July 17: Malawi's culture

The Sentinel's Laura Brost joins 46 other volunteers from Central Florida who are spending 10 days in Malawi, Africa to help fight the AIDS pandemic. This is a blog post from her trip.

A few things I'm learning about the Malawi culture:

- It's a very formal and respectful culture -- everyone always looks their best, whatever that may be. They dress as a sign of respect for one another, not necessarily for themselves.

- They're very touch-oriented between female and female and male and male. Its normal to see two men or two women holding hands, for someone to hold your hand while they are speaking to you or for children to be touching and hugging us -- as they did today.

On the contrary, men and women are very separate -- you might be able to tell a man and women are married if they are standing only a foot apart from one another --because that's considered close. In groups, men usually sit separate from the women -- even our married couples that came with us here on the trip were instructed to not show signs of affection while here, as it would offend and be inappropriate.

- Dating is never talked about until the couple is actually engaged. Pregnancy is never even acknowledged (even at nine months) until the baby is actually born because Malawi has such a high infant mortality rate.

- To greet a person correctly, you shake hands, placing your left hand on the upper part of your own forearm at the same time, as a sign of being open with that person. "Muoli Buanji." Hello, how are you? Girls make a little curtsy and boys make a little head bow.

- In such a formal culture, bringing up HIV/AIS is a bit difficult. When pregnancy isn't even addressed until a baby is born, how do you talk about or encourage teenagers or even children to get tested for the virus? Especially when a lot of villages still believe you still only get the disease from being really promiscuous.

- Children of the Nations national staff as well as the Malawi government have worked to try to break those stereotypes and bring HIV into the light. Now that COTN has the ability to provide antiretroviral drugs to those who test positive, one of our group's main purposed of being here in Malawi is to convince these children and teens in this village to get tested. The main way will be through a big "celebration" on Saturday where we will have games, singing, educational talks and HIV testing.