Zumani

VILLAGE MZATI: Agnes Ntenje

“I want to be highly educated. So that I'll become a teacher or the president of this country.”

The leap from teacher to president seems a small one in the world of Agnes, who is still in awe of “Madam teacher,” who taught her last year.

“We were listening to whatever she was saying. She was inspiring me. She is the one who made me want to be a teacher.”

The daughter of Zumani's charismatic headman, Agnes Ntenje could be something of a local princess. But the quiet, gangly girl with a mischievous twinkle in her eye has the same heavy load of chores as most girls in town: she sweeps the family compound, helps bathe her younger brothers, cooks, carries water from the well several miles away and helps in the fields. And Agnes and her little sister walk an hour and a half to school every day, just like other kids in Zumani.

It is Agnes' super-sized ambitions that really set her apart. And her persistence.

Agnes has repeated just about every grade. Some twice. At 14, she is still in fourth grade.

“She is too playful!” shouts her little sister, Angelina.

“I play on the days when there is no teacher,” Agnes murmurs, looking down at her hands.

There are three teachers to teach the 590 students in grades one through seven of Agnes' and Angelina's primary school. They simply don't have time to teach everything in the curriculum. More often than not, come exam time, Agnes fails. She dreads this. “It is painful because they give us what we did not learn.”

Asked how it would be if more female teachers came to teach in Zumani with the support of Join My Village, Agnes thinks for a moment about how she ought to put it.

“We will be better children. We will be admired. It can be a beautiful school... and we would be the happiest students.”

“In the past the government had built a fence to keep people from hunting animals in the forest but, in Zumani, they felt this was a prohibition and they kept hunting.” – David Ntenje, group village headman, Zumani

Some 60 kilometers along the dusty track that leads from the nearest paved road, the vista of yellow-dry rolling fields suddenly closes in and turns green. Gnarled acacia throng the road. You have finally arrived in Zumani.

In the aftermath of a drought-driven famine that killed thousands of Malawians in 2002, while other agricultural communities relied on luck, prayer and aid to avert further disaster, the people of Zumani took matters into their own hands. Three acres out of each villager's eight acre plot would be planted with trees to nourish Zumani's soil and counteract destruction of Malawi's forests.

“We wanted our children to know the natural forest,” says David. “The children who are born here will find these trees and call them by their names.”

It wasn't always like this. In the 1980s and '90s, elephants from a nearby national park trampled crops and poked their trunks through thatched roofs to devour the year's harvest. People struck back, poaching animals and stealing trees for kindling.

Since the famine all of that has changed. A sturdy new fence surrounds the area. People keep bees in the trees outside the park.

Now, in spite of its distance from paved roads and trading centers, Zumani is a coveted place to live. Many here share the feelings of Mercy Chifundo, a farmer who has shifted several times across hundreds of miles in search of a good place to raise her two boys. As secretary of the School Management Committee, Mercy has helped mold bricks and carry water and sand for the construction of a new school block.

Mercy for one, wants to spend the rest of her life in Zumani.

“I like this place very much,” Mercy said. “This is the place where I will die.”