This is the end of rainy season, when all is lush and grasses are waist high. I am receiving my karmic payment for torturing Catherine (my former, incredibly tolerant roommate), who endured three years of lawn mowing with only an electric weed whacker in the name, I insisted, of environmental responsibility. Well, here in Malawi, there are no weed whackers, or other machinated options for cutting grass, only brute strength and a dull metal tool like a hockey stick: the slasher. On Wednesdays, a few hours are set aside for general cleaning at school, and the students can be found slashing away at the seemingly endless expanse of green overgrowth. Truant or otherwise errant students risk hours of disciplinary action in this form. On my return Sunday, after two weeks away from site, I discovered a jungle of vines obscuring the long driveway that once served as a path to my house; in its current state, its passibility was in grave doubt, especially considering the serpentine wildlife that love this kind of habitat. Moreover, I had created an eyesore for my neighbors, whose culture expresses a strong distaste for such untidiness. So I had my first go at slashing. Thirty minutes later, hands blistered and ego bruised, I could at least claim success in entertaining the neighborhood. The driveway, though, showed no visible sign of my toil; at my current rate, I might expect to finish by the next rainy season. So, when a man called at my fence an hour later, eying the tangled yard and asking for piecework, I accepted his offer, and at the same time, the limits of my desire to prove self-sufficiency.
This is the first week of Term 2! Hard to believe how fast the first term flew by, and with it my first three months at site. Much of the last term was spent visiting the eleven schools in my cluster, getting to know the teachers there, and conducting a teacher survey that will help me plan the next two years in Salima. Initial school visits took more time than one might imagine, since I had to cobble together third-hand directions to each school and then attempt to find my way there via foot, bicycle, cheetah, or the back of a pickup truck. Some of my best days, though, were spent winding through villages on bumpy dirt roads, trying to keep my skirt dry while biking through a river. At the end of the term, I hosted a very successful lesson-planning workshop, which was unfortunately followed by three hellish weeks of exam typing and printing, a task that had me briefly questioning my entire purpose in being here.
But new terms bring fresh starts and there are a lot of projects in the works that I am very excited about: This week we broke ground on a school garden that will be tended by Home Economics classes and any other students who are interested in participating. It is the kind of project I’ve been hoping will take off, but I was even more delighted when the plan was suggested by one of the teachers rather than by me, since it is more sustainable if the community has ownership of the project.
This term I will be teaching a Form 3 Life Skills class. Life Skills is sort of a mishmash of topics relating to sexual health and decision-making and career-planning. I have also been assisting a group of teachers completing their degree through a distance education program who convene weekly at my school to work on assignments; mostly I help them with improving their writing skills. Also, this term I am supposed to begin teaching computer classes, both to students and teachers (a result of overwhelming requests from the survey). This has been delayed by the fact that the computers have been locked away in a closet since they were donated, and they won’t be released until the school saves enough money for stronger burglar bars. A temporary solution may be implemented: storing the computers in a closet after every class and setting them up again the next day. Really.
I am also trying to create a writing club and reactivate the Edzi-Toto (AIDS) club but extra-curriculars like these mostly exist in name only; by the afternoon, students—justifiably—are more interested in going home for their first meal of the day, rather than sticking around another hour. This is the main reason I’m trying to raise community interest in a school feeding program. There are some permaculture groups in Malawi taking this on, mostly in primary schools, but I’m hoping to find a way to implement it in at least some of the secondary schools in the cluster. [Since I wrote this we had our first AIDS club meeting and it was awesome. So, yay for progress!]
What else? We are in the early stages of planning Camp SKY, to be held in August. Much more on this soon. And I am trying to put together a five-day training for thirty local primary and secondary teachers to learn how to use the Hope Kit, a resource for talking about HIV/AIDS in the community. The kit includes a manual of exercises, a lot of teaching tools and a wooden phallus for condom demonstrations. I think it will help the teachers broach difficult topics that come up in biology or Life Skills classes.
Thanks to everyone for all of the birthday greetings!! It means so much to hear from home. Birthday festivities included a yummy grilled cheese feast prepared by my awesome site neighbor Ken, and then a birthday party the following weekend at the lake in Senga Bay. The torrential rains let up long enough for us to soak in some sunshine and bonfire and eat S’mores (thanks, Sammy!) Saturday, and then the skies let loose and the next day we had to wade a river to get back to the road, where we shared a hitch in the back of a truck along with a few loosely secured barrels of formaldehyde and a very pungent catfish. I can’t wait to turn 29 again there next year.
The first week of term break was spent back in Dedza for In-Service Training, a workshop for sharing start-of-service experiences, discussing project ideas and grant possibilities, and that kind of thing. After IST, a lot of volunteers were in Lilongwe to greet the newest batch of environment trainees at the airport, which was a surprisingly exciting event. It feels like years, not five months, ago that we had to tromp our eighty pounds of luggage through the customs gate. When we arrived in September, I had been fast asleep on the plane and missed the distribution of yellow customs cards. So when everyone disembarked from the plane and pulled out their cards, my sheer adrenaline and excitement from the landing swung into a panicked fear that I had neglected to bring some important paperwork and wouldn’t be admitted in the country. At that moment, in my sleepy haze, I realized I had also lost an earring in flight and, as the Country Director was greeting us and gathering luggage and everyone was all smiles, I had this crestfallen feeling that I had already messed up in Malawi, and this was just a bad dream. Fortunately, all of the new arrivals seemed to have all of their cards and emotional states in order and we greeted them with perhaps more than appropriate gusto, and then they were swept off to Dedza, and I began the second week of my term break, heading up north with a few friends to see the illustrious historical township of Livingstonia, on the edge of the Nhika Plateau.
Although the whole trip north probably isn’t more than 300 kilometers, our journey was delayed a day because the bus Elisabeth and I were riding on ran out of gas (not an infrequent occurrence here), and the bus in which Jesi was riding to meeting us got stuck in the mud (Also, not infrequent. And was still stuck when we passed it on the return trip three days later.) In any case, we finally made it north to Karonga, which is pretty much paradise.
Historical Livingstonia, as it turns out, consists of about three 100-year-old buildings that house a hospital and a guesthouse (aptly named the Old Stone House). Although the final destination left something to be desired, it was the breathtaking 15-kilometer trek from the lake up to Livingstonia that made the trip worthwhile. We stopped overnight about 12 kilometers up at the Lukwe Permaculture Camp, a collection of chalets floating in the clouds of a mountain, a quick walk to the Manchewe Falls and to an incredible garden that feeds the camp’s guests. There were composting toilets and hot showers overlooking the blue blue lake and we had the whole place to ourselves. It was a nice little vacation.
