I leave tomorrow for my third trip to Malawi. It is always difficult to arrange things here to keep going so that I can take the time to travel to Malawi. In many ways this is not a vacation. I have many things to do once I get to Malawi. I am trying to help Samuel Kayuni as much as possible to get his NGO, Children with Hope and Destiny, running more smoothly. I am also taking 250 books for children to read and to spark their own writing projects. I will also be looking for a school and teachers to come to Atlanta, GA with the Visiting Teachers' Programme in 2009.
I first went to Malawi 7 years ago. After spending 12 years living overseas with a mission organization, I realized that I wanted to find a national who was helping his/her own people in their own way. I was tired of seeing the Westerners "tell" others how to do things. It seemed to me that given the right tools, people could figure out the solutions to their own problems in their own way.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of this was when I met some street children in Quito. I had organized a trip for a group of American young people to Ecuador, so they could experience another culture. The young people spent their time teaching English in an international school, while I was taken in by the street children. The more I got to know the street children, the more I saw their unique culture and family structure. One of the older boys took me to the city dump to see the people living there. This young boy who lived on the streets of Quito, had exhibited great compassion for the people in the city dump. Watching him and the other street children, showed me that people - no matter their circumstances - can be powerfully strong. The funny thing was that while I was seeing these magnificent qualities in the street children, I was also experiencing "helping organizations" that refused to "help" the street children. They didn't want to be bother with them!
This led me to hear about a man in Malawi, East Africa who had been a street kid himself but was now reaching back to help his own people. I heard that this man was planning on taking in street children to make a home for them - NOT an orphanage. When I got back to the United States, I started to email this man, Samuel Kayuni. It certainly sounded like he was a national reaching out to help his own people, so I had to go to Malawi and meet him. I needed to find out for myself if what he was doing was really breaking the mold of what I had experienced during my many years overseas.
That was 7 years ago. What could have been a disaster, a woman traveling by herself to a country she had never been to before, turned out to be a dream. When it was time for me to leave and return to the United States, I sobbed all the way from the airport in Lilongwe, Malawi to New York. So when I travel to Malawi tomorrow, in many ways I am going home.
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