… I was back in Vancouver for a few days and it felt good, it felt like home. As I was walking down Main Street this morning on my way to the airport I couldn’t help but thinking about sequential moments of my life there over the last two year or so. I was picturing our crazy nights out, our gathering for brunch, our bike or snowboard trips, my foolish heart breaks, my biking to work all year round, our barbecues on the beach… It made me smile, but a bit nostalgic as well. I realized how much I’m going to miss it. Not only the amazing city and its beautiful playground, but most importantly the people I’ve met, the people I’ve come to know and love. I arrived in Vancouver two years ago and never thought I’d find it so hard to leave now. I arrived in Vancouver never hoping to make my life what it is now. I arrived in Vancouver with a guy, who is no longer in my life and no longer in Vancouver for that matter, but thanks Nate for having been part of it, for having made me go out of my way, out of my comfort zone to go live in Van. I’ve learnt a lot about myself over the last two years, I went through many mood swings, to finally end up happier than I’ve ever been. I know myself a little better, I’ve managed to live, work and love in another language; I’ve managed to be part of an incredibly dynamic group of people at work and outside of it; I’ve managed to understand that I can’t have everything I want, but that I need to appreciate the things I have; and, hopefully I’ve managed to be a little more humble, and accept the step backs that come my way… and if not, well I’ll learn it the hard way in my upcoming adventure.
Moving to Vancouver was certainly one of the best things that happened to me, even though it was far from being the easiest. A close friend of mine says that nothing worth comes easy and that what you want most won’t come cheap… I think he’s right, sometimes struggling and going through a rough period makes you appreciate more what you’re fighting for. I remember how scared I was to move at the other end of Canada, with no friends, no home, no family but eventually, with a bit of patience and some tears, everything worked out for the best. Having this in mind makes me feel confident that no matter how much I’m going to struggle in Malawi, things will eventually settled and I’ll be having the experience of a lifetime and the biggest smile on my face…
Cheers
Friday, January 21, 2011
Thursday, January 20, 2011
A little update about the projects we're working on in Malawi
Good morning,
today is my last day in Vancouver, for real this time. I’m heading back to Quebec City for a few days, then Toronto for the pre-departure training…then we’ll be leaving on February 27th.
A lot of my friends keep asking me what I will be working on in Malawi. I guess I can’t say for sure until I get to my town (and I don’t know where yet, there is a placement in the north and one more in the south) and see by myself, but I can try to summarize our projects. From my understanding, my co-workers in Malawi have been working mainly in four different areas:
1- Helping villages that decided to become open-defecation free within a district. The project is called CLTS (Community-Led Total Sanitation) and focuses on reducing the number of children dying from diarhea or other poor sanitation related problems. Basically the role of EWB for that work is to explain to the people of the community involved, without lecturing them, how their “shit” gets in their food and water by cross contamination, so that they decide to build latrines and enforce the use of them. It seems obvious to you and me, but some villages in Africa have a long way to go.
2- Helping with the de-centralisation of the government which is starting to give more power at the district level. The problem is, that they are dealing with a really heavy political system and even if the district has more roles to play now, they are not free to make the decisions they need to make, and they still depend on the funding from the head government. It’s like if the director of the water and sanitation in a municipality, anywhere in Canada, would want to repair/update their sewer system or water station, but would need to have the approval of the director of public works as well as the approval and money from the federal government. It‘d take forever for things to be done and for problems to be solved. Well, this is part of the myriad of problems that Malawi is facing at the moment.
3- Helping with the development and of better information management system at the district level regarding the water point locations and functionality. This means, facilitating and training how to use a “user friendly” standardize data base (in Excel) in which the location/village of the wells can be found and mapped, and whether this well is functional or not, and if it’s not, why is that. This database, as simple as it seems will be useful to know where to install wells next time they get funding for that, instead of blindly drilling/installing new wells.
4- Helping with understanding/fixing the broken wells and pumps. Why can’t they be used? Is it because they are in an inaccessible area (swamp, bush, too far); is it because the spare parts to fix it are not easy to get or are too expensive; or is it because the district has no money available to hire an area mechanic to repair the wells?
All this seems so easy for us here in Canada to fix those problems and move on to something more challenging, but it gets really tricky in a political system that is too complicated, to strict or sometimes corrupted, and in a country where money is a real concern. Malawi, as many other countries in Africa, is extremely poor and using the villagers’ money or asking them for more money to fix a well might be too much for them as they have problems to get food or send their children to school.
EWB understands that the solution to many of those problems is not in us doing the work and holding their hands, but by facilitating and coordinating the work with them, by finding a leader in the district to help motivate the community and take ownership of the solution.
I hope this makes sense to you.
Also here is a link to Duncan McNicholl's blog that explains more in details the WatSan team projects in Malawi:
http://waterwellness.ca/about-watsan-malawi/
Goodbye Vancouver....and all of my dearest friends here, I'll see you in 2012!
Cheers
today is my last day in Vancouver, for real this time. I’m heading back to Quebec City for a few days, then Toronto for the pre-departure training…then we’ll be leaving on February 27th.
A lot of my friends keep asking me what I will be working on in Malawi. I guess I can’t say for sure until I get to my town (and I don’t know where yet, there is a placement in the north and one more in the south) and see by myself, but I can try to summarize our projects. From my understanding, my co-workers in Malawi have been working mainly in four different areas:
1- Helping villages that decided to become open-defecation free within a district. The project is called CLTS (Community-Led Total Sanitation) and focuses on reducing the number of children dying from diarhea or other poor sanitation related problems. Basically the role of EWB for that work is to explain to the people of the community involved, without lecturing them, how their “shit” gets in their food and water by cross contamination, so that they decide to build latrines and enforce the use of them. It seems obvious to you and me, but some villages in Africa have a long way to go.
2- Helping with the de-centralisation of the government which is starting to give more power at the district level. The problem is, that they are dealing with a really heavy political system and even if the district has more roles to play now, they are not free to make the decisions they need to make, and they still depend on the funding from the head government. It’s like if the director of the water and sanitation in a municipality, anywhere in Canada, would want to repair/update their sewer system or water station, but would need to have the approval of the director of public works as well as the approval and money from the federal government. It‘d take forever for things to be done and for problems to be solved. Well, this is part of the myriad of problems that Malawi is facing at the moment.
3- Helping with the development and of better information management system at the district level regarding the water point locations and functionality. This means, facilitating and training how to use a “user friendly” standardize data base (in Excel) in which the location/village of the wells can be found and mapped, and whether this well is functional or not, and if it’s not, why is that. This database, as simple as it seems will be useful to know where to install wells next time they get funding for that, instead of blindly drilling/installing new wells.
4- Helping with understanding/fixing the broken wells and pumps. Why can’t they be used? Is it because they are in an inaccessible area (swamp, bush, too far); is it because the spare parts to fix it are not easy to get or are too expensive; or is it because the district has no money available to hire an area mechanic to repair the wells?
All this seems so easy for us here in Canada to fix those problems and move on to something more challenging, but it gets really tricky in a political system that is too complicated, to strict or sometimes corrupted, and in a country where money is a real concern. Malawi, as many other countries in Africa, is extremely poor and using the villagers’ money or asking them for more money to fix a well might be too much for them as they have problems to get food or send their children to school.
EWB understands that the solution to many of those problems is not in us doing the work and holding their hands, but by facilitating and coordinating the work with them, by finding a leader in the district to help motivate the community and take ownership of the solution.
I hope this makes sense to you.
Also here is a link to Duncan McNicholl's blog that explains more in details the WatSan team projects in Malawi:
http://waterwellness.ca/about-watsan-malawi/
Goodbye Vancouver....and all of my dearest friends here, I'll see you in 2012!
Cheers
Monday, January 17, 2011
EWB National Conference
"How can we evolve and create with experience being in the way of imagination?" - George Roter
__________________________________________
I'm back in Vancouver for a few days after having spent the last week in Toronto for the EWB National Conference.
EWB has been created 10 years ago by a few engineers, who just graduated and wanted to do something better with their knowledge and passion. They were young and inspired, they were naive and full of opinions, they thought they could create an organization to help changing the world. Well, they did it. They started it and now it's ten years later and they keep expanding and doing positive changes across Canada and Africa. They had something that not enough people have, they had a vision, a lot of balls and the courage to act.
Now EWB is way bigger than those few guys. It's a national office in Toronto with 15 full time employees, university chapters, professional chapters and some people working in Africa. Their work focuses on behaviour changes, leadership and global engineering. The chapters are mainly active locally, in their own community. For exemple, my Vancouver Professional Chapter worked on making Vancouver a Fair Trade city, they are organizing "Bridging the Gap", a yearly conference in Vancouver. They coordonate and participate in the "Run to End Poverty" event to raise money. I haven't been extremely involved with my chapter since I had a lot of preparation to do on my own, but I got a chance to meet about 30 active members last week in Toronto. I must say that I got inspired and I'm glad to say that I know and collaborate with people like those.
I'm glad I went to the conference. I learnt about the vision and mission of EWB, but I also learnt about so many other subjects: social enterprise, behaviour changes, why does aid matters and how can we fail forwards, distributed leadership, the impact of China in Africa, policies restraining international development, governance, advocacy... WOW. On top of it all, I had the chance to meet most of my team members, the people I'll be working with in Malawi. It was great hearing them discussed the different issues they are facing, their roles and the different projects they are working on.
With that being said, I'm more prompt than ever to embark my adventure in Malawi. I'm inspired, motivated and extremelly glad to have been selected to work with such amazing people...only a few weeks to go.
Here is a link to an article posted in the star regarding the conference and EWB mission. It's quite interesting:
Canadian Engineers Test Problem Solving Skills in Africa
__________________________________________
I'm back in Vancouver for a few days after having spent the last week in Toronto for the EWB National Conference.
EWB has been created 10 years ago by a few engineers, who just graduated and wanted to do something better with their knowledge and passion. They were young and inspired, they were naive and full of opinions, they thought they could create an organization to help changing the world. Well, they did it. They started it and now it's ten years later and they keep expanding and doing positive changes across Canada and Africa. They had something that not enough people have, they had a vision, a lot of balls and the courage to act.
Now EWB is way bigger than those few guys. It's a national office in Toronto with 15 full time employees, university chapters, professional chapters and some people working in Africa. Their work focuses on behaviour changes, leadership and global engineering. The chapters are mainly active locally, in their own community. For exemple, my Vancouver Professional Chapter worked on making Vancouver a Fair Trade city, they are organizing "Bridging the Gap", a yearly conference in Vancouver. They coordonate and participate in the "Run to End Poverty" event to raise money. I haven't been extremely involved with my chapter since I had a lot of preparation to do on my own, but I got a chance to meet about 30 active members last week in Toronto. I must say that I got inspired and I'm glad to say that I know and collaborate with people like those.
I'm glad I went to the conference. I learnt about the vision and mission of EWB, but I also learnt about so many other subjects: social enterprise, behaviour changes, why does aid matters and how can we fail forwards, distributed leadership, the impact of China in Africa, policies restraining international development, governance, advocacy... WOW. On top of it all, I had the chance to meet most of my team members, the people I'll be working with in Malawi. It was great hearing them discussed the different issues they are facing, their roles and the different projects they are working on.
With that being said, I'm more prompt than ever to embark my adventure in Malawi. I'm inspired, motivated and extremelly glad to have been selected to work with such amazing people...only a few weeks to go.
Here is a link to an article posted in the star regarding the conference and EWB mission. It's quite interesting:
Canadian Engineers Test Problem Solving Skills in Africa
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