In My Humble Opinion, It’s Pure Genius!

The past few days haven’t been as action packed but it was nice to be less rushed. On Monday we went to the community to complete some borehole related tasks. First, Sydney and I walked to all of the new boreholes and the boreholes we haven’t been to before in the community to mark them with the GPS. We had a lot of help finding the boreholes from around fifteen children that walked to them with us. We ended up walking in some areas in the community we had never been to before which was exciting. Afterwards we had lunch with the committee members back at the community center. Everyone seemed excited about the new borehole. We talked about how the committee members wanted to put up a sign next to the borehole that had the EWB logo and stated the date it was implemented. They asked us to write what we want on the sign and we came up with a sentence that stated that EWB, AfES (Action for Environmental Sustainability), and the community of Kumponda worked together to implement the borehole.

On Tuesday we dedicated time to both the borehole and the maize mill projects. We first met with the committee around 10:00am and gave a water safety presentation while they snacked on cookies and soda. This was our educational lesson for the project that the team at home worked on before we left. After this we went to Mr. Masamba’s house, where the maize mill is being stored. There we took some measurements of the mill and we took some detailed pictures based off of what the maize mill team asked us to look into while we were there. We also took water samples from the community center borehole and our new borehole and we took them to the Polytechnic University in Blantyre to have them tested for bacteria so we would be able to compare the results with the driller’s. After, we went to KFC for lunch/dinner because we were all craving American food and we saw a billboard that says “In my humble opinion, it’s pure genius –Kanye Banda”, so how could we not if it has Kanye’s approval?

Wednesday we didn’t go to the community. We first dropped Brian off at the library so he could explore all of the books they had on Malawi. Then Sydney and I went to our favorite place again, the National Bank. One of our friends at the bank who usually helps us wasn’t there that day so we had to get help from another guy. He didn’t know what we were trying to do (a cash advance). So it took twice as long just to fill out the paperwork. Once this was done we took our seats and waited for it to be processed. After two hours of waiting we went to the desk to check on it and we eventually found out that he had made a mistake. So we had to wait another two hours for him to fix and and have it ready. That was the longest amount time we had to stay at the bank but we are hoping that our friend and the bank will be back next time. We also met our driller's brother to get our final paperwork and give him the final payment. He gave us the test results and everything looked good but we'll be looking forward to our results from Polytechnic. After this we went to Levison’s (the machinist we go to in Malawi) to see if we could ask him a couple of questions about the maize mill but he wasn’t there so we arranged to meet with him on Friday and we left to go pick up Brian from the library. Later that day we went to dinner with Molly, the hotel owner and some of her family. It was fun to meet some of her family members and it was nice to eat different food.

On Thursday we went to the community for the “opening ceremony” for the borehole. We ended up giving a short speech along with Mr. Masamba. Everyone who came was very happy and excited to use the new borehole! After we finished speaking they sang a song and danced together. Then we went to eat lunch with the committee members and to ask them some questions about the maize mill. For dinner that day we took Steve, our mentor, out to dinner because he ended up being a great mentor and he really helped us when dealing with the driller. We ended up taking him and his wife to dinner at a Chinese restaurant and had a good time.

This weekend we are going on a trip to Mulanje and we will be having a Christmas lunch and final meeting with the committee members on Tuesday. We hope everyone is having a great break!

P.S. This post was written on Friday but we didn’t have power for the past few days and the laptop died so we couldn’t post this until now.