Powerlessness and Deep Poverty

This morning I witnessed a scene that almost made my blood boil. As I was leaving our house on a quick errand, I saw a man sitting on a wall outside our property. I waved and went about my business. As I approached home upon my return I saw two women and three children all balancing large, heavy bundles of wood on their heads.

 As the man stood up, hands empty, he began walking behind them. I then saw what he was waiting for; it was the last of the women coming down the steep, narrow trail with her equally heavy load, carefully avoiding the jagged rocks with her calloused feet. He was quite obviously not the least bit interested in assisting any of them bear their cumbersome loads. I have heard of the brokers who are the middle men for these firewood mining operations, and how they receive the much more generous portion of the spoils, while the women make barely enough to purchase a few morsels for their families' dinner that night.

Tomorrow morning the long trek up the steep mountain will begin again before sunrise for these women and children. They're trapped in this seemingly endless cycle of toil  and deep poverty. The women will grow old, and the labor will become more and more difficult. The children will never receive the education that would afford them the opportunity not only to pull themselves out of such deeply entrenched poverty, but most likely they will have any dreams of a real future dashed out before they’re ever kindled in their hearts and minds.

One needs to spend a bit of time here in Malawi to see what is perhaps a little less apparent, but an equally, if not more cruel reality, and that is the devaluing of both women and girls rampant throughout much of this culture. Women become like beasts of burden, daily fetching forty pound buckets of water and hauling it for up to several kilometers, gathering fire wood hours a day with which to cook by, tending to chronically sick children, and a host of other tasks.  Girls more often than not, never finish even primary school, begin toiling right alongside their mothers at a very early age, and are often married off at thirteen or fourteen years of age for the sake of the parents receiving a very small dowry, as well as having one less hungry mouth to feed. Thus the cycle begins itself anew.

Whether it's the restoring of wells, our energy efficient brick oven projects, solar cookers, or Phyllis' hygiene, sanitation and nutrition workshops, our work here is focused on presenting opportunities they would otherwise never know. The wells we’ve been able to repair since our first one in 2010 have already collectively saved the women of the many villages we’ve worked in over 4,000,000 hours of intense water gathering labors. The sanitation and hygiene workshops, although difficult to put a real number to have been saving countless hours for mothers walking to and from, and sitting for hours at local clinics. As our brick oven and solar projects take root in many communities we are certain additional countless hours of back breaking labor will be saved by these beautiful women and girls.

As difficult as all this is to implement, I believe that this is the easier part. Minds and hearts are often much harder to change. When women are made to cook, and serve the men at the dinner table, and they themselves are made to eat separately on the kitchen floor, and when women are often made to enter a room on their hands and knees and bow to their husbands there are deep cultural shifts that need to occur before any real and lasting relief can come in order for the women to realize meaningful reform, and lightened burdens. Our earnest prayer is that the Lord will use us for His glory in order to elevate and set free the women and children of rural Malawi.