Today is my last full day in Malawi; I’m leaving tomorrow afternoon. I can’t believe that 4 months have gone by so quickly! I’ve had a very eventful last week though. On Monday I went to live in a remote village that’s about 2 hours away from the Boma. I stayed in a small brick house with a thatched roof with a 17 year old girl. The village was a big change for me because there was no electricity, no private tap, I slept on the floor, and the latrine was a little bit sketchy (and was inhabited by giant mutant grasshoppers at night).

I enjoyed living in the village though; my Chichewa definitely improved and I had the opportunity to get out to the farm to plant maize and groundnut. I had a particularly eventful night when I woke up because rain was dripping down on me through the thatched roof. So I was resituating myself when I looked right and saw  this huge cockroach right outside my mosquito net. So I was like, “hmm…I think I’m going to kill that”, so I turned left to look for my shoe and found myself staring at a snake as it crawled up my wall. So my priorities changed a little bit and I woke up my roommate and we killed the snake by whacking it to death with a piece of wood!

Unfortunately it rained the entire time I was in the village and I learned a very valuable lesson; Never go to a remote village during rainy season when you are on a timeline (needing to get back to Lilongwe for my flight). A truck was supposed to come and pick me up on Thursday, but it was really delayed because of the rain and didn’t get to the village until 8:30 that night. I wanted to stay in the village and go back in the morning because the roads were really slippery, but the guys who came to pick me up really wanted to get back, so we decided to brave the hilly, slippery, Thyolo roads. Bad Idea.

Trying to get back to the Boma was pretty much the biggest nightmare of my life. I can kind of laugh about it now, but at the time it was awful. Lets just say my car ride back to the Boma involved lots of night time slippery driving, running out of fuel in the middle of no where, accidentally driving into a ditch, and having the starter motor give out while we were trying to get out of the ditch. So yeah, around 1:00 that night we gave up on getting home and I slept in the back of the truck in the middle seat between two guys. It was so uncomfortable. In the morning we had to hire some villagers to help push us out of the ditch and to come with us to the Boma so that they could get out of the truck every time we had to go up a hill and help push the truck up. So we basically walked the truck halfway back to the Boma. 70 kilometers and 14 hours later I made it home.

I spent the rest of the day saying goodbye  to everyone and spending time with my family. I was quite sad to say goodbye to my family. Over the last 2 months I really feel like I’ve become a part of their household and my 3 sisters have become an inspiration to me. They motivate me to continue working hard in development so that they can maybe grow up to live a better life. One where they will finish school and grow up to be whatever they desire. My family gave me a Chichewa name on my last day there and told me that I was always welcome back in their family. My Chichewa name is Chimwemwe Nzengo; Chimwemwe means Joy.

I arrived in Lilongwe on Saturday and I’ve been spending the last few days clueing up some stuff. Yesterday I went and visited the Village of Hope. When I was 14 I helped to fund the building of a house for  orphans that would be built as one of many houses in a village in Malawi. The Village of Hope was one of my first experiences with development and it was what got me really interested in working in Malawi. It was nice to end my trip by the going to  the village that inspired me in the first place. I got to see the house that was built in 2004 and meet the children that live there. I was also surprised to find out that all of the houses (12) that are currently in the village have all been funded by Newfoundlanders! The houses were all named after Newfoundland communities like Lewisporte, Grand Falls, Gander, Port aux Grave, etc, and they flew the Canadian flag in the middle of the Village! It was a special experience for me.

And so here ends my Malawian adventure. I wish I could put into words what this experience has meant to me. I feel so privileged to have had the opportunity to live with Malawians and to be able to learn, and start to understand, their culture. I’m happy about what I accomplished here, and my co-workers were very thankful for all I did. I feel though that the people here have taught me so much more, and have done so much more for me than I could ever do for them. I’m very sad to leave but I am excited to come home and continue to share my experiences. Thank you to everyone who has followed along with my blog over the last 4 months and to everyone who has offered me support throughout the last year. I really appreciate all the support and prayers I’ve received over the last few months and I’m looking forward to seeing you all again soon.

Love, love, love
Maria

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