Sustainability vs. Hand-outs

A letter from Barbara Nagy serving in Malawi

November 2015

Dear friends,

As the celebration of Jesus’ birth draws near, may you have the gifts of joy and peace in your Advent and Christmas remembrances.

We have started the rainy season a whole month early at Nkhoma, which may be an answer to prayer in the face of the severe hunger people are facing, because it means the harvest will come a month early if the rains hold.  Please pray that the rains will continue, because another year without a good harvest would be far beyond catastrophic for people here.  The system for supporting people through this year’s severe hunger crisis is coming into place, including direct food aid donations through Presbyterian Disaster Assistance and others, and food has begun to be distributed.  However, we will need to continue direct food assistance throughout the next four to five months.

A local woman carrying her produce to market

As food is being distributed and in the course of our daily work, we are using every opportunity to advocate for sustainable techniques such as conservation agriculture, kitchen gardens, crop diversification, and community development to try to break the continuous cycle of famine and malnutrition.  This slow process of community development work is even more important than direct food relief, but usually it is not well supported financially since the programs are time-intensive and effects are harder to demonstrate.  Many donors seem to prefer quick fixes and pictures of movie stars holding malnourished babies instead of the time-consuming and less photogenic work of helping village people integrate into their lives systems that can help them move forward with their own development agendas.  Thank you for your continued commitment to this important ministry of addressing the root causes of poverty and working to eliminate them.

In January the Nkhoma Public Health Department will start teaching the ASSET process in two communities around Nkhoma Hospital, whereby village people are taught to look at what they have to offer collectively as a community, and how those assets can be used to address community problems that they identify.  ASSET is built on the basic values of primary health care and comprises five main aspects:

A   Appreciate local resources/assets/strengths of people at the community level.

S    Stimulate local responses through activating assets owned by communities.

S    Strengthen community-owned resources and responses.

E    Engage people in the process of improving the health of their communities.

T    Transform individuals, communities and societies towards quality life (shalom).

I have written previously about the successes of the ASSET project in a neighboring community, so I am excited to see what this program will do for communities in our area.  If successful, we will be able to expand the program to our entire catchment area within the next few years. Although the program focuses on mobilizing the resources already present in the communities, we also have some funds available to support participants in projects such as provision of clean water, construction of latrines, and support of community health workers, according to needs identified by the communities themselves. How I would love to write a letter several years from now complaining that the Nkhoma Hospital pediatrics ward is in need of patients, or that our local primary school has so many thriving students the secondary schools can’t accommodate them as they move up the educational ladder!

Joshua School Business Women!

Our local seminary has classes for spouses of future pastors, all women at this point, with backgrounds ranging from some college to no literacy and almost no schooling.  Recently graduated pastors generally serve in remote congregations with high levels of extreme poverty. The women were discussing how they would help a mother with dependent children coming to them for food assistance.  Suggestions ranged from advice about hygiene, feeding practices and health, to the obstacles the petitioner had to carrying out this advice.  No bucket for water, no soap, no money to spend for Malawi’s six food groups, no income, no resources, etc.  The instructor laid 1,000 Malawi kwacha (less than two dollars) on each group’s table and started a discussion about how they could help people with income-generating activities.  Everyone got busy with ideas of how the students could turn their 1,000 MK into income-generating activities, and several tiny businesses were born!  The first beneficiaries of these businesses will be the rooms in which these ladies meet, which are badly in need of painting and restoration, but the learning they will gain about microenterprise will hopefully enable many impoverished women to get a step up out of poverty.  Pastoral couples will be in a better position to understand the micro-loan projects that are available in many rural areas of Malawi and to support the ASSET process as it becomes active in their congregations.  Presbyterian Women’s groups in local congregations have been doing small income-generating projects for years, but they can be encouraged to act as champions as other members of their communities try to use the extremely limited funds they have to work together on individual and community problems.

As a hospital we continue to labor under restrictions imposed by the Malawi government’s financial crisis. Programs normally supported by government falter (family planning, HIV testing, prenatal care, malaria treatment), our neighboring government health facilities are collapsing for want of supplies, and the response of the government is to forbid those institutions to talk to newspaper reporters.  We have confirmed maternal deaths occurring in our community and have seen patients arriving at Nkhoma hospital very late, dying of treatable problems due to care delayed by financial obstacles. Please pray for us for wisdom to care for the very sick coming to the hospital while balancing the needs of preventive care and community outreach.  There are never enough resources to support critically needed work.

We deeply appreciate the financial support and your constant prayers that have enabled our family to continue to work at Nkhoma Hospital and in the surrounding communities. Thank you!  Please continue to support this ministry in the coming year.  Presbyterian World Mission is experiencing an important financial shortfall and your gifts can help us to continue placing mission workers with our ecumenical partners all over the world.

Melia, my oldest daughter, has finished Nuclear Power School as part of her Navy training and is waiting to start her final stage of training as a nuclear engineering technician. Anna has weathered her first semester of college in fine style (kayaking, tree surgery, newspaper layout and creative writing), and Happy and I are preserving the necessary density of American flapjack eaters and English speakers in the Nkhoma community.

Blessings and joy from all of us at Nkhoma, and may Christ, who gives us life, sustain you all in this coming year.

Barbara

The 2015 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 156