi-human and able to make small talk other than caveman speech by 5:00.

Some of you will be happy to hear about how the crops are planted. Four different plants are grown in one plot. Here’s a text diagram (except repeat the middle portion between cassava columns half a dozen times).

Do you recognize it? The middle portions are sometimes called the “Three Sisters” for their complimentary qualities – corn gives beans a stalk to grow up, beans add nitrogen to the soil, and pumpkin leaves provide groundcover to keep weeds down.

A different field, but it sort of shows the rows and how they hold water. More impressive when it's wrapping around hills and valleys. The corn you see here would now reach past your knees. This was a rainy day in Phalombe when my minibus broke down briefly.

Planting is much easier than hoeing (which I “helped” with in October). I was told to drop 4 corn kernels in shallow holes about 2 feet apart. The grandmother followed behind, dropping in two beans and covering the hole.

While I wandered the rows (make a small hole, count to 4, aim, drop, step. make a small hole, count to 4, aim, drop, step.), my thoughts also started to wander. I was thinking about the other gardening I’ve done, particularly one summer in Fredericton, and how much fun that was partly because it was so experimental and it didn’t really matter if nothing grew. That wasn’t the case here at all – this harvest will literally determine how much food my host family has to eat in the coming year. This isn’t a cash crop, it is sustenance. What if it doesn’t grow? What if I was doing it wrong – if the holes were too deep, or too shallow? The soil too loose or too packed? I started keeping an eye on the grandmother – did she look worried? Was she thinking about how important this harvest would be in a couple months? But she seemed as calm as ever, chatting and kicking at dead grass clumps.

Then I thought about driving. Anytime I am in control of a car, my every move and every decision counts. If I mess up – if I steer too far, if I don’t see a moose walk out, if my foot twitches at the wrong moment – I just might injure or kill someone or myself. That metal box is much less protective than it seems while I cruise almost silently at 100km/hr on a highway with the radio humming and a friend in the next seat. But as much as I know this intellectually, I can’t think like that while driving. I do my best to pay attention and make smart decisions and be careful, but I can’t think about how any other car on the road might smash into me, that a tire might explode, or whether my breaks could give out. I would be paralyzed with worry. Maybe it’s the same with planting what you need to survive. Hold the consequences in the back of your mind, and get on with what you’re doing.

I was in in the middle of moving house from Ntcheu to Lilongwe, but decided it might be (a) nice, (b) interesting, and (c) appreciated if I spent Christmas with the family who has hosted me for the past 5 months. And it was all of the above.

Christmas in Ntcheu, with these folks, and ninja poses

I tried to ask a couple of times before the 25th about whether and how the family celebrated Christmas, but didn’t get a straight answer (“Of course we should celebrate, since we are children of Jesus” and “By Christmas it should be raining” were among the answers I got), so I didn’t have much of an idea about what to expect. It ended up being a pretty quiet and normal day, my hosts didn’t go to church, but they did have chicken for supper. I decided to make “Canadian Christmas cake” – a term I applied very liberally, and managed to cook something approximating an apple crumble (with mangoes, which are very cheap, replacing apples, which are very expensive) in one pot over an open fire. It was ready in time for dessert, but was deemed more appropriate as breakfast food and so saved until the next morning. When it was still delicious.

On Boxing Day, I boarded a minibus and eventually made it to the beach of Cape MacLear, Mangochi District, on Lake Malawi, where I spent a couple days swimming and kayaking and generally relaxing – a lovely break, with old friends, new friends, friendly acquaintances, sand, blue fish, butter fish, otters, hammocks, and sunshine. I keep saying it, but Malawi is a gorgeous and diverse country – if you’re ever in the neighbourhood, you should really detour to visit it. And me.

Hard not to be happy on the beach of Lake Malawi - there's Tessa!

From the lake, I moved on to Lilongwe and started transitioning back to work-mode, with the ever important interruption of New Years, which I spent at a bar in town with good friends and bad music.

I can’t say it felt like Christmas, or New Years, since I associate both of those with winter… neither the 25 degrees and rain in Lilongwe, 30 degrees and sun on the lake, or 25 degrees and hoping for rain in Ntcheu, match up with the holiday season in my head. But I had some really sweet and thoughtful and awesome messages from friends in Canada over the holidays – late night (or 3am is technically early morning) skype calls, text messages, blog comments, phone calls, and chatty emails were perfect for the moments when the realization of being so freaking far away from home and family did catch up with me.

Christmas in Ntcheu also marked my moving out… as of now, I’m based in Lilongwe, and will be working with some national public servants to map out financing of water and sanitation (donor money and semi-decentralized systems makes this much more confusing than it should be), and bouncing around to different districts as well. More on that to come later (since I’m still figuring it out myself!).

Happy New Year friends!

PS – there are just a few days left in EWB’s fundraising campaign! I am very grateful to all of you who helped me reach my goal of $1000 in support of our work, but if you missed it and still want to contribute, or just want to take a look and see what I keep blabbering on about, you are very welcome to do so! Check out https://perspectives.ewb.ca/kristinanilsson , and if you can make a donation, I can personally guarantee it goes to support a lot of really good and challenging work.

(This is part 2 in an ongoing series about money. You can read part 1 here)

At current exchange rates, $1 equals about 160 MWK (Malawi Kwatcha), which will buy you a loaf of bread, a bottle of beer, four eggs, two samosas, eight mandasi (unsweetened donuts), a long trip on a bike taxi, a short trip on a minibus, 16 bags of water or sachets of gin, or 32 homemade freezes.

It won’t buy you fuel.

A filling station with no queue is a filling station with no fuel. This one is just outside of Blantyre. The Petroda in Ntcheu hasn't had fuel in the 5 months I've been watching it.

Fuel, both petrol and diesel, are in short supply in Malawi. Like I used to count train cars, I now count cars in fuel cues, and reaching 100 isn’t uncommon – rumours of which filling stations might get a fuel delivery bring cars, trucks, minibuses, and people with fuel cans to line ups that last overnight, or even for days, in the hopes of buying some of the precious energy. In November, fuel prices jumped more than 30%, and are now well over $2 per litre. Legally. There is also a thriving black market for fuel: the scarcity means that people are willing to pay extremely high prices to get the fuel they need – I’ve heard of prices as high as 1000 MWK per litre, equal to about $6.25. Some of this fuel is smuggled over from Mozambique, and some is bought from legal sources and then stored for resale once the legal fuel runs out again. Sometimes vendors mix it with paraffin, cooking oil, or water to stretch their sales a bit.

The problem is forex, or foreign exchange. It is generally felt that, despite a 10% devaluation of the kwatcha in August, the currency is overvalued, and so the government has a hard time getting enough foreign currency to import fuel. The result is the high fuel prices, which in turn raise the prices on all other commodities (since most products travel at some point before sale, or need inputs that have to travel). And also contributes to disrupted power supply (backup generators used by some offices, factories and hospitals to mitigate the regular blackouts need fuel to run), time off work while people sit in fuel queues, skyrocketing bus ticket prices, and general stress and annoyance.

Sidenote 1: The insanely high fuel prices here are squashing my belief that people will use less oil if it is made more expensive. I used to think more taxes on gas would help reduce consumption, but the high sticker price in Malawi doesn’t seem to have that effect.

Sidenote 2: It’s that time of year when EWB is raising funds to continue its work in Canada and Africa. If you’re able to make a small donation to support EWB and my work with the Malawi Water and Sanitation team, I would really appreciate it! For extra fun, calculate your donation in terms of kwatcha value above – $5 worth of freezes would buy out the supply at the Ntcheu market on a Thursday.