SAN GABRIEL VALLEYWIDE NEWS
By Winston Chua

The African nation of Malawi faces challenges of epidemic proportions. This summer, the San Marino Community Church sent a Malawi “GO” Team in hopes of finding answers to those problems.
The life expectancy of a Malawi resident is currently 47 years old, compared with the life expectancy of an average American at more than 78 years. Malawi faces the problem of dealing with AIDS, which claims approximately 59-percent of deaths from people 15 to 59 years of age, according to Reuters. Although free clinics and improved care make some headway into solving some of the problem, about 800,000 people die from AIDS each year.
Many of those people were parents of children who have since died; their children today no longer have fathers or mothers to care for them. Today the vast numbers of orphaned children total more than 2 million. Most of those 2 million are AIDS orphans who lack adequate health care.
Without higher levels of education, those problems will persist. In Jeffrey Sachs’s book The End of Poverty, he wrote that when young people fail to receive education, the birth rates rise and opportunities for advancement cannot develop.
Furthermore, the government is only able to provide education for children until the age of 12, and those fortunate enough to receive education often lack the materials needed to succeed—inadequate and shortages of textbooks, for example.
Finances are another problem that plague the Malawi people. Without birth certificates, no identification papers or driver’s licenses or social security cards, the poor are unable to prove who they are before they can qualify to receive financial aid.
While Malawi’s social, educational and economic problems may persist because the challenges remain too daunting to overcome immediately, the San Marino Community Church is seeking to fight the pandemic.
Sixteen members from the San Marino Community Church and two others from Texas spent two weeks earlier this summer to learn about and help provide for some of the needs of Malawians in the capital city of Lilongwe.
Team members were composed of people as young as high school students to the wiser senior citizens. Other members included college students, graduate students, a water engineer, a psychologist (who lectured on healthy marriages) two fundraisers and former San Marino mayor and current City Councilman Dr. Matthew Lin, an orthopedic surgeon.
They also received support from the local church here in San Marino and Pasadena’s All Saint’s Church. One of their contacts from All Saint’s Church is Don Thomas, a board member of the Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance, who has spent two to three months in Malawi for the past eight years.
The SMCC, a part of the Presbyterian Church of the United States, worked alongside the Ministry of Hope, established in 1999. The MOH focuses on the needs of orphaned children and makes available elementary and religious education, even providing scholarshipsHilary for continuing education. The culturally and generationally diverse San Marino team worked with MOH feeding stations to provide good meals for the people and spent time in crisis nurseries, holding and caring for babies, some of whom have been abandoned in fields. The Lilongwe nurseries hold around 40 children and serve as a transitional place between birth and the time a child finds relatives for them or adoptive families.
Because there are no government subsidies for feeding orphaned children, the MOH works with Malawians to increase food supplies through construction on Malawian land at the expense of the MOH. These meeting centers are called feeding stations. The first MOH feeding station began in 2000. Some 300 children were typically present at theses stations during SMCC’s summer trip. The MOH also works with widows, helping with literacy, food production and teaching them ways to generate income.
This is the third trip the SMCC has made, according to SMCC pastor Jeff O’Grady. The church first went in 1994 and then in 2001. They continue to partner with the Christian Church of Africa Presbyterian and maintain relationships with Malawi residents. O’Grady said the church’s relationship with Malawi began through an early mission.
While the team stayed only two weeks, O’Grady said that they are only part of a larger, longer-lasting vision.
“You can see that the devastation caused by AIDS is creating a real crisis for the country,” O’Grady said. “Our partners are indigenous and help is developed from within; it emerged from within the churches. They, not us, are providing basic necessities for the children. Our partners in Malawi are also encouraging families to adopt children and keep them within their own communities rather than institutionalizing them.”
O’Grady preached in Malawi to crowds of around 450 people. There, he partnered with a local church pastor his elders during their worship service. He said that much of the health care and basic services are provided by the churches because the state is not in a position to provide those services. The SMCC team traveled through dirt roads for more than three hours to meet the people for service.
While in Lilongwe, O’Grady’s team also visited the Opportunity Bank, a microfinance bank that has been established in Malawi which provides banking services so those in poverty can save money and learn fiscal responsibility. Malawi’s OB gives poorer people the chance to work with credit, savings and insurance, among other things. The OB capital comes from a variety of sources and allows people to take out loans and create service accounts. A board member of the OB who works with the SMCC is from Newport Beach. Muhammad Yunus a Bangladeshi economist, initiated the idea of microfinancing was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
Malawi is called the “warm heart of Africa.” It is ripe for humanitarian aid because of its political stability (It has been stable since 1964.) and it is receptive to assistance from religious organizations. It is one of the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Ten countries in the world have fewer than half of school-aged children enrolled in primary school. Nine of them are in the sub-Saharan region.
On September 14, SMCC will host a dinner to share with those in and out of the church community what they discovered and determined as a result of their summer exploration. One focus of the meeting is to strategize ways to make significant impacts from their continued relationship with the Malawi people from San Marino. Two members of the SMCC congregation are board members of the MOH.
In October the church will shift their focus to China and their Christian education programs there.