Featured in “The Athenaeum” (Student Newspaper of Acadia University), October, 2007

“Soil, Soul, and Spirit:
A journey to self discovery, half way around the world”

By Sarah Haverstock

There is something to be said for leaping out of tall buildings. Leaving your comfort zone and diving into the unfamiliar. In fact, for me it is a bit of an addiction. It all comes down to making decisions. This is not an advertising plug for Nike, but I think that they’re on to something with the "Just do it" slogan.

One of my bigger ‘Just do it’ moments of late was deciding to spend my summer volunteering in Malawi. Not Maui, the Magical Isle of Hawaii, but Malawi, the Warm Heart of Africa. As I think it is for many people, traveling to Africa was on my list of things to do in life.

I had a romantic notion of being humbled and shaken to my core, coming back a changed woman, never to fit again into North American society. I was searching for meaning, for direction, for inspiration and in some ways, for an escape. Did I find these things? I may not have found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but I think that I found a decent road map on how to get there.

As most good things begin, the opportunity to go to Malawi arose with some good luck, good timing and hard work. Acadia environmental science professor Linda Lusby is one of many people working to develop a partnership between the agricultural sector in Malawi and that of Nova Scotia.

Among the partner organizations involved are WUSC (World University Service of Canada), LEAD (Leadership in Environment and Development), the Farmer’s Union of Malawi and the Catholic Development Commission of Malawi. About 85% of Malawians are subsistence farmers so the agricultural sector is as good as any to focus development efforts on.

Including myself, there were five Acadia ENVS students that went to Malawi; Julia Beresford, Brendan MacNeill and Katherine Dugas, along with Sean Loo from the N. S. Agricultural College.

I was working with the Catholic Development Commission of Malawi (CADECOM) and living with one of their Agricultural Field Officers, Costa Nkhani, in a region called Mpiri about 50 km West of the Mozambique border.

Our job was to implement CADECOM’s Integrated Food Security Project which has four main goals: to increase crop diversification and production, to form farmers groups to facilitate the marketing of crops, to train villagers in post harvest management, and to provide education on HIV/AIDS and gender issues.

Covering 20 villages by motorbike, we delivered workshops and demonstrations to villagers. We had food processing workshops where we made things like jam and peanut butter, soy milk and banana bread; demonstrations on how to make contour ridges, compost manure, nursery beds and transplant beds; training in treadle pump use for irrigation, and discussions on environmental husbandry.

Life was slow moving and most of the time I had no one to talk to but my self. My thoughts emptied out through my pen onto pages and pages of journal entries. From the outset I had reserved a green notebook for academic learning and a small brown leather notebook as a personal journal. About a week in, there was no telling apart the academic notebook from the personal learning notebook. So tightly intertwined were the things that I was learning about agriculture and people and myself that separating them would require shifting notebooks every second line.

My mom had given me her copy of The Poisonwood Bible to read. By chapter two, I was underlining paragraphs and scribbling in the margins, clinging on to the book as a source of therapy. Other than Allister, a volunteer from the University of Waterloo placed in a village some three hours away, my book was the only being with which I could share my experiences.

The greatest challenge that I faced in the villages was the language barrier. Although English is Malawi’s official language, no one in the villages speaks it. It is only those who have continued past primary school who speak English and most of these people live in the cities.

In Mpiri three languages were spoken; Chichewa, Yao and Lomwe. I did learn some Chichewa. My first week in Mpiri I was told that I had to introduce myself in church that Sunday. Thinking back to the often meager attendance at church back home, initially I wasn’t too worried. Then, as the week wore on, I realized that Malawians are very religious people, and almost every single person in my area (who was not Muslim) would be attending church on Sunday.

Costa gave me a long paragraph in Chichewa to memorize, and every night, becoming more and more anxious about the looming introduction, I sat down and copied it, chanted it, determinedly memorized it.

Sunday rolled around before I knew it. I wrapped my colorful chitenje around my waist to cover my knees, wore a t-shirt to cover my shoulders, hopped on the motorbike with Costa and went to church half an hour early to avoid causing a commotion. Only a week into my stay in Mpiri, most of the villagers had not met me yet.

First and foremost characterized by my white skin, they had not seen the ‘azungu’ (white person) yet. An azungu attracts a lot of attention and even positive attention can wear on you; cries of ‘azungu! azungu!’ wherever I went, staring, laughing, and on occasion babies and young children who have never seen white skin before would start to cry at the sight of me. I was always offered a chair to sit on instead of the ground and given special treatment, which although it was very kind, it did not help in my effort to show people that I was just a regular person.

So we arrived early to avoid all of these reactions. Mass in Malawi was something else. There were between 400 and 500 people there. All the women in colourful chitenjes had babies either tied onto their backs or hanging from their breasts; girls in white dresses with angel wings and crowns of flowers danced on the alter; a choir sang songs that were each 15 minutes long; live chickens, eggs, bread, fruit and sticks of wood were brought to the alter as gifts. Two and half hours of singing and dancing in the aisles shoulder to shoulder.

At the end of mass the priest said something in Chichewa and because he looked at me and motioned with his hand I could only guess that he meant for visitors to come up and introduce themselves. I left my pew and walked up to the altar along with three other visitors. The priest said something else that I probably couldn’t have understood even if he was speaking English. I took this as my cue to begin.

At first I didn’t say anything. I was a bit frozen I think. Then someone in the audience piped up and said (Costa later told me) “she cannot speak Chichewa”. I began. “Ine dine Sarah Haverstock. Ndimachokera ku Canada, ndimakhala ku Mpapa, ndimagwira ntchito mu bungwe la CADECOM…..” As I went on, I felt the hot flush of my face become less pronounced and I raised my voice to reach those in the back. Costa later told me that you could have heard a pin drop people were so attentive.

At the end of my speech, they applauded and a heavy weight lifted off my shoulders. As a generally shy person in large crowds, I considered this a feat, as my right of passage, my entry level test into Malawian culture. Now everyone had seen and heard me and I could get to work.

We used hoes in the fields. Hoes were the only implement used for tilling that I saw in Malawi, no tractors, no ploughs. At night I would help the women and their kids pound groundnuts or maize with a mortar and pestle. Women pound maize to make flour for their staple food, nsima, which is often eaten three times a day.

In the villages we carried our water in buckets from a nearby well. CocaCola and Fanta could be bought at the market and was drunk even at breakfast. Cooking was done over an open fire or if you could afford it a small charcoal stove, even though charcoal is illegal.

I often saw kids chasing old tires down a dirt road instead of going to school. It is common to see men holding hands but never any signs of affection between men and women. Women are subservient to men and sometimes kneel down and clap their hands to greet them.

There was a funeral every second day and all demonstrations or activities that we had planned would be cancelled. Waiting was a part of life, and patience is an innate characteristic for most Malawians. People seem to have a "Hakuna matata," no worries attitude and in some respects they are better for it. They are generous and they are much happier than we are. At the same time, they are suffering very peacefully.

You always hear about the widespread occurrence of HIV/AIDS and malaria in Africa and I could shell out the statistics but I am sure you have heard them before. In the villages that we covered only two of our beneficiaries had openly admitted that they were HIV/AIDS positive. However, hidden in consented silence, it was common knowledge that many people suffered from it. One had only to see the number of orphans or count the number of funerals.

Regina, one of my better friends in Malawi was HIV/AIDS positive. She lost her husband in 1999 and shortly after, her son, to AIDS. Regina was on antiretrovirals and doing well until my last week in Malawi when she had taken to the hospital with a case of Malaria.

I have not heard news of her present condition but assuming that she has recovered, they will have just had a wedding ceremony for her younger brother. Earlier in July she and her mother proudly showed me how they were drying cassava to make beer for the wedding party.

If I have left you hanging on my self-revelations too long I apologize, but hopefully from what I have said you may gather what some of them are on your own.

In Malawi I discovered the satisfaction in living day by day. Not to be thinking about ten things at once and running from one place to another. To stand still, to watch and not understand what is being said but understand perfectly well what is being felt, to pull a potato out of the ground, to hold hands.

It is nice to be part of a community where people work hard to take care of one another, where people sing as they cook, and dance because there is music. I always knew the importance of the ability to exist in the present but I had never experienced it for an extended period of time, and as such had never really understood how intimately it is associated with happiness.

It is not as easy in our fast paced, production and consumption driven society, but I have resolved to try and have time for people. When it comes down to it, it is the people in my life, and loving them that are most important to me and I will not so easily lose sight of that anymore.

I was humbled and shaken to my core. I have changed, but am forced back into a North American lifestyle (for the time being at least). I fit in, in some ways, but not in others. And yes, I think that I have gained a sizeable piece of the puzzle to a meaningful, happy life.

© 2007, Athenaeum