Blog

April, 2007

MARRIAGE IN MALAWI

Two weeks ago I began taking five students to Chimoka - a village that is part of Lilongwe - for outreach on Thursday afternoons.  It looks and feels just like an Malawi village, yet it is in the middle of the city of Lilongwe (a city of nearly 1,000,000 people).  It is very strange!

I sat and observed that week as the students led songs and taught a Bible study to about 20 people, mostly women and children.  They told me when we left that they had told the people to come with questions for me about marriage and family issues.  Connie and I are teaching a Marriage and Family course at ABC that two of these students attend - two relatively "liberated" women by Malawian standards.
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April 30, 2007 | 0 Comments | View or add comments
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WILD THINGS IN MALAWI

Connie was reading the newspaper recently when she came across an article that was particularly interesting. It was about a five little girls that were found in very bad shape along the road. They were bleeding and near death, one eventually did die. The cause was given as witchcraft. Really, by all the evidence cited, it sounded like they were simply physically and sexually abused. But, the paper said that the girls said they had been dropped from a "witch plane".

This sounds like something out of the Enquirer, but these stories are extremely common in Malawi. We spent sometime asking a student questions about this kind of thing and he was quite adamant that such things are truly happening. A few years ago there was a woman who was found in the morning on the doorstep of the Academy who was covered in mud and naked. The campus guards knew nothing about her or how she happened to get through or over the wall that surrounds the campus that night. They called her "mfiti" which means a specific kind of witch. When asked how she could possibly have gotten into the campus they said she either flew in on a leaf or became a rat and climbed the walls.
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April 6, 2007 | 0 Comments | View or add comments
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JOEL'S VILLAGE STORY

The following was written by Joel, our 15 year old, who recently spent three days in a village working with an orphan feeding program.  His observations of Malawian life (VERY up close) give a clear picture of this unique land.

A couple weeks ago one of my teachers at the school, Kellen Hiroto, invited me to go to a village and help build an orphan feeding center that he was sponsoring.  To be able to have time to do everything that he wanted to do we needed to stay in the village for a few days. I ended up going with Kellen along with one of my good friends, Mitch, from school.
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April 6, 2007 | 0 Comments | View or add comments
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