Friendliness and Running in the Warm Heart of Africa

Before I came to Malawi, I considered myself a friendly person. Sure, I’m inarguably an “I” on the Myers-Briggs test, and I plug in my earphones immediately upon finding my airplane seat, and I always get a little embarrassed and irritated when my mother chitchats with random people in the grocery line. But I do like people. As evidence of my friendliness I point to a sizable number of friends, two years of bartending (job requirement: friendliness), and a generally affable disposition in the company of strangers.

Malawians, however, are friendly to an incomparably higher degree. It is a country full of people like my mom in the grocery store. Or I could say a country full of chatty airplane seatmates who don’t seem to notice the earplugs. Everyone, everywhere, all the time, stops each other to ask: “Where are you going? What is your name? How are you? How did you wake up?” Strangers I pass on my bike, children 60 meters away, travelers heading the opposite direction, bike taxi drivers, women selling fruit: everyone shouts a greeting or a question. People can greet each other three or four times a day and it never gets old. Not just “hello”, mind you, but the entirety of a greeting like this: “How did you wake?/I woke fine, and you?/I also woke fine, thank you!” Some days, I love this aspect of the Warm Heart of Africa. A friend compared the greeting ritual to Belle’s morning walk down the country lane in Beauty and the Beast, as the butcher and the baker (and the rest of the town) pop their heads out to shout “Bonjour!”

But the friendliness can be exhausting too. I limited myself to early morning runs to cut down on the number of people, especially shouting children, I pass and greet; even so, I counted sixty such encounters one recent morning. “Where are you going? Why are you running? Do you want a ride? Where do you live?” they’ll ask as I jog by. Though the greetings can be tiresome, by the end of many runs I come home smiling and encouraged by the enthusiastic hellos of the early-rising passersby. I find myself shouting good-mornings to women in the fields, bicycle passengers, and the man setting up his market stand. Accustomed to, though sometimes weary of, all this friendliness, it’s been very hard to deal with occasional but very real unfriendliness in the community. This has come in the form of steel-faced stares, mimicry from groups of women and children, or just insensitive laughter at the ridiculous sight of the crazy azungu out running again. To be fair, I can see how jogging is absurd in a country where most people are in peak physical condition from going about their daily activities to live and provide for their families. Still, laughter stings. A few weeks ago, a group of older teenage boys waited for me after I passed and began running next to me on my return route, not greeting, not talking, and not being friendly. I refused to stop running, but had to fight back tears. Thankfully my former home-stay running buddy, Elisabeth, visited overnight the next week and helped me summon the will to get back on the trail again. Running with someone else, I forgot about the stress of greeters (and non-greeters) and had the chance to notice the purple beauty of the sun rising over Salima, the receding green along the dusty path, and white herons resting on bare branches. Running wasn’t a chore, it was a pleasure again.

Whenever my Dad visits Charlottesville, Virginia, where I’ve lived off and on for the past 12 years, he makes a crack about the ubiquity of joggers on every corner. “I can say I’ve been in Cville now,” he’ll always say. “There’s a jogger!” To run alone, unharassed, in the quiet beauty of the landscape. To run up Monticello Avenue or Carter’s Mountain, and to see the Blue Ridge tipped with red sun. It’s a luxury just like fresh produce and good health care and clean air, something I appreciate every day here in the friendly Warm Heart of Africa.


*All above references to my parents are made with affection (and apologies).

World Map... finished!

For the past two weeks, twenty students stayed after school to paint a 2x4m world map in the geography classroom. It was the first time for many of them to paint, or to find Africa on a world map.

In Malawi, colors are not clearly differentiated linguistically; blue roughly translates to "color of sky", green is "color of trees", red is "color of fire", but the nuances of shade aren't labeled, which strikes me as strange considering the vibrant variety of colors in clothing here. In any case, the students were fascinated by the process of mixing paint to make new colors for the map. "What color is this?" they would ask everytime we made a new combination. At the end of painting one day, I thoughtlessly started to toss out a few unused tablespoons of mixed paint when the students stopped me in horror. "That is waste!" Rebecca said, and began scooping the different colors into a small piece of a bag. The others helped her salvage the rest, and began mixing it together, until it formed a dull brown mass. "What color is this?" they asked, and excitedly painted their nails with the paint, happy to add "light brown" to their new rainbow vocabulary.

The project was also a much-needed refresher course for me on world geography. "Madam," one of the kids told me when we finished a big day of painting, "I learned something." I asked him what he learned. "I learned where Baffin Bay is." And so did I.

April/May Highlights

Greetings from Malawi! Term 2 is over, and I am spending the last few days of our two-week school break at the Peace Corps office in Lilongwe attempting to make headway on a massive To-Do list; life in Salima has been busy busy. Some of the April/May highlights:

Work Projects:
Last week, I hosted a four-day Hope Kit training for twenty primary and secondary school teachers around Salima District. The Hope Kit, as I’ve mentioned before, is a set of resources for raising community awareness about HIV/AIDS prevention and care. Despite a rocky start, the workshop was a big success; the participants shared their personal struggles and life goals, and seemed eager to return to their communities with their new skills.
The program was jointly funded by Peace Corps and the local education office, and it was a … learning experience… in dealing with the bureaucratic stagnation of the latter group. My budget was slashed a few times, and I wondered if some palms were being greased in the process. Malawian trainings historically operate on an allowance system, where participants are *paid* a daily stipend to learn new skills that will improve their lives and work performance; thus people attend workshops with the expectation of financial profit. This term, the local education office offered to help with transport allowances for my workshop participants, but it turned into a logistical nightmare and still didn’t quell the disgruntled complaints of many teachers who expected larger sums. The first day of the Hope Kit training, one of these unhappy participants (who was paid the standard government-issued allowance for his paygrade) yelled at me that he was being treated like an animal, not a human being. I went into the bathroom and cried. Things brightened quickly, however, as the workshop got underway. In a particularly humbling moment, I discovered that one of the teachers, whom I had suspected might be drunk, was in fact blind. He stood up during a session called Future Island and shared that, despite his disability, he had become village headman, a preacher, and he had built the primary school where he teaches. Later that day, he performed a spontaneously written poem. “Disability is not inability,” he said. Right on.

I facilitated three other workshops this past term: teaching techniques, classroom management, and time management skills. Those familiar with African Time can probably imagine the hilarity of that last subject. Standing in a classroom talking about time-management systems, I felt like Elaine in Airplane, teaching about Tupperware; my Western value of time-usage seems irrelevant in a poly-chronic culture that tends to value relationships more than efficiency. Still, forty teachers showed up (partly because of the allowances, I’m afraid), and appeared genuinely interested in some of the ideas I threw around about goal-making and prioritization. Who knows, maybe they got something out of it.

At Msalura CDSS (also pronounced Msalula, Msarula, Msarura, Nsalura, Nsalula, and Nsarura—maybe by the end of two years people will understand me when I say where I work), my Form 3 Life Skills class went swimmingly. It’s been a great opportunity to get to know the kids at my school and learn about their lives and community. I helped the Edzi-Toto club sponsor an AIDS Awareness Week and put on a school-wide assembly with dramas and dances and songs and a condom demonstration by yours truly. The next week, the Permaculture Club also had a big assembly to celebrate the donation and subsequent planting of a ton of moringa and papaya trees. (The latter have since been devoured by goats, but the moringas are going strong.) I arranged a club field trip to visit the home of the Nordins (neverendingfood.org), a family that promotes permaculture around Malawi. For kids who have grown up sweeping dirt and burning trash every day, the Nordins’ lush and nutritious (and unswept) homestead was an eye-opener. Sweeping the dirt around the home is a ubiquitous daily practice in Malawi, and I have had a tough time convincing my neighbors of its detrimental effects on the soil; sometimes I come home and, to my exasperation (but also amusement), they have swept my yard in my absence. Our school garden project has stalled a little bit, partly because of water issues, but also because of resistance from school community members toward this vaguely threatening no-sweeping philosophy.

With the aid of a small PC grant, I bought some paint supplies and am working with two Geography teachers to host a World Map Project at our school this week. The students will use a grid system to draw and then paint a world map on one of the school block walls. So far, we’ve painted the ocean blue undercoat, and penciled in the grid (which, thanks to my remedial math skills, took a few tries to finally get the correct number of squares up there).

Future projects:
I have been meeting with an HIV/AIDS organization in Salima that targets at-risk groups, especially commercial sex workers and bike taxi drivers. We are looking into starting some kind of micro-loan project or income-generating activity for some of their beneficiaries, a group of widows who care for orphans, and a group of sex workers trained in peer-health education.
Also on the horizon, in August, is Camp SKY, a 10-day academic leadership camp for rising Form 4 students. I will be leading a creative writer’s workshop and helping out with Teach SKY, a concurrent smaller camp for Malawian teachers.

And also Good Times:
We celebrated Elisabeth’s birthday in May at the beautiful and secluded Kande Beach Lodge on the northern lake shore, and indulged in the requisite amounts of swimming, dancing, and cake-gorging (thanks to Meg). Last week, Jerrod visited Ken and me in Salima, and then a whole crew came down for a few days of beach camping at Senga Bay. I am mourning the imminent departure of my awesome site neighbor Ken, maker of delicious grilled cheese concoctions, who is finishing his service and heading to Columbia’s School of Public Health. It will be a sad day for Salima, but we wish him well.
For culinary-minded readers, the monotony of my diet here continues to be grueling. At this time of year, tomatoes and onions are the only regularly available veggies, although in Salima we sometimes see eggplants and green peppers too. (Unfortunately, my kitchen garden has mostly fed goats thus far, but I will keep trying.)

And that’s pretty much life in Salima these days. I’m really happy to be busy and to begin to see some results of working here. There are still incredibly frustrating moments every day, but really, life is good.

Miss you all!
Love, A