Joel and I arrived in Malawi in January of 2004. We were relative newlyweds—married just over a year—and enjoying life together. In 2005, we began to contemplate starting a family and in 2006 we took the plunge and adopted two Malawian children—Isaac, who is now eight, and Masika who is seven.
Those first months learning to adapt to life with children and learning how to parent within an African context were filled with a mixture of excitement, uncertainty, terror and joy.
It has been six years since our family returned from Malawi—and we have since added a third child to our brood, five – year – old Canaan—but the lessons we learned while living in Africa are present in our child rearing every day.
In Malawian society, children are everybody’s business. To an outsider, it was impossible to tell which children belonged to whom, as they seemed to be parented by everybody and anybody. Within the extended family, Malawian children sometimes live with biological parents, but just as often they live with aunties, uncles or other relatives. Part of this is due to a society staggering under the heavy weight of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, but the greater part is due to longstanding familial structures that are much more fluid than in North America. It is a well – known cliché that it “takes a village to raise a child,” and this is absolutely true of how family life is lived out in Malawi. The entire community participates in rearing their children.
When we first adopted Isaac, we found it extremely unnerving when Malawian friends or total strangers would scoop him from our arms and disappear with him for minutes, or even hours at a time. The first time we experienced this was at a restaurant, when a female server came to our table and realized that Isaac was fussing. Immediately, she picked him up, and, to our wide – eyed alarm, left the room with him.
After about two minutes of total panic trying to figure out what was happening, we politely asked our waiter where our one – year – old had been taken. After a moment of confusion at our question, he replied that they had taken him to play so that we could eat. I tried to relax, but have to admit that I ate pretty quickly and was very relieved to have him back in my arms about 20 minutes later!
I also sometimes felt jealous when our housekeeper would swing Isaac up onto her back into a chitenje (an African cloth wrapped around the back with the baby inside, sort of like a Baby Bjorn or sling) and continue her housework, or run to him as quickly as I would when he would fall. I was his mother… wasn’t I supposed to be the one doing those things?
While there are many aspects of North American culture that Malawians wish for themselves, the strength of the community within Malawian society is one that I learned to appreciate and even envy. They seem to exemplify Romans 12:5: “so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members of one another.”
In Malawi, if one member of the family has a job, their responsibility is to provide money to members of their immediate and extended family. Other members of the family pick up the slack in regards to housework, child rearing, conflict management, marriage counselling and a variety of other tasks.
Here in North America, women have saddled themselves with an attempt to be superwomen—working full – time, cooking, cleaning, family management… and the list goes on, with very little help. In choosing to live in single dwelling homes and keeping our money for ourselves, we have independence and financial gain but have lost family integration, shared responsibilities and a lighter daily load.
Being interconnected and dependent upon one another is engrained in Malawian culture. It is certainly not without its own challenges! But, we have taken to heart the lessons we learned there.
In our home, we strive to show our children how other people need our time and resources. We sponsor a Malawian child and we speak often about having fewer toys and luxuries so that we can give more money to others. In our time – crunched Canadian society, there are vulnerable people who need our time more than our resources, and we are actively working to share ourselves by spending time with disadvantaged people in our community. We are also learning to use our home and our family as a gift from God. In the past few years, we have opened our doors to various people to live with us for days, weeks and months at a time. We have also chosen to partner with the Children’s Aid Society as respite care workers because we have been blessed with much, and we want to be a blessing to others.
Our children do not always like living this way. They don’t always want to share their rooms, their toys and their time with “difficult” people or those who are hard to love. They don’t want to drive people without vehicles to appointments or shopping or to hang out with strangers. But they are learning that as a family we are living out God’s call to community and interdependence.
We are making a conscious attempt to try to live Isaiah 1:17: “learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” It has not always been an easy road and we have so much more to learn, but it has also been joy – filled and rewarding. Our Malawian friends taught us valuable life lessons and each day we try to instil a little of their wisdom into our family life here in Canada.
