"Canadians share in the global consensus that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures"

The 2009 Federal Budget of Canada was released on Tuesday, and was introduced as follows:

"The world is passing through an extraordinary time. Canadians share in the global consensus that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.

Budget 2009 will help Canada to meet the challenges of our times. It aims to protect our country from an immediate economic threat while providing the solutions we need to secure our long-term growth and prosperity."

I am concerned that the 'extraordinary measures' arising from this consensus are so narrowly targeted.

Basically, this article sums up the situation nicely as follows:
"...there are no fresh ideas about updating international trade rules, or how to help the world's one to two billion poorest. It is a domestically-focussed, Canadian macro-economic document, which is appropriate for the times, but breaks little new ground."

While it's true that the budget "meets our international obligations" - you have to be careful to define those obligations as to our G-20 colleagues and to other industrialized nations. The budget is quite clear on that point, and quite silent on our whatever obligations we may have outstanding to the other 60% or so of the world's population.

While I don't disagree that the Canadian government owes its citizens a good-faith effort to avert the potential impact of this recession domestically (and that such measures may indirectly benefit the entire global economy), I worry that we are turning our focus inward at the precise moment when we need most to be paying attention to the long-term, global consequences of the actions we take in the short-term to stave off disaster.

While it's true that "extraordinary times" are widely accepted to be "dangerous and uncertain times" in this case, I think that they can also be seen as a time of opportunity - with everything that has broken in the last 3 months, we are uniquely positioned to apply innovative solutions to deeply rooted and concerning challenges.

This budget is, I think, a fine example of one of the more tragic dilemmas of Western democracy. Elected by Canadian voters, the Canadian government is accountable to Canadians first and foremost, and so must put the interests of Canada ahead of all other considerations; this looks to be shaping up to be especially true in a post-1990s deficit situation. In extraordinary times, it seems, spending outside of the domestic market can only be justified if it directly benefits Canadian citizens.

I think, Canada, that we can do better than that. In the words of Lester B. Pearson (someone that I think our current leadership could learn a lot from):

"It would be especially tragic if the people who most cherish ideals of peace, who are most anxious for political cooperation on a wider than national scale, made the mistake of underestimating the pace of economic change in our modern world. "

(h/t to Embassy Magazine, the only online publisher currently paying attention to the the global part of the global financial crisis as it's playing out in Canada)

My Head, My Heart And My Hands May Be in Malawi...

...but at least one of my feet is in an all-too-familiar Chamber in the halls of my alma mater...



Have a good weekend.

Obama, Obama, Obama

This needs to be quick as I have real work to do, but the political science nerd in me couldn't let the inauguration of America's 44th President pass by unremarked.

First of all: yes, people the world over (read: in Malawi at least) really were paying attention to the inauguration proceedings.

I haven't seen a Malawian paper yet today, but the weeks leading up to the inauguration have been sprinkled with stories about the newly minted President. As far back as November, American Ambassador Peter Bodde was warning Malawi that Obama's election could mean renewed pressure for democratic reform. A couple of weeks ago, both papers ran stories quoting Bodde quashing any hopes of a Presidential visit in the first 100 days. This editorial in The Daily Times on Obama's oratory style was a really interesting read last week.

Anyway, a number of people in the office spent last night watching the inauguration in various T.V.-equipped locales around Nkhamenya (the speech wrapped up around 7:30 p.m. local time). One fellow from work showed up this morning with a digital video recording of the address; another has already printed off a transcript of the speech and has half-jokingly vowed to "imprint the words on his heart." Someone also keeps wandering through the office singing "Obama.Obama.Obama" in a rising chant. The whole event is also a hot topic of conversation... in particular people are (unsurprisingly) interested in Obama's hints at foreign policy and what the talking heads on PressTV and other outlets have to say about it.

For my part, I stayed late at the office last night and attempted to watch via online video feed. One of my colleagues left to try and watch it at a neighbor's but came back, foiled, because the neighbor didn't seem interested/was under the impression that the speech had already aired. So we cosied up to the laptop to watch streamed video, which glitched and we missed a lot of the speech (as the video froze and lurched forward, played for a few seconds, then froze and lurched forward again).

We got the general idea though.

I'll save critical analysis for some other day - right now I have to go to a meeting to discuss work schedules for the next two weeks (I have a village stay, site visits to some Community-Led Total Sanitation projects, some software training and at least one visit to the field to learn about home visits to sponsored children to coordinate).

Not in Africa, but...

While skimming through the world news this morning, I ran across this feature on the BBC, written by a girl living in Pakistan.

It's a diary of her life in the Swat Valley region of Pakistan. The area used to be known as "the Switzerland of Pakistan," but has lately been making headlines as a hotbed of Taleban activity and the focal point of their campaign to close/destroy Pakistani private schools in an effort to stop the education of girls.

Education and the rights of women and girls have long been causes dear to my heart. Since coming to work with Plan, I've found that the listening to the voices of children (and protecting their ability to speak) has joined the list of causes I'd like to advance. With that in mind, it goes without saying (though I'm going to say it anyway) that this article struck a chord with me.

I touched on the education of girls in a previous post sometime back. Though I still don't know if achieving real success in development is as 'simple' as "getting girls (especially rural girls) into and through school up to the 8th grade," but I'm pretty sure ensuring that girls receive educations is a pretty significant step in the right direction.

Education is a a huge economic asset; for women especially, it opens doors to economic self-sufficiency and sustainability in the future. It's also been shown in studies all over the world that more educated women marry later (read: when they're women and not themselves still children), have fewer children, space the children that they do have, are substantially less likely to die in giving birth to those children, and are more likely to have children (both boys and girls) who themselves attend school and reap the benefits that it brings. And that's just the benefits to the girls themselves; the benefits to the countries and communities in which little girls grow into empowered and inspired women are nothing short of profound. (You can check out the reports being published by Plan as part of their Because I Am A Girl campaign for more detailed info).

In Gul Makai's case, you can already see the difference education has made. Being able to read and write allowed her to share her story with the BBC: maybe, just maybe, the education she already has will help her secure the education she and others like her need and deserve in the future.

You can't catch AIDS from sharing textbooks

As part of my orientation to Plan and the projects that I'll be assisting with for the rest of my placement, I've been visiting schools in the Kasungu District participating in the School Sanitation and Hygiene Promotion Project. The project is partly funded by the Plan Canada office, which is neat - it was both surreal and really exciting to see development dollars from the true north strong and free at work here in Malawi.
I'll write more about the project later (read: I want to run my post by the powers that be at the office to make sure that I'm providing a fair representation of one of their projects so as not to mislead fellow Canadians who may also be donors to Plan). For now, I just want to share a brief and deeply affecting episode.

We were visiting Mpsaszi Primary School to deliver construction materials and meet with the headmaster. Though I don't remember exactly the order, Mpasazi was later in the day on our first of 2 days conducting visits - probably the 5th or 6th school. So I knew the ropes.
1) We arrive in the Planmobile.
2) School is already out, so we either wait for the headmaster to come from his home (which is always nearby) or are greeted by the headmaster.
3) We go into the headmaster's office, make introductions, receive an oral progress report on the project including any oustanding problems, and sign the visitor's book.
4) We walk out to the construction (in this case, latrines) to inspect progress. These inpsections have been a great learning opportunity for me, both in terms of seeing what "good" and "bad" Ventilated Improved Pit Latrines (VIPs) look like and in terms of having the chance to talk to Sam, the field office manager (aka the "PUM"), Chingati (the Health Coordinator) and Tuntufye (the project point person) about the ins and outs of the project and Plan's history with each of the schools we visited.
5) We make sure the materials are all delivered and either chat with the headmaster, the teachers and the gaggle of children that has inevitably materialized or we pack up and go.

This visit went exactly according to the steps outlined above, with just a minor deviation in Step 3.

After showing us into his office, the headmaster was called outside to discuss the construction materials, leaving me with a little bit of time to kill. This headmaster's office, like all of the others I've seen in Malawi, doubles as a store-room for miscellaneous supplies and academic materials. The upper-primary school English textbooks happened to be on a shelf at eye-level, so I picked one up to flip through, curious about the curriculum in Malawi.

The second page of the book features a lively cartoon of children sharing books (a common occurence in Malawi - there never seem to be enough textbooks to go around), with this caption:

"You can't catch AIDS from sharing textbooks."

The previous page is also a message about AIDS - about how children with AIDS are children too; they're just special children. But it was the targeted mythbusting really dropped my stomach to my feet.

Occupying the intermediate space somewhere between "reading the statistics" and "attending the funerals" this single page brought home one of the major realities of Malawi to me in a potent, de-abstractifying way. High HIV/AIDS prevalance (one reasonably reliable estimate puts adult prevalence at 14.2%) means that children living with HIV/AIDS or at risk of being exposed to it are real, ever-present, and one of the many things that children in Malawi must be educated about that simply are not issues for the vast majority of children in Canada. I tried to put myself in the shoes of the children who must accept peers with AIDS or worse, have it themselves; with the teachers who face HIV positive pupils in primary school; and with the parents who have to field those awkward questions that children bring home from school about HIV/AIDS before we even get as far as the birds and the bees. I have a sister who will be entering elementary school fairly shortly: soon, my mom will have to explain why some children need wheelchairs or why she has to be careful about taking peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. The analogous situation here here is explaining to a child why some of her classmates have a deadly virus transmitted by sex, body fluid transfer, or from mother to child.

I pretty much failed outright in my attempt - it's just too big a thing for me to understand without ever having had to live it. But trying was a sobering experience.

A Walk Home

This is one slice of life in Nkhamenya. It was a particularly good one.

On Tuesday January 6th, I knocked off from work at about 6 ‘o’ clock. The sky was already starting to darken to dusk, owing to the large thunderhead building on the Western horizon and to the fact that the sun sets before 7 here.

Some of the field staff offer to give me a ride home on their motorcycle, but I decline. The skirt I’m wearing is inappropriate for motorcycle travel and anyway, I kind of want to walk.

The air was cool and smelled of rain – Malawian rain-smell is fresh and cool, like at home, but it doesn’t have the sharp, clear edge that it does at home. The view is breathtaking. Plan’s office in Nkhamenya is on the southern edge of town on the top of a hill. Heading north (towards my house) is a valley where the Nkhamenya trading center is, then another, gentler hill where the town unfolds. From the paved road in front of the office, you can see mountains in the distance to the northeast that mark the boundary between Malawi and Zambia, the town in the valley and sprawled up the next hill, and farmland and more town and villages to the east.

On this night, the eastern sky is clear and blue, while the mountains are gently greyed by falling rain, and a breathtakingly impressive thunderstorm is (as I’ve already mentioned) billowing in from the West.

I set off at a brisk pace, wanting to beat the rain home, and am promptly interrupted by running into Macfarlane, one of the men who lives near the maize market on the southeast edge of town. We exchange greetings in Chitumbuka (“Matandala? Tatandala makola. Kwali imwe? Natandala makola.”) and then I get lectured for not coming to see his house on the weekend. I promise to do it later in the week, and we part ways.

A little farther up the road, I’m flagged down by one of the local women who wants to chat. I decline the invitation in broken Chichewa (“Ndifuna kupita ku nymba… mvula zibwera”) and she laughs and wishes me well in Chitumbuka (“Muyendi makola”). A gaggle of children spot me from across the road (“Azungu!” Hello!”) and I pause to wave and laughingly reply like I do every day (“Hello! Good-bye!”). Then I continue on my way across the bridge just before the trading center.

Neli Ngoma and her family live in a compound just across the bridge – they’ve sort of taken me under their friendly and generous wings since I’ve moved to Nkhamenya. Frank, the father, is just pulling into the driveway with his bicycle. We stop to chat (exchanging greetings in Chichewa and then chatting in English). He’s just come from the field, and is looking forward to the rain. I’m planning on stopping at the restaurant his wife works at for supper. Which works out well – Nkhamenya has a resident madman who likes to throw stones at people and speak to you in unintelligible rhyme and Frank spots him headed our way. Frank escorts me to the restaurant – the rain seems to be due at any minute, but hasn’t started yet.

We sit and chat for a bit while we wait for Neli, Frank’s wife, to come from the kitchen of the diner. They’re busy tonight so it takes her some time. After she’s spoken to Frank and I, Frank leaves and I sit and visit with Fatsani, one of the other women who works at the diner. We chat about school, our families and about Canada, and she translates the choruses of the music videos playing on the restaurant’s TV.

After chatting for about half an hour, I remember that I wanted to order dinner. But Fatsani and Neli already have me covered. I have nsima with beef relish and am told that it is a gift – they flat out refuse to take my money (it’s a fight to pay for the bottle of pineapple Fanta I had while I was visiting with Fatsani). By now it’s about 7:15 and night has completely taken over – but no rain yet.

I say “night has taken over” and not “it’s completely dark” because it’s nowhere near dark outside. The thunderhead has blown into the east without loosing the storm, and the sky is alight with a waxing quarter moon and stars like I’ve never seen. Winter stars in Canada are bright, but rainy season stars in Malawi seem so close. And even at half-mast, the moonlight is bright enough to cast shadows; you can even still see the dark outline of the mountains in the distance.

I walk the rest of the way home without running into anyone I know. Once the blaring music from the local Chibuku bar fades, the quieter sounds of town at night set in – crickets, bats, and the metallic creaking and running water sound that means someone is drawing water from the borehole near the second bridge (a Chibuku bar is hangout that mostly sells locally brewed Malawian “beer” that comes in cartons and that I haven’t been brave enough to try yet). Just past the second bridge, I turn west off the paved road onto the lane that leads to my home. I can hear children laughing, women doing dishes or the sounds of people visiting by candlelight as I pass by the many, many houses crammed into my neighborhood (you’re never alone in Nkhamenya).

The maize garden in front of my house is beautiful in the moonlight. I stop to admire it a bit before dropping my things in my house and then stopping in next door to visit my neighbor. After a brief chat, I head back into my house, stopping on my porch to again admire the view before retiring for the night.

A Little Bit of Awesome in Africa

My neighbor has a dog, and that dog has a name and the name that it has (other than my neighbor's dog)... is Chuck Norris.

That is all.

Christmas Photo

(h/t to Alynne for this beautiful shot of the southern Africa half of our sending group tooling around on the Zomba Plateau)

Spark Notes Update

Happy 2009!

I live in Nkhamenya, a town/village (I've heard both - I personally lean towards 'town') 60km north of Kasungu on the M1, Malawi's main north-south paved road. For MK 4000 (about $35 CDN) per month - MK 5000 when/if the electricity gets hooked up - I have a 5 room house all to myself. Tin roof, brick & plaster, glass windows with burglar bars, locking doors, concrete porch - the whole nine yards. Also, 5 rooms is A LOT, as the latrine, cooking house and bathing room are all detached.

Work is good. I'm still learning the ropes here at Plan, but I've been able to attend (and help with presentations at) several training sessions on things ranging from Plans School Linking Program to Community Led Total Sanitation facilitation. I'm learning software by the bucketload, figuring out the filing system, and visiting the field whenever I can.
Work updates will get more interesting when I can update my photobucket with new pictures. I promise.

Life in general is good this new year. There's no shortage of people in the area wanting to be friends (though attempting to learn ChiTumbuka and ChiChewa at the same time is proving to be a bit tricky), the weather's good, and the market keeps me full of vegetables.