Skip to main content

Sometimes pictures tell more than words

Training farmers about heat detection. I was told here that every 9 cows out of 10 are not giving any signs of heat and are on silent heat.. We all know that´s not possible. So we went through the signs again and reminded the farmers that heat detection is one of the most important works in their farms. No calves, no milk. 

Introducing a very simple and easy to use "heat calender" for the same group of farmers that were getting the training about heat detection. That´s my pilot group working with this calender. I am looking forward for the feedback on it´s usage and later will introduce it to more farmers if it seems to work out well. The only problem is that not all farmers are able to read, especially the elderly farmers so this comes out handy only for those who are able to read. 

Teaching our community animal health worker to crab a cow for deworming. 

With these Malawian cows you need to really strong!! No matter how small jerseys they are. Must say that many works that I could be able to do at home are totally impossible for me to do here. The cows here are not use to people handling them the way they are use to back at home. 

Sometimes we have some runaway cows.. This cow had ran away in the morning so by the time we got there about 11am she was on her way home. The main cause for cows to run to the fields is the lack of food so they are just in the search of greener grass..

These two men farmers we spotted at the local bar on our way to see their cows. This is very common, men stay out drinking while women and children do the work. 

Definitely one of the nicest jerseys I have met. Milking 20kg a day. 

My heart was crying for this poor heifer who was tight on her leg with a rope. This farmer was complaining that the heifer was showing no heat and he was failing to get it in calf. Looking at the condition I am not surprised at all. We asked him to release the heifer at once and will follow up on the condition later. These kind of things we see too often, it leaves me more sad than mad and we have to be quite rough to farmers who treat their animals like this. 

Community animal health worker training the farmer on right milking technique in order to prevent diseases like mastitis.


And when the going gets rough and it´s time to get mind of from work for a while, luckily we live only one hour drive from the beach. 

Comments

Candice said…
I love it! You are doing such good work. Can I steal your photos?
Steve Morris said…
Thanks for this Milla, I didn't know tyou were keeping a blog, maybe you told me and I lost it among the hundreds of mails. I will share this link widely within VSO. Great work. keep it up.
Anonymous said…
Good gal :) Im so proud of you. keep up the good work. xoxo Päivi
Gill said…
Love the blog Milla, awesome moo coos!

Popular posts from this blog

Tomorrow..

All my bags are packed I´m ready to go... Well, about being ready I am not so sure about, can you ever really be ready to leave and live in another country for 2 years? I don´t think so. But at least my bags are ready so that leaves me some time to relax for tonight. I think I have left so many times already from one place to another that the whole thing about leaving and saying goodbye is easy for me. I always wanted to go back to Africa and haven´t really realized yet that I will actually be there on Sunday but I am sure it will be such a lovely feeling to land my feet back to the true African ground. And I love these moments where you can start a whole new page in the book of your life! I have really enjoyed the last pages and will probably stay on the same chapter still, just adding more adventures to this page. You might know that I have never really settled anywhere. Becoming older sometimes gives me the feeling that I should consider settling more but now at the moment of one mo

Preparing for Malawi

Well, time is running and my "to do list" is still quite long. The good news is that my flights to Malawi have been confirmed and I will be flying out on the 4th of February. So there is less than 3 weeks to go which at times brings a slight "panic related feelings" but calms down fast after realizing that 3 weeks is plenty of time to get everything sorted out. Autumn time passed fast with all the training we had to do with VSO. It seemed a lot in the beginning and I was wondering how am I going to survive all those studies both in England and online. If you come with an academic background it must be not that bad at all. But if you come with less studying background like I did it really seems like a whole lot of work to do, with lots of paper work, lots of big issues packed with big words! But now when I look back at it all it's been amazing times, have learned so much, enjoyed the conversations with other volunteers and had so much fun too! And I am happy that

From home and work

Greetings from Mzuzu, the capital of Northern Malawi! I am writing this with a candle light in our dining room. The power cuts are everyday and normally come around 6pm lasting about 1 to 4 hours. First few times are surprising but by now we are already use to them and basically the only way to be prepared is to have a good set of candles available for those times. Though when it happens you are always in the other side of the house from the matches and flashlights.. Our house So after having to spend some extra time in Lilongwe we finally made it to our new home. When thinking about it now it was actually a very good thing because we had time to settle and get to know the town before we started to work. We arrived last Thursday and mainly spend the weekend cleaning and setting up the house. We were really lucky to get a wide range of kitchen equipment from some previous volunteers so we didn´t have to spend a lot of money on those. We are still missing quite a lot of furniture since t