Water Aid for Malawi

 For the last three years the Club has worked closely with LINK Community Development, one of the leading agencies working on the delivery of the Scottish Executive's Programme for educational support for schools and teachers in Malawi.  In addition, the Club has part-funded the post of a LINK Development worker whose job it is to progress development in schools in the Dedza area, which lies south of the capital city of Lilongwe.

For several months now the Club has been in contact with the Gota Kanal Rotary Club, Sweden, and the Bwaila Rotary Club in Lilongwe, Malawi, with a view to jointly undertaking a number of water related projects for both the improvement of water supplies in villages and the provision of toilets in schools.  The idea being that the Inverness and Gota Kanal Clubs would raise funds and seek a matching grant from Rotary International, which would finance the project, and the Bwaila Club would hold these funds, monitor progress of the project, and release funding as and when required to keep the project moving forward and sending regular updates of progress to the other two rotary Clubs.
 

The supply of a water pump to a village means that the villagers no longer have to walk up to several kilometres for water on a number of occasions each day, but rather that they have clean water within the confines of their village and hence have easy access to it.  It also affords girls (whose job it is to fetch the water daily) more time to attend their local school and receive an education, which is of vital importance to their future and quality of life.  The supply of toilets to the local school not only gives the children decent facilities, but also helps girls to attend school more regularly in that they have privacy and washing facilities where possibly neither exist at the moment.  This International Project took a step nearer to fruition recently when, in May, three Inverness Culloden Club members, Phillip Thorn, Duncan MacDonald and Derek McRae, undertook a 10-day trip to Malawi, helped by Alness based company Sureclean which paid for the airfares of the three Rotarians concerned.

The idea behind the trip was to identify villages, which required clean water pumps, and schools which would benefit from toilets and sanitation projects.  The type of pump favoured by the Club was one produced by a company called PumpAid, the mechanism of which is easily installed by the company, with the villagers help (thus giving them a sense of ownership), and also readily maintained by the villagers themselves.  The school toilets are constructed of local mud bricks (usually supplied by the village) on the basis of two toilets per class (one for boys and one for girls).  Liquid waste from the toilets can also be used to manufacture manure for local gardens and fields.

Whilst in Malawi, the Inverness Rotarians attended two Bwaila Rotary Club meetings and also held successful talks with representatives from the Malawi Club regarding the monitoring of the project.  They also met with representatives from the LINK organisation and PumpAid, visiting villages and schools with them and discussing possible projects which could be undertaken in both the Lilongwe and Dedza areas.  In addition, they met with the Director of Education and his Depute, in Dedza, and discussed the best way forward for implementing the projects which they had identified.  All in all, it was an extremely successful trip which surpassed the expectations of those taking part and identified a sufficient number of projects for several years to come.  It is hoped to raise around �10,000 each year to fund these projects all of which will greatly improve the lives of the villagers and school children involved.

Travelling around the countryside and visiting remote villages was a bit of a culture shock and a real 'eye-opener' for the Inverness Rotarians.  The economy of Malawi is heavily based in agriculture, with a largely rural population, and whilst they were prepared for life in a country which is amongst the world's least developed and most densely populated, they were still shocked by the abject poverty and living conditions of the people, especially in the outlying country areas.

They saw villages, ranging from a few, to many mud built buildings with no toilet facilities and no water well, where the women have to walk several kilometres every day to fetch water which is sometimes not even clean or disease free.  Schools with dark, unpleasant classrooms, housing up to 350 children in any one room, and with too few teachers to teach them.  Schools partly built where the children sit on a ring of stones under a tree because there are no classrooms for them.  Schools where the girls cannot attend all the time because there are no toilet facilities for them during menstruation.  An orphanage where up to 120 pre-school children were fed by one lady every day from a small pot, cooking maize porridge on an open fire under an open-sided, straw roofed kitchen. 

Yet, despite these heart-wrenching conditions, and the apparent lack of hope for the future, the adults and the children they met were welcoming, polite, happy, eager to learn and always ready to smile and laugh.  It was a lesson in human nature which will remain with them forever.