I couldn’t decide on one topic to write on for this week, so I decided instead to write a few short stories for you. They’re all pretty random but I hope you enjoy them!

It’s a long way to Lilongwe

Two weeks ago I spent the weekend in Lilongwe for a team meeting with the rest of the APS team from Malawi. Along the way I discovered my general dislike for traveling throughout Malawi via bus. The thing about the buses here is that they do not leave at scheduled times; they leave when every seat is full and there are people standing in the aisles. On my way back to Thyolo I was forced to wait for two and a half hours for my bus to fill up only to have it break down 25 minutes outside of Lilongwe.

I ended up having to sit on the side of the road for about an hour until another bus showed up, however this bus was already half full and had to fit another full busload of people on it! I’ve never experienced so much craziness trying to get on a bus before! As soon as the bus arrived everyone started running towards it; men started jumping up the sides of the bus to crawl in through the windows and women started passing their bags and children into the bus through the windows! The door was just a huge pile of people not really moving anywhere; so many people were trying to get through the door at once that there just ended up being a jam of people stuck halfway through the door. Luckily I managed to get a seat and spent the next 5 and a half hours crammed between the person next to me and the dozens of people falling around in the aisles.

Bugs

I’ve come to hate ants since I’ve been here. I know they’re small and harmless, but you can’t let them get away with anything or they will invade your space.  I went to the latrine during the night a couple of weeks ago and foolishly didn’t check my flip flops before I put them on. My feet immediately got really itchy but I didn’t think too much of it and continued on my way. When I got back to the house I finally shone my light down on my feet to see that they were completely crawling with ants and that the “itchyness” was actually dozens of ants biting me! I started trying to knock them off with my hands only to have them crawl up my arms and realize that they were crawling up my legs and the inside of my pyjama pants as well. It took me a while to get them all off me and then I spent the better part of 20 minutes on my bedroom floor killing as many as I could. Lesson learned though, never leave your shoes in an ant hill.

I also spent three nights last week being traumatized by the biggest spider I’ve ever seen in my life. The first night I saw it scurrying across my wall (this thing moves super fast and it jumps) and got quite a surprise! I tried to kill it with my shoe but lost track of it and ended waking most of my family up; they were pretty concerned because they thought I was trying to kill a scorpion, not a “harmless” spider. The second night I caught it crawling up the outside of my mosquito net right when I was getting ready for bed again. This time I resorted to spraying my entire room with doom and sleeping with the door open in hopes that it would leave during the night. No luck, the third night it attacked my net again, but this time I managed to corner it and didn’t feel the least bit sorry beating the hell out of it with my shoe.

Mmm, nnnnsima

I had to add multiple n’s to nsima because that is the way everyone says it in Thyolo, you’ve got to drag out a long n right at the beginning. I made nsima for the first time this weekend! My host mom taught me how to make it, it’s pretty easy. You start off with a pot of water, you let it heat (but don’t let it boil) and then you add some corn flour to it. It is still pretty watery and you stir it until it starts to boil. At this point you put the cover back on and let it sit for 5-10 minutes. Then you continue stirring and add lots of corn flour until you have the right nsima consistency.

We started off with the normal sized pot that my host mom always uses to make nsima. Nsima is very hard to stir though! I’m telling you, Malawian women have strong arms from stirring nsima and lifting ridiculous amounts of things on their heads. Anyways, my attempt to stir the nsima in the big pot was quite pathetic. My host mom ended up taking it from me and stirring it around. She wanted to make sure I could do it though so she made me make another lot of nsima in a smaller pot!  This time I succeeded even though everyone was dying laughing at the sad little azungu trying to stir a pot of nsima. In the end it turned out well though and my host mom would only eat my nsima!

Borehole Borehole

Over the last two weeks I got to go to the field twice to witness boreholes being repaired; both of the boreholes were Afridev handpumps. The first borehole had been broken for about a year, but there was another borehole just up the road so the committee wasn’t really very motivated to fix it until they found out an MP wanted to build a house where the broken borehole was. This motivated them to get their act together and fix it so that he couldn’t destroy the borehole to make room for his house. The pipe in the borehole had become completely clogged with rocks and dirt so the pipe had to be taken up and new pump rods installed. The MP ended up being pretty pleased because he will now have a functional borehole right in his backyard; he even paid for spare parts. On a separate note, this borehole didn’t even really need to be fixed because it was in the Boma and there was another one 300 feet away; it’s frustrating that there is an abundance of pumps in the Boma and no pumps in more remote communities.

The second borehole had been installed in 2000 and had been broken for about 4 years. I thought it was interesting that the community was repairing a broken borehole after 4 years, so I asked around about it. Apparently this community did not pay a treasurer any monthly fees for their water, but they would pay for spare parts when they were needed. This borehole had the pump rods stolen though and since these are more costly to replace the community did not replace them or fix the pump. However four years later an MP agreed to pay for the cost of the pump rods for this community since they were so expensive. According to one of the water monitoring assistants, if the community had regularly collected monthly O&M fees (which would be smaller than a lump sum for spare parts) they would have had enough money to purchase the pump rods. I have a bad feeling now that after having had spare parts donated to them by an MP; this community is not going to pay fees anymore for their water because they believe they can get what they need for free.

Hope you enjoyed my stories,
Maria

The most common water points that you can find here in Thyolo include AfriDev and Malda handpumps, taps connected to Gravity Fed Schemes (GFS), and shallow wells. It is the responsibility of the District Water Office to manage these water points and water point committees, oversee repairs and installations, and act as a consultant for donors and organizations siting new water points and rehabilitating old ones. Unfortunately, due to a number of factors, it can be pretty difficult for the water office to actually carry out some of these tasks.

In development water infrastructure has often been looked at from an engineering perspective, design and build, instead of as a sustainable service. In 2006, an $11.9 million dollar CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) funded project called COMWASH was completed in Thyolo. The goal of the project was to implement sustainable water, sanitation and health programs within the District. This included the construction of the four major gravity fed schemes that currently exist in Thyolo. COMWASH concluded in their final report that one of their key challenges in the project was the complexity of the GFS’s which subsequently was a challenge when organizing Water Point Committees in communities to manage the schemes once COMWASH left. The project also failed to engage the District Assembly in any substantial capacity building and had difficulty raising funds to cover the operation and maintenance costs of the GFS’s. The result of this project is that some of the GFS committees have fallen apart and the 107 tap scheme named Didi has not been functional for over a year. In fact, since January the functionality of all 4 GFS’s has never been higher than 50%.

Poorly managed and communicated projects seem to be the norm here in Thyolo. Donors are supposed to consult the water office before drilling any new water points, however a conversation with my co-worker the other day revealed that some donors fail to even notify the water office that they are constructing a new borehole, much less consult them on where new water points should go. The water office only discovers these boreholes have been drilled when they are later contacted about setting up a Water Point Committee or when the water point breaks. The Ministry has even drilled new water points without notifying the water office. They simply took instructions from an MP on where the MP wanted new infrastructure to go.

This is another serious problem within Districts in Malawi. MP’s can dictate where boreholes will go; they often promise new water points to communities as a way to get votes. The same communities are serviced over and over again while other communities are consistently passed over. Some communities will refuse to pay for a new water point because they believe that water is coming from their MP for free. It is policy in Malawi that donors who are funding new water points also fund Community Based Management (CBM) as well. This involves training for community members on the operation and maintenance of the water point and sets each community up with a treasurer responsible for collecting a monthly sum from each household to be used for maintenance and repairs of the water point. In some cases CBM training is not done at all or is done very poorly. I recently visited a borehole that had been broken for a about a year, it was only installed a year ago and worked for only one week.

To make a long story short, the district water office has a hard time keeping track of what is going on in Thyolo. Pair this lack of communication with an under resourced and underfunded water office and it’s easier to understand why unequal distribution and non-functionality is so prevalent in Malawi. This is why I am spending my semester here in Thyolo; the hope that I can help enable the district to coordinate, get their data in order, and use it make evidence based decisions when it comes to water infrastructure in Thyolo.

The water monitoring system that I am helping implement at the District is one that is both simple and effective. The concept of water monitoring is not new to development, however past systems have often involved GPS’s and complex software that is not within the computer skills of most water officers. The system EWB uses is a simple excel database that stores the number of functional and non-functional water points by village, group village, and traditional authority (these are just further divisions of the district). This information is then automatically entered into a simple pivot table that can show the water coverage rate and functionality rate by TA, GVH, and village. The really exciting part is that the program also generates a map of the district indicating areas with good and poor water coverage.

The information for this database is collected by Health Surveillance Assistants (HSA). Health is significantly more funded then water and has dozens of HSA’s who are already regularly visiting villages and collecting information on water and sanitation. Since Health is also interested in this information, the health office is usually willing to collect additional data on water points. Having this information allows the district to be able to make informed and strategic decisions when siting and rehabilitating boreholes and when working with MP’s and donors. It’s pretty exciting!

Anyways, that’s what I’m doing here in Thyolo; working to increase the coordination between the different areas of the district by getting everyone to work together on this new Water Point Monitoring System. Let’s hope it works! I’d love to know your thoughts, questions and advice. Also thanks for the questions on my last post; I have just made a note of them and should get back to you soon!

Tionana,
Maria

I’ve been getting lots of emails asking me about what life in Thyolo is like, so I think it’s time I filled you all in. I am currently living in a village called Nchima which is just outside the Boma. All district capitals are called Bomas in Malawi. I have currently been living with Mr. Nzengo, his wife, and their three daughters. They have a nice house, complete with electricity, a tv, their own private water tap, and a latrine. I have my own room and I am quite comfortable here. I was expecting that I would not have electricity when I was in Malawi, but I am close to the Boma and a lot of the houses here are hooked up to electricity. I’ve been keeping up with the news; my family is Catholic so we’ve been watching a lot of the Pope’s visit to the UK.

There are banana trees and mango trees everywhere here! Thyolo is known for its bananas; mango season hasn’t quite started yet, but I’m very excited for it. You can always see chickens and goats roaming the roads everywhere here as well; my family has 7 chickens that are always kicking around in the backyard, I feel bad for them though because I know one of these days they are going to end up on my plate (one already has).

I love exploring the marketplace here in Thyolo. It lines the main road through the Boma and it has everything you could ever need! On the left side of the road there are stalls upon stalls selling fruits and vegetables, and on the right side of the road there’s many shops selling soaps and toilet paper (very important to always carry this around with you because otherwise you won’t have any). After that there’s a couple stalls selling bike parts and then you get to the clothing section.

You have to leave the road and continue into the market if you are looking for clothes. If you’re wondering what happens to the clothes you donate, it’s pretty likely it ends up being sold on the side of the road in a developing country. There are piles upon piles of used western clothing being sold here! People here mostly just wear western clothing, except women usually wear a chitenge (an African cloth wrap) over their skirt as well. My favourite part of the market is where they sell all of the African fabrics. They are so beautiful; I could just walk by them for hours. I’ve bought two chitenge’s so far and I’m hoping to get an outfit made soon.

For the second part of this blog I’m going to fill you in on what a typical day usually looks like for me. I wake up at 6:00 every morning and watch my family bustle around the house getting ready for school. I usually take my bucket bath around 6:30 and then get ready for work. It took me awhile to figure out how to wash my hair with just a bucket of water! I started with the “dunk my head in and hope for the best approach”, but I’ve got it to pat now using just my facecloth. At 7, Mr. Nzengo leaves on his motorbike to bring his wife to work (she’s a primary school teacher) and I have a bit of time to myself. When he returns, Mr. Nzengo and I have a breakfast of hot chocolate, eggs, and peanut butter bread. After that I head off to work for the day.

Any number of things can happen at work. Sometimes I go to the field with a co-worker, sometimes I spend time teaching people computer skills, and sometimes I’m meeting with people, just planning my approach or getting to know my co-workers. I’ve only had 6 or 7 days of work so far, but I think things are going to pick up this week. I go home for my nsima lunch at 12; people usually take a 2 hour lunch, so sometimes I head back to the market for a bit or to the internet café.

Work finishes for the day at 5, I head home, have my second bucket bath, spend some time with my family, have rice for supper and usually go to bed around 9. Weekends are pretty relaxing, this weekend I headed out to the town of Limbe and bought myself a bike! I really like it and it’s definitely handy. Now I can get around faster and hopefully explore more of Thyolo. This weekend coming up I’m heading back to Lilongwe for my first APS team meeting. The African Programs Staff are long term volunteers in Malawi, since there are only two JF’s here during the fall we get to tag along on the APS meetings.

A few things now to clue up this blog; I haven’t checked in with you in a while on my physical, emotional and mental state. Physically I am still healthy! I had a bit of a rough go at the beginning of last week, but I am feeling well now; still no sign of Malaria! The sun really takes it out of me though and I’m always exhausted at the end of the week. Emotionally I think I’m starting to come down from the honeymoon stage on the culture shock curve and am starting to miss home a little, but I’m still charging forward now. Mentally I’m a bit frustrated with the speed at which things happen at work. It’s been challenging for me to get used to the slow pace of life at work.

In other news, I posted a few pictures to facebook, I find facebook uploads them quicker then wordpress does, so I think I may continue to post pictures on facebook when I have the chance. Anyways, thanks for all the support, prayers, and emails; keep them coming. Also, I love getting questions, so keep them coming as well. I’m working on a more thought provoking post on my work, so I like getting questions.

Much love,
Maria