ORIGINAL EN INGLES

Back in Europe a month now and re-adjusted to the frigid cold winds after a couple of very hot, end of dry season, weeks in Malawi.
It was a most humbling experience, living like the locals in a small mud hut a way up in the dry and dusty hills.
I was able to help the villagers install two small, Chinese made diesel generators, that power by belts and 440 volts- an oil extraction machine and high pressure filtering machine. With this they can produce cooking oil from sunflowers or ground nuts (peanuts). Cooking oil is very expensive to buy, roughly a day's wages for a litre; consequently people buy it in small amounts from small local stores, the smallest amount tied up in a plastic bag.
Very few people in the villages have paid work anyway, they are subsistence farmers growing maize, ground nuts, cassava and tobacco. The tobacco is a cash crop but they do not produce enough in the villages to make much money. Proteins come mainly from fish, Lake Malawi which is 16 kms from this village, yields 16 tons of fish a day that supplies the whole of Malawi with protein, over fishing is beginning to affect the stocks in the lake. The commonest fish that is eaten looks like whitebait. It is eaten whole and processed by drying it in the sun. It is ok to eat but whiffs a bit. It is cooked up in a watery sauce and eaten with "nsima", a doughy substance cooked up from maize flour and water, rather like polenta. Meals are communal affairs, pull off a wodge of nsima and dip it into a bowl of the fish so that some stick to the bottom of the dough. There is another bowl of fresh water to wash your hand in. There are also fish that look like dorado and larger cat fish up to 2-3 kgs.
The generators and plant were picked up in the capital Llilongwe when we arrived, and transported the 250 kms back to the village on the back of a small truck. On board as well were 20 school kids on a day trip to see the capital, a prize for being top of their form at the village school. The children were all smartly dressed in their school uniform, socks and shoes.
When first asked if I knew how to do the installation I thought of concrete pads, bolts cemented in, etc. I was asked to go and see how a similar machine was set up using locally found materials, cement is very expensive in Malawai. A shallow pit had been dug by hand, some tree trunks chopped down by axe and some roughly sawn boards of hardwood formed the base to support the machinery. The machines were fixed on to the roughly sawn planks of hardwood, laid transversly across the hardwood logs that were half buried in the pit. The machines were bolted to the planks and the planks were fixed to the logs with spikes made from the rear axles of bicycle wheels. The steel axles had been hammered to a point using an old lorry wheel rim for an anvil. The bearing cone was left on one end of the axle whilst the other end was hammered into a sharp point. Great ingenuity and perfectly fit for purpose.
With 20 odd local guys from the village we set about digging the pit, chopping and sawing up the tree trunks for the installation. They make bricks from fire-baked mud that we used as hardcore. We broke them up to pack under the half sunken trunks, and re-filled the hole with earth which was then soaked with water to create a rock-hard surface. The planks were leveled up on top of the trunks, whittling away high spots with home made adzes. The holes were bored with an auger bit, and slots cut in two of planks to allow the belts to be tensioned when they become worn and have slackened off. The 500 kg oil extraction machine was levered and skidded up on to the woodwork and all machinery bolted down and connected up with the belts. Lots of cheering when we bled the generator and fired it up, the three fan belts were in line, evenly tensioned, it all worked perfectly.
The second generator and refining machine were smaller and simpler to fit without the problems of alignment for the belts. I helped with all of the installation except for connecting up the three phase electricity that powers the filtering machine- electrickery is beyond my ken!
Cristina has been busy as well. Her main task is showing teachers from several schools in the vicinity methods of teaching English. The main language is Chichewa- "language of the Chewa"- the dominant tribe in Malawi. English is an official language and is taught as a subject in primary school. All lessons are taught in English in secondary school but few children go on to secondary school as you must pay to attend. Primary education is free. Even so some children do not attend as they have to work with their parents to produce food or look after younger siblings.
Aids is rife (around 11% of the population) so there are lots of orphans and pressures on families for the children to work. The schools are very basic, the village that we stayed in did have some brick classrooms as well as classrooms built from wood and bamboo with rushes for the roof. They don't all have desks and books are very expensive so the pupils share.
Cristina travels around the local villages with the local school inspector on a small motorbike. She has small forums with village school teachers after school has broken up for the day. Most of the teachers speak reasonable English but not many of the primary level kids can speak much.
She also has several other projects- auditing some of the various projects that this small Spanish help has set up around the area.
Life there revolves around daylight. The day begins with the dawn around 6am and finishes at dusk 12 hours later. There is no electricity in the villages so once it is dark the only light comes from candles, oil lamps and head torches. The kids start school at 7.30 am, they walk to school carrying wood for the fires and water from the bore holes for their teachers.
She is lonely now that I have left. She is staying in a hut that belongs to Miriam, the Spanish girl who has set up and runs the help. She was there when we arrived but left for a couple of months the day before I did. There is another local girl living in the hut with her 18 month old child but she is away for these two weeks taking exams for a course in nutrition and food security that she has been studying. Her sister is staying at the hut whilst she is away, looking after the child but she does not speak much English. The village headmaster speaks good English and runs the help whilst Miriam is away.
Fortunately life there keeps you busy- water must be carried from the bore hole 500 m away, there is fire wood to collect and clothes to wash in the river, all hot food is cooked on an open fire, all very labour intensive.

We had a couple of great weekends traveling down to the lake to a small backpackers lodge and visiting a National Park on the Shire River, a tributary of the Zambesi. The lake is famous for it's cichlids. This is a freshwater species of fish that has diversified to fill every possible feeding niche in the lake. We visited Cape Maclear at the Southern end of the lake where the colourful fish congregate in millions. This is where Livingstone set up his first mission having come up the Zambesi and Shire Rivers from Mozambique. We hired a kayak and paddled out to an island where we swam with schools of brightly coloured fish milling all around us, some nibbling at my feet! The shore of the island is made up of huge rounded boulders, seemingly uninteresting underwater until the fish find you and start swarming around you as you swim. There are fish eagles screeching from the trees, small cormorants diving and drying their wings out perched on the rocks and kingfishers. The locals are out and about in their dug out canoes, fishing and picking up firewood.
The Liwonde National Park was spectacular. We splashed out and stayed in a safari lodge for two nights. They took us out for three driving safaris into the Rhino Reserve where we eventually saw a rhino. There were also a dozen types of antelope, hyena, water buffalo, hippo, porcupine, elephant, wart hogs and all sorts of great birds. The river safari took us within 5 meters of bathing elephants and hippos, crocodiles, meter long water monitor lizards and all the animals that come down to the river to drink. It is the end of the dry season so every animal needs to spend time by the river. The banks are green for a couple of hundred meters in to the forest and then the trees and undergrowth are dry, wilting and open scrub. Superb for spotting game. The birds are spectacular with all sorts of herons and hornbills, storks, eagles and osprey. I wonder if any make their migration next spring up to Scotland.
It was a complete contrast staying in the lodge after the village. We were suddenly amongst rich Westerners again. Electric lights, hot showers, a bar and restaurant serving a variety of food and money, money, money.
All in all a good experience, I have been to Africa several times but always spent most of the time in the National Parks. You see the people and the way that they live, but to experience it first hand, see the harshness of life and how happy and smiling people are in the face of adversity was humbling. A rich experience. All for now. Dom.