Glenn and Linda Inglis in Malawi

My work as Visitor Coordinator within the Blantyre Synod seems to get busier each year. Blantyre Synod has formal partnership agreements with the Presbyterian/Reformed Churches in Canada, USA, Ireland, Scotland, the Netherlands and Australia. Each year there are groups who come from all of these partners. There are formal visits with Synod officials, mission tours wanting to learn about the Church in Malawi, and work groups coming to build a classroom or a clinic, paint a church, visit orphan children and always to share faith stories, food and fellowship. Together, these things strengthen our commitment to Christ in mission.

In terms of the PCC, we had a Youth in Mission Group in May and a team from Coldwater PC in July. Early in the year we also had official visitors from PWS&D and the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. We look forward to planning itineraries for our PCC friends and sharing the life and work of Malawian Christians in many different locations and contexts.

I also work with a group established to assist physically and mentally challenged children and adults in Ndirande, one of the poorest locations in Blantyre. The name chosen by the group is ‘Tidzalerana’ which means ‘we must help each other!’ Each week the group meets for fellowship, prayers, music and recreation. They share problems, get support such as wheelchairs or appointments to clinics, and, when resources allow, they get some food supplements.

In 2010 we opened a ‘shelter’ or home for 10 challenged adults who had been living in appalling conditions. This was funded by friends in the Netherlands and has been a great blessing to many. Please be aware as well that Tidzalerana is now a recognized development program through PWS&D and can be supported through Gifts of Change.

We had a wonderful break in Canada from August to October 2010. Our son Luke was married to Carly in Galt-Cambridge. Then our deputation trail took us to congregations in Southern Ontario as well as a wonderful exposure tour to the Atlantic Synod where we visited several congregations and were guests at the AMS Annual Meeting in St. John’s.

We want to thank International Ministries and PWS&D staff for their support and commitment to our work. Blantyre Synod has partners and donors from many countries, but none are more supportive or innovative than PWS&D and IM. Please pray for our Malawian friends who struggle with issues of poverty and poor health facilities. We are making a difference but we can do much more.

Linda

Some people ask why the Church in Malawi gets involved in health and development issues when there are so many competent faith-based and secular agencies equipped to do such work. First, the early missionaries had a holistic understanding of the gospel. God’s Word was preached but the physical and social needs of the people were also attended to.The Church was responsible for changing public opinion about slavery; instituted the first hospitals and schools; introduced new farming methods and seeds and provided opportunities for people to learn trades. For people in Malawi, therefore, the Church has always been in the forefront of health, education and development and there are broad expectations that this work will continue.

The Church in Malawi is also the only organization that has access to every city, town and village. There is no place in Malawi where the Church is not. So the Church has a unique opportunity to mobilize people in terms of their health and development needs. Today, churches cannot do everything and resources are stretched. But rather than withdrawing from development issues, we seek to develop strategic partnerships with compatible agencies to increase our impact. Finally, there is a powerful international faith network through the World Council of Churches and other denominational and regional associations that contributes enormously to development as well as aid and disaster relief.

The Blantyre Synod Health and Development Commission has five focus areas: Public Health and HIV and AIDS; Livelihoods; Orphans and Vulnerable Children; Governance; and Gender. In 2010 we were able to begin our new Maternal and Reproductive Health Program. This is not only extremely important for health purposes (Malawi has one of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world), but it is a national program in that it links the three Synods of the CCAP in a pilot phase. HIV and AIDS continue to be a scourge. In Malawi everyone is either infected or affected by the pandemic. The National AIDS Commission has funded a mainstreaming program whereby we have developed a Synod HIV and AIDS policy as well as a Workplace Policy that will be rolled out to all Presbyteries and Congregations in 2011.

The new campaign slogan is that HIV and AIDS is not a moral issue – it is a virus! Separating HIV and AIDS from moral debate and seeing it as a public health crisis helps to de-stigmatize the disease and lessen discrimination. Prevention is still the key.

There is also change going on in the area of Livelihoods – what used to be called rural development. We are moving away from high input programs that provide seeds and fertilizer for farmers (although this will not be completely discontinued) and we are emphasizing conservation farming and climate change adaptation. We are helping people make best use of their land, water resources and woodlots in the face of growing populations and the vagaries of climate change. This is an area of intense debate as the decisions we make in the next few years will have significant impact on food production and the vitality of rural communities.

Although Malawi has a surplus of maize, drought reduced the harvest in some areas, and so we are carrying out three emergency food and recovery programs in the Balaka district (about 120 km north of Blantyre). One of these is funded by the Canadian Foodgrains Bank through PWS&D. The others are funded by Oxfam and the Norwegian Government.

Finally, we still continue the struggle to advance and defend human rights, particularly helping rural people develop advocacy skills. We are seeing attitudes move beyond resignation and fatalism as people become informed citizens who can claim what is rightfully theirs in terms of government services.

One of my duties is to work myself out of a job. Plans are underway to name my successor in early 2011, after which we will work together through 2011 until the Board decides BSHDC can be totally managed by Malawian staff.

Glenn

We are missionaries working in Malawi for The Presbyterian Church in Canada.  We have many responsibilities, but love the work we do.  We love telling you about our adventures and experiences so check back regularly for updates on what we are doing.

In Christ,

There are two emerging issues in our development thinking which are worth sharing and seeking some feedback from the wider constituency.

The first is the matter of integration. For example, we work in 27 communities supporting orphans and vulnerable children (OVC). Our strategy is to train community leaders to take responsibility for the care and nurture of these children. We supply food and training for the care givers, plus community workers to visit the homes. As well, we attempt to help older OVC to continue in school or acquire vocational training. At the same time, however, we recognize that in the homes of these children there are problems of poverty, nutrition, perhaps even abuse.

We work in six districts in livelihoods progrmammes. These are food security initiatives to help farmers to improve crop diversity, soil fertility, and crop storage so that the vulnerability of the family is reduced during the long dry season. Yet working in these communities one sees the problems of misuse of water resources, uncontrolled tree cutting, poor schools and lack of medicine in local health clinics.

We work in the areas of HIV prevention, testing and counseling as well as the wider issue of maternal and child health. One of the huge pressures we face is overcoming a sense of fatalism in isolated communities. They complain that the clinics have no medicine or there are no nurses or doctors on duty. And the clinics are too far away so that when people are really sick or a woman has premature labour pains; there is no way to get her to a clinic. One sees that there is a need for community health surveillance and motorcycle or bicycle ambulances.

In other areas we work on the issues of human rights and advocacy. We train community members to both know and demand their rights. If the school has no books or too few teachers; if the clinic has no medicine; if the local bridge has been washed away; if tree poachers come from another community and cut down trees; there can be a community response. There are ways to demands services from the local assembly, the MP, the community workers on government payroll.

What I am trying to convey is that we are doing good work in many communities but the work is not always integrated. Donors have preferences, we have certain skills to offer, but seldom do we have the opportunity to do integrated work in each community where we are present. Our specializations are: livelihoods, HIV and AIDS and public health; orphans and vulnerable children; governance; and gender. We are now working with partners, including PWS&D, to find ways that we can work in a fully integrated manner to maximize the effectiveness of our work.

The second issue is local empowerment. This is not a new issue but it is becoming strategically important. For too long communities have seen any number of experts from government, UN agencies, international and local NGOs come to survey, analyze, recommend, implement some programme or other, then disappear. Local people are consulted but are they empowered?

This is the newest strategy at BSHDC. We are intentionally working with presbyteries and congregations to develop local leadership to identify local issues and plan for local solutions. We see this as the only sustainable approach over the long run. Using participatory approaches, we will work with local communities to respond to local issues. We can supply professional services, administrative and financial support, technical advice and training, but local people must take the initiative and own the work that is being done. We believe that by decentralization and an integrated programmatic approach we can ‘do development’ much better than in the past.

In July our watchman died. We had known Custom since 1980 when the Synod appointed him to keep an eye on our house. When we returned to Blantyre in 1997, Custom left the Synod to work full time with us. Those who have visited ‘Canada House’ know of whom I speak. Custom officially died of malaria, but everyone knew the underlying cause was HIV/AIDS. Malawians seldom mention AIDS but speak rather of ‘our general disease’ or ‘the thinning disease.’ Some years ago, Custom and his wife separated and eventually reunited a couple of years later. She died of ‘the general disease’ and so Custom’s situation was not a surprise.

Linda and I were visiting Custom at the hospital one day. Because his condition was deteriorating, the nurses had moved him off his bed onto a mat sandwiched on the floor between two other beds which carried patients with a better chance of survival. The ward was chaotic with family members trying to administer food or water to the sick while determined charismatic preachers were shouting at the top of their voices that the sick and wounded should repent so God could heal their bodies. We finally found Custom when Linda noticed his young wife with tear-filled eyes watching over him. On her back was a new born baby. Three weeks before Custom’s death his wife gave birth to a lovely baby girl.

The lot of widows is seldom kind. After the funeral relatives of the deceased often either clear the house of all furnishings or simply clear the widow out of the house. In this case, Custom’s wife will take her two young children to her home village some 50 kilometres away. There she will have no job and no means of support save the generosity of the extended family. What will happen to her? What future will the girls have? Because of our long-standing association with the family, these are questions we will somehow strive to answer.

It is now a cliché but the truth still holds: everyone in Malawi is either infected or affected by HIV/AIDS. On average in this country of 12 million, a person is infected with HIV every 10 seconds and a person dies of AIDS related causes every 10 seconds. It is easy to do the math.

The latest UN report indicates a lowering of the HIV infection rate in Southern Africa. In Malawi the rate is now 12%. But this rate applies only to ages 14-49 and in urban areas the rates can go upwards of 30%. Through exceptional international efforts, anti-retroviral therapy (ART) is widely available. However, only about one-third of the people who need the drugs are taking them. A huge problem is the lack of trained medical staff in rural areas. The nursing profession is one of the hardest hit by AIDS. Also, hundreds of Malawian nurses have been recruited to the UK where life is decidedly better.

ART also requires a good diet. The pills are hard on the gut and must be taken with food. Because of the poor rainfall this year many villagers are already down to one meal a day. Eventually, people just quit taking the pills.

The social and economic cost of AIDS is beyond easy quantification. When a parent gets sick someone has to care for the person. There is one less person to farm or earn money, so the daughters quit school. People have to sell their household treasures like radios or beds or pots and pans to buy food. Too often the daughters end up selling their bodies so the family can eat.

The Church has turned a corner on HIV/AIDS. No longer does one hear sermons equating AIDS with the wrath of God upon the sinner. Ministers and Elders have attended workshops and are sensitized to the disease. Besides, lots of Ministers and Elders have also died throughout the country. But there is still stigmatization around the disease. It is hard for Christians to admit their affliction. Guilt abounds.

Then there is the question of why? Why should such a Christian country, full of so many faithful people, be so afflicted with this disease? There are many answers but the most obvious one to me is poverty. Poverty is now widely recognized as the key issue that limits otherwise noble interventions in health, education and environmental protection. The numbing reality that 57% of Malawians survive on less than one U.S. dollar per day is the issue that must be addressed before other interventions will have the impact we so desire. Why Africans are so poor is a complex issue, of course. But the reasons have much to do with a continent which, apart from oil and mineral extraction, is generally excluded from the benefits of the world trading system – a system that is weighted too much in favour of the ‘haves’ to the exclusion of the ‘have nots.’

The past few months have been extremely busy with visitors coming and going. Linda is the Synod’s visitor coordinator and she has made more trips to the airport than she cares to count. There have been clergy and youth groups from Pittsburgh presbytery; a work group from the Presbyterian Church in Australia that stayed for a month; visitors from Scotland and Holland. A retired couple from Ireland has been in our guest house for over two months coordinating a new livelihoods project funded by Irish Aid which is now part of our Development Commission programme. We also had a great visit with Karen Plater and her videographer Shane who were preparing educational material for the Life and Mission Agency.

There has been a tremendous increase in the number of individuals and groups wanting to experience life in Malawi. The Synod has a ‘partnership committee’ that works with Linda to make sure people have the best possible experience here. Visitors generally fall into two categories: those who make contacts with the Synod, want to learn about programmes and projects, and fit into the rhythms of Malawian life. Then there are others who decide that they can ignore all formal structures and cultural traditions and set up their personal development programmes. These inevitably lead to frustration and failure and promote an expectation among local folk that visitors come with piles of money to give away. We are thankful that our PCC, through International Ministries and PWS&D, works hard to prepare our Canadian visitors to walk along side their Malawian hosts, work through existing structures, and build up the development work of the Church which is so necessary.

We were delighted when the Hoekstra family arrived in August to begin their work here. This is a new appointment under International Ministries and Ed and Jackie will soon be inducted into a local congregation. So far it has been settling in, getting Jacob and Nico into school, and the million adaptations required to get going in a new culture. This family will be wonderful ambassadors of Christ and our PCC. The days are getting hot! We pray for rains in October as many areas are running out of food. Amidst the momentous changes occurring in the world – financial, environmental, political – please remember this little country in your prayers.

In faith, Glenn & Linda

Dear Friends,

I was at a workshop in Lilongwe last week and during the morning break was chatting with friends under the shade of a flowering cassia tree. Blue sky, not too hot, greenery all around – perfect, I thought. I mentioned God’s grandeur to my colleagues and one replied, ‘For this time of year it is not beautiful.’ What he meant, of course, was that the rains quit too early this year. Malawi was heading for a bumper harvest when suddenly, in early February, it stopped raining for four weeks. Yields are expected to be down by 30% opening the possibility of hunger by Christmas.

I grew up on a farm and should have known better. Clear skies in the rainy season are not a cause for joy but alarm. And so throughout so much of Africa, eyes are turning to the skies as people ponder the ways of God and man. Some areas wilt in heat while others are covered in floods. The seasons have changed, the times are out of kilter and some have turned from God and science to find answers in the ancient and often frightening traditions of the sorcerers. Life is unsettled and events are unsettling.

Not far away, Robert Mugabe has lost touch with reality, is fighting the ghosts of the 1970’s, and somehow seems either unaware or unconcerned that he has turned a wonderful nation into what Michael Valpy of the Globe and Mail calls ‘a place with plenty of nothing.’ Malawi’s entire maize surplus has found its way to Zimbabwe

Our Church, the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian, continues to grow and against many obstacles manages to train its clergy, its women’s guilds, attract young people and support a development department. But there is still unease in the Church. The Synods are arguing over boundaries and whether it is more economical to have three regional theological colleges instead of the one at Zomba which has been a source of unity and brought openness to the wider world.
In one community here in the South where a British University is doing an in-depth study of the sociology of HIV/AIDS, it was found that for the 1000 adults in the town, there were over 30 different religious affiliations. The ‘gospel of prosperity’ has arrived in force and no one seems to believe that any strength is gained by waiting upon the Lord. Better to shake the gates of heaven and demand a little action.

Many of the affluent people we know have sent their children to Europe or North America to study and don’t expect them to return. CNN did an article about the way Britain has drained Malawi of skilled doctors and nurses. There are more Malawian doctors in Manchester than Malawi. Some call it a crime against humanity and in a way it is. Even though we now have anti-retroviral therapies for AIDS patients, only about 25% of the people who need them receive the medication because there are not enough community health workers to implement and monitor the programme.

The geniuses, who can design a cruise missile to practically enter your mail box, can’t seem to design a stove so people can use less wood or charcoal to cook their food. Malawi’s forests are disappearing at 2.5% per year and this garden of Africa may, in 30 years, be a desert.

The economic situation in sub-Saharan Africa is distressing, but there are also signs of hope. We went through a strategic planning process at our development office and one of our colleagues came up with this brilliant insight: ‘Since independence we have been told that Malawi is a poor country and this has instilled an attitude of entitlement. When are rich nations going to give us what we need? But Malawi is not poor; it is the people who are poor. Therefore, we need to take responsibility for overcoming our own poverty.’ It is a courageous statement and, sadly, does not reflect the thinking of the majority. But there is a growing realization that change has to be effected locally. At the Blantyre Synod Development Commission, where I am currently the Director, these are ways we are trying to change attitudes as well as physical environments:

• Community Based Orphan Care: we run 18 centres in the Blantyre district which help about 1500 children and adolescents. Now, we are developing a new and more economical model to take our services into the rural areas of the Synod
• Livelihood Programmes: In three of the poorest districts of Malawi we are implementing integrated rural development programmes where people join together to find ways to save their woodlots, protect their water sources, multiply traditional seeds, plant drought resistant crops, care for their orphans, educate about HIV prevention, advocate at the local government offices for better schools and services, and empower women to become community leaders.
• HIV/AIDS: we are developing an integrated response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic that looks at the sociology and politics of the disease as well as medical interventions. Pastoral care and advocacy will be as important as drugs.
• Church and Society: After a lull, we are re-tooling this programme to work on grassroots democracy so people can access the services that are theirs by law.
• Communications: We realize we are not telling the story, not sharing good news. We do not want charity but partners in the search for justice. This is your calling as well as ours.

Linda carries out her own struggle to change attitudes from hopelessness to hope every Tuesday when she meets her ‘Club’ – the walking and sometimes crawling wounded who have no access to social services and so rely on this little gathering for prayer, moral support, a bread and butter sandwich and, on occasion, something more. This year, for example, when money was gone and people were hungry there came a totally unexpected gift from Canada that allowed the Club to purchase 100 bags of maize. The gift was kept a secret so a few ‘extra’ members didn’t suddenly show up. On the day of distribution exactly 100 representatives of the participating families in the group showed up. Linda continues to teach songs and games at the Community Based Orphan Care Centres once a week and helps the Synod plan itineraries for the visitors who come this way either to take part in exposure trips or to work. There is a continuous flow of visitors which is good.

It is time to push back, is it not? It is time to push back the hopelessness and the cynicism that goes with it. The Apostle Peter tells us we are born again into a living hope, not wishful thinking, but a sure expectation that what Christ accomplished through the Cross is the same power that is alive in the Church and the believer. Where there is hope there can be community. I think that is as true in Canada as in Malawi. Church growth in Malawi can be an obsession and idolatrous when it is driven by greed or a desire for economic payoff. But where a community of hope in Christ arises, there is true power for change.
We are fine. We had a wonderful wedding celebration for Jocelyn and Ryan in December. I was able to bless the marriage covenant and managed not to cry – at least during the service. Naomi has decided to be a hair stylist in Vancouver, and Luke is back in Ontario looking at ways and means to volunteer in a developing country.

The joy of Africa breaks through: Jocelyn and Ryan were returning to their school in Nigeria, some 4 hours into the bush from Abuja, when the car broke down. After an hour or so a replacement was found. It had no seats, nothing, just an empty shell with a gear shift sticking out from the floor. But they made it.
We have many visitors through our gate. Ken Kim was with us last week and Karen Plater will be here next month. I hope more Canadian Presbyterians can open themselves to that gnawing feeling I know is there – we can do more, we must do more for the Reign of Christ. Sometimes the grace of God says ‘Push back the darkness!’ If you feel inclined, please join in the conversation.

We covet your prayers as we thank you for your love and support.

Linda and Glenn Inglis