Stan finishes up his work.

Steps into his field boots.

Dusts off his jacket.

Tips his hat.

And closes the office door of the Dowa Environmental Health Office for the last time.

This is it, the last week/half week of work. It is a sneaky week, full of reports and typing and rain and blackouts.  Mizek and Joseph are in meetings in Lilongwe and Blantyre respectively so I’ve been left to my own devices here, trying my hardest to paint a picture of what I did here for the staff at the hospital and the District Assembly.

Make Like Merry Poppins and…

Fly away as soon as the wind changes. The weather is changing here in Dowa. Last night was unusually warm and windy, a sure sign of rain. I think. I am certainly not a meteorologist but it rained all day. Classic Canadian November Weather (CCNW) Cold and wet, down to the bone.

Also the dust immediatly turned to mud. Everywhere. Now I know how the Ghana team feels.

So now what is left, writing reports for my colleagues I am leaving behind, getting phone numbers and mailing addresses, thanking everyone who helped make my stay here a little easier than it probably should have been. Also to thank you for keeping up with the blog for all this time, I have gotten over 2000 hits over the summer!

All thanks to YOU!!!! Yep I’m talking to you!

Probably my last blog post from Africa. I have a few days left in the village then next Tuesday I am packing up and leaving Dowa for good, taking a few days to go to Zambia, see some big waterfalls and then fly home on the 24th.

But first, lets give some final thoughts on what happened over the past hundred or so days here.

Development: What it is and what it is not.

(That is a shout out to all the nurses in the crowd)

Development. Its awkward. If I could describe my stay in Malawi as anything it would be first dusty, and second awkward. Trying to work in a hospital where I am not even really a staff member, attempting to implement projects, trying to give feedback. Trying my hardest to do all of the above in some sort of measureable way so that I can tell the long-termers what’s up in my small district north of the capital so that maybe over the next year there will be some sector-level change happening.

EWB is small fry compared to some of the other players here in Dowa so it was both a pleasure and a curse to be representing a non-donor NGO while surrounded by the biggest names in AID since The New Deal. Not being from a donor allowed me to work very closely with the implementation staff but it also hindered my ability to try any implementation of projects. But I knew the JF program was half-exploratory, half-practical focused so that wasn’t a surprise.

But we try. We are learning and we are growing, both in size and in smarts.

Development work, it’s a strange middle ground between civil service and humanitarian action and a lot falls between these cracks. I could complain about beurocrats and impotent and blind NGOs for pages but I am not going too. Find me when I get back, I’ll buy you a beer and we can chat all night about the chasms between donations/planning and implementing of projects which are intended to help the poor and suffering people.

Malawi! I will miss the rust colored sheen you left on my jacket after a long day on the bike, I’ll miss the fresh sugar cane, the powdered milk and simple and tough life of the village.

Oh Canada!

I return to the country of my birth in a week and a half and to be honest I am excited. I have done all my work here so I am now ready to head home.  I am trying to figure out how I can package all the stories I have for the folks back home so that I can bear witness to what I saw here and have people not just think, “Man, Africa is messed up!”

At the end of the day, people are people are people. There is much less separating Canadians from Malawians than we think. People in my village, despite walking 8 or 10km a day to the Boma and back, still like to go for leisurely walks at twilight to kill some time, chat with their husbands or just enjoy the nature.

Sound familiar?

I don’t want to talk about how warm or kindhearted Malawians are, that’s ridiculous. People are warm and kind hearted, and those people happen to live in Malawi. Geography has nothing to do with personality. People here have tried to steal from me as well, or fight me or lied to me. Happens back home, happens here too. I think that is the biggest take away from all this. As much as I would like to lump Malawians into a big cluster of “Nice,Warm,Friendly Africans” I can’t. In nursing you work with people at their most vulnerable and most intimate levels, so the moment you start grouping and pre-judging groups is the moment your potential to make real connections goes out the window.

Malawi calls itself the Warm Heart of Africa, the same way Canada is the Great White North. But I am sure Norway has some snow too, and from what the UN tells me Norway is pretty great, so what gives?

Anyways, I am rambling, I have met some fantastic people here, and I will meet fantastic people everywhere I go, no matter what colonial boundaries box them in.

I feel that this is just the beginning. Every ending is really just a beginning that you are on the other side of. In 3 weeks I am going to begin fighting HIV/AIDs in a midsized, economically depressed North American city and that will be another adventure worthy of blogging about.

Like I said, I probably won’t post again until I get back to the western hemisphere, so in the meantime I have one last CHALLENGE for you from this side of the Atlas Ocean.

Not a question, I am dopne asking questions right now, now it is time for YOU to ask me questions!

I want YOU dear reader, to ask ME a Challenge question! Or a bunch of questions. Big, pressing issues, little trivial factoids, whatever! It is your turn to CHALLENGE me! You can use the blog, email me at stanmoll@ewb.ca or write it down and track me down in person, doesn’t matter!

Take care of yourselves,

-S