Cysfilm

Interview with Dr. Kim Yi Dionne: Part 5 of 5

September 27, 2010

Quick, imagine you’re a rural Malawian and put this list of development priorities in order, 1 being the most important to you and 5 the least important to you:

Agricultural Development

Education

HIV/AIDS services

Clean Water

Health Services

Bush League premieres in a week and a half so I wanted to take this week to post an interview I did recently with Dr. Kim Yi Dionne. Kim is a political scientist with a research background in Malawi who reviewed Bush League for accuracy during post production. In reading her work I was struck by the results of a survey she did of rural Malawian’s development priorities. The survey results look very simple, it’s just a short list of what the people in that region would prefer in terms of money/resources spent on development. Here are the actual results – see how you guessed.

In a survey of 1259 rural villagers in Rumphi district, villagers ranked their preferences with respect to development and health in the following order:

1. Clean Water

2. Agricultural Development

3. Health Services

4. Education

5. HIV/AIDS services

How did you do? See anything unexpected? Where did you rank HIV/AIDS services?

HIV/AIDS services were fifth? How many of us could have guessed that HIV/AIDS would be last? So what’s going on? Shouldn’t they be first?

To shed some light on this I’ll be posting a five-part interview with Kim on the facebook/Bush League group page and here over the next five days that looks at this. I hope you’ll find these clips interesting both as an insight on Malawi but perhaps equally so – as a reflection of ourselves.

For today I’m posting a second short clip from an interview with the Subchief of Zolokere (he’s the highest authority in the village where Bush League was filmed) and this will start us with some insights into the extreme end of the conversation –  the HIV/AIDS conspiracy theory.

Subchief Moses Khunga from Zolokere, Malawi, January 2007

Dr. Kim Yi Dionne at UCLA, June 2010