Health Center Building Update

Things are really starting to happen with this health center building project!  I just received word from PC Headquarters in America that we were officially approved and should see the money by the end of next week.  On Saturday we are choosing our contractor (from a final pool of 3 people vying for the job) and selecting our building site.  The building site I’ve been imagining in my head looks like it’ll be a difficult place to build because we’d have to get the devil Escom out here to move the power lines.  But someone suggested a site slightly up the hill from the current Health Center, where there are no other interferences and an ample amount of land and a beautiful view of Nkhata Bay.  It would also leave the current land open to further development later.  We’ll have to do an environmental impact survey before we approve it, but I hadn’t even thought of that area!  The District Health Officer sent a surprise representative to approve our project and to inform us of how his office can help.  From him we’ll get some transport for materials, help with plumbing and electrification, some amount of specialized labor and brick layers to keep the building up to code (whatever that means in Malawi).  By the end of next week we expect to have the building site cleared and the foundation dug!  It’s happening!!!

The villages have come together and over the last two weeks and molded 109,000 bricks.  Only 49,000 to go!  Here’s some pictures of Monday’s brick burning bonanza:

So first they stack all the bricks so to leave
openings at the bottom for  the fires

This guy's stacking the bricks on the top of the structure.
And its a bomb picture.

This is Village Headman Chipayika.  What a sweet old man, posing with his bricks!

Then they cover the structure with mud and build huge fires
in the  spaces underneath the structure.

This is a baby, named Mercy.  She was playing in the pile of unstacked bricks.
They wanted me to take a picture of her because they were laughing that she represented
child labor...it WAS pretty funny.

Mixing the mud to cover the structure

Smoke coming up through the cracks in the giant brick super-structure.
The top isn't too hot yet, so they men are quickly stacking the last of the bricks.

Guy in foreground is smearing mud.  Two oldies are stoking their fires.

I also took some videos, for Dad.  Can't load them though.

#3 "Yes! It is Very Simple!"

This one isn’t specific to Malawi, but since teaching is a significant portion of my life here, it gets added to the gratitude list.  My favorite thing about teaching math is when the students get it.  Seeing a room full of light bulbs go off above their heads in a school bereft of actual electricity gives me such a rush!  They’ll all nod in agreement and shout “yes! It is very simple! We are together!” It’s especially great when the concept is actually pretty difficult.  Today we learned how to solve quadratic equations by completing the square, something I never fully understood until I taught it to my own students.  They picked it up on the first try.  Not to toot my own horn, but it is SUCH a feeling of accomplishment when I’ve explained something well and they really understand it!  It’s a rare occurrence, usually they just look at me like I’m speaking another language…oh wait.  But today, the stars aligned and squares were completed!

I can see my new Form 3 students getting more comfortable with me.  We’ve gotten into a math-class groove.  Now they’ll see me coming down the aisle looking over their shoulders at their work and instead of giving me the evil eye like “what do YOU care what I write on my paper” they’ll shove it to the edge of their desk so I can see it better and have one-on-one’s with them.  They understand that when I’m walking around, they’re allowed to confer with each other and consult each other’s work.  When I stand at the front of the class and toss the chalk from one hand to the other, it’s time to shut up and see how I would solve the class work problem.  When they get the same answer as me, fists are pumped and shoulders are slapped.  They know I’m kidding and still think it’s funny when I tell them I’ll murder them if they forget the negative sign.  When I ask one of them to explain to the class how they did a problem correctly, they know to explain it in the local language, to help everyone understand, not just the exceptional English speakers.  Math class is just so much fun!  And they’re starting to get that!  Math doesn’t have to be the scary untouchable subject that no one understands and no teachers know how to teach!  Of course, they’re still way behind.  Today we also had a lot of trouble coming up with the correct answer for -2 divided by 2.  But, hopefully, they’ll eventually invest their brains in the subject and pick it up in time for the national exams at the end of their Form 4 year.  It might be possible!!!!

Doug was helping me grade math papers.
He doesn't have the attention span of my other students.

#2 Outrunning Rain Storms

I love rainy season for so many reasons.  For one, all bets are off.  Staying inside all day and expecting zero human interruptions is perfectly acceptable.  For another, I love the sound of the rain on my tin roof.  Also, my gardens are being watered and buckets are being filled with no effort on my part.  It’s just wonderful, the lazy person’s dream.

But sometimes, even during rainy season, some amount of responsibility is still expected of you.  Like going to teach your classes at school.  Rainy season isn’t like the rain in the Pacific Northwest, which is a constant rain with no end in sight.  Malawi rainy season involves huge amounts of water hurled from the heavens above for about an hour tops, then a respite, lasting anywhere from a few minutes to hours to days.  You can see the storms coming from miles away.  Usually they’re blown in from the east, over the lake and pushed through the mountains.  You can watch the clouds rolling in and swallowing up the hills as they go, turning the sky white, then gray, then black.  It’s one of my favorite things to do here, watching the storms come in, trying to read the sky. 

Sometimes they come in really fast though, and all of a sudden they’re on top of you.  You can usually gauge how much time you have to find cover by how fast the first wave of darker white clouds obscure the cell tower down at the market.  It’s a fun game, really.  Today I had about 5 minutes and a kilometer to go to get to school before I was completely destroyed by a massive black hole of a storm.  It was not at all my first storm here I’ve tried to outrun.  You’ll often find yourself miscalculating and taking refuge, soaked to the skin, in an abandoned half-roofed building with a pile of other Malawians (usually kids) who have likewise miscalculated.  Today, my adrenaline rose along with wind and the speed of the oncoming deluge as Doug and I raced the storm cloud to school.  We arrived just in time, me drenched with sweat instead of rain, as the buckets began to pour.  Success! 

I’m reading this book right now, Poisonwood Bible, about a missionary family in the Congo during the 60s.  It describes rainy season from the point of view of one of the young daughters:

“When the rainy season fell on us in Kilanga, it fell like a plague.  We were warned to expect rain in October, but at the close of July – surprising no one in Kilanga but ourselves – the serene heavens above began to dump buckets.  It rained pitchforks, as Mother says.  It rained cats and dogs frogs bogs then it rained snakes and lizards.  A pestilence of rain we received, the likes of which we had never seen or dreamed about in Georgia.”

…Just how I like it!

#1 Greeting with a Smile

This is just something I love love love!  While it gets super unbearably annoying sometimes greeting every single person all the time no matter how shitty your mood is and no matter how hard it is to contort your face into a smile-grimace, the practice really is beautiful.  I think I hate doing it half the time because it’s not something we do in the West.  We just don’t smile as easily at each other over there.  We like our bubbles and stop trying to make eye-contact with me, creep!  But here, greeting comes with a smile, and not forced like mine often are, a legitimate, sincere smile that crinkles around the eyes.

Today I was walking home and started approaching a man walking in the opposite direction with a sullen expression.  He was at an age where his skin was betraying where exactly his face would melt into a mass of wrinkles in the coming years.  His eyes were on the ground and his mind was obviously elsewhere.  But at the last moment, he looked up to greet me in his language, as is customary.  Even before he saw it was me, the village white freak show, his face completely transformed into this glowing smile as if to say “this is a human being I am fortunate enough to meet on this road of all roads”.  And, oh man, wrinkle smiles are just the best.  More loose skin, more to smile with.  It was just one of those smiles that your heart sees with your eyes, and you can’t help but return it.

And when you’re in the right mood to see them, they’re just everywhere here!

30 Day Challenge - Round 3: Gratitude

For November, in honor of one of my top 3 favorite holidays ever, Thanksgiving, this month will be about gratitude (the other two favorite holidays include a rotation of Passover, Sukkot, Christmas when it’s done right with a Favorite Things Feast, the occasional Halloween, and Leap Day, which isn’t considered a holiday but should be).  I was watching a TED talk about the benefits of “positivity training”, and the concept really peaked my interest.  Positivity training involves journaling about one thing that happened in the last 24 hours, listing three things you’re grateful for, meditating, exercising, and performing a random act of kindness every day.  All these things sound lovely, and all the research I’ve seen on stuff like this seems pretty conclusive.  But it also sounds like a huge commitment.  We’ll see how these next 30 days go.

This 30-day challenge also coincides with a text I recently received from another volunteer, Shelley Whittet, who has urged the other volunteers in our group to write or blog about one positive thing we love about Malawi for our final 180 days of service to help us get out of here on a high note.  That’s right, exactly 6 months left!!!  It’s another lovely, lofty goal, but I’ll try.

So here goes: …see tomorrow's post….

30-Day Challenge - Round Two: Sweat On Purpose

It’s October, which means hot season is in full swing over here.  H-O-T, Hot.  It’s at least a million degrees.  You wake up sweating, you go to sleep sweating, you sweat moving from one room to the other to the porch, you sweat sitting.  Luckily, my site really isn’t that bad, all the way up here in the mountains.  But once you leave here, maybe about 5km down the mountain, the head will hit you like a brick wall.  I remember last year feeling really low energy all the time during hot season, especially down at the lakeshore, due to a complete lack of motivation to move and cook, and thus eat.  I don’t think I did a damn thing this time last year. 

So to remedy the doldrums this year, October’s 30-day challenge was to sweat on purpose every day.  My goal was to sweat not just because I was breathing, but because I was up and doing stuff, using energy and staying productive.  Turns out, this challenge was a little too easy this month.  Maybe I’ll redo it once the rains come and it’s not only hot, but humid and suffocating.  But between walking to school every day, down one mountain and up another one (I didn’t go consistently this time last year…), and all the traveling around the country we’ve been doing, I found it easy to work up a legitimate sweat each day.  No doldrums here!

Traveling: 

1. Started with Rob and I heading down to Liwonde Game Reserve for the annual game count.  This year, as big, bad second year volunteers, we were allowed to camp at the super swanky in-park resort.  There was a pool!  And elephants that trampled through the camp!  We participated in the 4-day waterhole count, where 20 of us PCV’s took 4-hour round-the-clock shifts in hides at waterholes to count the animals that came to drink.  We saw everything!  It was nuts!  In one of my shifts, something like 25 elephants came to splash around the whole time, not 15 feet from our hide!  They were playing and tackling each other and spraying themselves and rubbing against trees and yelling at each other!  We saw rhinos, hippos, warthogs, zebras, a herd of 125 buffalo.  Once, riding through the park on transport to our hide, we met a pair of rangers on bicycles who had to abandon their bikes and were hiding and aiming their rifles at an elephant who had gotten too close and personal, a little too curious about the animals on wheels.  We helped scare it off, no shooting necessary.  Super awesome experience!  My hide-partner has all the pictures, but I’ll try to post a link to them.  Also, let it be known that in regards to this 30-day challenge, it was still way too hot to cook and eat.  It’s freaking hot.

2.  Then there was Lilongwe for the GRE.  Check that one off this list!  I choked on the verbal because no matter how much I studied, I just cannot comprehend those damn reading comprehension sections.  But it was definitely a respectable score on verbal.  I killed it on the math!  Just destroyed it.  All in all, I don’t think I’ll ever have to take the GRE again.  Scores come in 6 weeks, cross your fingers!

3.  Halloween was spent at a resort called Maji Zuwa, about 2 hours north of Mzuzu with about 20 other volunteers.  I went as Mitt Rom-mummy.  Pictures to come.

Creative Writing 101

So we’ve started another year of Secondary School.  I’m teaching math and biology to Form 3.  But I’ve added a little something-something to my personal curriculum for my own amusement.  Every week (or more than once a week if I don’t feel like actually teaching) we will write for 20 minutes on whatever prompt I choose.  This little exercise will work on a number of levels.  It’ll encourage them to write their thoughts and think about things they wouldn’t usually think about – these guys are in desperate need of critical and creative thinking practice.  It’ll also require them to write in English, which I can then correct and help them with on an individual basis.  And it is a perfect excuse to get them to tell me everything I’ve been so unbelievably curious about but can’t ask in any normal conversation since I’ve been here.  For example, I can’t wait till they trust me enough to honestly answer the question “explain local initiation ceremonies and how you feel about them” or “why don’t you think men and women are equal in Malawi” or “do male teachers really take advantage of their position with the female students” or “write about a rumor you’ve heard about someone with AIDS” or even just “tell me some Malawian sayings or proverbs”.  I know I’ll get at least a few honest answers out of them.  And I told them that I’ll be only one reading them (unless they expressly tell me not to read a particular entry), that I’ll keep them locked in my house when we aren’t using them, and that I won’t post anything they say online without their permission.

This week’s was a tame prompt, to get them used to the idea.  The question was “what do you want to do with your life after you finish Secondary School”.  I got a lot of “I want to be a doctor” or teacher or car mechanic.  But I also got one girl saying that she wants to be a medical assistant in a hospital.  However, she is worried she is setting her goals too high because she is an orphan living with her aunt and many other children, all of whom depend on her aunt’s single income.  Even if she can pass her national exams and get into University, school fees will be unattainable and she’ll have to stay in the village and get married.  Another guy in the class had very realistic expectations, which I really appreciated after ten future doctors couldn’t spell “doctor”.  He wants to become a soldier, have a good family, and then he wants to build his own house.  If he has money left over, he will buy a bicycle to ride to work.  Solid.  Way to go, kid.

Any prompts you’d like to suggest??