Barrio Malawi - Environment

Back to the Future

marissa — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 15:17:47 -0400

We had our first visitors in June. Fran, Jon’s mom, and Kris, Jon’s sister, spent time with us in Mzuzu and traveling a few of the country’s tourist attractions (i.e. Lake Malawi, safari in Liwonde National Park, etc). One of my favorite things is sharing our life with the people I love, so I was excited to have them see and experience everything from shopping at the markets, to visiting schools, to IT stuff with Jon at the University.

Over the two weeks, they heard many of our stories about the adventures of living and traveling in Malawi. What surprised me was that time and again, Fran wasn’t surprised. She was continually commenting that life in the States 30 or 40 years ago was much like the life we are living here in Malawi in 2006.

When we bought new tires for our car (this was after having our bald tires patched and re-patched several times) we had three options: used tires, tubes to line our current tires, or new tires. Needless to say, the used tires were worse than our own, and who has ever heard of tubes for car tires? I thought those were just for bicycles. To answer my own question, this is only news to people of my generation living in developed countries. According to Fran, tubes were a common, economical fix for Americans with worn tires half a century ago.

Other examples:

Cash is the only common currency as checks are rare and plastic is nearly obsolete.
Clothes are patched instead of tossed for new ones, socks are mended, bottles and plastic bags are always reused, shoes are taken to cobblers, etc. Actually, Malawi Gin is sold in cardboard containers which often crop up on peoples’ doorsteps and at tree nurseries as planters.
Everything is done by hand. Schools have full-time carpenters on staff to repair and make desks if there’s money to have desks.
There are no shopping malls, but every corner has a tailor or two.
When I wanted a rubber stamp made, I didn’t order online or from a catalog, but commissioned the man with his outdoor shop who hand-carves rubber stamps for everyone from store owners to the immigration office.
Everyone is a farmer! The majority are subsistence farmers, but even the elite have their gardens (garden = farm).
Water, electricity and phone bills must be paid at their main offices in town…that’s if you are fortunate enough to have these luxuries. Bills are sent by mail but usually arrive a month late, so if you don’t want your water shut off you learn to show up once a month regardless of whether you received a bill yet or not.
None of the houses have heating so we light a fire every night during the cold months and huddle up at its mouth for hours.
Life is lived according to the seasons…tangerine season just ended, but this week we were able to find cauliflower a the market, and we are eagerly anticipating mango season come November.
For people-meeting you don’t rely on cell phones, so it requires careful planning or often just serendipity.
You navigate by way of landmarks as streets aren’t often named and maps aren’t accurate.
Jon’s students write their computer programs out by hand waiting for their one chance a week to sit at a computer for an hour, punch in the code and see if it works. (Not that different from the original punch card system of computer programming).

Despite all of this, the future is creeping in faster than we are able to notice, given our very short time in Malawi. Aparently, only four years ago plastic bags weren’t available at the markets in Mzuzu, and it seems that widespread use of cell phones is not that far behind.

(P.S. these fabulous pictures are from Jon’s sister Kris.)

Update: Backyard Landfill

marissa — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 13:49:23 -0400

Home Brew Tempera Paint

marissa — Thu, 25 May 2006 05:51:01 -0400

Last weekend, I turned our kitchen into a chemistry lab. The Quest...to successfully make long lasting paint using only my hands and natural resources. The Result…fabulous egg tempera paint!

Egg Tempera ExperimentI was inspired by a number of factors including Victoria Finlay’s book Color: A Natural History of the Palette, Malawian artists’ need of access to affordable paint, and personal curiosity. Over the past few months I have been researching pigments and paint making techniques. Egg tempera paint is one of the oldest paints known to man, even older than oil painting. Some date egg tempera paint back to the first centuries AD, but it was most widely used in the Middle Ages with the Byzantine painters. The Greek Orthodox Church has maintained the tradition, and up to the present still uses egg tempera for icon paintings. In the secular world of art this tradition has seen a revival over the past 10 years. So much so, that there is a great online forum where you can read and participate in discussions about issues relating to egg tempera paint and painting

How does it work? The recipe is quite simple, but is a bit labor intensive when you talk about grinding your own pigments. First, prepare a fine pigment powder; then, add just enough water to make a thick paste. Next, prepare an egg yolk by separating the white from the yolk, dry the yolk membrane by rolling it around on a cloth, lastly drain the yolk contents into a container. Finally, mix 1 part yolk with 1 part pigment paste. You can add more water to dilute and get a lighter tone.Mama Marissa Grinding

I started experimenting with egg tempera last week using red ochre clays, charcoal and papaya leaves I collected from around town. Mama Mtetwa Grinding CharcoalI have gotten great satisfaction tapping into my resourceful side and knowing that my paintings from Malawi are not just about Africa but made OF Africa. I am hoping to hone my skills both on the production side of egg tempera and painting techniques with the medium, in order to teach Malawian artists how they can use their natural resources for painting. I met with two artists briefly this week. They were absolutely blown away by the results of my experiment and are super excited to learn how to make paint.

I hand ground charcoal which gave me a great black. It resulted in a grainy texture, but I was able to work with it and liked the effect. Right now I'm looking for cheesecloth to use as a filter and hopefully be able to make a finer pigment paint. For green, I used papaya leaves which gave me a wonderful brilliant green. But, as you might expect, after only a few days my lime green is turning more and more yellow. Interestingly, the paint I made from boiled papaya leaves is holding the color, but the pigment is more grainy. It appears to not have dissolved into the water.

To continue my experiment I need to fine a mortar and pestle which will make the grinding process more efficient and more effective. The other obstacle is supports (i.e. paper, canvas, wood). I haven't found any good paper yet. Honestly the best is card stock. Egg tempera is not a very flexible medium. The egg yolk is the binder which isn’t very strong, therefore, on a flexible surface like canvas it is likely to crack. The best option for us would be good stiff paper or wood. My only hesitation with using wood as a support is that it might limit the local artists' market which consists mostly of western tourists who want to buy something easy to travel with. I'm still searching for some kind of drying oil (linseed, etc.) which would allow us to make oil paints and work on unmounted canvas. reality is that this is one of the poorest countries in Africa. The local artists need to use their skills as a financial means to support themselves and their families.

Elephant LeafI’m posting images of my paint experimentation and the two small paintings I finished using my home brew!

Backyard Landfills

marissa — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 06:09:02 -0500

I would challenge my friends and family back in the states to try this one out…
Instead of putting your trash out on the street for pick-up next week, dig a small hole in your backyard and start dumping your waste there. It will be amazing to see how quickly your consumption habits change and how environmentally conscious you become.

As you can guess, this is the system for garbage disposal in Malawi. Any trash we make, literally, make a landfill of our backyard. In this light, composting is an absolute must. Any organic waste gets dumped onto the compost pile, which will then be used as fertilizer in the garden where we will grow many of our own veggies and herbs. Soda and beer bottles are all recycled, so much so that, cans aren’t stocked much at the stores and you get a refund on new beverage purchases when you return used bottles. What a brilliant system! Other recycling services do not exist, so we end up making all sorts of consumer decisions to minimize the size of the landfill in our backyard.

For example, the first few times we made pasta sauce we bought canned tomatoes and tomato paste. Afterwards we were left with two tin cans. We couldn’t stand the thought of them sitting in our backyard for the next thousand years. Instead, I will use the cans as water glasses for painting and we now make our sauce from fresh tomatoes, which come in 100% biodegradable packaging…and make way better sauce. Another example, in my suitcase I brought about 20 Ziploc freezer bags. Usually, I would go through a box of bags every two months. That’s 240 bags plus 6 cardboard boxes sitting in the hole in my backyard. I don’t like the idea anymore, of a perfectly useful, durable bag buried out there when I know I can clean it out and reuse. I’m determined to make those 20 bags last the whole year…it really shouldn’t be that hard.

We filter/boil our water, refilling our nalgeens and plastic bottles from the bottled water we bought our first few weeks in country. The yogurt containers get used as Tupperware, and we buy the milk the they sell in little bags instead of the thick boxed version with fancy labeling. Anything that does, unfortunately, make its way into the hole in our backyard gets burned periodically by the gardener to shrink and pack it down. Eventually, when the hole fills up, it will be covered with the red earth and a new one dug.

This system sure does make landfills a personal issue. I look at shopping through an entirely new lens, even though I arrived in Malawi fairly environmentally conscious. I hope I can bring home my new consumption habits, although it might take a toll on my wallet since fresh produce is so darn expensive in the states. In the end, if I dug a hole in my backyard…think it would definitely be worth it!