Day 6: Aug 21, 2017. Monday Monday was spent a bit like Friday but at a more relaxed pace and in parts of Blantyre that no longer seemed quite so forbidding as earlier. We travelled early to a borehole contractor who worked in a cramped, one-room office just up the street from the bus station. He asked an assistant to produce more chairs but we didn’t mind that he did not return. The contractor began by checking his email, and coincidentally found that another non-profit had emailed him identical questions we were about to ask. Answering his email to us, he told us his experience in the Chileka region and the capabilities of his company. Rory, having taken hydrogeology the semester prior knew a good deal of what he was saying and could ask pointed questions when the contractor asked if we needed further elaboration. He named the cost of boring about 60m into the average sand and clay material to be around $3,700 or about a third the cost to bore in Massachusetts. We took his card and told him we would possibly use his business in the best time to bore, peak-dry season (mid-November).
At around 2pm we met with the Malawian government at a run-down, large concrete building near the center of Blantyre. The outside was mobbed by Malawians seeking their electoral commission ID cards that would, among other things enable them to vote in the coming 2019 elections. At their feet lay a layer of garbage; congealed beverages plastered discarded plastic bags together like mortar and bricks to the ground, while rotting fruit and Carlsberg Beer bottles ensure there was no even footing for a square kilometer. The market lay just up the street from the government office, where dozens of Blantyre’s poorest offered cheap charcoal and nuts in the garbage that would eventually coat the city.
The government official was, to be perfectly honest, surprisingly competent. Our own notions were much closer to that of an older, pot-bellied Malawian soldier with a bad attitude than what we found: a young, industrious businesswoman who was excited about our project (and probably our decision to try and include the government despite their record of ineptitude). She worked for the land development office, and while her office was cluttered with dusty UNICEF pamphlets and discolored binders she took diligent notes on her Lenovo of what we asked and how we described our project. Offering little but the possibility of a few maps their geologists were developing (and had been for several years, allegedly) we left the government building empty handed but glad we had decided to pursue our project the legitimate way, and had been granted a seemingly competent civil servant who we could count on to not exploit us.
With time to spare after our meeting we decided to check up on the appliance stores in the city to get a sense of the prices for materials we would use in our borehole and distribution system. Since most of our system would focus on distribution and, tentatively, installing a solar pump with which to power the water out, we were able to get a multitude of prices in a short period of time. We found the costs of PVC tubing (per 6 meter, as it is measured) and the first store we visited proved not only the cheapest but with the most experience. Other stores gave us similar offers with different areas of expertise, and we recorded their contact information and prices for all of them with the promise we would give them a second look come drilling time next May. It was, in a strange way, fascinating to actually experience what one might read in magazines and newspapers about the culture or patterns of different countries; all of the contractors and shopkeepers we talked to were either Indian or referred to as Indian by Malawi society (for the most part Pakistani Muslims who had business connections to India and China). A merchant class actually existed in Malawi’s streets dominated by Indian or South Asian minorities much like Jewish merchants did in Europe historically. One merchant even offered to buy us dinner next time we visited, after schmoozing us for about 10 minutes (although to his credit he was earnestly helpful).