Disclaimer: The contents of this blog are my own and do not represent the views or opinions of the Peace Corps or the United States Government.

“I couldn’t poop in a hole in the ground.”—friend from home

“You don’t have electricity? So then how do you cook?”—Another friend from home

“I couldn’t live like you do, without anything.”—Government worker in Lilongwe

“This country is very poor with a lot of corruption. We cannot be like the United States.”—Malawian from my village

“Kodi tingatukuke bwanji opanda mphamvu zodalirika?” (”How can we develop without dependable electricity?”)—Sign near Mzimba turn-off.

“You mean there is also poverty in the United States? We were never told these things.”—My Chichewa tutor.

“Insanity is going to work for a power company every day and making schedules for when the power will not work.”—Popular anonymous quote shared by Malawians on WhatsApp

I had never stared at a lightbulb with so much interest as I did this one. As a man on the other side of the wall tied wires together and his co-worker adjusted things from the top of a telephone pole several yards away, I asked them questions about ESCOM’s schedule of blackouts, which I’d found on my phone but was having trouble interpreting.

ESCOM stands for Energy Supply Corporation of Malawi, essentially the sole provider of grid energy in the country, although they are often lampooned for corruption and their power providing constant blackouts. I saw a photo once of a man wearing a shirt which read “ESCOM: Everyone Should Count on Makhala [charcoal].” ESCOM indeed publishes a schedule each week of when which areas will experience blackouts. The power in Malawi is mostly provided by hydroelectric plants along various rivers, most prominently the Shire. However, there aren’t enough to provide energy for the whole country, so most areas are divided into three sub-areas, and the power alternates between two areas while one area experiences a 6-hour blackout.

Or that’s how it’s supposed to happen, anyway. ESCOM is notorious for not following the schedule they’ve made and often other problems cause inconsistent blackouts. Nevertheless, it was this schedule I was trying to decipher with the electricians. Our school used to have solar power and a solar battery but it was stolen in early July. Since then, we’d had no electricity. Even before the battery was stolen, it had been some time since I’d seen actual electricity near my own home. I had electricity in Zomba and of course in Lilongwe, but when my site got switched, one thing I was told is that my new house had no electricity. I had gotten quite accustomed to the electricity I’d had in Zomba and to be honest, part of the reason for my breakdown after being moved to a new site was not having electricity. It had been so long since I had started a fire, my phone wouldn’t stay charged, I barely had light at night, and I couldn’t use my laptop. The solar at the school helped, but I still would have preferred it in my house. I didn’t realize how much I utilized the solar energy until it was gone. From then on I was carrying a power strip and at least 7 cables to town to charge everything once every 2 weeks. Things began to change at the beginning of this school year with the arrival of a new Head Teacher.

Although my school had been wired for electricity for over a year, it hadn’t been turned on. This isn’t at all uncommon. I know other volunteers who live in houses that have been wired for four years without electricity. Some people live in houses that had electricity 20 years ago but inexplicably don’t have it anymore, despite all the wiring being there. One volunteer told me that when he moved into his wired house, his supervisor told him, “You will have electricity very soon.” 2 years later, it was turned on, when he had a week left of service. “I didn’t even use it,” he said. “I’d gotten used to living without it.”

Stories like these are why I was shocked that ESCOM came within 2 weeks of us calling them to tell them we were ready. My house was also wired in the process. It felt like a whirlwind of change all at once. They tell me that my house will have electricity no later than February. A few months ago, I would have seriously doubted that. Based on how they’ve acted here, I’m not sure. They might come earlier.

A large reason I haven’t posted as much lately is because I haven’t been able to effectively charge my laptop. Today is the first day that I am able to do that. Although there are still blackouts, after being here for a year, I can attest that they are less frequent and shorter when they happen. My friends and I recently went to Blantyre and did not experience a single blackout the entire 3 days that we were there. During a training that followed in Lilongwe, there were only 2 very short blackouts.

It’s easy to think about a place like this in terms of what we hear about it as a place of suffering and helplessness and underdeveloped infrastructure. We use the term “developing countries” these days rather than “third-world countries” to remind ourselves that these countries are in the process of developing and are not just static, unchanging entities. Yet all too often we say “developing” while thinking “underdeveloped.”

Shortly before I left the U.S., I began reading a book called The Bright Continent by Dayo Olopade. I finished it during PST here. It interested me because it was one of the few books about Africa that wasn’t about some sort of depressing conflict, development, or extreme poverty. In fact, that’s kind of the point of the book. Olopade’s basic argument is that the West’s perception of Africa is extremely flawed because all we ever hear about the place is war, genocide, and poverty. We seldom peel back the curtain to see what’s actually going on and who people here actually are. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TEDx talk “The Danger of a Single Story” is a wonderful elaboration on this point. We watched it during PST and I highly, highly recommend that you go and watch it right now because a) she’s an amazing speaker and author and b) it will likely change the way you think about not only Africa, but other things in your life). The argument that Olopade makes is that Africa is not “The Dark Continent” as people one hundred years ago may have said, but a hotbed of innovation and novelty, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world.

Our flawed view of Africa can and often does lead to a flawed view of development. “We focus on Africa’s formal organizations and its formal solutions. How many schools have you built? How many mothers have died? Was the election free and fair?” Olopade writes. It reminds me of the adults in The Little Prince asking irrelevant questions. When I first read The Little Prince I always thought those “adult questions” were bad because they were bland and less interesting than the questions a child might ask. Now I realize that they were also more negative.

Throughout the book, Olopade makes the argument that it’s precisely because of the majority of Africa’s financial state that new technologies and creativity are on the rise here: “Lean economies are an invitation to innovate.” She uses the Yoruba term “kanju” (meaning “to hustle” or “make haste”) to refer to the specific type of African creativity born from African difficulty. “The most important thing about kanju is that it is born out of everything outsiders pity in Africa.” A South African woman made a washing machine out of a vuvuzela. Fritz Ekwoge, from Cameroon, learned to write computer code at age 16 on a TI-82 calculator that he borrowed from a friend, since he had no computer (he also began hacking Nokia dumb phones to make them run apps—English learning apps, job searching sites, inspirational messages. “I’m turning Nokias into Blackberrys. Blackberry should be afraid of me.”). One company called Solar Sister utilizes a Mary Kay styled structure in order to sell solar panels. The film industry in Nollywood is sometimes pointed to as an example of kanju.

Here in Malawi one way that this is promoted is TALULAR (Teaching and Learning Using Locally Available Resources). Teachers are encouraged to create their own resources from whatever is locally available rather than purchase them. I was reminded of it when I saw my host brother making a checkers board out of some old cardboard and coca cola and sprite bottle caps. Even we as PCVs are forced to innovate on occasion (it turns out that a plastic medical kit case really does make a great cat litterbox).

Throughout the book, Olopade uses the term “fail states” rather than the more common “failed states.” Though she never justifies it in this way, the reason I like her term is because it doesn’t imply that the country is finished and there’s no hope. I also don’t like how “failed state” seems to imply that everyone within a particular set of political boundaries has failed. I remember being eye-opened to the fact that modern political boundaries are a recent innovation and completely invisible concepts. Especially in Africa, it is often tempting to identify people by their tribe or other makers rather than by their country (73% of households in Africa do not speak the official language of their countries. In developing countries outside of Africa this number is around 28%–evidence of arbitrary linguistic and ethnic borders). This means that if a state has failed, it doesn’t necessarily mean those outside the government of that state have also failed.

Generalizing all of Africa as poor isn’t just problematic because it makes the West seem condescending or elitist. It causes and encourages the very things which cause financial problems for Africa. Take donated clothing for example. Donating clothes to “Africa” hurts local textile businesses which are usually the biggest industries outside of Africa. In Ghana (and since reading the book I’ve discovered this is true in other countries), donated clothes are known in the local language as “a white person has died.” Most of Malawi’s textiles come from Zambia, largely because the local industry simply can’t compete with the influx of cheap, donated clothing from the West. Yet this wouldn’t happen if the West listened to African input on how they themselves would like to change their world and lives. Milly Businge says this: “We would like the entire world to know simply that we exist, and that we are empowered, we live, and we are real and not just a story. We would like you to know how we stand, how we live, how we grow, how we survive, our successes and our failures.”

Often donor and NGO money doesn’t support what’s already happening in Africa but crowds it out. The Cahorra Bassa dam in Mozambique produces enough electricity to power all of Mozambique, but the electricity is diverted to South Africa as a money-making endeavor. This reminds me of the situation in Eastern DRC, where people mine day in and day out for parts that will eventually be essential in making computers, and yet there are very few computers to be found in the area. Africa has so many resources, but due to a variety of internal and external factors, they aren’t utilized fully for Africa itself. Olopade makes this particular point stronger when pointing out that Africa is more ideal than practically anywhere on the planet for solar energy, but has great difficulty in implementing it widely. “The region starved for electricity is spoiled for sun.” (Speaking of solar energy, many African countries are leaders in the fight against climate change. Olopade writes, “African leadership in the production and sale of alternatives to fossil fuels is a rich irony, considering how little Africa has contributed to climate change.”)

The West’s lack of understanding towards Africa is not only about Africa itself, but also Africa’s impact on us. The innovation and kanju spirit has spread from there to the US in ways we don’t typically recognize can be traced back to Africa. Samsung created a phone that could carry 2 SIM cards at once, in response to the African practice of a family having one phone but switching SIMs depending on who was calling, or how good cell network is in one place (I currently have two SIMs that I regularly use and can attest that it’s just about essential here). It was later marketed outside Africa so that businesspeople could separate business and personal calls on the same phone. Have you ever heard of Venmo? That concept originated in Africa about 4 years before it took off in the United States. In many African countries, one can trade mobile phone units between different phone numbers and SIM cards. Because of the fluctuating value of currencies in many African countries, people often began trading in mobile units rather than actual money, paying each other directly from their phone. Eventually the banks took notice and allowed each other to do direct deposits to other accounts from their own phone. It took America a few years to catch up with most African countries on that one.

It was so refreshing to read something completely uplifting about Africa that didn’t attempt “inspiration” through making you pity the person and people you were reading about (I highly recommend the book).

So, why don’t we hear about those stories? I should clarify first that not all or even most Malawians hear these stories. Malawians are very aware of poverty. This makes sense when you think about it. American media spreads everywhere on the planet. In fact, if you’ve never traveled outside the United States, or if you haven’t traveled in a very long time, it’s difficult to make clear the extent to which American media permeates the facets of every country, even countries which officially have placed a ban on that media, and even the poorest countries in the world where most homes do not have a television. All of my students know who Madonna is, they can sing “Work” by Rihanna, and I’ve been asked more times than I count whether WWE is real as well as whether or not I like John Cena. When you see Hollywood images of America and that’s all you see, that becomes the single story you hear about America.

Likewise, in America, when the only images we see of any country in Africa involves flies surrounding a child with a distended belly, that becomes the single story we hear about Africa. As Adichie says, “It’s not that the single story is wrong. It’s just that it’s only part of the story.” Indeed, there are children in Africa who are malnourished and it’s a serious problem. But they are by no means all of the children and those children are also more than their problems. When I talk to friends at home about where I am, their first thought is usually about AIDS. AIDS is indeed a global issue, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, what is almost never talked about in Western media is the improvement in containment and control of the epidemic. Each year, new infections are declining, entirely due to the efforts of local health workers and implementations as well as the safer habits of citizens. It’s possible that by 2030, AIDS will be a thing of the past in Malawi, especially if health workers continue working with the vigor and zeal that they have been. Malawi is one of the leading countries in terms of reaching the 90-90-90 goals: By 2020, 90% of people should know their HIV status, 90% of PLWHIV (People Living with HIV) should be taking ARVs (Anti-Retroviral Therapy), and 90% of people on ART should have reduced viral loads. We’ve already hit 90% of PLWHIV knowing their status. It’s projected that Malawi will likely hit the 90-90-90 goals by or before 2020.

Stories like this don’t sell as well as stories about epidemics on the rise. The Ebola crisis was relegated to a few countries in West Africa, yet in the American mind fear arose concerning every single one of the 54 countries on a continent more than twice the size of all of Western Europe. We are fed images of despair, death, and poverty. Yet Malawians are fed with images of bling, smiling faces, and money. When I told my language tutor that poverty also exists in America, and that certain schools there also don’t have enough books or teachers, he was shocked. “We were not told these things” was his response.

In the minds of most Malawians I speak with, America is the pinnacle of development. I can see why they believe that, but I don’t always, or even usually, agree. The United States has built a reliable infrastructure, but one which is not sustainable. Malawians are hyper-aware of climate change, more than the vast majority of Americans I know. In a tropical climate, even subtle changes in weather become immediately evident every year. Any elder in any village in the country will tell you how much shorter rainy season is now than it was 20 years ago, as well as how sporadic the rains have become. When I tell Malawians that there are people in America who do not believe climate change is real, they are shocked. “But how?” they laugh. “Maybe it’s because they don’t farm,” a farmer here once told me.

As I said, energy here is primarily hydroelectric. Although it’s not enough energy now, the construction of new power plants in the future will sufficiently provide energy to the whole country. Malawi is also more poised to utilize solar energy than the United States because of its tropical climate. Although the current infrastructure is underdeveloped, when it is developed, it seems that it might last longer than the ever-changing infrastructure of the United States.

Then there is the ingenuity and curiosity of the people here. I’ve never met a Malawian who wasn’t curious about something. The problems here often force people to innovate in creative ways. I’ve said before that I was taught how to do most household chores by my 4-year old neighbor in the training village. She could start a fire, wash her clothes by hand, wash the dishes, sweep the yard, and cook, all better than I can even now. I didn’t plant a seed in the United States until I was 20 years old. Here that is unfathomable. We as Americans like to consider ourselves enlightened and skilled, but in reality we hide behind a façade of machinery. We don’t innovate the way people here innovate because there is no need to innovate. People become complacent and satisfied with what they already have. Here, that isn’t the case. Everyone is always striving to do the next thing, and once the next thing is achieved, they are already thinking of how to utilize it to achieve something else.

Before the school’s electricity was even turned on, the Head Teacher and another teacher were already brainstorming ways to use it to supplement teaching as well as possible extracurricular activities we could use it for. After seeing that there was a run-down old classroom block and not enough space in the library for books, the Head Teacher called in people to fix that block and turn it into a library. There’s not enough space in the staff room for desks, so the old library will be converted into a second staff room. This essentially solves three problems at once. TALULAR.

Over the past few years, this development has happened on a macro-level. Areas that once had no cell network at all now have 4G. When I read memoirs of people who served here in the 1960s and 1970s, I am amazed at how dissimilar what they describe and the country I know today are. Even blogs from just 10 years ago paint a different picture of the way things are. Electricity is spreading, 4G is spreading, and smartphones and WhatsApp have changed everything. Boreholes multiply each year. Students who are tested on Shakespeare every year pass the test with flying colors. The legality of child marriage has ended and women are taking more and more roles in the civil service. My school now has 4 female teachers, up from just 1 when I first arrived. Development is such a long process that it’s often difficult to see happen. For development to be truly sustainable, you’ll never know if what you did played any role in it, because you’ll be gone by the time the effects of it are seen and you only played a small role in it along with other people. What I’m seeing develop here are the consequences of the efforts of those who came before me, most of them Malawian.

It feels strange to have electricity again. Although it’s not in my house (yet), it has helped immensely. I’d gotten used to not having it. Sometimes people tell me they couldn’t do what I do, live without electricity or running water, poop in a latrine, etc. I think these things scared me a little before coming, but it didn’t take long to get used to them, especially because these things are normal for the vast majority of the world. People live this way everywhere, even in parts of America (yes, even in America). I am much less wasteful here because I’m forced to be and I don’t see that as a bad thing. It’s a fine line to try to balance between promoting life without electricity and keeping oneself in check when it comes to wastefulness. Mother Teresa once said that the material poverty she saw did not compare to the immense spiritual poverty of the West. I think the ideal is probably to find a middle way between these two problems. Our wastefulness causes us to be careless about our relationships and neglect our own well-being and happiness. Yet it’s obvious that poverty is not desirable.

We would do well to learn from one another. To learn to be sustainable, positive, well-off, happy, and full of perseverance. Development changes some things for the better and some things must be kept in check so that they don’t become harmful. The best thing it can do is create human capital and develop the minds of those who will become the developers of the country in the future. I think the first thing we’ll try is watching English cartoons on the projector.