Running Out of Gas

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

Tuesday I managed to get out to Magunditsa to do the assessment of the village fishpond. It went very well. The people there were so nice and friendly. One of the village women came running up to the pond when we first got there and called us thieves before she realized what was going on (the extension officer for the village apparently didn’t tell her of our assessment that day). It was quite funny actually. In the past the village has had a problem with people stealing fish in the middle of the night or while they were at church. She asked me for barbwire. They offered to give me a fish but only after I bring them some fishing nets they joked. By the end of the visit we were all good friends and everybody wanted their picture taken, they were amazed with my digital camera, especially when I played the pictures back to them. They laughed so hard when they saw themselves – I guess they don’t see pictures of themselves that often. When I was leaving the woman who called me a thief gave me a Malawi name – Najere. It was a touching gift of acceptance.

Today, Wednesday, I was supposed to do my last needs assessment in the villages of Chinyamula and Njuli, in Ntcheu District, but we ran out of gas for the truck (at least it wasn’t cancelled by a funeral this time). Normally you could just go to the gas station on the highway outside Dedza, but that station was out of gas too. It seems that a lot of places are out of gas. When I was in Kasungu over the weekend all 3 gas stations were out of fuel. The only place to buy fuel was from the hawkers who were sitting next to the gas station with drums of petrol. Petrol here costs 200kwa/L ($1.40/L), but the hawkers were selling for 500kwa/L ($3.50/L). Nice.

Gas shortages are fairly common here. The areas around Blantyre are also short on both petrol and diesel. I was reading in the national newspaper, The Malawi News (which is written in English thankfully), that some stations were hoarding gas and not selling hoping to drive the prices up. Some accused the gas station owners of being in cahoots with the hawkers. There is no government regulation on fuel here so the gas stations can get away with this behaviour. Malawi has no natural resource of oil or gas so they are very susceptible to any market fluctuation. Well we all know the politics of gas nowadays so I need not ramble on about that. But it seems to have affected Malawi about 3-fold that of Canada.

Apparently there are some stations in Lilongwe that have fuel and staff has gone into the city to buy some (I guess one of our trucks has fuel then). Aw yes, the joys of working in a developing country. Never fear, while the trucks and stations have run out of gas, my spirit has not. Hopefully I will get down to Ntcheu tomorrow. Cross your fingers for me.