Making a Living

In an e-mail I received from my mom a few days ago, she posed some questions about Malawi that I haven’t yet addressed in this blog or in e-mails to her. The questions seem so obvious, so simple, but at the same time I found them to be extremely difficult to answer. She wrote, “What moves or sustains Malawi, the economy, what do the people do for a living other than the street vendors? [What are the] attitudes towards women?” When doing any kind of development work, economics and the treatment of women are issues constantly coming up in conversation. And they are problems not easily solved.

Answering my mom’s question about what people do for a living should have been easy. I mean, I have been here for over six weeks now; the answer should have come to me right away. But I think the question itself was leading me down the wrong train of thought. In the U.S. we get up, do our 8-5 and get paychecks every couple of weeks—if we’re lucky. We refer this idea of working for your money making a living, which I think is what my mom was talking about. But the average Malawian isn’t making a living. I think of “making a living” as earning money to support a lifestyle. But rural Malawians (most of the population) don’t live in that once-removed world where they work to make money to buy things they need.

Instead, they work more directly for what they need. In rural areas, women will walk several kilometers to cut down firewood or get water from the river. They will spend the day taking care of their children, cooking food and tending to whatever crops or animals they may keep. Men will sometimes help with these domestic tasks, but often try to go out and make money by selling things (vegetables, baskets, tinsmithed miscellany), often with dismal chances of making any. This is why the market is overflowing with vendors.

Instead of making a living, most Malawians are just living, surviving, hoping they aren’t the next victim of disease or food shortage, just trying to make it until tomorrow.

When I think about the average Malawian lifestyle, I can’t help but compare it to my own. At Duke I am required to sign up for a $1400-a-semester meal plan. All this money is put on my DukeCard and all I have to do is swipe. I am about the furthest thing from growing or catching my own food. I’m also pretty far removed from paying for it myself. I often wonder if the average Malawian would even take me seriously if I told them about the Meal Plan.

So I guess that is my answer to the question of “what do people do for a living other than the street vendors?” Most Malawians live in the primary world; they’re not making a living. They’re just trying to live.

So what is fueling the economy? Well, the first thing to understand is that Malawi isn’t exactly skyrocketing into the G-8 anytime soon. Malawi is one of the poorest nations on earth, and the economy is in need of some serious boosts.

A few nights ago, Jing and I went to dinner with some people from northern California that Jing had met. We spent a long time talking about possible ways that the economy and Malawi as a whole could start moving more quickly in the right direction. Foreign investment, education reform and micro-lending projects seem to come up pretty often (well, at least in conversations in which I take part) as possible solutions to help boost the economy, but those are always very difficult to implement for a variety of reasons (The real kicker, I guess, is that if there was something easy to implement, it would have already been implemented). But one thing that has been particularly good, economically, for developing countries, especially Malawi, is the NGO presence here.

The number of NGOs here and the amount of donor funding flowing through this country is impressive, and the economic impact from that is most always positive. Hopefully that investment that piggybacks onto organizations setting up offices here can somehow translate into further economic growth. That, again, is difficult; it’s hard to have the money invested by foreign organizations get recycled in the Malawian economy. Many of the people that benefit from NGO money (landlords, restaurant and hotel owners, etc.) are not Malawian and don’t keep the money in the country or don’t care to put the money toward development related ends. Also, having lots of donor funding in a poor country can lead to dependency on the organizations and may not be a sustainable solution for the long term.

The way I am describing the Malawian economy seems grim. But, as one of the poorest countries in the world, describing what makes it and keeps it poor is often a depressing exercise. I don’t have any concrete ideas—or even a theory—to propose to improve the Malawian economy. There are many experts—both from abroad and from within Malawi—working to solve the economic problems here. All I can do right now is learn as much about it as possible and to wish them all the luck in the world.



Stay tuned for an entry on the treatment of women issue.