Category Archives: Malawi

A Journey Home to Malawi for Kerri Olson

Please donate to my Team Dayā fundraising effort – all funds go directly to building schools. If you are curious about Building Change with Team Dayā, please contact our Head of Recruiting Jaryd Knutsen.

By Team Dayā member Kerri Olson

(PHOTO: Team Dayā member Kerri Olson with her father and sister near their home in Blantyre, Malawi in the 70s.)

When Jay Sears asked if I would like to join a team headed to Malawi to build a primary school, there was only one right answer. My family and I had lived in Blantyre, Malawi when I was very young. It is the place that holds my earliest childhood memories, and I had never been back.

(PHOTO: Team Dayā member Kerri Olson and her sister in the town of Nkhotakota, Malawi in the 70s.)

I remember my father saying that the most rewarding part of his job in the U.S. Embassy in the early 1970s was working with rural Malawian communities to help them build a primary school for the children in their community. I knew that this was the perfect opportunity for me to finally go back to Malawi, and to give back to a country that was so important to my family.

(VIDEO: Team Dayā member Kerri Olson on the worksite in Malawi.)

What stood out to me immediately was the similarity between the model used by Team Dayā and the partnership model from 50 years ago that my Dad had described. Today, around 70% of Malawians live in extreme poverty. Over the past 50 years, the population of Malawi has grown from five million to 20 million people, which means that there is an even greater need now for more schools to ensure that every child in Malawi has the opportunity for an education that can help lift their community out of poverty.

The community where we built our school was chosen by Team Dayā’s Malawi-based partner buildOn. The village of Nchetana showed their commitment to education by agreeing to provide land, labor and local materials including supplying the bricks needed to construct the school. They also committed to sending equal numbers of boys and girls to school.

(PHOTO: Team Dayā member Kerri Olson signs the covenant, an agreement codifying the school building partnership between the community, Team Dayā, buildOn and local education authorities. Team Dayā members Nicolle Pangis, Vib Prasad and Chevan Nanayakkara look on.)

Using funds raised by Team Dayā, buildOn supplied the engineer and skilled laborers to assist in construction, and purchased materials such as the roof, doors, windows and desks. Once the school is completed, the teachers will be provided by the Malawian Ministry of Education.

On July 1^st our team of eight made our way to Malawi. Landing at Lilongwe airport in the middle of the night, what first struck me was how dark the landscape was, even near the capital city. Overall, only about 15% of Malawians have access to electricity, and in rural areas that drops to 5%. Despite the late hour and our very delayed arrival, we were warmly greeted by our local trek leader Vitu, who made us feel so welcome.

The next day, we headed north to the region of Kasungu, where we met the rest of our Malawi-based buildOn team. We had a Chichewa language lesson and cultural orientation, and went shopping at the local market to buy chitenjes, traditional long skirts that we would wear for the opening ceremony in the community.

Full of excitement, the next day we headed for Nchetana, a rural community about an hour from Kasungu town. As we turned down the dirt road that leads to the community, we were greeted by hundreds of children, singing and smiling and waving branches. They escorted us all the way to their school, where the whole community was waiting. After lots of singing and dancing and speeches, everyone signed a covenant and we broke ground. With formalities concluded, we were introduced to our host families, and settled in.

Each morning, after group stretches and songs with the assembled workforce, the workday would begin. Tasks we all shared included: digging the foundation and latrines, carrying bricks from the kiln, carrying buckets of sand from a dry streambed outside the village, and lugging buckets of water.

All work was done manually, mostly using the villagers’ own farming tools, and there wasn’t a machine in sight. The women of the community taught us how to carry our loads in their traditional way, using buckets balanced on our heads. It was humbling to discover that they could carry twice as much weight as we could, often with their babies on their backs, and always singing and dancing while they worked to encourage each other.

After the workday was over, we would spend the afternoon experiencing and learning about life in the community. One of the highlights was playing games with the children. We brought Jenga, Connect 4 and Uno, games which are easy to play even with a language barrier. Children would crowd onto the small front porch of our hosts’ home, and we had fun playing together and practicing our Chichewa phrases with the kids, while they shyly tried out the English phrases they’ve been learning in school.

By the third day of construction, we were already laying cinder blocks and applying mortar, and the walls were taking shape. I was amazed at how streamlined the process was and how quickly construction can progress with so many motivated helpers. Too soon, it was time for Team Dayā to leave, but the work will continue at an impressive pace. With at least 30 community members working 6 days a week, the school block should be finished within 8 weeks.

Currently, school only goes up to 6^th grade in Nchetana. Approximately 100 5^th and 6^th graders have lessons sitting on the dirt floor of a straw structure with a very leaky thatched roof. Once the new school block is completed, the greatly improved learning conditions for Grades 5 and 6 will almost certainly result in increased enrollment, bringing back children who had previously dropped out of school. And crucially, the community will be able to use the old straw structure to extend the school to 7^th and 8^th grade, thereby providing a path to secondary school and future opportunities both inside and outside the village.

One of the most memorable parts of the experience was at the end of our time in Kasungu, when we visited a nearby village that had completed their new school in March. It was so exciting to see the enthusiasm in the community, where primary school enrollment has already risen from 700 to 1,000 children.

Additionally, the new building has enabled them to start adult literacy classes with buildOn’s help. One hundred and seventy adults who didn’t have a chance to go to school when they were young are now learning reading, writing and basic math. We could clearly see how education is already creating a cycle of change in this community and how it can help lift them out of poverty. That cycle is now underway in Nchetana too, with the new school block that Team Dayā and its supporters helped build. For everyone on Team Dayā, it was a powerful, joyful, and unforgettable experience to be part of this process of Building Change.

Please donate to my Team Dayā fundraising effort – all funds go directly to building schools. If you are curious about Building Change with Team Dayā, please contact our Head of Recruiting Jaryd Knutsen.

Prasad on the Importance of Showing Up

Pangis: One Team, One Dream in Nchetana, Malawi

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(PHOTO: Team Dayā members Kerri Olson, Lauren Rosen and Nicolle Pangis with school children in Nchetana, Malawi.)

By Nicolle Pangis

My ‘start’ with Team Dayā originally came in the form of simply being a donor to Jay and the builds he previously raised funds for. And each time I donated; I told Jay that ‘someday’ I wanted to join a build. I loved the mission of Team Dayā and bringing the gift of better education to underserved communities. As 2023 approached, I had two personal goals for the New Year. One, I wanted to get out of the media bubble and do something to give back to people who need support, and secondarily I wanted to do something that scared me a bit. When Jay told me one of the builds was in the summer, when my daughters were out of the school year calendar madness, I committed to the build and started to fundraise.

(VIDEO: Team Dayā memeber Nicolle Pangis on the school work site in Nchetana, Malawi.)

While I have travelled much of the world, mostly for work, I had never been to Africa. It took three flights and about 22 hours to go from Newark, NJ to Liliongwe, the capital of Malawi. Once the rest of the team arrived, we headed a few hours away to the community in Kasungu where we would be building a 5^th/6^th grade school. We got briefed on the community, received an abbreviated Chichewa lesson (the language of Malawi) and boarded the bus to the community.

(VIDEO: Community members of Nchetana, Malawi welcome Team Dayā.)

As our bus drove in through an unpaved road, we were surrounded by members of the community singing and happily shaking branches. It was incredibly emotional as the gratitude of the community for receiving the funds and help for the school was palpable. We learned later a lot of the emotion on the side of the community centered around the fact that many in the community were illiterate (mostly women) and most children don’t go passed the 6^th grade, if they get that far. So, the idea of building a solid structure was not just about building a school – it was really about building hope, too.

(PHOTO: Team Dayā member Nicolle Pangis builds the foundation of the new school building that will house 100 5th and 6th graders.)

After an opening ceremony, groundbreaking, LOTS of dancing, and get settled in with our host families, the real work began. And it really was work. We hauled water, sand, bricks and rocks to the build site – in buckets – on our heads. We learned how to make mortar, and then learned how to apply the mortar to the block walls. By the time we left, we had finished digging out for the full foundation and new school latrines, and had constructed much of the lower perimeter of the school walls.

We spontaneously danced and sang (A LOT!) in the middle of all this work. We could not hold a candle to the hip shaking talents of the women of Kasungu. Beyoncé would be jealous. Off the charts amazing. And yes, they totally laughed at our lack of rhythm, and frankly I didn’t blame them much!

We slept in the huts of host families on a mat on the floor with mosquito nets as a malaria prevention measure. There was no electricity and no running water, so we went with our hosts families to bring buckets of water back from the well. ‘Showers’ consisted of buckets of water warmed on the fire, and you simply threw water on yourself from a cup. ‘Toilets’ were dug out holes in the ground. And after the initial self-conversation of ‘Hmmm. This is going to be different!’, it really didn’t matter. We had the best time. As it turns out, running water and real mattresses are overrated 🙂 And, headlamps work just fine when you are reading at night.

(PHOTO: Team Dayā member Nicolle Pangis plays a competitive game of Connect 4 in Nchetana.)

We played soccer, Connect 4, and Jenga with the members of the community in the afternoons, and learned more about their culture and customs. There was so much kindness and appreciation in the eyes of everyone we met, and their smiles were soul soothing.

Without question, in the end, we got as much or more out of this trip than the community we helped. It was life altering in so many ways.

I realized a few things as the days went by:

You need very little to get by. I brought a duffle bag for a 2 ½ week trip, and that included my sleeping bag inside. I did just fine. It was kind of nice, actually!
One team, one dream – really: In our culture, and particularly in the media industry when it seems nothing is ever enough, and everyone is trying to outshine the person next to them, this community did not give a hoot about a designer anything, who had shoes and who did not, who had a bit more than their neighbor. They were one community-they laughed together, watched each other’s children, cooked together, helped one another. This more than anything had the biggest impact.
Access to what we may consider ‘basics’ is not in fact accessible to many in the world. Chenay, the 10-year old daughter of our host family got very sick when we were there. After several days of asking our host mother about taking her to the doctor, we learned the reason she wasn’t going to the local hospital was for cost reasons. After offering, we learned the cost was only $8 – and she had malaria and what we believed was pneumonia of some stage. Seeing this close-up was sobering to say the least.

If anyone may be considering volunteering for a future build, I could not recommend it more. Besides helping a community who needs it, I think all eight of the volunteers would say they grew in important ways as a result of the experience as well. I plan to do another build sooner than later, and make it part of my annual calendar moving forward.