53 mins
’It’s even more amazing than I thought’
IT’S approaching 5pm and most of the staff in Christian Aid’s Edinburgh office, deep in the bowels of Augustine United Church, have gone for the evening.
The organisation’s chief executive, Amanda Mukwashi, apologises for being tired after a long day of travel and meetings. But other than a request for throat sweets, it really doesn’t show. She is warm, passionate and – about nine months in – obviously deeply in love with her new job, the charity itself and its supporters.
“I think it’s an amazing role to have at a time like this. And every day… sometimes I think I understand just how amazing it is, and then I meet other people and I think ‘my goodness, it’s even more amazing than I thought’.
“Today I came straight from the train station and we went to have lunch with Lady Davidson, who has been running the book sale [at St Andrew’s and St George’s West Church] for 45 years – 45 years –and we were having lunch together with a group of supporters, and they were talking about what it entails.
“Christian Aid Week is the culmination, but throughout the year they get donations, they grade them, they’re doing this on a regular basis and nobody really talks about all the work that goes into this preparation.
“And I sat there and I ind it amazing – you are talking about people’s individual commitment to helping others in a very long-term approach. And it’s not just a commitment to Christian Aid, it’s a commitment and an endorsement, when I think about it, to the work that we’re doing.
“They were asking about people in Bangladesh, they wanted to know what we are doing there, what are some of the challenges, is there any way they can help further. They want to know about Kerala, they want to know about Indonesia, Yemen, they want to talk about Brazil, they want to talk about Malawi.
“At a time when it has been quite challenging in the sector, when you sit with people like that what it says to me is if you look at history, every time we have a crisis there are people who are willing to step up and step out, to challenge the negative narrative and practices so we can create a better world. We ind them in history all the time. Without them I don’t think we’d be able to make the difference we do.”
Amanda was born and grew up in Zambia. Her biological father died when she was two and her mother remarried, and she was raised in a large family – ‘some of mine, some of yours, some of ours’ - with parents who were determined that their daughters would have the same opportunities as their sons.
“It was very fortunate that my stepfather was very much pro gender equality. He believed the daughters as well as the sons could achieve anything they put their mind to, and he didn’t flavour the boys over the girls. For all of us he was just very clear: you all go to school, you all get the same quality education, and make the most of it.
“And my mum was very clear that as a woman you should be independent. I think that combination was very good for me. It shaped my thinking around those issues.
“There was no expectation, no pressure that as soon as I finish at university I should get married, in fact they really wanted me to go for my masters degree and do other things. So I think it was almost inevitable that I would become more involved in work around issues of equality and justice.”
She moved to the UK to do her masters, but says that afterwards she struggled to ind work commensurate with her qualifications and wound up doing a lot of care work – in nursing homes, care homes and hospitals.
“I think there was something during that period God really wanted me to learn. And I think it’s around ethics, around integrity but I think primarily around humility. I had never envisaged myself as doing care work because I went to school, I had my degrees, I had my masters, why was I doing care work?
“But it was a time when I grew in my faith and my relationship with God, and I understood doing care work did not make me any less a person but I looked every day to see what I could learn from that process. And seeing the challenges people were going through physically, and just being able to talk to someone who was elderly, and give them some comfort, or maybe not so much comfort but just treat them as another human being who matters.
“And this sounds perhaps very spiritual, but I believe that when my time for learning was done in that area, God opened the door for me to move on, and I moved back into international development.”
Amanda has worked in the development sector for ‘closer to 30 years than 20’ and has worked for local charities as well as international organisations, but says certain threads have run through all of her career.
“One was around the whole area of gender justice, and knowing full well from my theological perspective and from scripture that God created male and female equal in his image, and everything else that comes after that is the distortion of God’s word by human beings, that has now legitimised that oppression of one gender by another in our world.
“That has been always a big thread for me: building that awareness of gender justice and looking at women and at the role of women in leadership.
“The second thread has always been a more general element of social justice. When you look at a people who are marginalised or people who are excluded or really struggling in terms of extreme poverty, they’re not there because of their own fault, they’re there because the economic systems and structures we have in place, are systems that continue to flourish at the cost and expense of the majority of poor people.
“And that we actually have to consciously and deliberately take action – whether it’s education, or health, or with those who are displaced – we have to consciously and deliberately identify and isolate those systems, those structures, those norms that flourish on the basis of someone else’s suffering.”
Her most recent role was with the UN, based in Germany. She says, a bit wistfully, that she liked it there, but that the Christian Aid role was a chance to combine her work in gender justice and social justice with being very explicit about her faith.
Brought up a Roman Catholic, she has been a Seventh Day Adventist since university. “I wanted to really study the scriptures, and ask so many questions about the relationship between God and human beings, and I found the Seventh Day Adventists allowed me to have that space to really debate the word of God and try to understand it.
“I came to it through one of my uncles, who was married to a woman who was a Seventh Day Adventist. Every time I was on holiday I would go and stay with her and I would go to church with her, and ind they had time for bible studies and I just loved that.
“And the music is beautiful. Sometimes I would go to the church just to listen to the music.
“But while I was there I learned how to read the Bible for myself and search the scriptures and in that process I made the choice that I was going to join the church. I felt within that church I could grow in my relationship with Christ.
“I spoke to my parents, and my dad said ‘well as long you’re a Christian, that’s ine’. Again, he was showing what a free-thinker he was in the sense of respecting that religious freedom and liberty of his children to be able to choose. He said ‘for all of you, the one thing I don’t want you to do is walk away from God, but within that spectrum, if you can ind a home that meets your spiritual needs then you have my blessing’.”
Amanda Mukwashi, Chief Executive of Christian Aid
“Jesus Christ was not a character that shied away from naming problems in society; to the contrary he was a character that really spoke up against double standards, he spoke up against abuse, he spoke up against injustice. He spoke up against the mistreatment of women.
She says that her work now allows her to tackle ‘the role that faith plays in both helping those that are suffering, but sometimes in exacerbating the situation’.
She offers the example of the campaign to persuade churches to disinvest from fossil fuels: “While we are tackling the banks in terms of their investments, we’re talking to governments, we’re talking to multi-lateral bodies – and we are also talking to the churches and saying ‘what are you investing your resources on?’
“This is a role that Christian Aid can uniquely play because we are grounded in our faith. And our faith allows us to be able to speak very strongly against injustice – in fact our faith demands that we speak up against injustice.
“Jesus Christ was not a character that shied away from naming problems in society; to the contrary he was a character that really spoke up against double standards, he spoke up against abuse, he spoke up against injustice. He spoke up against the mistreatment of women.”
We talk briefly about the sex abuse scandal that hit the international aid sector in early 2018. Although Christian Aid wasn’t implicated directly, Amanda says that out of the negative story has come a determination to confront the issue.
“I joined just after it had hit – it happened in February and I came in April – and one of the things that really struck me when I came in was just how personally people felt about it.
“We had an all-staff meeting and talked about safeguarding, and I went off to Bolivia on a visit and what I found was members of staff on the ground doing training in safeguarding. It’s like they feel they have to do more and more to make sure they’re aware of it, and they’re doing something about it, and they’re talking to partners about it.
“I think first it shocked people, but then it was a wake-up call saying we need to do more, we have a duty and a responsibility to the most vulnerable people we are working with, to make sure we are protecting them from this. So that conversation is happening at different levels.
“In conversations I’ve had with some of the supporters, they want reassurance that we are doing everything we can to make sure that there is safeguarding of those that are the most vulnerable. When you meet someone who is really poor, they have no food, they have no shelter, because you’re an aid worker you are in a position of power and how you use that power is really critical.”
It comes back, she says, to abuse of power and exploitation of the vulnerable, which is what she has spent her working life fighting. And while she accepts it won’t be ‘a quick win’, she believes we are moving in the right direction.
“This is really what has kept me in development, really believing that we are making a difference, we are making gains – maybe not as fast as we need to, but the gains are there.”
Amanda visting a Christian Aid project in Bangladesh
This article appears in the January 2019 Issue of Life and Work
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