My Kingdom for a connection

Well, I just finished a half hour of typing updating everyone. Ironically as the title shows, I started off with a description of all the internet connection difficulties I have been having. Of course when I hit post the whole thing failed and deleted everything that I had written.
Now I have used up almost all of my lunch hour so will just have to give a quick synopsis.
We have found a place to live which has relieved a lot of stress and we are only two days overdue from when we were supposed to be out on our own. Thankfully WUSC has put us up for a few more days. Janna is looking at furniture as we type this, the cheapest option is to find guys on the side of the road who build it from whatever wood they have access to. We will need to get beds, chairs, tables, a stove, a fridge and anything else that we might need. At first that seemed daunting but after the difficulty getting the house it seems like less of a challenge. Our Regional Director who is based in Botswana is here in Lilongwe and she has mobilized some resources to help us out, as well as taking all the volunteers out for a nice dinner last night.
Minimum wage was raised today and worker groups are quite happy about the spike even though it didn’t get to the level they lobbied for. The new minimum wage is 129.30 Kwachas for urban workers and 95.45 Kwachas for rural workers. On top of this urban workers get a housing allowance of 12 Kwachas / day while rural workers get 10 Kwachas / day. To put this in perspective one Canadian dollar is trading at about 140 Kwachas and the place we found which was the cheapest one we could find that would fit our family plus Heather was 80 000 Kwacha a month. Houses sell for prices like, 7 million Kwacha. Despite these surprising figures it really is quite a hike as the previous minimum wage was 87.50 Kwachas plus a 9 Kwacha housing allowance / day for urban workers and 66.50 plus a 7 Kwacha housing allowance for rural workers. Also, unlike Canada the rural population is far larger than the urban with about 85% of the population falling under the rural worker category.
On Monday and Tuesday I took part in meetings at the World Bank on their proposal for the implementation of weather insurance for crops. It was an interesting two days, especially since the model they are looking at is so different than what we used in Ontario. They are going for a fully private model with no financial inputs from government. As well there will be no coverage for yield loss or income loss. It will be an indexed insurance tied solely to rainfall amounts measured at government rain stations. It the rain is too little or too much a payment will be triggered, but this is where the significant difference comes in. The only access to this insurance will be in a bundled package with private bank loans so the payments will go directly to the bank to come off of the amount owing. In this way it is similar to fire insurance that you might have bundled with your mortgage. The main idea behind it is to try to improve access to credit for farmers as only about 6% are eligible for credit at this point in time and if there are more guarantees for the bank they will be able to expand their lending clientele. The main stumbling block may be the fact that the farmer pays 100% of the fees, and that it may not be optional. It is projected that this might only cost about 4-5% of the loan but that can be a lot when income is so tight.
Anyways it was interesting to observe all the parties, farmers, banks and insurance representatives discuss the various ways to run the program and even little steps can add up to big change eventually.