Last day

Huh.

Today the acacia's are out in full bloom (regardless of the drizzling rain): bright yellow against dark green. The maize is tall and dry, almost ready for harvest. The weather has lost it's heat as we creep into the cool season. 

All just like a year ago.

One of the oddest things has been seeing Malawi one year on after my arrival. To spend an entire year and to see everything come around again: flowers, maize, weather. As soon as you see this repetition it's like an immediate jolt of perspective--you see things just a fraction more as Malawians see them: predictable, cyclical, with no defining end point.

This is it: last day at IITA. 

What comes next

IITA and I have now broken up.

It's official: I sent an email to the staff listserv today to let my colleagues know that I'll be leaving at the end of the month. All the details had been finalized with the Officer-in-Charge, Dr Hailu Tefera, and my department head, Pheneas Ntawuruhunga, weeks ago, but my public announcement was today.

I'm not much thrilled at good-byes, not these kind anyway. I suppose that up until Tuesday I'll be greeting a steady stream of bemused well-wishers at my office door armed with as many questions as 'thank-you's.

What's next in store for me and EWB in Malawi is to be decided. My manager, Ka-hay Law, and I have made plans for me to meet with all the organizations in Malawi involved in value-chains facilitation in the first two weeks of April to suss out their directions and capabilities. After that, the two of us will sit down and sift out the best options from this list possibilities. While half-baked projects and organizations abound, I'm still confident in our ability to uncover a good opportunity.

So we'll see what comes next for me in Malawi.

The Power Taboo

I think the work of EWB is much more about power than anyone has realized or has wanted to admit. 

It was funny: last week, the Southern Africa overseas team was busy preparing for a visit from Conservative MP, Deepak Obhrai, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The plan: to take him to rural sites where we work to explain the purpose and methods of our work.

Well, in the end, he didn't show. He called off scheduled field visits in Zambia, and cancelled plans for field visits in Malawi. Instead, he stopped into Malawi to seek support for Canada's bid to be a member of the UN Security Council, while meanwhile the Conservative government is in the process of closing Canada's office in Malawi because budget funds are being directed to Latin America.

All of this I'm not much upset about. It's simply politics. EWB hasn't rubbed up against politics much to date, at least not in the uncomfortable way of "we want something and they don't want to give it to us." Politics is easy when everyone wants the same thing: EWB's push for better aid was a lesson in that--who could say no, that worse aid was what they wanted? But when there is a desire (e.g. moving aid money to Latin America) that is opposed to another desire (e.g. EWB's for poverty reduction in Malawi, Zambia and Burkina Faso) then things get interesting and get difficult. And they usually get decided by those with power.

Power--it's a taboo word, for sure. All the way from the village chief, to the Parliamentary Secretary. But I believe it is fundamental differences in power that have us inside this global system of inequality. Which is why I want to get more power to small Malawian farmers, chiefly by economic-agriculture opportunities.

Related, but tangential: I read this article today, posted up on EWB's forum. It's scathing, but contains some truth to be sure. 

Link: We must all sneer and scoff at the corrupt jackasses of Africa

Author: Matthew Parris from The Times

Excerpt:

Heaven only knows what these well-paid and fashionably sunglassed recruits to "a career in Development" are in Africa for but it is not to bother the political elites. If you work in development in Africa and are not bothering a political elite you have some serious questions to answer about meaning and direction in your life.

Twitter

Twitter--what a damn neat idea.

Text messages from your phone get piped to your blog, making a quick update no more difficult than finding mobile phone coverage (which isn't too tough in Malawi; a benefit to post-colonial politics that carved out a narrow, land-locked North-South strip and said "Malawi!"). 

I've joined as of today for two reasons: one, phone coverage is a lot more readily available than internet access (especially when rural); and two, part of the fun of Malawi are the run-ins with the odd-reality of life much different from back home in Canada.

So, I'm going to aim for texting one message a day, to have my blog a bit more topical, a bit more tropical. Maybe I'm over-confident that one interesting thing happens to me each day. Or maybe Twitter was just too good an idea to pass up.

Fair Trade Thinking

I recently read an article on Fair Trade and its usefulness in development. A key point was (more or less) this:

Small farmers in developing nations have little market power. Fair Trade can be a private sector mechanism for increasing the power of these farmers to allow them to better shape their world in ways that suits them.

I liked it. In fact, I'm going to try to get into it. 

I think that, if really done well, Fair Trade local companies selling to international Fair Trade buyers could become the way economic growth could really connect with the rural African poor. If supporting a Fair Trade system that suitably gets rural farmers into the flow of international exporting could be the policy goal of Canada's foreign affairs/international relations (instead of haphazard projects littered across the African landscape) some change could really start to happen.

I'm looking to apply to a Canadian grant, the Gordon Global Fellowship, to learn more about the relevant policy challenges and try to connect the micro-level small farmers of Malawi with the macro-level flow of international trade.

Of course, this whole started grew out of a single well-written article--probably time to do more digging.

Update on Mafayo Lungu

My boss is sick with malaria and things don't look good. What was a common case of malaria for Mafayo Lungu has now become a prolonged, and seemingly futile, battle to become healthy.

I've been chafing all week at my need to be in the office. I had an important meeting between my managers from EWB and IITA today and had to stay in Chitedze to attend it. But all the while I know that Mafayo Lungu--my real boss in a way--is sick and worse up north in Kasungu.

I'm headed up to visit him on Monday morning. It makes me sick to fathom the possibility of him dying while I dither in Lilongwe. I don't know if I've ever felt so anxious about another person before--

Separated: urban from the rural

I’m angry at the sharp divide I see between rural and urban Malawians. What first seemed mild complacency by urbanites now looks to me more like the wishing away of a rural life altogether.

Putting on airs, dismissive tones, avoided glances, casual dismissals: I’ve seen all this in Canada before, but I was never suitable well-heeled to see all that much of it. In Malawi, however, I’m in with the thin strata of Malawians with NGO or government jobs and privy to seeing all of these social status trademarks on display, and more.

Especially on the commute to and from work. These days I’ve found a place in Lilongwe, a small one-room rental, and the work bus picks me up each morning and drops me off each evening. As we make the circuit to collect the IITA staff it feels that we’re a silent spaceship lifting a dozen or so choice Malawians from anonymous dusty streets into the tinted-window confines of status.

This status struck hard when, one morning on the way into work, the bus pulled to the roadside for staffers to by fresh peanuts from a vendor lugging a 50kg sack around on the back of his bicycle. The patronizing tones in haggling, the hard-bargain struck, the flaunting of a few small bills before handing them over in payment all made it abundantly clear to me: the Malawians I’m with see themselves as separate from the barefooted labourers tracing paths in and out of cornfields.

And as always, I may have the sentiment wrong; I may have misjudged, misread the signs. I might be conjuring sentiment where there is none—but the palpable claim to status that has long since settled into the upholstery of that work bus nudges me to believe otherwise.