Malawian Birthday

So because I actually type up my blog entries on my laptop while I’m at site my last blog entry doesn’t mention my prior visit to Mzuzu. Which was somewhat more exciting than most because I biked. I started off at about 6:00 a.m. and get in around 1:00 p.m. The ride is I think just under 100K, and the first two hours are over dirt roads, which, thanks to some heavy rainfall were less road and more shallow stream.
Still, I arrived in Mzuzu safe and sound, and the first five hours of the ride were actually very pleasant – staring at the mist shrouded mountains, listening to the call of various birds and watching them flit around (we have really exotic birds around my site, and they are brilliantly colored. To see them is like watching a box of escaped flying markers). Then my right hand brake broke and all my gears below 2.7 froze. I spent the last two hours riding/walking and by the time I got to Mzuzu I was in so much pain I was practically crying.
But it was all okay because when I walked into the house I was met with a huge pile of packages. And five of them were for me! Since the mail here went on strike for almost all of December, everyone’s Christmas packages had just arrived beginning of Feb. Since I wasn’t entirely sure I could remain standing long enough to take a shower I stalled and downed an entire bag of M&M’s and five chocolate cookies.
You would think, given that most of the time we are stranded in the middle of nowhere with straight sugarcane being our closest source of candy most volunteers would hoard anything we receive from home. But in fact, we actually share quite liberally. Within about an hour piles of dark chocolate, sweedish fish and candy canes were laid out around various tables for all to enjoy. Almost everyone from the northern region was in the city that weekend since it was payday (we get our pay in three month installments that you have to go to the city to collect). Given that I slept (or more accurately did not sleep) in the living room of the house, the whole weekend lies in my mind as a rather pleasant haze of people, food, and candy.
My favorite time was Sunday night. There’s a hammock at Mzuzu house that is by far my favorite place to be. It’s on a tiny little porch area right outside the kitchen, and lying on it you can just see enough sky beyond the porch overhang to have a good view of the moon and stars. Sunday I felt like I needed a breather from all the company, so I stuck some cookies in the oven and stepped outside. Alyssa was baking granola and keeping an eye on my cookies, and for a while it was just the two of us doing our separate things, After about a half an hour an environment volunteer named Tim Strong stepped out with his guitar and started tinkering around, playing and singing bluegrass and old folk songs, quite a few of which I actually knew, mostly thanks to Dad’s musical tastes. Somewhere in the middle of thinking how pleasant and peaceful the whole thing was I fell asleep.
Back at site teaching is still going fairly smoothly. The irony of me teaching grammar does not escape me. A lot of times I’ll be reading my various textbooks on teaching grammar to ESL students and I’ll have these “oh that’s why we do that” moments. A lot of times though, English just doesn’t make sense.
Next semester I’m going to be teaching literature, which I am really excited about. Granted, we don’t actually have the required books (Smoldering Charcoal, Searching for a Rain God, and Romeo and Juliet) so I’m not entirely sure how the students are going to read anything, but we’ll figure it out.
One of the most interesting aspects for me comes not from the students but from the fact that, since we are ridiculously short on teachers, half our staff is actually preachers moonlighting as teachers. They’re really curious about American lifestyle so we end up having very open conversations. Both sides are always very respectful of the other’s opinion, and so far they’ve been really good.
Malawians on the whole are very very religious (and not just superficially) and naturally it affects their outlook on life to a great extent. Sex before marriage, for example, is extremely taboo (of course it still happens. A lot). In talking to the teachers though, we figured out that both Malawians and Americans start having sex around the same age (17-20 although, yes, I know, exceptions on both sides) it’s just that in Malawi you are usually married at that point.
I’m also very open about my views on homosexuality – which are pretty contrary to this countries’ beliefs – but are totally accepted as legitimate views on my part. It’s strange. At first I thought there would be rampant anti-gay sentiments but more than that there’s just a huge misunderstanding of what homosexuality is.
I was talking with Edina over dinner one night (Second wife’s first born daughter, fully grown and with three kids of her own). I told her my parents had gone to Paris to spend Christmas with a friend of my mom’s.
She asked me if they stayed with him and his wife, to which I explained well no, not exactly since he is in fact gay and has a husband.
To this Edina nodded, and then said that in Malawi being gay is not accepted. I replied that I knew that, but I wasn’t going to hide my views. She thought this was good, and proceeded to say to tell me they were very open in her family because they had seen a lot of western movies. She then asked me when he had joined,
Naturally I responded with something to the effect of,
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Being gay,” she repeated. “When did he join?” (I should specify that this conversation was in English, so nothing was a translation error.)
I explained that being gay is something you are, not something you join.
“Oh,” she replied. “I thought you had to join.”
Of course, later on in the evening I accidentally asked her if she was a witch, so hey.
Edina’s husband died just two weeks ago. (I counted, and with his death only 6 of my 15 brothers and sisters still have both parents). Funerals in Malawi are all night affairs that occur in a person’s living room. They clear out all the furniture and spread a bamboo mat on the floor and a rotating line of members from the community come and console. It’s a strange mix of singing then wailing, singing then wailing. Even if you don’t know the person, if you live within a certain radius you are supposed to come. If you are family or a close friend you are supposed to stay all night, sleeping on the mat. Edina’s husband, however, lived in Mzimba, so after four hours she and the children boarded a matola and the crowd dispersed.
My birthday was the next weekend, and I was worried. The family had previously promised to have a celebration for me, but I figured it would probably be called off since the house was still officially in mourning (still is in fact) and outpourings of relatives were coming in from distant cities every few days to offer their condolences.
On Saturday I biked to Rumphi (the nearest town… ish thing) and met Alyssa and Tina there. We ate at a local restaurant and then Alyssa and I biked back to my site. Alyssa had made me a homemade card, and gave me three snickers bars, a jar of peanut butter and raisins as well as a Spanish book she had stolen from her library.
On Sunday morning we made French toast for breakfast and then baked a pumpkin cake… which we finished within a half an hour. We were so full we couldn’t move. Fortunately two hours later we were hungry again, which was good because the family invited us over for lunch. Both Angelina and Alinafe had made me extremely detailed and colorful cards with roses and hearts drawn outside and poems inside. Even my littler siblings had put together makeshift birthday cards. Temwa, the youngest one able to write made one that simply said, “Happy Berth Mag, my name Temwa, Goodby.” Which is pretty much the extent of his English. I was really touched.
Alyssa and I ate at second wife’s house with about half the family. They had cleared out the furniture so that everyone could fit on the floor. Since you eat with your fingers in Malawi someone passes around a basin of almost boiling water and you have to wash your hands in it. To not wash thoroughly is really impolite. I’ve gotten to the point where I barely grimace and can keep my hands in for almost three seconds!
We had nsima (the staple food, it’s made of corn. It’s a patty. It’s really not comparable to anything in the U.S.) ntchunga (beans, my favorite!) and an nkhuku (that would be chicken) that they had killed just for my birthday. Alyssa and I had brought the desert, a pumpkin pudding we had made but not tasted. We were really scared as it was spooned out, but it turned out well, thank God.
Alyssa and I had also made a makeshift piñata from part of a package covered with construction paper. We filled it with gum and mints and hung it from the mango tree out back with my shoelaces. The kids came out and we did the whole thing – gave them a stick, blindfolded them, had them turn three times – in the end Sylvester, Edina’s oldest, busted the piñata wide open and even the adults went diving for masweeties. The piñata’s top and bottom had fallen out, so we put the rest on Sylvester’s head and he wore it around all day like a crown. All in all, one of the best birthday’s I’ve ever had.