This Is Not Just Like Malawi

Self-awareness is a gift. Not to each of us, but to those around us. A cross-cultural experience, even a short one, can often boost our self-awareness. But only if we let it. Too often, though, we settle for the performance of reflection rather than the real thing. We come back with polished phrases about what “they” have taught us, when what we really mean is that we have briefly noticed ourselves. “It showed me how much we take for granted,” we say, as though we have uncovered a profound truth rather than finally spotting comforts that were always wrapped around us.

It is a privilege to have the opportunity to share about life and work in Malawi. But it is also fraught with dangers. Even after seven years, our insights are clouded, our perspective skewed. Yes, race is a barrier to understanding culture, but so are the quieter protections we carry without thinking: a foreign passport, access to money, the possibility of leaving, the knowledge that for us many crises remain interruptions rather than traps.

So now in Scotland, when we hear, or even find ourselves saying, “well, things are hard here too,” it is worth pausing. Hardship is real in many places, but not all hardship carries the same weight, nor does everyone face it with the same protections.

The current fuel price shock is a global challenge. To see queues at filling stations, empty pumps and rising prices is not unfamiliar in Malawi. Seeing it happen here in the UK might make us say, “This is just like Malawi.” But it isn’t. Fuel shortages do not stop at the pump. They push up food prices, disrupt transport and trade, and make access to healthcare and work even more fragile.

To be a student in an underresourced school, a patient in an understaffed hospital or a driver on a potholed road in the UK may give us a point of contact, but not a claim to understanding. Those experiences, real as they are, do not automatically qualify us to understand what such hardships mean in the lives of others. At best, they may make us more careful listeners and less confident interpreters.

“Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; 20 for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” – James 1:19 ESV

What if hardship made us more careful listeners, less inclined to rush to speak, and especially less eager to speak in anger? If our hardships don’t lead us to vent our frustration, could they make us slower, gentler and more attentive to the hardships of others? Could we be moved in compassion to have anger toward the systems that create poverty and not just the circumstances that demonstrate poverty? Would self-awareness like that help produce the righteousness of God?