2006.03.07: March 7, 2006: Headlines: COS - Malawi: Service: Return to our COS - Malawi: Anchorage Daily News: RPCVs Dr. Tom Nighswander and his wife Ruth return to Malawi to work at Malawi Children's Village, a home for orphans whose parents have died from AIDS
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2006.03.07: March 7, 2006: Headlines: COS - Malawi: Service: Return to our COS - Malawi: Anchorage Daily News: RPCVs Dr. Tom Nighswander and his wife Ruth return to Malawi to work at Malawi Children's Village, a home for orphans whose parents have died from AIDS
RPCVs Dr. Tom Nighswander and his wife Ruth return to Malawi to work at Malawi Children's Village, a home for orphans whose parents have died from AIDS
"Malawians depend on one crop a year, and their lifestyle is pure subsistence. If you don't grow it or catch it, you don't eat. One year's supply of the staple maize was lost. There is no irrigation, even a few miles from the lake. There will be no new maize until mid-March."
RPCVs Dr. Tom Nighswander and his wife Ruth return to Malawi to work at Malawi Children's Village, a home for orphans whose parents have died from AIDS
Starvation returns to long-suffering Malawians
By TOM NIGHSWANDER
Daily News correspondent
Published: March 7, 2006
Last Modified: March 7, 2006 at 02:23 AM
This is the first of four columns by Dr. Tom Nighswander of Anchorage, detailing his recent experience at the Malawi Children's Village, a home for orphans whose parents have died from AIDS. Nighswander and his wife, Ruth, an Anchorage school nurse, were Peace Corps volunteers in Malawi in the '60s.
MANGOCHI, Malawi -- Welcome to Malawi, the Warm Heart of Africa, a beautiful, narrow strip of a country stretching 365 miles on the shores of Lake Malawi. It has the third-highest mountain in Africa, Mount Malange, and two 5,000-foot plateaus. It's one of the friendliest countries you could ever hope to visit.
It also ranks fifth from the bottom in world poverty. It would seem to be a place the world has largely forgotten.
The plane ride from Alaska is long, including a refueling stop in Ghana, to get to one of only two airports in Malawi. But after 24 hours in the air from Anchorage, we entered a different world: from the world of haves to the world of have-nots; from too much food to countrywide famine; from a place where HIV/AIDS is becoming a manageable disease thanks to available treatments to a place where HIV deaths cause chronic workforce shortages in both the Malawi police and army.
Ruth and I have made this trip annually for the past six years. Our destination is our thatched-roof, baked-brick cottage on the southern shores of Lake Malawi. Here we'll volunteer for the Malawi Children's Village, a program to help children whose parents have died from HIV/AIDS.
We've been associated with Malawi since our Peace Corps days; we have friends here from 40 years ago and feel comfortable with the people. But the contrasts are so stark, Malawi might as well be on another planet.
This is the year of the "njala." In a literal translation from Chichewa, the local language, it means "the hungry time." We know it as famine. The official estimate is that 5 million people (out of a population of 12 million) are in desperate need of food. A dozen Malawians were at our doorstep yesterday needing food. These are folks we know. Many have worked for us or have been our village neighbors.
Malawi is in a part of the world that gets unreliable rains, and every five or six years, the December-January rains don't come, or they come and stop or even flood the fields for two months and rot the maize. That happened last year.
Malawians depend on one crop a year, and their lifestyle is pure subsistence. If you don't grow it or catch it, you don't eat. One year's supply of the staple maize was lost. There is no irrigation, even a few miles from the lake. There will be no new maize until mid-March.
Meeka is an unusually tall, gracious man from the village, probably in his 70s. He stopped by yesterday to greet us. He has served as an intermittent night guard for us in years past. He was painfully thin, with tight skin stretched over prominent collarbones. He has grandchildren living with him; his wife is dead. He never asked about food, but Ruth did and gave him food for several days. He spoke in Chichewa of the great njala this year ... of small meals of maize flour each day if he could find it. He wanted to know how the "hungry time" was going in America.
We spent the day buying food -- small packets of rice, beans, maize flour, sugar and tea -- and handing them out to our neighbors as they stopped by. And it was our first day here.
Next week: HIV/AIDS looms much closer at the Malawi Children's Village.
Tom Nighswander and his wife, Ruth, have lived in Anchorage for 34 years. Besides their Peace Corps work in Malawi, they took a sabbatical year there in 1984-85 and continue to visit annually.
When this story was posted in March 2006, this was on the front page of PCOL:
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Story Source: Anchorage Daily News
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