Local man reaches out to Africa

JohnPaul Portelli felt like there was something missing in his life, so he set off on an adventure of a lifetime to Malawi to see if he could make a difference there.
Malawi is located in south east Africa and is landlocked by Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania. It is also one of the poorest countries in the world and has been repeatedly affected by famines in the last six years. During those famines up to 30 per cent of the population has been short of food. One million people currently live with AIDS in the poverty stricken country.
Portelli has travelled to Malawi with the Engineers without Borders. For the last five years, he worked at Syncrude Canada.
“I will be here for a year, and I just arrived on Feb. 29. I had the house and car and good job, but there was still something that wasn’t quite being fulfilled. So I decided to try something different. I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone and I also feel that I have a certain skills set, and I thought maybe those skills might be better used for the poor of the world,” said Portelli in a telephone interview this week.
“And the third reason I came was that I come from a Christian background, so I felt that something was always speaking to me to do something like this,” added Portelli.
Right now Portelli is working with Malawi’s Department of Science and Technology. They take ideas that already exist in the country and try to improve upon the technology and implement it on a larger scale. The current project is a maize, or corn mill. They hope to make it more efficient so that people will take less time to mill the maize, which is a main staple of the Malawi diet.

“With the group, we don’t necessarily do engineering work. It’s more systems work and we typically partner with non-government organizations and instead of doing our own designs, we try to learn or improve and then apply those practices to those who can use them best,” said Portelli.
The first two weeks of Portelli’s stay gave him a bit of culture shock. He was placed with a family in the village of Kadindiza, a tribal village with a chief.
He was put in a mud hut that had an earthen floor, no running water, electricity or bathroom.
Portelli said it was hard, because “Not too many spoke English, so it was hard to communicate. And I also was not working those first two weeks, so I didn’t feel like I really had a purpose.”
Portelli is currently staying in a hostel in the capital city of Lilongwe, but will be moving back into a village in a few weeks for three or four months.
There are no phones in the villages, and even in the city there are few landlines. Many actually have cellphones.
“Even just doing work is a challenge. When working at Syncrude and if you wanted information, or if you needed something done, then you would pick up the phone, or send an e-mail, but that doesn’t work here,” said Portelli.
“My plan is to stick it out for the year here in Malawi. But I do wonder sometimes if I made the right decision. I think should I have stayed in Fort McMurray? My motivation was to come here and make a difference, but now that I am here the problems seem so much greater than me, and I wonder how can I possibly have any impact?” Portelli asked himself.
He’s modelling his stay there on the story about the starfish on the beach. The story goes like this: “A young boy was running along the beach after hundreds of starfish had been washed ashore and was quickly tossing them all back in the ocean. A man came along and said why was the boy bothering because he wasn’t going to make a difference. The little boy tossed another starfish in and said, “I made a difference to that one.”
That’s what Portelli hopes he will accomplish, that he will at least affect one life.
Portelli is writing about his adventures in Malawi on his website: www.johnpaulportelli.com.