Quietly hopeful
By Cullen Mackenzie | September 28, 2011
Balaka Village Focus Group
The CIE's Julie Dawjee and Cullen Mackenzie are conducting an educational needs assessment in the Mangochi Diocese of Malawi. They are working with the national education secretary for the Episcopal Conference of Malawi, Cleopas Mastara; the head of the Unit for Justice and Peace/Education at the Catholic Relief Services, Thomas Hollywood; and the Mangochi Diocese education secretary, Cyprian Tambala. This is the field diary documenting the research team’s experiences:
We woke up to no electricity, no emails, no photocopying and, worst of all, no tea. Our contact for sending emails had come down with malaria. Hence this diary entry is a day late (we are holding thumbs that the power doesn’t go out again).
Day four’s trip was to Balaka township. The road there was exactly the same as the one to Machinga, until a certain point – the town of Liwonde – where we turned right instead of left. The smell of eucalyptus leaves accompanied us, the heat was stifling and baobabs rose strangely above the clusters of thatched houses.
Arriving at the district education manager’s office, we were surprised to find he could speak a bit of Afrikaans and isiZulu – he had studied at the universities of Cape Town, the Western Cape and the Witwatersrand, and knew Johannesburg and Cape Town well. So we felt more at ease, sitting in the borrowed office with roosters crowing outside. He had organised everything for us, and so we split up – Julie shepherded the enumerators into a combined survey session and focus group at a local primary school, while I began to interview the district education manager.
I began to realise that our sense of familiarity was masking real differences. This man in front of me was dealing with hunger and famine, as well as walking the tightrope of community politics, while shrugging at the criminally minimal provision of secondary schooling.
Julie commented that the people here were quieter than in Mangochi, and more hopeful than those in Machinga, but just as serious. “We sat under the clinking corrugated iron veranda, watching the world slowing down in the rising heat, and listening to the quiet voices of men and women wanting the best for their children,” she said. “As they highlighted their challenges and solutions, I began to get a sense of the struggles here.”
When we got back to our hotel, we gathered our pieces of paper from the last three days into neat piles, and paperclipped them together.
Now we must try to make sense of these different voices.
