World Vision | Pat Gilligan in Malawi

Archive for the ‘World Vision’ Category

23 Nov

Kafulama Primary School

Posted by Pat Gilligan in Children, Malawi, School, World Vision. Tagged: africa, child sponsor, Malawi, World Vision. 2 Comments

Today we visited the Kafulama Primary School to learn a little about education for young Malawian children and to see how World Vision has helped this school. This is part of the welcoming committee …

I think it was about this time that I couldn’t find Bill…

Before we began our tour of the facilities we had a short meeting with the staff, this woman was a member of one of the committees and was providing information on how World Vision had helped the school.

This school had been established in 1937 but only included one building and 4 toilets. This school currently accommodates over 600 children in grades 1 through 8. This has been made possible because of World Vision! They have constructed 2 additional buildings for classrooms, 10 toilets, housing facilities for teachers and provided desks and books for the students.

We had a tour of a number of classrooms where classes were being conducted. The kids are always willing to let us jump in and get their pictures taken with us.

This is another classroom with quite a few more students for this teacher to manage. We learned during our meeting with the staff in the morning that the student/teacher ratio is significantly different than at home. The ratio here is about 30:1, in Malawi the government recommended ratio is 60:1, but because of the challenges they face the reality is anywhere from 80-200:1.

I took this picture of a poster inside one of the classrooms at the school. It is a government ad campaign. Have a look and see if you can get the messaging behind it, I will include it after the picture. I would be quite surprised if you got it since there is a statistic that you are probably not aware of yet…

I think I mentioned that there were about 650 students attending the school. There are on average about 100+ students in grades 1 through 5, but the number drops off significantly by grade eight to about 46. Another interesting statistic about the grade eight number is that the ratio of boys to girls (which is close to 50/50 up until grade eight) is skewed heavily in favour of boys at that grade. We are told that the reasoning for girls dropping out is because of marriage or pregnancy!! (now that you know this try one more time to get the intent of the poster)

So, back to the poster and the government ad campaign. This picture is showing a young woman coming back home to visit her family. She is well dressed in business attire and driving her own car. She is clearly successful, independent, and has made her parents proud, all because she stayed in school. Did you get that out of the poster?

This is one of the two buildings that have been provided by World Vision to accommodate additional classrooms.

This is one of the toilet facilities built by World Vision for school. This still looks kind of basic by our standards but in fact this is probably the most sophisticated facility we saw in all of our visits.

In this photo one of our hosts borrows an exercise book from one of the children following us around to show me. I’m not sure how obvious this is from the photograph, but this is a pretty standard lined notebook, similar to what we would see here. The difference is that it has been cut into thirds to make notebooks for 3 children. This is also the only notebook the children will have, they will have to make do with this for all of their classes.

You may have noticed in the first couple of photos at the top, the children proudly showing their plastic water bottles. It is something that everyone has noticed, used water bottles are a hot commodity among children here. They watch you drinking water out of the bottle to see when you are finished and might set it down before any of the other children notice it, or if they see one in your pocket, they will point to it and ask if they can have it. During our photography workshop the first week where there was an abundance of water bottles, the children were hoarding them and bringing them home with them.

In the photo below, Wez explains to me why these are so valued by the children. They use these for all kinds of things including carrying roasted corn kernels (shown in the next photo), or to carry some kind of a drink also made from corn (see the photo at the top) as a snack throughout the day. Wez tells me that when he was young and in school, he and his brother would fight over whose turn it was to take the bottle to school. He has a very good sense of humour and teases us quite a bit, but he assures me that he is serious about this.

And, some random pictures from this day to close off this post …

20 Nov

Having a bad day?

Posted by Pat Gilligan in Children, Malawi, World Vision. Tagged: africa, ccr, child sponsor, dancing, Malawi, World Vision. Leave a Comment

Then check this out! We had just completed a visit to a family in a very remote area of the World Vision Mposa ADP and were parked on the road waiting for our colleagues in another vehicle when these children approached us. We happened to have some Creedence Clearwater Revival playing on the CD player in the truck and these children just started spontaneously dancing – it was absolutely one of the highlights of the trip for me! I’m quite certain that not only had they never heard this music before, it was about as far from the type of music they are probably accustomed to as could possibly be. They clearly knew we were loving it, and they loved hamming it up for the 4 cameras that were recording it.

Sorry for the laugh track – all of the circumstances surrounding this moment just made it absolutely hilarious for us, and at times we really needed it. I also wish the music would have come through louder, we really had it cranked up so the children could really hear it but it didn’t come through as loud as I would have liked on the video.

18 Nov

Day 9, Part 2, Malawi – Shakiri

Posted by Pat Gilligan in Children, Malawi, Sponsor, World Vision. Tagged: africa, child sponsor, malaria, Malawi, World Vision. 9 Comments

So after a long walk through endless connecting paths through rice fields, I have gone to a different village to interview another mother and child. This child’s name is “Shakiri” and he is 2 years, 4 months old, the father did not accompany us in this interview as he was out for 3 days working. In this photo you can see us getting started on the interview, most of the people you see around me, besides the mother and child, are World Vision staff from both Canada and Malawi.

This is a close-up of Shakiri and his mother. This woman has as much on her mind as she looks in this photograph, she was a very friendly woman but it was impossible for her to hide her stress. As part of the interview process we ask questions like “Is the child healthy?”, “What kind of personality does the child have?”, “What dreams do you have for your child?”, “How do you think sponsorship might help with those dreams?”, and so on. Well after asking question one, “Is the child healthy?”, we find out that he actually has malaria right now, and he looks it - he is not well that is for sure. You can actually see something in his eyes, but when you feel his forehead, his fever, which is very obvious with malaria, doesn’t seem too bad. The mother tells us that she took him to a clinic and got medication for him which he has started and seems to be working right now. Oh, and by the way, she had to walk 3 hours to the clinic and 3 hours back.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, there was a wind storm the night before which completely removed the thatch roof of their house. Then it rained and completely soaked and ruined all of the corn and rice that they had stored (and grown themselves) for their food supply for the coming months. The following photograph shows the roof of her house, it is no wonder she looks like she is carrying the world on her shoulders. We have had plenty of preparation to make us confront emotional issues that are going to come up as a result of the things we are going to witness on this trip, but despite seeing an entire country of people that seem to have similar stories, this one is very hard to deal with – the photo of this woman says it all, and is a completely accurate portrayal of what we could see in her yesterday.

I started to give them some of the gifts I had brought, but as you can see by Shakiri’s expression, he is just not feeling well, but he is a really sweet little boy and he is accepting all of these things from me, and then…

I bring out the soccer ball – he lit up like nothing I had seen during the entire time doing these interviews! It was absolutely amazing to watch him come alive, the power of a soccer ball here, even for a two year old, cannot be underestimated! Everyone that was around was shocked at the turnaround of this cute little listless boy just by the mere presence of a soccer ball. Even his mother seemed to have a momentary break from her significant troubles. I just had to include a few more of these photos of his reaction to this – if I didn’t know better I could swear that I just discovered the cure for malaria!

My Request

I know that there are a lot of people reading this, I can see that people are very interested in seeing this account of things through my eyes because the number of views of these posts have gone way, way beyond my expectations. For that I am very happy, but part of my responsibility in coming here is to find sponsors for some of these children. I had been given a number of them before I came here, and I did find sponsors for some of them (for those people, thank you very much), but I still have some that I have not found sponsors for, including Shakiri. I really wasn’t that aggressive because I wanted to see for myself what the situation was really like here, how is the money spent, what kind of programs has World Vision created, etc.

I can tell you that not only have I been absolutely and thoroughly impressed with how World Vision works in this country, the level of awareness and respect that this organization has in this country because of the amazing things they do is nothing short of astonishing! I can also tell you that I am now in a different position than I was in a little over 2 weeks ago. I was a sponsor of a good number of children, I always felt that World Vision was a great organization and I did not need any proof or evidence of the good they were doing. Now I am in a very different position; I have now seen with my own eyes how others live, I can’t pretend to be ignorant of the blatant and rampant poverty, and I just can’t possibly live in good conscience without using whatever level of influence I may have to act on their behalf.

I also can’t keep sponsoring them myself, this model does not scale well at all, so I am asking anyone reading this, if you have ever given any thought to this at all or if some of the things you have read on this blog have moved you or convinced you that you want to give back for the unbelievable standard of living that we enjoy, I ask you to please contact me. I am asking right now for this little boy Shakiri, because their situation is quite a bit more urgent, but I have others as well. The one thing that is so evident to me now, is the incredible, almost embarrassing standard of living we enjoy compared to others in this world (I have yet to even see running water out of a tap, even an outside community tap, it doesn’t seem to exist, even Shakira’s mother walks 35 minutes just for water).

If my opinion carries any weight with anyone please believe me, the situation is every bit as dire as I have written. I have driven close to 3,000 km over some of the roughest terrain I have ever encountered, and done my share of walking cross country when we simply couldn’t drive any further because the paths came to an end or were just too narrow to drive on, and what I have witnessed was absolutely consistent every place I went.

As a matter of fact I couldn’t begin, at least while I am here, to write about all of the things I have seen here, but I will. Believe it or not I have taken about 10,000 photographs while I have been here! Many things are certainly duplicates to make sure I had exposures right, or to cover things from multiple angles, etc., but it is more a reflection of my utter disbelief at what I have seen here, and partially because people here just love to have their picture taken, no matter how dirty the children are, no matter how tattered and dirty their clothes are, having their picture taken just means the world to them. I’m not sure why this is, because there is nothing being left behind for them, but I think again that it is just another example of seeing that someone cares even if it is just to take their picture, maybe they feel important for just that moment, which I could understand when you see just how many there are and how little they have.

If after reading this you feel that whatever you support is what you are comfortable with and this is not for you, that is no problem. As I said earlier, my eyes have now seen and there is no going back, I had to ask.

Thanks,

Pat

18 Nov

Day 9, Malawi – Meeting Getrudi

Posted by Pat Gilligan in Children, Malawi, Sponsor, World Vision. Tagged: africa, child sponsor, Malawi, World Vision. Leave a Comment

A major part of this trip has been to travel to very remote villages to meet both children who have been registered to be sponsored, as well as children who are sponsored. After being involved in this for almost 15 years and sponsoring 7 children now, I finally had the opportunity to meet my own sponsored child today! This was something that I couldn’t anticipate, I had no idea whatsoever what to expect, but I can tell you this; when you see and hear about these meetings on tv commercials, let me assure you of one thing – these meetings are absolutely the real deal!

I can’t tell you how many pictures, reports and letters we have put on our fridge over the years. I was always amazed that they would include simple drawings, or short letters actually written by the children when possible and translated by World Vision staff. Even when the child is too young to write or speak, they will sometimes include a traced outline of the young childs foot or hand. It was this kind of thing that I was really thinking about as I was walking up to Getrudi’s home to meet her and her parents.

I will post video later when I get proper access to the internet, but you can’t believe the reception I got when I arrived to meet Getrudi and her parents. I can’t tell you how many people were there, but I’m sure it started at 30 or 40 and grew constantly while the meeting and interview were proceeding. This is something that the entire community was aware of and they are genuinely excited for the child and her family, this process is known among these people and is a huge deal for them. Some might think that there might be a pride thing happening with the parents, I can assure you this is not the case. The father and mother spoke very kind words to me about my stepping up to sponsor Getrudi. These people are “farmers”, and let me tell you; life is hard here, very hard. The father thanked me from the bottom of his heart for caring enough to help someone that was completely unknown to me. I had this realization at some point during my preparation process for this trip that it must mean a great deal to these people to know that someone on the other side of the world actually cares for them, I have had this confirmed to me over and over on this trip.

This is a photo of me finally meeting Getrudi and her parents, after the initial singing and dancing that greeted me when I arrived, I sat down with the family to ask them questions about their life, as well as their dreams for Getrudi and how they thought sponsorship would help.

Children are often very shy, and sometimes a little afraid at these meetings. Getrudi is only 4 years old, and she is definitely not overly comfortable at the beginning of the meeting. I brought a large bag of gifts for her and her parents and pulled this toy out to try to break the ice.

I have been buying things for the kids here for months including toys and clothing items. In this picture I am giving her a hoodie (which was a little weird since it was 36 degrees that day, but apparently it does get cool in their winter) and I didn’t do that bad on the sizing considering I had never seen her before. Every item I brought out, the crowd, which was getting very large by this point (I couldn’t even see beyond the people that were watching), would let out a verbal “ahhhhhh”, in perfect unison (especially for the shoes which the father is holding), I really hope this comes across in the video when I post it, it was great! You would think that all of the people would somehow be envious of all these material things being showered on this one family, but our translators tell us this is not the case, they are genuinely happy for the family. The guy on the left in the photo is my translator.

The little guy behind Getrudi is her brother, he was watching this whole thing quietly and I felt a little bad since I didn’t bring anything for him. I had another bag with me with this soccer ball in it, it actually had another purpose but I opened it and gave it to him. The picture does not do any justice at all to his reaction on receiving this. I said in a previous post that I had not seen a proper soccer ball, this is still the case. The look in their face at receiving one of these is just unbelievable, I don’t even know what I would compare this to at home but they are absolute gold here.

After I had given everything I had brought to them, which included some items for the parents, the father went into the house and brought this out for me. He is a farmer and he also makes this handles for a cultivating hoe, which is their primary tool for creating raised rows in the dirt for planting crops. They will use this hand tool (it will also have a steel blade component) to create these rows completely by hand, sometimes just a small bit of land, but they will do acres of land with this. Anyway, he was definitely working at this in preparation for this moment and I was completely blown away and quite honored. This must be so hard to appreciate from just reading this post, but I will say it again, life is very, very difficult here. These people work harder than you can imagine to scratch the most meager existence imaginable from the ground. A lot of extremely hard work for everyone just to feed the family, there is nothing extra here, and I mean nothing.

Just as we were about to conclude, Getrudi’s father said something to me that really made me step back. Even though people know about the concept of sponsorship, many people, including Getrudi’s parents always thought of the “sponsor” (me) as a mysterious entity of sorts. Some didn’t actually believe there was such a thing as an actual sponsor, and they thanked me for making this long journey so that people could see that we actually exist. I couldn’t stop thinking about this because sometimes we hear the opposite comment at home, some don’t believe the sponsored children actually exist. This had never crossed my mind that they might think like this.

Our translators tell us that our presence has had other unforeseen benefits; apparently a lot of the families in this area want to register to have their children sponsored, but they don’t want to participate in some of the critical, mandatory parts such as photographing the children, they say it goes against their religion. Apparently our visits have made an impact because families that formerly would not participate for this reason are approaching the World Vision staff and are offering to participate completely because of our visit.

This is a bit of a view of the “audience” starting to close in around us, there are all kinds of people that can’t be seen in this view.

So we concluded the visit with Getrudi and her family and started the walk, in the rain, to another child’s home to meet the parents and conduct another interview. This photo shows my “entourage” walking with me to the next location. If I am walking I always have company, no matter where I am going, no matter how far we are walking.

So here I am doing the next interview and meeting with a child and his parents. You can’t actually see me because of the spectators, but have a look at the little girl on the extreme left of the photo. This is Getrudi, my sponsored child! So she was very shy when the heat was on her at her parents’ house, but she made her way down to the next house on her own and was standing up on the step where the interview was being conducted.

I talked to her after the interview as best I could (we are all learning a few words in Chichewa, which people seem to appreciate, and sometime laugh at). We do know the word for “smile”, which we use all of the time (can’t imagine how I would spell it now), and as you can see Getrudi is more comfortable now and manages a smile. She is still very shy, but I take this gesture in a very positive way.

So now we are leaving, and once again my entourage accompanies me. You never know what the children are going to do in any circumstance – I ducked under this little girls umbrella, and she hoisted it up high so I didn’t have to duck, they are so cute. I actually got out after this photo was taken, I’m sure she would have continued like this for a mile. I seem to be the only one with shoes.

16 Nov

Day 8, Part 2 – Village Savings and Loan

Posted by Pat Gilligan in Children, Malawi, Sponsor, World Vision. Tagged: africa, child sponsor, Malawi, World Vision. Leave a Comment

This afternoon the World Vision staff took us to another remote village to see another interesting project that they have initiated. The easiest way to describe this project is to look at it like a community bank which is managed by the ladies of the small community. The way it works is that anyone can purchase shares for 50 Kwatchas (not sure of the exchange rate, but this is pennies I’m sure). They hand out sheets of paper which seems to be like a balance book of some kind. They have meetings like the one shown in the photo below to allow women to purchase additional shares and to entertain loans. For every share you own, you can borrow up to 3x that amount. When you apply for the loan you will tell them whether you need one or two months to repay the loan, and they will charge you a 10% service charge per month. This project has been overwhelmingly successful and with the interest that is paid on the money borrowed the group ends up with a lot more money at the end of the year that they use for things that need to be done in their community such as bore hole (well) repair, etc.

You can see in the photo below, and in more of a close-up on the next photo that the community members own a lock box to store the money in. The box has 3 locks and the keys are given to 3 different individuals, the box goes to yet another individual to maintain the element of trust for the members.

Here is the box that stores the money, you can see the 3 individual locks being tested by security. This program was setup by World Vision in 23 communities in the area, they introduced the idea and provided the training in all of the communities, plus they provided the lock box for each community. I am continually impressed with their ability to come up with these regionally appropriate solutions that support their mandate of offering a hand up, not a hand out. You can’t imagine how well respected World Vision is here by the citizens and the government for the work they do to help these remote communities that might never be seen by anyone if it weren’t for them.

This post has to be short because we are doing visits to sponsored children this week which is very busy. Today we visited “Malita” who is a 7 year old child sponsored by the Carmichaels of Oxford Mills Ontario, tomorrow I will try to upload the video of that event and write about the experience of giving her a number of much appreciated gifts sent over by them. Until then I will end this post with more pictures of really cute kids, I keep saying this but I just cannot believe how we are treated here, and how fascinated the kids are by us. We continue to generate huge crowds wherever we go and the little children won’t take their eyes off of us while we conduct visits. Any indication of singling anyone out with a smile or a wave, or taking a picture will cause beaming smiles and laughter that just makes your day, it is quite fantastic!

This is obviously not a picture of a little kid, but this girl was fascinating, she stood like that during the entire duration of the presentation with that FULL bucket of water on her head.

15 Nov

Day 8, Malawi – Arrival at Liwonde, Malawi

Posted by Pat Gilligan in Journey, Malawi, World Vision. Tagged: africa, child sponsor, Hippo View Lodge, Malawi, World Vision. 1 Comment

After our weekend of relaxation at Lake Malawi, we journeyed to Liwonde Malawi to visit a variety of World Vision projects and a lot of children sponsored by Canadians at the World Vision Mposa Area Development Program. Liwonde is on the edge of Liwonde National Park in Malawi and is a wildlife reserve where safaris can be taken to view Hippos, crocodiles, elephants, etc. We are staying at a very interesting place called “Hippo View Lodge”, which is aptly named because it sits on the banks of the Shire river, which is full of Hippos, and they actually wander up the banks of the river and eat the grass on the grounds of the hotel. There are all kinds of signs around the property to “Beware of the Hippos”, and “Beware of the Crocodiles”. We are just about to venture out to see if any come on the property tonight, we can clearly hear them coming up out of the water and making a very loud grunting sound to one another and the night watchman assures us that they will come out after 10:00 to eat the grass on the grounds. Did you know that more people are killed by hippos than any other animal in Africa? Seems like a strange statistic, but most in the group agree that this is true. If you would like to have a look at where we are staying, have a look at this link – http://hippowviewlodge.com.

Visit to a primary school

Our first visit in the Mposa ADP is to a primary school where a group of some of the cutest little kids you have ever seen put on a show for us singing and dancing along with their teachers. If I can get a good connection tomorrow I am going to upload a video of this, the picture just doesn’t do this part any justice at all. Our access to the internet has been greatly reduced at this hotel, and we don’t really get any access at all until we go to the World Vision office in Liwonde.

The drive to the pre-school is kind of unbelievable. The following photograph shows you the caliber of “road” we are driving on to reach our destination. We are driving in a Toyota Land Cruiser configured with one front passenger seat and of course the driver (left-hand drive vehicle, they drive on the left here), and 2 bench seats facing each other where sometimes 6 to 8 of us are seated with backpacks, cases of bottled water, etc. It is the wildest ride you can imagine between getting used to someone driving on the left hand side, and the speeds they travel when we are on good highways (actually they travel fast enough on the paths as well)! As the photo shows, it isn’t much of a road at all and you are constantly meeting bicycle and pedestrian traffic as well as the odd ox cart which really presents a problem since they are kind of wide, generally full of bags of rice, and not really any place to turn off so we can pass. What can’t be easily described is the overall condition of the path (I’m going to stop calling it a road, I have seen ATV trails better than this), and just how incredibly bumpy and full of abrupt holes it is. Believe it or not we drive on this sort of thing for sometimes an hour to reach our destinations, our driver jokingly refers to this experience as an “African Massage”. We actually reached one place today where even the Land Cruiser couldn’t pass and required a 40 minute walk (it’s at least 36 degrees today) for one lucky couple.

The areas that we are driving through contains some sort of community farming project where a plot is given to a family and they grow rice alternated with corn. We passed field after field of men, women and children tending to these fields and actually harvesting and bagging rice. These people in this picture are standing in a rice field field actually harvesting rice. Don’t look too hard for harvesting equipment because there isn’t any, they are actually beating the rice stalks on the ground, by hand until the rice grains fall off, then they bag it by hand.

When we finally reached the pre-school we were treated to a demonstration of what the children were learning. They were so eager to sing their songs, some in Chichewa, and some in English, this teacher starts them learning English before they enter kindergarten. They were so animated and proud of what they knew, it was incredible! They did their “ABCs” for us and a few other very loud vocal exercises where they would yell out very loudly “Calendar – January, February, March…”, and also counting in English, all in perfect unison. I am really going to try to get this video uploaded, it was really something.

At this point the children came outside, some for play, others to demonstrate some of the other things they were learning. These children are as fascinated with us as all of the others have been, and just can’t get enough of getting their pictures taken. Sometimes you can cause a bit of chaos, if you happen to take a picture of one child, any number of others might rush in to get in the shot, and if you happen to show them the picture, then any kind of order the teachers are trying to establish is gone out the window, as they all come running in and crowding each other to get the smallest glimpse of themselves or someone they know on camera.

Actually, just before the little ones went outside, a few others were in the nap room getting rejuvenated!

They were only to eager to show us their playground equipment, actually this is the first I have ever seen anything like this since I have been in Malawi.

Here are a few of the classes that the children are participating in outside: the first group in the photo below are learning about drumming. When one of the World Vision guides starts singing some children’s song that they all seem to know, they all start drumming to it immediately, in perfect rhythm.

Here the children are learning about numbers…

I’m really not sure what they are doing here, perhaps learning to use an essential tool for pounding rice or corn into flour. It was pretty cute to watch, they were so proud of their abilities this this tool.

Here is a picture of the bathroom that all of the children used. This was not that uncommon, we have seen this sort of thing in our travels already, what was interesting was the hand washing “station”. Can you see the 2 upright pieces of bamboo with the bottle suspended? Have a look at the following picture for a closeup.

So the bottle is filled with water and is suspended between the 2 bamboo sticks with string. It is tied near the top of the bottle, so that when it is filled with water it would naturally rest right side up. There is another stick on the ground, this stick also has a string and is tied to the neck of the bottle. When a child wants to wash their hands, they step on the stick which forces the bottle to be turned upside down and the water will pour out over their hands. A couple of the children came and demonstrated this procedure with a level of pride that couldn’t be hidden – very cute and sad at the same time.

This is the room where the children’s lunch was prepared.

This lady is showing me how she dries the corn flour that is used to make their staple food, nsimas ( I think I am still getting this word wrong, definitely spelled it wrong in an early post). You see this activity played out constantly wherever you go. If you read my post about many of the children only getting rice at Christmas time, this is what they eat every day.

Here I am getting a bit of a demonstration on how they eat their nsimas. It looks like mashed potatoes, has a consistency that is a little more “rubbery” than that, and is very, very plain. They eat this, and pretty much only this every day, and you can see they are happy to have it.

Here are a couple of miscellaneous photos from around the preschool to end this post…

11 Nov

Day 2, Part 2, Malawi – Tembwe Village

Posted by Pat Gilligan in Children, Malawi, Uncategorized, World Vision. Tagged: africa, child sponsor, Malawi, World Vision. Leave a Comment

This morning we visited a village called “Tembwe Village”. I am going to have to keep this post relatively short and focus more on the pictures because we are packing up tonight for an early start to Lake Malawi, which is about a four hour drive from here. As I am writing this it is actually day 5 here, not day 2 but the days are so packed and there is so little time in the evening to write, not to mention the daily power outages.

Tembwe Village is similar in many ways to the village I wrote about in the previous posts, I have noticed however that the children here were not that afraid of us compared to the other village. We were greeted in a similar manner to which we were greeted the other day at the first village, absolutely amazing singing and dancing in beautifully coloured clothing, this seems to be a custom because it happens to us almost every day – It is absolutely an incredible experience, I love it. As you can see from the picture below, this is definitely a smaller group than the group that met us on our first day, the reason for this is that it is all women that belong to a breastfeeding club that has been setup by World Vision.

Very young children getting sick and dying is a big problem here and one of the major causes is because women have not had a proper understanding of breastfeeding. Most believed that feeding their babies occasionally was adequate, and their primary diet was some sort of corn meal that did not provide them with the required nutrition. They have also been taught generation after generation, that they should never feed their babies the first milk right after they are born. In fact the opposite is true, and without this first milk they are actually missing the antibodies required to fight off germs and disease. World Vision is aware of these misconceptions and sets up “clubs” in these villages to educate women on the correct procedure. Woman after Woman got up and spoke to the benefits they have seen since this education process has been established. They all acknowledged that their children were no longer getting sick and were growing up much healthier.

One of the women (kneeling) is giving a demonstration on how they make corn meal. The lady standing is “Ivy”, our World Vision contact that has setup all of our visits and acts as our translator.

This is the community bathroom…

And, this is the toilet…

I’m still a bit of a curiosity here, the children are usually a little reserved and shy at first, but once they have had their picture taken, they can’t get enough. They actually swarm you trying to get their face in front of the camera yelling “jambala” (I would be amazed if that is the correct spelling), which means “take my picture”, and “me”, “me”, then they giggle and laugh when you show them their image on the camera. Nothing gathers a crowd faster than that here.

This is a typical reaction; this young girl hovered around with the other children at first in a curious manner, but would run and hide if I pointed the camera at her – finally she reluctantly gave into it as though something might happen to her, laughing the whole time. Once they show an interest in having their picture taken I would concentrate on making sure I got their picture. Once I do it always appears to be the greatest thing to them. The innocence of these amazing children is absolutely unbelievable, we have now seen hundreds of children up close and I have yet to see an exception to this.

After the demonstration in the village, we returned to our meeting place at the edge of a large field with 2 rough soccer goal posts setup. This was a good time to give the children of the village one of the soccer balls that I had brought along. You can barely see the ball in the photo below, but after an invitation to come and put their hands on it and get their picture taken at the same time we had pretty much all of the children in attendance touching the ball. If you would like to see what almost all children use for a soccer ball, have a look at the next picture. I mentioned to our driver one day that I wanted to find someone with one of these homemade balls that would be interested in trading me for a new one. The next morning he showed up to pick us up and had this ball, sent from his son to trade me for a new one. I didn’t notice it immediately, but it appeared as though this ball had never touched the ground. He confirmed for me that when his son heard the offer that was on the table, he spent his evening making this ball!

As you can see, the homemade ball is significantly smaller than a standard #5 ball, but it is quite amazing how it is put together. Now that I have seen them all over the place, they are normally covered with some plastic garbage bags to make them waterproof. You will see in future posts that I am giving away a few of these to schools and other organizations wherever we go. In all of these places, with the hundreds of children I have now seen, I have not seen one real soccer ball.

After the kids played soccer for a little bit, this one ended up being the caretaker of the ball…

9 Nov

Day 2, Part 1, Malawi – Visiting a farm

Posted by Pat Gilligan in Children, Malawi, Sponsor, World Vision. Tagged: africa, child sponsor, Malawi, World Vision. 4 Comments

This is only the beginning of our second day in Malawi, and we have no idea what they have in store for us next. It turns out to be a visit to a very small farm that consists of 3 cows and another bunch of unbelievably cute Malawi children. Have you ever seen the World Vision gift catalog that comes in the newspaper? As part of their fall campaign the catalog was included in the Ottawa Citizen as well as the Brockville Recorder and Times. If you didn’t see it this is a catalog that allows you to purchase things for families in places like Africa and other locations throughout the world such as goats, chickens, cows and other things that allow a poor family (most families are poor here) to derive an income from cow’s milk, eggs, etc. (you can look at the catalog here – https://catalogue.worldvision.ca/gifts/Forms/Home.aspx?mc=4128930&lang=en).

Anyway, this morning’s visit was to a small farm that received cows (at least one) through this program. This photo shows the modest facilities for the cows – actually, out of all of the animals I have seen so far including pigs, cows and bulls, chickens, donkeys, guinea fowl, goats, dogs, etc., this is the very first enclosure I have seen. All animals seem to roam free, including on the sides of, and sometimes on the highway.

This is the owner of the farm with a couple of his kids and his wife obscured in the background, giving us a brief presentation on what it has meant to his family to receive this gift of the cow(s) through the World Vision sponsorship program. In every scenario and place we visit, the kids are a major part and always find a way to be involved. The one in the middle is a little rascal, and really cute.

This is the herd at feeding time. A two cow operation may not seem like a lot by our standards, but the farmer told us that he now has a constant supply of milk, and he has never run out of food for his family because he sells the excess milk and therefore generates an income from it. This is a perfect example of World Visions philosophy of giving a hand up not a hand out. He also showed us a calf that one of these cows recently gave birth to, so this kind of a gift from World Vision gives a lot more than just a cow, it really gives them a livelihood that allows them to sustain themselves.

This woman is cutting grass with a machete to feed the cows. It doesn’t look like grass, but I asked and that’s what I was told.

They needed a volunteer to milk the cow so I stepped up to the challenge!

Here we are having fun taking pictures and interacting with the children, which is more amazing than I could ever hope to describe. This little guy was always in the middle of things during the entire visit, he is saying something to me, the translator tells me that he is asking if I will come back.

9 Nov

Day 1, Part 3, Malawi – Childrens Photography Workshop

Posted by Pat Gilligan in Children, Malawi, World Vision. Tagged: africa, child sponsor, Malawi, World Vision. 6 Comments

The two previous posts only covered the first morning of our visit to Malawi, we have been doing something very interesting in the afternoons each day this week. World Vision has come up with this fantastic idea they call “Sponsorship 2.0″, where basically instead of publishing just photos from volunteers like myself, we have selected 9 children from a local school and are training them to use a digital camera and take photographs from their perspective. On the afternoon of day 1 we met the children and were each assigned one child and a translator to teach the children the basics of a digital camera, including actually taking pictures, viewing the pictures, composition techniques (portrait, landscape, other perspectives, etc.), and using the zoom feature. After the children were comfortable with the mechanics of the camera we take them out and take pictures. On day 1 they will simply take pictures of things that interest them, on the 2^nd day they take pictures of things that mean a lot to them, day 3 they are taking pictures of things they would like to change and so on. Throughout the week, each child selects their favourite 3 photos, and we will each pick several more that we like from the child we are partnered with. On the evening of the last day arrangements have been made in Lilongwe to have all of the selected photos printed and on Friday we will be having a photo exhibition where the children will get to see their own pictures displayed, these pictures will end up on the World Vision site where people can see this area through the eyes of these children.

Unbelievably Unselfish Children

It is important to note that this technology is as far from these children as it can possibly be, they have never held anything like this in their hands before. This process has allowed us to get to know these children a lot more than any others that we are meeting on this trip, and we are absolutely stunned by some of the behavior we are seeing. As an example, every day these children each lunch with us; our lunch general consists of rice, chicken, goat, some very good tomato sauce that is poured over the rice and these corn meal cakes (I think they are called “semis”, but I could be wrong) that are a staple here. One of the highlights every day is that the children come in and eat lunch with us. This photo is one of the children showing off her lunch as she is bringing it into the classroom.

Something quite amazing, and heartbreaking happened during lunch the first day, shortly after the photo below was taken; the room was arranged in a square pattern, and the children sat with us scattered about the room. The girl with the sunglasses on her head is Joanna, our guide from World Vision Canada. She had finished her lunch and the little girl (Felesite) sitting beside her was trying to communicate something to her by motioning to Joanna’s plate and speaking something to her in Chichewa. Joanna didn’t know if she wanted something from her plate, or her fork, so she just moved her plate towards her so she could take what she wanted. It was at this moment that Felisite took her spoon and proceeded to take rice from her own bowl and put it on Joanna’s plate – Wow, we were stunned to say the least! But we didn’t realize just how amazing this gesture really was until the drive home later that afternoon. One of our guides/translators from Malawi, an unbelievable man from Malawi named “Wezzie” (goes by “Wez”)was asked by one of the other volunteers something about the amount of rice the children ate at lunch. He informed us, to our mutual astonishment, that rice is considered “special”, and the children only get it once per year at Christmas time! So even though it is considered a very rare treat that they get at most once per year, she wanted to share it with Joanna! We keep seeing this kind of evidence every day from these unbelievable people. It is also important to realize that all they usually eat, every day, is the corn meal cakes I described above.

I am happy that these children are being spoiled every day with us (spoiled by their standards), not only do they get this once/year lunch, but we have brought in cases of Fanta pop (which they also never see), and they get one of these at lunch and another one at the end of the afternoon after our workshop, with a small box of biscuits of some kind. It honestly is the most unbelievable thing to watch. One other funny thing they do is they watch for us to finish a bottle of water and they take the empty plastic bottle. These things are gold to them for a lot of reasons that I will highlight when I talk about the school visit we had this morning.

I will talk more about the photography workshop as we progress with it, and I will post something on the photo exhibit that we will do on Friday. The plan is to do something like a party atmosphere for them including balloons and lots of gifts, as well as letting them see their work in print.

This is a photo of my student “Flora” (pronounced “Florra”, with a sort of a rolling “r”) showing a photo to some of her subjects. They have copied this behaviour from us, it is something we always do because the kids love to see their image and quite often they have never seen themselves like this. We did it with them when we first met them, and for all we know, they might think it is the proper etiquette when taking pictures. On day one of photography workshop, the children were to select 3 of their favourite pictures that best represented the theme of “things that mean the most to me”. Once again they, in this case Flora, stunned me by selecting 2 of the 3 photos that were pictures of me.

8 Nov

Day 1, Part 2, Malawi – “Don’t be afraid, they’re just like us!”

Posted by Pat Gilligan in Children, Malawi, World Vision. Tagged: africa, child sponsor, Malawi, World Vision. 4 Comments

Yesterday’s post was just the beginning of this experience at this village, I haven’t yet described what happened to us next after the amazing welcome song that was performed for us. As it turned out they had an entire ceremony prepared with us as the guests of honour, this included welcome speeches by various members of the community including the chief, some of the women and the men, and at least one of the children. We were seated at the front of the group on chairs, as though we were celebrities, while they sat on the ground, children at the front (but spaced well back for now), woman grouped together directly behind them, and men in another group off to the right.

We were asked to each stand and introduce ourselves, and each person received enthusiastic applause from the entire group, while the translator reiterated our names. The children gazed at us curiously throughout the ceremony with serious, almost guarded expressions while we sat there or took pictures of them, but after looking them in the eye and offering a heartfelt smile, their little faces, one by one would light up like light bulbs. We also had an opportunity to ask them questions and they could also ask questions of us; Joanna, our representative from World Vision asked the group how many children present were sponsored by Canadians? This kind of took me back a bit because it had not really crossed my mind (not sure why) that these would be the sponsored children we hear about and see on TV. In any case, many of the children raised their hands which was very heartwarming to see, apparently there were even more but those children were at school at this time. When it was their turn to ask questions, one woman stood up and asked why more Canadians don’t come to see them. You have to look beyond what we know about the obvious reasons and realize that they have no real concept of these things, I’m sure she thinks that if we could do it why not more? The more important and meaningful thing to me was that they truly enjoyed seeing us, I was told by one of our translators that the people, particularly in the rural areas honestly love to see white people (Mzumbas, as they call us). Not really sure why that is when you consider our history. They also asked them how many of them received letters from their sponsors; nobody raised their hand which made me feel bad. I think that a lot of people think that the correspondence that is spoken of on World Vision commercials is something that doesn’t happen, but I can assure you that it does happen, and I can now truly appreciate how much it means to these people who have absolutely nothing – this will change for me.

This photo shows the women and children at the gathering, the men were actually on the right side. Notice the serious looks from the children in the front row, they had never seen the likes of us before!

This photo shows how they seated us at the front of the group and the barrier that the children maintained (it may not look like much of a barrier until you see the closing ceremony photo)

After the ceremony, we were split up into three groups and led to different parts of the village to see what accomplishments they have made in hygiene at their homes or farms (when I say “farm”, don’t imagine what you see at home). It is hard to believe, but one of the major problems in this part of the world stems from not washing hands. This is something that they really don’t understand and is the root cause of many of the issues that were present years ago. World Vision has gone into these villages and educated them on the importance of this, as well as built proper wells for them, some were drinking water out of a shallow hole with a tire around it to keep things from going into the hole.

This photo shows one of the toilet facilities that everyone in the village uses – the word you see written on the bottom of the facility means “wash your hands”

By the time we reached the farmers small operation to view the progress he made, we started making some headway with the children. I discovered that the best ice-breaker was showing them a picture of themselves on a digital camera. Most of these children (and quite possibly the adults) have never seen their own image, and they were absolutely thrilled to see it, some giggling and running, but all laughing and encouraging their little friends to come and see, which would of course prompt more pictures.

Here is a picture of Bill and Phyllicia being swarmed by a group of kids trying to get a look at themselves on the camera

It was at about this point when one of our translators overheard one of the children yelling to her friend “Don’t be afraid, they’re just like us!”, and from this point on they were more than eager to get in any photograph that someone was willing to take, as a matter of fact, many of them became real hams for the camera in short order and seemed to absolutely love it. As a testament to this, I have now averaged over 700 pictures per day, and not a single one seems like a waste, every single place and face I look at I want to remember.

Here is a photo of me with some of my new friends

On the way back to the area where the ceremony was conducted a couple of the women wanted to demonstrate how the well that World Vision had provided worked. A little while before this photo was taken these 2 women were quite camera shy, now they appear to be willing participants in a documentary. Amazing people!

This was the closing part of the visit, the girl standing in the foreground is “Ivy”, she works for World Vision in Lilongwe and was the key individual setting up our visits and acting as translator. The other girl standing is “Joanna”, she is our guide from World Vision Canada and is unbelievable. She has travelled around the world for World Vision, she is very culturally aware and very experienced in these matters and really keeps things running smooth and professional. Remember what I said about the children and the “barrier” between us and them? Compare the distance where they are sitting from us here to the first picture above. Also notice that they are all looking at me – I thought I would get off my chair and slip into the crowd where a couple of other photographers were already working to get a better shot of how close they were to us, but it seemed that I was being tracked by almost all of the children, so I quickly took this picture and sat back down.

And finally, this group of amazing people wouldn’t think of sending us off without a proper escort – these children chased our Land Cruiser all the way out of the village, I’m sure it was more than a kilometer.

Thanks for all of the comments and people reading this – stay tuned tomorrow to see the reaction of a group of kids in another village when I give them a single soccer ball (as well as the hand-made soccer ball I traded for a real one), and when I take one for the team and volunteer to milk a cow with at least 8 cameras focused on me …

7 Nov

Day 1, Malawi – Can’t imagine ever being the same after today

Posted by Pat Gilligan in Malawi, Sponsor, Uncategorized, World Vision. Tagged: africa, child sponsor, Malawi, World Vision. 10 Comments

Today was the first day of my adventure with World Vision in Malawi, and to be totally honest, if they told us that we had to go home tomorrow I would feel that everything would have been more than worthwhile. This day started out with about a one hour drive outside the capital city of Lilongwe.

Driving around outside the city of Lilongwe is in itself a very eye opening, and almost heart-breaking experience. The highways are busy enough with traffic, but the view of everyday life on the side of road practically everywhere you go is unbelievable. An almost constant stream of people either walking or on beat-up old bicycles on either side of the road is always evident. Mothers carrying youngsters in brightly coloured cloth, cleverly wrapped around themselves, often carrying items of all description on their heads including water, suitcases and other kinds of packages. People carrying items from branches to other things of value, anything, possibly an old bicycle rim or other things that would have long been in the dump at home, are common here. Children in tattered, colourful clothing play together on the side of the road with sticks or rocks or mangy looking dogs, sometimes standing alone, occasionally waving at our Land Rover. Domestic animals including goats, pigs, chickens, guinea fowl, bony cattle and mangy dogs are everywhere, but not in any kind of enclosure, barn or paddock, they roam freely on the side of the road, quite often standing in the middle of the road.

Often when you go to a country that is known for poverty, you will see a mix of people living in some level of poverty mixed with other more middle or higher class residences. This is not the case here – it is all the same kind of house and there is no mistaking the blatant and rampant poverty – there is no exception to this that I have seen. My first view of this was in driving from the airport, it was more than a little shocking to me and I actually felt myself losing my composure (actually everything I could do to not cry to tell you the truth). I have found that even after one day of constantly seeing this, I am getting used to it, and I wanted to make that I commented on this while the feeling was still fresh, I didn’t want to become desensitized and not report exactly what I felt.

Something else happened today that I will never forget for the rest of my life; World Vision took us to a remote village this morning to see the kind of work that they have done on behalf of child sponsors in the area of health and sanitation. While this work was impressive, it is the reception that we got that completely blew me away. This village is called “Domo”, and is a remote village so far off the main roads that had we not been in the Land Rover, we never would have made it. Quite honestly, I’m not sure if anyone had any idea of what was about to happen, but as we negotiated this very rough path through the reddish dirt “road”, some children started appearing on the road. They waived, and started running after us.

These children were from the village that we were going to and I had no idea what was in store for us. Remember that my limited, but only experience with this country is a lot of people that just looked as though they were doing anything they possibly could to scratch the barest of existence from this country.

It turned out that the village of Domo was a small place with no stores, no business of any kind, just approximately 400 people growing tobacco, or whatever they can to support their families. Many of these children are also supported by World Vision sponsors.

To provide some further context, something we did not find out until later was that most of the people in this village had never seen anyone that didn’t look like them, including white people (or “mzungu” as they call us)! Believe it or not, young children were crying, and not with glee or happiness, they were afraid! Happily this situation did not last and the children couldn’t get enough of us, especially when we showed them their pictures we were taking of them. This turned out to be a real ice-breaker with the children, because almost all of them had never seen their own image before.

As we pulled into the village in our World Vision Land Runners, what seemed like hundreds of people, women in beautiful brightly coloured wraps, many carrying children either on their backs or in front of them in simple cloth slings, mostly barefoot, children of all ages wearing all manner of simple little coloured dresses or t-shirts, some with slogans or sayings on them, also mostly barefoot, and men wearing long pants and a variety of coloured button up long and short sleeve shirts all wearing shoes, singing the most amazing tribute song to us! They were singing in their native language, which is Chichewa. According to our translators, the song went something like this:

We are excited to welcome our visitors! You have travelled all the way from Canada to visit us!

Have a look at this video – this is what was happening as we exited the trucks. Apparently they made this tribut song just for our visit, and we have no idea how long they prepared because an entire ceremony followed which I will detail below this video. This was the 2nd of many times today (including as I write and recount the experience right now) that I just about totally lost it and started crying. This is hard to appreciate, and is why I am making sure I write it down now, I know that when I get back to reality I may not include things like this, but it is important and was that impactful on all of us. Have a look at this …

This wasn’t all that happened today, but it is getting late and apparently we do this all over again tomorrow so I am going to post a part 2 to this tomorrow.

31 Oct

October 30th – An Incredible Thing Happened Today!

Posted by Pat Gilligan in Malawi, Sponsor, World Vision. 3 Comments

In three days my step son Bill (Will) and I leave for Malawi with World Vision. It is kind of hard to explain, but the preparation for this trip, particularly purchasing little gifts like crayons, school supplies and other items for the children we will meet can invoke deep emotions. Both of us will be meeting our own sponsored children on this trip and have taken the time to purchase special things for these children and their families.

Bill had an extraordinary experience today; this is what happened in his words:

I went to the dollar store today to purchase a few more gifts for the kids in Malawi, mainly more things for my sponsored child’s birthday. When I got to the cash I started a conversation with the girl at the checkout. I ended up explaining to her what the items I was purchasing were for, and her eyes lit up. She went on to explain to me that she herself was once a sponsored child, when she was growing up in Rwanda, from the age of five until eighteen. She told me that she was very grateful to her sponsors and the money they sent her monthly allowed her to go to a good school and helped feed her. Most of all she was just grateful that through the hard times someone on the other side of the world cared and was willing to help. They exchanged pictures, gifts and letters over the years as well, and receiving a package from her sponsor was always very exciting for her. She elaborated and told me that people who think it is a scam or that the money doesn’t get there are wrong.
It was all I could do to hold back the tears as I left the store, an in person example that what organizations like World Vision are doing is helping those people. I wish all the naysayers could have a conversation with Jouduis, I think their opinion would quickly change. She even made more of a believer out of me. Three days till my flight.

I have often said that one of the reasons people don’t take the step to sponsor a child through World Vision is that they believe that the overall problem is too big and that it isn’t likely that sponsoring one child can put a dent in the problem. I believe that World Vision’s approach works on many levels and that their philosophy of offering a hand up, not a hand out is the only way of tackling this problem.

I have also always believed, and I think Bill’s experience today proves, that even though you may not be able to solve the entire problem by sponsoring one child, there is something quite profound and meaningful to them in the knowledge that someone else in the world, who they don’t even know, actually cares about them! This was confirmed today by Jouduis – what other conclusion could they come to? This has to be very uplifting to people living in such dire conditions, I think this alone is a good enough reason to sponsor a child and their family.

There aren’t many people that start sponsoring children at the age Bill is at, they understandably have other priorities as they are just starting out and would rather spend money on other things, but I can tell from his reaction today that this was an unexpected and extremely moving experience for him, and he has no regrets.

This is Bill’s sponsored child “Chikondi”, who we will meet in the next couple of weeks.