Re-training, and back to work again

Chocolate pudding – TALULAR style (Talular means using resources available)
1 avocado
2 tbs cocoa powder
1 tbs sugar
Mix ‘em, eat ‘em, love ‘em!

This past month has been filled with some of the highest highs and lowest lows I have had in my time in Malawi. Fairly strange, since it was 90% vacation and training. I should probably back up some though.
Beginning of April marked the end of school, and the beginning of Inter Service Training. For IST our entire group traveled back down to the Malawi college of forestry in Dedza to spend a week and a half together brushing up on our obscure tribal languages, learning about grants, and eating five times a day.
To get to Dedza we all had to pass through Lilongwe, which, at least for us northerners, was a bit strange. There are three major cities in Malawi; Blantyre (where, according to my students, you can buy superpowers), Lilongwe (the capital) and Mzuzu (my wonderful, wonderful, wonderful city). Blantyre, in the south, is the commercial center of Malawi, full of great restaurants, lots of bars, and huge businesses (or so I’ve heard, I still haven’t been there). Lilongwe (central) is pretty huge and sprawling, with affluent neighborhoods interspersed with ramshackle shanty-town places. Mzuzu (the north!) is a small city, about two square miles around, where you can walk anywhere you want to go, can circumnavigate the whole thing in about 45 minutes and people still greet you, instead of just brushing past rudely and possibly trying to grab your wallet while they are at it. If you could find varieties of cheese beyond cheddar and gouda here it would be just perfect.
So after having spent three months back and forth between villages, and the small city of Mzuzu, suddenly we were all tossed into a city with rushing cars, airplanes, mansions, and an actual grocery store. I was overwhelmed. One of the northern boys from my group commented that he couldn’t actually go into the grocery store because it was just too weird. It was definitely a culture shock.
After a weekend in Lilongwe, it was fun to go back to the college of forestry in Dedza. Last time we were there it was the middle of the dry season and Malawi pretty much looked like a desert. Suddenly we were back and there were wildflowers everywhere, and the ground was covered in a carpet of green. Also, it was cold! It felt like fall, and Tina suggested we should carve pumpkins. We didn’t, but just the suggestion was cool.
Being back in language class it was amazing to see the progress we’ve all made. In the village it is easy to feel like you aren’t progressing at all. You still can’t understand people, still don’t know quite how to express yourself, and typically they just switch to broken English after about two sentences anyway. But we really have improved. We were all able to actually hold classes in Chitumbuka, and to describe our villages, and the work we are doing in them.
At least the first hour of ever class served as a sort of group therapy session. It was so nice to be around people who understood where you were coming from when you vented, but who also understood that the venting didn’t mean you were miserable, just that you needed to get things off your chest. Being around people who had exactly the same frame of reference didn’t hurt either, it was sort of like “you hate it when they try to stone people in your village for being witches? I hate that too!”
In addition to learning about grants and doing language work the whole group had a chance to meet Vic Barbiero, our new country director, also known as the father of the girl we sold my first car to… right before the engine exploded. I had actually met Mr. Barbiero a bit earlier, right after Alyssa, Terence and I got into Lilongwe, and our conversation went something like this:
Mr. Barbiero: Wait… Margaret Sessa what?
Me: Hawkins
Mr. Barbiero: Hawkins? Are you by any chance Steve Hawkins’ daughter?
Me: Uh, yeah.
Mrs. Barbiero: Wait, who?
Mr. Barbiero: You know honey, the one with the car.
Mrs. Barbiero: Oh right! The car! (To me) Did you ever hear what happened to that car right after we got it?

That lovely first meeting aside, Mr. Barbiero is a fantastic country director, and his wife is wonderful. Both of them are very interested in all our projects, very eager to support us, and really seem to care about all the volunteers, about Malawi, and about the work we are doing here as a whole.
So back to IST. After training a few of us went to the beach on vacation, where we lazed on the beach and enjoyed more good eating. At the beach my brand new camera that I had just bought (the first one having broken, if you recall, on my first morning in Malawi) broke, and I was back to square one.
I spent a few days after the beach doing business in Lilongwe before making a rush pass through Mzuzu and heading back to site for one of the toughest weeks I have had since I got here.
I should mention at this point that one of my fellow teachers died over break. Mr. Caplusha was attending Domasi college, to try to get a more advanced degree. He was one of our best teachers and had endeared himself to me from the very start by wearing a huge pin with Obama’s face on it and the message “happy days are here again.” With his death we are down to four teachers full time teachers, two part time.
I spent the week sitting through meetings where we re-allocated classes (I am not teaching Life Skills to forms three and four, Literature to form four, English to forms three and one, and both Biology and Physical Science to form one), talked about whether we should have the school only serve two forms, how many students had transferred (about 60) and how we couldn’t get enough new teachers because we don’t have housing (for more information on how you can help with that, go to the next blog entry).
At this point I have talked to (pressured, yelled at, sat in office until they agreed, whatever you want to call it) enough people that we should be receiving another teacher in two weeks. My favorite moment from this whole process was when, trying to impress the urgency of our situation on a man in the northern education office I told him “we only have four full time teachers” and he asked me “excluding the dead one?” to which I, completely astounded, responded, “Well yes, we’ve tended to exclude him since he died. Fortunately the sarcasm was lost on him. Still, even if we do receive this teacher, it is a temporary solution. Until we get the currently half-built teachers house finished and more teachers houses built we are in pretty bad straights.
On the upside though, our budget meeting went surprisingly well. My two yelling poins were that 1) We bought a duplicating machine and typewriter for 140,000 (about a thousand dollars) when we still have teacher’s houses that need to be built and 2) Construction of the library has stopped.
They defended themselves on the duplicating machine, saying that it was a unanimous decision, and will be better for the students, and them a lot of work and money in the long run. I am still not happy about it, but it’s not my decision to make. It’s not my school, I’m just here to help where I can.
As for 2, I was told that the contractor had halted construction because monkeys were eating his corn, and he had to be home to chase them off. This completely floored me. I wanted to yell “well that’s no excuse!” but I couldn’t, because honestly, I don’t know. Is that a good excuse? Are we plagued by a scourge of corn-eating monkeys? I mean could be, we have enough of them around.
At this point though, the other teachers stepped in and started arguing saying, essentially, “well, we’re paying him, he can use some of the money to hire someone to chase off the monkeys.” They even ended up setting an ultimatum for him to come back to work or they’d hire someone else. An amazing feat in a place where people tend to feel, well it will happen when God wills it to happen.
On another upside, I have joined the community netball team. Netball is a game really similar to basketball, except you don’t dribble, and the hoops are made of tire rims nailed to posts. I think mostly they wanted me to join because I serve as a point of amusement. “Madam,” they tell me. “You play so well.” When I counter with “Boza!” (“You lie!” or “false!”) They say, “oh, but you are learning, little by little. Don’t worry, we will teach you.” I don’t really care if I learn or not, it’s a really fun way to relieve stress and hang out with the children in my community.
My surrogate family is also doing very well. I bought them some childrens books in Chitumbuka and Chichewa. I’ve been getting them children’s books in English, but we always run into cultural problems (what’s a ghost? What’s a babysitter? What’s a berenstein? Etc.) They really loved the books, and Andrew, my one brother who speaks Chitumbuka, thought it was hilarious to watch me struggling to read it. After all the times I’ve made him read English books outloud to me, I think he thought it was fair payback.
As for the littler kids, Trouble has, after months and months of saying only “nose” to refer to everything from his actual nose to my bike, learned to say “mah ears” and point to his ears. Patty (Patrick) the one and a half year old who was barely doing a tottering walk when I first came, is now running. He’s still one of the happiest babies I’ve ever met, and can’t stop laughing when I toss him into the air.
For now I’m enjoying a restful weekend in Mzuzu, filling out grants to run a workshop to get bookshelves built, and another to get funding for building teachers houses (again, for more information on that please go to the next blog.) I’ve also joined a program with the regional library whereby I pay them roughly ten dollars and can go into their storeroom and take as many books as I want back to site with me.
It’s pretty cool to see what we are all doing. Alyssa is trying to get a borehole built, Terence is forming a small business owner’s group, and Enrique is trying to get his corrupt-as-anything headmaster kicked out. It’s funny how fast the time has passed, it really does seem just a bit ago we were all being thrown, scared, into a village to live with a family, looking around at these small mud huts and thinking “what the heck am I doing here.” Now we’re at the point where we get to carve our path and decide for ourselves what, in fact, we are really doing here.