Village Visit with Angellah Kasanga

In December I arranged a visit to new scholar Angellah Kasanga’s home village called Kwa Chilamwera in Thyolo District.

Village visits are one of the most engaging parts of the work we do because they bring home in a vivid way the reality of a student’s life as she enters AGE Africa’s program. Angellah lives with an aunt who is a smallholder tea farmer, which is common in the area as Thyolo is one of the major tea producing districts in Malawi. Angellah’s own parents as well as her aunt’s husband all passed away in 2003. Angellah’s aunt earns about $50-$80 dollars a month, half of which she has to pay out for agricultural inputs and other costs for her small tea garden. Paying St. Michael’s fees of around $300 was an enormous strain on the family, especially considering the six other children Angellah’s aunt currently cares for and supports. That strain becomes even greater upon considering that $300 only pays for the direct costs of fees but does not include additional vital needs such as a uniform, school materials, and transport to and from school.

Angellah lives approximately a twenty minute walk away from a major tea estate. As she leads me through part of it, we pass a sign that boldly declares the estate’s stance against child labor. I ask Angellah what she thinks of the sign and with a little smile, she says in Chichewa ‘ahhh bodza’, a polite way of calling something a lie. She says children often go to the fields with their parents whatever their age and whatever signs say. She tells me the biggest problems she says in her community is that people never had access to education, especially girls. In her primary school, there were dozens of standard 8 students, and there are a fist full of such primary schools within walking distance of her house, but when I ask her how many students are going to secondary school, she gives three or four names of students at schools similar in caliber to St. Michael’s and says another ten or twelve go to the nearby CDSS. Most of those are boys.

According to Angellah, a lack of education among girls makes social problems in Kwa Chilamwera like early marriages even more intense as girls lack educated women who might serve as their advocates. Some girls ‘choose’ early marriage if such a term is meaningful given the options at hand. Others are pushed and intimidated, often by women who end up perpetuating the kind of institutional violence visited upon them when they were girls. She says if more of the girls had guardians like her aunt, who has struggled constantly to see Angellah advance with her education, they would be much better off.

Angellah is not clear on the solutions to these larger problems. She realizes the problems run deep, that they involve providing viable alternatives to communities rather than preaching as if there are obvious fixes to many of these problems. However, as she keeps learning, she is clearly dedicated to improving the lives of the girls in her family and community.

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