Walking Tour of a Fishing Village near Chintheche, Malawi.

  

 

Our second hotel where a tour of a fishing village was offered as an activity provided a paid tour with a guide from the local community who received the entire cost of the tour. I was surprised and impressed that our hotel which arranged for the tour did not want a percentage of the cost.  They were happy for me to pay the guide the entire amount directly.  It turns out the guide was an artist who does guiding to supplement his income.

This time, we set off about 7am and walked to the village past houses which could have been in Waterloo.  I was told they were owned mostly by folks from Europe who come for a few weeks each year personally or by wealthy Malawians or by people building units to rent to more wealthy people in Malawi or elsewhere.

Rental houses

House owned by a better off Malawian

Unlike the first village which was near the south end of Lake Malawi and not far from a very prosperous town, this village was much further north along Lake Malawi and much more economically disadvantaged.

Some things I noted that were different from the southern village were housing and fishing, a frustrating gardening problem, and a quite different school.

 

When we got to the village, I said "Good morning" to some very young children we walked near; they did not respond, and my guide explained that these were preschoolers, and children do not learn English until they go to school.

I noticed that the architecture was quite different from that of the southern village I had toured. To start with, the soil here was not clay so bricks cannot be made locally, cooked in an oven, and used to build houses. If bricks are to be used, they have to be purchased and transported from an area which had clay; the cost of fired bricks as we know them would be even greater, so only the foreigners or wealthy Malawians used bricks of any kind, as seen in the pictures above.

 

Some local people used thatching for the walls of the house as well as the roof. 

Others built a stick lattice frame and filled in between the sticks with mud. You can see a building framed but not yet filled in, 

and a completed house. Note the firewood stored primarily for cooking and smoking fish.

Outhouses come in many different designs.  This is one:

People with a bit of money and labour could make concrete blocks, as the village was on Lake Malawi with was lots of water and sand. All that was needed was powdered cement and labour to mix it. This is a rental housing building which was started but construction is currently paused, as sometimes happens in our community also.

Lake Malawi has about 1000 species of fish, most of which are only found naturally in Lake Malawi. However, fishing was much poorer in this part of the lake.  This is a fishing boat operated by a large crew.

This is a one-person dugout canoe, which is also used for fishing, and this morning's catch.

                                                    

This photo shows even more clearly the size of fish which a fisherman returned with; you may notice these are much smaller than those I was shown at the more southern village. 

The overfishing problem is even more obvious here. One fisherman had fish a bit larger, but nowhere near the size fish used to be.  Once again, the overfishing problem is a difficult one to solve when people are poor and do not have enough money to buy food if even a few month fishing moratorium were mandated.

The unusual-looking fish which was caught in his nets is a freshwater catfish called a Malawi squeaker. 

Fish from Lake Malawi, including Malawi squeakers, are also found in aquariums around the world as many are quite colourful and they are freshwater fish, unlike those we see near coral reefs.

 

The problem with subsistence fishing and agriculture is compounded as attempts at gardening, cassava, for instance (been below) are made difficult by hippopotamus arriving to 

eat your garden. Note the footprint in the mud below.

And we think rabbits and deer are problems, but most of us have money to purchase food if the garden gets eaten. Hippos will eat whatever they like and cannot be shooed away.

 

Although the community is not well off in some ways, it is in another. The local school is run by a woman from Germany who raises money to provide a local school for children in the village, and a boarding school for up 60 girls in Grades 5-8, with a total enrolment of 170-200, and eight classes with a maximum of 30 students per class (compared with 80 or more per class in government schools).   

This school was established and funded primarily by Thuringians (folks from central Germany). The cost per student is about $225 per year, including lunches and morning tea for all students; donations are sought primarily from people in Europe to pay for school buildings and for students whose families cannot afford that much, and to pay for the extra meals for residential students. They are in the process of creating a secondary school for girls who would be funded to attend. The concept is that if girls have a better education, family sizes eventually would be smaller and families would be less impoverished.

 

On our way back to the hotel for breakfast we passed a house which is relatively modern in construction but has an old dugout canoe used as a flowerpot. 

Another interesting village tour.