11 - The Launch

So our exposure to Malawian politics did not end after our meeting on Monday. The Ministry of Health, Vice Presidentn of Malawi and Concern Universal had organized a formal launch day for the distributions of the mosquito nets full with dance performances, speeches, drama and media coverage. It was quite the production, given what we had seen here thus far. So without going through all the details, we had learned the previous day that President Bingu had suddenly stripped the VP from much of her authority, and had scheduled his own malaria project launch on Monday with the first lady being the guest of honor and government officials getting the glory on TV. They had announced the distribution of 40,000 nets, purposely since it was double the amount we were doing, to build political goodwill of the ruling family over efforts of the VP. So our back up guest of honor was supposed to be the DC we had met the day before, but he sent the Director of Planning and Infrastructure to represent him, most likely out of fear for being responsible if our event created lots of positive attention for what was originally the VP's plans. We all treaded lightly making sure to keep everything we said focussed on malaria aid and nothing else. I was interviewed for Malawian national news, and although I never saw it a bunch of workers at our lodge and the CU office did and were excited to tell me they had seen me on TV. There was a rep from USAID at the event too who I rode with and had a chat about development work in Africa. I will spare details, but to say the least she was a complete nutcase and probably the last person I would ever want representing my country. The scripted things she said both to me and the people in the crowd at the event made it so clear that she has done nothing but work in and add to government beauracracy for her whole life and has done little more than shake hands and pass out her business cards to politicians in Africa. We talked about working in developing nations and some of the challenges. The ones she shared had to do with trying to provide Western level human rights to countries that have cultures that will never accept them, and blaming previous US administrations for making matters worse overseas. She told me something that was one of the most ridiculous things I had ever heard. Her driver and her had hit a poor old local man on his bicycle while barreling along the dirt roads in her brand new embassy issued SUV the day before. He had rolled out of the way of the tire barely, and they ran over his bike completely. Afterwards, she decided it would be best to only give him what it would cost to fix his bike (1,000 kwacha or $7 USD), after consulting with her embassy authorities of course, so that she would not admit fault implied by providing a larger sum of money to the poor man. I'm thinking to myself, bikes here are all from China and cost less than $70 brand new, you couldn't just replace the guy's bike??? I was asked to develop a relationship between her and CU, and after biting my tongue as she talked about all the wrong ways our government has tried to help this place, I realized working with this woman was hopeless. The girls and I gave a short talk at the event on behalf of PwC and Against Malaria Foundation which was translated into Chichewa and seemed to be taken very well. We explained that other African countries that had obtained mosquito net usage benchmarks had drastically reduced deaths from malaria and that we would like to see similar success in Malawi. After the launch we held our first distribution in Phalombe district starting with the Kalinde village. The people were genuinely thankful for their nets after waitin in line for hours to receive one.