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
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