Malawi 2009 Makupo Leader Doug Miller

The Education for All Trip to Makupo Village

by Doug Miller

Before the Vanier Education for All Study Trip to Malawi in June, I was interviewed by a Vanier student who wanted to write an article for the school newspaper. Time and again, she returned to the idea that our trip was a humanitarian undertaking to help the poor people of Africa. She was stuck on the idea that we have so much and they have so little so we must be going to help them change their impoverished lives. It took some discussion but when her article finally appeared it reflected the idea that this sort of exposure tourism for student learning benefits the Canadian visitor more than the Malawian hosts. The June – July trip for 7 students from Vanier College fits within the sustainable tourism project of Makupo Development Group. The goals are to provide a unique learning experience for Canadians of all ages to travel to Africa, learn about life on the ground through face to face contact with rural people, and provide them a source of income beyond the once a year returns from sale of farm crops. The experience is based on equity where the visitors learn and take away as much if not more than they contribute.

Malawians do benefit when there is a redistribution of wealth from the rich world to the poor, but a charitable approach perpetuates dependency and is too transitory and short term to bring about any real change. The goal of the exposure visits from the Makupo perspective is to create income generation projects based on ethical tourism. By paying villagers to house and feed them the Canadians are contributing to creating a self-sustaining enterprise which can serve as a springboard for many other revenue creating activities. This is not charity, it is sustainable development. Apart from paying for the experience and thus providing a revenue to the villagers, the utility of whatever the Canadians bring must fulfill the principle of providing a hand up and not a hand out (credit to Geoff Furber of Ripple Africa). The visitors pay for their stay and thus contribute to building economic diversity. For their efforts, the villagers earn money rather than being dependent on the problematic handouts from expatriate family members and rich relatives.

For their part, the Canadian students derive lifelong learning and benefits from their visit. They gain knowledge and insights about another side of the world that we are carefully shielded from when we live in the splendid isolation of middle class Canada. The intense friendships that are formed allow them insights into the nature of structural poverty and the limits on the lives of people who do not have access to the kind of resources widely and freely available here in Canada. They also learn about how resourceful Malawians are and how they are able to accomplish a great deal despite the lack of material wealth. The Canadian students benefit enormously from this knowledge, friendship, and appreciation of a different way of life. The learning they acquire allows them to return home with information for credits, and an enhanced resume. They gain even more experience when they give presentations, and write articles about the experience. They will be able to continue their education to achieve their goals and the village experience becomes an integral part of the accumulation of wisdom about life making them richer in many ways. Regardless of what they learn about the difficulties of rural life in Malawi, the Canadian students have the privileged vantage point of being able to return to their comfortable North American lives and draw benefit from the experience for many subsequent years.

These exposure visits must be carefully managed to create the most favourable opportunities for the Malawian hosts and facilitate the learning experience of the Canadians in an atmosphere of mutual respect and recognition of the enormous differences that the contact represents for the 2 sides. The sustainable tourism bases the experience on the learning of the participants. The visits brings Canadians into a friendly, safe environment where they can meet rural Malawians who in return house them, feed them, wash their clothes, act as  guides and translators and provide security at nights. The people of Makupo Village are wonderful hosts. They are natural guides and teachers every day of the visit and even those who speak little or no English are excellent teachers as they help their visitors master the chiChewa greetings and vocabulary needed for everyday life.

Learning about life from the ground up is a unique way of introducing people to a new country or environment. As an approach it allows the ordinary people to become teachers and explain the realities of their life without academic, political or social/ cultural filters which by virtue of their perspective bias the view visitors can have about life in the rural areas. The Vanier students learn about the country through the eyes of Malawian villagers and their everyday lived experience. Without fail the visitors to Makupo find they are received with such warmth and made to feel so comfortable and secure that regardless of where they traveled thereafter they were keen to return to the village.

This kind of exposure requires a special kind of arrangement and preparation. The participants are selected from a pool of applicants after period of publicity to advertise the trip and its role in the Vanier International Education programme. This year’s project was entitled: “Education for All” and attracted almost exclusively female applicants. They quality of the applicants was exceptional, with many of the students already implicated in international projects or social justice issues. In the months before departure, my wife Nellie and I had worked with our group of Vanier students and staff to give them a feel for the village with regular orientation sessions which included language, culture, food and medical preparation as well as some politics and history. We set goals for the trip and developed the methodology to ensure that we learned as much as possible during our limited time in Malawi.

These kinds of trips have had a specific focus and objectives which members of the group are committed to fulfilling. These overall objectives are often complemented by deeply personal goals that motivated the students to join and learn.

The focused learning: The Vanier students spent time the morning of each day in the schools collecting information, taking pictures, interviewing teachers, headmasters ands students and building case histories of students struggles to get an education. The three headmasters did a great job of giving the Vanier students access to the classrooms teachers and students. Our students are all academically strong and were able to tutor individual students and groups during their stay. A special focus was put on the graduating year students preparing to write their major exams at the end of Standard 8, and Forms 2 and 4. They helped with English, mathematics, and science among other subjects and always under the direction of the responsible Malawian teachers.

With the help of a small amount of money from a primary school in Victoria B.C. we were able to dedicate 3 afternoons to a cooperative work brigade to paint one of the primary school classrooms. We also brought a few used laptop computers to become the nucleus for a small computer laboratory at the Chilanga Community Day Secondary School. Our students helped the teachers and students become familiar with the educational software we installed before we left Canada. The Vanier students also recruited some special paper for printing the Braille texts for the School for the Blind.

I did not foresee our students doing classroom teaching because of their age, they lack the skills and experience to deal with such large groups. However in the class, they first observed the lessons then circulated among the students and gave one-on-one help to the students when the teacher had given an assignment. This has to be the senior primary grades and maybe the secondary classes since these students would speak enough English for our students to communicate with them. Even here our Canadian students have never learned the elements of English grammar so they had to struggle to learn the basics in order to be helpful with the lessons in English. Our students had to quickly pick up the Malawi methodology, but since it is a relatively basic level this was not too hard.

For the first week especially we held regular end of the day meetings to reflect on how we felt as individuals about what was happening and to plan our activities for the next day. These were essential for moving the learning forward and guiding the participants into fruitful experiences and contacts. The presence of the Vanier College photographer, Dale Robinson, provided another useful focus. Dale taught us all how to effectively and artfully capture the images of our experience by teaching us all how use the cameras, compose the picture and how to look for the best shots. The post-trip presentations and displays are going to be very well done as a result.

The goal of our exposure tours is to bridge the void between the portrait drawn about the poor world and the reality by providing some insight into the daily reality facing ordinary people in one small, poor country. Our slogan is “solidarity not charity.” We were not primarily interested in finding more ways of fundraising or exploiting the impulse to reach for the cheque book to solve the problem. Our goal was to create bridges of understanding that lead to action for change in Canada, to change the relationship between rich and poor countries and undermine the structural impediments to development. The Vanier Education for All visit accomplished all of this and I know from speaking with the students that they recognised how much they have gained and are wonderfully motivated to stay involved and work for the kind of change that will bring about real change and amore equitable world.

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