Women’s Turn

To all of you
On behalf of all of us

Kundifunsila wekha
Kenako kumangondisiya ndekha
Then complain when my mouth runs a-muck
Tell me what the fuck
Did you think was going to happen?
Thinking you can appease me with a buck
“Ukuvuta chani?
Kukonda nkhani
Chilichonse ndima gula”
Mxxxi mudzikula
Do you seriously think we get off on all that nagging?
And if your answer is yes then examine what you are lacking
If we enjoy the nagging it’s because you don’t provide us with no good alternative
Wanting to spend more time with you is our motive
You said you’d be home by five
And I gave you two extra hours for you and your boys to get live
At 8 I become a nag because I’ve started calling
You don’t answer because you say you don’t want any quarrelling
12 O’clock and my man still is not home
He is not answering his phone
I am all alone
I am just supposed to know that he is alright
And when he comes stumbling in at 3 not put up a fight
After my unsolicited, unbeneficial sleepless night
I am just supposed to roll over
Bite my tongue, swallow my tears, and throw off the cover
Take it as part of my lot for being a woman
It’s all God’s plan

I Still Lost Him

Forgot to post this:

I still lost him
Worried so much about her that I didnt see when the next girl grooved him
The man wasn’t happy and I thought the solution was to get vexed
Not knowing I’d get rowdy with one while he jumped onto the next
Never once blaming my lack-lustre flex
Nor the boring sex
I just worried about who is paying his pention
And never noticed he needed some attention
Concentrated more on highlighting his faults than doing anything to please him
‘I am making him a better man,’ I said
So he found another to come to his aid
It’s ironic I thought the best way to get my way was to withhold it
When a man’s life lacks something, he will hunt for it
He wanted to stray
And he found a way
No matter how I tried to catch him out
No matter how many times I went through his phone or caused a bout
Who do I blame for that?
Did she wreck my life?
He presented her with a choice all she did was choose it
There was that one time I found another woman in his kitchen making him lunch
I fretted so much to the point that I learned how to make something other than punch
In the end I was grateful
Sometimes a little insecurity can cure a great fool
Like when I act confused about what I want
And someone else swoops in who has a ready mind,
He lied to both of us like a rat
But how can I blame her for that?
Would I really feel fulfilled if I gave her a smack?
I told her to leave him alone
And she sent him back home
But nothing in my house had changed so I still lost him
Anyway, I still lost him. – as inspired by Tanya Stephens

When I check the situation I see something wrong with it

Forgot to post this:

When I check the situation I see something wrong with it
Telling us to come back

And providing no jobs is like leading me to the slaughter

Knowing there are thousands of youth who cannot earn a buck

When the only opportunity I will get will be to wait for BenWandawanda every morning

Just so he can hook me up with an interview

None of us want to kakamila kwa eni

Working the kind of jobs we would not even dream of pa deni

When I check the situation there’s something wrong with it

A decade after college I am over qualified

And they bar me from taking the bar

While I was downing five pound pitchers

And posting bullshit pictures

On facebook to bullshit how awesome my life is

They were busy making up bullshit laws to get me back for making it to Cambridge while they made do with learning ’24 reasons to strike, choose 1′ ku Chanco

They say I am not patriotic because I have not been back in twenty years

And yet I am expected to pay fees for all four of each of my four sisters’ kids

When I visit, my old friends invite me out and I foot not only their bill but that of the forty friends they have brought along kudzadyanawo ma dolla kapena ma pounds

I am supposed to play the role of big man ‘n’ boss

That I’ve created for myself

With all those pictures of the chrysler I bought on credit

When I check the situation there’s something wrong with it

I see them giving the woman safe motherhood to bring another youth into the world to kill him with unemployment

I see with all the highways he built he never thought to build a little way for the youth to earn a buck

I see free education means wa form two teaching me MSCE modules

Poor teaching means 11% pass rate

And the biggerheads’ disappointment in ‘the youth of today’ makes headline news

While they secretly breathe sighs of relief because university can only take 7%

When I check the situation I see something wrong with it

 

Never his

Tracy Chapman said, “Say I’ve known some, less than I should; say I’ve known some, too well for my own good. Say I’m a saint of mercy; say I’m a whore. I’ve been a lot of things, but never yours.” The lengths that we will go to to be his. We won’t put out on the first night in case he thinks we are easy; We put out on the first night to show we are fun and not wachimidzi. In the end, he thinks what he will and we are still not his. Tracy Chapman said, “I wear my Mama’s dress; her finest clothes…I laugh at all your jokes, but you just look bored. I’ve been a lot of things but never yours. So you say you won; it was a bet. A game of pool or cards, I repay my family’s debt. I let you lie beside me with no remorse. I’ve been a lot of things, but never yours.” The lengths that we go to to be his. We change our skin colour to fair; We put up with the most uncomfortable wear. We exaggerate his image to make him feel like a man; We rearrange our thinking, compromise our values…our family name…our plan. We do a lot of things. In the end, we are still not his. Tracy Chapman said, “You never cross my mind, you can be sure. You’ll never catch my eye waiting for you watching the front door.” We deny our feelings, hide under a cloak of pretence Talk foolishness, talk sense. In the end. Never his.

Hope is in the Youth

*peaceproject.com please don’t sue me for using this image*

I, too, am persuaded that our only hope (where that combination of four letters is the embodiment of corruption not being the order of the day, of a lack of complacency in our attitude, of a lack of laxity in the delivery of services, of…development) is in the youth, and most likely not even my generation; our fathers and mothers have already failed us beyond redemption. They have instilled in us that fatal worship of acquisitive success that gives Tay Grin five thousand followers and Lawi only five because one has a benz and the other is struggling to meet ends.
But we do have something over our parents; and that is witnessing the ruin of corruption: to both the exploiter and exploitee. We have seen Presidents gain billions at the expense of a fuel drained economy only to lose their lives, we have seen brilliant doctors abandon already constrained hospitals in search of personal glory, only to become glorified puppets, we have seen the media obscure truths, musicians turn into mouthpieces of propaganda. And we have seen them rise; and we have seen them fall. And this has led us to inherited a bullshit economy.
Perhaps it’s too late for my generation not to covet the Malawian dream of a Range Rover and an over ambitious house in Area 44. So since only less than one percent of the nation can really afford that on an honest salary we will continue pilfering where we can, the bank teller will continue to bemoan the shitty services of our shitty free hospitals while the nurse bemoans the shitty customer service of the shitty over charging banks, and I’ll pay off that traffic officer with MK1000 for that MK5000 speeding ticket because it does not tally with my salary, and I will console myself with the fact that either way it would have ended up in someone’s pocket whether at the spot check or at the Ministry of Finance. Then I will get on my high chair, log onto facebook, My Malawi-My views, and bemoan corrupt politicians and their corrupt attitudes.
But like a prostitute selling every night just so her daughter doesn’t have to go through the same thing, let’s teach our children differently. Let’s teach them a fuller kind of success: love of achievements over lusting after acquisitions.

Conversations with A Little Figment of My Imagination

A Little Figment of My Imagination: What are you on about in  your (facebook) status?

Having man problems

Me: What Status? What does it say?

A Little Figment of My Imagination: Something about employees stealing and men.

Me: (Remembers status in question: On Men: My father told me that if something bad always seems to be happening with an employee-something often goes missing under their watch/ gets broken, etc., – then, either that employee is doing that something bad, or they have bad luck; either way, it’s not good enough, he said. I should act decisively and not worry me pretty head about it. I find this applies precisely also with men.)

Something like that. Nothing to worry your handsome head about.

A Little Figment of My Imagination: You worried about it enough to put it into the ether.

When actions and words are in direct conflict, it is the action that is truer.

Me: If I worry about it enough to call it a worry, the last place I would put it is the ether.

Are you saying actions speak louder than words?

A Little Figment of My Imagination: I think so.  Talking is too easy. To do takes more effort.

Me: That might be so but let’s remember that he who speaks the loudest is not necessarily the truest.

A Little Figment of My Imagination: In fact might be the most false.

Me: Exactly; so action being louder does not make it truest.

A Little Figment of My Imagination: Don’t you think you are getting a little too literal? Louder does not mean louder in this case.

Me: Oh? Does louder mean ‘softer’ in this case? One of those ‘less is more’ deals?

A Little Figment of My Imagination: No, it means you are being cheeky; to what end, I don’t know.

Me: I am just saying I mean what I say about internet and my private life.

A Little Figment of My Imagination: Either way, nothing happens outside of the cause and effect chain.

Me: Of course not. And experience forming cause is not always direct; it may also be vicarious.

A Little Figment of My Imagination: Either way.

Me: Either way.

Just Eat A Banana

 

“I say u cant just plan to have oral sex.

Oral sex is a bit eeeeew. You know there is throatal gonorrhea out there,

and do u plan to have it with rubber?

Do u know that even if he is the one giving u head he can infect u with something???

Say he has bleeding gums or something. No ..oral sex is huge…

bigger than plain ol’ sex.

‘Cause even if you have plain sex, if you wait until you r properly wet chances of catching something are low.

lower*

Mm mmm sex should not be played around with.

No, Sir.

End of. “

I have been advised to just “eat a banana.”

Inspirations From Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein said, ‘The destiny of civilized humanity depends more than ever on the moral forces it is capable of generating.’
It is not my belief, as past generations like to posit, that there has been moral decay over the years, culminating in ‘the youth of today’; rather, I believe that not as much has been expended on moral progression as on technological advancement, and thus we find ourselves too immature to handle that which is meant to ease life. Cellphones are a big one. Whereas, it is universally known and understood that a child must not play with a knife, and it is accepted that using a knife to assist one in the kitchen is good, but using it to kill another (all things being equal) is bad, technological advancement has not brought with it a manual on the moral use of cellphones versus the wrong, so we find, in some cultures it is alright to take a call in the presence of company; and in different households of the same culture others are allowed to browse their facebooks via their smartphones at the dinner table; still, others find it appalling to give more attention to their Blackberries than a person they are hanging out with in the flesh, until they go to Chameleon and find all five of their friends who are sitting at the table are only giving a token of their attention to real time before bowing their heads down again to the Holy Grail in their hands. To which, any sane, integrity-keeping human responds in kind and takes out their daft phone to scroll up and down their phonebook, reread ten times, the ten text messages their under-par brick which used to pass for a phone 5 years ago, is able to store, before accepting that they are being daft and need to get a phone as smart as the times  since ‘hanging out aint hanging out’ until you can accessorise your conversation with squeals of what so ‘n’ so statused on facebook, talk about what’s trending on twitter, take a minute to answer that-guy-you-never-have-anything-to-talk-to-about-in-person’s all important ‘hi’, or all of the above.  
It would seem where advances in telecommunications, internet, social networks, are supposed to bring the human race closer and make the world one big giant community, they have only torn us further apart, isolated us from our neighbour, stripped us of face to face social etiquette, and made us slaves of the very things that are supposed to make our lives easier and happy.

Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it too?

So on Friday, I got the shocker of my life. “Ukumela ndevu ngati ine?” said a friend whom I had gone to visit over their lunch break at work. Now, it’s not that I didn’t know I have developed smatterings of very pronounced hair on my chin; no. It’s that I had fallen into the trap that only ensnares rich men and politicians- of which I am neither, as evidenced below, but we shall analyse whence I came to fall into this trap another day.

(Actually, this photo is not evidence at all; I just really dig it and have been looking for a non-presumptuous way of sharing it with the world)

I digress. The constant companion of my working hours has always obliged me with a, “what beard are you talking about? I can’t even see anything,” to the point that I have been compelled to disregard the joint testimony of my eyes and fingertips which both attest to the existence of un-womanly (so there is ‘unmanly’ in the English language but not ‘unwomanly’) happenings on my jaw and to embrace the witness of a third party. So my friend’s statement gave me a very coarse and harsh jolt out of delusion land * BUT* the new age mantra is all about taking it like a champ; playing the cards you are dealt; blah blah SO it’s either I choose to rock the beard or get rid of the beard.
               **Alert** I am just messing; the first option is not really an option; please do   

                not rock beards; ‘Women! Please do not rock beards!’

So, I have seen some others of my friends in the same predicament plucking their beards; me? I don’t go down like that. I am not about the ‘treating the symptoms and not curing the disease’ philosophies. I ‘hit the snake on the head’; ‘go straight to the root of the problem’. So the problem is…LACK OF ESTROGEN vis a vis TOO MUCH TESTOSTERONE, and if I go deeper (sound effects: go deepppeeeer) we will see that this is because of this ‘independent woman’ bullshit: I am doing too much for myself, by myself, so because psychologically, I have taken on the role of the man in my life, my physical self has gotten the memo and is following suit- Lawrd knows I know it ain’t genetic: My mama didn’t even have a shadow of a ‘stache, and my two sisters’ faces testify to that. Anyway, since marriage does not seem to be around any corner, I think its best I become someone’s mistress: a kept woman, with all my material and financial obligations catered to, while still leaving me to my independence sans beard. Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it too?

Please Disregard If I have Not Referred You To This Post Specifically

You are probably still reading but I would like to reassure you that this post is no tree of knowledge. It’s posted here simply because I would like to insert pictures into my narrative, and, either I am not email-savvy enough, or yahoo! does not allow photo insertions into text, so again, disregard this one, and I’ll hit you with a little something on Sunday.

To Whom It May Concern:
2007, my mother died and I moved back to Malawi to live with my Dad.

 -the last photo I took with my mum

Exactly 11months and 2 weeks later, my father died from injuries sustained in a car accident.

 -last photo I took with my Dad

Before he died, he was admitted in Kamuzu Central Hospital’s ICU for 3 days. I was his guardian. This allowed me front row view of the various strengths and weaknesses of this particular healthcare department.

After my father’s death, I left the country for a year, but when I came back I could not help but be drawn to KCH’s ICU. I ended up doing a mini-research focusing on the shortcomings of the ICU and providing options of solutions. In 2010, I submitted my findings to the OPC who were very responsive; I talked to then Min. of Finance Hon. Ken Kandodo about the findings, chiefly that there was lack of government initiative in  buying equipment for ICUs across the nation- he was appalled and allocated MK250Million to the Min. of Health, specifically for the buying of hospital equipment.

Then the OPC told me that government would do all it can to improve the situation, however, they said the reality was that they could not do it alone…I talked to some friends about collating our efforts to lobby the private sector to channel CSR funds to this particular healthcare need; there was overwhelming response and a sizeable group was formed, representatives of which went to MoH to establish a Memorandum of Understanding regarding our fund-raising and their commitment to the development of ICUs and High Dependency Care Units across the nation.

MoH was not aware of our group; was not aware of our talks with the OPC nor with the Finance minister; and was weary of do-gooders who come with a lot of aplomb but forsake them once they realise the level of commitment required to bring about any fruits.
The press started calling me saying they heard I did a research which had some suggestions for the improvement of our healthcare system but that MoH was not taking it on board; I alerted MoH about the pressure I was getting, however, they were still reluctant to work with us. As the months wore on, our group started disintegrating until, finally, by January 2013, there were just five us. In the meantime, Malawi saw a President die via circumstances that needed urgent and critical care; a commission of inquiry instituted by the current President pointed to the inadequacy of KCH’s ICU, and suggested developing it. The media was all over this story pointing to the fact that there was a group which had made this suggestion and yet was not taken up. MoH accused us of being all talk no action, we accused them of complacency; in the end, the Daily times got an article dubbed “Blame game dogs ICU” out of it…but we still did not have a thistle of development at any of our ICUs. The article was the impetus for MoH and our group to begin talks again, and they found that during the year of silence between us and them, we had not given up but were establishing ourselves as a trust, independently from MoH. I suppose the fact that we had been financing the cause for 3 years gave them a clue about our commitment to seeing it’s fruition. Immediately, they took us on board and gave us the mandate to design, lobby for funding for, and oversee the construction of, an expanded ICU at KCH. We realised we need to formalise taking this new mandate, and working hand in hand with MoH into account. We became icare.
That’s where we are now. June 8th 2013 saw the launch, which was also used as a podium to raise funds for the immediate needs of KCHs ICU, namely medication, bandages etc. We also wanted to honour KCH ICU/HDU staff (31 of them) and each was given a goodie bag.

– KCH representatives accompanied by MoH architect, receiving a meagre token of our appreciation for all that they do.

– Tokens of appreciation pictured on a banner carrying all the sponsors’ logos.

The launch was a great success; why? Because many connections were made with various corporations regarding long term partnerships doing this work; The fundraiser was a miserable failure; why? Because icare overestimated its own clout and was able to bring 130 people, and not 1000, to the dinner, thus only a drop in the ocean was made towards the MK15Million that we had promised KCH for their immediate needs.           

What now? Our priority is to finalise registering icare as a legal entity- a charitable trust; at the same time, we are following up on leads made at the launch.