Money, ideas, and what I want

[img_assist|nid=2863|title=Duncan McNicholl|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=0|height=]Each year, Engineers Without Borders produces a calendar that highlights a different overseas volunteer and their project for each month of the year. I wrote this short piece below for the upcoming 2009 EWB calendar to go with a photo taken by Duncan McNicholl, an EWB member from UBC who worked with me for the summer. It’s probably the most economical description I’ve got of my work in Malawi.

I work with Mafayo Lungu, his wife Tryness, and their daughter Lusungu in the village of Chisemphere where Mafayo runs a small cassava flour factory constructed with the help of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.

In April, Mafayo and I sat down on the factory front steps to write down the problems he was facing. Nothing was too big or too small—a broken weigh scale, or a spoiled batch of flour. When we finished, I asked him, “Okay, what ideas do you have?”

Mafayo didn’t answer right away. He sat there, thinking. Finally, he said, “I don’t have ideas. If you don’t have money, you can’t have ideas.”

I didn’t get him. I asked what he meant.

He explained that there’s no reason to think of ideas that cost money because he never has any. But with money, well, then things are possible, and then he might have ideas.

To understand this is difficult coming from Canada, where the phrase “knowledge economy” is cliché; where ideas are money. It’s also painful to understand, to see a poverty that can even cripple someone’s imagination.

To me, development is possibility. I have it in abundance in Canada. I want Mafayo to have it, too.