WORK HURTS!

You have good days and you have bad days as a Volunteer that is just the reality of the work. I have been in my village for three months now and the good and the bad go hand in hand. I have been trying to write more.
I wrote this after walking home frustrated. I waited all day for my group to show up to a meeting I had scheduled, but no one showed. Walking home I met with a few of the women in the group. They were the ones who were frustrated, that I didn’t provide enough money for our jam making project.

***No call, no show! It’s so hard to find good workers. If you want to find a job and keep your job, half the responsibility is showing up. I find myself scratching my head over this same phenomenon here in a rural village. Is it culture or an individual’s drive to accomplish that task which cannot be achieved without sweat? Work hurts! It challenges the mind and it hurts the back. I feel overwhelmed with a sense of pride, that I was raised not to fear work. The pride that I take in my work allows me to achieve the unattainable. In addition to empowering men and women in my village, I hope to leave this place a spirit of self directed work. Empowerment by no means will make people rich, but it could very well improve their daily subsistence, which proves to be a day to day struggle to survive. Are people lazy, uneducated, or educated into habitual laziness? I constantly debate this idea.
“Here in Malawi, we are poor, that’s our problem”
- A continued response when surveying village problems.
A lazy man observes the problem, and the successful man solves the problem. This is true in the states and even here in Malawi. Americans seem to be successful at the development of conveniences, but in times of economic or social hardship the ones who thrive are those who show up to work on time with the solutions to the problem. Poverty in developing nations might be political but the problem is not cultural. To help alleviate the pressures of poverty, the efforts should be redirected to the successful empowerment of the entrepreneurial work ethic within each individual.