This is the second weekend in Malawi, and instead of venturing out to a new mountain for hiking or going to Lake Malawi, we spent Saturday going to Blantyre market, exploring it in greater detail than before. It was not just an amazing vegetable market, but clothing and electronics were also sold there as well in shops that wound through alleyways and around corners. There was a group of carvers making small trinkets up the hill. By the river, an entire row of vendors selling shoes, displaying nearly a thousand different choices. Sunday was the first day of hand washing. I have hand washed clothing at school before—shirts that needed special care and sweaters that could not go into a machine. I have never attempted to hand wash a week and a half worth of clothing before and it was quite an exhausting exercise.

Monday and Tuesday each have more village visits planned, hopefully one of which will be our choice site for our project. We have asked for the help of Village Hygiene Project as well as WASHTED, two programs related to our goals. WASHTED will take us to the Ndema village, an isolated place near Chikwawa. They have reported water contamination problems and use shallow well/open water sources as well, meaning there is great potential for our design. The second location, suggested by Hygiene Village Project, is Ndemanjie. It also uses open water sources, but is closer to Blantyre than Ndema. This means it is easier to continuously collect samples from here over time, allowing for long term study of the treatment project. Samples will be taken and tests run, but it will be a large discussion past simple test results to determine which, if either, site is viable for our project.