Well, we’ve all heard of the saying…”Don’t judge a person until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes”. My shoes may be a little uncomfortable due to their small size, but I do encourage you to walk a mile in my shoes..figuratively.
Summary
TLC works in irrigation during the winter or dry season in Malawi. Under irrigation, TLC deals with stream diversion and treadle pumps. Below is a description of field visits to both sites.
Field work – Treadle Pumps *Please use your imagination, my batteries were flat!*
After eating a breakfast of either rice, bread, sweet potatoes, or cassava and tea, I get dressed and wait for Llewellyn. Puuuutttputtttttttttttt. That’s the sound of his motorcycle when he arrives. We greet each other and I hop onto the back of his bike, ready to roll into the village (or villages) of the day. This one particular day, we visited about 5 treadle pump members, each in different clubs. The main purpose was to 1. encourage farmers to start paying their loans and 2. allow me to survey these farmers and ask questions about loan repayment so I can get a full comprehension of the obstacles to overcome.
The first farmer we visited – Krispin – Llewellyn and I are riding to this village only to find the Krispin in the dimba (garden) we ride through the bush on this narrow dirt path that’s bumpy and full of rocks. We ride for about 5km through the bush, but oh no! There’s a patch of buffalo beans that are growing on the sides of the roads! *side note: buffalo beans are not pleasant. They make you itch and itch and itch and the only way to stop itching is to scratch the hairs of these beans out from under your skin *wince in pain** Luckily, the wind was favouring us and was blowing the buffalo beans away from our path *breathe sigh of relief*
The road gets too steep downhill for the motorcycle so Llewellyn and I dismount and walk for about 100m until we reach the bank of a river. I look across the river with no clear understanding of how the farmers get across it… I mean, as a structural engineering student, shouldn’t there be a bridge or something? Or something is right.
We take off our shoes, socks and roll up our pants and walk across this river..except, we couldn’t walk directly across. We walked up stream for a while and then onto the river bank where the paprika plantation and treadle pump was located. Barefoot (hookworms anyone?), we survey the paprika field but the owner was kulibe (not there!)
Slightly disappointed, we walk back through a different path that required hiking through the paprika, tomato and bean garden with sharp point reeds (yes reeds! Schisotomasis anyone?) poking at my legs and we cross the river. Lo and behold, Krispin was waiting for us on the other side. I ask questions that Llewellyn translates and I get a pretty good response from him. We’re all satisfied and Llewellyn and I ride off into the afternoon heat to visit a handful of treadle pump farmers.
At the end of the day, I have gathered enough information to start making recommendations to help increase the loan recovery rate. I’m pretty sure too that the farmers now are at least aware of the loans and of the seriousness of the loans. It’s still pretty frustrating though when farmers are looking for free issues – something that they’ve been trained to look towards (ie. The government provides free treadle pumps and some other NGO’s as well)
River Diversion
I feel pretty terrible for my camera batteries having gone flat so I have included pictures of a stream diversion project (I also have video for when I come back home!)
After spending a night at Nkhotakota working on inputting and analyzing data for the conservation agriculture project, I took a ride to go to Lilongwe with one of the TLC staff members. Lo and behold, I ended up visiting a 11 hectare, 68 farmer in the club field where they used river diversion to irrigate their lands. Let me say that it was an impressive site. 11 hectares tilled all by hand is nothing short of unbelieveable.
In the big white SUV (yes, very typical of the development worker), there were 2 men from ASNAPP in Zambia, 2 staff from TLC, a Member of Parliament and of course, yours truly. It was interesting to have the MP come for the field visit too, I mean, the women were singing and dancing and the MP sings and dances too. Apparently, out of all of us in the vehicle, we all knew at least one other person in EWB. Either Malawi is very small or EWB is becoming pretty well known in the development sector.
Anyway, I hiked for 3 km along the canal which they dug on the mountainside by hand and almost slipped and fell into the abyss (or steep bush) more than a handful of times. But at the end, it was well worth the risk.
