Getting around....

I really do live in the middle of nowhere.  Kalino, my village, is fairly isolated in a beautiful area but the catch is getting in and out of this place. Transportation has to be done on a bicycle taxi, not a motorcycle, and not a bike that pulls a cart contraption of any kind. Bicycle taxi’s are simply a bike that you sit on the back of and hold on.

This was something I had planned on putting off for as long as possible. I have enough food to manage for two weeks at which point I planned on walking out of here and taking a care hire back. Day one in Kalino my supervisor Sammy said he wanted to show me around Zomba Town (the nearest place with a store). Off I went holding on for dear life going down the mountain on the back of a guy’s bike. With the language barrier, fear is quickly forced to morph into laughter at how ridiculous the whole thing is. You are barrelling down the rocky dirt road trying desperately not to throw the bike off balance as you tear through the short cuts in the field. Some I have taken are equipped with radios and a cushion as a plus. You do this for about a half hour to get the trading post, Thondwe. This is where there is a market twice a week and where you can catch the infamous minibuses either to Blantyre or Zomba. Bike taxi rides are actually really fun, and the views are worth it. It costs MK150 for this leg.

Minibuses, the second leg to get to town, are not exactly fun. The cars are 16 seaters, but I have not been in a public one with less the 20. You can flag them down at any point on the road or find them parked at the edges of towns and markets at make shift stops. They don’t leave until they are full. The buses are in serious disrepair (missing parts of the floor) but they are how you have to go. You can only get the good transit buses from town centres....I’m nowhere near there.  Anyway, when you get near mini buses you will get harassed and shuttled around to the buses, you have to be pretty assertive to make sure you are getting on one that will go in the right direction. These guys tend to have these really large plastic containers. They are much like the ones you get ketchup or vinegar in at a fast food place but bigger. I finally figured out what it was when I saw them at the store...rum. But they’re not the driver’s! It’s a 3 man job. 1^st the drunk man who recruits passengers, than the guy who mans the door collecting money during the ride, and then there is the driver.

Another way of getting around is by ‘matola’. We have been severely cautioned about this. It is hitchhiking, for a fee, in the back of a crammed pickup truck. During the summer, 2 volunteers were riding in one, as the tire blew they were thrown out and badly injured, while there were many other fatalities in that incident. These are considered the least safe way to travel.

The other experience of transit I have had is car hire. It’s a typical taxi except you will find yourself a customer to only a few. It’s all independent.  Every time you get into a new town, you try and find other travelers and get there trusted taxi drivers’ number.

I’ll tell you all about the good buses when I finally take one.

Gas...diesel/petrol, it all matters as Malawi faces another shortage. In Lilongwe, line ups would run a hundred deep at the pumps.

My Job

I work at Action Hope Support Organization(AHOSO), in Rural Zomba, south of Zomba Town. It is a CBO for 30 surrounding villages(approx. 17,000 people). The organization runs programming for the areas of youth, OVCs, home based care, and HIV/AIDS.  The office is run completely by volunteers as it is currently receiving zero funding, and its income generating initiative is not doing well.

With a couple different tasks over the next few months, I have been assigned to the OVC program. Orphanages or any formalized foster system do not exist here. Instead, the goal is to keep orphans and vulnerable children in the community. The previous intern was able to survey and document OVCs in 29 of the surrounding villages and I have now created a database with the information for 485 children. However, vulnerable children are difficult to document given the applicability of the term. What we do know from the documented orphans (in child headed households and living with other family) is that there is a wide spread problem of abuse and lack of basics such as soap, clothing, and multiple meals a day.  Furthermore, although there are volunteers in each village responsible for programs, there is no policy or outline for monitoring OVCs and following up with issues such as school attendance.

Some of what I’m to work on

1.       Breakdown data to distribute to each specific village, identifying areas of concern in the care of OVCs

2.       Work towards creating a Village Based Coordinator(VBC) policy and monitoring outline with regular reports/checks

3.       Help publicize the recent Child Rights Bill by organizing a meeting with 110 of the local AHOSO stakeholders (VBCs, teachers, village headman, faith leaders etc.)

4.       Resource mobilization, identify potential at local and international levels

5.       Increase local partnerships

6.       Develop information package

7.       Work on funding proposals with the Executive Director

That should keep me busy for awhile.

Godzilla Arachnids

You cannot go anywhere in my house unless you have shoes on or a fly swatter in hand. It is not for the bees, which I have made my peace with, or the ants and roaches. Instead it is for the spiders which easily span the palm of my hand. They are not the kinds that simply squish when you kill them, but they crunch, explode and still try to run away. I have become pretty good at hunting them but they are crafty, hiding under doors, in the toilet, the shelf in the shower.  Worst of all, they jump when they scurry. No matter how many I kill, another always manages to startle me.

September 8,2010
The Shack

After meeting Leanne and David, two long term WUSC volunteers, for lunch, we took them up on the invitation to go to the Shack for the evening.

Since people do not walk around at night in Lilongwe, the Shack is mainly for ex patriots and the upper class who can afford to hire a taxi. It is bar that serves Carlsberg ...exclusively, like everywhere else here. The key thing the Shack has that we need more of, for nights out in Toronto, would be the two beach volleyball courts. What else there is to know about the Shack is that the washroom is where the local girls meet up to get ready for a night out at work...think lots of neon.

September 9, 2010

Welcome to Dzeleke.

Tucked in a valley about an hour outside of Lilongwe, is a self sufficient village. It is out of view, seemingly only infiltrated by deliveries of Cocoa-Cola products and cell phone distributors to stock the small shops. It is not a dense community, in that the alleys and walkways between homes are passable, not overcrowded, and chaos is not in your face. The sounds are different from the city. Here, it is a mash up of English, French, Kiswahili, Chichewa, and many other languages and dialects. As you walk, the red dirt turns up, forming suffocating clouds. Women wash clothes on cement blocks that stand between the water pump and cement trenches which drain into the gutters. This is a permanent place.

What one will also notice when trekking into the community is the presence of the military on the roads, and the UNDP, WHO, and WFP in the village. There is a hospital and school as well. There is nothing to really shock one’s sight.  Instead, it is the stories of how people came to live here that carry weight.

This is Dzeleke, a community of 12,000 refugees, and you know it as you see JRS and UNHCR services. There are no frantically put up tents as one might imagine, but instead there are fired brick homes with thatched roofs.  They have established restaurants, shops, a high school, and all the other standards you expect in a community. This is where families grow, yet this is the periphery where people have become stuck, losing years of freedom in their lives. One must remember that although this has become a formidable home, no one chooses to be here and few have the chance to leave. Some have been here since the early 1990s when the camp was established, while others are within their first year.  It is home to people from Mozambique, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Zambia for various reasons. The majority though have found their way here from the DRC.

Sorting out passports and identification documents is an agonizing process. One man from Zambia, taking a break from reading a John Grisham novel explained, “If you want the truth, don’t look at the news, ask us. When you leave your home with a gun at your back, you do not turn around to search for your papers. So now you are stuck, you cannot go anywhere.” He is grateful to have this place, but that does not remove his feelings of constraint.   For life, they have given up freedom. After all, this village was converted from a prison, and some things never changed.

From what do you take refuge?

FYI

Dzeleke houses WUSC’s Student Refugee Program. Around 15 students a year are sponsored by Canadian Universities to come study the following year. The camp is good at reconnecting people between camps and countries. This is successful only if the other involved is alive and also looking for the family member.

Under the African Sky

After a long day at Dzeleke we returned to Henderson Lodge.  It’s a place where you find hedge hogs outside, while on the inside you find lizards, rats, ticks, bedbugs, and of course mosquitoes. The sun sets around six here so that by seven, the lack of lights leaves a blackened city.  Charles asked if he could show us something at his meeting. Off we went not knowing what this was about or really where we were to go. Fifteen minutes later we pulled up to gates and entered Gateway Boarding School for girls. He told Elisabeth and I to walk towards the buildings, but that he and Nathaniel could not follow. It was blackout and closing your eyes would not have made it any darker.

So under the stars in the power outage we walked towards the singing, afraid of startling the voices. Squeals were followed by giggles as they noticed us and pulled us in. “We are dancing in the light of God, Let it be.” Sung to the tune of The Beatles ‘let it be’ of course. Unsure of what was going on, and what the meeting was, the girls lead us out of the boarding area into one of the classrooms and we squeezed down the narrow rows of desks to sit with them. In came Charles and thus began a talk on how the value of a girls work is worth more than money. It will take courage and hard work beyond one’s education to find a job off of the streets.

Charles is a taxi driver by day, motivational speaker by night.