"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

Agatha's son Malango doing his best Bruce Lee impression. Area 25, Lilongwe, Malawi.

While I was talking with Agatha (a wonderful woman and I'll explain who she is at some point) she made a very interesting point. She said that one of the big differences between city kids and village kids is that city kids meet a lot of different people who do a lot of different jobs, while village kids only see a very limited number of professions. My parents always used to tell me that I could become anything I wanted to, but how are you supposed to be something you don't know you can be? What are you supposed to do if think you only have a few options? What if you don't want to be any of them?

As an experiment I asked Idah to try and remember what kinds of professions she's ever met first hand; here's what she said: farmer, teacher, doctor, nurse, merchant, police officer, solider, musician, carpenter. At the immigration office in Blantyre, where she went because she's been given a scholarship to study in the US and needs a passport and visa, she meet clerks, bureaucrats and other civil servants. Through the AGSP project she went to Chancellor College where she met professors and lawyers. While on an AGE sponsored retreat she met bank tellers, managers, accountants and, at the hotel, concierges, cooks and janitors.

I'm going to ask my nephew, who is more or less Idah's age (hard to say since no one knows exactly how old Idah is), the same question and see what he says.

ps - no, there are no janitors at the school, that's what punishments are for.

pps - i do have blog entries for all the interesting people i've meet and places i've seen in the last week and a half. i have pages and pages and pages of stories and observations and emotions and random comments, but it's going to take me a while to transform that mess into something coherent. bear with me.

this picture was published on tuesday, may 19 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: 70.0 mm; shutter speed: 1/350; iso: 800. this image has the following tags: malawi.