Practicing Communication Celibacy
It’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done. I mean, I’m in BumF***, Africa. It’s not very hard. Phones are few and far between and internet is….what’s internet? Peace Corps Trainees (PCTs) aren’t allowed to use it until after training even if we could find it. But while I’m happily free of my addiction to Facebook and I don’t have a cell phone to check every five minutes even when it doesn’t ring, communication celibacy is a little depressing. As I’m writing this post it’s been three weeks since I’ve made any significant contact with the MotherLand. Talking about mothers, I think this is the longest I’ve ever gone without talking to mine. Just today I was thinking “ok, where’s my Mommy. Time to give that woman a call.” But alas, no phone until week 7-ish. unless I find a way to beat the system.
So with no internet to blog regularly, I’ve been attempting to keep up-to-date with my posts so I can do a little cut-and-paste action when I DO get the chance. So, if you’re reading this, it means you have a novel to read ahead of you if you want to catch up. My apologies. Oh, and I apologize ahead of time for my sarcasm and my rants, especially if they sounds culturally insensitive, ignorant, or hotheaded (as they usually do when I reread them months down the line.) I don’t mean for them to be so. Just saying it like I see it.
February 24-27, 2011 – Staging in Philly
Let’s start at the beginning. Show up in Philly coming from Southern California dressed for Africa. Apparently it snows in Philly. Duh, you idiot, its winter everywhere else in the U.S. My bad. But I meet some great people on the plane. There are four of us from San Diego, Little Baby Eric who has never been on a plane longer than four hours and is sweetly innocent and thus crazier than the rest of us for doing this, Michelle and her husband Ryan, both 26, beautiful and ultra SoCal, and myself.
They are actually the only people I care to meet that first day, after a sleepless and emotional final night at home. I can’t bring myself to care about anyone else in the group (that part changes really fast!). Sara Kuzmik to the rescue!!! Turns out one of my oldest friends from Emory is teaching algebra for Teach For America two blocks away from our hotel! Such a relief to meet her for a little dim sum action and have her talk at me for awhile so I didn’t have to think about what I got myself into. I remember thinking that I could finally breath for a second again since I started packing days ago. So if you’re reading this, THANK YOU, Sara! And if anyone has the chance, go see her teach in Philly! It’s a sight to see! I’ve never seen her so…amazing? Confident? In control? I don’t know the right word. I think at the time I used “inspirational”. That word always sounds so floofy, though.
Met more people over the next day and a half. Got the Yellow Fever vaccine. Had a philly cheesesteak sandwich at Gino’s. But staging was boring…let’s skip that part. Let’s also skip the bus ride to NY and the 14-hour flight to South Africa and the two-hour flight to Malawi. I was out cold the whole time anyway.
Ok now we’re up to driving through Malawi from Lilongwe (the capitol) to Dedza (where our training site is). After an overwhelming and intense welcoming from the PCV’s already in country and an initial African sweat in the rainy-season humidity we crammed ourselves into minibuses and stared open-mouthed for awhile. Malawi in the rainy-season looks like the set of Avatar. It’s vividly green and has mountains popping up sporadically that are weirdly rounded at the top covered with crazy African trees. It’s beautiful, to say the least. But it’s surreal. The thought “I’m in Africa” just seems absurd in my head… it still does, three weeks later.
February 28 to March 5, 2011 – Training Week Zero
There’s a reason they call this Week Zero. We’re in Country Club Africa. Fake Africa. Summer Camp Africa. This certainly shouldn’t count. First off, we’re entirely numb too everything and jet lagged out of our minds. We find ourselves saying stupid things to each other and following it up with “I swear I’m not a dumbass.” This week we are all staying in the dorms at Malawi’s College of Agriculture and Forestry. By the end of the week the dorms will resemble a frat house. Everyone keeps saying it feels like summer camp but I’m having serious flashbacks to Dharmasala, India, to the point that I wake up thinking I’m back in my dorm room at IBD-Sarah. The mosquito net above my head eventually puts me right, though. We have our days planned out for us with training sessions, intro to Chichewa classes (for those of you who don’t know, that’s an obscure African language they’re trying to make me learn), and meals…ooooh the food. I don’t know if you guys are ready to hear my full take on the food. It’s brutal. I’ll start you off easy and get to the real rant about the lack of nutrition and brainless eating practices later on.
So their staple food is maize, which is not native to Malawi, thank you Portuguese colonialists for single-handedly ruining Malawian nutrition for generations to come. Malawians like to highly process their corn into a fine flour that they add water to and turn into mushy pasty tasteless patties called nsima, which they eat constantly. I wonder how many ears of corn are in one patty of nsima. At least 500. Must be. Anyway, common knowledge is corn is barely nutritious, especially after its been beaten to dust, yet, that’s what they, and we, eat. It’s not terrible, as long as you take it slow and add lots of salt. It just gets really old. And my stomach is far from acclimated to a thick coating of paste. The rest of the food is equally nutritionless and mushy, but I’ll get to that later. But I will say that at the college we get a choice of rice with the nsima, fruit and sometimes uncooked greens, meat with every meal, and it’s guaranteed that the food is clean…thing’s we took for granted in this long ago Week Zero.
Notable things that happened this week: We climbed the mountain behind the school which felt really good after two days of traveling…but we weren’t on our malaria medication yet and were a little nervous about that one when we came back all eaten up. We later started our malaria medication, a side effect of which is crazy vivid colorful dreams, which are known to be unpleasant. I had a stressful dream about having a neon green talking pet snake that I was very fond of but accidentally let him die and get eaten by a mean bigger black, white, and orange snake that I’m sure I’ve seen at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. We had a drunken talent show and partied late into the night at the nearby bar, which is placed randomly up the hill in our middle-of-nowhere college “town”. Real showers with heated water, more than I was expecting.
After this one week of Chichewa classes to prepare us for our homestays, they sat us down and informed us of what language we would be studying during the rest of training, and thus indirectly, the whereabouts of our permanent sites. I’ll be learning Chitonga, an even more obscure African language that is eight million times harder than Chichewa, in my professional opinion, but it means I’ll be in stationed in the northern portion of the lakeshore. I’ll have prime seating in Malawi! Pineapples and mango trees and banana trees and fish and schistosomiesis! Come visit me!!! Chonde (please please please)!
March 5, 2011 – Africa’s First Punch to My Face
Happy Birthday Dad!!! Sorry, still practicing communication celibacy. Wish I coulda called. I was thinking about you.
Today is the fateful first day of homestays. The most stressful overwhelming awkward day of my life, if I’d paid attention to what was going on. I was blind sighted and entirely unprepared. They split the 45 of us up into four villages surrounding the training site. I’m with half the health volunteers in a village called mkomeko. We show up in the Peace Corps jeeps to the village’s football field, where everyone is singing and dancing African-style. Sorry if this is repeated information to those of you I’ve written to about it…actually, you may not have even gotten that letter yet. We all line up and wait as our name is called out and the name of the family we’re staying with. The Amayi’s (moms) come out to greet us with huge smiles and tried to hug slash shake our hands at the same time they kneeled on the ground attempting to combine the two customs in the most awkward way possible. We PCTs all ended up confused half kneeling half trying to hold them up while everyone clapped wildly. The Abambo’s (dads) balanced our huge trekking packs on their heads like it was nothing as the Amayi’s and the entire extended families led us to our respective living compounds. I had maybe a hundred people following me straight into the compound and cramming in to get a good look at me be awkward with my new family in my new nyumba (home/house thing). I’m in a mud thatched-roof hut off the main mud metal-roof hut. What seemed like half the village children fought each other for a view through my tiny window and people piled outside it and kids sat on kids squished into my doorway. Their parents filed in to introduce themselves to me and try to explain their relationship to the family in super speed Chichewa. Introductions were lost on me, it seems that in this chaotic state I had forgotten every word of Chichewa I’d learned so far. I responded in English because it made no difference. This went on for hours. Or it may have been only one hour, but it sure felt like multiple multiple hours. I eventually had the language trainers come and explain to them that I needed a few minutes to unpack and breath. I was thoroughly shaken.
The staring hasn’t stopped since then. Turns out we’re the most exciting thing that’s happened in five years, since the last time the Peace Corps used this village for training. We like to joke (but not really joke so much as discuss seriously) that we should introduce the television so they’ll leave us alone for five minutes. Kids will follow us around greeting us over and over again because that’s all we know how to do. People will stare at us unabashedly, openmouthed and unblinking, as we do absolutely nothing. Kids peer through the reed fence and giggle to each other whenever I leave my nyumba. There was a funeral the other day in the Gulewankulu sect, a traditional Bantu religion, with loud drums and huge traditional costumes and elaborate dances and the whole village was there to celebrate, but all anyone would do was stare at us and completely ignore everything else. Half of them had their back turned to the dance to get a better look at us. This went on for hours. Hours! It was kind of amazing, actually, however very uncomfortable for us. There really is nothing else to do here. We’re real life aliens.
But back to my family. They are super sweet and all of them are unbelievably beautiful. I have three siblings, two sisters, Adaif, who is about 10 I think, Sofereti, five, and a brother Marayu, two. Sofereti has quickly become my best friend and has permanently cemented herself to my hip. She likes to correct my Chichewa pronunciation and play with my hair. Marayu more or less worships his sister Sofe, but he’s in the extremely obnoxious “mine” stage. Doesn’t matter what it is, it’s his. “Ine! Ine!” My pens, my hair ties, my homework, my toothbrush, my right hand, his sisters’ shoes, his sisters’ pieces of corn, the baby chickens. For this week, it’s still cute. That’ll change. I usually wake up to him and Sofe adorably singing made up songs in Chichewa that don’t make sense. This morning it was a chant of “mogadabo” or “fingernails” with them intermittently inserting their own names. Adaif is much more aloof with me. I think it’s because her siblings have marked me as a child’s toy and she’s well above that, being 10-ish. My Amayi is about 26-ish, but I have no way of asking her exactly. I think she appreciates that I distract her kids while she’s working her butt of all the time, mostly cooking and taking care of the kids. I wish I could help her out, but I’m useless. I can’t make a fire, I can’t carry buckets of water on my head, I certainly can’t cook because she won’t let me near the fire. My laundry skills are laughable. When my Abambo is home he has me sit with him on the porch and not do anything because I’m the guest. But they’ll let me help debean the green beans and dekernel the corn (I dekerneled myself into a massive blister right in the middle of my thumb), and peel potatoes. But I’m so bad at peeling potatoes Malawian-style they’ll either call their neighbors over to come watch me and laugh or take the knife away and give it to a toddler, who’ll undoubtedly kick my ass at it. Can’t wait till my American-style vegetable peeler comes in the mail. We’ll see whose laughing then!
Kuno Ku Malawi (Here in Malawi)…
Time for a little Malawi Run-Down. Here’s a few examples of why even the smallest things which we take for granted in the States are just that much harder in a third-world. Let’s start with the chimbuzi!
Kuno Ku Malawi….Malawi has taken the squat “toilet” to a whole new level. We like to call it chimnastics. The chim is the hole in the ground they use as a bathroom with a mini mud hut structure covering it with an entrance fit only for hobbits. Often times the pants must come down before backing into the chim, tush first. Put your hands in a circle with your fingers touching on one side and your thumbs touching on the other. That’s about the size of the hole. Just TRY poo’ing in that! Now try poo’ing in that in the dark! Luckily, aiming doesn’t usually enter into the equation. And oooh man, the flies, especially after a good night of rain. I’ll let your imaginations run wild with that one.
Kuno Ku Malawi… Cooking involves real life fire with real life burning sticks. The kitchen, or kochini, is a circular mud hut, vented only by the open front door. I can’t go in there for more than a few minutes before my eyes start tearing and I’m coughing from the smoke. The roof is coated in black tar from burning coal and collected gases that you really shouldn’t be breathing in… And they think that smoking tobacco is the only way to ruin lungs. So their kids are running around with perpetual hacking coughs and sore throats. Some things they do here just drive me crazy, especially the painfully obvious things like un-vented kochinis. Duh. Put a hole in at the top of the hut and add a few more years onto your lives.
Kuno Ku Malawi… The Return of the Bucket Bath. Bucket baths are taken in the baffa. Ya know what that is? You guessed it, a mud hut. Our world is suddenly made of mud.
Kuno Ku Malawi… We eat with our hands. This isn’t necessarily harder than eating in the West, it’s just messier (and the reason a diarrhea-related illness will be inevitable). Step one: pinch off a piece of pippin’ hot nsima and kind of roll it into a ball in your palm.
Step two: pick up some beans or cooked greens or chicken or whatever the side dish is with your fingers.
Step three: shove into or around the mouth area by whatever means necessary.
Eating with the hands actually makes eating in Malawi much more enjoyable, god knows the food alone won’t make it so. The first few days at the college I insisted on using utensils because I had the option to stubbornly stick to my Western ways. But I soon found out that the food tasted way better once I got my fingers involved. My dirty hippie friend, Meredith, said its because my fingers taste the food before my mouth does. The practice involves an extra sense and thus an extra dimension in the eating process. Converted!
Training Weeks One thru Five – Real Life Africa 101
And by Real Life I mean Still in a Bubble, But Less So Than Before.
Week One:
The first night at my home stay I was still pretty shaken up by being kicked in the shin by Africa continually throughout the day. We were told by PCVs before we were dropped off that Malawians always ate everything on their plate and that we should prepare to be overfed as our family’s guest. Two nsima patties were more or less expected of us at every meal. Two nsima patties?! That’s three times as many nsima patties as I could usually get down at the College! Sitting down for dinner in awkward silence in the dark at the end of a high stress day did not put me in the mood for what looked like a mountain of nsima, which seemed to replenish itself with every bite I took. Two patties?!? I very nearly puked. Oooh man I was so close. I got down one and a half before calling it quits. I didn’t want to set the bar too high for myself for subsequent meals. I went to bed not only full of way too much corn than a normal stomach should hold but depressed that I thought I’d offended my Amayi the first chance I got.
But no fear! I soon established that one nsima patty was more than plenty for my old American belly. My Amayi still gives me judging looks when I return the uneaten nsmia, but c’mon Amayi, that shit sucks! Thankfully, though, she doesn’t push the subject.
Other things that suck are all the other foods we eat in Malawi. It’s really quite frustrating. They have these beautiful fresh produce they can grow (I know because I’ve seen that noise in the market!); eggplant, huge cucumbers the size of my calf, tomatoes, onions, avocados, carrots, lettuce. It’s awesome! But no, everything is cooked and fried until there is no nutritional value left whatsoever…hence, malnutrition. They KNOW that produce is better for you when it isn’t cooked, but they cook it anyway. I can wring out the oil of my greens. And potatoes. So many fried potatoes. With salt. “Chips,” they call them. False, those are just whole potatoes, fried in animal fat. The first time, they were awesome. Everyday since then, not so much. And for some reason, fruit is considered children’s food and it’s rare to see an adult eating it. C’mon guys! You NEED fruit. And its right there! In your yard! That is a massive banana! And it’s free! I just don’t get it. The meat’s fresh though! Like, alive-this-afternoon fresh. The food is definitely become less of an issue though, as malnutrition sets in and our standards are lowered and the taste of pizza is forgotten.
Here’s another Kuno Ku Malawi… spontaneous dance circles. Malawians LOVE to dance and clap and sing. It’s their main form of entertainment when Azungus (white people/foreigners) aren’t around. But what they love more than anything is an Azungu in their dance circle. They’ll start a circle when they see a group of us coming up and pull us in and make us dance for them. Then they’ll laugh and laugh at us while we try to dance like Africans. The first few minutes of it are always really fun, and I can almost pass myself off for a native African dancer. Then it gets painful, like all awkward moments of the last two weeks. But they have this one song, Soforeti’s favorite song, called “jiga.” She LOOOOVES it. She’ll greet me at the gate every day after school with “jiga jiga!!” trying to get me to dance. We’ll start and then the neighbors will come over to see what all the fuss is about. Next thing you know the whole village is in our compound to watch the Azungu dance.
Recently I’ve found that everyone in the village, especially the little kids all know my name, Estazia. They’ll run after me on the road and call out to me from the schoolyard “Estazia! Estazia!” I, of course, have no idea what their names are, but I wave and greet them in Chichewa anyways because that’s what you do here…then they start dancing and singing that damn jiga song…
Week Two:
The staring and the attention are slowly chipping away at my patience. Every day we feel more like zoo animals. We’ve found out quickly enough just how micromanaged our days would be here at the village. We go to language class and technical training in the morning, go home for lunch, go back to another round of classes in the afternoon, and come home to a baffa, dinner, and bed. Basi (period). While I appreciate the routine I’m starting to feel a little claustrophbic.
Chitonga is stupid.
Week Three:
March 19, 2011 – My Kingdom for a Carne Asada Burrito!
Today I successfully downed two patties of nsima! Granted, one was a little baby patty of nsima and soya pieces were for dinner, which made it easy. But still, the count is at two. I have no idea what soya pieces are, where they come from, and what they’re made of, but if I had to pick a favorite food from the total of five foods I have to pick from in Malawi, they’d be it. Katie-Shea says they look like, have the consistency of, and taste like cat food. There ya have it folks, Malawian food. I’m expecting some SERIOUS care packages. Chocolate food-stuffs preferred. Or a freaking salad. Ohh and a pizza! Cheese! A burger! A CHEESE BURGER!! Hell, anything remotely appetizing. But no peanut butter. Dear god. I have a stash of peanut butter in my room that I douse everything bread-related in when the Fam isn’t looking.
P.S. When every single one of you sends me care packages filled with love and joy, be sure to write “education materials” or religious Christian symbols on the outside of the box so the post officials will think twice about opening it up and stealing things. The post offices are really corrupt here.
March 24, 2011 – It’s Twelve Koloko Somewhere
Officially half way through homestays, thank the sweet baby Jesus in his swaddling clothes. Damn, time flies. We’ve already been at it a month. No Malaria yet! No mail either…
I love my family and everything, I really do. And the kids are still adorable, but they just aren’t that cute anymore. Soforeti won’t go away (!) and throws tantrums like a banshee from sunup to sundown (literally). Marayu has a new affinity for spitting and likes to greet me in the morning by peeing on my doorstep…and throws tantrums like a two-year-old. Adaif hides in my room with me, which is actually kind of nice. However, I’m getting so much better at carrying water on my head! Now I’m only slightly damp by the end of the walk from the borehole to the compound instead of entirely drenched. My Amayi has even promoted me to a full bucket of water instead of just half! I’m starting to feel slightly less useless, but still entirely useless. Baby steps.
Like every Thursday, today was another joint Environment and Health sectors day at the College. I always feel so much better after those days. Hot shower, tea at the ready, eat as much as you want without thinking “if I eat this, my family doesn’t get to.” We learned some stuff and whatever, but we’re half way through training and getting a little fed up with sitting in a room for hours on end for sessions. My buddy and I may or may not have taken a little time off to head up to the random bar near the college for a few Carlsberg Specials, my new beer of choice. Some insights he had that I won’t get too into, but suffice it to know that they put some of my insecurities at bay:
-PC is inherently selfish, at least initially, but we keep forgetting that we’ll be here two years and that’s plenty of time to change our minds and our intentions about why we are here and what we’re doing, naturally and consciously.
-The language is a bitch an its frustrating and a major source of stress. But we keep forgetting again that we’ve only been here four weeks and we already know so much of it. Two years is a long freaking time. It’ll come, we just gotta be patient.
I’m slowly but surely making some legit friends, but I find myself getting frustrated that we’re not best friends already and aren’t desperately in love with each other and haven’t pledged a lifelong bond of brotherhood yet. I am very much craving a rock-solid support system as I am entirely cut off from everyone at home but I have to keep reminding myself to be patient. I’m definitely still not myself and everyone else probably isn’t either. Its still kind of a friendship-free-for-all and the fishbowl effect we’re running into living in the village together has us sending mixed messages to each other. Its an “I want to hang out with you so you’ll be my friend but I don’t want to hang out with anyone because I don’t really know you and I need to breathe. Stop talking at me. I don’t feel like smiling. Ok let’s go hang out” thing. Really, this whole thing is such an impossible situation.
There are a few jems though that I’m so happy to have on my side. Katie-Shae, a 27 year old nurse from Atlanta and I can converse freely about our bowel movements, which is a common hot topic now that our happiness hinges on its occurrences. Renee, hands down the most ridiculous girl in the group, who has that bless’d affect on me which allows me to laugh freely and constantly whenever she’s around. And Robert, a fellow Chitonga speaker (thank Moses we’ll be in the same region!), who comes off as quiet and unassuming but is actually riotously hilarious and his smile is the definition of contagious. There are others, but I won’t bore you with the details at this time.
Had a bonfire tonight in the backyard to burn all the bean shells. The kids got so excited they started up a chant of their favorite song “jiga.” I officially hate the song “jiga.” So, I changed up the chorus to moto, or fire, and added a few choice dance moves of my own. Needless to say they have a new favorite song. Thwarted again!
Week Three:
March, 26, 2011
Just found internet!!! Half way through training we’re celebrating at Dedza Pottery, where they have cheesecake and pizza…and booze. Happily tipsy after 2 brewskys and WELL deserved. Today we practiced hitch hiking. We went from Dedza to Lizulu for market day, about a 30 minute drive. Free ride there in an ambulance, 100 MKW (about 75 cents) on the way back. I’d write more about it, but my lasagna is ready… HOLY SHIT!!!! I’M SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS NOISE!!!! 2 years is SUCH a long time...
April 2, 2011
Where did that last month go??? These have been the fastest and the slowest 5 weeks of my life, as time usually goes.
Finally got sick. Thankfully it’s just a 24-hour flu thing. It was GREAT because it was the perfect excuse to hide in my mud hut without snot-nosed children on top of me and I could turn down a mountain of “chipis” without offending my Amayi. This is the longest I’ve gone in a third-world without lying on my deathbed!
I’ve said before that everyone here greets everyone while walking through the village else you’ll get a reputation for being unbearably rude. A very respectful good morning, or “mwadzuka banji?” is expected for the adults and an offhand what’s up, or “bo?!” to the kids. But the bolder kids will go out of their way to greet the Azungus. They get SO excited when we give them the attention to greet them properly. They stick out their little hands for us to shake and squeak out a shy little “muli bwanji,” or how are you. Thing is, you know how in America all the little kids have sticky jam hands? Somehow, doesn’t matter if they’ve had jam recently or not, they are always without a doubt sticky in the hand region. Well it’s the same thing here, except this is Africa, and they have Africa sticky jam hands. What is on your hands, kid?! How are you so sticky? That is not jam! There is no jam here! I do not want to touch your filthy little jam hand. Sometimes I’ll put a chitenje in my hand before I touch the filth, but sometimes they’re just so unbelievably cute I grit my teeth and “ndili bwino” back at them. They’ll giggle uncontrollably till they yell with excitement and run and tell all their little friends that an Azungu just talked to them.
