Author: Maria

Malawi Bound

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Thyolo District

After 10 months of preparation and excitement I am finally on my way to Malawi! I left St. John’s yesterday morning at 6 :10 and I am currently in the EWB house in Toronto. I am spending 2 nights in Toronto and then tomorrow I leave for Malawi. I am flying through Washington, on to Ethiopia, and then to Lilongwe. I know it’s been a while since I have posted, so I want to check in with you all. Physically I’m a little tired but healthy; mentally I am excited to get to Malawi and start learning; emotionally I was pretty sad yesterday to leave my family and friends behind and I was a little bit nervous about the unknown, but I am finally on my way, so I’m excited!

I finally have some information for you on what I am going to be doing in Malawi for the next few months! I will be working in the Thyolo district which is in the south of Malawi. The capital of the district is also called Thyolo and there is approximately 500 000 people living within the district. I will most likely be staying in a village shortly outside Thyolo. As a bonus, Thyolo has internet cafes, a good hospital, and it is about an hour from Blantyre.

So what am I going to be doing? I will be working with the District Water Office (DWO), which is a part of the Malawian government, on a water monitoring system for the district. Basically the two main issues Malawi is facing with its water infrastructure is that many water points (boreholes, pumps, etc) are not equally distributed throughout the district and that many water points are no longer functional. Mapping the location of water points and their functionality provides the District Water Office with important information for drilling new wells and fixing non-functional ones. The software that has been used in other districts for water point monitoring is  quite interesting as well, you can read a bit about it on APS Owen’s blog.

Anyways, that’s about it for now, I’ll try and post when I  arrive in Malawi. I leave you with some interesting facts about Thyolo. It has quite alot of tea plantations and it’s a pretty hilly region which makes in a little bit cooler than other regions. I like this fact because the hot and dry season is now commencing in Malawi, so it is going to be quite warm when I get there. The rainy season begins in mid-november, so I’ll get to experience a bit of that as well.

Love Maria

Pre-departure learning – Part Two

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Working hard at pre-dep

One thing that most JF’s find themselves doing at some point throughout their placement is interviewing people who work in the field. In our workshop we discussed the importance of thinking about the questions you ask and framing them in the right way. If you ask too many leading questions, it is quite likely that you will simply receive the answer that you are looking for, but is maybe not the truth or entirely accurate. Finding the right open-ended questions to ask can give you a better idea of how things actually work in the field. To practice our questions we went around downtown Toronto for an hour to question people on the street on homelessness. It was a really interesting experience for me. Once I stepped a little bit outside of my comfort zone and talked to perfect strangers, I realized that most people were pretty willing to talk to me and had really interesting stories themselves! One of the most important things I noted was that people were usually more engaged in the conversation if I started the discussion with simply asking them about themselves and how their day was going. It was much easier to connect with someone once you know a little bit about them.

Ann mapping our case study on sorghum

We ended off the week with a case study on growing sorghum in Zambia. Sorghum is a cereal crop that grows really well in areas prone to drought. We started off by reading about an initiative that aimed to get farmers to diversify their crops by growing sorghum in addition to maize; we then had to evaluate the project, identify parts of the project that were essential to “get right” and parts of the project that were pretty risky. Then we had to interview farmers who had taken part in the project and evaluate what key things were hindering them from producing a grade A product instead of grade B. It was another opportunity to practice asking questions. While we learned a lot from the farmers and discovered some things that were not working, we still missed a lot of information from the farmers. Looking back on the experience I think we weren’t really listening hard enough to the farmers and what they had to say. After completing the case study and after talking to 2 or 3 of the farmers I think I had already decided in my mind what wasn’t working and why some farmers were only producing Grade B sorghum and I stopped listening to some extent. Discussing with the group after made me realize all the things I had missed and important questions I hadn’t asked. It definitely made me think about how to frame my questions better and to really focus on listening.

Finally, stay tuned, I should have some idea what I am going to be doing on my placement by the end of the month!

Love Maria