A Rude Awakening
My decades-long journey alongside the people of Malawi began with a single, piercing question.
The year is 1998. I’ve just been invited to teach at a conference in Malawi, Africa—a gathering of pastors and leaders from eleven African nations coming together for a week of worship, learning, and community.
I have never been to Africa. Years of living and serving in impoverished urban neighborhoods in the U.S. have shaped me, but nothing could prepare me for what I am about to encounter.
My responsibility is to teach and encourage the 120+ women who will attend, many of whom are pastors’ wives and ministry leaders. I meet with the conference director’s wife and ask what she believes the women need most. She crinkles her brow, thinks for a moment, and quietly replies, Please teach them not to take their babies to witch doctors.
I nod as if I understand - but of course I don’t. I am a Belfast-born Irish immigrant to the US who has a thoroughly Western worldview. Why would anyone take their baby to a witch doctor, and what exactly would that witch doctor do?
The women begin to arrive. A few are finely dressed and educated, but the majority are illiterate villagers, some wearing the only clothes they own, most barefoot. All of them, though, are beautiful, warm, courageous, and dignified. They raise the roof with their singing, dancing, and laughter.
The conference is held in a crumbling concrete building topped with a rusty corrugated roof. During the day, the men meet inside on chairs while the women sit outside on the ground in the blazing sun. The women cook their noon and evening meals over open fires and sleep on the ground at night.
Before long, I overstep my boundaries by asking the male leaders to provide chairs and move the women to a shaded area. A debate breaks out—the women are too noisy… they will disrupt the men… they like sitting on the ground… But this, for me, is non-negotiable. Eventually, the women move off the ground and into chairs in the shade. They are delighted.
They attend several sessions each day—laughing, weeping, asking questions, even arguing. We talk about God’s love, truth, compassion, and mercy; we talk about following Jesus and the way of God’s kingdom. They pray for each other and for their sick, malnourished children. As they continue to open up, I decide one afternoon to hold an informal Q&A session. Each gathering has been intense, so a couple of hours to lighten the mood and learn more about each other could provide a much-needed emotional break.
Beforehand, I take a taxi to the market to buy fresh fruit, biscuits, and drinks, and then arrange them on a table beneath an awning. One by one, the women come forward, approaching the food as if receiving holy communion. They tuck pieces away carefully in the folds of their colorful chitenje wraps for themselves and their children. I watch a toddler with orange hair, falling out in patches, eat a banana slowly, reverently, not wanting it to end.
While the women eat in silence, I explain that we can ask each other anything—no barriers, no pretense. We’re sisters, I tell them. My heart is sincere, but my thinking, understanding, and seeing are deeply flawed. I don’t know it, but I am about to be exposed before God, myself, and these beautiful women.
A Mozambican woman rises immediately. She stands proudly on bruised, bare feet that have carried her across many miles—from Mozambique to Malawi—walking for days under a scorching sun, carrying a baby on her back and balancing heavy bundles on her head.
She lifts her chin and asks the question that silences us all:
“Does anyone in your country see us?”
Her words pierce me to my core. I had expected questions about my daily life—my children, what kinds of foods Americans eat, how we wash our clothes, and whether we take maize to the maize mill like they do. But with only seven words, she cuts to the heart of everything.
I realize that I know nothing, but I understand what she is really asking:
Does anyone in your country see our desperate struggle to survive?
Do they see that our children are as precious to us as yours are to you?
Do they see beyond our poverty to our possibilities, our strengths, our talents, our dreams?
Are we visible? Do we exist for you?
I stand before them and weep openly. The women wait quietly for my answer; some weep with me. All I can say is the truth:
No. Not yet. Not really.
I tell them that, before being invited on this trip, I had never heard of Malawi and couldn’t readily find it on a map. I confess that I know nothing yet of their lives, struggles, or hopes—but I want to. Please tell me what I don’t know. Tell me what you want me to understand. Help me see.
For the rest of that day and the rest of that week, they do just that. I listen, pray, learn, and teach what I can. Many openly admit that they take their sick children to witch doctors out of desperation because they have no money, no medicine, no way to fend off malaria, blindness from lack of vitamins, and severe malnutrition. A woman brings her stick-thin, diarrhea-ravaged baby to the front of the room. Okay, I’ll stop going to the witch doctor, she says, but now please pray for my child to live. The women encircle her and pray for the listless, feverish baby in faith. The next morning, the child is sitting up on the floor, babbling and smiling; the women who prayed are not surprised, but I am shocked. My God has just grown bigger, along with my faith and my family.
When it is time to leave, we part with hugs and tears—and on my part, an inward promise to return with a different answer. I know I cannot change the world, but I can do something. And if I don’t, I can never look them in the eye again and call them my sisters.
Something has to change—starting with me.