Peace Corps News

Spotlight on Peace Corps Malawi

RPCV Janet Littlefield has built an orphanage in in the village of Chigamba to shelter, feed, and give medical care to homelss children
Janet Littlefield first went to Malawi as a Peace Corps volunteer after she graduated from Skidmore College in 1998. She was assigned to teach in the Ntaja region in the small, landlocked African nation tucked between Tanzania, Mozambique and Zambia. While there, she funded the education of an orphan almost her age name Shaibu Kaliati, who today is the director of the Little Field Home, named by the staff in honor of its founder. Littlefield sends the money, Kaliati oversees the orphanage. Littlefield guesses so far the investment into the orphanage has totaled $15,000.

The orphanage is impacting more than just children in Malawi. This summer, Janet Littlefield brought four teenagers from the academy with her to Chigamba for a month-long trip that affected the students and fortified her mission. "It changed their lives going there; they think differently," Littlefield said about the students. During the recent trip to Chigamba, the four Hebron Academy students slept on the cement floor of the home along with the children, living without electricity or running water. They taught seminars on nutrition, AIDs, goat husbandry and health. The group was met with singing by the villagers.

Littlefield, a science teacher originally from Union, started the home in 2003 with money she donated from her teaching salary and from fundraisers. Since then, the orphanage has grown from 20 children to 56. They are cared for by a staff of 14 teachers and workers. An international AIDs charity called Avert reported that in 2005 more than half a million children in Malawi had been orphaned by AIDs. By 2003, roughly 14 percent of the country's adult population had been infected with HIV, according to data from the United Nations Development Programme.  Read more.

Greg Dorr describes Peace Corps stay in Malawi at Camden Public Library
Dorr said that the sheer joy of the work he does is that there is no schedule or itinerary. “I get up in the morning and am free to do whatever I want that day. It makes you extremely motivated. More than that is almost too complicated to describe, but remember it does take some time to boil water for tea first thing in the morning and, without electricity, night comes early (6 p.m.), so you’re limited to what you might want to read or write by kerosene lantern. I’m greatly enjoying writing letters with my Cross fountain pen.”

“From my village to the nearest town of any size is a 20-mile ride in the back of a pickup truck. I’ve counted 47 people in the back of that truck with me. I was holding on to the rollbar with only one foot inside the truck body, as were the two people in front of me and the two behind me. I’ve never traveled on the paved road from Mzuzu to Lilongwe (the capital city) without passing a couple of overturned vehicles. Every vehicle is loaded with passengers. It feels like just a matter of time before you’re going to end up in the ditch,” he said.

The Tumbuka are a handsome, proud, friendly, gracious, engaging people, he said. “Greeting is nearly mandatory, so we foreigners refer to a Malawi traffic jam as the delay you experience where ever you go in having to exchange greetings, handshakes etc with everyone you meet,” Dorr noted. “I’ll often go for a walk with my violin, that way I can play music and not have to be speaking all the time to all the people I meet, and they enjoy the Irish jigs and reels immensely,” he said. He said he is unaware of any melody instruments in the community, outside of his violin, but drumming is everywhere. “Groups of boys seem to be either drumming or playing soccer. And singing is ubiquitous. People walk the path past my house on their way to their gardens singing. At night groups of people gather and sing and dance to the most exotic drumbeats. The absence of electricity seems to contribute to community cohesion. You don’t have people sitting in their individual houses starring at a small lit screen, not speaking to each other.”  Read more.

Speech by President Bakili Muluzi of Malawi: American Peace Corps Are Best Friends Indeed
Let me begin by extending to you all a very warm welcome to the residence as we celebrate 40 years of Peace Corps volunteerism in Malawi. This is a great day to you as well as to us Malawians because it marks the spirit of sharing and solidarity that the United States of America and Malawi have enjoyed together through Peace Corps Volunteers over the years. It is indeed now 40 years since the first group of Peace Corps Volunteers came to Malawi as part of President John Kennedy's commitment to nation building in developing countries in 1963.

I invited you to come here today for me and the entire Malawians society to experience the joy in solidarity with you that 40 years have passed since the first group of Peace Corps Volunteers came to Malawi. Today I want to congratulate you all and express the gratitude of the government of Malawi and my own, for entering into relations of friendship with us for the good of our two countries.

I congratulate you because it is always the young people with the spirit of self-help and discipline, concern for others and their aspiration who pioneer to a new era. It is the young people who are the engine for reform, whether it is Nicole Nelson teaching at Chikangawa Community Day Secondary School in Mzimba or Emily Petersen working at Tulonkhondo Health Centre in Mwanza. I cannot therefore underestimate the remarkable contributions Peace Corps Volunteers have made in Malawi during the past 40 years.

Moreover, it is my ardent desire that the Peace Corps Volunteers should expand their programmes of activities to include teacher training, agriculture and vocational training. These are very pertinent areas for this country to achieve sustainable development. I am aware that this would require an increase in the financial resources usually made available to the Peace Corps development assistance programme. Certainly, Ambassador Meece will look into his request with the necessary authorities in Washington.

I am also aware that as Peace Corps you live under difficult conditions in the rural areas and that your wages are small but you do worthwhile work. I thank you most sincerely for all the sacrifice and efforts of walking together with Malawians and placing your individual skills and talents at their service to shape a better Malawi.

Let this be a day of celebration as well as a day to reaffirm our commitment to work hand in hand in the development of Malawi, and strengthen the good will and mutual understanding existing between the citizens of our two governments. Read more.

Read more about Peace Corps Malawi.

Two Senegal RPCVs fight AIDS

In "The After-Death Room" Senegal RPCV Michael McColly catalogs his trips through Asia, Africa, and the United States as he attempts to get a grip on the global AIDS crisis
There are a lot of emotional and intellectual benefits to working as a journalist and activist: See the world, bring the news, have a hand in improving people's lives. But as Michael McColly well knows, more tangible perks are harder to come by. In The After-Death Room: Journey Into Spiritual Activism, he catalogs his trips through Asia, Africa, and the United States as he attempts to get a grip on the global AIDS crisis. It's a powerful, panoramic glimpse into the religious aspects of AIDS activism, the reality of the problem among poor sex workers, and the various bureaucratic bottlenecks that hamper better treatment.

A native of Marion, Ind., McColly moved to Chicago in 1980 to pursue an acting career, followed by stints in the Peace Corps, the University of Chicago Divinity School and the University of Washington, where he earned a degree in creative writing. In 1996 he was diagnosed as HIV-positive, which inspired him to become more closely involved in studying the AIDS crisis. Much of The After-Death Room paints an alarming portrait of the epidemic: The president of South Africa standing at a 2000 conference denying that HIV causes AIDS; doctors in India who refuse to treat AIDS patients; the difficulty of getting medicine in Vietnam (in 2001 he was told that exactly seven people in the country had access to HIV combination-drug therapy).

Chicago, the subject of one chapter in the book, has its own concerns. McColly interviews local activists, social workers, and doctors at Cook County Jail, which takes in an estimated 4,000 HIV- positive people every year. Public-health programs are overwhelmed and better health care for criminals tops no politician's legislative agenda, but McColly argues that such willful ignorance only perpetuates the problem. "We can't give them anything but the very basic health care," he says. "But the fact is, these people go back into their communities. They go back and they have sex . . . I know that you don't want to give them much health care, but these people affect others."

Fixing the problem, McColly says, requires a host of changes: stronger international public-health initiatives, more financial cooperation from pharmaceutical companies, and more work to remove the stigma of HIV from communities. And in The After-Death Room, he also writes at length about the small but substantial role that his yoga training has played in his own treatment, and some of the most intriguing passages in the book follow him passing that knowledge on to others. Read more.

Senegal RPCV Jennifer Astone devotes herself to the “AIDS orphans” of sub-Saharan Africa as Director of the Firelight Foundation
Jennifer Astone earned an undergraduate degree in political science from Barnard College, then joined the Peace Corps and was sent to a village in Senegal because she spoke French. “It was a real eye opener.” There was no plumbing, the adults were illiterate. The market was an eight-mile walk away. “It was a very humbling experience, and very exciting,” she said. She worked to identify the needs of the village and get funding for projects, helping villagers make a living through local crafts including furniture making. Her French, as it turned out, did not help her. “No one in my village spoke French,” she said.

She earned a doctorate in anthropology from Binghamton University in New York, where she continued to study the African continent and the causes of its poverty. In her studies, she was exposed to the views of anthropologists who stressed that people seeking to help underdeveloped parts of the world should set aside their preconceptions about how to “help,” and instead ask the local folks to identify their needs. She performed field work in three African villages. She studied archival economic information including records from tax collectors. She interviewed elders. She developed a greater understanding of Africa’s complex issues, learning how colonialism, labor migration and World War II contributed to the continent’s poverty. She deepened her understanding of the world as a “smaller,” interconnected place, studying how Africans helped ease the Allies’ rubber shortages during World War II, and how they helped fight the Axis on the Belgian front.

Jennifer Astone became a program officer for the Global Fund for Women, working in the area of women’s human rights. She became more involved in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and met Kerry Olson, founder and president of the then-recently-launched Firelight Foundation. In 2000, he asked her to join the foundation’s advisory board, which she did. In April 2001, she became the foundation’s first director. “Since then I’ve had quite the ride,” she said. The donor list continued to grow, and after three years of support mostly from individuals, entities such as the Johnson & Johnson Foundation and the Elton John AIDS Foundation came on board. “Our work resonates with the donors,” she said. Read more.

Read more about the Peace Corps and AIDS.

Peace Corps volunteers in Namibia are producing a CD called "NamibiAlive!" that will raise awareness about Namibia's AIDS crisis inside the country itself

Peace Corps volunteers in Namibia are producing a CD called "NamibiAlive!" that will raise awareness about Namibia's AIDS crisis inside the country itself
PCV Amy Taylor and other volunteers are working with Namibian recording artists to create the CD, which will be distributed free to 5,000 combis, mini-buses that transport Namibians from town to town, in December. In her nearly two years spent in a Namibian homestead, Taylor said she's formed a bond with the people that compelled her to do whatever she could to help. Taylor teaches English classes in Namibia in which she incorporates AIDS education into the curriculum, and she's organized an HIV/AIDS awareness volleyball tournament, HIV/AIDS testing and peer training for students, an AIDS awareness week and World AIDS Day activities and events.

"'NamibiAlive! is important to me because the people of Namibia are important to me," Taylor said in an e-mail message. "I live with around 20 babies and children on the homestead. They call me Meme (mom) and I adore them. The women in the village all care for me like I was their child. "It hurts to know that, statistically, if something drastic doesn't happen to change the course of AIDS, these people that I love so much will not live past 45."

"The musicians are great," said Taylor. "We were already on the same page. Many of them had already released HIV/AIDS-related songs or been involved in AIDS awareness efforts. Everybody in Namibia, myself included, is desperate to do something to curtail the epidemic. You just can't imagine what it's like to wake up to a funeral gun (people in the villages shoot off guns to alert their neighbors of a death in the house), and know that someone close to you has fallen victim to HIV/AIDS. There are funerals all the time."

The CD was released on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day. And after her service time with the Peace Corps is done Dec. 15, Amy says she'll stay in Africa until mid-March, touring the continent with friends.

Visit their web site for more information on "NamibiAlive!"

Learn more about Peace Corps Namibia.