Kaisi

VILLAGE MZATI: Naomi Chibwe

“Those girls in school, I tell them my life story… I want them to go far. Maybe they will assist my own small kids one day.”

Naomi Chibwe’s story isn’t a particularly happy one. But she knows there are lessons in it for Kaisi’s next generation, so she continues to tell it.

Just two terms from finishing high school, Naomi was raped. When her baby was born, her parents hoped to marry her off quickly. But Naomi ignored their entreaties and the convention of the day. She went back school and got her diploma, a rare accomplishment for a girl in rural Malawi.

Twenty years later Naomi, now twice-widowed and a mother of five, is not bitter. Instead, she's dedicated herself to making sure girls growing up in Kaisi today have a fair shot at the kind of future she once coveted for herself.

“I go and tell the kids in the classroom: Nobody should laugh at these girls,” Naomi says. “Because this can happen to all of us whether we like it or not. Circumstances happen which make one have a child whether she likes to or not.”

As courageous as she is, Naomi knows she cannot level the playing field for Malawian girls all by herself. Programs like Join My Village that address the disproportionate pressure for girls to leave school will be invaluable.

“There are many problems that the girls have been facing. They are delayed to school, they take their parents responsibilities when the parents have passed away, they are being abused. There is also hunger and lack of school fees for girls. But now you are here I think it will get a little bit better.”

“In the past, if there was hunger, most villages would flock to this area to find food. We were self-sufficient. This village started doing better a long time ago.” – Fred Genesis Bokosi, group village headman, Kaisi

For decades, the proud fathers of Kaisi sought their fortunes outside of Malawi. Leaving families and fallow fields, they toiled for years in the gold and copper mines of Zimbabwe and Zambia. Compared to the promise of Malawi's ore-rich neighbors, Kaisi's ample fields seemed a stingy birthright.

Even the village's founder, who made his name as the first driver to Malawi's first president, invested much of his life in the economy of Zimbabwe.

But today, with food prices booming, the people of Kaisi have come to recognize the wealth beneath their feet.

“People used to go to Zimbabwe and then they came to see that the money they made here was better than in Zimbabwe,” said Fred. “Now we are fertilizing the soil. We take farming as a serious business in Kaisi.”

All of the effort the people of Kaisi once threw into the pursuit of foreign riches, they now pour into their own land. Five years ago, they pooled their money to hire a backhoe to build a dam for irrigation. Alongside the regional staples of tobacco, maize, cassava and groundnuts, farmers are growing tomatoes, onions and carrots to sell on market days. Following the example of farmers in Zimbabwe, the families of Kaisi have planted citrus and apple trees. No visitor can leave Kaisi without buckets of jumbo limes and tart tangerines.

Kaisi’s already vibrant market days are the perfect venue for a new crop of entrepreneurs supported by village savings and loan associations (VSLA) to flourish.

Kaisi mzati Naomi Chibwe has already hatched a plan to use a VSLA loan to import clothing from the capital Lilongwe to augment the already abundant stocks of fruit and vegetables at the Wednesday market.

All those possibilities get Fred thinking, with shining eyes, of his own legacy.

“When people are well-to-do in a village, honor goes to the chief.”