Getting stuck in!!

Hi everyone!

Well, what a few days I've had since I posted last. It's been nice up until now, mostly introductions with the people I'll be doing most of my work with, getting the feel for my surroundings, etc. It' been enjoyable, apart from a spell of homesickness over the last few days.

I'm sort of, you could say, being thrown in the deep end today. I'm going with a few others out into one of the rural districts within about 50-60kms of Lilongwe. That will no doubt entail lots of bouncing around like a ping-pong ball in the back of a 4X4, but at least it's not too far away!! Once we get there, we'll be interviewing poor households about how the bridge the gap between the cost of living - which has taken a jump of about 30-40% since last year - and their income. This is something the organisation have been doing for years in urban areas, as it's easier to easure there. They simply go around the markets to monitor the price of basic food staples, as well as the cost of basic rent and heat, etc, then compare it to people's wages to see the defecit.

It's easy enough to measure in urban areas, but once you get ot into rural Malawi, this gap becomes considerably harder to measure. To begin with, only 15% of Malawi's population are in formal employment, and these are virtually all city-based civil servants, etc. So, the rural population gets what little income they do from more diverse sources than a paid wage, and it's harder to measure. To add to this, while the urban population buys almost all food in the local market - making prices easy to measure - rural populations grow some food, trade some, pool some, and buy very little. So it's considerably more complicated.

So, basically I am very nervous about it. I have visions of me making the most enormous gimp of myself in the village - it still disconcerts me to see people in the city wearing ragged clothes with no shoes on, begging, and since most of Malawi's most abject poverty is concentrated in rural areas like the one I'm heading to, I can only assume that it's going to be quite a shock to my senses.

It sounds stupid, but I'm actually quite nervous about meeting these people, in and of itself. I'm still adjusting to the culture shock of Africa as a whole, and I'm afraid that I will be so utterly unable to relate adequately to these people and their lives that my input into the programme will not be worthwhile. I want to toe the delicate line between sympathy for their obviously difficult situations, and having respect for their dignity as human beings. Not being incredibly patronising, basically. I'm still not totally sure where that line is... I suppose I'll just have to be as friendly and open as possible, and pay attention to the other interviewers, who are all local guys with lots of experience. So I'll just have to watch them like hawks at first, LOL!!!

I'll let you all know how it went as soon as I can when I return!

Finger crossed for me en masse, please!