So, How is Africa?
My immediate reaction: How do I answer this?
I can’t tell you about Africa. I can’t tell you about Malawi. I can’t tell you about Mangochi. I can’t even tell you about Mapila (my village). I can only share my perspectives through my experiences during my placement. That’s right, you are only seeing snapshots from what I decide to write, take photos of, and skew in anyway I like.
What does this mean?
Welcome to my blog post about blogging. I started writing this blog post during pre-dep, but decided to leave it for a while. It’s been almost two months. Time to turn the status from draft to published.
We’ve had several conversations in our pre-dep group, as well as two sessions about communications about Africa and with Canada.
An exercise that we did during pre-dep was write about the Akwaaba House. Each person outlined a blog post about the Akwaaba House. Each person had a different perspective, a different way of communicating what this house means to them.
Talking about blogging at our one session at the Akwaaba House. Notorious B.I.G., I miss y’all!
Now let’s bring this to Africa. This is an entire continent. This raised several questions, which are always on my mind when I’m writing.
- What is appropriate to share?
- How can we responsibly communicate our stories and be mindful of mental models of Africa that are commonly reinforced in media?
- Are we misrepresenting or generalizing an entire population with a very biased viewpoint through our blogs?
Now that I’m here, I still don’t know the answers. Right now, I am trusting my own judgement that the decisions I make in how I communicate will cause more benefit than harm in building empathy and understanding in whoever reads this blog to ultimately have a positive impact Dorothy. I may be wrong.
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Malawatsanli 
I think you have done a very good job in introducing Africa to us who do not have a chance to go there to see it with our own eyes. Of course, it is impossible to see the whole picture with just a few words. I find your blog very interesting to read and the photos are so real to view. I will miss it for sure.
Definitely a tough balance at times. I definitely feel like I have an inappropriate amount of power to shape people’s perceptions of an entire continent based on my few short months in a small part of one of the many countries there. It’s also challenging to think about how sharing certain facts can shape people’s opinions in a negative way. But then, what is a negative way?
Ah, good question since it made me do a mind check. I don’t have a definition, but an example of what I don’t want to happen is the symptom of a single story due to urban/class/insert other parameter biasing. Malawi is around 80% rural, but I live in “town”. Since my experiences are predominantly in the minority urban population, there’s a huge blind spot. I’m not showing rural village life, which I assume is quite different (or maybe my assumption is wrong). This can create a misconception if all a person sees is my blog (e.g. “Malawian” life is pretty comfy, people live in towns with power and water, why should we bother supporting development there, etc). I hope to get out to the villages more, and write about them, as well as highlight some not so good things about Malawi. All about balance.
I think you are doing a good job with keeping balance as you post pictures and blog about what and how things happen rather than why. Also presenting a “broad-view” of your small niche, leaving us to take things at face value and without bias. At least that’s how I feel, good job! =)
Hi dear
I have been following some of your blog randomly for some time and here are some of my own thoughts and questions:
How much time & effort do you put into communicating on this blog. Does it come easily to you or do you have to do a rough draft and screen it for validity and content?
So far, I have spent between 1-2 hours on my blog. Sometimes, it goes up to 3-4 hours, but that’s when I’m working on a longer blog post or doing drafts for future posts. I’ve been making a habit of recording notes and reflections on a daily basis (or almost daily) so I usually look for something interesting in those for my blog. That, or I get questions by email or comments and they become a blog topic. For now, as I am still learning about Malawi, I have a lot of ideas for things to write about. Most of it comes quite easily, but for some topics, mostly with regards to work and culture, I go through the draft/revision process a few times to make sure my facts are correct and the messaging is appropriate.