Wells for Zoe

Wells for Zoe, a sister project of Small Change, is an NGO operating in the Northern Region of Malawi which was set up three years ago by John and Mary Coyne from Dublin. The idea is to help small villages to develop their farming techniques. It is a hugely impressive initiative which has been making the lives of the villagers much easier. The great thing about the project is that these communities can very quickly become self-sustainable, allowing the organisation to move on to other people in need.

The villagers have learned to build dams and irrigation channels, so that they can farm much larger areas of land than before. They are experimenting with new crops - strawberries, peas, carrots, radish, and banana trees. Rather than relying on fertiliser which can be hugely expensive, they have learned about natural fertilising and crop rotation techniques. They use the food to feed themselves and sell the surplus at the market in Mzuzu. They save some of the proceeds to provide for the future.

Previously many of these people had to walk a few kilometres to draw water at a spring, and this water was often dirty causing diseases such as diarrhoea and cholera. New wells bring them clean water without the walk. The materials for the well cost just €50, which the village receives in the form of a loan. The wells also allow these villagers to develop vegetable plots. The money that is earned by selling surplus vegetables can be used to repay the loan within around two years. In this way, ownership of the well is transferred to the people. Finally some local people are trained in the maintenance and reparation of the well. The result is that in the future, the village is in no way reliant on Wells for Zoe.

To learn more about Wells for Zoe, listen to this interview by Pat Kenny with John and Mary Coyne.

In fact Wells for Zoe is achieving what Ungweru wants to aim for. That is promoting self-sustainability. Funds coming from Ireland and elsewhere to Ungweru may not continue to flow forever, and the centre needs to be able to stand on its on two feet. Hopefully the web design project will lead to income generation for Ungweru. Ungweru hopes to increase the level of community involvement with its projects, but the way to go about this is not obvious.

A Good Weekend

There was a good deal of excitement when we handed out the projects in class on Friday morning. They were pretty pleased as well when we gave them the afternoon off! We’ve assigned each of them a local organisation to build a website for. I reckon most of them will be well able for the task of handling a real life client. And for the others, it should be even more valuable as a learning experience.

They will need to meet with the clients a few times to discuss the layout and content of the site. One flaw with the idea is that they only have ten days in which to complete the whole thing – we’ll have to allow for that when giving them marks. Hopefully having completed the project, they will have the confidence to approach clients in the future and provide a professional service that they can charge for.

After lunch we packed everything into the pick-up truck, took a photo, and set off towards Vwaza Marsh, a nearby wildlife reserve, with Val and Deirdre working on their tans in the back. On the journey down John told us about the tutsi flies whose bites can cause a potentially fatal condition called sleeping sickness. Just after we arrived one of the feckers bit Jack

We had a long meal and an interesting debate started up, covering everything from gay adoption to nature vs nurture to Fr John’s interpretation of God. Later Jack, Rosanne and I stayed up on hippo watch under the stars. Of all the animals in Africa, hippos kill the most humans. It was going fine until a loud hippo grunt freaked us out and we headed for bed!

Six o’clock the next morning, and we were heading out to look for elephants with our rather useless guide Raphael. Three hours later, without an elephant in sight, I was starting to get hungry. All I could think of was barbequed sausages and fried tomatoes! We gave up eventually and returned to the camp. I spent the rest of the morning listening to The Cure and looking at some hippos lounging about in the mud. They don’t do much but they are bloody massive!

We decided to go for a quick game drive before heading home and lucky we did because we were only half way down the road when we spotted a trio of elephants fifty metres ahead of us! The male wasn’t too pleased to see us bearing down on them, and let out a huge bellow. We let them go and started the journey home.

On Saturday night Jamie and I went to the university to see what the craic was at big student gig that was on. A few Carlsberg stouts later and I was the token mzungu trying a bit of white-man-dancing in a room full of smooth-moving Africans. Very embarrassing!

This afternoon the first meeting of a new board of directors for Ungweru took place. It offered a real insight into the workings of a growing NGO. Another thought I had was that the evaluation of the lusekelo school of computing is a worthwhile project. We thought the whole thing was fairly well set up after our initial analysis but it turns out we left more than a few stones unturned.