Flame Tree's Reflections: Our Country & Malawi

The US needs to borrow a term from the Irish, who called their decades-long religious and political struggle “the Troubles”.  We now have the troubles. They result from America’s original sin, human slavery, and our imperfect efforts toward human equality, and simple decency, ever since 1865.

Often I have described the smart, energetic, courageous Malawians with whom Flame Tree Initiative works as a vanguard, amazing people who are, in a phrase I long ago stole from one friend, “trying to build a country”. Sometimes I feel we are present at the creation of a new Malawi, and we are there to guide.

That is wrong, not because it isn’t true of Malawi, but because it rests on the assumption that we in the United States are somehow a complete society whose institutions and social contract will carry us through whatever travails arise. That might not be the case.

Closer to the truth is the observation that we are like Malawi. We both have to build a country. Never completed, societies and nations require the courage, ethics, self-awareness, resilience and ability to adapt to change of each and every generation. That work is never done.

What does this observation imply for Flame Tree’s work? It suggests that great humility is in order, that progress in both countries rests on recognition of human rights, tolerance, and the rejection of any racial, religious, ethnic or gender discrimination. Our current American Troubles merely remind us of that essential approach to our chosen work.

As we go forward, tackling critical problems like energy poverty in partnership with many others, we do so with a guiding principle. We will be inclusive, and we are not going to tolerate discrimination of any flavor either here in the US or in Malawi.

Wayne Decker