My birthday and heading home!

Well, this is it. The end of my 3 months here and the past few weeks have just flown by! I finished off all the projects I could and handed on things I couldn’t finish. I did manage to get a new mattress for the ante-natal room at the health center – the women there were sleeping on barely covered mattresses and two beds had no mattresses at all.

Last Thursday I celebrated my 27^th birthday in true Malawian style!! Louise, Kirsten and I were invited to lunch at Agnes’s house. Agnes is a local lady who was baking and bringing our bread daily but was recently employed by RIPPLE to be our evening cook/help. We went to her house in the morning to watch her in her bread making process. It is amazing what she did with no oven – the whole thing is done in a straw/brick hut and baked in a brick oven. Very impressive as even with a real oven at home I can never do it right! Around 9am, it was time to catch out chicken for lunch. Her whole family spread out in the bush looking for this chicken, who probably knew what was coming because he had gone missing! It took them about half an hour of hunting through the brush and then chasing the poor thing to capture it. It was promptly beheaded, plucked and cooked with tomatoes. I have never spent a birthday helping to pluck a chicken but it had to be done! We had a lovely lunch of chicken and rice. I have to say though one of the hardest things that I’ve dealt with is the real poverty in the families where we lived but also their sense of welcome and generosity. Getting this chicken and cooking it for us was expensive and a massive deal for Agnes, she was so proud of what she had to offer us and made us eat most of it. It was heart breaking afterwards to watch her children suck on the bones. We tried to leave as much as we could but it is insulting for them for us not to eat it. It really was a special birthday. We had a lovely chocolate cake in the evening and the other volunteers gave a painting of Mwaya Beach by our local wood caver/painter.

My other brilliant birthday present was a hot shower! Our boiler has been broken for the last 4 weeks and so it has either been a cold shower or a bucket wash – take your pick! But we got the boiler back on my birthday, it was amazing!

The last weeks flew by. I got sick again! Another fever bug – but this times just a tummy bug, luckily!! I spent the last few days at Mwaya in bed or in the bathroom. Not great but what can you do?

And now I am back in Lilongwe waiting to fly out tomorrow. It was really sad to leave Mwaya. I have met some amazing people and experience some incredible things that have greatly touched me and changed my life. I am going to continue to try to fundraise (I have another half marathon in the fall) and so if anyone wants to help, it will always be appreciated. I do look forward to returning home and back to some of the luxuries that a wait me but I leave here with a lot of sadness. It is a lot harder to say good bye to people who you’ve met when you know keeping in touch with them will virtually be impossible. But I hope to be back to visit at least!

xxx

An interesting journey back and then the work continues!

I had a HORRIBLE journey back from Mulanje last week. After saying good bye to Patrick and Jo in Blantyre I got the 6am AXA bus back along the lakeshore road. The bus was due to get to a village called Dwambazi at 5pm and from there I was hoping to get a matola back to Matete. Molly had agreed to meet me and walk the track with me in the dark. However, all the ‘due’ to leave and arrive times never transpired. Given the transport in this country I really should have known better!! We didn’t leave Blantyre until 7:30am and we stopped at least every 20 mins. I still haven’t quite figured out where and when they decide to stop or how long they decide we will stay in one place. Anyway, I didn’t get close to Dwambazi until around 6:30. I realized then I was in trouble and there was no way I was getting back to Matete. The lakeshore road is dead quite most of the time anyway, let alone on a Sunday evening and we live so rurally getting stuck with no where to stay is not a nice prospect. After I had some discussions with Molly about my options another mzungu girl on the bus approached me. Luckily (thank god!) she was a peace core volunteer living in a village about 30 km south of us. She made a few suggestions of places I could stay and then said that I could stay with her if I didn’t mind the bare minimum! I took her up on it and spent the night on her floor – good thing I always travel with my sleeping bag and mosquito net.
Anyway, I got up at sunrise on Monday morning and was back at Mwaya Beach by 8am. Exhausted and very dirty but back!
Travelling in Malawi leaves a lot to be desired. It can be quite fun and at times funny as long as you ignore the fact you are gambling with your life everything you take public transport. The people though usually make it an enjoyable experience – on the matola back to Matete we were squished in as per usual and the woman next to me had a baby, her bag and her chicken. She kept having to move things and get things out of her bag and so kept handing me her chicken to hold. I’ve learnt how to hold a chicken properly so it doesn’t flap and squawk in your face – should be a useful talent for the London underground. I’ve also learnt how to put chickens away in a coup for the night. Maybe I’ll raise chickens in my flat when I get home.

This past week has been one of renewed frustrations but also of a new commitment. I’ve begun to really learn that one of the only ways to really help the communities out here is through education. I’ve spent more time at the health centre, working with one HSA, still helping with wounds and some of his pill dispensing (the medical officer here has TERRIBLE handwriting so I’m constantly running out to clarify). The wounds are so frustrating! What we would see at home as simple cuts/scrapes out here turn into nasty wound infections, necrotic tissue and sutures not being removed etc. I continue to endeavour to do what I can with the basic dressing supplies and also to try to teach how to care for different wounds. There seems to be a belief here that putting Vaseline gauze on everything will do the trick! I’ve seen a variety of machete wounds, wounds inflicted by other people (one man came with a note about how he had been attacked by an ‘embicile’) and burns. Down at Mwaya we get a lot of people coming to us to clean their wounds. We do what we can but by the time they come to us they are already infected. Basic wound care seems to be lost.
So I’ve now started to follow up on previous volunteer’s efforts to do first aid in the community. This week I’ve turned my attention to the people who work at Mwaya Beach. We have a lot of people who do ground work and house keeping etc. and I have the hope (small but it is still hope) that by teaching them, they can take it home and teach others.
Teaching out here moves at a very slow pace. It seems that people really have developed a learned helplessness where they see mzungus and expect us to do it but in the long run this does them no good. So much of what I am doing feels so redundant and futile but you can’t give up.

Our Lifeskills (sex ed.) class continues at the secondary school. We have learnt more myths that are rife in the area –
Men eat raw cassava because it improves their sperm
They believe you can get Vitamin K through sex (where they got that I have no idea!)
And apparently the local men have sex an average of 3 times/night (not sure I believe that one!)
We also get some really good questions about pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. There is a big problem here with the number of children people have. The average family has about 7 children and a lot of men have more than one wife and so have many more children. But with the size of the families it becomes difficult to feed them. So family planning is of huge importance. Unfortunately though the girls in the class remain very shy and a lot of the questions and comments come from the boys. It is great because the boys need to be more involved in family planning and protection but we want the girls to feel more empowered. There is still quite a noticeable gender difference here and the girls/women don’t have a lot of choice in the number of children etc. they have. And some of these girls are as young as 14 when they have their first baby. It tends not to be the educated ones but sadly if a family is unable to pay school fees and the girl has to drop out her only option is to get married and have children. Some of the mothers are so young and never had any other opportunities or choice.
There is also local group of young men who have formed a club called the Toto Club. Their aim is to educate about HIV. It is positive because hopefully if young men are out talking about it will help to lift the taboo that is still present. We are hoping that once we get to the topic of HIV they will come into the classroom. But I may not be here to see it because I only have 3 weeks left and this week has been midterm break for the schools.

Geoff and Liz, who own the organization, arrived a few weeks ago. It has been great because we now have a supply of drinks every night and some great food – including meat! I was actually seriously considering becoming a vegetarian at one point because I forgot what it was like to have meat; I am still thinking about it but the meat is slowly luring me back! For dinner tonight we are having goat, there has been a lot of firsts for me out here and eating goat is certainly one of them.
Geoff is full of energy and actually got me up on a Saturday morning before sunrise to swim in the lake. We had some visitors from the states here and they were up as well. On a weekday we are usually up around 6am so it wasn’t too, too early. But we were up at 5:30 and in the lake at sunrise. It was surprisingly warm and lovely at that time of day. There really are no crocodiles (I hope) at this time of the year because it is the dry season. Plus crocodiles don’t eat mzungus because we look like hippos!

This evening Molly and I are straining the wine. We make our own ‘banana wine’ here and after 10 days of brewing it needs straining with a pillow case and left to brew for another 10 days. I’d liked to say it is delicious but I think it is more of an acquired taste!


Victoria
xxx

Mount Mulanje

YOU MAY SEE ARMED GUARDS

DO NOT BE ALARMED
THEY ARE THERE FOR YOUR PROTECTION
PLEASE INTERACT WITH THEM
WELCOME TO MOUNT MULANJE

So that was the sign posted upon entering the forest - it was a bit strange, made me feel like I was entering Jurrasic Park or something. We didn't end up seeing any armed guards, or many other people for that matter. It was an amazing, but hard, 3 days though.

We got the base of the mountain in Mulanje town on Tuesday morning. The mountain looked rather impossible, as the top of it is just rock. I couldn't figure out how we'd get up there. It is the highest peak in south, central Africa, at 3000m above sea level and has various huts scattered around the top. It also has 5 different habitats on it, rainforest, long grass land, bare rock face....everything. It was also the inspiration for The Hobbit setting when J.R. Tolken visited here. Enough facts though.

We got a local guide and porter arranged (there was NO way we were carrying all out stuff, including our food!) and we went to stay at the local church run hut at the base of the mountain.

The next day out guide, Felix, and out porter, Pitman, met us at 8am. I was a bit nervous because of the season here the mist can set in really fast and then you are in trouble. But we set out and after a STEEP and difficult climb through the various landscapes we made it to our hut in 4 1/2 hours. Quite please with out time. I think it was getting so tiring that we all just wanted to get it done. We stayed at the CCAP hut that was built in something like 1890 (I'm not joking). It was weird - very Little House on the Praire. We got to the top and there is a massive grassland plateau with the hut on the edge of it. It hadn't fallen apart or anything but felt and looked like it was built in 1890, complete with an open fire for cooking, a pit toilet and a hut to wash in. At least the water was warmed from the fire!

In the evening we went out to watch the sunset and it was one of the most amazing sights I have seen. We sat out on the edge of the mountain and it felt like we were sitting on top of the world. To our left were the mountains of Mozambique, to the right Zomba Plateau and the sun setting over the mountains directly ahead of us. It was incredibly beautiful. And we were the only people out there.

We spent the next day exploring out the other huts before heading down yesterday. In some ways coming down was harder than going up. It took us just as long. We walked across the plateau, back to the edge and down the side. We started on the rock face, through the grass lands and back through the rainforest. It was really quite frightening on the rocks because there was nothing to stop us from going over.

All in all, the 2 nights up there were enough! I am grateful to have lights, a shower and a toilet now!

Once we got down Jo and I went to the tea farms around the base. Tea plants were bought here from India originally and now there is a massive tea plantation at the base of Mulanje. It grows best in the area and we had a cup, it was lovely! I have a new appreciation for how much work goes into tea picking and the manual labour involved from the pickers. I will endeavour to buy fairtrade tea from now on!

I am back in Blantyre for the night and back on my 12 hour bus tomorrow back to Mwaya. I have only 4 weeks left out here. No more travelling for me. The next 4 week will be spent focusing back on my work here.

Trips and a little bit of work!

Trips and working in between
I have spent the past few weeks off of working and doing some travelling. We were away for a week and then back at the beach for a week and now I am away again.Likoma IslandTwo weeks ago most of us from the beach, plus two of Patricks visiting friends, headed over to Likoma Island for the week. We took the Ilala night ferry to the island and had to stay for 5 days as the ferry only goes twice a week. The ferry was crazy!! I have bought a book while here which as the perfect way of describing it;"The 'Ilala' can only actually dock at two or three places, so at most of her ports of call she has to anchor offshore after a warning blast on her hooter. She then lowers her two lifeboats and the scarmble begins. Personal belongings and children are handed down into the rocking, rising and falling boat and it motors to the beach." The Great Rift.It was insane! This was all done in the middle of the night as we arrived in Likoma at 4am, so we had to make the sramble to the boats in the dark and I had to fight with a woman and a bunch of bananas to get on! The was all after spending the night under the stars on the deck.The place we stayed was paradise - secluded and white beaches. I got one scuba dive in, a visit to the cathedral and a visit to the local witchdoctor (who I lied to and told him I was teacher when he asked!) It was an amazing week of pure relaxation!HOME VISITSMolly and I have started trying to get out into the community more. Bascially the health center is a very difficult place for us to do anything productive. THere is a language barrier combined with lack of resources. Doing home visits in the community seems to make more sense right now. We went out on Thursday and visited the children who are underweight. THe first woman we got to had a child of 1 year and 3 mos who was severly underweight and under developed. He couldn't hold his head up nor could he bear his own weight on his legs when held. We found that she actually became impregnanted because she has been unable to pay for medication from a witchdoctor and had instead paid with sex. She very little at the house. We were able to give her some food supplements and discuss nutrition with her. There is a belief about not giving children eggs because they cause seizures and the elders also do not believe in putting infants down on the ground and so they are constantly carried on the backs of their mothers.We visited a few more homes with children who were still underweight but not as bad. Hopefully when I get back we'll be able to do more in the community.It was depressing at the clinic the other day when a woman came in with a bad leg injury - she had cut through the tendon in her leg and could not move her toes. There was nothing we could do but refer her to the local hospital. Her husband had to carry her on his back to the main road to find a minibus. I felt totally helpless in being able to at least get her to the hospital.

Now I am down south in Blantyre. We went north first for the weekend to a place called Mushroom Farm and then a hellish 12 hour night bus which played music all night! Now I am about to attempt to climb mount Mulanje! I will updated it once this week is done!xxx

Not a great week!

Sorry for all the delayed up dates, this week however turned out to be not so great!

We (fellow volunteers and myself) went up to Nkhata Bay again for the weekend and I had some errands to do. I woke on Sunday feeling pretty worse for wear but put it down to a bit of a hangover. We went out at lunch into the town and while sitting to update my blog I started to feel seriously unwell – sweating, nausea etc. It got worse while I tried to eat lunch so I headed back to my room to lie down and try to sleep off what felt like the worlds worst hangover. It didn’t get better – it got worse with aches in my legs and more sweaty and exhaustion. After discussing it with Molly (the American Nurse I am working with) we decided it was probably heat exhaustion/dehydration and a few litres of rehydration salts and a good night’s sleep would cure it. I was wrong. I had the worst night’s sleep I have had in a long time and woke feel pretty much the same. The others returned to Mwaya while Molly and I stayed behind so I could go to the private clinic in Nhkata Bay, which has the ONLY doctor in the entire region. He was a very good doctor actually and I felt quite comfortable with him. They did a malaria test, which was negative, but given my symptoms he diagnosed it as malaria. He explained that being on prophylaxis can give a false negative test results. So I started on anti-malarials and remained in Nhkata Bay. Monday was a very rough day – fevers, body aches and vomiting is not a lot fun, especially in the tropical heat!! The staff at the Nhkata Bay lodge were all amazing – they put us in a private room with a fan and a bathroom and did not charge me for my nights stay. They arranged a car to take me to the hospital as well.

I returned to Mwaya on Tuesday. The organization has a truck and they came to collect me. A 2 hour car ride in the heat did me no favours and I had a fever again that evening. After some educated discussion with Molly and reading through our books, I decided to start myself on antibiotics just in case and decided to go the hospital again in the morning. I was taken to a private hospital in Dwangwa – not an experience I would ever want to repeat. There they did another malaria test (which was negative) and checked my blood. I was told again it was malaria and I should feel better on Thursday. After another fever that night, Thursday rolled around ok and the fevers stopped. Since then I have only been on the mend and am now feeling almost 100% better. My appetite had returned and I have more energy but still feel a bit tired. But I am completely on the mend. The experience has shaken me a bit – realizing how easy it is to get sick and being far from medical care but I am feeling a bit more confident again now I am feeling better.

Visiting the hospital in Dwangwa though bought out some racial based issues. We were the only white people there and there was a massive line of people waiting to be seen and waiting for the pharmacy. As soon as I arrived however they put me ahead of everyone and saw me immediately and dispensed my medications first. I am not sure if it had to do with the fact that I was white but it definitely felt that way.

We had a really quiet weekend here at the beach, which included a massive thunder storm – probably the loudest thunder I have ever heard and the strength of the rain is incredible.

Today was my first day back at ‘work’. I went back to the health clinic and forgot how I actually find it quite depressing to be there. It may sound like a terrible thing to say but it is the truth – seeing such basic health care is hard. I helped out in the wound clinic. The only thing to do is clean the wound with anti-septic and cover it with wrapped gauze – they have no other supplies. I had to cut up the gauze used to wrap in order to have gauze to clean with. The water used to dilute down the anti-septic comes from a bucket of water in the corner – god only knows how clean it is. But as there is no running water so there are not very many options. A lot of the wounds are burns or what look like machete wounds from working in the fields and most already look infected.

I am trying to do as many bits and pieces as I can around there, which now include packing pills in the dispensary into little baggies. I don’t think I ever what to be a pharmacist!!

I went up to the local library today to get another book out. The only positive of being sick is being able to indulge in reading. The library in the village here is amazing. I wish I could describe it in away to do it justice. The Mwaya primary school and library is a RIPPLE Africa initiative and funded. The library is run but a local gentleman and it is a dearly loved project. It is a tiny little circular building but everything is perfectly organized and put away and they have a good fiction selection of books left by old volunteers. They need more reference books however for students so if anyone has any old texts etc. lying around, let me know and I’ll arrange to send them down!

Now I am back at Mwaya writing this up, waiting for our weekly vegetable delivery – it comes from about 2 hours away. Otherwise it will just be beans and rice for dinner. BUT papaya is in season here so every morning we get fresh papaya which is delicious!

xxx

May 1st 2009

I have wanted to write a bit more but the internet and electricity out here is totally unreliable! Last weekend the electricity to the whole district went off. So it has been more sporadic than I would have liked.

Last Friday (April 24th) we went up to the town of Chintheche (about 30 min drive from here) for a presentation that RIPPLE Africa was putting on for the locals. The organization has been working on encouraging locals to use mbulas for cooking. They are small ceramic stoves which are locally made and are designed to use up about 75% less wood than the open fires which many of the locals use to cook on. The deforestation in the area is a big problem and so the cost of wood is getting more and more expensive. The idea is that the stoves are faster to cook on and cheaper to use as they use less wood. So RIPPLE organized a ‘cook-off’ designed to prove that the stoves are faster. It was quite the event! All the chiefs from the local villages attended and the local turn out was huge. They surprised the chiefs by having local traditional dances before the cook-off and the TA (territorial chief) attended and was due to make a big speech. Apprantly this is the most important man as he is chief of the entire Nkhata Bay district but as it turned out he never received an invitation and so was only informed on the day what was happening. He got up to speak, in Chitonga, and basically (as was translated) starting raging on about how he never received an invitation and was generally quite angry about the whole thing. Anyway, the cook-off went well. Afterwards myself and Patrick (another volunteer) some how found ourselves loaded in to the car with the TA and the local minister to go and have a drink at the head of RIPPLE’s bar around the corner – which is called Budget Boozing Center (I am not joking). It was the strangest thing to be sat at the bar with the most important man in the region having an awkward, broken conversation. I asked him at one point if he would like a drink, to which he replied that he would like a fanta but then promptly changed his answer to wanting a fish – it never became clear if he was requesting that I find him a fish to give him, which was a definite possibility!!

On that weekend we went up to Nkhata Bay for the weekend to stay at a lodge. The trip out was uneventful and the lodge is beautifully situated on a steep hill on the side of Lake Malawi. The view was amazing over the lake. We lay in the sun and swam in the lake (don’t worry Mum – we have been told that the crocodiles don't eat mzungus because we look like hippos). Out trip back however was a different story. Four of us left the lodge together on Sunday and were followed by two dogs, which I think belonged to the lodge. I am a little weary of the dogs here as one volunteer has already been bitten and a lot of them seem like strays. Anyway, these dogs did not leave out sides. They sat under our seats having lunch, followed us around town and then climbed onto the minibus with us when we went to leave. They climbed on after us, sat down and would not get off. None of the locals on the bus seemed inclined to help as one of the dogs already started looking at bit agitated but would not get off. We were all sitting in the very back of the bus and had no way to get to the door. The driver then decided (and this was a brilliant move) to start hitting the dogs with a stick to get them off, at which point on dog jumped onto the seat, started growling and bearing his teeth. We wasted no time in promptly jumping clean out of the window of the bus in the back. The locals thought it was the funniest thing, watching 4 white girls climb as fast as the could out the back window. I did not find it funny until they finally got the dogs out and we could get back on and shut the door.
Then to top it off the door of the minibus kept falling off so we had to stop every 10 mins to put the door back on. It was one of those days where you just had to think ‘this is Africa’ – four of us in the back of a rusty, dilapidated old minibus, with Paul Simon’s Graceland playing as loud as they could get it, with the door falling off.

Healthcare wise this has been a challenging week as well! I have spent every morning out with the Health Surveillance Assistances doing the UNICEF Child Health Days. Each morning we have been out in a different village in the area giving all children under 5 vitamin A supplements and deworming tablets. Each morning bought new challenges, having to find somewhere out of the dirt to organize the tablets or having to wait for a local funeral to end for the women to show up. Never have I done so much medical work in the dirt, which pills balanced on a rock or piece of wood. Friday morning’s though was the worst! It was a combination of Under 5’s Clinic, where all children are weighed and vaccinated, and the deworming/vitamin A. There were literally 300 mothers and their multiple children there, all crammed into a small, hot preschool building. It was unbelievable the number of children we had to get through, I really can not describe the noise and the chaos! We tried out hardest to have everything going in a nice, orderly fashion but everything kept breaking into what felt like completed mayhem – women getting angry because they thought that should be first, fights breaking out between them and the HAS’s (all in Chitonga, so we couldn’t understand a thing), children running around, children screaming. It took us four long and very hot hours to get through them all. It amazes me the way things get done here – a lot of medical records and vaccination records for children and sporadic and incomplete, mother’s don’t know their child’s date of birth, records are kept on scrap pieces of paper. You really have to just take everything in stride or it becomes completely overwhelming. Then one child who had a very high fever started to convulse. There was nothing we could do but to help bring the child’s fever down and advise the mother to take him to the health center. I had to cycle 3 km back to camp to get my own supply of Paracetamol to give to the child. It really is just madness sometimes.

The mother’s though still astound me. It is incredibly hot here during the day and difficult to be out in the sun and yet these women are walking around bare foot, with children on their back and buckets of water on their heads. They literally pick the children up of the floor by their arms and tie them onto their backs. I don’t know how they do it, I can barely survive being out in the heat getting to where I need to go. I have started cycling everywhere (yes William and Louise – I have gotten over my fear of bikes!). The transport here is so unreliable that you can wait 2 hrs for a bus to get to the health center. Our bikes are pretty unreliable as well – the other day my peddle just fell off on my way to the center – but they get you there faster. And riding around here is just beautiful, the landscape is stunning and everyone greats you. Yesterday I had to young girls running along beside me laughing with me. It is a lot of fun.

We’ve started out Life Skills classes last week and I have started my Biology tutoring club for the boys who want extra help to pass their exams. So far we have covered digestion, kidney function and neurology. Next week is the endocrine system!

We are also branching out with our cooking as well – we managed to find dried tofu to add to our meals!! Maybe next week we’ll get some beef, but I am not holding my breath!

xxx