Because They're Burning Bricks

Posted By Sika on July 13, 2007

So, I can’t room with a Malawian because judging from this day that would mean that my coworkers will try to save me at work and at home, and really a person shouldn’t have to deal with being saved more than once a day.

We were told that we could say that we pray at home. We were given some names of denominations that don’t have churches here. And when I found out that there is no Unitarian presence here, I thought I was golden. Woo-hoo, said I, I can deflect the questions and I will even be mostly not lying. I guess it’s different when you work for the Christian Hospital Association of Malawi. My coworkers aren’t satisfied when they don’t know the name of my church. They’re not satisfied when I say that I will pray at home because my church doesn’t exist here. They aren’t satisfied when I say that it’s a Christian church (even though the first time I add “mostly” only in my head). They ask me if I recognize that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation, to god (though they capitalize the G).

I know what I should say. I know how to get them on my side and off my back. It’s really quite simple: It’s one word and there’s only three letters. The worst thing that happens: I have to go to church with them sometimes, if I even actually end up here. But I stood there, mind churning, trying to make myself say the one little word and recognizing that instead I was about to do was the exact wrong thing if I don’t want a hassle, if I want to fit in, if I want this to be a non-issue. But I can’t say the one little word because the very idea that millions of good people who do the best they can to be the best they can every day, no matter what shit the world throws at them—and the world throws a lot of shit—that these people will go to hell because they don’t believe that, as Julia Sweeney quotes, “Jesus had a very bad weekend for our sins” is completely and utterly morally repugnant to me.

So I say, “No, I don’t believe that.” I say, “No, I believe that there are many paths to god, and I don’t believe that anybody has the one right answer.” My dad calls and I breathe a sigh of relief because the damage wasn’t too much, and now the topic is over; little did I know that there was actually a multi-pronged attack planned.

I think, briefly, of just going for shock value and saying, “I’m a pagan.” But then I remember that many people, when they say, “I don’t believe in witchcraft,” mean it the same way as I might when I say, “I don’t believe in torturing people,” and not that they actually believe it doesn’t exist. I remember that when death seems too random and inexplicable, people believe that a witch has done a spell, and sometimes the accused witch disappears, never to be seen again. Death is often random and inexplicable in a country as poor as Malawi. I think that perhaps shock value is the wrong way to go.

This is the kind of post, I think, that Peace Corps doesn’t want me to write. I think this is what they mean when they say that the good stories should be part of our letters and emails and the bad stories, the sad stories should be only for our private journals. But when that happens I feel like everything gets skewed. There are people who edit themselves down until they are saying nothing over and over again, and there are people who have given up on pleasing PC and have only vitriol left to spew. So please, recognize this as an attempt to give shape to another side of Malawi, and not an attempt to negate everything positive about it.

To give balance: in Mterera, my family and the neighbors were satisfied with me saying that I go to church sometimes. My abambo’s response was a light, “Ok, you can stay with your amayi here while I go to church.” They gave me a space in their family, different and flawed though I may be (not that I’m admitting anything), and accepted me as who I am because that is what you do for guests. There is no price that needs to be paid to be regarded well, no conversion necessary as the admission fee for good treatment. That to me is the true Christian way to behave—the good humanist way to behave. That is decency unmarred by the poison of believing yourself to have the only answer, and that is how nearly everybody I have met here has been. They wear their Christianity comfortably, talk about the comfort it has given them, discuss its importance in their lives and trust that their example is enough; that coercion and threats of hell are unnecessary.

I was talking to Martha and Carrie about PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and how it’s practically criminal that much of the funding is constrained from doing things like providing condoms because the President (that would be of the U.S., in case you were wondering) wants a certain percentage of the funding to come from religious sources and many religious sources place all kinds of restrictions on the use of their money because better that (other) people die than to jeopardize their souls.

Martha, a Catholic, was surprised and a little horrified that those kinds of religious limitations would come from the U.S. government. But there are people who wear their religion like an ill-fitting suit of armor and feel the need to clash around violently and loudly just to prove that their armor is really the best in the land. Unfortunately, some of those people work at my proposed college. Unfortunately, some of those people are in charge of things like PEPFAR.

Categories: Malawi
Tags: culture, religion