Hi, this is Hudson. I’m the flights and schedule lead on the trip to Malawi. As you know from the last update we’ve had a long, but fun travel experience but it finally came to an end and we made it to Malawi.
This morning we arrived in Johannesburg on time. Sophie, Annie, and I went to the business class lounge as we all needed to purchase business class tickets since the economy cabin was sold out. This meant we could all take a needed shower and eat some delicious South African food. We also has some delicious South African chips which we all loved.
After this we got on our plane to Malawi which happily arrived on time. Right before landing we were greeted with the beautiful view of the village we were travelling to, Solomoni. The bright green water tower made spotting it much easier too. Once we landed we were picked up by JOCC and driven to Solomoni.
From there we were greeted by many community members and slip up to get as much work done as possible before sunset. Gordon and Natasha went into Blantyre to pickup plumbing supplies for the next day while everyone else, including me, stayed in Solomoni to be toured around the village and test the working tapstands.
On the tour we were shown around to all of the tapstands where we found that only 3 were fully functional. Some just had the taps removed so they couldn’t be used while the school was closed, but others were completely broken. The broken ones were broken for many reasons, but they were mostly caused there were issues due to theft of the metal taps or by broken valves due to misuse. We were also able to see the science lab where sinkss were installed inside, and the periodic table was painted by our travel group last year.
As the sun set Gordon and Natasha came back and we all went inside to debrief the day. We then ate a delicious dinner of rice, vegetables, and hard boiled eggs. After that we all spend about an hour jerry rigging up our mosquito nets so we wouldn’t get bitten while asleep. This was extra difficult given the fact that we had two nets made for one person and one net made for two people. This means we had nets made for 4 people that needed to fit 6. We all had to squeeze in a bit but in the end we all fit were able to finally sleep in a bed instead of an economy seat.