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