SuperSTAR

I had a pretty crummy week last week and it was followed by an equally crummy weekend. There were some woe-is-me moments and a few tears and then just when I started getting comfortable with my misery Frank called and said we needed to meet. This afternoon I drove over to his work and we sat outside the gate in my car and talked.

Just as a reminder Frank is the superstar dad whose took a personal tragedy (his wife died the day after giving birth to their first and only child in January) and used it as a reason to transform his community (he started a feeding program for 60 orphans and looks out for severely impoverished families in his area).

Two pieces of background information First, Frank's family is in Blantyre (4 hours South of Lilongwe) he lives near his in-laws and spends most of his free time with their family and his daughter (culturally the daughter must be raised by women until she is at least a few years old). Frank also supports his in-laws financially to a great extent and defers to them frequently when decisions must be made concerning his own life. This has been working moderately well but it means that there is no one on his side. Second, in Malawi property grabbing is a problem. The typical scenario of property grabbing happens this way - the husband dies, his family comes and takes everything and anything (including children) from the wife, leaving her destitute. There are groups trying to fight this practice both culturally and legally but it still happens.

Frank has close to nothing but he told me that he anticipated such a scenario, he had heard people talking about his sister-in-law wanting his sofa set. He even confronted her months ago saying that if she wanted it to let him know and give him time so he could save and buy another set. When he confronted her she said, "I could never do that to you."

Well, apparently she could. Last night a large group of men showed up at Frank's house. Frank's reaction was to kindly offer them all his possessions. He said, "Would you like the sofa? Ok? Let me help you with that. How about the radio? Yes? Here it is." And, he actually helped them carry his things out of his house to his mother-in-law's house. They left him his small bed and his clothes, he said they even took the bags he used to store his clothes in.

On hearing this I felt completely outraged, I wanted to scream and call the police and get his daughter away from them. I wanted to stop working with the feeding program that runs out of his mother-in-laws house but he said those actions would just cause more suffering for other people. He said he didn't sleep for much of the night until he realized three things: (1) the experience would make him work harder to save money; (2) it would make him a stronger person; and (3) at last he was free, there was nothing else for them to take.