Ndabwerera ku Malawi

Living in Malawi for two years has taught me to live by the phrase, “plan for the worst, hope for the best.” This is exactly the approach I took when coming back here a few weeks ago. When I left Malawi for home in December, we had many different projects that we were in the middle of, and I flew back to the States concerned about how things would be going when I got back. Coming back to Mitundu, I was prepared to encounter some disaster that had happened while I was gone. Locusts destroying all of the crops in the area, my house getting broken into, a close friend dying, or the theft of the supplies for the girl’s hostel construction-I wasn’t going to be surprised if any of these things happened. It turns out that everything worked out fine while I was gone, not great but fine.

The hostel that we have been working on for almost two years now should be completed within the next month or so. Hopefully, it will start housing students by April, when the third term of the school year starts. In December, we were concerned about not having enough cement. We purchased enough cement, but the problem was that we purchased more than was available—in the whole country. One characteristic of a third would country: frequent shortages of basic commodities such as cement, fuel, electricity, and…food. Until now will still don’t have the cement that we paid for, but it looks like we already have enough to finish the hostel, just not the kitchens or bathing area. The girls will have to be creative until we get the later constructed.

Our food security project for PLHIV is going along about as good as I could have hoped for. We’ve spent the last few weeks since I’ve been back visiting the various groups that we are assisting. There are no major problems, just little things like one group’s beans not growing at all (this raised suspicion that the expensive hybrid beans that we gave them were never planted at all, but redirected elsewhere (ie stolen)), two groups having squabbles about lazy members that don’t show up to the field to do work, and another group with a field infested with witch weed-a nasty plant that starves maize of nutrients in the soil.

As you may or may not know, malaria is a big problem in Malawi, especially this time of year during the rainy season. One effective way to prevent the transmission of this bug is to sleep under a bed net, which prevents the malaria vector-a specific species of mosquito that only feeds at night-from sucking your blood and at the same time spitting some plasmodium (malaria) into your bloodstream. We wrote up and submitted a proposal in November to get 2000 (as a start) nets that we wanted to distribute to children under the age of five in rural areas where access to nets and halfway decent healthcare is hard to come by. When I left in December, we hadn’t heard anything back about this, and I kind of lost hope and forgot about it. Therefore, it was a surprise when I opened up the door to my little house and found 1000 bed nets inside. We had originally planned to store the nets at the local hospital, but recently there’s been a large turnover in staff at the hospital, resulting in disorder and confusion, so someone though it would be best to just throw all of the nets in Bryan’s house. It turns out this was the right decision to make, and the bright side to only receiving half as many nets as we requested is that I still have a little bit of room to walk around in my house. After some initial confusion and multiple changes of plans, we’ll start distributing the nets this week.

Another potential crisis that I had my eye on was the electricity in my house. I was worried that it would be cut because I haven’t paid my bill for over two months now. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the lights turned on when I first got back to my house. I was also surprised to see that I hadn’t received a bill for either December or January. To me, this was a cause for concern because ESCOM (the Malawi government’s halfway functioning company that has a monopoly over the country’s electricity) is know for causing bizarre fluctuations in one’s account balance, cutting one’s electricity out of nowhere, and doing other things to inconvenience their customers. To avoid any misunderstandings that would blackout my house for an indefinite length of time, I made a trip to their office to figure out what the heck was going on. It turns out that, from ESCOM’s perspective (which is the only perspective that really matters), I overpaid my November bill by about MK3500. I’m pretty sure this didn’t happen. I guess poor customer service and poor accounting sometimes works in the customer’s favor. Now I don’t have to pay my bill until around May!

So things are moving along. Obviously, they could always be moving along better, especially in this crazy place, but most of us are managing to live respectable lives.

"If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people." Chinese proverb