N k h a n i  Z a u l e r e - July 2007

All change at the top

Archbishop Bernard Malango has resigned as primate of the Anglican Province of Central Africa as from September and as Bishop of the Diocese of Upper Shire from December. The Province comprises Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Botswana, nearly as large as Western Europe and equally diverse. It has nineteen dioceses and costs of meetings are very high. There are plans for Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi to become separate provinces. It is likely that
Botswana will join the Province of Southern
Africa.

Bishop Trevor Mwamba of Botswana has been elected Dean of the Province, and will be looking after the Province from September until the election of a new Archbishop. The Province has chosen wisely. Bishop Trevor was born in Zambia and has degrees in law and theology from Zambia and Oxford. His CV includes being curate at Notting Hill in London, assistant chaplain at Keble College, Oxford, a banker and voluntary priest in Botswana where he was personal assistant to Khotso Makhulu, archbishop of the Province for twenty years. Trevor has been bishop of Botswana since 2005. He is married to Mmasekgoa, and has three children.

He also has the gift of direct speech. An article by him on the problems of the Anglican Communion ends, “This is our calling: to build God’s Kingdom on earth, not to throw rotten eggs at each other.” Soon after his appointment as Dean, he was in the Diocese of Lake Malawi to listen to the views of people concerning a successor to Bishop Peter Nyanja. Blessed are the peacemakers.
 

Swinny Mtiesa, beloved physician

Swinny died on 30 June, after a lifetime of dedicated service. We do not know when he began helping in a hospital, probably in the 1920s. In the 1930s he was selected for further training at Liuli Hospital on the Tanzanian
lakeshore, then part of the Diocese of
Nyasaland. This was followed by another four years at the Scottish Hospital in Blantyre. In 1945, Swinny and Edward Nemeleyani were the first two Medical Assistants to be put in charge of a hospital, Edward at Nkope and Swinny at Malindi, where I found him in 1961.

Following the unsuccessful Chipembere raid on Zomba in 1965, many Anglican lay leaders in the Malindi area, including Swinny, were arrested and detained without trial in appalling conditions. At least two fellow-prisoners were ordained as a result of their experience and are still active. Swinny went back to Malindi, but soon afterwards he was preparing to give up work because of failing eyesight. The Israeli specialist at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Blantyre advised him to learn Braille as his condition was untreatable.

Then he had a dream that he would be cured by an American eye-specialist at the Q.E.H., so he made his way back to Blantyre. There he was put in a private room out of respect for his status, prior to sending him home again. The next morning he heard an American voice asking, “Who’s in that room?”, to which the sister explained the situation. “Let’s see him anyway.” It was a visiting opthalmologist from the States, who after examining Swinny said, ”I can’t promise anything but I did read in a recent journal that massive doses of vitamin B12 sometimes help. Let’s try it!” They did and it was successful.

Swinny went back to work. Dr. Art Johnson, Diocesan Medical Officer from 1965 to 1968, thought highly of Swinny and brought him across to Houston, Texas, to work with him at his own private hospital for a few months.

Nearly all of Swinny’s last 20 years were spent at Matope Health Centre, where the gently flowing Shire river descends 1500’ over 35 miles of rapids before joining the Zambezi. Matope is famous for the quantity and size of its mosquitoes. Swinny’s first recorded act was to persuade the Lions Club in Blantyre to give him
mosquito-nets for all his patients.

Once when I was staying with him, there was a rap at the door late at night. Some miles away, a family had gone down with cholera, then a new disease to Africa, spread by the wars in the Congo and Mozambique. Matope had no transport. Swinny left at once, knocked up a friend with a pick-up truck and returned an hour later with half-a-dozen adults and several children writhing in agony on the floor of the truck. Then he set up saline drips. At sunrise the whole family was laughing and chattering on the khonde outside the ward.

The next time I was at Matope I met a Muslim man whose problems the two main government hospitals had been unable to solve. He said that Isa (Jesus) had healed him through Swinny’s hands. Now he was visiting all the Muslim homes in the area with a Chichewa New Testament saying, “This will tell you all about Isa.”

While he was at Matope, Swinny had a moment of fame when his photograph appeared on the front page of a national newspaper holding a glass jar containing 988 worms, all extracted from one patient, who had come from Blantyre, some 35 miles away. This was his reward.

Swinny retired in 1985 but continued to live just across the Shire River from Matope. Each time I have been back to Malawi I have visited this great man. On our last visit he was plainly very old and and nearly blind. His friend Edward Nemeleyani was honoured by being admitted to the Order of the Epiphany more than 40 years ago. This Order celebrates outstanding service to the community by lay people. If the rules allow it, I hope that Swinny’s outstanding work might be recognized even after his death. Donald Arden

St. Luke’s & St. Martin’s Hospitals

These two hospitals are both in Upper Shire Diocese. St. Martin’s, at Malindi, though much less known, is the older, founded in 1898 in preparation for Malindi becoming the home of the steamers.

St. Luke’s began in 1940 but was only a tiny clinic on the hill above Malosa School. You had to be pretty fit to reach it if you lived on the Lake Chirwa plain, its main intake area. The present buildings by the main road were opened in 1964 when Art and Nan Johnson arrived from Texas as doctor and nurse.

A few eye-catching points from the summary Report to June 2006:

Child in-patient figures were almost identical: StM: 1,797. StL: 1,771

Dental patients: at both hospitals, 7,571, but the supervision of 7 affiliated units abandoned
through lack of funds and materials.

Drug needs: 83% met through a huge donation from St. Luke’s Foundation of the Netherlands and help from USPG.

Mother & Child Health – vital because Malawi’s numbers for maternal death are the third highest in the world - a course was held for traditional birth attendants; 10,439 visits at both hospitals by expectant mums and 1,067 new clients for family planning a small but significant breakthrough in these rural Islamic areas.

Cholera: none at St Luke’s, but a serious outbreak at St Martin’s.

The Similium fly, a transmitter of river blindness, reported at StM.

Nutrition clinics: 10.5% of 28,695 babies underweight.

MACOBO (Malosa Community Based Organisation) continues its wonderful HIV/AIDS work, based near St. Luke’s, with 170 trained volunteers working in 30 villages, providing orphan care and home-based care for People Living with Aids (PLWA).

The eight Health Centres are an important outreach into the community. In all they saw 35,072 patients and delivered 1,755 babies.

Only 3 Centres have electricity. Most are far from a tarmac road. Lulanga is 95km from St. Martin’s. The head of a Health Centre - usually a Nurse-midwife, some times a Medical Assistant - is on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Each Centre is visited once a month for support, supervision and supply of drugs.

Three other Health Centres – one Presbyterian and two government – are also supervised. CHAM (Christian Hospital Assoc of Malawi) has given two bicycle ambulances and promised two motor-cycle ones.

Developments A new maternity ward and new water tanks have been provided at Matope. This is the oldest HC and has top priority for the future. It needs a new borehole. A new holding ward and a renovated outpatients dept. and a new general ward at Chilipa, thanks to Dr. Helen Cox and the Patriarch Trust.

Nkasala is looking for help to build a shelter for ante-natal and U-5 clinics, still being held under a mango tree.

Mposa, near Lake Chirwa, has no electricity but may be reachable by a new line being planned.

St.Luke’s College of Nursing, founded in 1971, now has a capacity of 113. Students graduate with a diploma and the course includes midwifery. The College had a 100% pass in the last Midwifery exams. Funding comes from government on a basis of £745 p.a. per student. The Malawi-Norway Nursing Partnership has given 7 tutor houses and a 32-bedded hostel. The College desperately needs a 20-seater minibus.

The Malawi background:

• 1 doctor for 62,500 people
• 1 nurse for 3,500 people:
• 3 dentists for 15 m people
• 8 of 27 District Hospitals had a doctor
• Attendance at birth by trained midwife: 57%
• Lifetime risk of maternal death: 1 in7
• (UK: 1 in 3,800)
• Estimated HIV rate: 14.2% of 15+ (Zambia 17%; Zimbabwe 20%; Botswana 24%)

What Bono doesn’t say about Africa

William Easterly, professor of economics at New York University, writes:

It’s a dark and scary picture of a helpless, backward continent that is being offered up to TV watchers.

The real Africa is quite a bit different. What percentage of the African population dies in war every year? What share of male children are child soldiers? How many died of AIDS last year or are living as refugees? In each case, the answer is one half of 1% of the population - or less. In some cases, much less; annual war deaths have averaged 1 out of every 10,800 Africans for the last four decades. The reality is that many more Africans need latrines than need Western peacekeepers – but that doesn’t play so well on TV.

The real Africa has seen cellphone and internet use double every year for the last seven years. Africans are saving a higher percentage of their incomes than Americans are. I agree that it’s too soon to conclude that Africa is on a stable growth track, but why not celebrate what Africans have already achieved? Virtually all other countries that have escaped extremely poverty did so through the kind of respectable growth that Africa is enjoying.

Africa will fail to meet the goal of universal primary education by 2015. (though the Malawi attendance ratio in 2005 was 82% - ed.) Most African countries have actually expanded enrolments far more rapidly over the last five decades than Western countries did during their development.

Africans are and will be escaping poverty the same way that everybody else did: through the efforts of democratic reformers and ordinary citizens at home.

The real Africa needs increased trade from the West more than it needs more aid handouts. The fact remains that the West shows a lot more interest in begging bowls than in, say, letting Africa’s cotton growers compete fairly in Western markets. See the recent collapse of world trade talks.

 

Why dump maize on Malawi?

This has been a good year for growing maize in Malawi but a bad one for farmers trying to sell it.

Some extracts from a comprehensive article by Alex Renton, in The Observer on 27 May :

• a deal announced in April provides for $19.5 million worth of American corn and soya to be sent to Malawi as food aid, on condition that it is transported in US ships
• a Malawi-based analyst of ‘food security’ says: “It’s very short-sighted; it undermines farmers; it won’t bring long-term change to malnutrition rates”
• maize is so plentiful it fetches only 8 Malawian kwacha a kilo (3p) – if you can sell it; in 2005 the price went up to 50 kwacha a kilo
• the cost of buying, transporting and packing the US maize is $812 a tonne; cost of Malawian grown maize is $320 a tonne;
• farmers in the US are paid subsidies for growing corn amounting most years to $5-$10 billion and so produce huge surpluses
• last year, Eritrea declared that is was ending a culture of dangerous dependency and would no longer receive food aid
• in Malawi, Oxfam’s Mary Khozombah says, “People who want to help Malawi need to support agriculture by educating farmers and improving irrigation. We need empowerment so our farmers can export. Food aid, should be the last resort, in an emergency – and even then it should be bought locally if possible. In the long term it really kills our people.”
In brief

The Nyika-Vwaza Trust is holding a fascinating evening on 8 November from 6-8pm at the Royal Geographical Society, near the Albert Hall, Exhibition Rd entrance.
There will be a lecture by Professor Colin Baker By Water to the Warm Heart of Africa, ranging from Livingstone to the new proposal to re-open the Zambezi to navigation. Paintings by Malawian artists will be on sale and there will be ample opportunity for socializing. Tickets £15 from Harry Foot by e-mail: stowfoots@southdevon.org
Or tel. 01752 892 632. Or see the website www.nyika-vwaza-trust.org Doors open 6pm, lecture starts 6.45.

Water. The World Bank has approved $50m. for water development, 55% by grant, the rest by loan. The aim is to increase the recipients of clean water from 67% of the population to 79% by 2012. The cities will all benefit -Blantyre, Lilongwe. Mzuzu. Zomba – also the fastest-growing towns of Mangochi and Kasungu. It includes proper sanitation for Blantyre and Lilongwe.

President Bingu Mutharika has asked the clergy to lead the nation in prayer to end the constitutional crisis. “We are in the grip of the devil and all Malawians need to pray to God for this country. We should set aside our differences and consider the plight of the poor.”

The supreme court has upheld an extraordinary clause in the constitution, which forbids any MP to change party. President Bingu ended decades of corruption when he came to power with only a handful of MPs and has been facing an impossible situation since the High Court upheld this clause in June.

Médécins sans Frontières say that in Malawi, Mozambique and South Africa more than a million need antiretrovirals (ARVs) but cannot get them for shortage of trained staff.

“In Thyolo we are treating 7000 with HIV and need to increase this to 10,000 but we are hitting a wall. There are not enough nurses and medical assistants...Already in Thyolo one medical assistant can see 200 patients in a day, far too many for quality care.” Even near Cape Town, where there are far more medical services and staff than in rural African countries, the head of MSF’s pioneer ARV programme at Khayelitsha, said: “It feels as if we are losing the battle.”
Canon Rodney Hunter. Readers will remember reading in the February Nkhani of the death of Rodney Hunter last November at Nkhotakota. Readers may also have seen a headline in the London Times in April reading, Enemy of Liberal Anglicans was poisoned. The three substances named in the article were all medications Rodney was taking for cancer. Efforts continue to press for a definitive autopsy report from South Africa to ascertain whether or not these substances were present in lethal quantities.

In the meantime, please pray for Rodney’s cook, Leonard Mondomo, who has been in prison since November.

36 Young People Learn and Share. 16 young people from St Alban’s church in North Harrow have just returned from a two week working visit to Malawi. While there they worked under the guidance of Malawian craftsmen, doing maintenance work at St Luke’s Hospital and building pit latrines and enlarging the kitchen at the School for the Blind at Nkope.

At the same time, 20 students from Bishop Ramsey High School in Ruislip, Middlesex, spent ten days alongside students at Malosa Secondary School and helping with maintenance work. The six adults who accompanied these young people learned a great deal!

Exciting growth in the Diocese of Lake Malawi, where the number of schools have increased to 83 over the past few years. More on this in our next issue.

Editor: Donald Arden: