My first week in Malawi was so full and colorful. Two American women from our project picked me up in a tiny white minibus with a Malawian driver Weison, from the Lilongwe airport and took me to the Kayesa Inn in Mchinji district, the first region where the survey is being implemented. Kim is a politics student (or post-doc?) who I think is studying whether majority vs. minority status of different ethnic groups in a country affects their inclination to collaborate politically. 
She has a Fulbright to stay through January, and is here with her adorable and intelligent 14-month-old daughter Kezia and her husband Josh, a philosophy grad student whom she met on the previous survey round – he was here with an NGO building a library. Jessie (pictured at left in Kayesa Inn) is an outgoing and very sassy sociology student at the University of Florida who is managing the Voluntary Counseling and Testing (VCT) survey team – which means she oversees the Malawian supervisors who manage the Malawian counselors who administer HIV tests in the field. On the drive to Kayesa, I drank in the Malawian countryside, which now in the dry season has orange dusty clay earth, not much grass, trees shaped completely differently from American trees –banana trees, mango, palm, and baobab trees, and one particular kind of tall tree with very large round leaves and huge orange blossoms on top that I swore I’d seen in Nepal and India. It is winter here since we’re south of the equator; here winter means it’s light from 5:30 a.m. till 6 p.m., never rains, and is sunny and 70s – 80s during the day, but 50s or even 40s at night. The mornings are lovely with pink and pale yellow light, birds singing, roosters crowing, and quiet morning chores like scrubbing laundry and hanging it out to dry.
We are here implementing the Malawi Longitudinal Survey of Families and Health, compiling a large database of health (including HIV status), economic, social and demographic information for a large random sample of Malawians. I have only a general sense of how our various staff fit together, but I am involved with the data team, a group of Malawians trained to do data entry in Access and Excel, and a few grad students who are managing them and coordinating with the other teams. Our team is responsible for logging and keeping track of quantitative parts of the survey, managing databases,
checking for discrepancies, and sending interviewers back into the field (when possible) to resolve them. When I arrived, several weeks after fieldwork started, the team was being managed by a warm and very energetic Chilean demography student from Penn, Rubin, and his lovely Chilean wife Marcela (in photo at left). Rubin created a huge Access database with 9 sub-databases and all our work revolves around that; he named it “Galu”, which means “dog” in Chichewa. He is bursting with ideas for how to make our whole process more efficient and reduce errors, and after he and Marcela depart in 3 weeks I don’t see how I’ll possibly match his enthusiasm when I will (most likely) take over managing the project. He is a great manager and is including me as a co-manager, which is fantastic (and also a sign of a good manager). We students on the project can take on various roles: some spend a good deal of time with their own research, others spend all their time managing survey implementation, training and supervising Malawians. Our roles can also evolve during our stay. I am happy to be in this role, supervising Malawians, because I feel that cross-cultural management is extremely delicate, interesting, challenging, and important - basically I consider the way we manage and treat our staff to be a particular kind of global development work. And I just don’t feel like I’m “here” unless I have a fair amount of interaction with Malawians. One day at lunch I took the little white minibus with our staff into the boma (the market) instead of dining with the other grad students into the hotel because I had to exchange an electric water kettle (which I bought to purify water) that wasn’t working. There in the bus, talking and laughing with them, I felt I was finally “here”. They were so playful and inclusive, and when I described my errand they volunteered the biggest, tallest guy, Moses, to be my “bouncer”, as they called it. He went in with me, and the shopkeeper exchanged my kettle very politely, no questions asked.
One nice thing about Kayesa Inn is that all the data team stayed there together, along with some graduate students and post-docs on the qualitative team. We ate dinner together in the evening, which was a nice way to get to know our staff. The food was really good while I was there – always rice and nsima (porridge made from maize which is the Malawian staple), with some chicken or goat meat, sautéed greens, a salty tomato sauce that’s used to flavor the nsima, and/or one or more of the following: boiled eggs, French fries, fried eggplant, cooked beans, or pumpkin leaves, which were my favorite in Nepal but here are cooked differently – with a creamy peanut sauce instead of potatoes. Everyone told me that the food had improved quite a lot when Susan arrived! Susan Watkins is the demography professor who is the brains behind this whole thing – who started the project in 1998 and is one of the PIs on the grant, along with 2 economists. I was lucky to overlap with her and Ann Swidler, a sociology professor from Berkeley, during my first week in Malawi. Susan and Ann would join us for meals and tea, and anything anyone said around Susan was fair game for the most rigorous intellectual criticism or professional development advice.
For example, Susan told me she’s on a campaign to get her female graduate students not to speak in questions (“I am studying statistics? I am doing social network research?”) This style of hers was completely invigorating (though sometimes a little embarrassing), and I appreciated that she genuinely cared a lot about everyone’s intellectual development – including our Malawian staff. Ann had a different style: she was less openly critical but if you sat down next to her, she’d take a subject and just start talking, about all sorts of intriguing stuff – some academic and some personal and some mundane, and ramble on and around and hit on all different subjects and by the end of the meal she would have downloaded a bunch of articles onto your flash drive – from independent Pentecostal churches in Malawi to a study of sexual networks on Likoma island to randomized comparison studies of HIV prevention campaigns. Ann and Susan were a fixture at a particular table by a sunny window in the hotel’s dining room, where they’d spend the day typing on their laptops and meeting with grad students, throwing out all sorts of creative research ideas, Susan with a cigarette in hand and Ann working on her 3 cups of black tea. (Photo above left shows, from left to right, Kim - a student of Susan's who's been in Malawi over a year, Susan, Ann, and the Kim who picked me up, in their sunny window.) Ann and Susan both departed for a conference the day before I left Mchinji, and I was sad to see them go. They provided a lot of intellectual leadership and people responded to it.
Our team of Malawian data staff is a diverse and hardworking group; some are shown in the photo below. Chifuniro is from Likoma Island, an island in Lake Malawi with population 12,000. He is vegetarian, runs an hour a day, wants to be an accountant, and has
a stunningly beautiful girlfriend, Efi, who joined us for lunch one day and was too shy to answer some of Susan’s probing questions. He has an accounting certificate but needs a master’s for a good job, and may not be able to afford the education. I asked where he met Efi, and he said they attended the same school. “You were classmates?” I asked. “No, I finished before she did,” he said, “but I spotted her.” The Malawians speak English in an old-fashioned British style which they picked up during British colonization. Gift (love that name!) and Leeness are engaged to each other; they met while working on a previous round of the survey. Another of our staff, Austin, has endured great hardship in his life: he lost his mother at the age of 3, and his father at the age of 16. He has since lost all his siblings (2 brothers and 1 sister) – most recently his brother who left him 4 orphans to care for. When he was a teenager, a Peace Corps Volunteer in his village saw how intelligent he was and paid his school fees so he could finish high school. He is involved with a lot of community-based organizations (CBOs), which are voluntary service organizations founded and supported by the community (unlike NGOs whose support is usually external to the community they serve). He is cheerful when I talk to him at meals, and on our team he works with integrity and concentration. I asked how he does it – how could he be happy in spite of all that hardship. And he responded that his Peace Corps friend once told him that although he’d experienced a lot of hardship, it would do himself no good to complain; instead he should try to be happy with the present moment and remember that the future could be better. He felt pretty bad when he heard those words but went home and reflected on it and decided that she was right! “Why not appreciate this day,” he said to me, smiling, “those other things are in the past! The future can bring something different!” The extent to which he’s been able to integrate this philosophy seems to help him a lot, but this does not mean that his grief is gone. When he described the CBOs he’s involved with to me, he said they all relate to AIDS prevention and treatment, and do a lot of work with AIDS orphans. “Sometimes when I see those orphans, I feel so sad,” he said, his voice trailing off, and I felt very sad sitting there with him. Then he abruptly got up, said “Thank you, have a good night,” and quickly exited the room.
On our last night in Mchinji we were all sitting around after dinner, and Rubin asked Agness to sing – he noticed that while she does her data entry she’s always unconsciously harmonizing to whatever African gospel music is playing on the radio. She showed us all how to clap along, a quick light rhythm, and when she opened her mouth, I was transported! How can I possibly describe it? I felt I’d transcended this world of pain and misery. And when all the others effortlessly joined in harmonizing her, I was transported even farther away, to some perfect place and tears were in my eyes. There was no sense of time, and everything felt resolved.
When she finished, I asked what the meaning was of the song. She said the Chichewa words meant, “There is no person like Jesus.” These people, they know what life is about.
She has a Fulbright to stay through January, and is here with her adorable and intelligent 14-month-old daughter Kezia and her husband Josh, a philosophy grad student whom she met on the previous survey round – he was here with an NGO building a library. Jessie (pictured at left in Kayesa Inn) is an outgoing and very sassy sociology student at the University of Florida who is managing the Voluntary Counseling and Testing (VCT) survey team – which means she oversees the Malawian supervisors who manage the Malawian counselors who administer HIV tests in the field. On the drive to Kayesa, I drank in the Malawian countryside, which now in the dry season has orange dusty clay earth, not much grass, trees shaped completely differently from American trees –banana trees, mango, palm, and baobab trees, and one particular kind of tall tree with very large round leaves and huge orange blossoms on top that I swore I’d seen in Nepal and India. It is winter here since we’re south of the equator; here winter means it’s light from 5:30 a.m. till 6 p.m., never rains, and is sunny and 70s – 80s during the day, but 50s or even 40s at night. The mornings are lovely with pink and pale yellow light, birds singing, roosters crowing, and quiet morning chores like scrubbing laundry and hanging it out to dry.We are here implementing the Malawi Longitudinal Survey of Families and Health, compiling a large database of health (including HIV status), economic, social and demographic information for a large random sample of Malawians. I have only a general sense of how our various staff fit together, but I am involved with the data team, a group of Malawians trained to do data entry in Access and Excel, and a few grad students who are managing them and coordinating with the other teams. Our team is responsible for logging and keeping track of quantitative parts of the survey, managing databases,
checking for discrepancies, and sending interviewers back into the field (when possible) to resolve them. When I arrived, several weeks after fieldwork started, the team was being managed by a warm and very energetic Chilean demography student from Penn, Rubin, and his lovely Chilean wife Marcela (in photo at left). Rubin created a huge Access database with 9 sub-databases and all our work revolves around that; he named it “Galu”, which means “dog” in Chichewa. He is bursting with ideas for how to make our whole process more efficient and reduce errors, and after he and Marcela depart in 3 weeks I don’t see how I’ll possibly match his enthusiasm when I will (most likely) take over managing the project. He is a great manager and is including me as a co-manager, which is fantastic (and also a sign of a good manager). We students on the project can take on various roles: some spend a good deal of time with their own research, others spend all their time managing survey implementation, training and supervising Malawians. Our roles can also evolve during our stay. I am happy to be in this role, supervising Malawians, because I feel that cross-cultural management is extremely delicate, interesting, challenging, and important - basically I consider the way we manage and treat our staff to be a particular kind of global development work. And I just don’t feel like I’m “here” unless I have a fair amount of interaction with Malawians. One day at lunch I took the little white minibus with our staff into the boma (the market) instead of dining with the other grad students into the hotel because I had to exchange an electric water kettle (which I bought to purify water) that wasn’t working. There in the bus, talking and laughing with them, I felt I was finally “here”. They were so playful and inclusive, and when I described my errand they volunteered the biggest, tallest guy, Moses, to be my “bouncer”, as they called it. He went in with me, and the shopkeeper exchanged my kettle very politely, no questions asked.One nice thing about Kayesa Inn is that all the data team stayed there together, along with some graduate students and post-docs on the qualitative team. We ate dinner together in the evening, which was a nice way to get to know our staff. The food was really good while I was there – always rice and nsima (porridge made from maize which is the Malawian staple), with some chicken or goat meat, sautéed greens, a salty tomato sauce that’s used to flavor the nsima, and/or one or more of the following: boiled eggs, French fries, fried eggplant, cooked beans, or pumpkin leaves, which were my favorite in Nepal but here are cooked differently – with a creamy peanut sauce instead of potatoes. Everyone told me that the food had improved quite a lot when Susan arrived! Susan Watkins is the demography professor who is the brains behind this whole thing – who started the project in 1998 and is one of the PIs on the grant, along with 2 economists. I was lucky to overlap with her and Ann Swidler, a sociology professor from Berkeley, during my first week in Malawi. Susan and Ann would join us for meals and tea, and anything anyone said around Susan was fair game for the most rigorous intellectual criticism or professional development advice.
For example, Susan told me she’s on a campaign to get her female graduate students not to speak in questions (“I am studying statistics? I am doing social network research?”) This style of hers was completely invigorating (though sometimes a little embarrassing), and I appreciated that she genuinely cared a lot about everyone’s intellectual development – including our Malawian staff. Ann had a different style: she was less openly critical but if you sat down next to her, she’d take a subject and just start talking, about all sorts of intriguing stuff – some academic and some personal and some mundane, and ramble on and around and hit on all different subjects and by the end of the meal she would have downloaded a bunch of articles onto your flash drive – from independent Pentecostal churches in Malawi to a study of sexual networks on Likoma island to randomized comparison studies of HIV prevention campaigns. Ann and Susan were a fixture at a particular table by a sunny window in the hotel’s dining room, where they’d spend the day typing on their laptops and meeting with grad students, throwing out all sorts of creative research ideas, Susan with a cigarette in hand and Ann working on her 3 cups of black tea. (Photo above left shows, from left to right, Kim - a student of Susan's who's been in Malawi over a year, Susan, Ann, and the Kim who picked me up, in their sunny window.) Ann and Susan both departed for a conference the day before I left Mchinji, and I was sad to see them go. They provided a lot of intellectual leadership and people responded to it.Our team of Malawian data staff is a diverse and hardworking group; some are shown in the photo below. Chifuniro is from Likoma Island, an island in Lake Malawi with population 12,000. He is vegetarian, runs an hour a day, wants to be an accountant, and has
a stunningly beautiful girlfriend, Efi, who joined us for lunch one day and was too shy to answer some of Susan’s probing questions. He has an accounting certificate but needs a master’s for a good job, and may not be able to afford the education. I asked where he met Efi, and he said they attended the same school. “You were classmates?” I asked. “No, I finished before she did,” he said, “but I spotted her.” The Malawians speak English in an old-fashioned British style which they picked up during British colonization. Gift (love that name!) and Leeness are engaged to each other; they met while working on a previous round of the survey. Another of our staff, Austin, has endured great hardship in his life: he lost his mother at the age of 3, and his father at the age of 16. He has since lost all his siblings (2 brothers and 1 sister) – most recently his brother who left him 4 orphans to care for. When he was a teenager, a Peace Corps Volunteer in his village saw how intelligent he was and paid his school fees so he could finish high school. He is involved with a lot of community-based organizations (CBOs), which are voluntary service organizations founded and supported by the community (unlike NGOs whose support is usually external to the community they serve). He is cheerful when I talk to him at meals, and on our team he works with integrity and concentration. I asked how he does it – how could he be happy in spite of all that hardship. And he responded that his Peace Corps friend once told him that although he’d experienced a lot of hardship, it would do himself no good to complain; instead he should try to be happy with the present moment and remember that the future could be better. He felt pretty bad when he heard those words but went home and reflected on it and decided that she was right! “Why not appreciate this day,” he said to me, smiling, “those other things are in the past! The future can bring something different!” The extent to which he’s been able to integrate this philosophy seems to help him a lot, but this does not mean that his grief is gone. When he described the CBOs he’s involved with to me, he said they all relate to AIDS prevention and treatment, and do a lot of work with AIDS orphans. “Sometimes when I see those orphans, I feel so sad,” he said, his voice trailing off, and I felt very sad sitting there with him. Then he abruptly got up, said “Thank you, have a good night,” and quickly exited the room.On our last night in Mchinji we were all sitting around after dinner, and Rubin asked Agness to sing – he noticed that while she does her data entry she’s always unconsciously harmonizing to whatever African gospel music is playing on the radio. She showed us all how to clap along, a quick light rhythm, and when she opened her mouth, I was transported! How can I possibly describe it? I felt I’d transcended this world of pain and misery. And when all the others effortlessly joined in harmonizing her, I was transported even farther away, to some perfect place and tears were in my eyes. There was no sense of time, and everything felt resolved.
When she finished, I asked what the meaning was of the song. She said the Chichewa words meant, “There is no person like Jesus.” These people, they know what life is about.
2 comments:
So many wonderful people you are meeting! Keep up the good work, sounds like a beautiful place.
Hi Gail! Sounds like such an interesting place. You are an excellent writer...making me feel like I am right there with you!
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