Well I am now officially finished my work with the District Water Office. It’s weird to have finished everything up and to be in a position where I actually feel comfortable walking away from the District. I feel really good about the way everything has clued up; if you’d asked me three weeks ago about how I felt my placement was going, I might have told you the whole thing was going up in flames….

We spent September and October in contact with the Environmental Health Officer for Water and Sanitation from the Health Office. However when the Water Office finally got all their forms for data collection copied and brought them over to the Hospital, the DEHO (Head Health Guy) completely shut us down saying that we shouldn’t use a separate form for Water and that we should combine all the data on the one form Health was already using.

Now this is a much better way of collecting data; because the Water Office is so small, it is really good to have our program embedded in Health’s. My problem was that I didn’t put a whole lot of faith in the Health workers actually modifying their form to suit us and all I could see ahead of us was a long battle between Health and Water, both trying to collect and share data from the same forms. However, it would appear that I didn’t give the District enough credit and things came together really well.

I met several times with the two guys from Health who are responsible for managing the data. These guys were awesome. We had a quick excel training and they were whipping together pivot tables and graphs in no time! They had been trying to create a database for Health in MS Access and were having a lot of trouble. They were really excited to try modifying EWB’s database. So we sat down for a few hours and set up a database for them, modified the current Health form, and now all Water has to do is copy and paste their data into the Water database! We even managed to get our hands on data that was collected this quarter and so the Water Office is diligently working away on data entry.

So in the end it all worked out better then I imagined it could. Because the whole thing is embedded in Health it should be a lot more sustainable because now Water (who is significantly less funded) won’t have to be copying forms and tracking down the forms from Health. I was also quite happy to see communication finally happening between the Water, Health, and Planning Offices. They all agreed on a WPM protocol and on roles and responsibilities. They actually go back and forth to each others offices now to talk about stuff. Might not sound like a lot, but believe me, it’s progress for Thyolo.

The Water Office will still continue to need some support every now and then from a long term volunteer and I’m not sure how long they will remember their training about using data to make decisions, but I’m pleased with their progress. So that is the conclusion of my work in a nutshell. Thyolo District finally has a Water Point Monitoring System up and running and they have hopefully gained some useful skills.

I guess some of you are probably wondering now what I’m going to do in Malawi for the next little while if I’m finished work. I just returned from Senga Bay (the Lake!) where there was a retreat/team meeting with the Malawi Watsan Team and the Zambia AVC team. It was my last time at the lake and I quite enjoyed it. I’m back in Thyolo now and tomorrow I am going down south to stay in a rural village for a few days. I want to stay in the village so that I can really understand what it’s like to live in a remote village in Africa/Malawi. I’m pretty excited for it. I’m a little bit ashamed of how little chichewa I’ve learned, so this will be a good time to learn a little bit more seeing that no one in the village speaks english.

After that I’m dropping back to the Boma for a day to say goodbye to my family and my co-workers. Then it’s back to Lilongwe to catch a flight back to Canada! I’m staying in Toronto for three days when I get back to debrief and I arrive in St. John’s at Midnight on December 18th. So yeah, that’s my schedule for the next two weeks. I’ll make a post after my village stay and then I’ll see you all in a few weeks!

Much love,
Maria

I think it’s time I shared some of my religious and spiritual experiences here in Malawi with you. As I’ve mentioned before (I think) Christianity is the majority religion here in Malawi; approximately 70% of the population practices Christianity. I’m not sure what percentage of Canadians associate themselves with Christianity, but I imagine that whatever that number is, many of that percentage doesn’t actively practice Christianity. I don’t find that to be the case here in Malawi.

From my experience, pretty much all Malawians who practice Christianity go to church every Sunday, pray, and trust in Jesus to protect them and their families from day to day; they unwaveringly trust in God to provide for them. Christian and gospel music and dancing is much more popular and I’ve heard a couple of songs my church sings in Canada on the radio (Geoff Moore’s ‘He knows my name’ anyone?). One message I’ve heard preached to Malawians is that “their individual situation is an opportunity to be a witness and that others will find salvation from their situation.”

As someone who would call themselves one of Canadians actively practicing Christianity, I was very interested to experience the faith of Malawians. I think that being a Christian has definitely helped me to bond with my family; because we have little in common and because I can never escape white privilege, there’s something powerful about being able to meet in the middle and share the same core beliefs. I’ve been quite moved being able to hang out with the kids and have them sing “I have decided to follow Jesus” and to then later play some songs on guitar for them that they sing in church.

Over the past few months I’ve really been looking for God in Malawi, but I have to admit that I was finding it difficult to find him. I’ve been going to the Salvation Army church in Thyolo, but the entire service is conducted in Chichewa and so I wasn’t getting a whole lot out of it after the initial excitement. However this morning I felt incredibly moved by the service and the display of love and passion for God shown by Malawians.

Church usually starts at 10 and is attended by about 15 people on average. There’s tambourines, a drum, and lots of singing and dancing. I got quite a surprise at the scene that met me when I arrived at church this morning though. There must have been 100 people lining the road in Salvation Army uniforms and SA chitenges and there was an actual brass band! (very exciting for me – I’m sorry if I confuse some of you with Salvation Army references now). It turns out that there’s a new District Commander for Blantyre Division and so people from churches all throughout Blantyre and Thyolo had travelled to the Boma to celebrate.

It was a service of energetic dancing, singing, and fellowship. What really moved me though was at the end of the service each corps had the opportunity to present a gift to the Commanders to welcome them to Malawi and help them get settled. As each corps name was called out, everyone would get up and dance excitedly to the back of the church to grab their gifts. In true Malawian fashion, huge stalks of bananas, baskets of tomatoes and cassava, and chickens were all brought to the front of the church as people sang happily. My friends at the church made sure I knew what was going down and when we were called I got to dance up to the front of the church with them and offer the couples dollars of kwacha that I had, feeling so inadequate next to such generosity.

A bunch of bananas or a chicken are not small gifts for a Malawian family, they are huge gestures of generosity and thanks, and the manner in which people are excited to give them away amazes me! Anything you give away is money you will not make. So it was there, in a small brick church, on a wooden bench, that I found God in Malawi; it was pretty simple. Not that I don’t see evidence of Malawian generosity every day, but it was presented to me in a different way this morning. Malawians may be poor by our Canadian standards, but they are so rich in spirit. I hope your internal image of Malawi, and dare I say Africa, is not one of desperation, but one of passionate, energetic and intelligent people that unfortunately lack opportunity and security in their lives.

I had no intention of doing this, but on that note, I’d like to make you all aware that EWB has kicked off it’s holiday campaign and that I, in turn, have also kicked off my own personal campaign to fundraise for our overseas programs. I have learned so much from this experience and I would formally like to ask you for your support. So I’m asking you to support me and EWB’s work like Malawians support each other and in Malawian spirit, (if you feel so inclined) to support me generously 😉      (I promise this entry was not a plot to get donations!)

To donate or to read more about what EWB actually does overseas, go to https://perspectives.ewb.ca/mariaadey

Thank you all so much for the support you’ve been offering me already, I appreciate it enormously and I am very excited to see you all again in three weeks.

With much much love,

Maria

Everyone seemed to like my short stories entry, so here I go with Short Stories Part 2:

Zambia

After spending 90 days in Malawi on a visitors visa you are required to leave the country and then re-enter it. So this past weekend me and my fellow JF Don headed up to Zambia to take in a safari! I was a bit of a rebel when we were crossing the border; I forgot my yellow fever card so I had to sneak Don’s and use that instead, luckily they didn’t look at the name! I kind of wanted to argue with the guards though because Malawi is not a yellow fever country and so I shouldn’t have needed it; Trevor told the JF’s not to do this though and I was a good JF and listened. Anyways, Malawi is known as “the warm heart of Africa” and apparently Zambia is known as “the real Africa” because of it’s unspoiled wildlife. I found this easy to understand driving through the Eastern part of Zambia because there is a lot more open space in Zambia as there’s a lot less people living there (about the same population as Malawi).

We stayed in South Luangwa Park in a chalet that was located right on the Luangwa River. The river is absolutely beautiful but it was really low because it’s the end of the dry season; we saw some crocodiles swimming down there though! In the park we saw giraffes, elephants, zebras, buffalo, monkeys, baboons, impala, hippos, and all sorts of other animals; we even got to see a pack of lions! We saw them once lying around in the shade and then later in the night we were about 6 feet away from them when they were hunting! It was a little scary, but pretty cool! I’m going to try and post some pictures on facebook soon.

Culture Exchange

So my sisters have been teaching me some of the stuff they do for fun. They taught me this skipping game a little while ago that involves two ropes that are tied to two trees; you have to hop back and forth between the rope from one foot to the other, it’s kind of hard to explain so I’ll try and get a video! They also play regular skipping games and they have all their own chichewa rhymes for them! The girls also taught me this card game they love to play that’s a lot like crazy eights. Instead of 8 cards you get 4 and the ace is the card that has the power to change suit. In this version the 8 reverses the direction of play and jokers are pick up 4.

In turn I’ve made a couple of “Canadian” meals for my family. It was challenging to find something I felt comfortable cooking over a fire though! First I made them french toast with maple syrup that I brought from home. Watching them eat the maple syrup was pretty funny; my family thought it was honey and they spread it really carefully over their toast with a knife as if it was butter! They found it really sweet. The second time I made them spaghetti; it had an interesting spaghetti sauce because I basically chopped up and threw in every vegetable I could find at the market. The girls loved it though!

On a side note, I finally learned how to spell my sisters names: Tacondwa is the oldest at 13; Pemphero is in the middle and is 9, and Nicky is the youngest at 6.

Frustrations Abound

I had a short period where I was getting pretty frustrated with work and the way things happen around here. Everyone is really excited about collecting data on water points and I’ve made a lot of progress with training in the office, however not a lot of progress was being made on actually collecting data. Collecting the data involves getting the health office, water office, and planning office to coordinate. They’ve all admitted that coordinating between sectors is a weakness and that they need to meet and talk about it; however because they’re so poor at coordinating it is really hard to get them all in the same room. So things have been moving very slowly as it’s hard to track people down and even when you schedule meetings, people often don’t show up or show up late.

The second thing that was frustrating was trying to get the data collection forms photocopied. It’s really cool because the Water Office is running Water Point Monitoring without an external donor, which is quite unique for them to pilot a program like this on their own. It’s quite frustrating though because the Water Office’s budget for each month is very small. A lot of the budget goes toward fuel which is very expensive here ($1.86 CAD per litre). So when we were trying to get the forms photocopied at the end of the month it turned out there was no money left to pay for them until the following month. Basically the water office was held up for over a week because they didn’t have $27 CAD to pay for photocopying. It’s incredibly frustrating to not have a functional system because of such a small sum of money. The good news is we now have the forms, the bad news is my meeting was cancelled again today when Health never showed up.

Keep an eye out

It was a rough day at the Limbe bus depot last week. I was coming back from Blantyre on a minibus and I had to stop at the Limbe bus depot to get a bus back to Thyolo. As you’ve probably gathered from my previous entries, bus depots are crazy! So as I was trying to get off the bus a lot of people were crowding me trying to get on the bus. There was one guy in particular who was standing right in front of me and would not move out of my way, next thing I know I feel my pocket go really light and I see this guy stalking off through the crowd. That’s right, I got pickpocketed!

It took me a minute to realize that this guy had stolen my phone, when I did I started calling after him but I couldn’t follow him because there were so many people crowding me. One guy who works on a minibus asked me what was wrong and I pointed at the guy walking off with my phone and told him that he had stolen it. The bus worker looked at the guy, sized him up, sighed tiredly, and said, “okay, I will go get it back”. So he disappeared off while I checked the minibus I was on to make sure I hadn’t just dropped it (I wasn’t 100% sure it had been stolen). Anyways, a few minutes later the bus guy came back with my phone! I was amazed that I had gotten it back so I thanked him profusely and went to find my next bus. The reason I say it was a rough day at the bus depot though is because about 3 minutes later I saw two other guys get in a fist fight next to my bus that almost involved one guy breaking a beer bottle over the other guy’s head! Thankfully a bunch of people pulled them apart though. (I swear Malawi is a safe place though Mom!)

Anyways, keep the questions and emails coming!
Love you guys,
Maria