Sorry, Malawi. These chairs are everywhere, and they’re terrible.

It wasn’t an easy week in Malawi.

First, my trip to Mulanje got canceled, and along with it, I lost the driver to take me to different factories around Blantyre.

Then, the map office was closed because the owner was sick. When I went, there were four employees hanging outside the office, but they told me that the owner was the only one who could open the office. So I couldn’t get a proper map of Blantyre to locate the different factories.

So I decided to go to Blantyre on my own, to jump on a bus and make my way around town. How hard could it be to find a few factories?

Turns out, it can be quite hard, especially when the phonebook doesn’t have any actual addresses for places, only P.O Boxes; especially when factories don’t answer the phone; and especially when most roads aren’t named.

My first stop was supposed to be Terrastone, a factory that makes pre-cast concrete parts. Some locals, eager to help, gave me quite detailed directions, and others along the way confirmed the directions.

“Terrastone is this way?”

“Yes, it’s that way.”

After about an hour of walking, I pull up to the location: the Bridgestone/Firestone office. And even that has moved to a different location.

The worst part was that my phone betrayed me today. (Yes, this is the same phone I recently referred to as the best phone in the world.) It seems my line got crossed with somebody else’s, because a couple times when I tried to call customer service, I only got an old man screaming, “HELLO? HELLO?”

So I couldn’t call Ismail, the Lilongwe architect with whom I’m collaborating, for help. I couldn’t call the factories or my local contacts for help.

But I did make it to the Blantyre map office right before it closed, and got great maps of both Lilongwe and Blantyre. Also, the view from my hotel room is amazing (below). So, all was not lost in Blantyre… only the things I came to accomplish.

I’m looking for waste, extra material, and factory byproducts, to use simply and beautifully as architectural materials. 

(It would be so easy: I’d get published, everyone would celebrate me, and I’d be well on my way to becoming a famous architect. “Have you heard about that kid who made beautiful bricks out of those extra plastic tubs from the dairy plants in Malawi?”)

Only… there doesn’t seem to be any such waste in any of the factories that I’ve visited so far. I can’t even seem to locate a junkyard. This place is maddeningly efficient; with not much new material coming in, many here keep reusing whatever they can get.

There are just those flimsy blue plastic bags that people toss on the side of the road. I wonder if we can do something with them.

The search continues…

mosquito net + fan = net on the face

mosquito net – fan = sweat on the face

fan – mosquito net = bites on the face

One of the things I’ll be doing here is looking at how kids play, and taking advantage of natural materials and local manufacturing processes to develop low-cost or no-cost toys for underserved children.

This past Saturday, I went with a couple friends to Dedza, a town 85 kilometers southeast of Lilongwe. On its map of Dedza, the Brandt guidebook had a little dot locating a metal toy shop, which I thought might be worth checking out.

Well, there was no toy shop where the map promised one, only a small general store. I did see a young boy pushing a metal car (above), but he ran away before I could ask him where he got it, or if he made it himself.

Here are some photos of Dedza, with a focus on play patterns and points of departure for new toys.

Football goal

Football field

Climbing

Playing while working, tomatoes as building blocks

Ceramic balls for macrame (and maybe something else?) at the Dedza pottery workshop

Modern printing combined with classic glazing, also at the pottery workshop

House of Pooh (and orange Barney)

Kids dancing, Avik dancing behind camera

I traded in my iPhone, which some might argue is the best phone in the world, for a Nokia 1200, which some might argue is the best phone in the world. Let me make the case for the Nokia 1200.

This Nokia 1200 cost 3,500 MWK, which is about 25 USD. It’s the entry-level device and the most popular phone on the streets of Malawi. When I bought the phone, I knew I was getting a bare-bones device. 

There are three features, however, that make this an important tool for people in developing countries, beyond its communication functions. This phone was designed for people in the villages.

The first feature is the screensaver—a big clock. Before my trip, I was warned to be careful with my wristwatch, by two different people who had traveled in Malawi. I appreciate that telling time is integral to development. How can you join the larger economy if you don’t know when to show up? But with more cellphones in the rural areas, phones like this—all small portable alarm clocks—make watches unnecessary.

The second significant feature is the flashlight. I have had phones with a flashlight before, but it always seemed like a useless add-on. Here, where power outages are frequent and scheduled, and where many villages don’t have electricity at all, the strong white LED is a brilliant, invaluable addition.

Finally, the battery life is amazing. I haven’t charged the phone since Friday, and it still shows a full battery. I’m sure the battery life will decrease over time, but this phone is clearly designed to conserve power, allowing villagers to use communal charging stations when they don’t have electricity in their homes.

If only I could receive international texts…(and use the iPhone’s Google Maps application…)

My first stop was the tobacco auction floors here in Lilongwe, as Malawi’s economy largely relies on the export of tobacco, which is responsible for more than half of the country’s export earnings. 

My final project at Columbia looked at how the tobacco-based economy has contributed to the joint crises of AIDS orphans, malaria, and deforestation. The Tobacco Association of Malawi (TAMA) was instrumental in preventing the use of DDT to kill mosquitoes, as this plan would have compromised the quality and purity of the tobacco leaf. 

Additionally, the tobacco growth and curing industry has led to Malawi’s massive deforestation; it takes 8 kilograms of wood fuel to cure 1 kilogram of flue-cured tobacco leaves. At the current rate of deforestation, Malawi will no longer have trees for lumber or fuel by 2015. The effect on the tobacco-based economy is imaginably disastrous.

The tobacco auction building is simultaneously sophisticated and low-tech, finely tuned to the spatial and environmental needs of the program. The roof is designed to keep all direct sunlight out and let indirect natural light in.

There is also a complex network of conveyor belts that brings the bales of tobacco in, distributes them underground to different outdoor sheds after the different buyers select their bales, and ultimately carries them through enclosed above-ground bridges directly to the buyers’ processing plants. Throughout this whole process, direct sunlight doesn’t touch a single bale.

The auction floors just closed for the rainy season; this was great because I wasn’t restricted to the public viewing area and I was allowed to walk everywhere, but I’ll have to go back to see the system in operation.

Lilongwe feels like a new frontier town, an outpost in the wild wild South, one edge of our global civilization.

All over the city, there are empty billboards, which seem like an appropriate metaphor for Lilongwe. The infrastructure is increasingly in place to accept new investments, new corporations, new populations; those things just aren’t here yet. Lilongwe is waiting to be filled.

It has everything you might expect of a city—cell phone carriers, supermarkets, banks—but it has only one or two of each, with names not often found outside of southern Africa. Instead of T-Mobile, McDonald’s, and HSBC, there’s Zain, Nando’s, and Stanbic Bank. Globalization has brought the technologies and the ideas, but it hasn’t yet brought all the brands. 

Then there are curious places like this modern petrol station, which has no brand or name at all.

From the Johannesburg airport…

…to the streets of Lilongwe.