How to Kill a Chicken

Before we left Africa, Nat and I decided we really should learn how to kill a Chicken. We enlisted the services of Frank (Nat's gardener) to help us out and produced this short video...

The Break In

A few weeks ago I was woken up by Judy ringing my mobile phone.

“Come to the door quick! I think there’s been a robbery!”

I stumbled out of bed a little bemused and staggered to the front door. I opened the door to realise that I was standing in front of the entire compound wearing nothing but my underpants; it suddenly felt like being in a scene from a movie where the angry villagers go and confront their demon with pitch forks, with Judy leading the pack.

“I think you have been robbed Oli, you’re back window is open”

I turned round to see that sure enough my sitting room window was swinging open, my coffee table dragged to the window ledge and its contents removed.

It had been a very stormy night and the noise of the rain had kept me up most of the time, it also seems that it had been the perfect cover for someone to jimmy my window and steal my laptop. Ironically I’d actually got up at several points in the night to check my front door believing someone was trying to break in, there had been several other robberies in the area and in some cases the burglars had cut through the bars at the front door and held people at knife point. I now suddenly felt very lucky that making off with my belongings had been so easy for them.

We walked to the back of my house and discovered the true ingenuity of our thieves. Lying on the ground was a long stick with a hook on the end and over the wall of the compound hung a makeshift rope ladder.

Judy and I called the police to report the incident and in true Malawian style they said they would be happy to attend the scene if we’d be so kind as to go and pick them up from the station. It was still very early so we had some time to do our own investigation before collecting CID.

Our neighbours immediately jumped on the fact that there were no footprints by the rope ladder and that it couldn’t support a man’s weight.

“Inside job! Arrest the guards!”

I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions, justice is pretty rough shot in Malawi and I’d hate to be responsible for sending the wrong person to one of their prisons. That said the more they talked the more implausible an “over the wall” attack seemed.

Assuming that the police would do very little and telling them was really just a formality Judy and I were not taking the situation all that seriously; we started posing for photographs with the long stick they had used and testing the rope ladder to see if it would break under our weight.

9am came and we set off to pick up the police. Melvin and his partner were waiting for us when we arrived and came straight back. To our horror he then immediately set about dusting for fingerprints, it would be highly embarrassing if we suddenly became implicated in our own robbery! Predictably however the police never took and exclusion prints from us so we were saved that awkward conversation.

In the end Melvin was fairly convinced that the neighbours were right and that it was most likely the guards to blame so we all bungled back into Judy’s car, perps and all and headed back to the police station.

I haven’t heard anything from the police since and don’t suppose I will. I only hope the guards they arrested don’t become wrongfully imprisoned and end up on remand for years. Another surreal Malawian experience…  

Developer Training

Last week I led a training course for the local developers and technicians that will take over the maintenance and future development of iHRIS when VSO are gone. The course was four days and aimed to provide an introduction to working within the iHRIS framework. Documentation for iHRIS is pretty hard to come by; myself and other VSO’s have had to learn most stuff through trial and error so it was very important to me that as part of the course I had written a developers guide that will hopefully prove a useful reference resource when they start making changes.

Each day I introduced a new topic and then walked through practical exercises with the group so they could practise the skills. Despite the occasional internet outage the course went very well on the whole and all the participants were able to pass the final exam I had set with flying colours!

Full pictures available here: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjRjiWp1

Likoma: The Island

Likoma is a beautiful island with around 6000 locals and two lodges, each with their own private beach. The staff at Mango Drift, both expat and Malawian were excellent and very friendly. They all made an effort to learn our names and made us feel very much at home.

We quickly settled into the slow pace of island life and past our time playing games, snorkelling and generally lolling around. Christmas day was very different than back home; the expats who ran the resort were South African and so had not heard of many of the usual British traditions. We had come armed with a Christmas pudding and a DIY cracker kit which we shared with the rest of the guests, bemusing and delighting in equal measure. Christmas dinner was local fish, served by candlelight on the beach. Just to make the experience completely surreal I was sat next the American ambassador to Malawi who had flown in for a couple of days holiday.

The resort had a PADI centre attached to it so on one of the days I went out diving, finally making use of the open water course I had done the previous year. Diving in the lake has a lot of plus points over the sea; because it’s fresh water you don’t need any weights and you don’t have to worry about breaking any coral, also because the fish are mostly found in the shallows you can dive to around five metres and spend much longer under water.

The South Africans may have very different approaches to Christmas day than us but when it comes to New Year ’s Eve they’re definitely on the same page! At 4pm they held a beer snorkel relay challenge where we were split into four teams and had to take it in turns to run into the lake, snorkel and dive to find sunken beers, bring them back to the beach and then down them as fast as possible! It was exhausting and vomit inducing but great fun all the same. Sadly as we came last we had the added pain of all downing vodka shots afterwards!

All in all Likoma was great fun and very relaxing if not fairly unconventional. We were all sorry to leave, especially as it meant getting back on that dreaded boat…

I hope you all had a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Full pictures available here: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjQcsMH4

Likoma: Getting There

After a six hour car journey we arrived in Nkhata bay where we would get the ferry the following morning to Likoma island. Because space in our bags was limited (largely due to the amount of booze and Christmas nibbles we had packed) we decided to give each other our presents before we set off and then leave them in the car while we were away. We’d set a fairly harsh limit of 2500 MKW for the gifts (about £3.50) but that goes a fair way in Malawi and although not quite the same as Christmas back home I was chuffed to bits with my Nkhotakota pottery stew pot that Nat and Judy got me!

I should mention at this point that Judy has been pretty unwell for a few weeks now, like me she has been in and out of the clinic and was very nearly not able to come along at all. Fortunately though because Nat is a nurse the doctor allowed us to take some drugs and drip lines away with us so Judy could continue her antibiotics. NMH (Nat’s mobile hospital) was erected in the car, at the lodge in Nakarta bay and later in a beach hut on Likoma island – pretty surreal!

We got up the following morning at around 4am, Judy had another bottle of metronidazole and Nat and I had a coffee. We then set off with all our gear for the beach where we had been told the ferry left at 6am.

When we arrived there was a hoard of people jostling to get on small fishing boats that were taking  them out to what appeared to be a half sunken ferry in the bay. Taking a deep breath we threw ourselves into the chaos and clambered aboard a boat with five others, several sacks of maize, two chickens, three huge bunches of bananas and a dining room chair! Naturally the small fishing boat was grounded at this point and took four very strong Malawians to pull us the fifty yards or so out to the ferry.

As soon as we got close to the ferry things started being thrown aboard with no concern for who owned what or where their belongings were going. At some point our bags disappeared into the boat, not to be seen again until Likoma. We were last off and scrambled aboard to find there were no seats left which gave us two choices; either sit on the bow of the ferry or find a spot on the lower deck amongst the livestock and grain. We opted for the bow and after several more impossible boat loads of stuff and people were brought aboard we set sail.

After a couple of minutes we’d all re-grouped from the boarding ordeal and started to enjoy the ride; the wind was cool, the lake was flat and someone below us was playing Malawian pop on a stereo that set a fitting soundtrack. The landscape was beautiful too and for a few short moments I felt very lucky to be part of the experience… Then it started to rain.

The weather in Malawi is often very localised and you could see the storm coming from a mile away, we knew we were heading straight for it and being completely exposed on the bow of the boat knew we were in for a soaking. Suddenly the waves picked up, the wind went from cool to cold and the rain was torrential.

After about ten minutes Nat was fed up and started praying for the storm to end and the sun to come out. He must have listened because as quickly as it had started we were suddenly though the storm and the sky was clear again. For about thirty seconds we celebrated, then we started to realise just how strong the sun was. Within another ten minutes we were getting very badly burned and begging for the rain to return. Eventually we reached the ferry’s first stop, Chizumulu island and managed to negotiated some space inside the boat where we spent the remainder of our ten hour voyage nursing our sunburn with liberal quantities of after sun.

No journey in Malawi would be complete without a breakdown, so when the ferry came to set off from  Chizumulu we did just that. For an hour and a half it looked like we weren’t going any further. Likoma was only an hour away at this point and we could have maybe phoned the lodge for help but naturally none of us had reception so we just had to wait it out. Eventually the Capitan managed to restart the engine and we made it into Likoma at around 5pm.

Getting off the ferry was much the same as boarding only now the entire boat wanted to unload at the same time and get ashore as quickly as possible. For a couple of minutes we just stood watching the madness not quite knowing what the best tactic might be, then a young lad appeared from nowhere and asked if we needed help. He managed to find us our bags and carried them all to the back of the ferry where we could board another little fishing boat. Bearing in mind that Nat and I could barely lift our own bags the strength of this guy was truly amazing.

Finally ashore one of the staff from Mango drift was waiting for us and drove us the twenty or so minutes across the island to our lodge

The gin I had on arrival was one of the hardest earned I’ve ever had!

Merry Christmas

Well it feels very different here to back home; no tinsel, no tree and definitely no snow! The rains however have arrived on cue, the weather here has changed dramatically in the last couple of weeks and now it rains for about an hour each day. The rain is announced by a sudden drop in temperature of about 10 degrees which is incredibly welcome as otherwise it’s around 35C and very humid. As soon as the temperature does drop you know you have about 5 minutes to find shelter before the heavens open. The rain can be very heavy and on my tin roof sounds almost apocalyptic! It’s a refreshing change though and things are already starting to get much greener. The whole place seems to be coming alive which is great except that includes the insect world; millipedes a foot long, damsel flies as big as your hand and armies of flying termites which seem to get into your house whether you leave the windows open or not!

Today is my last day in Lilongwe before I leave for Likoma Island where I’m spending Christmas with Nat and Judy. Likoma promises to be something of a paradise; white sandy beaches and palm trees with the warm waters of Lake Malawi lapping at the shore. There is however very little phone reception, no ATM’s and only one shop so it could be quite a quiet Christmas. The place we’re staying at has a dive centre so I’m hoping to do some scuba while I’m there; I’m also going armed with a Christmas pudding courtesy of my father so we can inject a little traditional Christmas spirit.

The journey also promises to be an adventure, the regular ferry that runs twice weekly has broken down so we’ll be braving it on a local boat which no doubt will be packed with people, poultry and drying fish!

I hope you all have a very merry Christmas and a happy start to 2014, I’ll be back on the 2^nd of Jan and will be sure to post some pictures as soon as possible.

Production Ready

Our iHRIS pilot phase is now drawing to a close. We’ve had some really useful feedback from our users and have done several iterations of development to address the points raised. We’re now in a position where we have imported the entire HR dataset into the new system and in the New Year we plan to slow down our rate of change and enter a more maintenance-like development cycle. This means that iHRIS will be live and users will start cutting over to the new system, using it as their primary HR planning tool. With this in mind it was very important for us to setup our production server before Christmas and migrate our first official release to the new environment.

Just in the nick of time USAID came through with the goods and our shiny new HP ProLiant arrived in the office. Now all we needed to do was rack it in our “data-centre.” I use that term in its broadest sense as in true Malawian style our data centre is actually a single rack cabinet in an air conditioned room (not common out here) with a backup generator that broke down two years ago! The rack does of course have a battery backup but with all the kit plugged into it we can only really survive a power cut of 10 minutes or less.

With none of us being proficient server technicians, installing the new box was not without its moments of comedy, but we got there in the end;

The Ministry of Health closed down for Christmas on the 13^th of December; this gave us the opportunity to sneak in this week and try to sort out the spaghetti mess that is the ministries computer room while nobody else was there. Over the course of three days we managed to tidy Teddy’s office so it vaguely resembles a useable space and also sifted through the mountain of discarded desktop machines they have, find the ones that still have a pulse and set them up as proper workstations in the computer lab. We even had time enough for some guerrilla networking which will hopefully mean we can all get IP addresses a little more reliably in the New Year!