Friday, September 21, 2007

Our First Village Visit

I've been getting emails from people wishing me Happy Birthday (thank you everyone btw) and asking me how birthdays are celebrated in Africa/Malawi. The answer is... they don't. Not much in Malawi anyway. I got some congratulatory words from the people in the office that knew, and that's about it. Jeff actually had plans to buy me a bottle of fanta after dinner from the store across the street as a birthday gift, but the store was closed. Hahaha, that's ok though.

We spent the day in the Mpando area, doing a count of households in the surrounding villages to compare to the current number of filters in the new project. We pulled up in the truck, and before you know it, the word when out (Which word you say? Well that's coming up in the next post, so sit tight) and before you know it we had a mass of children around us. After a few minutes, we started walking to the nearest well so we could make some observations, and again, the swarm of children made a semi-circle around us. I thought to myself, this would make a great picture, Jeff walking and the throng of children following him. I hurried on ahead about 30 feet, so that I could pull out my camera, get the right settings, and then take the picture.

Now I'm 30 feet ahead of everyone else, and I've pulled my camera out. I turn around, turn on my camera and am looking down to adjust the settings when I hear kids shrieking and the ground thundering. I look up and saw a dust cloud in front of me:


I didn't even have time to get the settings set up right; hence the blurry picture with one kid's face/hand kind of in focus...

Then it was off for some well inspections; it would be the first time we'd see firsthand the quality of the water our filters would be up against. As we walked to the wells though, the horde of children kept following us, turning our little inspection into a spectacle.





A close-up of the shallow well. Yes, the water really looks like that, and yes, that is what appears to be a plastic bag floating on top.



Here is Gerald talking to Jeff about this shallow well. You can see how low the level of the water is. When it gets to this point, the vilagers get what they can, then wait 10-20 minutes for the water to rise again. Yes, the water here is also pretty turbid and not too clean.


Another village, another shallow well. There was visible algae growth along the side of the uncovered well, and the water was pretty turbid. On the way to this well, one of the men from this village turned to me and simply said, "We drink like pigs." They use this well for everything, from household chores to drinking water.


The Mpando area where this villages are located will be the second area Jeff, Gerald and I go to after Chiwe. The project begins with us building and installing 50 filters in Chiwe before moving to Mpando, to build and install 250 filters. Our project is at a much different state than some of the other countries' (re:Brazil). Since this is only the second year of the project in Malawi, there's still a lot of foundational work to do, from continuing to build up and train local staff as well as even spending time getting our local partner organization here (The Evangelical Association of Malawi, EAM) more enthusiastic about our filters.

Ah there's more to write, but I just need to get some pictures posted, so there it is.

Posted by Malawi Steve @ 8:56 AM