Blogs from Nkhata Bay, Northern, Malawi, Africa - page 4

Day Three Plan for the day - get all of the modules attached to their support frames by lunch and start marking out the roof in the afternoon while the electrician pulled cables for me. I hadn't accounted for bendy and very hard hardwood timbers and an electrician who has gone AWOL. I thought the pile of bent and twisted timbers of varying thicknessnes on the building floor were the scrap pile - perhaps destined for someone's kitchen extension or new ensuite latrine. But, oh no, these were the best of the hardwood planks left to use on the project. While I was away in Senegal, the carpenter had lost the file and sketches I left him and had installed extra purlins under the roof from memory. They should have been at the top of the ... read more

Day One At last! After constant pushing and encouraging, buying and painfully slow transporting of 3,000 bricks plus suggestions of other projects on the lakeshore which could make use of the panels and batteries stored in Pauls house, the building was as ready as it would ever be to accept SolarAid's solar power system. The shell from September now had a roof and, under that roof, a store room has been created. The rest of the building remains unfinished but in the past 2 weeks, whilst teaching a group of 12 young men and women how to start a business making and selling small scale solar panels, I've been employing electricians to install "first fix" conduits and boxes and making sure that internal walls got built, walls plastered and floors screeded ready for me to start ... read more

We opted for the Scandanavia bus from Dar to Mbeya, near the Malawi border, as they had the best reputation, so considering it was a long drive, we thought we'd do well with these guys. We couldn't have been more wrong! The bus was late, due to mechanical problems, and certainly problems that they didn't fix properly! About 6 times the bus died on us, and as this caused the bus to run late, the driver thought he better speed things up. I reckon he had his foot to the floor the whole time that the bus was actually moving, overtaking around blind corners, running other cars off the road... the guy was a mad man and we were very surprised to make it to Mbeya alive, although we were about 8 hours late thanks to ... read more

After my first encounter with the half completed Kaliya Vocational Training Centre, I was a little nervous about meeting the group - did they actually exist? I’d seen the video prepared by Christian Aid for the launch of their report highlighting the impact of climate change on developing countries (see www.solar-aid.co.uk) so I hoped that I would recognise a few faces. I had already met Emmanuel who picked me up from Njaya and took me to meet Mr Chiumia for the long trek up the hill and had also seen Chimemwe (meaning “happy”) in the video, hacking down trees with alarming ease. The first meeting was wonderful. Everyone was enthusiastic (although some expressed it much more reservedly than others) and all were eager to know more about solarthan John Keane had been able to cover in ... read more

As proof that life ebbs and flows, after our easy bus trip from Blantyre to Lilongwe, we experienced a hellish 10-hour bus trip from Lilongwe to Mzuzu. Not only was it very long (it should have only been about six hours) but about seven hours into the trip, we stopped at a town and the bus got so packed that people were standing in the aisles and sitting on the backs of the benches. A lady with a chicken stood over Vicky which caused Vicky (the English Princess) to freak out for the rest of the three hour journey. In addition, a baby being held near Vicky peed on her. I laughed as, after having traveled in India, everything is EASY. After the hellish bus trip, the girls wanted no more "public transportation" and we took ... read more