The people of Embangweni, Malawi, start every day with a prayer.
All across the African village, people gather at church or school between 7 and 7:30 a.m. for a time of singing and prayer.
“Their No. 1 dependency is on God,” says Cary Roberts, who has been visiting Malawi with two local churches since 2003.
“Malawi is called ‘the warm heart of Africa,’” she adds. “The Malawian people are the most joyful people we have ever met.”
Roberts is scheduled to talk about her experiences there at 10:30 a.m. Thursday in the Forest Library Meeting Room. It will be part of the Lynchburg branch of the American Association of University Women’s (AAUW) January meeting.
Malawi, a landlocked country in Southeastern Africa, is bordered by Zambia, Mozambique and Tanzania. It became a fully independent member of the British Commonwealth in 1964 and a republic in 1966.
One of the country’s first significant Western contacts came in the 1850s with the arrival of explorer and Scottish Presbyterian medical missionary, David Livingstone.
It was through the mission work of some latter day travelers from Lynchburg, Dr. Harold and Barbara Riley, that Roberts and her husband, Robert Roberts, first heard about Malawi.
“Both of us had always felt it would be an opportunity and a challenge to serve somewhere,” Cary Roberts says. “And we had heard such good things about what (the Rileys) were doing. We have really felt it was a calling.”
The Rileys organized a more formal trip to Embangweni, Malawi, for members of their church, First Presbyterian, in 2003. The Robertses, members of Westminster Presbyterian Church, went as well.
During that trip, Harold Riley says they were told about a village called Kalikumbi, about 20 miles from Embangweni, which needed a lot of help.
Since then, they’ve done a lot of work in Kalikumbi, including building a manse for the village’s pastor, renovating schoolteachers’ houses and beginning construction on a new church, a project that is still in progress.
The Robertses have also begun reaching out to other villages. Most recently, they worked with a nearby village’s students to build 80 new desks for their classrooms.
“Don’t let her be humble about what she’s done there,” Riley says. “(She and Robert) have been extremely helpful to lots of people, aside from what our group’s projects have been.”
During the mission trips, they all stay at Embangweni’s Loudon Presbyterian Station, which is home to a hospital, a primary school, a secondary school and a school for the hearing impaired.
There’s also a mobile health clinic. During mission trips, Roberts says one person from their group goes out with the mobile health clinic every day to give out food, provide TB shots and test for AIDS, among other things.
During her first trip there in 2003, Roberts - a retired English professor from Georgia’s Kennesaw State University - taught English at a secondary school. In recent years, she’s become more active in reaching out to the different villages to find out what they need.
“The primary reason we go over there is to convey a Christian brotherhood that we care enough about them to come,” she says.
Once they find out each village’s needs, they set different projects into motion to address those needs.
The cornerstone of their work, however, is that they don’t do anything for the Malawians. They do it all together.
“I think that is the single most important thing we can do: do things with them,” she says. “It’s not our project. It’s their project.”
Roberts says the cultural attitude in Malawi is that educated people should not have to do physical labor, so their group had to teach a lot of the villagers how to paint and perform other construction tasks.
Obviously, that’s just the beginning of the cultural differences the group has encountered over the years.
Roberts says the women of Malawi are the primary workers. They cook, clean, look after the children and hike to get wood and water for cooking.
It only recently became legal for women to wear pants, she says, and the idea of them getting a secondary education is relatively new. But she thinks things are changing, in large part because of the church’s influence (Malawi is a primarily Christian country, and the largest Protestant denomination is Presbyterian).
“The church values women as much as men, and the men are being taught respect for women,” she says.
Most of the families there grow their own food, and some have chickens and goats, but you rarely see full-farm operations.
Their main diet consists of a greens and a mixture called nsima, which Roberts says resembles grits.
“There is very little protein, so one of the things we’re trying to teach them is to use soy.”
The culture is also very community-centered, Roberts and Riley say.
“Everybody depends on everybody else because so many times, they have drought and food runs out,” Riley says. “They really help each other very much. It’s an important part of their custom.”
Roberts says that if someone starts making any significant amount kind of money, they are expected to share it with everyone else in the village - something that probably sounds crazy to the average American.
But “you have to acknowledge that people have been living a particular way for a period of time, and that their way of living is radically different from ours,” Roberts says.
“We have a lot to learn from them.”
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