Life in Lilongwe

I've add some pics from the trip across Zambia on my Flickr site. If you haven't seen them, yet you can find them here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27531054@N03/

Also, Cynthia gave me the good idea of creating a Google map of my little life in Lilongwe. You can find that here: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&t=h&msa=0&ll=-13.960557,33.80373&spn=0.073633,0.105743&z=13&msid=113365185812763974101.00044f873997a4090858a

Click on some of the tabs to get their descriptions. You can zoom in a bunch and actually see the building. You'll see the USAID office building where I work is a weird curved building. The other fun thing to note are the trails through brush around the buildings. The thing you notice most about Malawi is how much everyone walks. This is especially true in the morning and late afternoon hours when everyone is either walking to or from work. They walk so much that all of the grassy areas have well-defined trails that look as though they've been there for centures. Which they probably have.

So I thought I'd use this blog space to explain to folks back home why I'm here and what I'm doing. As you could probably guess, Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world. But really I think ranking poor countries is a dumb, useless thing to do. They're poor. Do you really need to compare who's the poorest of them all? I mean, does it really matter that one country's citizens make about $300 a year and another country's citizens make about $500? The point is they're all poor. So I won't say that Malawi is less developed than other areas. What I will say, though, is that Malawi has some big problems they need to overcome. Among those are a large HIV positve rate (about 15% of the population), high Malaria rates (One of the security guards at my house just took his 10 month old daughter to the hospital for Malaria. Thankfully she is doing better), tuberculosis, and poor economic opportunities.

The US government, along with other donors such as the UK, the EU, the UN, and China, are all working to improve life for ordinary Malawians. About 75% of the $100 million the US spends here goes into the health and education sector. The rest goes towards agriculture mostly. One of the things I've been asked to do within all of that is help come up with success stories for USAID projects. It's pretty helpful for me because it allows me to get in and see all of the projects being done. Soon I'll make trips out to the field to interview beneficiaries and get their side of the story.

Also, I'm getting to do some analysis on effective ways to improve the Justice sector here and see how it can be improved. I got to meet the Solicitor General at a meeting this week where they were discussing Judicial reforms.

My day gets started around 7:30 and finishes around 5:00. This allows us to take half of Friday off, which I used today to play golf with some coworkers. Golf if cheap enough here for us to have a caddy, which I've never had. My caddy was named Lewis and was from the central region of Lilongwe. As I talked to Lewis it was interesting to hear his perspective on politics. The political parties in Malawi are all based on what region you're from. The former dictator of Malawi, Hastings Banda, was from the Central region. When I asked Lewis about Banda, he quickly corrected me: "Do you mean Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda?". Oh yeah, that's the one I meant. Of course he thought Banda was great and all of the problems in Malawi have come from the people who replaced him. People from the other regions think that Banda was a brutal dictator that ruled his country with an iron fist. Stories of Banda's strong rule are everywhere. He banned the book "Africa on a Shoestring" because it criticized his regime. He banned Malawian flags from being displayed for no apparent reason. And he changed his official title to President for Life Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda. Everyone thought that he would die in office. Instead he got kicked out at the ripe old age of 94 and ended up living to 101. Life is good when you're a dictator in Africa. They still celebrate Banda Day here in Malawi, and there's a huge Mausuleum/Monument dedicated to the man. I mean Jefferson Monument-sized monument.

I get to interact with Americans and Malawian in my office. Most of the people in the office are Malawian. In my two meetings today, 7 of 10 in one meeting and 8 of 12 in another meeting were Malawian. So while I'm not exactly living with Malawians, I get to have a somewhat filtered perspective on life in Malawi from my co-workers. In my mind I think that I need to see poor people in order to get to the "real" Malawi. But I think that's unfair to Malawi. I wonder if it's because of my Western bias that I think that the "real" Malawi has to be poor. As if the folks I'm working with are somewhat less African or less Malawian because they've got steady jobs and aren't pushing bananas or cell phone minutes on me on the street. The truth is that it's all Africa. It's all Malawi. Some are doing better than others, and hopefully in the future all Malawians will have the chance to have such jobs if they so choose.

So that's a little on my work here in Malawi. The other aspect is that there's really a tight ex-pat community here that really tries to fill up social calendars. I didn't spend a single evening at home this week until now because I've been invited to so many events. Not to brag, but one of the events was a poker night with my bosses, the heads of the USAID mission, where I ended up walking away with most of their money. I'm not sure if this was the best way to start off my internship here, but as a Texan I felt obliged to teach these northerner a lesson. God Bless Texas.

This weekend I'm heading off to a sailing club and will visit one of the Malawian churches for some cultural exchange. Next weekend I hope to hit Lake Malawi which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful places in Africa. I'll be sure to snap lots of pictures.