A typically untypical day.

(Friday, May 13)

I am looking at this, and realizing I haven’t given much content about what I’m actually doing right now. That’s mostly because there hasn’t been much consistent for the last couple weeks (or the last 6 months, I was realizing the other day… and it’s not ending anytime soon). However, there’s no real reason why I can’t share a day that isn’t particularly representative, so here goes!

Woke up this morning in a guest house with pink walls and a shower curtain over the window in Karonga, northern Malawi. When we went to bed, it was hot. I didn’t check the actual temperature, but at 8:30pm it was still 30 degrees and very humid. This place has a fan, and it ran all night, and was still not a great sleep. First time it’s really been hot for me here in Malawi: this town is both closer to the equator, and close to the lake (the lake = Lake Malawi), both of which raise the temperature.

Waking up. I realized I hadn’t properly tucked in my mosquito net around my bed: my legs were sticking out, as was one arm, and the net was sitting on my forehead. So now my forehead, left arm, and both legs are covered in red bug bites (I’m guessing mosquitos because there are tons here, but they aren’t itchy so I’m not sure). I look very spotted and contagious.

Also, waking up (I promise the whole day won’t take this long) was at 4:30am, an unfortunately early hour, but for a good reason. After a cold shower, we were out to find a bank machine, and then a bus at around 5:30am to another district even further north, where we would set up Karina, a JF (Junior Fellow, or, a very rough approximation, EWB summer student), for her placement.

Finding a bus meant going to the road where a bus would theoretically go, and then asking around about who might be going north. We didn’t end up finding a bus that would leave in a reasonable timeframe, but did find a pickup truck that the drivers said was leaving “soon.” About an hour later, having found no better alternatives, we hopped in the back of the truck with 10 other people, and set off up the road.

Duncan and Karina set up details of their coaching plan in the back of the truck as we drove up the road, past the uranium mine (???!). A brief stop at a police roadblock provided a morning snack of bananas and hardboiled eggs, purchased from ladies selling to passing passengers. The road was paved, to start with, and graded dirt most of the rest of the way. China has been building this road as a development/investment project, and it’s coming along very quickly, apparently. We still had to go around most of the new bridges, which meant bumpy side trips off the graded road onto the old road. It was also super dusty. So much so that our hair, skin, and clothes were all caked in red dust when we arrived three hours later.

Feeling that the dusty red chalk look didn’t quite match the professional vibe we were going for in introducing Karina to her new coworkers, we found a guesthouse and asked to borrow their shower. The taps weren’t running, so we opted for bucket baths instead (splash and pour water at yourself from a bucket until you’re mostly clean). Clothes were shaken out, and then beaten like you would beat a carpet, to try and make them slightly less red (my black shirt was a bad choice, but the white alternative would have been even worse).

Looking (slightly?) more presentable, we crossed the road (quickly, to avoid getting our now damp selves re-dusted by the next passing vehicle) to find breakfast. Tea with ridiculously amounts of milk and sugar, plus bread with avocado from the roadblock grocery stop, made a delicious meal while we tried to connect with Karina’s new coworkers.

The rest of the morning was meetings with district officials, and discussing the details of Karina’s work plans. She has some really interesting questions to research, about how community leaders can drive sanitation projects, and some work on supporting the district in setting up a data system for monitoring the waterpoints in communities. We then went to meet the host family she will be staying with for two weeks while she gets settled into her new home for the next four months. Because of a death in her host-family-to-be, she won’t be able to move in there until Tuesday, but we went to meet the family and see their place. It is a room in a home of 3 buildings, about a 4km bike ride from the office where she’ll be working. The father is on the community Water Point Committee for the borehole that serves their village. The borehole was built in 2001, and he says it has almost never broken down because they do maintenance on it every 2 months. That level of dedication to preventative measures is impressive, and its also impressive that the WPC currently has about 14,000 MK (nearly $100) in its account ready to deal with future potential breakdowns. From everything I’ve heard and seen, this is highly unusual, in the best way possible.

After a brief final check-in with Karina on her placement plan, we left her with the district officials and went to find a bus back to Karonga. This time, we did find one. Minibuses leave when they are full of passengers, not on a particular schedule. We were near the middle of the minibus fill-up, so only had to wait for a couple more passengers before leaving. About the size of a 15 passenger van, minibuses can fit a lot of people: 4 across each of the four rows of seats, plus 2 or 3 up with the driver, plus a conductor hovering in the door gunnel, to give a total of 20 adults. Plus assorted children and bags on laps, and luggage under every seat and tied into the trunk that can’t quite close. It’s not a particularly comfortable ride, but a good way of getting most anywhere.

The guy next to me on the bus back was an electrician who installs solar panels. He was returning from installing some at the housing provided for school-teachers. In case you were wondering, installing a set-up of one solar panel, battery, and all parts, costs about 200,000 MK ($1,300), and is enough to power about 5 fluorscent light bulbs and one “screen” (computer or TV) and probably also charge your cellphone. If you wanted to power a fridge, you’d need 3 or 4 solar panels (which would not triple or quadruple the price, since some of the electronic equipment is only needed once).

Along the way, we bought a new delicious snack through the bus window (at that same roadblock as this morning, actually). Its banana mixed with maize flour into a paste, and then wrapped in a banana leaf and steamed. Very strange looking: picture a block of Spam or other mystery meat, and that’s the texture. The colour is exactly like a bunch of raw ground beef after its been sitting in the fridge for a couple days – brown on the outside, and pink on the inside. Despite that (or because of it?), its delicious, sweet and cakelike, even though it sits in your stomach like a rock.

The drive back was bumpier than the ride there had been – some combination of the bus going faster and having worse shocks. The bus also made nice reassuring crunching noises near what sounded like the back wheel axel, when we went over particularly large bumps in the road. These crunching noises got a bit more frequent as the bus drove on, even though the road got better the closer to Karonga we got. This was doubly fun as we realized it was Friday the 13^th, and that the last time Duncan had been on this road the minibus had broken down completely and they had waited at the side of the road for a while longer than ideal before being picked up by a transport truck and added to its cargo of bamboo and maize flour.

We made it back in one piece, of course, and came back to the guesthouse. As ridiculous as this sounds, we were hoping for a third shower of the day, having gotten fairly dusty again, but the water was shut off, so no luck. I’m still dusty.

Then I started writing this blog post, then we had supper (rice and beef and canola/rape leaves), and now I’m finishing up this post before starting on some other work stuff: most likely reading policy documents and training material that we will be presenting tomorrow on using data for decision-making.

There’s a day! What do you think?