Malawi’s missing midwives

The Guardian March 8, 2011

 Just found this article by Brigid McConville on a day when new President, Joyce Banda took a leaf from Bingu’s (the late President) notebook and banned Traditional Birth Attendants TBAs.

In the past 3 years few nurses were trained, as Bingu’s government failed to fund nursing student fees. So my question is where will the nurses come from. One of the most serious issues in Malawi today

Is there any chance of up-skilling the more skilled TBA’s in the short term?

• Brigid McConville is director of the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood (UK)
In Malawi the risks of women dying in childbirth are among the highest in the world, and local women need to be empowered to press for change
Malawi is crucially lacking in midwives and nurses, with around three-quarters of staff positions vacant.
On a fact-finding missing to Malawi, I can’t help noticing a 5 metre-high billboard at Lilongwe airport: a young woman in jogging gear and headphones advertising an offer of high-speed downloads, live TV, music and video calls. Mobile phone technology has truly arrived.

But midwives and nurses still haven’t. Around three-quarters of staff positions in Malawi are vacant, and sometimes women are arriving at health facilities in rural areas to give birth – to find only a cleaner to assist them. It’s only 50-50 that a woman in Malawi will have a midwife, nurse or doctor on hand in childbirth; the rest give birth alone or with only a neighbour to help.

In this small country, the risks of women dying in childbirth are among the highest in the world: 510 women will die for every 100,000 who give birth, compared with 12 in the UK. The loss of newborns is so common that they are not buried as other people are, but often in a nameless, limbo category of their own.

Lennie Kamwendo, a stalwart of the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood and former president of the Association of Malawian Midwives, has been a newspaper agony aunt for many years. In a country where it’s difficult to talk about sexual health openly, she put her mobile phone number on her column and took calls from women day and night – at no charge.

Kamwendo is immensely proud of the profession of midwifery. Yet her colleagues, especially in the remote rural areas where 90% of Malawians live, are often working alone, day and night, to save women’s lives without the back-up they need. When things go wrong, they get blamed. When the health clinic is late to open because the nurse or midwife needed a few hours of sleep, lives are put at risk and communities are angry. When exhausted midwives respond rudely, word gets out and women don’t come – again putting lives at risk.

A few years ago, the government simply cancelled all training of health workers; the midwives trade union and others threatened a strike, and training was restored – but a year’s “crop” of health workers was lost. And that was only 500. Meanwhile, the system lacks accountability. A medic told me how this year, as in previous years, doctors knew that blood banks didn’t have enough supplies to get through the Christmas season. But their views were not heard, and women died as a result. Did a minister or senior civil servant lose their job as a result? No.
Why aren’t people up in arms about this needless loss of life? Levels of literacy in Malawi are low, and only around half of women can read. Midwives told me that women tend to think of professional healthcare as a privilege rather than as their right. So when things go wrong, they don’t complain.
Only when women are aware of the dangers of giving birth without skilled care, and know their rights to health services, can they press for change. Only when they are asked about their experiences – and listened to by policy-makers – will things move forward.
The White Ribbon Alliance in Malawi wants to make a film that will do just that – and show it in villages, on television, in parliament. Maybe the music will come from the charming permanent secretary at the ministry of health? Apart from his day job, he is a popular “selector”, known as Dr DJ. I heard about him from a young advocate in Lilongwe who regularly checks Facebook on her mobile phone.
So if phones and Facebook are available across Malawi, why not nurses and midwives?

The international community has promised resources to cut maternal deaths by three-quarters. The Malawian government has promised to invest in health workers. Let’s make sure these promises are kept.

A forgotten story: Jacob’s Well

A forgotten story: Jacob’s Well

I suppose sometimes when I write, it’s a bit of a rant, but today there’s a bit of an ulterior motive, a catch, which is serious, maybe a matter of life and death.
For the past week we have been visiting schools, like 750 girls in a secondary school over two days, a transition year group and finally a group of special needs students in the primary school in St Michaels House in Ballymun, which was an amazingly humbling experience where we met each one of them and their carers and teachers, showed them our pictures, got them involved, let them mess with the model pump, got unexplainable attention and feedback.
One great thing about these seriously challenged young people (from 5 to 18) is their ability to find out you name and then continue to address you, using it.
For those of you who didn’t manage to get Sunday Mass, the Gospel reading was on the Woman at the Well, about this outcast Samarian woman being asked by Jesus for a drink of water. It’s a wonderfully deep story and was well commented of by our priest in Mullinavat on Sunday. He declared that he had only a hint of an idea of what it means not to have clean water, that water IS life, that water-drenched people, in Ireland here can’t imagine thirst, or what its like to be given a drink of cool, clean water. That parable has great meaning for us in our Malawi mission.
Where we work in Northern Malawi, women and girls walk at least a million miles, each day, in search of water, any kind of water, just so long as it’s wet. Most times it comes from streams and swamps or holes in the ground where animals and humans compete for whatever is available, which often is pest ridden and smelly.
These women roll off their mat on the floor in the only clothes they have before dawn, bring their daughters, mothers, aunts, nieces and maybe a granny to set off for maybe a four or five mile trip, over all types of terrain to the nearest location. They skim off the top and fill their 25 litre containers, help each other to hoist them on their heads and head back home. They are mostly hungry, often sick because diarrhoea and water related diseases are ever present in their systems, without shoes, pregnant, or even carrying babies who may have to be fed on the way, as they go.
Of course they will sing, chat, laugh and pray on these daily, futile treks. They will thank God for all they have, as well, because they have never seen anything else. They will arrive home in bright sunshine, collect sticks, make a fire and cook, feed everyone, till, sow, harvest or prepare soil, go to bed in the dark until the process begins again the next morning, 24–7–365, without breaks, holidays or appreciation.
Now the simple plastic pump we make in Mzuzu changes all this. The water is clean and pure and close at hand, women get a life they never knew, girls get a chance to go to school like never before, women have time to grow stuff or start little businesses. They still have the same amount of backbreaking work, but without the sickness and maybe even a little earned income.
There are two significant facts in this:
• We can help communities access, pure clean drinking for less than 1 Euro each and
• Mostly avoid this million mile daily trip.
(I explain it like this: even in the district of Mzimba, one of the areas in which we work, there are 850,000 people and a minimum of 250,000 carry water every day. If their round trip is 4 miles, then those women and girls walk a million miles every day)

So we have an idea, to invite people to do this million mile challenge.
Walk a mile, anytime, anywhere, on one day or over a number of days and give us one Euro so that we can give another person clean water.
Walk in solidarity with those amazing women, they will bless you forever.
Clean water is often the difference between life and death, often death in Malawi.
I’m sure it’s puzzling to most readers as to why we are fiddling around with one euro donations, why don’t we put an advert on tele and collect thousands.
BUT we decided, at the beginning, to pay all expenses ourselves, keep costs to a bare minimum, spend nothing on advertising and keep everything in scale.
If one Euro can give a person clean water for life, then one euro is the scale and a reasonable donation to ask for, especially in these harsh economic times.
A point I make to students, by holding up their bottled water, (everyone has a bottle of water nowadays. Bring the bottle home, fill it from the tap just for one day and buy water for life for one of the poorest people in the World.
If you want to change someone’s life this year, 2011, then this may be your chance.
Clean water changes lives totally and completely and it costs 1 Euro.
Now back to the kids in St Michael’s House, primary school: I had shown the idea of the million mile challenge to a teacher who comes to Malawi to volunteer this Summer and after explaining the situation to children parents and staff, the word came back to say that they were all up for it, They could walk a mile, no bother, and give a pump to those poor people.
As Mary went on with her talk
One little girl with red hair and a big smile asked! When we buy the pump, Mary, for these poor people, will we have to carry it a very long way to Malawi, Mary, being good at the delegation, assured her that I would do all that for them! This one sentence was enough to send me back to Malawi on April 4 newly enthused and inspired, to suffer bureaucratic indifference, political corruption, chiefs without hope, fuel shortages and cratered roads, mixed in with two months without sky sports, showers or sausages.
Robert, my helper, who claimed allegiance to Gortahork, in Donegal, lives in Gardiner St and without a hint of a Donegal accent told me that he knew all about having no water after the frost. He knew he couldn’t have a drink, wash, flush the loo or have a shower and it wasn’t nice.
The woman at Jacob’s well knew all about clean water as well, collecting it was her daily chore, she asked Jesus where his bucket was, suggesting maybe that he was a typical man.
After our talk in one school it was heartening to get a letter from a father of a student we spoke to saying:
“My great picture and no sound, son, sat me down, tonight, after your talk, went on for an hour about water, pumps and Malawi and convinced me that we should all get together, as a family and buy a pump for a village. We enclose a cheque for €130 which may be my best investment we ever made. Now I have women in Malawi praying for me, a son who is my best mate and when we get the pictures lots to talk about; a common interest”. Not a bad day’s work.
Oh about the girls, they have more ideas than the contents of a small novel, and over 60 are signed up for the mini marathon.
This is part of the million mile challenge, walking for water. Did I say you can walk, run, skip, hop or even skate board. You could do it with your team, school, class, club, granny or even walking the dog, at home or on holiday.
Maybe you could promote the idea for the beginning of the new school year.
I did say there was a catch, but it’s just a Euro.

Volunteer Testimonials

Lynne Swan

Why I Volunteered

My name is Lynne Swan. I am 20 year old journalism student from Dublin, Ireland. I was selected as one of eleven students to volunteer with Wells for Zoe in Malawi during Easter 2011. I wanted to come here as I had heard about the great work Wells for Zoe had done and are continuing to do in Malawi by providing opportunities for Malawian citizens and letting them know that just about anything is achievable.

Since my first day here I’ve learned the true value of communication within the communities here. I’ve heard numerous stories of how Wells for Zoe changed hundreds of people lives just through word of mouth and thus being able to find out which communities need clean water.

I absolutely love being here helping out John and Mary and meeting the amazing Malawian citizens but at the same time I cannot wait to go home and spread the good word of the constant work of Wells for Zoe here in Malawi.

I definitely want, and very much hope, to come back to Malawi again so that I can help to continue the amazing and life changing work Wells for Zoe do here.

This is the fourth year that DIT students have come here to help with the NGO and I hope that there will be many more students volunteering here in the near future. We visited schools, fixed pumps for the wells, visited Mzuzu Central Hospital and have gone to local communities to identify needs and talk to villagers.

It has been an absolute honour to have been able to converse with so many wonderful Malawian people and I truly believe that they can achieve what ever their hearts desire once NGOs like Wells For Zoe are around to inspire and assist them in doing so.

Having spent just over a week here so far I am in awe of what could be achieved if we stayed longer or came back again. John and Mary Coyne have achieved so much with Wells for Zoe and I am proud to be able to say that I have assisted them with even just a tiny percentage of that great work.

I’ve made life-long friends and met people that I will never, ever, forget.

Wells for Zoe takes water pumps to Mzimba

Wells for Zoe takes water pumps to Mzimba
from The Nation Newspaper, Malawi’s National Daily.
Thursday, 26 May 2011 10:49 Albert Sharra – Correspondent

John Coyne demonstrates how to assemble the pump

December 26 2002 is a day that will never go out of the memories of 32-year-old Mary Msimuko of Msira Village, Traditional Authority Mtwalo in Mzimba. This is the day she buried her husband and two children who succumbed to cholera in two consecutive days, turning her into a childless widow.

According to Msimuko, the three got cholera after drinking contaminated water from a nearby river which is the main source of water for people in the village, who do not have access to tap water and boreholes.

“Doctors told me that the three died of dehydration caused by cholera. The water we were drinking was contaminated by running rainwater because the streams were not protected and when doctors came to taste the foods and water at our house, they found out that the water was contaminated,” she said.

But Msimuko is not the only one who has lost her family members to waterborne diseases. In 2005 and 2006, when the country received heavy rainfall, many people lost their lives to such diseases in the district.

Statistics kept at Mzuzu Central Hospital indicates that about 10 people in Mzimba lose life to waterborne diseases every rainy season due to lack of clean water.

Mzimba is the largest district in Malawi. With a population of over 850 000, only less than 200 boreholes have been constructed since 2000.

According to an environmental officer at Mzimba District Hospital Chimwemwe Jella, the fight against disease outbreaks and sanitation has been poor because most people rely on river or stream water.

But people in the district have every reason to smile with the coming of an Irish organisation called Wells of Zoe which is running a project aimed at supplying communities with clean drinking water in the district and the surrounding areas.

The organisation is installing shallow well pumps in the communities and already, over 4 000 pumps have been planted in Mzimba and part of Nkhata Bay and Karonga since 2006, benefiting over 100 000 people.

Speaking during a media tour, one of the project co-founders Mary Coyne said her organisation came up with the project after noting that most people in the district were drinking unsafe water.

“Water tops in any health issue and we were shocked when we first visited the country in 2005 to see women walking long distances carrying dirty water. As a charitable organisation, we decided to assist by providing water pumps. So, we decided to come up with a simple pump which can be repaired by anyone cheaply and we are happy today that the pump is efficient,” Coyne said.

The simple water pumps are made using two plastic pipes, a nail and a rubber disk cut from the inner tube of an old tyre, but it pumps water from as deep as 18 metres.

The Wells of Zoe is also training the communities on how to repair the pumps.

According to Coyne, the pumps are durable and each has a capacity to support over 500 people in a day.

To ensure that every community has access to these taps, the organisation opened a factory that manufactures the pumps in Mzuzu and community leaders can go and ask for one for their communities free of charge.

They are only asked to provide a place, sand and bricks for the construction.

One of the beneficiaries, Group Village Headman Kadambo, said the project is a relief to his community which had no access to clean water.

“We believe cholera and diarrhoea cases will be eliminated because we now have clean water,” he said.

Director of Water and Sanitation at Water for Life, a non-governmental organisation based in Lilongwe, Masautso Ng’ube, says the simple pump is a relief to Malawi because the boreholes have a shorter lifespan.

“Government has been drilling many boreholes countrywide, but very few are still working. I feel if we can embrace this simple pump, our communities will never go short of clean water,” he said, asking Wells of Zoe to open other factories in the Southern and Central regions.

Break the cycle: Educate girls

If there were such a girl as the average Malawian girl then this is her.

She would have a 20% chance of going to secondary school and a 10% chance of completion.
Parents often can’t afford to pay for secondary education for all their children and if there is a choice they will send boys
If a girl goes to secondary school, only half will pass their Junior year exam and 25% their MSCE (Like Leaving Cert/ A Levels)
One in 5 will give birth by 15 and half will be married at 18.
Will live in her village, have 6 children and spend her life carrying water and firewood, as well as minding kids and doing chores, have a 20% chance of getting AIDS, have no money, electricity or sanitary facilities, have a 40% chance of being malnourished, spend her time in subsistence agriculture, with little access to medical services and die by the age of 40.

In relation to Malawi, I always look on the bright side because the women I write about here are bright, cheerful, spirited, intelligent and positive. They don’t want me to pity then or give them handouts. They would like a little help to restore their dignity, but given the slightest opportunity they can lift them selves out of this life of unnecessary drudgery and become self sufficient.

We see water as the first step and food close second in terms of beginning a process, BUT without education nothing will change and here I mean the education of girls and women. If you educate a man, that’s all you get, but if you educate a woman, she educates a family and even a village, and we have seen in our studies in Salisbury Line that the amount of change is proportional to the number of years in school.
SO we are funding education for girls. They must qualify for Government Secondary school, be poor but willing to work very hard and be determined to achieve.
Here we see the possibilities for breaking the cycle as a result of confidence, attitude to education for their children, further education for themselves and influence in their community.
We are convinced that the future of Malawi can be shaped by it’s women, educated women. They know what is needed. They can certainly do it
Education makes the difference: we have seen it.

Top: Victoria carries clean water from the pump 20 metres from the kitchen: She walks 3 km to school every day and so has a chance of qualifying for secondary school.
Below is Patricia who is 18 and married, has little formal education. Her dream was to be a nurse. But now all hope of that is long gone.

295 Euros meets the bare necessities but we help the girls with growing and cooking their own food. Kitchen, toilets and showers are outside. Most come from very poor farming backgrounds and have overcome a multitude of obstacles to get there.

Primary Education as we experience it.

Little girls wait patiently for a teacher to come. He won't come. Another day wasted. Another life wasted

Even though I see clean water as the first step on the development ladder in Malawi and food for a healthy diet as a close second, education is essential to these two even if I rank it third on my wish list.
I suppose I look back to my own youth in the West of Ireland, where thankfully we had an excellent well within half a kilometre and always enough food and education was central to my parents’ expectations for the family.
I went to school at four when my mother sent me in with a neighbour’s lunch and they kept me! I think they needed the numbers rather than having discovered a child prodigy. Anyway I can remember little besides the lunch for Pat Morris, may he rest peacefully!
The school with the rather exotic name of Fort Augustus, was a present from the British, built in 1895, to a standard plan for the colonies. I even discovered the same school structure in the gold mining town of Ballarat in Australia.
Even though the Brits were in Malawi, there is no such legacy, or more disastrously absent is the teacher’s house. In Fortaugustus, the teacher’s residence was impressive, second only maybe to the old landlord’s house up the road. It made a statement on the importance of the principal teacher and his place in society. It gave him stature, like the priest and the sergeant, even though he didn’t have the uniform like the other two. I suppose the respect or dependence of the people came from the fact that these teachers could read and write and very importantly could sign documents. For decades this respect for teacher and education has stuck with us and in poorer areas today the teacher is valued highly in Irish Society, particularly the primary teacher. Of course nowadays we have social workers and other pseudo medical state employees who figure they know it all, everything about everything, but an observant primary teacher, with their students for more time than their parents even, can be a wealth of knowledge and value to society. For me a good primary teacher can leave the mark of their teeth on four generations. Unfortunately I missed out on this one.
What am I ranting about?
Well I recently met an Irish priest, Paddy Leahy from Tipperary, 50 years in Malawi and I was excited when telling him how a group of students, from DIT had helped a community to complete a three classroom school in two weeks, but he quickly burst my bubble by asking what about teachers houses. Good teachers can teach under a tree, but you can’t attract good teachers to Luvuwu, in the middle of nowhere without giving them a good house.
There are about forty six thousand primary teachers in Malawi and over forty thousand have to live sometimes long distances from their school. To get to school they walk or cycle and most can’t afford a good bicycle on the wages they get. In the fine weather there is some hope if you can avoid rocks craters thorns and whatever as they take all shortcuts available. In the rainy season it’s a whole other matter on dirt roads, floods, wooden bridges made of sticks, arriving late, soaking wet, with sickness and disaster ever present. No wonder most days half the staff is missing, in the hospital, burst tyres, tubes where the patches outnumber the original tube. I know how tough it to cycle to school, but I only did 7km each way, on a good bike, on a good road. Oh, I travelled 10 km each way for one year, as our school was being refurbished, on a sand road. It was tough enough, but nothing like the goat paths here, and I wasn’t a qualified teacher, just in sixth class!
I then thought of Ison, the school principal, in Luvuwu, living in a poorly constructed thatched house, with his wife, children and extra orphans, and knew immediately why he couldn’t command any respect for himself or the message he was offering. He was no better off than the people he was trying to lift and inspire. What good is education if this is what a principal teacher can afford?
To date I have found no teacher with a landmark house, one that makes a statement, one that would inspire any young person to become a teacher. I believe, in the end only a good primary school system with well trained, paid and respected teachers will ever lift this country from its status as a begging dependency
All I have seen is the North, where we are supposed to have the most educated Malawians and it’s awful. Now if I am seeing the best education in the country, God help the rest.
Statistics, God help us, tell us that Primary Education in Malawi is free since 1964, I think, but what does that mean. 100 children sitting on the floor of a poorly constructed classroom, with no books, copies or pencils, learning by rote writing English they don’t understand on a white blackboard. The primary school system is absent, if you use any meaningful yardstick, the secondary school system is expensive or private and very often supported by donor money and Church bodies. Teachers are poorly trained and paid, have no status and the brighter ones find themselves delivering aid for NGO’s who should realise that their work would be much more effective if they left them in their schools. Of course who can blame the teachers for accepting the white jeep, the big money, the expenses, and the status?
The next big issue is that you have teachers, with poor English, preparing students for exams in English. We have recently done some inservice teacher training with six volunteering Irish primary school teachers, working with staff in a remote primary school, and the improvements were amazing with even a little intervention. Regular follow up contact between teachers, here and there, is having great response.
Another issue is that of books. The school above has no books for Standard 8, the year where they do the exam for admission to Secondary school. You can’t buy them, they are not available. They printed millions a few years ago and when they’re gone they are gone!
As the world commemorated the International Day of Literacy last month the teacher in Malawi continues to play second fiddle in almost every sphere of life. The nurse’s wages have been propped up by the world of NGOs because of the AIDS pandemic, the Aid business gobbles up the brightest and training is not great. The Malawi Growth and Development Strategy (MDGS) well acknowledges that education is crucial for Malawi to achieve the much desired sustainable socio-economic development, but as usual Malawians talk a lot but application is regularly missing. Loads of Strategy but where do they start? As is regularly found the central people in this, the teachers are of such low status, they are omitted from the script. Loads of bureaucratic bullshit, big words, hotels, meetings, meals, expenses and out of pocket expenses and millions of donor money spent, results in little or no spend on the issue. Donor driven reports in Malawi are ten a penny, a must have for every bureaucrats shelf or more regularly drawer, rarely produce results. They do however employ and overcompensate the consultants of the Aid business, and pretend that all this money is spent on Malawi and Malawians. The National Education Sector Plan (NESP) recognized that inadequate and inferior physical infrastructure, including teachers’ houses, is one of the challenges facing primary education. Malawians love shortening names but in reality this plan like a million others lacks any kind of teeth, and if it does ever happen it will cost 500% of what it should with much of the money going to foreign, highly paid consultants and little will go on teachers houses!!

Mary Coyne, Edited Jan 3 2011

If they make it to Secondary school, we have a fund to pay for them

Mama Gondwe and her handbag!

Location decided

We’ll chance it says William

Clean Water

Tastes good

All sick, we brought them to Hospital

It might be called philanthropy, but who cares. We got involved with Malawi just to make some little difference to peoples lives, by bringing them clean water. We thought it would be easy: it wasn’t. We thought Malawi would appreciate our work: they don’t. We thought people with a lot of money would help: they didn’t. We hoped we could make little difference: we have. Are we enjoying it: Wow!

We found that we can give a remote rural villager clean water for life for one euro!

On February 11 last, I sat beside an old gogo (granny) outside the pump factory in Mzuzu. We communicated with a real Malawi handshake and a few smiles. When I threw in my few words of Tumbuka, she bent over laughing. She was in her Sunday best, weather beaten, looked to be 90, but what really stood out was a fantastic handbag.
She wanted a pump.
William (one of our pump men and much more) was called into action and said to me we have to do something, it’s not far.

We'll chance it says William

All three of us hopped in the jeep only to find that after 17km mostly deciding where the road was, as she was directing us to do the crow flying bit and we had to find the roads or tracks to match, we found ourselves walking, no, running, the last mile, behind this fragile old lady holding her handbag way out in front of her.

She showed us the river where 16 villages were getting their water, with the heavy rains it had become a fast running stream of grey water, the river of death, I now call it.

By the time we got there we had attracted a bit of a following: chiefs with hats and sticks, old men, women and children and one scrawny dog.

Location decided

After a short discussion we agreed a location for a new well, which would be the first one in the area.
I had the video camera with me and suggested to William that he do a little interview, with Mama, but as he went on, the number forty one kept coming up (when speaking Tumbuka they give their numbers in English). I stopped recording and asked William about 41 and with his usual laugh he said that’s why we’re here, forty one people from the villages are in Hospital with cholera, and some have died.

William worked all weekend, organised the bricks, sand and manpower (not always easy, but William is a convincing and vocal six foot three) and we put in the new pump on Monday, amid songs dances and prayers, always prayers.

Clean Water

Tastes good

Not totally convinced that her figures were correct, I visited the Chief Medical Officer, Winston Mwanza, at St John’s Hospital (formerly run by the Medical Missionaries of Mary): a meeting hastily arranged by Harisen (our man in Malawi).
He had a huge welcome, and even though his clinic was full, he brought us to his office, did a bit of tidying, sat down and said you are the pump people. He verified the figures and told us the Hospital was over run with cholera cases, BUT then said I have a great story to help you.

You know we run an outreach clinic in an area called Doroba; In 2007 we had 143 cases of Cholera and 6 people died; in 2008 we had 6 cases and no death. This year we had no case. His information from the clinic is that in late 2007 we installed 3 pumps and more in 2008 and 2009.

Standing in amazement I asked could the pumps have much to do with it and he said EVERYTHING. He continued; if people don’t have a protected source of water, when the heavy rains come, everything is washed into the drinking water sources, the water becomes polluted and Cholera, and Diarrhoea result. He continued;

All sick, we brought them to Hospital

Diarrhoea is a real killer and Malaria of course. Keep building the pumps, that’s a great solution…
As we rushed back, I told him it only costs 1 euro to give each person water. So sad he said as he returned to his overflowing waiting room, considering that talking to us for 10 minutes was worth while.

Are we happy to be making a difference?: we are amazed!
And so is Mama Gondwe and her handbag.

You might ask, where do we get the money?. Well mostly from people with little money, friends and friends we don’t even know. But THEY all know that WE pay all the organisation’s expenses, so 100% of anything they give us ends up in a village in Malawi.

Are they happy with their investment?

They certainly are, mostly disbelieving that so little can do so much!

If you can pay even for one person to have clean water it would be magical: It would cost you a Euro and could you find a better investment. You would’nt get much of a handbag for it

If you want to invest: http://www.wellsforzoe.org/donations.htm
and some amazing Malawian women can get a life

John and Mary Coyne, 31 December 2010