His name is Richard and he picks me up at the hotel to drive me to a restaurant where we were to meet others for lunch.
While waiting for his colleagues—the Synod of Livingstonia’s development department—and mine, I ask him a few questions about his life in the Ekwendeni district.
His father died because of AIDS when Richard was quite young. So did two of his brothers. Both brothers left behind their wives and children. Richard himself is married and has children. His mother is still alive.
They all live in a family compound just outside Mzuzu, Malawi. Richard is the only breadwinner.
He is an agriculturalist for the synod. While he is understandably hesitant when talking about himself, he is animated when discussing his work. Many of the places I have visited with Rev. Dr. John Vissers, moderator of the 138th General Assembly, his wife Lynn, and Rev. Dr. Rick Fee, general secretary of the Life and Mission Agency, take on a deeper meaning in Richard’s dissertation. Suddenly this is not just mission or development theory; this is personal.
Richard’s parents were subsistence farmers, like the ones I have met on those dusty fields long distances down bumpy roads. People who live that hand-to-mouth life do not produce agriculturalists; but, Richard found work with the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian, in Livingstonia Synod, and the church found promise in the young man. The church sponsored him to get an education.
And so while we wait for the others, his hands moving in front on him, his eyes lit, he tells me about finding famine-resistant plants which will provide several annual yields and will be highly nutritious for subsistence farmers like his parents once were.
He tells me about sorghum and pigeon peas and soya and cassava. All things that require relatively little water and provide several harvests a year. He tells me about goats and rabbits, which can be bred several times a year, and provide sustenance and resale value to many poor.
Richard isn’t a story, a theory, a statistic. He’s a man sitting across from me. And all the things I’ve read about Malawi I’ve heard course through his life. And I know that in a small way I have affected his life, through my participation in a church that supports his church, which found some promise in him.
