Two years and two months is a long time to know that one of the core differences you made was inspiring just one person. Maybe not just inspiring, but the one person you sustainably inspired. Empowering them with inspiration that will actually last, or inspiration you think will last. As much as everyone says that making a difference for one person is a lot, it’s hard to truly feel and believe that. Mostly, I think because people need pats on the back, and if you have changed just one person it’s not easy for others to recognize that and to commend you. But that doesn’t mean that making that difference is less important than building bridges, tearooms, and women’s centers. Actions I have received a lot of pats on the back for. Along with these pats however, I have also felt a lot of doubt that I may have built these structures and bridges as structures of self-preservation. Desperately wanting my presence here to be continually felt and to survive, I have often felt there was not a lot of true need for some of these projects, making me anxious as I start to get ready to go home.
In all honesty, I still don’t know if I truly believe that changing one person makes a great enough difference. Then again maybe it’s the only real difference one can make. Everything in the world feels so currently urgent, most things feel as if they are very close to falling apart. Development projects face the same problem again and again of implementing projects that just cannot be sustained. But if one truly changes one person, that empowerment and inspiration is usually sustained much longer than any project. I don’t think Malawi was able to fully teach me that changing and inspiring one person makes a difference, but Malawi did teach me to love doing this, to love inspiring and working in hopes of that one individual change and that this will be enough.
I feel both honor and privilege of being part of inspiring just one person. Estnart Gondwe Muthali has been my Malawian mother, my drinking buddy, my guide, my collaborator, and my friend. I stand by the idea that pride is a crucial part of what an outsider can build and grow as an integral part of development. Individuals, communities, villages, districts, and countries, need to know pride in order for them to truly stand by their home, to love it, develop it, sustain it. Pride is something an outsider can help with as someone who can say ‘even though this isn’t my home, it is becoming a part of my wider home, as a place I see and feel as worthy, as a place I fully love.’ Estnart helped me get to this point, this point where I placed my pride in Malawi, in her, and helped her to recognize her own pride. Together we have built, planted, created, cooked, gathered, found, sung, talked, and lived out our different forms of pride, together working to better a community we both feel deserves so much more than what it has.
When I leave, I will in theory, not be replaced by another Peace Corps volunteer. Estnart will come live in my house. She will run the programming at the women’s center, manage the Rocket Tea Room, run her nursery school, and even tend to the garden at the back of my house, I continually fail to nurture. But what I am most hopeful for, is that Estnart will continue to be prideful of her community and this will fuel her not only to develop the area, to instigate change, but it will naturally spur others to take on pride. To build pride, that without workshops and training manuals, empowers all with an empowerment of true self-love and respect.
I am grateful to Malawi for letting me stay here, I am grateful to my village for loving me unconditionally. I am always grateful to all my family and friends who love and know me, and I am grateful, honored, and privilege to have been able to be a part of building such a crucial piece of pride.
