Everything’s going really well. Pendulum Project people have been gone above and beyond in introducing me to community members, interpreting during interviews, teaching me Chichewa, inviting me to meet friends and family, and answering all my questions. I stayed with this amazing Couchsurfing couple, Frauke and Saqib, the first two nights, and am now at a Malawian woman’s house until June 1. My host works at an embassy here and I’m very lucky because she’s really sweet and my rent includes meals (prepared by a cook), laundry, great company, and a gorgeous garden. Okay, not rustic at all, and a totally different world from the one in which I spend the rest of my time, but that’s just how it worked out.

So right now I’m not going to try to summarize everything that’s happened during the past week. Here’s yesterday’s interviews:

A 16 yr old girl who lives with her 17 year old brother, and has been cared for by her grandmother since the age of 2. Her grandmother is old and can’t help as much anymore, so she spends her day in the fields gathering up things such as peanuts leftover from the harvest. She sells them for food for herself and her brother. Her friends go too, but they use their money to buy little things their parents won’t get them, not staples. Her brother doesn’t do anything but wake up, eat, and hang out with his friends all day but she can’t tell him what to do because he’s older, and because if he leaves she’ll be without a blood relative. We showed her how to use a disposable camera and she tested out two pictures. We’ll pick it up in a week.

A young girl, Irene, and her grandmother, Agnes. Agnes has outlived all of five of her children. She depends on people in the community to help her and her grandchildren, as she dislocated her hip a few years ago. She has been caring for Irene and her cousin since they were toddlers. Irene fetches water, does the dishes and the laundry, and prepares warm water for her grandmother’s bath. She said that what she really wants is new clothes to wear to school, but her grandmother chided her, saying that that their need for food is too great to wish for new clothes.

Tankulengi, 11, Machuona, 12, and their grandmother, Nachuletsu. The girls’ mother died in 2000, so Nachuletsi and their aunt care for them. Machuona’s favorite subject is math. Nachuletsu says that she has never seen or heard of anybody in her village having or dying from HIV. Some die of headache, others of rheumatism, and some just drop dead. She said that four times a year there’s an assembly where all of the kids do skits related to HIV prevention. There’s also a joint session held once a week for all children grades 1-8 (!), but she doesn’t feel comfortable asking questions there. She has questions. It isn’t appropriate in Chewa culture for a mother to educate her daughter on sex – this is the job of aunts, etc – and her grandmother says she’s old and that this kind of thing is none of her business at her age. This question keeps coming up - who is talking to these orphans about HIV and sex?

Liknet, 29, who has two children. She was 25 years old when her mother died and we were incredibly impressed by her resourcefulness, kindness, and strength. She works in the fields and started a small business so she could build a place for herself and her children, but is still struggling to feed her family. From her mother, she learned to be a well-behaved person, to work hard, and to learn from the achievements of others rather than being jealous of their success. She ended the interview with prayers for me and for the American People. We gave her a disposable camera, which we’ll pick up next week.

There was a sixteen year old who didn’t want to speak with us. First she said that she had nothing to say to a white person. Then she said that if she missed work she wouldn’t be able to eat. So we went to the field where she was working and one of the volunteers with us offered to work for her while she talked with us. We knew from the local organization that both her parents had died of HIV and that she lives with her grandmother, who is very sick with the virus. During the brief interview, however, she gave one sentence answers and painted a rosy picture of her life, saying that she was just working in the fields to get extra money so that she’d have something nice to wear to a friend’s wedding. Mara, who was interviewing her, eventually said that “you can’t interview someone if they don’t want to talk with you” and we let the girl know that if she changed her mind, she should let us know. I keep thinking about her though, because it’s obvious that she must have been through so much, and is having a hard time with it all.

People are willing to talk about HIV, but in general terms. Abstinence and good behavior are repeated over and over again. When I asked three orphans ages 16-18 how HIV is transmitted, one girl said through sex, the other “sharp objects”, and the 18 year old boy, who travels back and forth between Malawi and Mozambique for seasonal work, said he didn’t know. As the conversation continued, the girls also mentioned transmission through breast milk (but only after the baby turns 6 months, they said) and blood transfusions. In our conversations, witchcraft is usually at the root of a loved one’s death, and people die from accidents or an unknown, and often sudden, illness. Mara seems sure that all of these deaths are due to AIDS, and it will be interesting to see if people open up about the virus as we get to know each other.
As we went from hut to hut, village to village today, we were escorted by a group of volunteers from the local community organization. They wouldn’t let us carry our bags and a woman in one of the villages made lunch for us (sardines and nsima, the Malawian staple of maize porridge) even though I know she couldn’t have had more food than anyone else we saw.