A letter from Jim & Jodi McGill in Malawi
March 2013
Dear Family and Friends,
We are within Lent and I (Jim) have been studying John’s Gospel recently—and learning how John does not speak as much of miracles, but of signs. So as we entered into the Lenten season looking for the signs of which John writes, this billboard appeared in downtown Mzuzu. We thought, "Wow, that sure beats giving up chocolate!"—so thought we would share it with you.
Photo of billboard near the main entrance from the south and north into Mzuzu
In Chitumbuka, the major language in northern Malawi, Ls and Rs are pronounced similarly, so we often hear and see interesting phrases, such as a glass store advertising grass and grazing or being asked by someone for lazor brades. However, I know that people don’t understand why I’m asking them to walk more quickly (Kupinda) when I am trying to ask that they cross their arms (Kuphinda) or they can’t understand that I can’t hear the difference between Kuphika (to cook) and Kupika (to carry a load).
Every day I have to make a decision—will today be an office day catching up on email, or will it be a field day and get yet further behind on correspondence. I tend towards the unpredictable and unstructured field days and spend the office days apologizing for being so far behind in responding.
Today the plan was for a field day to Usisya to follow up on a household water treatment program. Usisya is on the shore of Lake Malawi, right off the rift escarpment, and is a challenging trip of 75 km (45 miles), which takes two hours to drive from our home in Mzuzu. It is rainy season and we have just had two days of sun to dry up the road that is impassable when it is wet, so it seemed a good idea to get there if I could. However, our start became delayed, so we prayed for yet another day of sunshine to allow the Usisya trip tomorrow and switched to other field options closer to home.
Local water company beginning repairs on appropriately simple, inexpensive but broken pump
So instead I went to three sites to monitor the progress and quality of hand-drilled wells being drilled by three different new companies. In between visiting the sites I remembered that an employee of Mzuzu University, where the Centre of Excellence for Water and Sanitation is located, had persistently been requesting that we assist with a pump for her well. On her well we found a locally manufactured and innovative but non-functioning pump and proceeded to try to sort out how best to assist her to have access to water again.
The producer of both the well and the pump had left his phone number written on the top slab, so we knew that he already understands a bit about marketing and producing business for himself. As we took the pump apart, we found he had used locally available spare parts for a local hand pump in order to produce his own simple pump and had improvised for the parts that were not readily available. He had quite cleverly put together an extremely low-cost pump made with locally available pieces but one that was costly to repair.
This is exactly the type of person that we are trying to build up and support through our "Smart" water and sanitation Centre. We can work with him/her to make the pump more repairable by working with the producers of the parts to begin to make the parts more available. As the pump becomes more repairable, the pump also becomes more expensive. So we work with both customer and water supplier to ensure that the supplier gets paid immediately upon completion of his services and that the customer, if needed, has access to a sliding scale loan service that allows up to one year for repayment.
In this particular case Mzuzu University is willing to work with us to deduct an agreed-upon amount from the employee’s salary to pay back the loan. In most cases customers do not have employers, so we are beginning to work with Village Savings and Loans and other micro-financing institutions on "smart" financing schemes. We do know that increasing the length of repayment time enables more people to purchase their own water and sanitation facilities, which in turn provides a larger market for the producers of the water points. Studies have shown that ownership of a water point increases the income of a family on average of over $200 per year. Most of the people with whom we are living have less than $1.25 per day, so this is a significant boost to their livelihoods.
Many of you have been supporting this work through prayer as well as financial and physical support, some through supporting the purchase of the vehicle that allows us to do the field work to monitor and train, some through training and through support of individual wells. We thank you all for your concern for your brothers and sisters here in Malawi and your willingness to help.
The McGill Family
The 2013 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 117
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