© 2007 AID AFRICA UK Registered Charity Number 1116336
The rains have all but finished, leaving a luxurious display of flora all around, but devastating road surfaces. Most of our travel is on dirt roads – the tamac stops just outside the cities and major routes, so progress out in the Bush is painfully slow – and I do mean painful! Being thrown around in our ancient 4x4 Toyota for hours on end is challenging, tiring and expensive in constant car repairs!
In the meantime our hybrids are doing a good job. We’re not yet producing enough milk for the bicycled milk rounds into the villages to boost the nutrition of malnourished pre-schoolers, but we are saving lives. We have five extremely vulnerable youngsters on our books receiving a daily delivery of goat’s milk – doomed orphaned babies are now thriving, and other little ones, once swollen with malnutrition, are playing and growing normally .
Much of our focus has been on our Milk Project. We’re building a Dairy Unit, consisting of two milking stations, an office and store room. Right now we’re having some of our guys trained in dairy management, and have been trying to locate a particular breed of goat, allegedly producing the highest milk yield. Unfortunately, it seems that only a few are in the country – up in Lilongwe at the main Veterinary College. We’ve spoken to the boss up there but he doubts there’ll be any available this year. But we’ll keep trying.
From Malawi - May 2007
However, it’s great to be back in Malawi. All the Projects seem to be progressing well. We’ve just spent a week down in Muona, our second base, checking out the harvest fields and Loan-A-Goats. Maize is piled all around, drying out ready for milling into flour. Early reports from our Agri-Gardens suggest a good harvest, but the subsistence farmers aren’t so fortunate, as the coupons promised for the Government-subsidised fertilizer failed to appear. It’s likely therefore that many will face serious shortage and hunger in a few months, despite all the hard work they did in their fields. Those in our target group – the orphans, elderly, disabled and chronically sick – always bear the brunt of scarcity, so we’ve bought in a few extra tonnes of maize while it’s at it’s cheapest to help them out later on.
Out in the fields, drying maize towers above you.
