Malawi is known as the Warm Heart of Africa and it will always hold a very special place in my heart. I had the opportunity to live in Malawi for 4 months in 2010, volunteering with Engineers Without Borders. I was selected as a Junior Fellow to represent my University Chapter at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

I completed 8 months of pre-departure learning, including a week long workshop in Toronto, before travelling to Malawi in September 2010. My placement was based in Thyolo, which is small district in the southern part of Malawi that primarily farms and exports tea. I worked at the local government Water Office and lived in the village with my host family: Mr. and Mrs. Nzengo and their 3 daughters.

During my time in Thyolo I worked with the Water Office to develop a database of all of the water points in the district, their operational status, and rural population near each water point. This enabled the office to make evidenced based decisions on where to site new water infrastructure in the future and a way to prioritize maintenance on broken water points.

While the majority of my time in Malawi centered around my work placement, I did have the opportunity to travel around the southern half of the country. The Capital is located in bustling Lilongwe, which is where I arrived in the country, but Blantyre is the largest city in the southern half of the country.

During my 4 months, I had the opportunity to visit other volunteers in Zomba and to travel to Mangochi, which is located at the bottom of Lake Malawi, for a weekend music festival called Lake of Stars. I visited Lilongwe several times and travelled to the lake town of Senga Bay for a team retreat. Lake Malawi dominates much of the country and is known for being the most diverse freshwater lake in the world. It is an important part of Malawi’s ecosystem and economy as many fish as a livelihood.

I explored extensively around Thyolo, which is a beautiful hilly region filled with sprawling tea plantations. I regularly bused in to Limbe or Blantyre to shop and use internet cafes and I once visited the neigbouring region of Mulanje to go hiking on the mountain. Finally, near the end of my stay, I travelled into Zambia to go on a safari in South Luangwa National Park. Liwonde National Park is popular in Malawi for wildlife viewing, but because of population density in each country, wildlife is much more abundant in Zambia.

It is my trip to Malawi that originally inspired the creation of this blog. Check out my BlogRoll for a plethora of information and stories about my time there!