In 1997 Mike Cook invited me to visit Malawi. Mike and his wife Claire had met in Malawi in the 1980’s when they were on a two-year VSO placement. This visit was an eye opener for me, and I returned with so many questions. I was shocked by the poverty, the hunger, the number of orphans, the schools with classes in the hundreds, the average life expectancy around 40 and in the case of Mbulukuta village children dying from diarrhoea due to lack of clean water.
We returned in 1999 to open a new church building in Mbulukuta village. We wanted to provide a borehole for clean water, but the community said no, they had to have a church building first. At the time I struggled to understand but we listened and that listening gave us legitimacy and an invitation to work with a community. We returned to open the borehole in 2001.
Our visits were infrequent and each time we attempted to learn and do something. We were aware that HIV/Aids was devastating Malawi and in 2001 we met Peatry Ntodwa. My first question to Peatry was ‘what is the goal of your life?’ He said, ‘we are in a war with HIV and we are going to beat it’. For me personally I knew at that moment that even though I was only a piano player and a music teacher the course of my life was going to change.
The period from 2001 to 2014 was littered with successes and failures. In 2008 we carried out a survey of all households in Mbulukuta village – 155 households. We discovered that in the previous 12 months the village had conducted over 50 funerals. Half were of young adults leaving behind many orphans and half were of children mainly under five years of age. The adult deaths were almost certainly HIV/AIDS and the children malaria. We attempted to raise funds for mosquito nets and eventually sent those funds. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough for everybody, and we insisted that the nets were distributed – it divided the community. When we enquired about how the children were now that they were sleeping under nets the response was ‘the children aren’t sleeping under the nets, the parent are’. When we asked why, the answer was ‘if it’s a choice between losing a parent or a child it’s better to lose a child’. We asked, ‘why didn’t you just tell us that if this project was going to work, we needed to supply two nets per household?’
I share this story because it was instrumental in helping us realise that we didn’t have a clue what we were doing, finding out information was difficult and complicated, the barriers between our cultures were problematic and we needed someone who could bridge all those gaps. That person was Peatry Ntodwa who eventually became the Director of Mbedza in Malawi.
The vision for Mbedza became clear. We needed to focus on community-based projects where everyone benefits – the basis of our social cohesion policy. Poverty had many faces, and we needed to tackle several factors to make a difference – our four areas are Health (HIV), Livelihoods (Stoves), Environment (Trees and gardens) and Education.
For me personally it meant a big decision to leave teaching (2015) which I loved to fully focus on Mbedza. I re-educated myself first with a degree in International Studies and then a Masters in Development Management. From 2015 things have really taken off – Mbedza has built over 7000 Esperanza Stoves in over 70 villages, planted over 90,000 trees in 30 communities, our counsellors have conducted over 30,000 HIV tests and we have education programmes at Nursery level, Secondary School and embedded in other programmes such as our sex and relationship education. Mbedza employs over 40 staff in Malawi.
In 2014 a young man that I first met in 2001 came to me and said ‘Mr Watson, do you know that there is a stigma that is worse than the stigma of HIV?’ I had no idea what he was referring to. Accomplish Children’s Trust will know that he was referring to the stigma of having a disabled child and in the communities where we are working these children are hidden. The piano player in me felt helpless but asking for help back in the UK led to a meeting in a café in York with Sue Baldock and the journey with Accomplish began. The Heart of Mercy project amazes me. I was walking through a number of our communities in January 2023 and people were coming out of their homes to shake my hand and say thank you for the work Accomplish are doing, there was such a deep joy and gratitude on their faces.
Our hope for the future is to upscale – we are still scratching the surface.
Julian Watson
Mbedza
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