Lessons in research.

I am now half way through my in-field research in rural Blantyre, Malawi. I aim to conduct semi-structured interviews with close to 50 savings group participants to find out gendered information regarding why people joined and what they do with their money. I am hoping to see a difference between men and women but so far my research has not really confirmed such a theory. Anyway, the research is going well and the villagers seem to be very excited to see us for the most part. I think white people coming is a big event in small villages like the ones we are going to. Everyone waves and children all run after our car.

My interpreter is named Alfred and I he is a teacher assistant, meaning he is not employed by the government but rather by the local village members. His English is decent though I have difficulty understanding him and find that he is unable to translate word for word. As such, my research has not been going as perfectly as planned, nor have I been getting the amount or quality of data I had hoped for but I guess that is just all part of the learning process!

TIA (This Is Africa) Highlights of the Week:

1. The sliding door of my minibus taxi completely fell off the vehicle on the way home. Men shoved it back on and we continued on our way with some passengers having to exit through the window. No big deal here apparently.

2. Sitting under a tree, eating lunch while listening to the local people discuss their very real belief in magic; maize meal is made through magic, you can be killed by magic when the wrong person looks at you, and Hitler had a coat of magic that now resides in a museum so no one can get to it.

3. We passed through a rural primary school en-route to our research location and at least fifty children dropped what they were doing and ran behind our car screaming and waving for close to a kilometre. I guess I now know how it feels to be a celebrity! 

Liwonde National Park.

This past weekend I took a trip up to Liwonde National Park. The park is north of Blanytre and not very far if you have access to a car. I was stuck with a more rudimentary method of transport however, so it took me a few hours on an overpacked minibus and another half hour or so on the back of a bicycle.

  

We did one game drive through the park where we were able to see elephants. In general though, the park was really lacking animals. They say this is due to a lack of funds and poaching by the park rangers and local people.

We did a second outing via canoe on the Shire River from where we were able to get very close to groups of hippos. They barely budged when they saw us. They stand in the water with just their eyes and ears poking out while they eat the vegetation on the bottom of the river. Despite their calm, herbivore nature they actually kill many people here. It sounds like this is an accident when people walk at night time and the hippos do not see them. 

Overall, it was a relaxing weekend and I would not have minded scraping Blanytre and remaining at the park for the rest of my stay in Malawi!

Mulanje.

On Saturday, Laura, Lena, and I took a little day trip to Mt. Mulanje in the southeast of Malawi on the country’s border with Mozambique. We took the only transport available to us, the minibus taxi, and what we were told should have been about a twenty-minute drive turned into two hours. There were even chickens on the bus at one point. It is all part of the Africa experience!

There is little touristy information available here so we didn’t know exactly what to expect when arriving in Mulanje, though we had heard that it is a must see. It did turn out to be very beautiful – we decided that it resembles Jurassic Park because of the bright green tropical forests. It turned out we couldn’t do more than walk around the little town at the base of the mountain when we got there because we didn’t realize that the mountain is quite large – a third the size of Mt. Everest actually – and you need a guide and a few days to hike to the top. The area is also known for its tea estates; however, they are all closed on the weekends so we struck out all around. I think we might try to plan another visit so that we can stay somewhere on the mountain, hike, see the water falls, and go tea tasting at the tea estates!

Despite the other failures, we did stumble upon possibly the nicest restaurant in Malawi, Mulanje Pepper Pizza. It was very unexpected because I just don’t think there is a market here for upscale dining. The place makes homemade stone oven pizzas out on the veranda so you can sit and watch them. They also had homemade chocolate cake that I am still dreaming of. Considering the food choices here are quite limited, it was exciting to find a ‘fancy’ and Western meal for a change. As you can imagine, this place is also a gathering spot for white people living throughout Southern Malawi. I would guess some even drive a bit of a distance to eat there once in a while. Anyway, there were more whites there than we have seen in one place since arriving! We met a really nice Norwegian who has been living in Blantyre for years teaching at the local university and he was able to give us a lot of advice on touristy activities we must do while here which was very helpful and got us excited for the coming weekends. Malawi is a strange place for white people to live and so I think that the whites that are here form a tight community and help each other out.

Microfinance, minibuses, and blackouts.

I now have three days (two really because today was a national holiday!) of work at ASAP behind me. I have really been enjoying it; though I already understand how difficult it will be to get much work done. The work atmosphere and general way of life here is much more relaxed and slow going. In addition, the logistics of transport and safety can be quite time-consuming and also constrictive. It takes us about an hour or so to get into work on the minibus taxis, the local form of transport, so we don’t actually arrive until almost 10. Then lunch is 12-1:30 or so. We leave around 3 in the afternoon to give ourselves time to return home before dark. In general I find that the after lunch slump is strong here and even less is accomplished in the afternoons. In addition, we don’t have Internet and no electricity at times.

It is near impossible to explain just how crazy the minibus taxi transport system is here. The average Malawian (or African for that matter) uses a bus system to get around if they can afford it. The buses are about the size of a small minivan in the States, the ones without the large trunk space – the short ones! These minibuses would not be legal vehicles elsewhere but here they are the essential transport. They squeeze 16-19 people into these minibuses and on top of that many people travel with large baskets of produce, babies on the backs, etc. So as you can probably picture, it is quite crowded! We walk about 10 minutes from our compound/house to the major road where we stand there and wait for a minibus going in the right direction to stop and pick us up. We take the first minibus from our town of Chicumula to a town called Limbe where we then get on a second bus to Blantyre. There is really no telling exactly how long it will take because the buses may not even leave until the entire bus is full. It will also stop all along route to let people out and pick up new passengers. If the passenger getting off is in the back of the minibus all the other passengers must get out to let him off before reloading and continuing on our way. There is also a lot of traffic because there are few roads, and even fewer decent ones, lacking stoplights and proper intersections.

Another issue we are faced with here are power cuts, or blackouts. There is not enough electricity to go around so we had heard that this was common. We just did not know how common! We have had a blackout each evening just as we go to start cooking dinner and also two of the four mornings we have been here. They seem to last a few hours and while inconvenient I think we have already gotten used to it. We did have quite a scare this morning however. When I woke up this morning the power was out so I went around unlocking all the doors and gates as usual, but was unable to disarm the alarm since it does not work when there is no electricity.  When the electricity can back on the alarm apparently came back on as well and it was set off since we were awake and moving within the house. We had a little visit from the security company to make sure everything was all right – I guess it was like a practice run!

A little bit of background information - I am living and working with three other students from The University of Edinburgh - Laura from Scotland, Lena from Germany, and Terry from Tanzania. We are working at a local organization in Blantyre, Malawi called ASAP, standing for A Self-help Assistance Program. ASAP works in villages to establish groups of around fifteen people that together save small amounts of money that they then lend out to each member in turns. The money is then supposed to be invested in a small business of sorts to increase income. They are called savings groups or rotating savings and credit associations and are a branch of the overarching microfinance concept. We will mostly be doing our own individual research in conjunction with our dissertation for the university. I plan to look at the gender dimension of the savings groups to see the difference between male and female motivations for joining, as well as their spending. There is evidence that women tend to spend increased income on the household well-being, especially their children’s nutrition, health, and education, opposed to men who use any increased income for personal use. If indeed this is the case, focusing on women could have a greater impact on wider developmental outcomes, as well as increased sustainability since the children (the next generation) will be better off.