A Rambling on Social Change

My good friend Sarah Stance is doing her Master's degree at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, and recently asked me to give her my perspective on Social Change as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi. As it turned out I ended up talking mostly about my friend Benidicto Gondwe who I have pegged as a "posative social deviant". So I thought I'd share what I wrote to her, because it shows the cream of the crop of the people I work with in Mwazisi. People like Benidicto are the ones that make me feel so lucky to be doing what I'm doing.

In my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi social change needs positive social deviants to initiate the shift in thought. Somebody who is willing to break away from the crowd and try something different. I would summarize most change that I have seen as follows: it starts with an original positive social deviant or even a group of social deviants who first question the way everybody around them is doing things or sees the world. After realizing that something needs to change, the social deviant starts putting a better way into practice for themselves. Sometimes doing things different can cause a person to be isolated from their peers, but if they stick to their idea they start setting an example for the people who have ridiculed them. The change really starts to happen when people see the success of the original deviants and start adopting the new idea. The more examples start to crop up the more people see the benefit of the change and adopt it and the idea snowballs from there. Eventually the change becomes the norm and anybody who does things the old way is the social deviant.

As Peace Corps volunteers our job is essentially to become just another member of the community and try to be that positive social deviant. Unfortunately that isn’t as realistic as I hoped because no matter how long I am here, and how hard I try, I will never be just another member of the community in this rural Malawian village. To think that eventually I will blend in and be seen as something different then the Azungu would be just deluding myself. I will always be different and I can deal with that. The problem is that I can’t be a positive social deviant when I am coming in as a very strange outsider. Anything that I do that is out of the ordinary is simply dismissed as the madness of the crazy Azungu by most people.

It takes the communities own innovators who are willing to give new ideas I try to initiate a try to initiate the real change, often times adding their own ingenuity to improve on it. My friend Benidicto Gondwe is a great example of one of those necessary social deviants. With out Benidicto I don’t think I could have been effective in initiating any new ideas here

I can’t say that in my two years I have seen any significant change in the communities behavior or way of thinking towards environmental issues, which is what I am here to work on. But I have seen small shifts in a variety of aspects of life in the village, from the way people garden to where they try to earn their money from. I hope that these small shifts in daily life add up to be an overall change in mentality towards the local environment down the road.

One specific example of a small shift is beekeeping. From the very beginning of my service I have been trying to encourage as many people as possible to take up beekeeping. It’s a very profitable business for the community and it’s a fantastic way to protect the existing trees that the hives are hung from. I encourage Kenyan Top bar hives made from timber planks instead of the local hives which are made from a hollowed out tree trunk. The plank hives are far less destructive to produce, and they are a far more efficient way to manage the bees.

Most people say they would prefer to have the plank hives but they are too expensive. So I tried to present ways to make the same hive less expensive. I used a design from the Nkhata Bay Small Beekeepers Research and Development Association to build a top bar hive that had split bamboo on the sides instead of planks, then I plastered over the spaces with mud. This design used less than a quarter of the amount of planks needed for regular plank hives, but the hive was far too heavy to carry up the mountains to hang. Benidicto still saw the merit in the design of the hive, and used the same design to make a hive that was plastered with paper-mache made from soaked waste papers mixed with cassava flour as a glue. His hive was much lighter, and once dry less susceptible to cracking. The community really took to his design and lots of people helped in constructing many more that have all since been sold or hung. But it first took Benidicto’s openness to try a different idea that everybody was closed to for him to bridge the gap and make my idea useful for a larger group of people.

Another example of gradual changing mentalities is mulching a garden during the dry months in order to hold in the grounds moisture. The year before I started my river valley garden I noticed that absolutely nobody put mulch on their garden. The next year when the farmers in the gardens next to mine saw me mulching my vegetables, they said “you will invite termites and other insects that will attack your vegetables.” Of course the opposite was true, mulching kept the ground around my vegetables constantly moist, and therefore made for strong resistant crops. While the others had problems with pests, because their vegetables quickly dried out and were unhealthy. Again my friend Benidicto was one of the first people to take up the idea. He chopped up Sugar Cane waste grasses and put them all around the base of his tomato plants. He bragged that one heavy watering once a week was enough to keep his tomatoes watered for the whole week.

Benidicto is a great example o a positive social deviant , he is constantly looking for new and better ways of doing things. In addition to the previous examples I can say that he was the first person in Mwazisi to start using a treadle pump, to plant sunflowers in the rainy season, to start growing climbing vines on his house to make it cooler in the hot months, and many other things.

I’ve seen him laughed at and made fun of for being different pleanty of time but he always smiles, shrugs his shoulders and says “We shall see.” Often times people see that he was right, and that’s when they start making changes. It takes somebody like Benidicto to first be willing to be different and try something that might not work to pave the way for change. I may not be the great social innovator that I hoped to be when I first joined Peace Corps, but I am happy to keep feeding ideas to Benidicto and see where he can run with them, without him and people like him I can’t imagine how ideas would evolve in Mwazisi.