Geography and Transport

The Lago Project area is situated along the shores of Lake Nyasa (aka Lake Malawi), in Nyasa Province, in Mozambique. It’s about 160km from the northern end of the project at the Tanzanian border to the southern end of the project in Metangula. Around 30,000 people in the project area.

Map of Mozambique

The project is 3 days journey from the capital of Mozambique, Maputo, in the far south of the country. This creates problems for funding – often western agencies are not willing to fund projects unless they can audit the work being undertaken and the long journey to the Lago Project can be a deterrent.

The project is actually closer to Blantyre – the major city of Malawi. Peg has worked in the hospital in Blantyre, has friends there and flys back to the UK from there. It takes 12 hours to get to Blantyre by public transport and usually involves an overnight stop somewhere en-route.

Map of the Lakeshore area

This map shows the major centres of near the Lago area. Lichinga, where Bishop Mark is based; Metangula, where the project has built an HIV/AIDS centre; and Cobue, where there is a diocese training centre. Peg has built a home near the lakeshore in Cobue.

Likoma Island is owned by Malawi but is close to the Mozambique shore. It has been an Anglican centre for many years and has a hospital.

Nkwichi, about 2 hours walk from Cobue, and is a luxury hotel that “provides guests with beautiful accommodation from which they can explore the surrounding wilderness and communities” http://www.mandawilderness.org/ . The hotel has set up the Manda Wilderness Community Trust which manages the Manda Wilderness Game Reserve and encourages responsible tourism in the area. Peg goes here to relax, sit and chat.

Transport

The Ilala ferry runs between Likoma Island and various towns and villages along the shore.

““The ferry is very large so it has to stop out in deep water, then all the goods and people get off-loaded into lifeboats which shuttle back and forth between the ferry and the shore. There's no jetty in Cobué (or anywhere along the lakeshore come to that) so people have to wade out into thigh-deep water to off-load the life-boats.”

Waiting for the Ilala ferry to bring cement

A German canoe company has donated a 2 man kayak to the project. An airline flew it to Blantyre free of charge and after many trials it arrived at the lakeshore. It then had to wait for parts to replace the things that had been damaged on route.

“The other members of the team joined us about an hour later and the Nkwichi boat arrived and dropped off my kayak on the beach, just in front of the hut (I was going to paddle it back to Cobué on Friday but the lake was really rough). It was warm and sunny and, after I'd shown them a bit about how the rudder works and the basic principles of paddling with a double ended oar, I handed the kayak over for them to play with. It was brilliant fun, especially when they started practising falling out of it and getting back in in the event of it turning over. All these adults, men and women, in the water laughing and joking around with each other in a wonderfully friendly way with little groups of children sitting along the beach watching them play. They love it, which I'm really happy about (up until now, apart from using it for the bilharzia survey, it's been in storage at Nkwichi as I never found the time, or inclination, to arrange some spare time for the team to learn to use it). It was great doing it on the beach in front of my hut; partially because it's a very clean beach that slopes down quite steeply into the water, and partially because it was like an informal opening party for my hut, with everyone feeling free to wander in and out (to strip off wet clothes) and joining in the tree planting, giving me advice and fetching more rich earth for me.”

The canoe is useful for trips along the project area because it can carry baggage and food.

“Each day 2 people will go ahead with the kayak to confirm to the community that we're coming and take a contribution of food.”

The main form of transport between the towns is lorry or public buses. The diocese has one(?) lorry and a canoe with an outboard, which are rented by the project for specific trips. Neither Peg nor the project have a car so the main form of transport is walking. Crocodiles are a problem in the rainy season as they come into the rivers, which are swollen and difficult to cross.

The main road in the rainy season

“During this last trip there was a typically African incident with the tragic and the amusing all tangled up together in an insoluble knot. The Cobué river is still so deep and full of crocs that virtually everyone crosses it by canoe-ferry. The young man who ‘operates’ the ferry is a one-legged 21 year old lad called Kandola. His missing leg was savaged by a crocodile a couple of years ago while he was returning from Chigoma one evening after a drinking bout. I’m full of admiration for the way he can pivot his skinny body around on his one remaining leg to manoeuvre the big canoe (large enough for 3 people as well as the boatman) off the bank into the water, and then paddle it accurately across the current to the other side. He’s kept extremely busy by the children attending Chigoma school:- he takes them back and forth for free, making his money off the adults. Anyway, after ferrying us across the river for the community meeting in Mataca, he followed us up to Mataca for a medical consultation as his stump (it was a very high amputation, leaving him with only a few inches of femur) is still oozing pus. After the meeting we had to return across the river to take the track up through the hills to Mkondessi. Arriving at the river we shouted and shouted for Kondola but there was no response, although the canoe was clearly visible on the opposite bank. After about 10 minutes someone appeared to explain why: A small child in Chigoma had been sent to bring fire from a neighbour so his mother could cook (matches are an expensive luxury here). The child, realising that the flaming grass he’d collected would burn out before he got home, added some more from a pile of old thatch, failing to notice that in the process he’d dropped some smouldering ashes. The thatch mound caught fire and set light to the adjacent hut. The hut belonged to Pedro, one of the Chigoma health post volunteers. Pedro, was up in the hills teaching about HIV/AIDS, his wife was in the fields and the only person in the hut was sick and asleep and woke too late to prevent it burning down. Pedro’s son had been on our side of the river when he heard the news. He immediately ran to the river and, finding Kondola absent, jumped into the canoe, paddled it to the other side, tied it to some reeds and dashed off home. All the men in the huts adjacent to where the canoe was moored were away fishing, so there was no one who could paddle it back, and no one on Kondola’s side of the river who was willing to risk their limbs to swim across and retrieve it. Eventually someone volunteered to walk up stream to a place the crocodile’s don’t hang around, and wade across there. It delayed us for about an hour and, as it is a tough four-hour long trek up into the mountains to Mkondessi, we didn’t arrive there until an hour after dark, by which time we were extremely tired and hungry. Not nearly as bad for us as for Pedro however; he’d only just finished building the hut and it was a large one with proper doors and windows. All these overlapping circles of poverty > disaster > more poverty > more disasters > …”

Digging out the Nkwichi car.