Let the Games Begin!

On Wednesday, the Water and Sanitation department headed out to Halala village (where all the meet is Halal!), to pre-test the Focus Group and Survey instruments I designed to study the differential rates of composting toilet implementation in our various target villages. It was really a splendid day. I love being out in the village, greeting the people, hearing what they have to say...really a great reminder of why I'm in this field.

Mike took some pictures of our focus group and surveys in action, which unfortunately I don't have copies of at the moment, but when I do, I'll post. For now I will include a picture of our valiant Water & Sanitation Department for your viewing pleasure.

So next week will be WatSan in full force! We're doing one village per day, with Thomas and I running the focus groups, and Khumbo and Francis doing the KAP (Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice) surveys. I'm really excited - I was nervous about doing a focus group through an interpreter before the pilot, but it's actually a bit easier than doing it in English, since I'm both the moderator and the note-taker due to a lack of personnel. The translation gives me natural pauses to scrawl my notes and think of follow-up questions.

So, all of next week I'll be staying in Liwonde so that I can debrief the focus groups each afternoon with Thomas, and then head back to the villages early in the morning. While I'm there I won't have internet access, so this will be my last post for a week or so.

On another note, I received the box of completed surveys for my first project, so I'll have LOTS of data to keep me busy after next week's WatSan data collection.

Oh yeah, and I'm moving out of my house on Sunday, and we still don't know where I'm going to live when I get back to Zomba next Friday. I'm not worrying though - I know God's plans are best, so I'm not going to stress...

That's all that's going on! Check out some new pictures on the Flickr site by clicking on the slideshow on the sidebar.

God bless and keep you all for the next week - until we meet electronically again!

A Lunch-Time Stroll

Living a 30-second walk from the office has certainly reduced my level of physical activity on weekdays, when I don't have time to do the trek into town by foot. Even though I am moving in less than a week and will no longer have this problem of living too close to work, I decided I should go walking during my lunch break. Today was my first walk, and it was lovely.

I turned right to go up the hill. I met some lovely people while walking up, and then we went our separate ways at the top. The road I took was quite narrow, but paved. It has gentle left and right bends, and hills and valleys. I admired the poinsettia bushes on one property, and the banana trees on another. And then there are the bougainvilleas. They are gigantic lush trees with dark green leaves, streams of purple flowers cascading down, and an underbelly of vines reminiscent of Tarzan.

Since it is the dry season, the sound of a grasshopper hopping in the tall grass can make you think you're being tracked by some sort of wild animal. I had a little jump at one point, but soon realized I was not be stalked by a rabid rodent or a snake.

I came around one particular bend, near Edrinnie and Dennis' house, and my eyes feasted upon a clear view of the Zomba plateau.

On the walk back, I took a wrong turn down what I thought was a road, but was actually the entrance to a long drive-way. Then I thought I could circumvent the walk back by following a footpath that I assumed went down to the road. I was finally forced to turn around when I saw the brick wall a few hundred yards in front of me blocking the way.

I spotted a foot path that led up to a giant rock formation. I climbed the rocks and then looked out into the valley where Zomba lies. It was breath-taking. A beautiful, clear sunny day - I could see for miles, all the way to Mount Mulanje, the highest peak in Malawi (3 miles high!). I came down the rock formation, and listened to the plethora of life around. There were so many different bird calls all at once. It reminded me of the jungle feature on "Planet Earth". I was lucky enough to spot a bird in a nearby bush. It was only 3 inches long and had a shining, turquoise head and a bright orange breast. Beautiful.


I think I'll go again tomorrow...this time with my camera.

Where's the Line?

Today I feel the need to write a little bit about the internal battle that has been raging since even before I came to Malawi. Malawi has only intensified it. To not write about this would be to conceal something that I deal with everyday.

The battle is about wealth, poverty, and entitlement. For years in Canada, I felt a restlessness attached to my elite status as a North American. I wanted to sponsor an African child since I was 6 years old. I yearned for simpler living. I longed to share what I had with others.

It took a while for me to feel, however, that I was financially stable enough to start sharing the wealth I have. After all, most of the past years I have just hovered above the poverty line, being a student, living on a third of the salary of a typical, established Canadian a couple years into their career.

Then fast-forward to last Saturday afternoon. I was sitting outside in the shade with Mr. and Mrs. Sumani. Mr. Sumani is a security guard that guards the property I am currently living on. Each Saturday, Mrs. Sumani walks an hour to bring him lunch. Last Saturday it was nsima (corn porridge) with no relish (usually a sauce with cabbage, or if they're lucky, some kind of meat). Nsima is plain horrible, to my opinion, without relish. It's dry, and doesn't taste like anything. It's like tofu - just takes on the flavour of whatever you eat it with. That's what makes it good.

Anyways, a batique seller came to the gate. Batiques are like paintings, but made of a special material that they dip in different dyes to produce a nice picture or landscape. They are a bit more expensive than an average painting. He was selling the batiques at a good price - 1,000 kwacha each. That's about $7.50. I bought two for gifts, put them inside the house, and then continued my nice chat with the Sumanis. A few minutes later, Mrs. Sumani asked me how much I paid. It was an honest, non-malicious question. I didn't feel I could escape answering it directly, so I told her. If I had blinked, I might have missed it - a shadow crossed her face. As fast as it came, it was gone, but it is etched in my memory. I can imagine the thought that might have accompanied it - "2,000 kwacha for decorations? That is half of a minimum-wage monthly salary." I felt like a traitor or an impostor.

This short story is only one example of how this inner battle has intensified since I got here. So many thoughts run through my mind. First is that even on my meager salary of $340/month, I live like a queen. $340/month is roughly twice the GDP of Malawi, meaning the per capita earnings of Malawians in a year. But food is not cheap here. I went to Blantyre on Wednesday with my boss and his boss who were going on EI business. Food is cheaper in Blantyre. The food prices were pretty similar to what we pay in Canada. I really have to watch my money to be pay Canadian prices with $340/month. So that begs the question: How on earth do people survive on 4,000 kwacha a month?

Then there is the running water and the electricity. Sure, one might think it's been quite an adjustment. I have to boil and filter all my drinking water. I spent 3 1/2 hours with only candlelight last night because the power was out. I can't take a shower in my house because there isn't enough hot water, so I bathe some nights in under an inch of water. There is no heat in the house. It sounds like a nightmare, but already I have acclimatised. It isn't so bad. In fact, I am so fortunate. My neighbours cannot afford to buy candles. When the sun goes down, they are confined to the darkness inside their house, with no windows to keep their body heat inside. Violet walks back and forth from the borehole with a bucket of water on her head. She has probably never even had a hot bath in her entire life - mother of 8.

For us, having running water and electricity is just...normal. But as I have adjusted to life here, I am realizing that for two thirds of the world's population, it's not. That's the majority.

I once heard a sermon about giving. The Bible tells us that when we give, we should give generously. The pastor had two glasses of water with him on stage. One was enormous, like a stein of beer. The other one was a shot glass. He poured out twice the volume of the shot glass of water from the large glass. Then he poured 80% from the shot glass. Even though the volume from the shot glass was so small, he explained, it was the latter, rather than the former, which was a display of generosity. That image has stay in my mind for many years. I have tried to live by it ever since. We should not simply give out of our excess. True generosity means foregoing something yourself. It means sacrifice. And not to the point of ill-health - we aren't meant to waste away ourselves. But it's about equality - not eating meat twice a day when your brother has none at all. It demands a change in lifestyle.

I thought I had understood that before coming to Malawi, but what living here has done is challenge my view of excess. Yes, I give so that I cannot afford to buy music CDs and movies at my whim. I must plan for those purchases. But is that simply the excess to my excess? What is excess? What is need? What am I "entitled to" - anything that my African neighbours are not? The Bible says that the poor will always be with us, yet we need to open our hands freely. Freely - to what extent is that?

Check-Up Day

Today I got up early to head out to the old courthouse in Nkumba...where I was charged with stealing corn and sentenced to 2 months in prison.

Just joking.

Yes, so I got up early to head out to Nkumba, where I would be having a meeting with the field promoters I trained on Monday to see how they were progressing with their survey. The meeting was set for 9 am, and Nkumba is roughly 2 hours from Zomba. By the time we were rolling down the high-way, it was 8 am. As it turns out, we were only a half hour late instead of a whole hour, and everyone arrived right around the same time. We even passed by one promoter one her bicycle and picked her up. I let her sit in the cab and I sat in the back with the bike. It was my third time in the back of a pick-up truck (but first time in a skirt)!

One of the hold-ups to getting on the road was that I had to buy buns and a crate of pop for refreshments. Pop is the drink of choice here since it is one of the only drinks that the water is guaranteed to be safe. I loaded up a crate full of Coca-Cola, Sprite, and Fanta and asked the guy how much I owed him. 1,750 kwacha (roughly $13). Oh dear, I thought. I don't have 1,750 kwacha. And that seemed high compared to my memory. I told him I couldn't afford it and walked away. Then Harry, who was driving me to Nkumba, asked me why I didn't buy the pop. I said I couldn't afford it. He said something to the guy in Chichewa, which later he told me was "She's with me," and the price instantly dropped to 800 kwacha. Such is the life of an "azungu" (foreigner/European) in Malawi!

So crate of pop and buns in tow, we were off. The meeting was short, which is a way of saying that the check-up went really well! I asked each of them how many surveys they had completed. How many respondents had refused the survey (I think only 3 out of the whole bunch! Unimaginable response rates for North America...). Then I sat down one-on-one with each of them and looked through their surveys and respondent lists. After addressing a couple mistakes, we were all done. I was incredibly relieved to see that they all seemed to understand the skip patterns (i.e. "If respondent says yes, then go to question #..."), and that ID numbers and consent signatures were all there. Ah - the first project really is in full swing!

And so, I have this next week to get the second project focus group questions and attitude survey together, before pre-testing it in the village the week after. Everything is actually on schedule - the same schedule I made before I arrived on African soil. God has been gracious!

Tslani bwino! (Stay well)

Waiting

Since arriving in Malawi, I have had many opportunities to improve (or exacerbate) my patience. Fortunately, for the most part, all of the waiting has made me more laid-back rather than more uptight. It would not take long for an impatient person to perish here simply from the anxiety caused by waiting, because it seems that one is nearly always waiting for something or someone. I thought that today I would share some recent examples.

There are the general everyday things, like waiting for the power to come back on. Waiting two hours after dinner to take my malarial medication, and then waiting another 30 minutes before it is safe to lay down and sleep. There is waiting in the office for 10-20 minutes for a 1.9 Mb report to download. And lately, another daily waiting activity has been the suspense of waiting to see if the Malawian telephone networks will allow international calls - my parents, despite numerous attempts, have only managed to connect through 2 or 3 times since May 26th.

Then of course, there is waiting for people. Yesterday I held a training session for the health promoters that will be carrying out the I-LIFE survey I designed (it starts today actually!). We waited for an hour for everyone to show up. This was actually not too bad considering the promoters came by bicycle, and one ever 3.5 hours by foot. I have heard horror stories from co-workers about waiting for a bus that showed up 8 hours late. Today there was a management meeting, and Helen said that nobody showed up at all. Things like that aren't all that uncommon here.

My most pronounced waiting experience, however, was photocopying the surveys this past Saturday. I started on Friday afternoon at 3 pm. I was delighted to learn that the photocopier in our office did double-sided printing. Except for the requirement to let the photocopier rest for 10 minutes between runs, things were going pretty smoothly. I had almost finished 120 copies by 5:30, when the photocopier ran out of toner. Of course, after inquiring with the other office, I found out that, of course, we had been waiting a while for a new order of toner. Since the toner cartridge from the other photocopying didn't fit in the first photocopier, I trekked up to the other office (called the "upper office" since it is just up the hill from my office, the "lower office"). The photocopier in the upper office not only did not do double-sided photocopying, but as I quickly learned, needed longer breaks between runs, and was extremely susceptible to frequent paper jams.

I started photocopying at 9 am on Saturday morning, figuring I'd be out by lunch. After all, I only had 320 copies left - a job that would only take 30 minutes on the Health Canada photocopiers I had used as a summer student in Ottawa. Surely this job wouldn't take any longer than 3 hours.

At 4 pm (7 hours later), I walked out of the office, tired but happy. They were done. That is all that mattered.

So, in short (or in long), it took 9.5 hours to make 440 copies of a 3-page, double-sided survey. And I am thankful to God it only took that - imagine had the toner run out in the second photocopier!

So be careful if you ever pray for patience. God might send you to Africa!

A Comedy of Errors

I have been quite pampered during my few weeks here in Malawi. Sarah Eggert looked after me as if she were my own mother. She did my laundry, and put out fabulous meals night after night. Because of this, I have not had to cook at all. The weekend the Eggerts went to Lilongwe, I was going to make a lentil stew, but was invited to eat with the Jones family. And so, my debut as a gourmet Malawian chef was *supposed* to be two nights ago, on Sunday.

On Sunday afternoon, I got busy slicing and dicing myriads of veggies for a delectable vegetable chowder. All of the prep work done, I headed off to Sunday volleyball, only to find out that Josh MacDowell was in town and speaking at the university in 45 minutes. Ben and I rushed back to our respective houses, and my veggies stayed put in the fridge. Instead I plowed down a bowl Corn Flakes with milk that tasted like water - I haven't yet got the right ratio for the powdered milk. "I will cook the chowder tomorrow," I told myself, and hurriedly rushed off to the university with Ben and Mike B. As my old friend Chung would say, "Worth it!!"

And so, I got home after swinging by the Eggert house to pick up some donated food. I put all the veggies in the pot, along with chicken bouillon, water, rice, and seasoning. Everything was going just fine until - the power went out.

For those of you who have never been to Africa, the power goes out quite often here. In Zomba where I'm living, there are power outages mostly every day, sometimes twice. They usually last 1.5 hours and hit between 6-7 pm. If there is a second power outage, it is in the morning or around lunch, but those usually do not last as long.

So here I am with a partially cooked chowder, and a conundrum. What should I do? Wait a likely 2.5 more hours to eat? It was already 6 pm. Call the Jones family, and go there for dinner? Eat more bread and peanut butter?

No, I thought. I musn't be so weak and dependent. Most Malawians didn't even have power, and cooked all their food over a fire. Why not me?

And so [aha my friends, the power just switched on. Hurray!]

...now I am going to write this at the risk of sounding incredibly foolish, however at the time it seemed like a good idea...

I resolved to make scrambled eggs by frying them over a candle.

It didn't work as well as I thought.

The pan wasn't heating up, so I borrowed the pot cover from my chowder. About 10 minutes into the "egg-scapade", I heard a dripping noise. I walked over to my clay water filter, frying pan in hand. Nope, no water coming out of the spigot. Okay, back to business...holding my frying pan, holding my frying pan. More dripping? I walked over again to inspect the water filter. Indeed, water was seeping from where the filter portion and the bottom vessel contacted. The vessel had overflown, and there was a mini-flood on the floor. I turned around abruptly to put down the frying pan as the cover went flying off and onto the floor. Frantically, I picked it up and set the frying pan on the counter. I went over and grabbed the top portion of the filter and pored out its contents. This filter is extremely heavy, and not wanting to contaminate it, I could not put it down. And so, one-hand holding the 10-pound clay mass and the other rummaging for a pot and a ladle, I scooped out the excess water from the bottom vessel so that I could put the 10-pound clay top back on the bottom. I did damage control on the flood with my mop made out of a bamboo branch. That over with, I went back to my "frying", and twenty minutes later, decided that I was done (though the egg was not).

Still, I figured the egg was done enough, so I slapped it between two pieces of plain bread, and prayed a very thankful prayer, realizing what a struggle it is to prepare food without electricity, and grateful that I had any food at all.

Then it was time to clean up. All seemed well until I noticed a thick black residue all over the underside of the frying pan. I suppose it was carbon monoxide. I opened the windows and started to scrub. Even now [it is Monday night], I am letting the sink soak in bleach to remove black stains that I don't think will come off. My hands look like I've spent my day cleaning chimneys. At least I didn't set anything on fire with the candles as I walked around the house.

So that, in detail, was my first Malawian cooking experience.

Smatterings

If you never thought that Africa could feel cold - well, you're wrong! It's coming into the Malawian winter. Now let me qualify that. You'll still feel warm (even hot) and maybe perspire when you're out in the sun in the middle of the day. But outside of the sun, even in the daytime, I need to where long sleeves, a light jacket, and socks. At nightime it is even colder. I am very happy I have a nice warm sleeping bag to sleep in. I think of the people living around me, and how some of their houses have no glass in the windows - nothing to keep the warm air in and the cold air out. And no fancy sleeping bag.

So now I am living just two doors down from my office. The house is on a beautiful fenced property, and the house has tiled floors! (No concrete) I have the house to myself for now. On the weekends I will be sharing with a family who weekends in Zomba. Then I was supposed to get roommates for the month of July, but who knows now since it looks like I'm going to have to move out of this house in a month since Dignitas (the actual renters of this house) have just hired some new staff. Oh how I hope for a mutually beneficial delay for the move-in! I don't want to move again (the story of my life - my parents can attest).

Yesterday I had the wonderful opportunity to attend a joint Chichewa/English joint service in Chinamwali to celebrate the opening of the pastor training institution by EBCM and EI. All I can say is WOW! The church I am going to in Zomba is quite conservative in terms of expression during worship. The Chinamwali service was more what I had envisionned an African church service to be. There was awesome dancing and choral singing in Chichewa. There was time for the whole church to pray. The sick were invited to come up and the pastors prayed over them. It felt sort of like what I envisioned an early church experience 2000 years ago to be like - but more expressive. One thing I didn't expect was the honour that they give to their visitors. All the visitors were invited to stand in the front, and then as the whole church erupted into song, every single man, woman, and child marched up single file to shake our hands in welcome. Think of a congo line. I was blown away, and quite humbled by the experience.

An unexpected bonus yesterday (for those who have heard of Josh MacDowell), I got to attend an evening service at the University of Malawi. Josh MacDowell spoke (he is a famous American Christian author). It was pretty cool to see him live - and in Malawi of all places! He looked exactly like I had pictured. I wonder if that's because one of his books I read when I was a kid had a profile picture or something...

Work is clickety-clacking along nicely. So far I am on schedule with my target dates. I will be finalizing my survey for my first project this week, after I get it translated and pre-test it with some people in the neighbourhood. Then I will train the field workers in how to administer the survey next Monday, and they will go to town (or 'village' should I say?) and carry it out. All in all, there will be 362 face-to-face oral surveys conducted in the next 3 weeks by 7 field staff.

Finally, after a long hiatus of 13 years, I have taken up volleyball again (recreationally of course!). I may not be the greatest gal on the court, but you know what? I'm not too bad either! And it's lots of fun - a great chance to get to know some Malawian friends, and get to know some EI co-workers better.

Well, I think that's it for now. I plan to upload some new pics soon of my new place. Tsalani bwino!