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Published: July 11th 2008
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Here we go again....
Pretty sure we could have gotten in a lot of trouble for taking this picture. Today I am pleased to announce a new addition to our project team - our driver, Harold Chaponda. Harold is from Chileka (just down the road from the hospital), has quite a few years of experience working as a driver and maintenance guy for a car hire company, has great English (bonus!) and lists chatting with friends and taking non-alcoholic drinks amongst his hobbies.
Sitting in on the interviews was an interesting experience for me! I had some questions to ask but I left a lot of it in the hospital administrator’s capable hands (the lot of it would include much of the technical driving and maintenance type questions). A scoring system was used. Marks were issued for education (completion of form 2 of secondary school was the minimum requirement with completion of secondary school being a bonus), English, presentation (including 1 mark for whether or not the candidate waited to be asked to sit down), technical (could the candidate walk us through checking the vehicle is safe, dealing with a puncture etc.), driving experience and practical (we went out for a drive). We were lucky to be able to do the driving part actually as there hasn’t been petrol
or diesel within about a 50 km radius of the hospital for almost a week now. Apparently people are holding it back as the price is going up and up. It is currently running at about 300 Kwacha per liter which is about 8 dollars per gallon. Obviously, this is affecting everyone. The hospital currently provides medicine at less than 10 percent of its’ cost but they are struggling to continue to do this. Hopefully all of this is not going to cause us too many problems.
Harold won out over the other short-listed candidate for several reasons, one of them being that Roy suspects (from his license and the drive that we went on) that the other candidate is currently a Matola driver, in which case he probably drives like a crazy man. Speaking of Matolas, I know I told you some stories in my blogs from my last trip but I have new stories I could tell almost every week. For those of you who don't know, Matolas are a form of public transport here.
From the latest incident, I learned something that might come in handy - the going rate for police bribes at road
Msundwe
One of the busy trading centers (and one of the places we will be visiting on our outreach journeys). blocks. About 100-200 Kwacha (about 1 dollar) should do it for one policeman, maybe best to give 500 if there are two of them. There’s a new law here that the minibus drivers can only take 3 people per row (that would be 1 person per seat). Several times I have been in buses that have been stopped at road blocks, of which there are many, and everyone has had to leave the bus and wait at the side of the road for another because the vehicle was overloaded. This recent time the bus was packed full with an average of 5 people per row plus quite a few chickens. The bribe got us through.
In some Matola situations, the fact that my Irish housemate Margarite and I can be pretty stubborn seems to help us. The last time we got on a bus we pretty much demanded that we left once there were 3 people per row. This saved us from a likely dumping at the side of the road and also a likely hour or so of waiting for the bus to fill to the capacity that the driver would like. Our fellow passengers, thankfully, all thought
this was great and went along with it. Public transport is by far the most dangerous thing here in Malawi. Most of the time, as with everything else out here you really just have to go with the flow otherwise you’d never get anywhere. I did get quite scared last weekend though when we were in an overloaded truck which smoke started coming out of prior to it swerving all over the road. The truck stopped, we got off and started walking and everyone else got back on and tried again. Anyway, someone must be looking down on us because we always seem to be rescued by tourists, NGO vehicles, ambulances etc. It’s kind of entertaining not knowing how you’re going to get somewhere!
As always there’s so much I could say but I’ll leave it there for now. I’ll let my photos tell you some more stories.
I'm in Johannesburg for training right now and am going to see our project vehicle for the first time today! Next time I write I'll introduce you to a few of my colleagues here on the continent and I'll be able to show you pictures of the vehicle, and people's
Carrying wood.....
...and this one is not even high. reactions! Soon we'll get this show on the road!
Hope everyone is well,
Joanna x
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