Christmas 2024

Wells For Zoë just grows and grows

Mary & John Coyne (WfZ founders)

We are just home after our 49th working trip to Malawi. As Sean Keane might sing in his “Home away from home”:

“And I make it home at last and I’m barely un-packed when
I’m already making plans to go again.”

Two years ago in a little flash of madness I decided that we could convert a disused building into a rural health clinic. This flash from somewhere above has seen us open our 12th such facility this week. It is our first with the South Mzimba Health Board, who had 28 of these running until Government funding stopped a few months ago. Devaluation of the Malawian currency by over 50% has been a disaster. This monthly clinic will be linked to our tree nurseries and Land Restoration projects in this new area for us.

The official opening of the latest (in Mtaja) in another disused building we refurbished for the job, was a special occasion. The people came from everywhere with all the Chiefs and community groups attending for the big occasion. They used two Health Board tents (to shield the sun), got 100 chairs and set everything up for the big day – all a bit different from the Northern region. They had the head of District Nursing and Midwifery, 12 chiefs, 5 Community Nurses, 1 Doctor, and 5 Area health officers. We would love to have been there but our son Éamonn was lucky enough to attend and be part of the action.

The following stats summary arrived afterwards with many pictures and a long report (as they regularly do for all Health Clinics):

Mtaja Outreach Clinic

Oct 7th 2024

Women: 203
Under-5s: 169
Men: 36

Services that were offered:
Family planning/contraceptives, Weighing to test the malnourished, HIV Testing , Antenatal care, Outpatient Department Care; For under – 5s, Immunisations, Malaria testing, Consultations, Drug administration,
Undernourished children with Nutritional Assessments.

A terrific ongoing achievement. If anyone needs Hospital treatment they are sent in a taxi to the nearest hospital where they can be treated and regularly returned on the day.

Currently the North Mzimba Health Board is severely under-funded as with other areas.

They have funding for Nurses and all medicines at 15 of their Health Clinics but cannot afford fuel to attend their own clinics.

Many of the children attending are malnourished so we have recently started to develop model gardens at all our 12 Clinics, without fertilisers but instead inter-planting with nitrogen fixing species, like Sesbania, Velvet bean and Msangu (a local indigenous nitrogen fixing tree). These will be used for research and demonstration purposes and will be managed by some of our more experienced Land Restoration workers and worked on by the community. The aim will be two-fold: to demonstrate easier ways of growing nutritious food and to provide food for the aforementioned malnourished children. We also have two clinics per month for men – who don’t usually attend with women – where the all-important counselling services are again present.

Education of girls has always been a big interest of ours, particularly remembering the Ireland long ago (or even in my own time). As we have done for many years, we currently fund about 334 girls in secondary school in our Girl Child Student (GCS) project. We now fund over 30 girls in University which is a follow-on from that. We also run about 60 preschools for boys and girls where we have approximately a hectare of land where the parents come together to produce food to feed them.

We are now in the 2nd year of our Tailoring Course run by two former GCSs who take on and train 3 students every 6 months in a course designed by one of our board, Eilís Butler. Amongst the skills they learn is the manufacture of reusable sanitary pads for distribution to our students, staff and nursery workers – all made with the help of 4 trusty Singer sewing machines!

One of our other GCSs, Lusungu Chirwa, has come back to work for us recently, after getting 3 A’s in her degree. This is particularly great news for St Patrick’s Parish (Lucan) who funded her education over the years, and for which we are so thankful; moreso maybe because very little of our current funding is local or Irish anymore.

The pumps go on and on – Manufacturing, Installing & Maintaining – and we currently have 2,854 installations on our website & WfZ map, with many more having been installed before we started recording them this way.

Land Restoration is our Major project these days. Over the years Malawi like everywhere cut down its trees without replacing any, leaving hillsides with major Soil Erosion problems and all the associated negatives of this. We plant only local species, follow their progress with 1000s of photos of sowing, planting and growing using our in-house developed greenhouse.Flority system, and further this transparency by using drones to add this data to our mapping system. We have record success rates with some species and our percentages keep rising.

Our funders (predominantly Mastercard’s Priceless Planet Coalition as supported by WRI/CI) observe everything very closely and value how we treat communities, with healthcare, education, and food production. The added community restoration support and engagement – which is what WfZ has always been about –means people are less likely to cut down or burn the trees. Of course the fact that the project employs up to 2000 workers in busy times, mainly women, who never had an income before, is a major bonus for these communities.

This is just a quick summary of what Wells for Zoë is currently doing. Keep an eye on our website for further stories and updates.

Have a great Christmas from us all at Wells for Zoë, and for the New Year of 2025 follow us…

We are planning our 50th visit in March and no doubt there will be a little celebration.