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.