Full Belly Project – In A Nutshell – Fiona Melville – Malawi

27-09-2010

A couple of years ago a young Peace Corps volunteer was able to help stem a cholera outbreak in his remote Malawian village by raising enough money to drill a deep water well.  He'd achieved this by putting to use a hideous lump of concrete passed on to him by his boss Brian Connors.  Brian was a friend of the philanthropist and Hollywood movie engineer Jock Brandis who'd invented the lump of concrete – an ugly but portable, hand operated peanut shelling machine.  The villagers shelled literally tonnes of peanuts using Jock's 'Universal Nut Sheller' and sold them to a local peanut oil producer, raising enough to qualify for a substantial grant from the US Embassy.

My mission was to fly to Lilongwe to retell this story for World Challenge, but with no idea how to find the remote village or whether the young Peace Corp volunteer was still in the country.

Jock Brandis lives in North Carolina and is more "Dynasty" than mad inventor, but so far I'd only met him virtually via email and knew him as a helpful, self-effacing eccentric. He put me in touch with Lameck Makutu at 'C to C Engineering' in Lilongwe who manufacture the Universal Nut Sheller for Jock's enterprise: 'The Full Belly Project'. Lameck and his family were my companions, fixers, drivers, presenters and translators from the moment they met me at the airport.

'C to C' stands for Capetown to Cairo and is basically a foundry. Entrepreneur Lameck Makutu, was brought up in Zimbabwe when it was Southern Rhodesia, Zambia was Northern Rhodesia and Malawi was Nyasaland, and they were all part of the British construct, the Central African Federation. He worked in the Diamond mines.

Back in what is now Malawi he got himself on a Commonwealth scheme to India where he bought machines that make parts for agricultural machinery. He also set up his foundry but tragically its success has been severely hampered by the city's frequent power cuts. He was attracted to manufacturing the Universal Nut Sheller as it requires no power to make or run.

Like his father, Lameck Junior who now manages the factory sees enormous potential for agricultural development in Malawi, an aid dependent country currently importing over $1.6 billion in goods per year. They feel manufacturing nationally is the only way to make equipment affordable for small farmers. Lameck Jnr demonstrated the assembly of Full Belly nut sheller and his brother who had been to college in Walthamstow and I chatted about living in London.

Lameck Junior and his nephew Lynze managed to get me to Chilombo village where we filmed the new borehole and heard from the village Borehole committee about the success of the project. I also managed to meet up with Tim Strong, the Peace Corps volunteer, now back in Malawi working for the Clinton Foundation. He happened to be passing through Lilongwe that week. They also introduced me to Queen Elizabeth, a PA at Monsanto who uses the nut sheller for peanut butter production to help support her 13 dependents – mostly her orphaned nieces and nephews. Elizabeth and her husband also own a coffin shop - a stark reminder of nearly a whole generation lost in Malawi to AIDS and other illnesses related to malnutrition.

Posted by Fiona Melville

Full Belly Project – In a Nutshell – Jock Brandis

21-10-2010

Panic was probably the first resonse when I heard that the BBC was taking the whole video presentation seriously. I spend most of my professional years in the film industry, documentaries included, and I know how hard it can be to get a story that's all over the world to play out just right in front of the camera in a few days. First of all, the whole idea of making mini-factories, putting them in cartons so that people on the other side of the globe can make precision machines out of concrete . . . . ?

Well, that sounds pretty crazy, and maybe that's how the camera would see it. And what would happen if they tried to film water pumps in the middle of a monsoon or peanut shelling during the off-season. Frankly the whole thing could end up looking a bit 'Monty Python'.

Then there was the idea of the film crew in our North Carolina shop, which could easily double for a mad scientist workshop set in a movie. Making movies, I was always behind the camera and now, every time it gets aimed at me I get a bit queasy and keep yelling "CUT" very loudly, much to the irritation of the professionals.

Fortunately the BBC put me at the mercy of two fabulous people. Fiona, went to Malawi, and took the major effort to make the project look good by finding the real situations that made the Full Belly inventions look good. And Max got off the plane here in America and figured out a way to shoot around my "CUT"s. And he took a lot of time filming the people that really make it all happen, the volunteers and my Board of Directors. The shift inside you head, when panic turns to relief is about as good as it gets, and thanks BBC for not sending me John Cleese whose first question would have been, "So Mr. Brandis, is it correct that you are attempting to make a wrist-watch out of concrete?"

Posted by Jock Brandis