Thursday, October 27, 2005

Food!


Food!

 

Hey folks, I hope everyone is well! I don’t know what kind of media coverage that the droughts and imminent famines are getting in Canada (although I know they are all over the news in Europe)… but yep, of all the countries in Africa I go too… I had to pick the one with an upcoming famine.   After the fourth consecutive year of erratic rain fall patterns and drought,  the government of Malawi has called a state of emergency and is predicting wide scale famine throughout Malawi.  So far, the hardest hit area is in the south (I am in the central region).   Of course you are all welcome to send me donations of food (chocolate, candy, microwave popcorn and home made cookies preferred and ohhhh cheeeese please!) but the sad reality is that the rich guys (including us) in the cities probably won’t feel the affects.  It is really the 80% of people that live in rural villages who will be starving (but please, do send me food anyways!! Decent food is hard to come by here ;) )

 

Apart from development work, CPAR has also been distributing food on behalf of the World Food Programme (good work Jacquie!) in certain villages where most of the able bodied workforce has been affected by HIV/AIDS.  Many households consist of grandparents trying to provide for small children (as their parents have died), or child headed households, trying to provide for their younger siblings.  There are some households that do have living adults, but many of these adults are also suffering from HIV/AIDS, and are unable to farm and support their families.  It is unbelievable.  I went to one of the food distribution centers to see how the monthly distribution operates. About 1000 people were lined up with their WFP ration cards, for over 8 hours in the blistering sun in order to get their rations. Then they walk about 10 kms back to their villages either carrying on their heads, or precariously balancing on a bicycle a 50kg bag of maize, 3 L of cooking oil, a small bag of peas, and a few small children.   I had a 32 kg luggage on wheels when I came to Africa, and I could barely pull that sucker around the airport.  Imagine a 50kg bag on your head!! Frig.

 

Due to the upcoming famine, CPAR is also scaling up its food distribution to other parts of the country, for the general population this coming November and December.    We are also hoping to get funding from CIDA ( aka Canada) to do food security programs (i.e. irrigation, seed diversification, etc) in the affected areas in order to hopefully mitigate future famines.  Good thing I a have such a green thumb (I can barely grow grass in my front yard haha).

 

On another note…. We finally found a flat!  We move in Nov 1st. After Jim spent about 3 weeks walking all over town with random Malawian so-called-rental-agents looking at exorbitantly priced white peoples housing.  It is a tiny one-bedroom flat, but it is furnished, safe, and actually affordable. Everyone is welcome to come crash on the couch, anytime. We’ll even try to get ya your own futon bed and mosquito net. (for those who know  Katherine, ask her about her experience of sharing our mosquito net haha).    We are pretty excited about moving out of the hotel, and finally settling. And speaking of furniture… Jim made some friends with some guys from the curio (i.e. crafts) market. There are tons of Malawian chief chairs (Mary do you want 7 more to complete your set??). Jim re-designed the chief chair, and some wood carver guy traveled 200 kms by ox-cart to his village to chop down the proper sized tree, and make Jim his custom made 100% teak wood chair. It’s pretty cool, we’ll try to send a pic. But if anybody wants some amazing wood bowls, frames, elephants, hippos, chairs, etc, let us know! We will trade wood carvings for food haha.    And if you do feel the urge to mail us, it will still be best to use my work mailing address:

 

Tess Ocol

CPAR Malawi – Country Office

P.O. Box 30998

Lilongwe, 3

Malawi

 

Take care everyone, and please send us news!!

 

Cheers,

tess n jim o

posted by Tess and Jim O @ 12:57 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Week 2...


Last week, work had their annual general meeting with all program and management staff at a “business conference center” at a remote village about 4 hours north of Lilongwe.

Usually I can sleep in just about any moving vehicle…however, The truck, a brand new Toyota Forerunner is generally used for food distribution in the drought affected south. The problem being that an army of roaches have made it its home. So, we rode in the roach-mobile, with swarms of roaches crawling all over my legs and feet. I spent the entire 4 hours flicking off the adventurous suckers that would crawl up my leg under my skirt, So no sleep in that ride haha.

The conference center was literally a few huts, and one big hut with a long table and over head projector. The sleeping huts were naturally, also roach infested (which no longer bothered me at this point) and the conference main hut was infested with these HUGE hornets that were the size of flying mice. So, all day long, as we sat through 8 hour meetings, all my colleagues would laugh as I would continually freak out when ever one landed on me. In all my travels, I have NEVER seen any stinging insect SO FRIGGIN BIG before. Roaches are one thing….. flying mice with 2 inch stingers are another.

As I was the only mazungu (foreigner) there, the lodge had no bottled water. After 2 days of drinking only bottled coke in 40 degree sweaty hot water, I was finally dehydrated enough for the lodge owner, so she finally agreed to boil some drinking water for me. However, I swear that she deep fried some fish in a pot, then used the same pot to boil water, as the water tasted and smelled like oil. I swear it tasted like pure oil. I probably wouldn’t of minded so much if every thing we were eating was NOT deep fried as well.

So after 4 days of roach massages, colossal sized insects, oily water, and numerous meetings, I am back in the city. Who would of ever thought that I would miss the luxuries of Lilongwe!

Jim spent the whole week in the city house hunting, and trying to find us a car. Once we get all that figured out, we’ll let ya know where we live…. I hope everyone’s doing well in TO! We miss ya.

posted by Tess and Jim O @ 6:03 PM 0 comments

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Test 2

Testing... testing... still trying to get this to work properly....


Okay, So we have made some changes as we are figuring out this blog thing. Our new development is that we have removed you as contributors, however you can still make comments located throught the link below the posts.
whew.. internet is ssslllooowww here....

posted by Tess and Jim O @ 1:25 PM 0 comments

Friday, October 07, 2005

Hello & Cell Phone Numbers

Hey folks,

First off, we want to thank everyone again for all your time, help, prayers, support and just being there for our wedding. So many of you did so much to really make the celebration so awesome!! A gigantic thanks again to Chris Radz and Travis who spent the whole week preparing the reception site in Huntsville! We posted up a few of the pics that Adam took on our website. (www.tessjim.com)

Secondly, thank you for all your emails and phone calls. Sorry we have been terrible in responding lately. It’s been a whirlwind of activity post wedding preparing for our departure, but do expect to hear from us in the next few weeks as we get settled.

As for getting settled, we are just waiting for the natives to finish constructing our grass and mud hut. That, and we have yet to find a contractor to dig the borehole for our well. Just kidding… Work set us up in a hotel for the next two weeks, and we will start house hunting this weekend. Lilongwe is a nice town. It is the capital city of Malawi, but it is more a town than a city. Albeit I did get lost my first day returning to work from lunch. Good thing I found a man under a tree running a pay phone service in the middle of nowhere…. I started working at the CPAR Country Office (www.cpar.ca) and Jim has made friends with most of the street vendors as he has been busy be-boppin’ around town getting us setup with phones, food, power converters, etc. We did get mobile phones activated (yes, my coca-cola UK phone has been resurrected! hehe) and our numbers are as follows:

Jim - 00265 9 362 775
Tess – 00265 9 362 774

I think we can send and receive calls / text messages internationally. We’ll let you know when we figure it out.

So, we are setting up this blog page, just to make it easy to send out group emails and pictures. We are in the process of getting everyone’s email addresses signed up to it… but as the connection is slow, it may take us a few days.

Anyways, I hope everyone is doing well, and we will be in touch soon. Happy Thanksgiving Canada!

Cheers,
Tess & Jim O

posted by Tess and Jim O @ 5:14 PM 0 comments