Aside from the all the posts about our projects and experiences here, I wanted to devote some of my time to writing about three young Malawians and telling their stories.
I met these guys on the way to back to work after my usual lunch break. Starting from the left: Hosea, Mayamiko, and Samson.
Usually I see many high school age students riding bicycles or walking back to Namitando, the village near St. Gabriel’s, on my trek to and from the Gray house. One day a few weeks ago though was a little different. Instead of the usual waves or polite “hello” and “good day”, three students decided to strike up actual conversation with me. Since that day these guys have been taking me out around Namitete and Namitando showing me what life is like for them.
Hosea and Mayamiko both plan to be surgeons and Samson plans to be a lawyer. These goals are nothing new to me. Frankly speaking, I am an Asian American and stereotypically have been reminded all my life of the value of education. I also grew up in an environment where many of my peers planned on pursuing professional degrees and careers. Here in Malawi though, these goals are not part of the norm.
Because most of the population ends up entering the workforce after primary school (elementary school), education in Malawi is geared more towards agricultural studies and other vocational training programs rather than professional studies and higher-level learning. This presents severe challenges for students who do not have the resources to attend secondary schools that prepare them for universities.
When I asked how difficult they think it will be to achieve their goal, they all replied tersely, “very difficult”. Hosea pointed out that they see foreigners as being lucky.
“It is very difficult for people from Malawi to go to university”, he added.
However, Hosea is most likely seen as being lucky by his peers. He lives in the St. Gabriel’s complex because both his parents work for the hospital. Although he is younger than the others, he is surprisingly very fluent in English. He’s also a hooligan. Hosea never forgets to poke fun of his friends and crack hilarious jokes.
Miyamiko and Samson, on the other hand, live in the outlying villages. Their English is choppy, and they understand only small fragments of what I say.
Mayamiko’s father invited me to their home where I sat down to hear what he had to say. Charles used to work at a non profit organization for helping the orphans from the AIDs Pandemic in Namitete. He left recently though because of the misuse of funds he witnessed there; this seems to be an unfortunate problem that plagues some organizations here in Malawi. Like most fathers I know, Charles has very high expectations for Mayamiko and pushes his son to excel in school. He struggles to find work to pay for his son’s education but desperately wants Mayamiko to have a chance at higher education to leave the cycle of poverty here.
The private school the guys attends costs less than twelve dollars a term. The fact that this kind of money is so hard to come by here is so hard to accept. Before I came to Malawi I had heard and read about poverty, but living here has shown me how deeply being poor affects the people of a country.
“It is very difficult to pay school fees because my father died in 2010,” Samson told me. Despite this, it doesn’t seem like Samson is going to give up on his goals any time soon. Among the three, he was the most excited to tell me what he wanted to be in the future; I could tell he had drive and a lot of quiet determination. Samson helps run his older brother’s general shop in Namitando whenever he has free time. When school ends at two in the afternoon he makes the 6-7 km walk back to Namitando to start working until the late evening. When I visited his shop I asked if I could buy 1000 kwacha worth of airtime for my prepaid Malawian cell phone. He directed me to another shop that apparently has larger airtime cards that I would probably want instead. Samson could have tried selling me smaller cards that would add up to 1000 kwacha like most shop workers do, but he didn’t want to create hassle for me. I still bought a 500 kwacha card from him.
Hosea, Mayamiko, and Samson ask me all the time if I want to go exploring the river or climb rocks on hills. My friends and I used to do the same things growing up. Hopping on rocks across rivers and climbing hills we all seem to forget about where we’re from.
“One time I was with my father here and we saw a monkey!” – Hosea K.