Blogs from Malawi, Africa - page 77

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

Internet Free Zone ! Am safe and am now back in Malawi abd currently running round like a headless chicken trying to get more equipment up from Lilongwe to Nkhata Bay. I'd forgotten just how slow and expensive internet access is - really involves a 2 hour round trip to Mzuzu. So, just wanted to let everyone know that I'm fine, that me and Katherine are settling into Njaya Lodge, that things will calm down with work as soon as I start training on Friday and that the rains arrived last night - on the exact day that everyone told me they would arrive ! I'm told the mozzies will be out and about by Friday - oh good ! Will try and write some offline blogs and post as soon as possible. ... read more

We crossed the border into Malawi. Frustratingly we discovered, on being handed back our passports later, that our Yellow Fever certificates had disappeared from our passports since handing them to Kat for bulk processing prior to entering Zambia. This was a niggling worry as theoretically we could be stopped at some borders without them. We reached the Malawi capital of Lilongwe. We queued in the hat for ages at a cash machine. We saw a man with the biggest growth on his neck that I've ever seen. We then rushed to an internet cafe for half an hour to email the travel clinic back in Nowich for duplicate Yellow Fever certificates. They are availalble for £10 but the difficulty is getting them to us. Lilongwe is very poor - we met some street kids. One ... read more

Hi folks, my quietness on Travelblog has been as I have had to postpone my departure from the UK slightly. I have re-booked for 5th November and extended my stay till 15th December - Ethiopian Airlines have been very accommodating. Hopefully be in touch in the not too distant future with news and pictures. Hassan... read more