Two years ago, Bryan Layman traveled to Malawi to rebuild roads in a remote village. What he wasn’t expecting was to build on a relationship between a Catholic diocese in the African nation and the Arlington diocese.
Layman is a member of Engineers Without Borders, a nonprofit that works with underprivileged countries and communities to install vital infrastructure for water, sanitation and transportation. Two years ago, Layman began work on a road repair and drainage project in the small village of Kaseye. When he arrived as the project lead, he learned that the small village was a Catholic mission. “It just happened to be a Catholic project,” he said.
Roughly the size of Pennsylvania, Malawi is located in southwestern Africa. The Kaseye Mission is a part of the Diocese of Karonga, one of eight Catholic dioceses and archdioceses in the country. A rural community, Kaseye is home to a girls’ secondary school operated by the Sisters of the Holy Rosary, and the Kaseye Community Hospital, both Catholic institutions. Catholics often go without a Sunday Mass for weeks until a priest can make the trek.
Traveling from Northern Virginia to Kaseye is no small feat, said Layman, a parishioner of St. John the Apostle Church in Leesburg. The journey involves 24 hours of flights from Dulles International Airport to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital. From Lilongwe, it’s a 14-hour drive to Kaseye.
The majority of Malawi’s roads are dirt or gravel. “Malawi has a very poor roadway system,” said Layman, a parishioner of St. John the Apostle in Leesburg. During the country’s rainy season from November to March, “the roads are just overwhelmed,” he said. Enormous potholes threaten to incapacitate vehicles, and clogged ditches quickly make the roads impassable. Transportation is so bad during the rainy season that those living outside Kaseye are unable to drive to the hospital. “It severely limits health care, emergency care, transportation to the schools, to the church,” Layman said.
Over the years, EWB volunteers have made several trips to Kaseye, scoping the project’s limits and identifying roads most in need of repair. Through these trips, Layman met two other Catholics involved with EWB, Thomas and Elisabeth Hangartner. Even before they joined EWB, the Hangartners had been involved in Malawi service efforts for more than a decade, including installing an x-ray room at the Kaseye hospital.
Elisabeth said she once observed an ambulance unable to cross a road due to flooding. “We hope that the road will eventually be in a (condition) where, year round, it is passable, that people can go to the hospital,” Thomas said.
On an Aug. 28-Sept. 14 trip, Layman and EWB volunteer Dan Johnson implemented a test solution to a 100-meter stretch of road, cleaned clogged ditches, and replaced several culverts and dams. If the test solution survives the rainy season, the EWB team will return several times over the next few years to fix additional portions of the roads. A local contractor, his team and 18 hired members of the community were taught how to maintain the road.
An EWB requirement is that the recipient community must contribute 5% of the cost, “whether it be in money or services or materials,” Layman said. The project must also be sustainable, where community members are taught how to prevent the project from falling into disrepair.
With a limited budget and resources, Layman and Johnson ran into a significant challenge — little to no mechanical equipment. Layman said the only mechanical item they had was a rolling compactor to flatten and compact the soil. “Everything else was done manually with spades, hoes and a team,” he said. He acknowledged that while this particular project is limited to the roads leading to the Kaseye hospital, the community’s needs are great. “There could be years of projects,” he said. But the project’s success ultimately depends on how much EWB can fundraise, he added.
What surprised Layman the most was the mission community’s faith. On one trip, he witnessed a procession led by the Sisters of the Holy Rosary with dancing and singing in Lambya, a Bantu language. “My ears didn’t understand, but my heart felt everything,” he said. “It’s a very strong religious community.”
He was surprised to learn of the connection between the Diocese of Karonga and the Arlington diocese. Karen Ward, program coordinator for diocesan Arlington Missions, said that the two dioceses have had a longstanding relationship spanning more than a decade. Arlington Missions coordinates mission efforts for the Arlington diocese and organizes Sunday Mass appeals by missionaries across the globe.
Starting with Bishop Paul S. Loverde, the Arlington diocese began welcoming visits from Bishop Martin Anwel Mtumbuka 12 years ago. During his visits, Bishop Mtumbuka would reside at Our Lady of Good Counsel Church in Vienna and appeal for support, describing the needs of his diocese. “There’s a very strong relationship with the diocese,” Ward said.
Layman met with Bishop Mtumbuka on his return trip last month. “Bishop Martin expressed his appreciation for the project and spoke about the importance of improving infrastructure to better serve the people of the Diocese of Karonga,” Layman said. “We also discussed my connection to the Diocese of Arlington, which he knows well through his previous visits there. It was a warm and encouraging conversation, and we were grateful for the opportunity to meet with him during our visit.”
Ward said that the poverty in Malawi is extreme. “These people have nothing, and I don’t think people understand it, that they really have nothing,” she said. Elizabeth Hangartner agreed. “A great number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, they live in (the) greatest poverty,” she said, adding that few in developed Western countries “have an idea what a person in the north of Malawi has to go through to get water, to get a child to school, to get food for the family.”
Donofrio can be reached at anna.donofrio@catholicherald.com.
Find out more
For more info or to support Engineers Without Borders, go to ewbnova.org/malawi.
To support Arlington Missions, go to arlingtonmissions.org.
