Out of Africa

A year has gone by so fast. The time has come for me to write my final post and sign off from Malawi. I’m set to fly home on Thursday back to the rain and cold, roast lamb dinners, exotic caffeinated drinks and of course my family and partner.

Through trips to the lake, climbing mount Mulanje, braving the voyage to Likoma and hopefully improving the professional lives of some of my local colleagues Malawi has left its mark. There will be many people and places that I miss and I have made some really great new friends that I’m sure to keep in touch with back home.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my time in Malawi and would recommend the experience to anyone, work has been incredibly frustrating at times and there have been moments where I’ve missed home very much but Malawi is a truly beautiful country, the people are very welcoming and I can’t help but feel sad for the hard lives they face every day.

Malawi has so much unrealised potential in agriculture, tourism and manufacturing; if only they could stand on their own without donors and sweep aside the corruption that plagues institutions then maybe they could begin to tap it and truly flourish.

Right now donors are tackling the symptoms of a dysfunctional country; training nurses, building schools. If instead they focused on the fundamentals of building a stable economy so that Malawians could make money, start paying taxes and ultimately survive without the need for foreign aid then maybe Malawi could begin to unlock its full potential.

Donors focus on the projects they do partly because they are easy to sell to you as individuals; buy a mosquito net for a child, send a child to school, help prevent HIV. These sorts of projects look great on posters and provoke the generosity of the general public. It’s much trickier for them to get you excited about helping a Malawian start their own business or facilitate the creation of co-operatives and regulatory bodies.

My message to you as individuals would be to try and look at the bigger picture, as emotive as the symptoms can be try and think about what will help countries like Malawi in the longer term. Support micro financing projects and policy level interventions over quick fixes and bandaid solutions.    

Above all, come to Malawi! The easiest (and most enjoyable) way you can help is by visiting yourself, spend money in the local economy and enjoy all the wonderful sights and activities that Africa has to offer. Malawi is a very safe country, easy to navigate and has everything from relaxing lakeshore beaches to soaring mountain ranges and fascinating safari reserves.

Thank you for all your support, I hope you have enjoyed reading my blog as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it and I hope to see all of you very soon! 

How to Kill a Chicken

Before we left Africa, Nat and I decided we really should learn how to kill a Chicken. We enlisted the services of Frank (Nat's gardener) to help us out and produced this short video...

The Break In

A few weeks ago I was woken up by Judy ringing my mobile phone.

“Come to the door quick! I think there’s been a robbery!”

I stumbled out of bed a little bemused and staggered to the front door. I opened the door to realise that I was standing in front of the entire compound wearing nothing but my underpants; it suddenly felt like being in a scene from a movie where the angry villagers go and confront their demon with pitch forks, with Judy leading the pack.

“I think you have been robbed Oli, you’re back window is open”

I turned round to see that sure enough my sitting room window was swinging open, my coffee table dragged to the window ledge and its contents removed.

It had been a very stormy night and the noise of the rain had kept me up most of the time, it also seems that it had been the perfect cover for someone to jimmy my window and steal my laptop. Ironically I’d actually got up at several points in the night to check my front door believing someone was trying to break in, there had been several other robberies in the area and in some cases the burglars had cut through the bars at the front door and held people at knife point. I now suddenly felt very lucky that making off with my belongings had been so easy for them.

We walked to the back of my house and discovered the true ingenuity of our thieves. Lying on the ground was a long stick with a hook on the end and over the wall of the compound hung a makeshift rope ladder.

Judy and I called the police to report the incident and in true Malawian style they said they would be happy to attend the scene if we’d be so kind as to go and pick them up from the station. It was still very early so we had some time to do our own investigation before collecting CID.

Our neighbours immediately jumped on the fact that there were no footprints by the rope ladder and that it couldn’t support a man’s weight.

“Inside job! Arrest the guards!”

I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions, justice is pretty rough shot in Malawi and I’d hate to be responsible for sending the wrong person to one of their prisons. That said the more they talked the more implausible an “over the wall” attack seemed.

Assuming that the police would do very little and telling them was really just a formality Judy and I were not taking the situation all that seriously; we started posing for photographs with the long stick they had used and testing the rope ladder to see if it would break under our weight.

9am came and we set off to pick up the police. Melvin and his partner were waiting for us when we arrived and came straight back. To our horror he then immediately set about dusting for fingerprints, it would be highly embarrassing if we suddenly became implicated in our own robbery! Predictably however the police never took and exclusion prints from us so we were saved that awkward conversation.

In the end Melvin was fairly convinced that the neighbours were right and that it was most likely the guards to blame so we all bungled back into Judy’s car, perps and all and headed back to the police station.

I haven’t heard anything from the police since and don’t suppose I will. I only hope the guards they arrested don’t become wrongfully imprisoned and end up on remand for years. Another surreal Malawian experience…