North Leeds Barrister and Chair of the Leeds Jewish Representative Council, Simon Myerson, has recently returned from Malawi where he trained the country’s top lawyers in advocacy.
Many members of our community will be familiar with Simon Myerson from his work as Chair of the Leeds Jewish Representative Council, and as one of our region’s leading barristers. Simon was recently asked to take his expertise abroad to Malawi to train government lawyers with the Basel Trust. He tells us how he became involved in the programme: “I taught advocacy for 20 plus years, and I teach it pretty well at all levels. There is a fantastic organisation called the Basel Trust, which is essentially funded by Western democracies to promote democracy in other countries. They’re heavily invested in Malawi, so I was contacted, pretty much out of the blue, and was asked if I would like to go to Malawi and teach.”
When he was asked to participate, Simon was immediately on board, though the long travel required to reach the country did concern him: “It was an easy decision to make in the sense of: Do I like teaching? Would I like to do it? Does it sound interesting? And then I looked at how you got there and it became a much more difficult decision. You can either go to Nairobi, Addis Ababa, or Johannesburg, and I needed to do it the quickest way, and I also needed to be there for Shabbat. We flew out to Nairobi on the Wednesday evening at 6.30pm from London and got there at about 5am local time. And then we had a seven-hour stopover. And then you fly about two and a half hours to Malawi, on a plane that stops at Malawi and then goes on to Zimbabwe, like a bus! Half of the passengers weren’t getting off the plane.”
Simon spent 10 days teaching in Malawi and was extremely impressed by the experience:
“It was amazing in all sorts of ways. Firstly, the people I were teaching were government lawyers. I had no idea how experienced they were. They were very impressive! It was a very productive teaching experience for both sides. I learnt a huge amount from them also and they told me they enjoyed it.
“The country is just amazing, but very, very poor. They are really trying to sort out corruption, which is difficult, but they are genuinely invested in it. They are supposed to be the politest people in Africa, and I have to say that everyone I met was just lovely.”
Naturally, teaching in an entirely different country did come with a few culture shock moments: “It is not rude to keep your phone on all the time and just to wander away to take a work call. If you forget to say please and thank you nobody says anything, but they stop listening to you. It’s also an intensely religious Christian country: every day starts with prayers. When they learnt that I was Jewish, they by and large left Jesus out.”
Simon also particularly enjoyed the two Shabbats he spent in the country, especially as he visited during the southern hemisphere’s winter, which provided mild weather and pleasantly warm temperatures: “Shabbat was really lovely. The hotel was more of a guest house. I rested in the garden, and when it got too hot I came inside to the lovely lounge area and read my book. And because it’s virtually equatorial, it was over by 6.30pm, unlike here where Shabbat goes out at 11 o’clock in the summer.”
Simon is set to head back in December to teach others how to deliver the course themselves, ensuring future lawyers can also take part.