The Magic of Malawi

I’m writing this in a guesthouse in Addis Ababa, where I am spending the next 4 days with some of the Women At Risk team. This comes on the back of a CRED Team Trip to Malawi – the team is currently flying home – and it is a few reflections on that trip which are the focus of this blog.

Everyone says that Malawi is a magical place, not in a voodoo and witchcraft way (although I’m sure there is some of that practiced as it is in most countries), but through the smile of the Malawians, the warmth of the sun, the beauty of the landscape. And after the past week, watching that ‘magic’ work on the team, I have to say there is something in it.

The trip to Malawi was the first one we have done, although I’ve been out to the project a few times before this. And as a result there were a number of teething problems to start with – mainly around managing expectations related to transport and accommodation.  But a smile and a friendly greeting can defuse many a situation, and soon it wasn’t mattering that the accommodation was a bit more rustic than had been expected, or that the transport had turned up 30 minutes late.

For me the best bit of trip, as on all trips, was seeing the transformation of individuals as the week went on. Transformation of team members, but also transformation of children at the project, and especially at the school where we were volunteering.

The team member who was so shy that she wouldn’t hold eye contact at the start of the week, leading a session in the classroom by the end of the week.

The team member who has grown up in a family where approval is based solely on achievement and where any failure puts you back at the bottom of the pile, getting to the point of being able to say that he likes who he is for who he is rather than what he does.

The team member who has grown up in such a dysfunctional home that her defence mechanism became shutting herself away from the world and living in a fantasy world where socializing wasn’t required, opening out to the extent that she was dancing with the rest of the team on the final day.

The look of total amazement and excitement on the face of the team member when they saw an elephant for real, because until then they hadn’t even seen one at a zoo, such was the previous lack of life experiences.

The team member who was so anxious on the first day that he was unable to climb the hill, relaxing into life enough to be smiling, laughing, leading classroom sessions and playing with the children by the end of the week.

Each team member came with a burden of some sort that they were carrying – luggage that had inadvertently accompanied them from UK and their life back home.

And as the week went on, it was possible to see those burdens being set down – some of them permanently, some of them temporarily, some of them just enough to jettison a bit of the load so when they were taken up again they weren’t so crippling. The magic of Malawi was at work.

And as I said, it wasn’t just the team who changed as the week went on. To start with, the children at the school would fight for pencils, grab everything in sight, and the team had to quickly learn to only give out what was actually needed rather than expect sharing to take place. When you grow up in poverty, a pile of pencils can look like a money making opportunity, a means of buying food for the next day, rather than just the tools to colour in a picture. And when you’ve never seen coloured pencils before, there is the fear that if you don’t hang on to them they might not reappear.

But by the end of the week, as the team demonstrated gently how to share, and showed that the coloured pencils would reappear each day, and that there were enough resources to go round everyone, the scuffles and grabbing stopped, and the children learnt to share, and to relax into the activities being set.

For the teachers of the school it was a chance for them to observe their students from the sidelines, and to get to know them a bit more, particularly through the home visit opportunities. And the teachers are now starting to plan how to integrate into their lessons all the resources that the team left behind for the school, and the new ways of interactive learning that the team demonstrated.

It was a very special trip. It was a trip where a group of disparate individuals gelled into a family, where the soothing sight and sound of the gently lapping waves of Lake Malawi acted as a balm to stressed and tired souls, and where the friendly smiles and greetings of those we met on the walks to and from the school brightened every heart.

Yes we get transformations on the other trips, and yes we get individuals gelling to be a strong group on other trips, but there was something about this trip that made it even more special. And that something was – the magic of Malawi! Thank you Lord for creating Malawi, and Malawians, and for instilling in them that little something extra J