Mulibwanji!!! I hope you’re as excited to hear about our day today as we are to tell you. So here it goes 🙂

We kickstarted the day by meeting with the Village Implementation Committee (VIC) and the Water Committees of the community of Chilimani to discuss the wells that were previously implemented in 2018. We found out that even though the hand pump wells haven’t had any problems yet, the community has failed to perform any maintenance on them. This is a problem because some parts need to be replaced periodically or else they will wear down, break, and cause more expensive repairs. There are a number of reasons as to why no maintenance has been performed, but the importance of quality maintenance for the wells was emphasized by EWB and our partnering NGO, Villages in Partnership (VIP), and a solution was found. Chilimani’s water committee promised to take better care of the hand pumps while VIP decided to hold some refresher maintenance workshops for the committee.

After the meeting our groups split in three; Travis, Erin, and Kim went to Mphero to collect more water samples. Jordan, Nicole, and Lexi interviewed some members of Chilimani that the teams from years past befriended.

Upon joining again in the afternoon, our group enjoyed a wonderful lunch at a lovely place called Steers. A South African delicacy that can only be compared to that of the fine dining one would encounter at McDonalds. We met a group of Americans from Wisconsin doing similar water supply projects to us and we exchanged names as well as useful information. Coincidentally, their group had a person named Travis which made our Travis very happy and made his day 🙂

The last thing we did today was ONLY GO AND DRIVE UP A FREAKING PLATEAU! EXCUSE ME?? We drove up the Zomba Plateau which overlooks Namang’azi Farm and Zomba. It was absolutely beautiful! We saw a waterfall, hiked, bought some berries, and bought some rocks! We were closing in to the top as the sun was going down and were debating going back down until our wonderful escort, Happy motivated us by saying we are the “Winning Team” and we can’t quit so we perservered. Eventually, we drove ALLLLL the way to the top to watch the sunset and let me tell you; it was stunning. The area below looked so lively and the landscape was incredible. It was really windy and the sun was going down so we were really cold, but all was well because we MADE IT TO THE TOP AND BECAME THE WINNING TEAM!! We took some really great pictures which will be linked here so please take a look at them!

-Travis