World's Apart

Canada and Malawi are separated by a 24 hour flight (that can take up to two days with layovers). Truthfully, though, the distance between the two countries is more striking when measured by other statistics. Here's some of what we've learned:

Malawi's population is about half that of Canada - almost 16 million to our nearly 34 million. Of course there's more elbow room in Canada with a landmass of nearly 10 million square kilometres compared to Malawi's 118,000. I guess truthfully that doesn't exactly translate into elbow room for most Canadians as we're one of the world's most urbanized nations whereas most Malawians live in rural villages. But I digress ...

So back to that Malawian population. Of the 16 million, approximately 1 million (6% of population, or basically 1 in every 20 people) are HIV positive. Ouch. And there's an equal number of orphaned children in the country. That's staggering from a Canadian perspective where only 0.2% of our population is HIV positive and there are approximately 45,000 orphans. Another way of expressing this difference: Malawi has over 12 times Canada's incidence of HIV and over 22 times more orphans than we do.

Phenomena such as these (and others) contribute to disparity in terms of life expectancy as well. At birth a Canadian has a median life expectancy of 81 years. This compares to 54 years for a Malawian. In Canada 15.2% of our population (over 5 million people) are over 65 years old. There are a mere 430,000  Malawians (2.7% of the population) over age 65. Another take on this: the median age of the population in Canada is about forty whereas in Malawi it's just over seventeen.

And daily life in Malawi is very different from life in Canada. I've mentioned the urban versus rural thing already but of course it goes beyond this. Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in Canada breaks down to $47,689.00. In Malawi that number is $354.00. Wow. And while in Canada inflation is low (the stat I found was 1.78% ... I'm sure some of you financial watchers could correct that number). In Malawi it's pretty high - 7.41%.

So there's more than distance that separates Canada from Malawi. We're sobered by these statistics and by the dark realities to which many of these numbers point. May God grant us His love as we enter a very different world. My guess is that this unfamiliar "other world" of Malawi will serve up both beautiful and heart breaking experiences. I hope we never recover.