Malawi: An Opportunity of which I Will Take Full Advantage

-Stella Samúelsdóttir and Ásdís Bjarnardóttir in Malawi talk to Moses Thomas, a young university student from a village at Lake Malawi

“It is far from easy to get support to go to university and this is an opportunity of which I will take full advantage. The school opens up my eyes to different issues, improves my chances of finding work and last but not least, the university studies have maturing effects on me,” says Moses Thomas, a young Malawian, who is the first student from the Namazizi-school who was chosen by the state to study at university level.

Moses Thomas is a 22 years old student at the Chancellor College in Zomba, born and raised in the Madzedze-village in Monkey Bay where he grew up with his parents and siblings, three brothers and four sisters. They all still live in the village and Moses is the first one in the family to go to university. He graduated from the grammar school in Namazizi in 2000 and that was the first school that ICEIDA built in Malawi. The school is a “friend-school” of the primary school Mýrarhúsaskóli in Seltjarnarnes (in Iceland).

After graduating from primary school, Moses attended another school that has connection to Icelanders, namely the Lisumbwi secondary school. The Rotary Club in Reykjavík and the Soroptimists in Reykjavík provide study grants to girls in that school through the intercession of ICEIDA. Moses has a secret friend from Iceland who supported his studies at the school and his success at Lisumbwi resulted in the state choosing him to study education and science at Chancellor College.

“If I would have been able to choose I would have chosen another subject. I would have chosen accounting but here in Malawi it is the state that chooses the subject according to need. I have always liked working with numbers and math came easy to me. I could imagine becoming a banker in the future, even a congressman or a president,” says Moses and smiles as he mentions the last profession.