Wednesday, October 29, 2008

disaster risk reduction

My work at in Malawi is primarily agricultural, mostly because 85% of people here are subsistence farmers, but my actual role is in EI's Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) program. There is a series of DRR videos online with some footage from our projects in Malawi. (David Kamchacha in the video is one of our DRR partners in the Malawi Churches Partnership Program)
  1. Local Voices, Global Choices
  2. Breaking the Cycle: Good Practice Principles for DRR
  3. Disasters are a Development Concern (view below)


A collaborative project between a number of international agencies and their local partner organisations, this set of 3 videos includes a wide range of good practice examples from international and local agencies working on community based disaster risk reduction in high-risk areas in the global south.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Happy Birthday Lara!

This Lara. She turned 5 today here in Malawi. I heard her singing this morning as she was enjoying her new swing in the backyard: "I'll never know how much it cost..." You just have to see it...


Monday, October 20, 2008

pictures at home and around


pictures of Andre's work



Andre's work with EI is in the field of agriculture, but the focus of our activities is disaster risk reduction. The area we work in is prone to flooding every year and frequent droughts, which often results in food crisis. Our project interventions are aimed at helping people recover from disasters (through things like winter cropping if they've lost their crops) and help them become more resilient to future disasters (by helping them grow different crops, start small businesses, etc.). Because we are working in villages covering a large area, we have field staff that live in the villages and are working with the people, teaching them and supporting them. As a result, my job is to supervise our field staff and administrate the projects. I visit the field regularly to visit the projects with our field staff.

Monday, October 13, 2008

thanksgiving

It's Thanksgiving Day in Canada today. Time to celebrate the harvest, a time of abundance. Ahh, the thanksgiving feast - turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy and cranberry sauce and all sorts of other good stuff. We're missing out on that this year, but don't worry, we'll have some nsima and relish. Actually, I can't say we are lacking anything. Just on Saturday, for example, I had my third meal of the day at noon. We had gone for a visit in a nearby village in the morning. They offered us nsima and beans, which of course I couldn't turn down, even though I knew that we had to get home in time to go over to our neighbour's house because we had been invited for lunch. Our neighbour Mary is an amazing cook. I could eat nsima every day if she was cooking. And she did prepare a feast for us (although of course she denied that it resembled anything like a feast). Rice, nsima, delicious curry beef (her curry chicken is just amazing too), some very nice chambo (tilapia fish, especially for Ezera because apparently she had seen the whole fish in our neighbour's kitchen and wanted to eat it), and some 'spinach' relish. Hmmm, just excellent food. Had seconds too, even though that was my third meal for the day. Just skipped dinner that evening. I could very well gain some weight while we're here with all the starches we're eating: nsima, rice, bread, potatoes...

Anyway, all this talk of feasting while many people here in Malawi are lucky to have any nsima at all. At our monday morning staff devotional, Mike asked us to share something we are thankful for. The responses were sobering. One guy was thankful for his position in life now when some time ago his future looked very bleak, having lost both parents and contemplating suicide -- now he's working in the EI finance department and getting married next month! Another responded that she was thankful for her children even though they are fatherless because she knows God is the Father of the fatherless. Another shared that she was thankful just to be alive because so many of her friends and family have passed on. Many people around us have lost loved ones during our short time here but they continue to be thankful. In the villages there is always the sound of laughter, despite the hunger, sickness, and death. So many people have names like Joy or Happy or Blessing. It seems the poor are often more thankful than the rich. They experience more joy in life despite all their suffering -- or maybe because of the pain they've endured they know what joy and blessings are. In our affluent western world we take so many things for granted. We're not satisfied with what we have. We complain at minor inconveniences (the power is out again, for the fifth time this week, I have to boil my water, my cell phone doesn't work, etc.), but we forget that we have the privilege of so many conveniences and luxuries. Here in Malawi, if you have maize flour, you have nsima, and you are satisfied. Things like salt, sugar, and soap are luxuries. The disparity between the rich and the poor forces us to stop and think about what it means to be thankful. It should also force us to question why so many of our brothers and sisters around the world are living such lives of poverty while we as westerners grow fat with abundance. Especially those of us who are Christ-followers - could you imagine sitting down for thanksgiving dinner and only feeding yourself and not your family? But for some reason there are many who are hungry in our worldwide family of Christian brothers and sisters... Think about it...
(not to spoil your thanksgiving feasting or anything, it's good to celebrate, even the poor celebrate by sharing the food they have, but it's also good to think about life from a broader perspective sometimes)

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

seasonal calendar

Just to give you an idea of where we're at in terms of seasonal activity in Malawi. Right now many farmers are getting their fields ready for planting as soon as the rains come (which in last years has become more difficult to predict and rainfall patterns are changing -- and when you're dependent on the rains for your crops, too little or too much rain at the wrong time means there's a food crisis).

the VanWoerdens in Malawi | Emmanuel International