Social capital

One thing that I was fascinated with during my studies is the idea that people here have social capital: a strong social network that works to advance the community as a whole, not individualistically like in the developed world. It is something that I have been trying to uncover while I’ve been here, but it has been harder to find than I thought. That is not because it doesn’t exist; instead, it’s because no one recognizes it as anything worth mentioning. It is just part of life.

The most striking example of social capital that I have found so far is the building of Kamphombo bridge. The rickety rutted “road” (path) that passes through all the villages in the area, off the main road, crosses the stream at many points. There are all variations of broken down bridges to cross with, but just after Chileka and before Kamphombo village there was no bridge, and during the rainy season when the water rises to enormous levels, it becomes impassable for long periods of time. People on the far side of the stream (ie Kamphombo and beyond) have literally died because they couldn’t reach medical care in the clinic in Chileka, or died from starvation because they couldn’t get their goods to market; women have even given birth on the riverbank, unable to cross to reach the clinic.

So after years of applying for funding to build a bridge, the government finally gave them some money to build. However, it was not enough to cover all of the supplies or even the wages for labour. Plus, supplies are hard to get. But this community is resourceful and hardworking. With all the Zambian cement going to South Africa to build stadiums for World Cup, they resorted to Malawi cement – a poorer quality. When it was difficult to get stones and gravel, this community pulled together and made their own – literally. From the boulder outcrops at the village, both men and women sledge-hammered off giant rocks (basketball size) to use as the base for the bridge supports and side walls. The same for the gravel: they made their own using nothing but sledgehammers and hand labour, until the rock was crushed to a fine gravel. Then when the rock needed to be transported the 4km from the village to the bridge site, they did so via wheelbarrows. There is no other transport, and the oxcarts were needed for the fields.

The men would work all day – a typical day was from 4am to 6:30pm – and the women would work in the morning until they needed to go to their fields. Most of the labourers – excluding the supervisors – were not getting paid, and could expect to see no remuneration except for the completion of the bridge itself. Yet this is all that they were hoping for.

(I apologize for the lack of pictures with this post; the network is soooo sloooow and the uploader keeps timing out. I'll try to put some pics of the bridge on my flickr account.)

How can you not admire this determination, this resourcefulness, this strength in body and heart? Yet even still when I asked some of the women involved to tell me about the strengths of their community, and the ways in which they help each other, no one mentioned the bridge at all. This is because they didn’t see it as anything special; it was necessary, and therefore everyone – because everyone has a vested interest in it – just hunkered down and did what was needed. This type of humility and community strength can still be found back home sometimes in some rural areas, but it seems to be a dying breed in our “civilized” city culture. Are we really so advanced? What have we lost in our race to be modern?