Breaking down in Mozambique

Three weeks ago my mother's worst nightmare came true: braking down 100km from anywhere in rural Africa. However, unlike in her dream where a man comes out and kills us all, a very nice NGO car stopped, temporarily fixed the car, gave us the name of an engineer and a man who spoke English, and helped us back to the town we had come from. If anyone feels like donating to ADRA, they are the wonderful NGO which saved us. If anyone is passing through Mocuba and needs the name of an engineer let me know.


After a two day drive from Malawi, we finally reached the Ilha de Mocambique, in undeveloped and rarely visited Northern Mozambique. This is the island which gave Mozambique it's name, and would have been extremely beautiful aboout 300 years ago. It's 600m x 2km, and yet squeezes on 7000 people.







The Island is currently a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and so protected from any mass developments. The plans at the moment are to restore it to former Portuguese glory. Everything is there, structurally, but the extent of lack of care, and the number of people living from this tiny space has taken its toll. We stayed in a restored house, which is owned by the Italian architect Gabriele (www.mozambiqueguesthouse.com). He is part of the rehabilitation of the Island, and if he has his way, the Island won't be ruined. Give it ten years he says, and come back and see a transformation.

The Development Set

There’s a wonderful poem at the beginning of Lords of Poverty which starts:
The Development Set is bright and noble,
Our thoughts are deep and our vision global;
Although we move with the better classes,
Our thoughts are always with the masses.

In Sheraton hotels in scattered nations,
We damn multinational corporations;
Injustice seems so easy to protest,
In such seething hotbeds of social rest.

Last week I received a letter from my friend. She wrote that it felt like I was in a parallel universe and how on Tuesdays we used to sit after our International Institutions lecture having a very un-nutritious lunch of a caramel square talking of those people who work in deprived areas of Africa, and now how it seems I’ve temporarily become one. It’s as if the ‘big dream’ is being carried out, and yet it doesn’t in the least bit feel like that.

A few days ago I was at a rural hospital, and while I was waiting for the keys to the storeroom so I could check up on WFP food I was sitting in the NRU chatting to the homecraft worker. As I was there it began pouring with rain, with the wind pushing the rain into our open concrete square and through the windowless window frames. A woman walked in with her 13 month-old grand-daughter who had been referred to the NRU from their local health centre. The grandmother had walked for 4 hours with the girl, as the mother was at home with her 1 month old baby. The little girl had 3plus oedema, the symptom of quash. In malnourishment terms there are two illnesses we see, quashiokor and marasmus. Marasmus is what you see on tv, the stick like arms, alien looking head and general wasting which comes from starvation. Quash presents itself in fluid retention, so the child has swollen feet, arms and a moon-like head, often with very fair hair. Unlike most of sub-Saharan Africa here in Malawi quash is the most common form malnutrition takes, and it’s the hardest to cure. The girl who showed up with her grandmother at Alinafe in Nkhotakota district was a typical example. Her mother had initially taken her to the traditional healer, because a chubby looking child doesn’t equate with malnourishment for these rural women. The traditional healer gave the mother some medicine for the child, believing that she has either been cursed or that the husband was cheating. That medicine made the child’s legs purple. So the mother waited 4 days before taking the child to the health centre, who refered her to Alinafe. It’s not good enough that the child will probably recover, providing that there are no complications. The damage has been done to the child’s cognitive and physical development. She’s not unique by any stretch of the imagination, so when you consider that thousands of children suffer from malnutrition and what this does to their cognitive capacity, is it any wonder that countries develop at different rates? And think about all those children with quash who aren’t taken to the health centre, or who aren’t picked up by the HSAs – the outreach health surveillance assistance on their insane 50km bicycle catchment areas.

So what are the developments? I admit, WFP is not a development agency. It is a humanitarian aid agency which primarily works in emergencies, with a few development programmes such as school feeding. And yes, by looking at the facts in my programme alone we are proving food to 96 NRUs, 250 supplementary feeding centres every month, which equals about 30 children per NRU and 350 per supplementary centre, and this is half the size of the school feeding programme. In NRUs we also provide fortified foods to the caretakers to reduce the abscondee rate, and support nutrition education and low-input gardens to provide the caretakers with information about how malnutrition can be prevented. But is any of it working. The malnutrition rate is decreaing so far this year when compared with last year, but surely that’s only because the emergency is ending and the crop stores are better? Sometimes, when I’m in the office filling out a procurement form for ink and ink pads for the stamps the health centres need to complete their waybills I really wonder if this is it: hospitals which need signs on every wall saying not to wean babies onto Fanta or tea, and hospital workers who can’t keep a food storeroom clean and don’t seem to understand that the food we send should be treated like medicine, and not left to be eaten by rats or ruined by piling it up against damp walls. So I suppose what I’m trying to say is does any of this make a difference?

What I fear becoming is one of those development people who complain all the time and outside work only talk about where to buy such and such. I see myself doing it a lot. Conversation often revolves around the latest import of really fantastic cheese, or whether or not there’s the nice yoghurt this week. This isn’t what it should be about, but I suppose in an effort to blank out the work shallow-ness comes to the surface. It’s so easy to walk through an NRU and not take in what is actually there, and most of the time that’s what happens – it just looks so normal now.

In order to keep sane things are done in baby steps, one person by one person, one drop of water to make up the ocean, and all those other analogies. But ultimately what good is it doing? As the poem ends:

Enough of these verses -- on with the mission!
Our task is as broad as the human condition!
Just parry to God the biblical promise is true:
The poor ye shall always have with you...

Press Release: WFP REACHES BENEFICIARIES DESPITE LOGISTICAL OBSTACLES

LILONGWE – Due to generous donor support, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is confident that it will be able to successfully scale up its operations and deliver vital food aid supplies during this lean season to 1.3 million Malawians (including pupils benefiting from the school feeding programme) in need of assistance in the coming months despite the deteriorating state of much of the country’s infrastructure.

Recent heavy rains have damaged numerous roads and bridges, leaving many vulnerable communities in danger of being completely cut off. However, thanks to substantial contributions from a number of donors and a remarkable logistics effort, WFP believes that it will still be able to reach all of its targeted beneficiaries.

“While the heavy rains are welcome in terms of the forthcoming harvest, they have made WFP’s life much harder by hampering access to many rural communities that urgently need our help,” said Dom Scalpelli, WFP Country Director in Malawi. “But WFP’s logistics unit is working non-stop to overcome all the infrastructure problems to ensure that all those in need of our assistance receive sufficient food supplies.”

During the lean season between January and March, WFP intends to distribute an average of 14,000 tons of food per month to around 1.3 million beneficiaries, including families affected by drought, floods and HIV/AIDS. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to transport food aid to some parts of the country due to the devastating impact of recent downpours.

WFP road and bridge assessments indicate that parts of Chikwawa, Ntcheu, Nsanje, Phalombe, Salima and Thyolo are now extremely difficult to reach. In addition, an average of 10 trucks per day are currently getting stuck in the mud, forcing transporters to hire tractors to pull their vehicles out of the mud.

While these obstacles are certainly hindering operations, WFP is continuing to deliver food to people across the country, even in the most remote areas. Along with pre-positioning food supplies in temporary storage facilities in some of the worst-affected districts like Nsanje and Chikwawa, WFP has also been relying on a fleet of small powerful 6 ton trucks donated by the Norwegian government.




“We knew that some areas would be inaccessible after the rains so we stockpiled food aid in these districts before the rains intensified so that vulnerable people would still get aid,” said Scapelli. “We have also managed to reach many people in other areas thanks to our own fleet of trucks. We are very grateful to the Norwegians because without these tough trucks, many of our beneficiaries would have been left with little or no hope of assistance.”

WFP is also extremely thankful for the contributions from other donors, including Denmark, DFID, the European Union, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, TNT (a multinational logistics company) and the United States. In addition, the government of Malawi recently donated 10,000 tons from the country’s Strategic Grain Reserves.

“Millions of Malawians have received food assistance over the past few years – and will continue to receive food assistance until the end of 2007 – thanks to the ongoing support of our donors,” said Scapelli. “Donors seldom get the credit they deserve but without their contributions, large numbers of Malawians would be facing an even harsher lean season.”

Most donations are used to procure food in Malawi so boosting the local economy and strengthening local markets. Since 2001, WFP has bought 140,000 tons of cereals, pulses, Likuni Phala and sugar in Malawi, ploughing over US$33 million into the economy.

Nevertheless, WFP Malawi still requires additional contributions to fund its operations, with another US$24 million needed until the end of the year to meet its current shortfall for the regional protracted relief and recovery operation activities.

FAO/WFP Flood Impact Assessment, Lower Shire

Two women assessing their replanted maize crop, Nsanje District.

Legend has it that God intended Malawians to live on the plateau of Malawi, but to work and harvest from the rich soils of the Lower Shire (pronounced Shir-ee). Of course, fast forward a few thousand years and things haven’t quite worked out as God intended: a large number of unfortunate souls live in a basin well below the rest of Malawi in intense humidity and horrendous average daily temperatures of 42 degrees. Oh yes, God was certainly right about one thing – the soil is incredibly fertile, as the sugar plantation owners know, but there’s always a catch – in this case the humidity, floods and drought. Welcome to Nsanje and Chikwawa Districts which make up the Lower Shire. It’s a little cruel, in my opinion, that from the bottom of the basin the soaring ridge of the plateau is visible so that every time you look up you are reminded that not everywhere is already 36 degrees at 7am.

Having heard the legend, last week I was fortunate enough to travel to Nsanje and Chikwawa for a week to conduct a flood impact assessment as part of the joint WFP-FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation – another UN body) mission team. Actually, the ‘team’ was made up of me and Chester, a FAO guy and previous Chikwawa District Crops Officer, and the ever important driver who managed to only get us stuck once. In November some flash floods hit the Lower Shire – quite normal for that time of year, and quite expected. BUT, come January, no one was expecting more floods. At WFP these floods have been disastrous, as transporters carrying food for the Jan-Feb distributions have become stuck in an area called the East Bank, along the River Shire.

According to Ministry of Agriculture assessments huge numbers of hectares had been totally destroyed by the January floods. Unfortunately the very lovely Ministry of Agriculture have a few ulterior motives when reporting crop damage, so we were there to do our own assessment. Unlike in the health sector, where Malawi’s 28 districts are divided into Traditional Authorities (TAs), in agriculture the districts are divided on geographical, not political lines, which results in about 5 or 6 EPA (Extention Planning Areas) per district. We spent a lot of time wandering around fields of half flooded maize, and looking at sand covered rice crops. Why oh why, we pleaded, had these people been advised to plant maize after the first rains?? Why not cassava, rice or sweet potato, which are much more resistant to flooding? At one spot we cowered under a tiny tree for shade and looked out on a field of maize which now looks like a beach. Gradually the whole village came over to us and explained that floods had never happened before in the area since 1997, and that they were 100% reliant on the maize they had planted for food. Luckily most other areas weren’t so dependent on their summer crop (it’s summer here!) and could get by on winter harvests, so there’s no need for food aid. Food aid, in my opinion, can be a hugely dangerous thing.

One night I found myself in a snazzy motel in a place called Nchalo, half way between Chikwawa and Nsanje, with ‘you want regret’ under its sign. Nchalo is your typical Malawian town, strung along a main road with a PTC shop, petrol pump and a whole host of little run-down shops selling very randoms things from bicycle tires to goats (Chester actually bought a goat on the way back). There I sat in a bar drinking a ginger ale next to a guy slowly getting drunk on green Calsberg who asked the same question ever 10 minutes or so. Behind the barman’s head was a novelty item: a television with DSTv disk, flashing scenes of As Time Goes By. It had taken some persuasion and the agreement of the entire bar to change the channel to BBC Prime, but the explanation that it would remind me of home made everyone very agreeable. Of course, there followed 100 questions: where was home, what was I doing in the Lower Shire, how long had I been here, which football team do I support??? They were, for the most part, half drunk, and so ecstatic to oblige a white girl who for some bizarre reason was spending a night down in the Lower Shire. So, we sat in the bar till 10pm, by which time the temperature had dropped to a sleep-able 30 degrees.

I wouldn’t want to live in the Lower Shire, although an awful lot of people do. Illovo, the sugar company, has a huge plantation there, and about 30kms of the M1 road travels alongside the sugar cane. Of course, those 30km takes nearly an hour to drive as the road is so bad as to make you feel that your spine is being compacted on every single bump. Nsanje, the last town on the M1, or the first – depending on your viewpoint – promises the exciting Nsanje Port on the Shire River when you enter the town. Unfortunately this hasn’t been built yet, and comments go that why not build a proper road before building a port. At least the promise of the port has brought a baker to the town.

According to my colleagues, I can now say I have seen Malawi. I have traveled the whole of the M1, from the most Southern tip in Nsanje to the most northerly point in Chitipa, covering 24 of the 28 districts. What can I say? Half the time I want to stay for ever in this beautiful, friendly, well meaning country, and the rest of the time I desperately want to come home.

Problem solving in the New Year

Here follows a typical problem:

My friend Amos over in logistics called me the day after New Year saying that, unfortunately, there wasn’t enough maize meal to fulfill the therapeutic feeding distribution plan for January and February: shortfall of 30metric tonnes, and we need 82Mt. Well, I had checked our pipeline stocks, and apparently we had loads of maize meal and no pipeline breaks until Easter – when it won’t matter anyway. Wasn’t the distribution plan supposed to have been implemented that day, or at least the next day??? Anyway, these questions can be dealt with after some sort of food commodity has been dispatched in place of maize meal.

In therapeutic feeding (the NRUs) we give maize meal to the caretaker of the child. This means the mother (caretaker) will stay at the NRU until the child is better instead of withdrawing the child early because the mother can’t afford to buy food independently. It’s one of WFPs really great, well thought through schemes. Studies have shown that when the caretaker isn’t given a ration the abscondee and death rate of children in NRUs increases dramatically.

So Step one: try and borrow maize meal from another programme. Whoops…the only other programme using maize meal are the refugees and for the next two months they’re getting rice.

Step two: try to replace the maize meal with something else. Ah ha, there is sorghum, and we have tones of it and are trying to get rid of it. Perfect, especially as in the Southern region sorghum is accepted (it’s not in the North – they’ll burn it), and we have the biggest distribution in the South. Oooh, so perfect, we’ll replace maize meal with sorghum in the South. BUT, the sorghum needs to be ground ready for use. Technically CHAM hospitals (about half of the ones we supply) could grind it themselves, but then they’ll charge the beneficiaries, which isn’t so great (admission will decrease, which in this lean season is BAD news).

Step three: Spend a morning on the phone to millers seeing how much it costs per metric tonne to grind sorghum, plus calling round the District MCH Coordinators to see if they’ll accept Sorghum this month (like they have a choice).

Step four: with quote see if we have any money for grinding. We don’t (we’re broke). Help.
Step five: at this point Blessings (National programme officer) suggests that maybe we just don’t send any food. I start pleading. So, in steps the lovely Karla, our Deputy Country Director (who has a lovely house we house-sit for at every opportunity).

Step six: A solution which will cost a lot (but to logistics budget, not ours) and irritate logistics – but it buys us 4 weeks to find more maize meal!! Horray. We continue with 100% distribution of maize meal in the South (a mere 23 Mt) for Jan/Feb, but only do a one month maize meal distribution to the Central and Northern regions (29Mt), there by giving everyone maize meal and allowing us to hunt some more down before Feb. Logistics now hate us due to the cost of transporting such small tonnages twice, and all the other commodities for NRUs (likuni phala, sugar, beans) is still being distributed in a two month cycle. So…watch out for health facility misuse and confusion. But, problem solved for now.

An interesting thing about this time of year is all the maize growing. Even in our ghetto of Area 15 the verges have been dug up for maize. Dave, our housekeeper, without asking, dug up our entire vegetable patch to plant maize (we had words on that). Everyone is talking about maize, and the quantity of rain to quantity of sunshine, and whether this year there will be enough maize. Everything here is so dependent on the weather and this one annual crop. If it fails we enter an emergency, and we are still only just recovering from the last one. I was at a very depressing national Food Security and Nutrition conference where one guy got up and said – ‘all we need for food security is to grow more maize.’ Oh dear – not really the point WFP, FAO etc have been hammering on about for the last 20 years. Food diversification is the one thing that could really work here. With such a great growing season and good climate, products do grow all year round, and no one is saying stop growing maize, only perhaps suggesting growing 85/90% maize and the rest sunflowers or soya, with the odd avocado tree in the villages (vitamins and fats in one great package).

The end of 2006

There’s nothing like a reminder of the UK, and down in Thyolo on the tea estates you could be forgiven for thinking yourself in the Lake District, apart from all the tea, that is. Is there anything more picturesque than a rainbow framing Mount Mulanje, poised behind a field of flourishing maize?

New year was spent in the Southern region, flitting between Blantyre, Thyolo and Mulanje. Pete, another VSO with WFP, lives on the Confordzi tea estate by Thyolo boma, in what must have once been a very beautiful colonial house, which still contains some interesting retro furniture and matching curtain pelmets. His kitchen must surely be the envy of all VSOs: large and freshly painted, with an oven, kitchen table, and looks over his garden. He also has the most extraordinary bedroom, complete with walk-in closet and attached bathroom with full length mirror. It might seem extremely odd that I am listing the contents of a house, but for VSOs in this country such items were very strange sights.

Thyolo boma is a blink-and-you-miss-it type place, set off the main road going to Mozambique, but a convenient 40 minutes by minibus from Blantyre. Its setting is beautiful, with the hills keeping it cool, and the fields of tea keeping it green. Thyolo is also a modestly prosperous district, which is unsurprising considering the number of NGOs working there. But the prosperity is visible in brick houses and slightly fewer un-torn clothes than usual. From my perspective, Thyolo has the highest number of supplementary feeding centres in one district, at remarkably close distances from each other.

On New Year’s eve Nell, Pete and I headed to Chitikali, a small village on the main road to Mulanje, situated at the base of the mountain. It’s a really beautiful spot with the mountain running all the way behind one side of the street. Having missed the daily motolo to the Forestry Lodge down a dirt track 10km away, and the start of the climb up the mountain, we braved some bicycle taxis and marveled at the strength of the guys as they cycled us up and down the track in not especially cool weather. Considering we must have been double the weight of their usual load, what with backpacks and water bottles and not being malnourished, it was quite extraordinary how fast we went.

By the time we got to the forestry lodge and had been pounced on by our self-selected guide Edington and entered the park, it was sweltering, and not even the smell of Mulanje cedar made us feel particularly enthusiastic for the climb ahead. Still, a mere 2 hours later and we were swimming in the waterfall about a third of the way up the mountain with Nell doing her best ‘mysterious girl’ impression. It was a perfect stop, and even Edington didn’t complain about the vegemite sandwich we offered. Thanks goodness it wasn’t marmite!

The journey back was made eventful only by a shortcut by the bicycle taxis. It seemed that wading across a waist-high river was for them a shortcut, and somehow I didn’t believe that Peter, by taxi-driver, who was a good 5 inches shorter than me and about half my weight, would be able to carry me. So Nell and I turned back opting for the road while Pete braved some extremely murky looking water.

Chitikali is not one of those places where you would expect to find a pizza oven. Goodness, even Lilongwe has difficulties on that front. Still, there at the bottom of Mulanje Info is a pizza plaza place, and I don’t know whether it was the climb or the trials of the bicycle taxis, but the pizza there is phenomenal. The perfect ending to 2006.

Christmas is coming

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.