I arrived in Matema village on the shores of Lake Nyasa/Lake Malawi and set myself up in a 10,000 shillings (9 dollars) accomodation right on the beach--it was a splurge of an extra five bucks or so because I was alone, there are only 3 accomodaton options, I didnt have my passport on me so I didnt want to make problems for myself with the border police, it was my last few days...After justifying the expense and realizing how disapointing it really is to not negotiate and argue and make up stories for the hotel-owners, I took my marimba (wooden hand [View Full Entry]

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On The Road Again Malawi has been very hard work and very rewarding and I have lots to post once I get some time to sit and upload some of my notes from the past 5 weeks. We'd planned to leave Nkhata Bay on Sunday morning but I managed to pick up a nasty throat infection which turned to tonsilitis and which had me in bed shivering and sweating until Tuesday evening. We finally left Paul, Claire and Jorda Norrish to enjoy their own Xmas at Njaya on Wednesday morning and travelled north as far as Karonga - the last major [View Full Entry]

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dont have energy to say alot right now being as i slept on the street under the bus last night. i just travelled in buses for 26 hours and the last four hours we had to stop because the police wouldnt let busses pass because it is around the christmas season and thus lots of armed robberies on the highways i guess, or at least a potential for. short trip summary: went to iringa by bus (6 hours) where it was quite cold, and host of one of the very few tanzanian movie theaters, beata and i saw "the truth about [View Full Entry]

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It was past noon and sitting on the benches in the shade of steel-roofed gazebo was a small crowd of Africans and more white people than I was expecting. After the usual two or three hour wait, boarding was announced and we joined the queue that bottle-necked through the gate. Once onboard the MV Liemba we were assigned our berths and given our keys. The MV Liemba is a wonderful old iron ship and piece of history. Built the SS Graf von Götzen in Germany in 1913 for the colony of Deutsch-Ostafrika she was disassembled and transported in piece [View Full Entry]

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The last time I updated my Blog I talked about the place I am staying, but I didn’t talk about the family who I am living with. They have been really great to me. The pictures with this post show almost of them, so you can tell it is a big family. Since they are relatively well off, there are also regularly various uncles, aunts and cousins around. Oh yeah, and the first day I moved in they miss heard my name as Eric, so that is what I am called there. This is actually quite common, very few people can [View Full Entry]

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I have spent the last two weeks house hunting so I can stop spending more than a third of my living allowance on my accommodation. The kinds of places I am looking at are just one or two rooms attached to a compound that a (usually extended) family lives in. These places usually run about $10 / month or less, which is vastly better than the $100/month that my current room is costing me. It has taken me a lot of talking to convince people that I am actually serious about wanting a place like that. I keep being told that [View Full Entry]

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Today I went out to dig tube wells. These are narrow wells (about 3”) that we dig for use with treadle pumps. We don’t dig them deeper than 10m because that is the maximum lift available with our pumps. And that’s a really good thing because they are hand dug and it’s really hard and dirty work. In this particular location, the soil is mostly compressed sand, so that’s why there is someone sitting up on the auger. It’s actually the only way we could get the tip to bite into the soil. The even more discouraging thing was that after [View Full Entry]

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Enterprise Works Tanzania (EW) has three areas it operates in: Tree Crops, Irrigation, and Seed Oil. With Tree Crops, they establish mother orchards with improved tree crop varieties (better tasting, larger fruit, more suitable to the local conditions). Teach farmers about grafting and budding to expand crops, as well various techniques to improve yields on fruit trees (pegging to induce early fruit, stripping leaves to force dormancy). They also cover management skills so they can establish their own nurseries. Recently they have also started to produce Band Saw Mills for lumber processing. T [View Full Entry]

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The smell of burning leaves (and garbage) here. It’s not like the smell of a campfire in your back yard, or out in the mountains. It’s kind of like you can smell and taste the dust that is being burned. Also with smells, maize being roasted on a charcoal fire. As a kid I remember hiding them in the back of the car, so when we would go for drives my brother, sister and I would pick the kernels off one by one. Since we would leave them there for so long, they would actually be like slightly soft popcorn kernels, [View Full Entry]

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While there are things that remind me of the past, those memories only loosely compare to the present. Things have changed a huge amount in 15 years, I know I know, not terribly surprising given how much things have changed in Canada in 15 years. It’s just striking to see the way things have stretched out between those at the top and those at the bottom. In Mbeya there are a lot of people with very little, but there are also at least two computer stores that I have seen. If a cheap desktop computer in Canada costs about $1000, that [View Full Entry]

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