Rain, rain glorious rain.

The Chinese are coming, and therefore the Taiwanese are out. The Taiwanese who have been in the country the last 50 odd years have been given 30 days to leave and close their Embassy. The relationship is over. 2000 Chinese are being flown in and the government is USD6 billion better off (so the rumour states). We found this out through the grapevine (the Daily Times, Malawi’s premier daily, has been more preoccupied with people committing suicide after testing HIV positive – a story which appears weekly along with men in Mangochi who have ‘relations’ with goats). First, a friend of ours tried to renew the lease on his house. The landlord had already handed it over to the Chinese, as well as the other 5 houses on the compound. Then there are the ads that go round on the Lilongwe google-group - Taiwanese are selling EVERYTHING – furniture, pets, plant pots. Then we hear of a Chinese restaurant starting up (very welcome – but we’re still suspicious). When a road building project is funded by the EU, Malawian labour is used. For the Chinese they bring their own labour – hence the 2000 – and finding accommodation for 2000 in a small town like Lilongwe is difficult. I’m suspicious: there are certainly a lot of very nice, new, expensive cars driving around with Malawian Government plates at the moment. They weren’t there before Christmas.

Some people say that the Chinese want to irritate the Taiwanese. Others say they want votes from African countries to get them a seat on the UN Security Council. I wonder what else the Chinese are getting out of it? I feel strangely protective towards this little country, and my over-active imagination has kicked in. Just think of Darfur and the Chinese influence there. Two days ago at a steering committee meeting for an international training on community management of acute malnutrition I brought my suspicions up with Tapiwa, the chief government nutritionist. ‘Eee Hazel’ was all she would say, and went back to discussing the more important matter of which snacks to serve on day three of the training.

WFP is not flavour of the month with the Malawian government. Please find attached a recent newspaper article, published by that bastion of journalistic skills, The Nation. It should be pointed out that a mere week later the Nation also reported (on page 2) about how Malawian wives were a disappointment, were getting fat and lazy and forcing their husbands to look elsewhere, usually to the domestic help. Yes, Malawian journalism is something else. Anyway, recently the press hasn’t been very favourable to WFP. Unfortunately, they seem to be getting things rather wrong, so just to set the record straight:

Malawi is maize secure. The harvest last year was very successful and the government was quite right to export maize. Malawi, in fact, became the maize basket of Southern Africa. Problem is, if you eat only maize you become malnourished and end up in either supplementary feeding or therapeutic feeding, which are WFP supported programmes. Hence, there’s still a problem, and food aid for the management of malnutrition is still desperately needed, as are school meals for children every morning, food supplements for people living with HIV and AIDS, and rations for the refugees at Dzaleka refugee camp.

Anyway, none of this has helped our funding situation.

The rain continues to come, down-pour after down-pour. Getting from car to health centre door has become a challenge as the ground turns into mud baths. The constant sweeping which is done around all homes/buildings means that the soil is little better than dust or sand, so when the rains come there is nothing to hold it together.

The BBC is reporting rather different figures for the flood hit areas in the South than our own investigations reveal, although both reports aren’t exactly cheery reading. While many are displaced, there are still only 4 flood-related deaths, and from our sources half of these deaths were caused when two very drunk men decided to cross a crocodile infested, slightly flooded river at 3am one morning after a celebration. The District Commissioner reported these deaths are being entirely flood related, which they’re not. Unfortunately the same District Commission has a tendency to exaggerate pretty much anything that goes on in his district in order to extract money.

For us we can just wait to see how bad the flooding will become, and the indications are that it will be very bad indeed. Already 70,000 people affected in the South. We hear that either this or next weekend the dam at Kariba, Zambia will be opened. That hasn’t happened since 2000/2001 floods, when the whole of the southern African region was denoted as a disaster area. Unfortunately donations aren’t usually received until the tvs show people climbing up trees to avoid being swept away. Here, WFP cannot act unless asked by the government, at which point the EMOP – our emergency operation flood plan – kicks in. UNHCR – the UN refugee organization, which is based on the floor above ours, has already been asked to assist with the flood hit Mozambiquans who have come across the border into Malawi and now need shelter, food and water. If WFP is also asked then – being on the emergency flood roster – I might head down to the South to carry out a rapid nutrition assessment. This is done using a MUAC tape (Mid Upper Arm Circumference), which is a very quick and easy tool to use to assess the nutrition status of individuals. As the government is slightly anti-WFP at present I doubt this will happen. As it is, in the two flood prone districts in the Lower Shire, we scaled up nutrition support through supplementary feeding in January, and the impact of floods on levels of malnutrition won’t be felt for at least a couple of months. At the moment we are preparing for 120,000 individuals to be flood affected, but it could be less, or a lot, lot more.

Last night it started raining at about 5pm and it was still pouring down this morning when I woke up. It’s still raining now. The plants and the insects love it, but the vegetable patch does not. My butternut squash crop has been entirely eaten by a rather gruesome snail, which maybe shows that homemade pesticide mix of chilies, washing powder, soap and water is useless. The basil crop is also looking less than healthy, and Dave – the housekeeper- has temporarily given up cutting the grass with his panga knife because it grows back so quickly. While all the plants expand magically over night, the one plant I was told, in fact guaranteed, would grow as fast as a monkey climbing a banana plant has stayed exactly the same size. Thus the bamboo arch we constructed remains bare.

Finally, on a kind of aside, I have been really touched by the response to the plea for USD18million. Sometimes I feel that I have lost my way here, have fallen off the desire to follow what I so stringently used to believe were appropriate development techniques along the post-development theory line, in the hope of just achieving anything at all. Theory goes out the window when you’re faced with 15,000 children to feed every month and no food. I never used to be much of a fan of food aid; amazing how things change. Anyway, being forwarded responses from various peoples MPs or DFID enquiry people about the funding of WFP Malawi has been heart warming. Things are still looking grim, we are probably borrowing food from the Tanzania programme at the moment to see us through February, and the constant rain and daily flood alerts don’t help – but it’s good to know that people care, and instead of just saying they care, actually do something. It’s the doing which I am so thankful for. There’s the classic story of the development pornography on TV: the person looks up from reading the paper, says ‘isn’t that truly terrible, someone should really do something’ and then goes back to reading the paper. I am proud that among the people I know it’s not like that.