do something

Friday, Davie (top), and Charles.

I learned that Friday passed his Malawi School Certificate Examination with 20 points.

6 is the best you can do, and a 42 or higher is a fail. Friday did the best of everyone in his class, and there were a few kids who did well enough to apply to Malawian university: Samuel, Charles, and Davie. Everybody else got low passes and fails. Cameron was one of them. It’s to be expected; he faced a lot of obstacles and distractions. The future isn’t as present in Malawi as it is in America.

But a Malawian college education would still be a huge opportunity for the ones who passed. And tuition is cheap enough — maybe $200 a semester — that I reckoned I could raise enough money to pay for at least the first year. Get their foot in the door and figure the rest out later.

Even though I had good intentions, I didn’t want to assume I knew what was best for these people, so I reached out and asked if they’d like my help. As you can probably imagine, they were thrilled that their old English teacher had come out of the woodwork and offered to help them pay for college. Friday seemed especially honored that I was making good on my promise to help him chase his dream of an American education.

I felt guilty that I was only helping a handful of people —all boys, all naturally intelligent. What about my female students? What about people with HIV or albinism or disabilities? There are so many people who need so much more help.

But I don’t know how to foster gender equality in Malawi. (Or in America, for that matter.) I don’t have the resources to address larger social issues like hunger, disease, or disability. I know how to help kids apply to college, though. So I decided to use my knowledge and energy to give a couple people a hand. In turn, they could go on to support their families and hopefully shape their communities.

You can’t help everyone, I’ve learned. But you can do something. And something is more than nothing.  

ambitions

Friday’s last name is Ganizani, which translates literally to “please think.” It’s fitting. He looks like he might be about 10 years old, but he carries himself with the confidence of a bright college student. His hand moves when he talks, like he’s weighing something light in his palm, and travels up to stroke his chin while he searches for the right word. He speaks directly, holding my gaze.

“I want to go to America.”

This is probably the most common request Peace Corps Volunteers get from their host country nationals, and I believe the correct response is: “Me too, buddy, I can’t believe I ever left that sinner’s paradise!” Ahh, but I was still young and green, and so I took a minute and genuinely thought of how I could help this kid out.

“Maybe if you went to university?” I suggested. It seemed like it could work. How hard could it be?

Ludicrously hard, I found out!

But as luck would have it, I heard about the MasterCard Foundation Scholars Program: a $700 million, 10-year initiative to send 15,000 poor African students to an array of top-tier universities in North America, Europe, and Africa. It was exactly what I was looking for. Friday was too young to apply, but I helped six talented Form 3 and 4 students submit applications. And wouldn’t you know it, two of them got in!

“Well, that was easy!” I said, dusting off my hands.

Ha-ha, just kidding — it was an obscene amount of work. I helped put together more than 30 individual college applications, and then coordinated the passport/visa/travel process for the two students who were accepted. The whole process took 10 months. I remember 14-hour days, frantic bike rides to town to send time-sensitive emails, strategically flirting with immigration officials, agnostic prayers to the universe, and hours, HOURS of sobbing on the floor.

But I also have the memory of Freza’s face when he read the email from McGill that began, “We’re pleased to inform you…”

It might be the most precious moment in my life.

education system

Friday and his classmates on a rainy day in 2013.

As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I taught English at a secondary school in Malawi, a sliver of a country wedged between Zambia and Mozambique. It’s poor[1], and the education system is screwed up. If I may elaborate:

Malawi’s official language of instruction is English, but few of your teachers are fluent. There aren’t enough qualified math and science teachers either, so it’s entirely possible you’re learning math from someone who doesn’t understand it, in a language they don’t speak. On top of all that, it’s acceptable for your teachers to hit you, flirt with you, show up to school drunk, or not show up at all.

You have to memorize information by rote for the one exam administered per class per term. Of course, a 50% is a pass, so pretty much everyone moves on to the next grade. As a result, the classrooms are completely overcrowded: 80, 90, 100 of your peers jostling each other for space. You’re definitely sharing books — there are only 11 literature books for all the students in Form 3 and Form 4. You might also have to share a desk, or if you’re really unlucky, a chair. Or you might not have either. Hope you’re comfortable sitting on a concrete floor for eight hours!

And of course, this all takes place inside a brick building with a corrugated tin roof and not even so much as a ceiling fan. When it’s hot, it’s an oven. When it rains, your teacher is inaudible, and you and the other students who bothered to show up are mostly concerned with avoiding the puddles that spread across the floor.

Your day doesn’t start with school, by the way: It starts with hard physical labor in the field, or with household chores. Then you have to walk, sometimes miles, to school, trying to keep your uniform clean even when it’s muddy or dusty. If you’re a girl, this trip is a gauntlet of sexual harassment; no matter who you are, you have chronic malaria, and HIV is a real possibility. And if it’s the month before harvest and your family’s food supply is dwindling, you’re getting by on one meal a day.

School isn’t free, either. Your mom might scrape together the $8 for your school fees by selling tomatoes in the market for 3¢ each, but then your dad might find that money and go out drinking with his buddies. Bummer dude, you don’t get to go to school this semester.

All of this leads up to one exam, the MSCE, a standardized test that determines your entire future. It’s only administered once, at the end of Form 4. If you fail, you have to go back to Form 3. If you pass, you qualify for college… but you have to compete for limited spots and even more limited scholarships with all the kids from town whose parents could afford to feed them every day.

You could have been the smartest kid in your class, and still end up working in the fields like everybody else.

[1] I use the word poor and not developing because as Dayo Olopade asks in The Bright Continent, “developing” toward what? Toward developed, of course — you know, like America. That’s a pretty arrogant assumption, isn’t it, that Malawi wants to be America? Maybe it just wants to be Malawi with enough food.

The issue isn’t “development;” it’s that most Malawians are broke and don’t have a lot of options beyond farming and selling stuff in the market for less than a nickel. So let’s call the problem what it is. Then maybe we can solve it.