Week 6 (28th- 4th May)
Well this week has been exciting. Things are really happening…and ahead of schedule!
Our new volunteer Howard arrived on Thursday and is going to be a great help I'm sure. He's a builder and generally practical kind of person, so he's going to work on site this week and see how they do tings and then I'll probably give him a small project of his own to do. He brought with him the footballs and netballs donated from the Great Football Giveaway, which are going to be fantastic! I'm going to present them to the school next week and they are going to go CRAZY! There are a couple of footie kits in there too that I think I'm going to save for our sports project (I'm coming up with a name). We'll give the kits to a couple of community football teams after we get enough out here.
He also brought marmite, for which I am eternally grateful…..
I was still a quite nervous about the water situation mid week as the water tank was still not up yet. We've bought a new tank from VJ and we had to fit ion the proper inlets and outlets and overflow pipes. Luckily, it all got sorted on the Wednesday and I brought it up here ready for the guys to put up on Thursday. I had forgotten that Thiursau was a public holiday, labour day, and no one was woring and I wa stressed since the plumber from Kawalazi was coming up the next day to fit all the pipes properly. I didn't want this problem to continue on for much longer. Luckily, the guy, Mr Kamanga, was a legend and came on Thurs anyway to put up the tank with the ease of a pro. Being Africa and all, the plumber didn't come on Friday in the end, but rocked up on Saturday morning earrrrlyyyyy (whilst I had a monstrous hangover) and fixed it all up. We now have running water to the houses and at the clinic. The only problem remaining is to sort out the overflow outlet which is too small to handle the pressure of the solar pump that pumps water to the tank. Francoise came back this week though and will handle that next week. The important thing is that we now have water directly at the site and a pipe from our excellent plumbing system brings water right into the trough!
I remember in Phase one having to do the hellish water runs in the Beast from a very scarce stream not too nearby. I hated those runs and they were such a waste of fuel! The water borehole pump would break all the time, the community were being difficult as always and we had a major pressure with water. This plumbing system has changed our lives. Thank you dad and Francois!
The only other stress now is the water borehole, which is taking ages to get around to us. Either the bloody compressor breaks down her, or the rig breaks down there….it is very long, as they say. Jim has assured me that the rig will be with us next week and I put down the down payment this week. We've signed a contract and everything but we just need to get this sorted! This time, I assure you, I will be present the whole bloody time to monitor and be a pain in the ass.
So, I've been alone most of the week as the boys are in Lilongwe sorting out our vehicles. Francois and I are buying one for our business and I'm also purchasing a 3 tonne truck for myself. Ill loan it out to the project and my business to cover costs and I'm positive that this will greatly improve our quality of life! Transport is one of our main stresses here, is VERY expensive and I reckon this is a great investment. You can't rely on your friends forever, or you wear out your luck! Francois and Howard arrived on Thurs anyway with our new jeep, which we have yet to name and Happy arrived on Sunday in Mzuzu with my new truck, which is just beeeeaaauuutiful!
Kelvin has been a star this week and his team have collected over 30 tonnes of sand. The new arrangement seems to be working and we're happy as ultimately sand is MUCH more expensive to buy than that. It's part of their contribution though and I think they understand that again. On Sunday, much to my delight although it was a tedious process, Kawalazi's tractor came again to help us shift the sand and we got over 25 tonnes to the site! It was a long day and we all pitched in shovelling with kawlazi's boys who were great, though a bit lazy at times. That's why you have to oversee things like this. If we had left them to their own devices, they would have taken 3 hours for lunch and only did about 2 trips. I was very happy with the result and next week we won't be so pressured. Now it's just the quarry…mmmm
So, all in all, things seem to be going smoothly, though of course, with all the usual small hiccups. Happy and I are much more relaxed at the moment as we are looking ahead and we now know what needs to be done. I remember being amazed at the beginning of this all at how much sand a construction like this needed and we were very pressured, especially as we didn't know who we could rely on. We've done so much work over the last 10 months and established so many relationships with people, it's been great. I tell you, the kids are amazing…it's such a privilege to see them there learning and I can't wait to get the older years in there. I feel that then we as volunteers will have more of a role as we can directly target the youth and start our schemes in the community centre. Oh yes, I can teach them the mad tactics of raving and dancing with style! haha
On a slightly contemplative note though (sorry!), I wonder what it would be like to do a project like this in other African countries and whether this kind of project will work in say, Tanzania or Mozambique. I mean the people of Malawi are unique, literally amazing and so genuine. Yes, this project has driven me almost mad, but I've learnt a lot about how to go about this type of adventure. There are many ways to do projects out here, but I really do believe, now more than ever, that we've done it the right way. We've had to modify many things of course, (one major one was TIME. I thought I could do it in 4 months only! HAAAA), but we can see the pride in people's eyes here and they all know me and Happy personally because we make an effort to interact with them directly. The community contribution method is HARD because ultimately people have other things to do (although here it sometimes looks more like lazing around and drinking most of the time!) or they can't be bothered. It's the same in the UK or anywhere. But I think it's worth it to try and push it, and one has to reconcile themselves to the fact that not everyone will want to get involved. This is hard to accept at first, especially when you're faced with SO many pressures, but you have to work with those people who are active otherwise you'll go mad trying to convince people who will just lie to you to get you off their backs.
I think that's what I found so hard about Phase one; that initially I just couldn't accept that people didn't want to help us build THEIR school. But the hard work and the long meetings and hours have been worth it in the end, at least from what we've experienced so far in this Phase of working with the community. They know their roles and how we work and what we require from them. Of course, we're at an advantage now. We've got the sports project to encourage the youth to help us out and we're looking into building a secondary school, providing the government are willing to support it. This is all depending on the community's attitude to this phase and so far so good. I certainly am not going to come back again and start something new with out a mountain of bricks to get started with. Or come back without the land issues clarified and agreed upon in advance…. Those all seriously delayed us before and will not happen again!
I got an email the other day from a lovely lass I met in Nkhata Bay last month who lives in Tanzania. I spoke with her at length about doing projects and my experiences here. She's now been inspired to do one of her own, which is fantastic and I'm really intrigued how she gets on out there. I haven't done too much research on projects in the other African nations and it will be interesting to see how she does hers and how it differs from here. Many NGO's and international Aid Agencies agree on the 25% contribution method now but I'm not so sure how many actually implement it. It's hard to do and hard to monitor, especially if you're so big. The advantage of being small is that you can establish relationships with the communities and people there because you're always present, such as in my friends project in Usisiya (www.temwa.org). They are doing things quite similar to us here, and even did the Tevet scheme as well back when they first started out.
When I was doing my research for this project, I managed to meet with a lot of the top guys from various government and international agencies and found that they were quite willing to share their information with us. Perhaps this was because they didn't perceive us as a threat and the information they shared was already being promoted. But on the whole, between themselves, big Aid organisations are very competitive with each other. It is an industry of course and therefore a business and with that comes rivalry. But, it will be interesting to see how these relationships change over the next ten years. Whether they become more competitive or whether they work together more. Already aid has changed enormously over the last 25 years or so and has learnt a lot through working with different types of regimes, often corrupt that lead to unstable countries. But still a very small amount from donor countries is spent on international development, much less than was agreed on in the summits. They say they need more time…but how much time is this? They've been saying this for years, so how do we move forward. Is the answer trade? Is it injecting more money, or even capacity building? These ideas aren't anything new, but you think about it a lot when you're out here working on the ground and see the desires and needs of the people here, whether in town or country.
Even the villages are changing now at quite a quick pace. From when I came here, more people have mobile phones and want them. They dress quite well, especially on Sunday, and some people even have generators. It's definitely a different situation from 2 years ago, when of course they had the terrible famine here. What's even worse is the deforestation that I can see worsening even in the short time I've been here. We're gonna save the trees! But change can be both good and bad and I just hope that the Malawians go down their chosen path in the best possible way and retain their culture and personality. It's easy to get dazzled by the prospect of phones and cool clothes, but I just hope that they learn from the lessons that we've learnt in our countries and don't make the same mistakes.