From New York to Africa, everyone wants to gossip about romance

The most pressing question from the communities I met with in Malawi: at the age of 32, why do I not have a husband or kids?

No one in the most rural parts of Malawi know what “dating” is, and they may not even have a comparable word for it in their native language Chichewa. But they are definitely interested in romance.

For ten days, I traveled to the villages of Malawi to learn about a friend’s initiative to uplift the women and girls there via seed funding into women’s small businesses and self-esteem building among the girls.

Malawi has some of the highest rates of child marriage and teenage pregnancy in the world, which leads to girls dropping out of school and becoming entirely dependent on their husbands. The suite of opportunities for people who are not able-bodied boys and men are still minimal, because cultural grooves make it far easier to fall into early motherhood, dependence, desperation, or some combination of the three. It’s just the path of least resistance.

Going deep into African villages is an affronting experience. There is no running water, electricity, or the basic health standards that many of us in America take for granted. There are no cell phones or technology. One of the Western women on my trip, a lawyer, noted that a baby in a community we were visiting was sucking on a piece of a plastic bag, and could suffocate. Our trip organizer responded quickly that it’s not uncommon for little kids to be running around with razor blades there.

We heard stories about a 13-year-old girl birthing twins via an untrained C-section provider, and stories of disabled people being literally locked up in their houses because families carry shame and there are no wheelchairs. We went to a community that was a safe haven for albino children, because some village chiefs try to kill them.

The lawyer’s gesture to remove the plastic bag from the baby’s clutch came from a place of care. At the same time, we did not need to tell them how to parent their children there. They were attune to the urgent problems at hand: cyclones, drought, bringing back enough water from the water pumps, breastfeeding, handling their relationships with their husbands.

The programs and women’s collectives that I shadowed to bring power to women and girls were remarkable in a lot of respects, in that they provided women not just with unrestricted financial capital like some aid programs, but with the mental health support and community to become self-sustaining contributors to their local informal economies. The ultimate goal was independence, and building a life that wasn’t simply responding to whatever present matter of survival was in front of them.

I spoke to one woman who is a goat breeder, and she mentioned that before joining the women’s collective she felt like an insignificant wife, and after she became a person with status and dignity in the community. Another woman was growing seedlings in partnership with a conservation effort on the mountain. The women were bold and intelligent: they had businesses as pig breeders, seamstresses, and creators of briquettes, or eco-friendly bricks made out of sawdust, paper, and water. We met people of all ages, from young timid girls whose stoic expressions melted into blushes when I smiled at them, to widows hosting dance parties together.

In fact, all of our visits into the villages started with dancing and music. In advance of our visits, the women had splurged and hired a local DJ and drummer, all with the money they had saved up in their businesses.

But after dancing and hearing about their businesses and educations, the conversations often came back to relationships. One girl told me that she stopped spending time with a boy, so he started stealing tomatoes from her outdoor garden. Another girl told me that her boyfriend started to “beat her up” (words via the translator) when he thought she was flirting with other men. She chuckled about it and melted into her friend’s lap after sharing the story with us (what girl hasn’t, as a defense mechanism, made light of some boundary-crossing while melting into her friend’s lap.)

We wondered whether the husbands might be threatened by some of the advanced women’s groups financial success. But many told me that their husbands actually were thrilled their wives were breadwinners; with some actually becoming “lazy” upon experiencing their wives’ windfalls.

I was struck by how similar these relationship issues were to the experiences of all women and girls everywhere. Certainly, the rule of law in a place like Malawi is weaker than the rule of law in America (though honestly, who knows anymore). But when it comes to hearing the pure interpersonal connections, a lot of their relationship issues were similar to ours. People are people.

The number one question from the women and girls was usually directed at me: how old was I, and did I have a husband? After a few of these questions I honed my response that no one had yet met the “husband bar,” to which they cackled and applauded in glee. One woman asked “don’t you have men in your country?” while another group of women conspired and approached me to say that I should marry a wealthy man and divert his money to them. (I haven’t told them about my last Substack post, On very rich men and the continent of Africa, lol)

The group of women who I traveled with from America and New Zealand were initially surprised that career- and business-building were not the primary focuses of all the communities. But it made complete sense to me. Relationship issues are far from frivolous; to feel love and desire are some of the things that make many of us excited in our existences, a pillar of life that can either provide the greatest joy when upheld or the darkest despair when obliterated. Plus, it’s when you hear about someone’s relationship intimacies that you get to know the real parts of them.

I came away from this experience feeling an overwhelming shared sense of humanity with the people there, who were powerful and resilient in their own right and foreign aid just unlocked what was already within them. The women and girls there were joyful and funny. Many of them actually just wanted to gossip or laugh.

I don’t write this to discount the severity of their problems, but rather to show our common points of connection. As an American woman, I have incredible comforts because of the randomness and luck of my birth. But surely there are things they can teach me. I for one would much prefer to have a dance party when I meet people, instead of wearing a conservative pantsuit in a fluorescent conference room. When did this rigidity and suppression of our joy become the norm?

My favorite conversation in the communities was with this casually brilliant 16-year-old girl at the first school we visited, named Ruth. Ruth saw me standing alone at one point at the netball game, and approached me to ask in English “why are you standing alone?” She later revealed to me that she also likes to stand alone and observe. Upon finding out that I am a writer, she told me that she had written a story about “betrayal.” A woman comes into money and success, and then her best friend in a fit of jealous rage drives the woman’s car into a ditch and murders her. She presents it all as a car accident in a calculated scheme to assume her friend’s identity and take over her home. Ruth was more clever than a lot of people I know.

After I gave Ruth a pair of underwear, which we brought as gifts to the girls who had one or no pairs, it occurred to me that I would probably never see Ruth again unless I returned to that specific village. She doesn’t have a cell phone or computer, let alone a mailing address. It made me think, even if I could contact her, what could success look like for Ruth?

Some of these issues are too massive to take on in one bite, and they range from the macro (vaccines for children, air quality, and birth control for girls) to the micro (self-esteem, tailored vocational training, and personalized relationship counseling).

And obviously many problems can be attributed to the corruption of the government and brokenness of the system, rather than the intrinsic ability, agency, or intelligence of people who happen to be born into extremely limited opportunity. Remarkably they are still able to find joy within it, or in spite of it.

But maybe the traditional methods of “success” and the “KPIs” or whatever acronym that we use in the Western world are not the point. Is success getting out of these conditions where babies are huffing plastic and kids are coughing from smoke inhalation? Is success Ruth becoming a true crime novelist or a biologist, the profession she told me she was interested in? Is it groups of women presenting their artisanal soap in a conference room instead of underneath a tree?

Yes, it could be. But sometimes, it’s dancing and laughing. Joking about my lack of a husband. Being seen.