The Face of a Dollar a Day

Since I was little, Sally Struthers has been asking us to sponsor a child somewhere in the world who is living on less than a dollar a day. I’ve been working in Africa for the better part of the last ten years and have become accustomed to what I see in the village -where most African still live- that once made me stop and think. Six year olds taking care of two-year olds. Kids running around with swollen bellies full of parasites and orange-tinged hair – a sure sign of malnutrition.

In the countryside after the rains, the fields are full of green green crops and overripe mangoes lie rotting on the ground, and I can’t help but wonder how people here can be so poor. The soil is volcanic and fertile. But it’s malaria season, flooding has brought cholera to the surface, and bridges to health centers have washed away only to be rebuilt after an interminable period of time.

Here in Malawi, 133 of every 1000 children born dies before they turn 5. Amazingly, this figure is down from 189 deaths in 2000. Forty-six percent of children are stunted from malnutrition, and only 64% make it through enough school to considered be literate. Over half of Malawians live on less than a dollar a day.

I was in the bush last weekend, face to face with a young man speaking decent English with a good head on his shoulders. He has 2 small children, his wife has passed away. His salary comes out to a bit over a dollar a day, making him just slightly better off than many others in the village. But averaged across his small family of 3, he and his little boy and girl are each living on about 35 cents a day. Even if his kids don’t go to bed hungry, any extra cost -a minibus ride to the health center, a few secondhand clothes- will seriously set them back.

Progress is made slowly, but today out of each thousand born, 56 more children than at the beginning of the decade make it to their 5th birthday. Each step, however small a stride in keeping those most vulnerable alive, is bringing us closer to a world in which a child can grow up to earn more than a dollar a day.

10 Things You Should Know Before Coming to Africa

I recently discovered that a friend of mine who’s never been to Africa before will be moving to Malawi with the Peace Corps in a couple of months. In honor of his impending arrival, I give you The Basics: 10 Things You Should Know Before Coming to Africa.

10. There are children everywhere: in the village playing, in the city begging, in the river washing (a few of them are in school, too).

9. There are people everywhere. People live life  outside from cooking and washing to socializing and working. And if you’re over 18 and still alone in the world, they want to know why you’re not married/reproducing yet.

8. Not matter how far in the bush you are, you can always find a cold beer. And 5 guys waiting for you to buy them one too.

7. The following items are considered legitimate supplies for vehicle repair: twigs, cardboard, tree sap.

6. Toilet paper in public restrooms is about as scarce as Democrats in the current administration.

5. The phrase ‘time is money‘ has no meaning. Be prepared to spend most of your time waiting for a bus/your lunch/your bill/a meeting/change. Note: change will never come. If you overpay for something, that’s your problem. The overage will be consumed by the business.

4. Never assume anything. This includes but is not limited to ‘yes’ meaning ‘yes’, ‘no’ meaning ‘no’, ‘I understand’ meaning ‘I have processed what you said and will act upon it’, a right indicator meaning a right turn, a business being open during regular hours, or a confirmed reservation meaning your hotel room/restaurant table/plane seat will still be there when you arrive.

3. Traffic laws are optional. (What’s the difference between a drunk driver and a sober one? Only the drunk driver goes straight, the sober one goes around the potholes.)

2. Electricity is optional. It generally goes out when you’re about to cook dinner. It will take between 10 minutes and 3 days to come back on and will blow out your speakers with a power surge when it does. (What did Africans do for light before candles? They had electricity!)

and…

1. Just when you think you finally have her figured out, Africa turns around and bites you in the ass. But hell, I still wouldn’t live anywhere else — for now.

The African Gasket

On our way back from the Lake of Stars music festival last weekend, we passed a friend’s broken down pickup by the side of the road. Having already made ample use of jumper cables at the aid of those with less energetic car batteries, we stopped in the name of good karma.

We picked up a local mechanic in a nearby town and brought him back to the truck to take a look. Within a couple of seconds, the mechanic found a leaking gasket and set about the repair by African gasket. A notebook cover was converted to two snug-fitting nuts on either side of the faulty gasket and got the engine running tout de suite.

When the truck’s owner asked if the replaced gasket would carry him 3+ hours back to Lilongwe, the mechanic asked “Today?”

By the time we were loaded back into our car and getting back into the road, our friend’s engine had already died again. We left him in good hands and well on the way to another African gasket.

Getting by in Africa is all about appropriate technology — although the African gasket wasn’t featured in the exhibit I saw over the summer at New York on Design for the Other 90%. I can’t imagine why not.

Village in a city

Being a New Yorker and having spent the last two years in a city so large, it was of indeterminable size (best guess on Kinshasa: somewhere between 6 and 10 million), life in Lilongwe is dramatically different. For starters, if you didn’t know where City Centre was, you wouldn’t know you’d driven straight through the middle of it.

Lilongwe, despite only having about 600,000 residents, is about as sprawling as African capitals get in the sheer sense of distances between anything of significance. To get to a friend’s house in an adjacent neighbourhood, one more or less has to drive through the bush.

Case 1: Just the other night on the way home to Area 43 from Area 10 (they are next to each other and I’ll come back to this), I saw a snake in the road. For those of you who may imagine Africa to be one endless National Geographic special, this may not seem strange. But from personal experience, I’m not used to seeing safari-life 500 meters from my house - although I’m told it’s not uncommon to see hyenas in residential areas.

Case 2. When I asked my gardener where he lived, he said Kauma Village. Oh, I thought, he must commute into town everyday. But no, his village is in one of the ‘Areas’ a few away from mine.

Case 3. Driving at night in Lilongwe is something akin to trying to tie your shoes while blind-folded. There are no streetlights to be found other than the occasional floodlight outside someone’s front gate, even on major thoroughfares. When driving at night, there are two scenarios: fumble your way through total darkness, your headlights like a dying flashlight when faced with the depth of the African night or be blinded by the brights of an oncoming vehicle and pray that your instincts guide you forward, avoiding both oncoming collision and veering off the road entirely.

Which brings me to the key question about Lilongwe: Why are we talking about ‘Areas’ and why is #10 next to #43? Blantyre, Malawi’s longer-established economic capitol about 4 or so hours to Lilongwe’s south has neighbourhoods with proper names. Of course, Blantyre is said to have lots that Lilongwe doesn’t: dance clubs, more and better restaurants, and of course, the illustrious Game, which I first came to know and love when living in Windhoek, Namibia. I have discovered that Game, a South African chain fairly similar to Target (a true resemblance, unlike the last superstore comparison I drew), is what Lilongweans, both expat and native, truly pine for. Any trip to Blantyre involves multiples requests for everything from a bottle of Pantene shampoo to a box fan.

But back to Lilongwe. Lilongwe was made Malawi’s capital in 1974 under the country’s first president, Dr Hastings Banda. My understanding is that the Areas are numbered in the order in which they were developed, rather than geographically. Dr Banda, whom I’ll no doubt come back to at some point, apparently demanded the city be as spread out as possible with winding roads instead of a grid. The idea behind such design was to make public gatherings (read uprising and protests) to be as difficult as possible to organise amongst the people. Why Dr Banda would be concerned about crowd control is a story for another day.