Burgled! A Chicken’s Karmic Revenge Or...Fight or Flight II: Adrenaline, My B.F.F.

Gentle Reader, I must apologize for never leading you on a tour of my humble abode in Salima. Tucked away among the teachers’ houses at the secondary school, I am parked very much in the center of town, in close proximity to a community football pitch, a quick walk to the markets, just off the tarmac, and a short stone’s throw away from my nearest neighbors. Lest when I say town your mind conjures urban images of parking lots and sidewalks and convenience stores, I should note that my house is surrounded by fields of maize and the most common visitors to cross the threshold of my fence are goats and chickens. Last night at 3 a.m., however, I discovered a visitor of another sort lurking within my sanctuary: a man.

It started when I awoke to the sound of rustling and scraping within the house. Since I live with approximately 34 lizards, 3000 spiders, and who knows how many roaches, such sounds are not unusual, though this was slightly louder than normal. Presuming a rat, I stumbled out of my bedroom to check if I had left food out. Crossing the living room, I flipped on the light switch near the front door. It was while standing there that I could see, behind the door to the half-open spare room, a man’s arm.

Suddenly I heard a low, seemingly drugged, guttural voice screaming: “Get out of my house! GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE!” And then a few seconds later, I realized it was my own voice shouting, and I had crossed into the room, grabbed the man by his shoulders and was unlocking the door to shove him out. He was limp as liquid and moved dumbfounded as I screamed and screamed and screamed. I locked the door and kept on yelling… at him, the roaches, anybody else who might be hiding in the yard… it didn’t matter.

Then I called Hector. Hector is the Peace Corps security officer and a wonderful human being, who told me sensible things like: call your closest neighbor, drink some water, and you are okay now. He then called the police.

A whole troupe of neighbors, including my headmaster, came over and surveyed the scene, which included: one rattled Peace Corps Volunteer, three open windows, zero items of property missing, and on my front stoop a belt embossed with silver images of Mickey Mouse. (This afternoon a teacher told me he suspected this belt was a critical part of the intruder’s witchcraft, which was enlightening since I had imagined he merely forgot it there when he removed it to slide in through the window.) Of course I should mention all of my windows have burglar bars and it is not uncommon to leave some of them cracked during hot season. As it turns out, unfortunately, no one had noticed the burglar bars to the kitchen window were wide enough to fit the body of a man.

The school watchman was brought to stake a post at my house and, though I certainly didn’t sleep for the rest of the night, it was a comfort knowing he was there. My Dad chatted with me on the phone for a while, and calmed me down until I was able to convince myself that, despite my agitation, I was physically safe.

The day dawned, and I began to clean and purge. Only thinking back on it later, I realize my morning’s efforts began by sweeping outside under the kitchen window (where the intruder entered) and immediately next by attacking the space behind the spare room door where I found him. That room, mainly used for yoga, is also the home of my bicycle and an ever-growing pile of difficult to throwaway items that I had been storing, in vain, for the day when the recycling truck would show up to haul away used light bulbs, Priority Mail boxes, empty cartons of Jungle Oats, and yogurt containers. Separating the few things I thought I might actually use, I took the rest to the trash pit and set them ablaze in a bonfire of catharsis.

As for the culprit, I suspect I scared him as much as he scared me. He is still at large. I have spent no small amount of time puzzling about his intentions. Why was he in the mostly empty spare room, when he had passed my laptop, camera and wallet untouched? He was holding a white cloth in his left hand, which in my hysterics I assumed was covered in chloroform. Do criminals use chloroform in Malawi? Had he mistaken that room for mine, after tiptoeing past the open door of my own bedroom? What kind of criminal wears a white t-shirt and a Mickey Mouse belt? I did not recognize him. Since crime is more likely during the start and close of one’s service, why did he target me now, after so many months here? Last week he may have noticed me at the markets, some of which I rarely frequent, buying large quantities of food for the below-mentioned Permaculture Training, and maybe he thought I was loaded with cash. Or maybe he just liked my bike. Most of all, I wondered: Did I grossly miscalculate the karmic value of the chicken’s life I took last week? Was this my payment?

Anyhow, in the evening a day later, I have some new burglar bars, better hung curtains, and the comforting presence of the school’s watchman just outside the door. I have replaced the whistle next to my bed with a deafening personal alarm. This week I will get a reinforced door, hire a watchman just for my house and also hopefully have some lockable screens installed so that in the hot season I can breathe… safely.

Much gratitude to all of you folks for your love and concern. I was a bit shaken but am doing just fine.

Death of a Chicken (at my own hand)

Sorry, vegetarian readers.

It took a few years, but I have now accomplished my Michael Pollan-invoked duty: to kill and prepare my dinner. (Or, for the sake of accuracy, lunch.)

It all happened Thursday, the penultimate day of the permaculture training we’ve been holding all week for teachers of Msalura primary and secondary schools. The participants learned about water management, land design principles, nutrition security, and medicinal gardening, and additionally they enjoyed delicious lunches featuring a variety of local foods from all six of the Malawian food groups. Thus it was that I spent a large chunk of each day biking here and there for menu items: goat at Takumana market, three chickens at Kamuzu Road, bananas and fresh chambo near the bus depot. I spent a lot of time with the facilitator’s wife, Mrs. Chawawa, and her very competent assistants, Charity and Mrs. Chimpeni, who took pleasure in improving my Chichewa and teaching me how to kill and pluck a chicken.

At the start of each day, Mrs. Chawawa listed the foods Ieft to track down and bring back to the cooks. On Thursday, she sent me to the market for “nkhuku atatu” (three chickens). “Tambala!” she kept repeating to my confusion; tambala is the smallest denomination coin here, virtually worthless. I have since discovered one face of the coin features a cock, and we eventually established that she wanted three “amuna” (man) chickens. So, I peddled away to Kamuzu Road market, strapped three fat local tambala to my bike rack, and made my way warily back, finding it difficult to maneuver the bicycle very far without getting my skirt or the chickens’ heads caught in the rear-wheel spokes.

For some reason, it was decided that I would dispatch one chicken and Mr. Simphire, a teacher participant, would kill the other two. The need for a halaal method was debated and eventually discarded, since no one in the group was Muslim. And so, Mrs. Chimpeni (whose name means “knife”) led us behind the back fence, apparently a more hygienic place to do the deed. Holding the wing of my bird, I felt it grow still as Mr. Simphire began on the first chicken, pinning its feet and then pulling back its neck so he could pluck away the throat feathers. He cut it quickly and yet the bird’s body shuddered for a few minutes as the blood seeped out of its throbbing neck. He wiped the red knife on the white feathers and handed it to me. Mrs. Chimpeni demonstrated how I could pin down the wings and feet, and then I pulled at the tufts of its neck feathers and severed the neck, holding the quivering body as the life ran out. After we placed the three beheaded chickens in a basin, they continued to jump and flutter for a moment.

Mrs. Chawawa led us to a pot of boiling water, in which we dangled each bird, the hot water loosening the feathers from the pimpled skin. She showed me the three kinds of chicken feathers, tufty white fluff under the joints, long black feathers on the wings, and smaller thin feathers underneath. We plucked and pulled, peeling away the extra layer of skin on the feet, dislodging the beak and tongue. To remove the last remnants of hair and feathers, we singed them in the fire, and finally they came away too. Behind the fence, neighborhood dogs snarled for a share of the spilled blood.

And that was how I killed and plucked a chicken. It was a surprisingly emotionless affair at the time, such an everyday and matter-of-fact event for Mrs. Chimpeni, the chickens, and the hungry dogs. After a few days of contemplation, I feel a little sad thinking about my conscious participation in the death of an animal, though I know I participate in that process every time I eat meat, and at some point or another I should come face to face with the extent of that act. I think, however, it will be my first and last experience in killing chickens, or anything else for that matter.

As for the permaculture training, it turned out to be a big success and a good sign of things to come. Though some teachers started off a little wary of some concepts (no sweeping, as you’ll remember, seems especially threatening to Malawians), they were all converts by Monday afternoon.

Mr. Chawawa, the facilitator, brought with him a huge collection of handouts and books, and designated a teacher as a librarian for the week to maintain these on a resource table every day. He began the week with the lesson that Malawi is rich in resources, but lacking in memory and imagination of how to use them. Participants went out and found items they consider useless and then they were shown that most “trash” can be put to some kind of good use. The first two days were spent discussing food and nutrition security, and how healthy living is achievable with locally available but often forgotten foods.

Mrs. Chawawa and her team, over the course of the week, prepared a series of delicious teas and juices: bwemba, malambe (baobob), papaya, lemongrass, chitimbe, chidede, and others, each with the ability to remedy some ailment or another. As I mentioned above, she also orchestrated the preparation of healthy and delicious lunches, with varied examples from each of the six food groups in Malawi. (I was playfully shamed a few times for having misgrouped certain menu items; soya is not a protein here, it is a legume). The teachers were delighted to rediscover certain foods and learn that wild basil, widely considered a useless weed, is in fact an edible, nutritious, and valuable herb. That last quality—value—really seemed to hit home with many of the teachers; Mr. Chawawa emphasized that they could improve family and student health and, at the same time, save money or even supplement their salaries with a year-round kitchen garden.

On Tuesday, my friend Kennie, a volunteer at the NdiMoyo Palliative Care Clinic in Salima, shared about the medicinal qualities of many common plants and herbs. He distributed recipes for the home treatment of a variety of maladies, and remained for the rest of the week to supplement Mr. Chawawa’s sessions with information about medicinal gardening. He has promised to visit the schools regularly and assist as we are planting the garden; he will be a big help.

On Wednesday, the group traveled to Mr. Chawawa’s home in Mchezi, to observe permaculture in action. “Your disorder is my order,” he laughed as we disembarked from the minibus and looked upon a bushy front yard, full of trees and brick-lined pathways that, not swept bare, were instead strewn with a mulch of thick green banana leaves. Although Malawi is in the height of dry season and the rest of the country is dusty and dead, Mr. Chawawa’s home was lush and plentiful with ripe foods. He introduced the teachers to the concept of “guilds,” plants grouped together to support and sustain one another: a guild can have diggers, supporters, climbers, and protectors. Behind the house, we found an immense plot of gardens dotted with a series of fish ponds, some of which drain in the dry season and serve as nutrient-packed soil for vegetable beds. For three hours we tromped through the maze of paths surrounding the Chawawa home, learning about plants and design, sampling stalks of sugarcane, and seeing how very possible it is for Malawians to grow enough to eat plentifully and thrive. Mrs. Chawawa then served the sun-worn group a feast of cassava, banana, ngaiwa nsima, beans, fried cabbage, eggs, and an assortment of other foods grown on the homestead.

The following day, after lunch, the group began the practicum aspect of the training at the primary school. They hauled bricks and rocks from around the campus and then constructed a mandala design with key-hole pathways around a young tree near the headmaster’s office, each path of the circle varying in height in order to catch and control water. After the paths were made, the teachers found leaves and ash and manure to feed the soil. On Friday, in the afternoon—it happened to be the first incredibly HOT day of the season—we visited the secondary school garden site and began preparing the soil and laying brick designs there too.

Afterward, we gathered for distribution of certificates of participation (Malawians LOVE certificates!), and for final comments on the training. We encouraged the teachers to implement what they learned, and to support one another like a guild as they bring these “new” ideas back to their homes and school communities. The teachers left inspired and very excited about the possibilities of permaculture at their respective schools. You can guess it was gratifying to see some of the same teachers that mocked our permaculture efforts a few months ago offer support and encouragement to the project. Envy can be such a hindrance to success here, and it seemed to be holding many of the secondary teachers back from getting involved. By opening the training to so many interested teachers, no one could be upset that they were not included from participating, and there was a real sense of camaraderie at the end. I am hoping it keeps up.

The training was sponsored by Biggin Hill school community in England, and especially through the help of Martin Pullen, a friend of Msalura primary school. He visited Salima a few months ago and helped spark interest in the school garden project when my own hope (because of the issues mentioned above) was flagging. So, a very big thank you to Biggin Hill.

In other news: on Thursday, Sally, my new health sector site mate, moved to town, and I stopped by her house to welcome her. The sun, which has been kindly mild for a few months, returned keenly to welcome her as well. Salima is hot again.

“I killed a chicken today,” I told her.

“Oh. I’m a vegetarian,” she responded. So much for my dreams of a Salima pork party.

She forgave my faux pas, however, and l’m looking forward to future fun and adventures with my new neighbor. Next weekend: a beach day at Senga Bay and then homemade dumplings!

Fire on the mountain, and other Sky anecdotes

When Jerrod, Elisabeth and I arrived five days early to prepare for Camp Sky at the venue in Kasungu, we naively imagined that they would remember we were coming. But on this continent nothing ever goes according to plan. We found the hostels roach-infested and matted with a thick layer of rubbish including popcorn, discarded hair weaves, and sanitary napkins. The 120 mattresses we planned to use were locked away. As it turned out, the keys to that room and to the rest of the dorm rooms were unlabelled in two giant plastic bags; sorting them became Jerrod’s personal hell for the next few days. Instead of prepping signage for camp and planning registration and all that jazz, we spent the next four days implementing a roach holocaust and making the campus hospitable to (hygienic) human life.

The campers came, and it all went …dandy.

About six boys signed up for the creative writer’s workshop that Jerrod and I led. We started with Found Poems cut out of magazines, then tried some very structured exercises (mostly borrowed from Kenneth Koch), and finally moved into free writing guided by a few loose prompts. In general, Malawian classrooms promote rule-following and rarely encourage creative energy, so it was a challenge convincing them it is okay to play with words. One day, we wrote five-senses poems and had the students visit different “sense stations” and write about their sensory experience. Jerrod and I had a good laugh watching them try chocolate-covered espresso beans and writhe with disgust at the flavor. One boy licked it and tried to put it back in the bag. This exchange between two students in the middle of camp was heartening and made the whole week worthwhile for me:

Tisunge: Why did you choose to make the lion in your poem black?

Edward: Because I think of night as black, and night is fear.

On Friday night, to our mild concern, we noticed that Kasungu mountain, our field trip destination for Saturday, was ablaze orange with fire. Nonetheless, the next morning, we crammed 110 people on the back of a flatbed truck and drove singing and shouting through the heart of Kasungu toward the mountain, and climbed it anyway. Now, bear in mind that what Americans look forward to as a “wildlife hike” to Malawian schoolchildren (who are fit as a fiddle from working hard and don’t need to exercise for fun) sounds like a pointless march uphill. “Madame, I have never climbed a mountain before,” I was told more than a few times. Nonetheless, they did it and, even if a few didn’t really enjoy the experience, all of them expressed a sense of accomplishment when we arrived at the top. Jerrod told me one of his students journaled this at the summit: “Today we climbed Kasungu Mountain. Everyone is singing and laughing. We are even eating groundnuts!”

I was in charge of booking speakers and arranging the camp field trip to Lilongwe. First, we visited the new Parliament building (recently built by the Chinese), and were led on a tour of the chambers. Most memorable for me, however, was not the great hall but the bathrooms, where I was stationed when all 70 campers decided they had to go at one time, and I had to teach thirty-five girls how to use hand-pump soap, faucets that lift (instead of turn), and toilets with flush buttons.

After Parliament, we headed to the airport and watched a few arrivals and departures from the observation deck. If you have never flown on a plane, the airport is a mystical place; watching the campers react, I could understand why my neighbor described flight as magic. Airplanes and computers, he said, are your western witchcraft.

On the way home from the airport, Ruth, one of the girls in my hostel, said: “I saw a little boy at the airport and he spoke English so well. It made me sad. If he can speak so well when he is so small, I will never learn when I am so old. I wish I was rich and learned English when I was young.”

During the second week of camp, I taught computer classes. We talked about the capabilities of computers, played around with Word and Excel and, on the last day, took a brief tour of the internet. One girl googled “foccacia” since she’d made it the day before in Meg’s cooking class.

Running concurrently with camp was a four-day career development workshop called Teach Sky for motivated Malawian teachers. On Thursday night, I led a session on time management for Teach Sky, with the help of the TDF trainees. We put on a skit that mocked an oft-interrupted Malawian staff meeting; one teacher afterward described it as “stingingly true.”

And that was Sky.

To celebrate its close, everybody headed into Lilongwe for an evening of fun, debauchery, and a bank-breaking dinner bonanza. Esther made lasagna and chocolate fudge brownies, and I made bacon-wrapped dates and a spinach beet salad with goat cheese and strawberries and pineapple and cucumbers. Need I note it was a pleasant change after three weeks of rice and beans?

For the very few of you (probably none) who happen to be interested in my physical exercise regime: I ran almost every day in Kasungu, led some yoga sessions, and it was heavenly. Well, sort of. For a few days I ran with Elisabeth (the marathon runner) and Jerrod (six-feet tall), and they promptly left me in their dust. I’m usually a solo runner so this wouldn’t have bothered me, except for the hoots and hollers of every Malawian I passed. “Mwatopa! (You’re tired!) Muchedwa! (You’re slow!),” they called to me. A few large groups of women pumping water at the borehole burst out laughing when I ran by. As you can imagine, this kind of encouragement doesn’t motivate any part of me except a certain finger which twitched with temptation a few times. But really, I keep telling myself, being openly ridiculed is one of those cultural exchanges you should accept and embrace. I keep telling myself that, but it hasn’t happened yet. Anyhow, I found a solitary path in the maize fields and for the rest of camp enjoyed the red sunrise everyday… all by myself.