October 9, 2005

Embangweni #30

Dear Friends and Family,

Beth left Malawi a month ago and Tyler Hutton Blank arrived this past Wednesday, to everyone’s great joy. Of course, that turned out to be just the time I had previously arranged to be in Lilongwe for several days and so I was away from the usual means of communication for the immediate post-natal celebrations. Murphy should be proud of the way we uphold his law here in Malawi!

The month since Beth’s departure has been a busy one and the one remaining before my flight promises to be at least as busy.

Integrated Health Services Center

We reviewed and rejected one round of contractor bids to construct the new IHSC because they were much higher than our own tabulation of required materials and labor costs indicated they should be and because the quality of other work they had done was unimpressive. We rejected a second round because they left out too many obviously necessary things and were not able to make all the numbers in their proposal add up correctly! It was finally decided that the hospital will serve as its own general contractor (through the person of Mr. Zgambo, the maintenance supervisor) and work has now begun on clearing the site and ferrying in sand, gravel, and bricks. We still need to raise the final $20,000 but we believe it will come. Last week in Lilongwe I was getting prices on windows, doors, reinforcing rod, et cetera, and I do believe I will see ground actually broken before I leave Malawi on November 13.

Computer and network maintenance

Did I mention that Murphy should be proud? Lightning knocked out our radio email link until we were able to swap in a spare radio, and did the same thing to the computer we have at the guest house for visitors to send emails home on until we were able to replace the network card in it. A week later, some equally malicious force knocked out a radio amplifier until we managed to find an older model that had been presciently stored away for possible future use! At the same time, we have had a string of computer power supply failures and currently have six or eight computers sidelined and waiting for new power supplies. These commodities have now been purchased from e-Bay but we are looking for someone coming this direction who can carry an extra 30 pounds. Despite that, we have used some of the computer fund money to hire a computer teacher at Robert Laws Secondary School, and the students there are falling all over themselves to get to that class, whether they make any of the others or not!

Computer maintenance training

One of my big hand-over projects has been to teach a class on computer maintenance and repair techniques to a small but hardy group of interested staff persons from the various Embangweni institutions that now have computers—four schools, the hospital, the guest house, and the station office. It has been thoroughly enjoyable to watch this group becoming more and more comfortable, taking out and replacing various parts of the computer, analyzing problems, learning computer concepts and nomenclature, becoming familiar with software fixes, and generally turning into the Embangweni cadre of computer gurus! Junior Nyirongo, whom we sent off to Lilongwe for nine months of in-depth A+ training, has been back here periodically on breaks and has managed to fix several laptops and printers that had previously defeated me. It is enough to make me prouder than even Murphy, and at least a little hopeful of his eventual decline, if not actual demise!

Computer parts depot

In order to maximize the chances of a sustained computer program at Embangweni, I felt that a good parts depot would be essential. The unspent portion of the computer account will be left in a trust fund for parts and training, under the auspices of a station computer committee, and a store room has been set up in the Robert Laws computer building. It has been truly gratifying to see shelves built and now lined with neatly labeled boxes of various parts, tools, cables, supplies, wire, software, spare monitors, keyboards and even mice—the good kind, that is! The remaining step before I leave will be to put an inventory system in place so that things go where they are supposed to and not otherwise.

Grain bank buying

Aside from the IHSC mentioned above, perhaps the biggest effort we have been engaged in for the past couple of months is the purchase of grain for local grain banks in the communities surrounding Embangweni. In response to predictions of famine in the upcoming period, December 2005 through March 2006, we have received overwhelmingly generous donations for the purchase of maize and soya, to be stored wherever each participating community can provide security and treatment against weevils. These grain banks are not intended to hand out free food, but to form a revolving fund, whereby sales of grain during the hungry season at reasonable, below-market prices, will provide the funds to restock the banks again after next year’s harvest and repeat the cycle. We have been performing an almost constant round of meetings and visitations in each community to ensure that maize is purchased while it is still available at reasonable cost and to ensure that it is being stored under acceptable conditions. Almost 90 percent of the donated funds have now been spent, and none too soon—the prices of maize have already started taking a sharp trip toward the sky and no end to the trend is in sight! But it has been a time-consuming and often painful process as villages had to be convinced that they should buy at the lowest prices possible for their own future benefit, rather than lining the pockets of their friends who wanted to make a big profit on their excess maize at high selling prices.

Marion Medical Mission arrives

The shallow wells season has begun with the arrival of the Marion Medical Mission first team—that being a reference to the timing of their arrival, not necessarily to the comparative quality of their work! The night of their arrival, Tom Logan knocked on my door in some distress. It seems the driver of their van, who was supposed to take them onward to another destination the next morning, had disappeared and apparently gone back to Lilongwe. And so came into play our new-fangled gadget here at Embangweni—the telephone! A call to Nancy Dimmock gave us the driver’s cell phone number (can you believe technology!) and the next call found him in Kasungu—about halfway back to Lilongwe. A few well-chosen words convinced him that his proper place was at Embangweni early the next morning and Marion’s travel plans were once again secure, and Murphy was once again put at bay! We celebrated our victory, small and brief as it was, with chocolate chip cookies that Marion had just delivered to Martha Sommers that day.

Committees, committees

In addition to the aforementioned computer committee, as part of my hand-over efforts, I have been trying to organize several committees to assume duties that have been informally mine. One of those has been organizing, orchestrating, and generally coordinating the visits of various groups who are here for only a short period and need some semblance of pre-planning to ensure that they are able to fit all of the desired projects and activities into the limited available time. The local wisdom is that only an expat can do this. However, since most of the work simply involves going around and arranging schedules with the heads of the various institutions, it seemed logical to me to suppose that those same heads of institutions could just as easily band together and make the arrangements themselves as have someone else do it who had to find out their constraints and schedule conflicts from them! This is still, and will be until my departure, a work in progress; but those who might be planning a mission trip to Embangweni in 2006 should, hopefully, expect to be communicating with local folks on the planning and arrangements. I shall be watching from afar in high hopes that such arrangements will be good and fully satisfactory for all, and that Murphy will once again be exiled to some far off place.

Another committee that I have urged on station management would be the formation of a presbytery-sponsored development committee that would review, screen, encourage, and pass along applications for low-interest development loans from Christian businessmen and women who are so-minded. We have become increasingly convinced that the long-term direction of aid to developing nations must take this form, rather than that of free hand-outs, and we are equally convinced that business-minded Presbyterians in particular will be most responsive to this type of appeal. But such a program requires confidence among would-be investors that mechanisms are in place for accountable and responsible management of loans—hence the need for a competent and committed group of Loudon Station officials to provide that sense of assurance. If we are successful in getting this off the ground, many of you will be hearing more about it as we carry the word about Embangweni back to home congregations over the coming months.

Tawonga Karonga’s restaurant

As a model for the above loan concept, we have underwritten a restaurant at Embangweni where visitors can dine on pizza, pasta, and pie as well as nsima, chicken, and rice. I have been taking my evening meals there since Beth left and, while it is not New York’s finest, it isn’t bad! Potential profits are still being held hostage to high electricity bills and low customership so I have been spending some of my waning moments here in counsel on finances, marketing, management, etc. People sometimes ask us when Embangweni hospital will become self-sustaining (perhaps forgetting how many hospitals in the United States are not!) and no longer dependant on foreign donations. The answer to that question lies, of course, not in the hospital itself but in the economic health of the community around it. We continue to be hopeful.

Vehicle and transportion problems

A good bit of my time lately has been tied up on transportation issues—driving people hither and thither, getting my car worked on and into reliable enough condition to sell, and agonizing over the lack of adequate carrying capacity for all the building projects we have under way. In addition to the hospital’s IHSC, Marion is building a new workshop in which to fabricate shallow wells pumps, Loudon Projects is struggling to transport maize from buying points to storage sites, and the local merchants with trucks for hire have scented blood. Last year, a lorry could be hired for 75 Kwacha per kilometer, and even that was considered to be at the high end of the scale. Now we can’t seem to find anything available for less than about 250 Kwacha per kilometer. It makes the price of maize look almost stable! Last year Loudon Projects was forced to sell its ancient three-tonner because of prohibitively high maintenance and upkeep costs, but there is no money in the budget for a replacement vehicle and we are at the mercy (or lack thereof) of the truck owners. It is a small issue compared with kids dying of malaria and their parents of AIDS, but it does take my time!

Database work

Another time-consumer has been database work. With computers comes the need for programs to use them. The ARV (anti-retroviral) program that Beth has been working with was one that needed statistics and lent itself to development of an Access database. Similarly, the hospital has finally realized it cannot continue to provide essentially free water to the entire station, what with the increasing cost of diesel and all other things needed to maintain a reliable supply. Therefore, we have installed water meters and set up a program for calculating water bills, deducting previous months’ payments, and printing out the invoices. Tweaking these programs to perform all their computations flawlessly and watching the amazement of staff as the computer does tasks in seconds that they were doing by hand in hours and days has been one of the fun aspects of the job, but it also illustrates the need for ongoing support and expertise.

Catherine Ndolo

Finally there has been the saga of Catherine Ndolo. At the risk of repetition for those who have been following the story, Catherine developed a carotid artery tumor that threatened to kill her and was inoperable in Malawi. Through the generosity of Global Interfaith Alliance of Myers Park Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, and of Dr. Messina and the UCSF Hospital, it was arranged for Catherine to receive the life-saving surgery in San Francisco at the end of September. The operation was highly successful, and today Catherine is in route back to Embangweni where she will take back up her job as a nurse here at Embangweni Hospital. It has been a truly heart-warming episode and we pray the Lord’s most special blessings on all those—many unnamed and unrecognized—who made it possible.

Well, that about does it for this letter and for this trip. I’m sorry to say, but from me you don’t get all the medical stories and the side of life here that is really life-and-death. I can’t tell you how many babies were born here last month or the number of surgeries or the inpatient and outpatient populations over the period. Actually, I guess I could go look some of that up in the statistics being kept on one of the computers (!) but time is up now and I’m due for bed. What you get from me is the dry behind-the-scenes stuff. I hope each of you has found at least one or two things of interest in it and I hope that we will see most or all of you in the next few months.

In the meantime, blessings to you!

Bill (with Beth in New Hampshire!)

The 2005 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 337