For Malawi girls, high school is only the first hurdle

She could be a "manageress" she mumbles, "… of human resources..." Her voice trails off. "I don't know much about it."

It's quite possible that Matilda will return to Bowa, help her parents and four siblings with their small subsistence corn and tobacco farming, and get married. She is not enthused. "I don't really like going home anymore," she admits. "I don't like the hard work. And it's boring."

Matilda reflects on her future prospects and allows herself a little teenage sigh of despair. "I think my education will not help me back in Bowa," she announces. "I will not be any better than someone who has not gone to school."

The elder women of Bowa understand her sentiments – but beg to differ.

"There is no opportunity for her here, that is true," acknowledges Fanis Chakaka, Matilda's mother.

The elder Chakaka, a red woolen hat pulled down over her brow, her face, just like her daughter's, a study in seriousness, speaks slowly: "But you get other things from school. You become smarter about everything."

USAID's Ms. Pérez concurs. "Education is a means not only to further education but also to a better life," she argues. Indeed, studies find that the more education girls get, the later they marry, the fewer children they have, and the healthier their lives are.

"If you have an education you have a small chance to move ahead. If you don't, you have no chance at all," says Selina Bonefesi, the Bowa villager who was the focus of the original Monitor story. "I know clerks at the airport, and policemen and some others…. I am not sure what they do, but we see them going to offices, and that is very good," she says. All of them, she notes, have some secondary school experience.

Ms. Bonefesi, who earns a net income of about $38 a month running a home-based doughnut business, is convinced that, if she had a secondary education, she would have opened a little doughnut store by now. "All of us wish we could go backwards and go to school," she says.

That said, her own daughter Anne, one of the original AGE scholarship recipients, dropped out of school to get married. "I regret she did, but that's what happened," Bonefesi says simply.

"We were disappointed that Anne would not continue on to secondary school, yet we are not unduly discouraged," says Xanthe Scharff, AGE's founder. "No one can take away from Anne the year that she was at the center of her own universe and not on the periphery of someone else's."

'The happiest time'

Dyna Tambala is the young wife of Bowa's schoolmaster who attended – but did not graduate from – secondary school. Up until now, she has been the most educated female in the village. "They teach you so many things in school, but I did not learn enough about marriage and babies there," she explains without irony. Mrs. Tambala dropped out of school when she became pregnant at 15, and today has four kids.

"Secondary school was the happiest time of my life," says the schoolmaster's wife, putting her thin hand over her heart. "You learn about how the country works and about the world."

Her best subject was English, and although she gets no practice, Tambala remains almost fluent. "I can go to England where there are people who only speak English and be fine," she boasts.

She has not, however, even been to Blantyre, never mind Britain.

A passing dust storm whirls through the village, and Tambala – a baby tied to her back, another clutching her hand – scurries behind a hut.

She wishes someone had helped her finish school, she says, wistfully, as she takes cover. "Who knows," she says, "what could have been."

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