"Getting to know Christina Michael"

Christina and Doreen outside their house in the village.

(ndr: i'm trying to not edit these entries after I've written them, but in this case I've made an exception and gone and added a few paragraphs sunday morning which I wanted to write yesterday but just didn't have the time)

As per the plan (it's always nice when you end up following your plan) today I went back to Christina Michael's village. I spent the day there and got to know her a little more than yesterday, when I'd only been able to see her for 15 or 20 minutes.

Christina is a smart and very articulate young woman. She is aware of her situation and surroundings on a conscious level in a way few 15 year olds i know are. She knows exactly what she's up against, she's not going to take any bullshit from anyone and she's going to do whatever she has to do. She was extremely kind, generous and accommodating, while at the same time being proud of herself, her home, her family and confident in what she can (and does) do. It would seem, though I'll have to see for myself once school starts up again, that she's a bit rowdier that Idah and might get herself in trouble a few times, if this were true I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.

In Malawi they have use the word "orphan" even for people who've lost just one parent, and it doesn't matter if this parent is dead or has simple abandoned the family. The phrase "double orphan" is used for what we'd normally call an orphan. Idah is an orphan, while Christina is a double orphan, having lost both her parents, who lives with her grand-parents, her uncle (who is Christina's age) and a small girl named Doreen. I don't know exactly how but Christina and Doreen are somehow related, though I'm pretty sure it's a distant relationship. When Christina's mother died she had already taken Doreen, who was very little at this point, into her care and she asked Christina to look after Doreen after she'd died (so I'm also assuming Christina's mother did not die in a sudden accident, but I don't know the details surrounding her mother or her father's death). Doreen follows Christina around, and hides behind her when she's scared, like any child would with their older sister, while Christina treats Doreen more like her child than just a younger sibling, it's a beautiful and interesting relationship I hope to get to know better.

The thing that struck me the most about Christina was how well she was able to articulate the inequalities between the sexes in Malawi (both in the sense of what these inequalities are and in explaining why they are). She lives with her grandparents, a young relative (pictured above next to Christina) and her uncle, who is only a month older than her. I'm pretty sure, but not certain, that it's this relationship with her uncle that makes it so clear to her the obligations and responsibilities she has only because she's a girl and not a boy.

On our way back from buying eggs we were talking over lunch about who was responsible for the cooking and Christina's comment was: "Of course it's my responsibility, I'm a girl." She spoke of the fact that she, simply due to having more house work, has only 1 hour a day for homework while Henry (her uncle) has 2. If someone in the family gets sick it will fall on her, and never Henry, to look after them, and if this means she misses school then so be it.

Ben, who again came with me and explained the basics to me, mentioned that he'd had conversations with Henry about this exact topic. It seems that Henry is well aware of the responsibilities Christina has to live with, he knows she does a lot of things, many of them directly for him, which he will never have to do. While he says that this is wrong, at the very least grossly unfair, he only acts differently when his mother, Christina's grand-mother, is away. It would seem he does this because otherwise he'll be seen as too effeminate by his friends, while this is certainly a cop-out it doesn't surprise me that a 15 year-old rural Malawian boy would take the easy way out, especially since no one in the community or family, not even Christina herself, will blame him or even really hold it against him.

On a slightly happier note I brought 2 small point and shoot cameras with me to Malawi. I lent one to Idah the other day and lent the other one to Christina yesterday. After lunch we got to talking about the camera and photography and what she liked to take pictures of. Many of the things she'd photographed so far were what I would have called fairly normal moments of a normal day, and either I or Ben asked her what was special about that particular moment. Her answer was that the moment was special because she'd taken a picture of it, photographing it had made a normal moment into something special. I don't yet know what to do with that statement, but I'm going to have to rethink a thing or two because, on a very fundamental level, Christina's right and I'd never realized that.

As far as what her village is like I don't really know what to say, it is exactly the "African Village" I was expecting to find. Christina, like Idah, has a house in which she can sleep and store food, but she really lives outside. Her house, like all the ones around her, are brick and mortar with concrete floors and window panes (instead of the window just being a hole in the wall). The roads are all dirt, lots of small children running around all day. There are women carrying things (clothes, food, wood, children, etc.) on their heads and back. There are a few workshops here and there, carpenters mainly but I also saw a few bicycle shops and a few mini-markets (nano-market would be a more accurate description) which sell random house hold items (and some foods). During the day there are only women, children and the elderly in the village since the men are all either in the fields working, at the market selling or, as I found out yesterday, at the pub drinking. They, the adult men, come back in the evening around time for dinner and sit outside and talk about "stuff" before having dinner and going to bed (I don't speak chichewa and couldn't really ask, so I don't know what about).

The only thing that did surprise me is how dense the villages are. Christina's house is no more than a few meters from her neighbor's, and that his is no more than a few meters from the one next to it. There are no vacant lots here, land is either used for farming or lots of people live on it. The most obvious consequence of this, to me at least, is that you have no real privacy or personal space. If you're inside you're sharing a 10 square meter (or smaller) space with a few other people and some animals, if you're outside you're sharing a slightly larger space but there are even more people around. I wasn't even able to explain the idea of "personal space" to Christina, so I don't think she minds not having any, for me it'd take some getting used to.

ps - i hate insects.

this picture was published on saturday, april 18 2009. there is a full size version available. this picture was taken with a 24-70mm f/2.8 on a nikon d700. the settings when this was taken were: focal length: 48.0 mm; shutter speed: 1/250; iso: 200. this image has the following tags: malawi.