(continued from Part Two)

I’m so thankful that at a very young age I found my calling. So many of my friends are still struggling with what they want to do in life, but early on I remember being fascinated with sexuality in general and about why it was such a big deal, and fascinated in particular that people were so negative about adolescent sexuality. I guess that was my big personal experience, being caught in two cultures – I grew up in New York City in a very fast-paced life, but I’m first-generation American and my family has a lot of the traditional values of where they came from. So my professional life is certainly a product of my personal life. Yeah, I’m my own case study – I think many professionals choose fields that mirror their personal lives.

And then coming to Malawi – whoa! – what personal life?! I was incredibly sexually active before I came here. I was in a two-year relationship until the time I got on the plane to come here. Before that, I had two other long-term relationships, and even in one I had an open relationship, and in between those I had casual relationships. And of course this is during a time when I’m studying sexuality and growing as a person, and I remember when HIV/AIDS wasn’t really an issue for the general population so things were different. But I’ve been in Malawi for nearly two years and I haven’t really dated anyone.

When I first came, it was all about work. That changed – I learnt that this project, this government, and the reduction of HIV are far beyond me as an individual. I definitely know my limits, and working twenty hours a day doesn’t change a whole lot at the end of it all, so why? And then this is a conservative society, and that’s also fed into my conservatism in my personal life – I know I’m under the microscope, not only because I’m here but also because of the work that I do. And there’s all this gossip and small-town mentality – everyone knows everybody and it’s a bit incestuous.

But largely it’s because there’s slim pickings here, right? There just aren’t many single, eligible, worthwhile people. That sounds awful! – but there’s nobody who’s crossed my path and I’ve thought, “Oh gosh, he’s good-looking and seems very intelligent and is not committed, maybe I should go for it”. Lilongwe is a small town when you think about who your potential partners are.

Certainly if I wanted to have sex with married men, I would have had lots of sex – there’s a lot of infidelity in the expatriate community. You know, most people think monogamy is the way to go, but there’s hardly any monogamy going on so let’s be real. For me, if people want to have open relationships, let them be honest with their partners, but that level of honesty isn’t there.

And if I was going to have a relationship with a Malawian man, he would have to have very specific attitudes towards women, me, and the kind of relationship I would want, and so many people are HIV positive, he’d have to have many HIV tests. So a relationship would have to be calculated and it would have to be serious. And status is so important here I’d have to choose very wisely or my credibility would be shot – like I’m not going to wind up with a waiter at the Capital Hotel, because it would reflect on me, and though I would like to be an example above and beyond all that, I think it’d hurt me more than it’d help me to cross that barrier. So he’d have to be very high level – and most of those guys are screwing around. It’s terrible to judge in general, but I’m at the workshops with these guys planning the country’s HIV strategy, and just speaking with them in the context of their work, they’re very clear.

So all of that has meant that I don’t look into it. And being surrounded by miserable circumstances has had an effect. I’ve seen so many people sick with HIV and dying of AIDS, it’s like, “Woo!”– it makes me think twice if not ten times about what I’m doing, who I’m doing it with and why! I would like to think that any thoughtful person comes to a place like Malawi and somehow takes that into their personal life.

So I’ve been on my own, which has been another interesting episode in the odyssey of my personal sexuality. It hasn’t been that difficult because I’m not letting it be difficult – I’m letting it work for me, and it is working for me. This time alone has been very healthy. I feel I’m much more mature because of it, and that my experiences in future will be much more aware – I don’t think I really appreciated each and every act as I will now. All I can say is, the next person I’m with is also going to appreciate it!
And Then I Came Here documents the overseas experiences of twenty-six expatriate women who were living in Lilongwe, Malawi, at the end of the 1990s. The individual voices combine to create a multi-faceted account of the joys and frustrations of the women’s lives in Malawi, the contrasts with their experiences elsewhere, and the rewards, challenges and effect on themselves of a nomadic existence.

Paperback, 226 pages
ISBN: 0-9549202-0-1
Publisher: Cirrus Books

Available through amazon.co.uk. Or email Cirrusbooks@aol.com.

(continued from Part One)

For anyone who’s in a helping profession, there has to be a degree of separation from your work or you’d have a nervous breakdown. You see so many young women selling vegetables by the side of the road here, and if you took the time to ask, you’d hear the same stories – “I was in school and my teacher used to ask me to come and clean his house, and he started having sex with me and then I got pregnant. I got kicked out of school and now I’m sitting here selling vegetables by the side of the road with my baby.” And then their life is finished – they feel like it is, society tells them it is – and there aren’t really opportunities for them to pull themselves out unless they’re incredibly motivated and have support systems.

And one stroll through Lilongwe Central Hospital is enough to make you cry – the conditions that people have to work and live in. Imagine you have a job to do, but even if you’re motivated to do your job, you don’t have the tools – it sets up this horrible, horrible situation for the Malawians trying to manage people who have Aids. And I mean, in most of the developed world, we’d say, “Yeah, go get yourself tested for HIV. If you know you’re HIV positive, you can eat better and stay healthier, and you won’t infect anybody else.” And there are all these great services and support groups and counselling. There’s close to none of that here.

But the worst for me is the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness among the youth here. We do these questionnaires where we try to assess their knowledge and attitudes, and the last few questions go around their self-esteem and decision-making skills and their hopes for the future. We ask, “Where do you see yourself in five years? Ten years? What is your dream in life?” Youth the world over are so energetic and idealistic by nature and have so much hope, and they usually say, “Oh yes, I want to be president. I want to be a doctor. I want to do this.” In Malawi, most of them will say, “I think I’ll be dead in five years. I have no idea what I want to do in the future.” It’s really telling and very alarming. I’ve never been so impressed by a segment of society anywhere that feels so down and out.

So it’s sad, but I don’t let myself get consumed by the sadness. I try to let it motivate me to promote change, and just be incredibly grateful for my own life, my own family, and my own spirituality and belief in what I can contribute. So many of my professional experiences have made me grateful for my life.

And I do believe there’s a God, and that provides me with strength. I was raised Greek Orthodox, but I like to pick and choose and borrow from other religions or spiritual philosophies. The basic truths are the same, and what transcends particular passages of the Bible is the overall message that we should live our own lives with a clear conscience and not judge one another, and that what goes around comes around.

Also I believe that no one rises to low expectations. I mean, if you see all the muck and the filth and the ugliness of life, and you let that penetrate you, then there is no motivation, there is no creativity, there is no moving out of that, and you become part and parcel of it. So although I’m forced into situations where I’m surrounded by misery, I like to look up, literally look up, to the light, to nature, to the beauty that is around us, even amongst the filth and poverty and muck and grime and disease – and this is a gorgeous country geographically.

So it’s striking balances and trying to aspire, and asking other people to aspire, to something beyond themselves, because we all have so much potential that’s unrealized, in every aspect of our lives – and certainly in our sexual life! I’m in this field for many reasons, and I love it and I wish more people in the world could be open and honest about sexuality – I’m sure the world would be a better place for it. I’m constantly inspired by what I do.

Read Part Three of Maria’s story

And Then I Came Here documents the overseas experiences of twenty-six expatriate women who were living in Lilongwe, Malawi, at the end of the 1990s. The individual voices combine to create a multi-faceted account of the joys and frustrations of the women’s lives in Malawi, the contrasts with their experiences elsewhere, and the rewards, challenges and effect on themselves of a nomadic existence.

Paperback, 226 pages
ISBN: 0-9549202-0-1
Publisher: Cirrus Books

Available through amazon.co.uk. Or email Cirrusbooks@aol.com.

I’m a pretty confident person. I didn’t have a lot of anxiety about packing up my life and going to a place where I knew nobody and just starting up by myself. And then one month into being here, I was robbed at gunpoint and handcuffed to my housekeeper in the toilet. I’m a tough New York City woman but I’ve never been victimized there.

It was seven in the morning and the housekeeper knocked on my door so I went to open it… and there were two guys behind him with guns. It was surreal. It was like, “Oh, am I really being robbed? Am I really handcuffed?” But the whole time I had this incredible calmness, and up to now I’ve never cried or got worried over it.

I believe that I was and am protected. And I compartmentalized it in my mind, and I tried not to let it affect how I feel about Malawians, because I know they’re not all like that. And I didn’t tell my parents – my mom would have made me get on the next plane home. And when I came, I was so committed to my job, I was like, “They can try to hold me down, they can do whatever they want. I will prevail! I’m still going to work hard and get this job done!” That’s what got me through.

And friends and colleagues were very supportive, and the Greek community here insisted that I stay at one of their houses for a few days. Yeah, I didn’t think it was such a big deal but everyone kept saying, “Wow, you’re so calm!” It was certainly another lesson in my own strength, boy. I was like, “Whoa, good for me!”

I’ve been working as an adviser on a family-life education programme for out-of-school youth. The ultimate goal is to reduce teen pregnancy and HIV. It’s exciting to be a sexologist and doing this kind of work. You’re trying to come to people’s sexuality from a positive perspective and say, “OK, reality is we all have these feelings, and young people are quite normal in wanting to explore such feelings and desires, but how do we manage them in a realistic way?”

So, as you can imagine, my work is incredibly challenging, in this country and in others. Religion takes a large role anywhere in what I can do and how I can do it. And here I’m constantly battling with public versus private attitudes. I mean, it’s the very same fifty-year-old men, married with children and grandchildren, who are saying to the youth, “Oh no, we can’t discuss these things,” but who are sugar daddies themselves and running around with schoolgirls.

It’s hard to be completely non-judgemental – we all have our own values and attitudes and opinions and beliefs, and it’s completely impossible to remove those from one’s work. However, the challenge is to know one’s values and attitudes, and share them in a balanced way that’s not completely tilting or skewing the message you’re trying to get across.

So I will never say that I’m not judgemental about the gender roles in this country or the status of women and how they’re treated in so many aspects of life, and as a woman I can freely discuss that. On the other hand, I can appreciate that it’s hard for whoever’s in power – whether it’s men, whether it’s white people, or whoever – to give up that power… and power is a big dynamic in the work I do.

Clearly through my work I’m getting to the most intimate matters of different cultures. But this experience in Malawi was my longest overseas, and it really had me appreciate the deeper contrasts of a different culture in terms of personal values, attitudes to family life… work ethic too.

Nobody gets fired here because there’s this unwritten belief – Don’t fire somebody or one day somebody might fire you. I have full-fledged alcoholics on my staff who can’t sit through an hour’s meeting without leaving for a sip. Everyone knows the situation but no one’s going to do anything about it… And there’s so much jealousy among Malawians. If they’re going to be stuck down there, they’d rather bring people down with them. There’s this passive resistance, passive aggressiveness. I would rather someone come out to my face and say, “I don’t like this and this and this” – I’m more used to that open communication than hiding the letter of invitation to that meeting or something.

And then the regular salary of government officers is a joke, and the only way they can supplement it is by pinching money here and there, like trying to get overtime or an extra night’s allowance – and the donors have fostered that. So now my accountant doesn’t want to work Monday through Friday – he wants to work on Saturday so that he can get extra pay. There’s a lot of that going on, and I don’t see it as a healthy work ethic. But you know what – I’m not financially desperate and they are.

There are different levels of desperation and poverty but who can blame this small band of middle-class people? Why shouldn’t they have a telephone? Why shouldn’t they save enough money to buy a VCR? I’ve got those things. Here I am living a nice lifestyle, making more money than I did back home, so I wrestle with the whole thing. You’re asking people to see beyond themselves to a larger picture, but they’re too concerned on survival for themselves and their family – and so many Malawians are supporting a large extended family. So I understand it but it doesn’t make my life easier. I’m often the bad guy, and that’s something I never felt comfortable with before. It’s not nice to have to say no all the time, but I’m glad I’ve had this experience – it’ll make me a better manager in the future. Life is not a personality contest, I’m learning.

Read Part Two of Maria’s story

And Then I Came Here documents the overseas experiences of twenty-six expatriate women who were living in Lilongwe, Malawi, at the end of the 1990s. The individual voices combine to create a multi-faceted account of the joys and frustrations of the women’s lives in Malawi, the contrasts with their experiences elsewhere, and the rewards, challenges and effect on themselves of a nomadic existence.

Paperback, 226 pages
ISBN: 0-9549202-0-1
Publisher: Cirrus Books

Available through amazon.co.uk. Or email Cirrusbooks@aol.com.