I am running my hands along the engorged skin of my feet and ankles, counting the many souvenirs that I have brought back from Malawi: love bites of the malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquito. Two low bumps circle my right ankle bone, and stir in response to the light touch. After 10, I stop counting that foot. The temptation to scratch becomes too intense.
I am now an appreciator of bednets. In the parlance of development-speak, we recommend LLINs, or long-lasting insecticidal nets. These are bednets pretreated with insecticide and highly effective in a malaria-endemic country like Malawi. My first night in Lilongwe, the capital, was spent curled up under a simple, untreated bednet. My feet poked out at times and the Anopheles feasted. Luckily, I am also taking anti-malarial drugs while I'm here. Many Africans aren't so lucky; last year, the region had over 90% of the 200 million cases of malaria.
Perhaps we could invent a portable mosquito eater. Something in the shape of a frog, mouth open, that attracts or sucks in the mosquitos, kills them, and uses the remains as biofuel. Perhaps it is something we could put in our purses and place on the floor when dining outdoors. Has it been done? Could I do it?
We drove for some hours outside of the city to visit a district hospital. The landscape rolled around us, burnt red dirt, windswept trees and bright green banana plants. The driver played a mix of African pop and Christian music on the radio (which were often the same), and as the colors swirled by, at times I felt myself a bit like James McAvoy in a montage from “The Last King of Scotland.”
Malawi is a landlocked country, with a vast lake in the middle shared with Mozambique and Tanzania. I stood on the shore of Lake Malawi on Wednesday, squinting to see the shore on the other side and failing. It is the third-largest lake in Africa, with waves that lap against the sandy beach like an ocean.
We had driven for hours past small, one-room houses with thatched roofs, past boys holding bundles of dried fish for sale -- the local "chambo" from the lake -- and past women in brightly colored dresses carrying buckets of water on their heads. I envied the grace of their movement, and was saddened by the fact that they had to walk at all. I have seen pockets of poverty in almost every place I've visited, but in Malawi, the poverty never ended. It continued, along the main roads, next to tobacco and sugar cane plants, through one montage after the next. The overcrowded, run-down minivans, which the Kenyans call "matatus" and are found all over the developing world, are few and far between in rural Malawi. It is expensive to import things into Malawi, without a port, a functioning railway, and only a handful of international flights to other countries in Eastern and Southern Africa.
Is there a way to make solar-powered electric cargo bikes cheaply? I thought about this as we drove. Fighting poverty is most often about increasing access -- to healthcare, to food, to education, and to markets. But doing it sustainably requires that people want it, are willing to prioritize it and work towards it. This is why so many donor-funded projects fail, because people don't want the thing enough that they're willing to pay or change their way of life for it. I wondered if an electric cargo bike could be made cheaply so that the average Malawian, or group of Malawians, could afford it. Has it been done? Could I do it? Would it help make people more productive, so they wouldn't spend the entire day walking?
Being in Malawi has reminded me why it's so hard to do development effectively from afar. My problems in Copenhagen are not the problems that people in the developing world face on a day-to-day basis. There are too many cupcake cafes in Denmark, and not enough real problems.
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