There’s been big excitement in Lilongwe in the form of a new ‘direct’ flight to Lilongwe from London. The excitement lasted about a week until the inaugural flight. Not so direct it seems, as it includes a little plane change in Harare. The excitement now focuses on whether any one will pick up on this modest scam which allows a direct plane from Zimbabwe land in London.
So Christmas is approaching. No break for the wicked this year. Wouldn’t want to leave nutrition activities all on their own, especially as the great boss Lazarus is on leave for a month and I am now sole person in charge of nutrition activities in this magnificent country. People starve 365 days in the year you know, and especially over the Christmas season as the rains have come in earnest. Yes, I am SO much fun to be around right now. Anyone want to know about malnourishment? Anyone? Goodness, I’m never going to look at food in the same light again. I imagine if I ever do pop home I’ll end up eating my body weight in ice cream and probably killing myself on a tea drinking overload. I miss milk, milk that doesn’t smell and taste like it’s off.
But it’s all good news. So far have managed to avoid destroying the nutrition programme here. This week has been more than a little stressful with food distribution plans for Jan – Feb to complete. Now, usually this would be the work of the sub office nutrition officer, and we here in the Country Office would consolidate and approve. But ah ha! – not this month, because there are no nutrition officers in the suboffices!!! Why, you may ask? Well, WFP is fairly broke (we actually do spend all our money on food rather than fancy branding apparatus…-I wonder why UNICEF springs to mind). So this month, or rather week, I have been compiling distribution plans for our two programmes: therapeutic feeding and supplementary feeding. The joy of this was that I got to go down to Blantyre suboffice last week and really bond with the excel programme and calculator, and then spend another week on the phone trying to establish why the non food items which are essential to beneficiary screening for both programmes hadn’t turned up in the relevant districts, which meant our food was now sitting around going bad (ahem…UNICEF again I wonder). So, it’s all fun down here in the Southern hemisphere. At least I have a very exciting new umbrella which according to the guy in the market is a genuine umbrella, unlike my last one which he claims was not in fact an actual umbrella.
There’s a lovely little heart warming story though: The MCH (maternal child health) coordinator of a particular district in the South was complaining that health centres in her district couldn’t implement emergency supplementary feeding because the UNICEF consignment of non food items (height boards and MUAC tapes) essential for screening hadn’t turned up. So, after checking with UNICEF in a very sarcastic and skeptical manner, they swore they had been sent. So…the big mystery: where were these essential items? I call back the MCH: ‘Are you sure you didn’t have a delivery from UNICEF in October?’ I enquire – not wanting to accuse her of perhaps getting confused. ‘Absolutely not’ she replies, ‘although we do have some big boxes from UNICEF sitting in the storeroom, which have been there for two months.’ ‘Hm…any reason why they haven’t been opened?’ I ask. ‘Well, we don’t know what’s in them,’ she replies. Three hours later the boxes have been opened, and there are all the non food items, just sitting there. Of course, it’s now nearly Christmas, and the district hospital still hasn’t distributed any of the items to the health centres because they have no petrol for their truck. And in the meantime our food goes bad because emergency supplementary feeding was supposed to start in October. Now, technically we could go over to the district, pick up the items and distribute them. But, first, it is UNICEF who should follow up their own items, and second the district hospital (aka Ministry of Health) has got to start doing something for themselves at some point.
I am looking forward to the return of Lazarus. While the benefits of being current Head of Section are enormous: lots of fun Heads of Sections meetings where we eat candy and talk about the telephone bills, quite bad neck ache from a 2 hour phone conversations with Blantyre suboffice head, and lots of pity from our Deputy Country Director, who came in with two large tins of imported biscuits this morning which I am trying not to eat, I feel a screw up on my part could occur at any point and I’d have no one to blame but myself. On the plus, I have managed to track down – with the help of the Food Aid Monitor down in Thyolo – why 33 bags of our maize meal was transferred to a non-WFP supported health centre without WFP knowledge. This might not seem like a big achievement, but phone lines have been down in the South, and communication is not the easiest even when everything’s running smoothly.
But all these daily palavers have been compounded by the death of our colleague, Waka. He makes the 6th staff member to die in 2 years. It’s a reminder that while Malawi is a relatively secure and peace loving country, we have one of the highest road traffic accident and HIV rates in the World. Spare a thought for Waka’s wife Rose, and his two little children, Joshua and Will. We are skipping Christmas here this year.
