Muzungu in Malawi

Dalhousie science student Emily Stewart is a volunteer in Malawi with Engineers Without Borders.

“Malawi … I think I’ve heard of that. Didn’t, like, Madonna adopt a baby from there or something?”

Dal student Emily Stewart admits to not knowing much about Malawi when she first heard that’s where she’d be going as a volunteer with Engineers Without Borders Canada. But since May, the 19-year-old from White Rock, B.C. has been gaining an intimate understanding of the impoverished country which is nestled between Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia in southern Africa.

So far, her experience has been eye-opening and exhausting. She’s been wrapping her tongue around the Chichewa language, rebuffing marriage proposals and bathing in four cups of warm water. There have been bouts of explosive diarrhea and unexplainable tears. Plus, she’s had to get used to being the centre of attention almost all the time.

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“That’s the toughest thing,” she writes in an email to Dalnews, “The respect and privilege I get as a muzungu (white person/foreigner) is not something I feel I deserve in the least.”

But at the same time, she’s never learned so much, from how to adapt to a new diet and living conditions to communicating using a Chichewa phrase book, lots of hand gestures and plenty of good humor. Everything is markedly different from her life as a Dalhousie science student. Until now, one of the biggest challenges she’s had to face is deciding what to focus on in her second year: microbiology and immunology or economics?

Engineers Without Borders, by the way, isn’t limited to engineering students. Volunteers come from different academic disciplines, including international development studies, science, environmental studies, theatre. EWB volunteers are currently working in four countries: Burkina Faso, Malawi, Zambia and Ghana. Some, like Ms. Stewart, are on four-month junior fellowship placements while others are on long-term overseas placements ranging from one to three years. Many Canadian universities have chapters of EWB, including Dalhousie.

She done things she never could have imagined. Despite being a vegetarian, she’s sampled offal (“rhymes with ‘awful’”), a deep fried assortment of goat heart, liver, stomach, and large intestines. And, early on in her stay, she was enlisted by a blind midwife to deliver a baby.

“I entered the dark hut and was immediately struck with a metallic odour I couldn’t quite put my finger on,” she recounts on her blog (http://emily-in-malawi.blogspot.com/.) “Amayi gave me a pair of XL plastic gloves and told me to close my eyes. ‘So you be blind like me,’ she explained. Closing my eyes didn't make much difference as the hut was almost pitch dark in the middle of the afternoon. But I closed my eyes, and let Amayi take over. She took my hand and my finger and placed it somewhere as I heard a quiet moan. ‘That is head of the baby,’ she told me in her limited English as the tip of my finger poked an indescribable surface.

“I was in such shock that the next 20 minutes passed by without much thought. The birth was surprisingly muted and happened very fast (unlike how movies make them out to be); the woman giving birth (named Melissiana) was silent except for an occasional quiet groan. But the most shocking part came after, when I realized I had delivered the baby myself. Amayi had simply stood at the head of the bed, supporting the woman’s head in her arms, while I stayed at the other end and pulled the curly-haired baby out.”

As a volunteer with Engineers Without Borders, Ms. Stewart works with Concern Universal, a non-governmental organization that works to alleviate poverty in rural communities. Specifically, she’s been monitoring and evaluating how the organization's water and sanitation projects are working—whether disease prevalence has been decreasing because of better hand washing and covers that keep shallow wells from becoming nesting grounds for mosquitoes.

There is usually a technical component to the projects EWB volunteers work on. In Burkino Faso and Ghana, for example, volunteers are refining what’s called a “multifunctional platform.” It’s basically a diesel engine mounted on a steel chassis that powers a variety of end-use equipment such as grinding mills, de-huskers, battery chargers and water pumps. The idea is to help women with many of the tasks they do by hand: pounding cassava, grating gari and grinding grains.

Ms. Stewart’s work with EWB will continue when she returns to Canada: “My goal is to learn as much as I can about poverty and development ... Whether it’s learning to be more critical about development initiatives, or simply promoting development among family, friends, community and government, I'm going to share my experience.”