Getting Adjusted... again

Well, I didn’t expect to be updating for a while, but then I ran out of money. Completely. Had enough to travel, bas. Turns out the only ATM we can use is in Mzuzu, so anytime we run out of money we have to come back to the city. On the plus side, anytime we run out of money we have to come back to the city.
Before I start with this entry I should say that Jenn and Tim are both okay and have been released from the hospital, but Jenn will not be allowed back into Malawi because her spleen was removed. Stupid spleen. Of course we’re all extremely relieved they’re okay, but I’m really miffed she can’t come back. Ok, now onto our regularly scheduled blog.
I have a chicken. Her name is Henrietta. Actually, she belongs to my landlord so I have no earthly idea what her name is, but I figure if she is living in my dining room (she is) and has laid eggs in my house (she has) and will soon have a bunch of annoying squacking chicks getting under my feet (unfortunately) then I get to name her. Plus Malawians don’t seem to be big into naming things. Whereas you can hardly pass a spoon in front of my face without it acquiring a name, rank, and possibly complex back story, Malawians tend to call the cat “pussy” or “chona” (cat) the dog “soldier,” “police,” or “ncheve” (that would be dog) and even kids have a rotation of only about ten names (Hopeful, Blessing, Awesome). That combined with the fact that there are only about three different last names in the whole country makes being a teacher interesting. You could almost set up a comparative bingo card. “Really? You have three Gift Bandas in your class too? Great! Now all I need is someone with a Mercy Kandawiri.”
Of course, every now and then accidents of originality happen. For example; Boneface. (The parents were going for “Boniface” and somewhere in there tripped over an unfortunate spelling error.) The fact that “L” and “R” are completely interchangeable in all tribal languages here also leads to some great names. My favorite is Helbert, but Rucy and Frolence in my class also crack me up.
Back to the original subject, in addition to Henrietta I will also be getting a puppy. Meg, my sitemate, has a dog that just had puppies, and I get to pick. I got to hold them when they were only eight hours old. Very tiny, but not as cute as kittens. No worries on that front though, I met up with a VSO (British volunteer) last weekend who is leaving, and promised I would take on her cat when she goes. So between those three animals, the mouse in my cupboard, the birds living in my wall, and the new two year old always underfoot I’ve acquired quite the menagerie. I of course asked my landlord if owning a cat, puppy, and his twelve new chicks simultaneously would not perhaps be a conflict of interest, but he said no. Or maybe he’s just not counting his chickens before they hatch. (Sorry, I had to).
Other than that these past two weeks have probably been the hardest I’ve had since I got here. Comparatively, the magnatude of difficulty has not been nearly the same. Whereas when I first got here my emotions ran somewhere along the lines of “What am I doing here, why are all these people staring at me I wanna go home I wanna go home I wanna go home now!” the past two weeks my emotional narrative has more followed a trend of “Well jeez this is hard, I really want my mommy and some ice cream and a taco would be great..” I have yet to get used to how raw, emotionally, we are here.
After three months I thought I would have gotten tougher skin, but no. When I’m happy, I’m ridiculously happy, and from the littlest things. For example, I made guacamole the other day, and felt roughly the equivalent of having just climbed Everest. Any accomplishment, no matter how small, is a huge trail blazing triumph. On the flip side, sometimes you just trip into a pile of depression and are completely unable to figure out why. Perhaps my biggest accomplishment, emotionally, is not figuring out how to overcome these moments of depression, but realizing that if I just ride them out I’ll pass to another moment of blazing triumph, or at least one weird enough to distract me.
My biggest problem this past week was that although I was supposed to start teaching Monday, the government didn’t release the results of the standardized exams students need to pass to move up, so students had no idea which grade they were in.
So, instead of teaching I inventoried all the books we have back in the storeroom (we are in fact constructing a library, but it’s currently a hole in the ground). It is an eclectic collection to say the least. While we have, for example, 27 copies of Roget’s Thesaurus, 53 Liddy’s, five Canterbury Tales, and even an Introducion a Matematicas we lack your basic fun teenage reading – Goosebumps, Animorphs, Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, I would gladly trade our “Cultural Anthropology Throughout the 1900’s” for any of them.
I promised to go into the Malawian education system in more depth a while back, and now seems as good a time as any. Basically it’s a tier system. There are government funded schools, which are typically boarding schools. Private schools, and Community Day Secondary Schools (CDSS). Government funded schools and Private schools are amazing and their facilities leave me absolutely in awe. To get into one you need to a) test in and b) be able to afford it. If you miss either of those criteria you can go to a CDSS, which you still have to pay for, and which you still have to test into (it’s just a lower price, lower score sort of deal) and receives no funding at all from the government. To me the system seems completely designed to enforce the socio-economic divides already in place. Of course, I feel the same way about the U.S.’s system, even if it’s not as extreme as Malawi’s.
So, the CDSS’s typically lack materials, sometimes including desks. Mine, for example, doesn’t have doors. Perhaps the biggest drawback though, is a lack of good teachers. I’m lucky, my school has really dedicated teachers (although we are unbelievably understaffed). A lot of schools have teachers who show up drunk, or don’t show up at all. There’s really no incentive. The salary is abysmal, and you’re living at the corner of podunkville and that nice bush. Anytime I get too depressed about the CDSS’s though, I remember that they are really new, and a step up from what existed before –a rough correspondence program.
That said, I really love teaching in mine. I like my students a lot. At first they were completely baffled by me. They are used to just memorizing facts and spitting them back at you and they are insanely good at that. But when it comes to actually processing the information and applying it, not so much. The first time we played a game in school they were floored, but by the end of the week they started catching on, and the form 1’s (freshman) started laughing and enjoying themselves. The Form 3’s still seem a little unsure of how to take me, but it’s harder with them. They had Laura, another Peace Corps Volunteer, for two years. So I have to work really hard to challenge them, and to figure out exactly how much they know. I also think there’s the matter of “you’re white, and yet you teach different from Laura – does not compute” going on.
Other than teaching, food has been foremost on my mind. For the past two weeks I’ve been mostly eating rice, tomatoes, and onions -- the food available in my village. Evenutually I just stopped eating because I couldn’t stand to take another bite of rice. They say back in the middle ages starving sailors would actually die rather than eat hard tack. I can relate. Now that I’m in the city I’ve bought a bunch of pasta, flour, cheese and canned veggies. Hopefully that will help add some variety to my diet.
When I’m not teaching, eating, or hanging out with my family I’m reading. Mzuzu house has a ton of books, and we operate on a book exchange system, which is awesome. I read so much here, and everything I read I just want to read more. Typically I’ll be reading one non-fiction and one fiction at a time. In addition I’ve got some philosophical reads I brought along, basically amounting to a book on Budhist philosophy Suzy sent me, and “Dinosaurs at Easter” a collection of sermons by George Booth (he used to be a minister at my church, for those reading who are not of the rock spring community).
I think “Dinosaurs at Easter” helps me through the tough times the most. I realize Rev. Booth wasn’t writing with the intention that some day a girl in the middle of nowhere Malawi would be reading his sermons, but they are very applicable. I just really enjoy and admire his views on life, and how we should live. I also of course sneak in the occasional sordid romance novel. What can I say, they are comforting.
So overall, I’m still really happy here, and definitely still think coming here was the right decision. I remember in the beginning we all wrote down our reasons for being here and they struck me as being very selfish. Most of us put down things having to do with self-discovery, or getting to understand a different side of life. No one put down something to the equivalent of “make the world a better place.” Now, looking back, I think that’s actually really good, and may be the reason none of us have chosen to go home. I think you have to feel that just being here is enough. That just interacting with your neighbor, or getting a smile from your two year old brother or even being able to think about the world in a new light, is good enough. Because you are always going to wonder if you truly made a difference, or changed anything for the good, but if your only goal in being here was just that, to be here, well then, odds are you are doing okay.