The Maru has been monitoring the Mazukuhunju
Fishing Village for over 7 years, weighing the fish that they caught everyday in
order to get an idea of how many fish had been taken from the lake. In spite of
this monitoring when I arrived to The
Maru I realized that everything we knew from the fishing village was based on
rumours or casual conversations with the people around Kande, so i decided that
we needed to do a characterization of the village and ask villagers their challenges
while they are fishing and living in this village in order to be able to create
a project together with the community that can both increase the amount of fish
in the lake and improve their quality of
life.
So far we have done over 22 interviews and the
results have been better than expected, the people from the village, have been
very receptive to us asking them questions about their way of life, and we have
been able to get to know more about their life style, their organization as a
community, their main challenges in
their fishing activities, their opinions about other stakeholders in the lake,
their feelings about overfishing, among other things.
Once the interviews are over, we will be able
to characterize the demographics of the
village, and also I will be designing a project with the information gathered with
the aims of decreasing the overfishing in the lake while also helping the
villagers to have a better way of life.
As a divemaster and an environmental lawyer it
has been an amazing learning experience to come to The Maru and learn more
about different scientific disciplines, like aquatic biology, learning more
about the cichilids, how to to do underwater surveys, monitor water quality in
the rivers, and also complementing my social science knowledge by getting to
know the people from the fiishing village and their way of living, and learning
how to create a community engagement project by just doing it. Also just the
fact of being living in Malawi , right next to the Lake in a beautiful place
like Kande has been wonderful.
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