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
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