The end of a tiny era

Godiva tripple chocolate brownies, S’mores, Bubble gum, Goldfish, Lolipops, Banana Bread, Tortilla Chips

Ingredients: The most awesome Peace Corps Staff ever, who, for some reason, love to spoil volunteers.

To make: Complete two years of Peace Corps service in Malawi. Attend COS conference. Eat.

Well, the end of July marked the end of the second year I have been teaching and even if the school year was switched around so that this one was shorter, I still felt proud, and, while I still love my job, pretty relieved to see the school year come to a close.

For the next week I stayed in village and, for the first time ever in this country, I found myself with nothing to do. I kind of liked it. I did cross word puzzles, I read, I wrote, I ran, I did yoga. I played jump rope with my kids, I bird-watched, I sent people texts that said things like “How come no one ever told me there was this much nothing to do?” It was fun. Of course, by the end of the week I was pretty ready to get back down to business. First though, I had to attend a wedding.

I’ve already attended one wedding in Malawi, but since it was in the city, and this one would be a true village wedding, I was pretty excited. I wasn’t disappointed. The wedding was a truly interesting mix of western and Malawian cultures.

The night before the wedding the bride and her party came over to our compound (the groom was related to my family, though I’m still not sure how. I’ve stopped trying to graph the family tree - polygamy leads to way too many branches). We danced around outside the house most of the night while the bride and her party stayed inside wrapped in chitenjes, receiving visitors and in general looking miserable. I asked a friend why she was so sad, explaining that normally I felt one should be happy before getting married. My friend explained that in Malawian culture one is supposed to act serious the night before a wedding. Apparently it’s proper to be shy, because you are coming to the husband’s family, and sad because you are leaving your own.

Bridal parties in Malawi are more extensive than in America. There is the maid-of-honor and the best man of course, but then there are two bridesmaids, two teenagers, two pre-teens, and two children - all with accompanying partners in tuxes - who also walk down the aisle and stand up with the couple.

It was really fun for me to see everyone dressed up so nicely. The morning of the wedding the girls all came to my sisters hair salon to have their hair and makeup done, and they looked gorgeous at the church.

The church itself was decorated with garlands of blue toilet paper and blown up balloons hanging from the rafters. Extra benches had been piled in and there was a keyboard attached to speakers, with an accompanying gospel choir for music. As for the ceremony itself, there was a lot more talk about wifely obedience than you typically get in an American ceremony, and half of it was conducted in Chitumbuka, but other than that it was pretty much the same.

The reception was held outside, with the bridal party sitting under a long reed canopy while all the guests danced around and threw money into the air. At one point the bride and groom sat on a mat and guests literally showered them with bills. It’s rather funny to see all this dancing around and money flying through the air, just because Malawian currency already looks so much like monopoly money so the whole thing just has a feel of being in a game, or play.

I left my village in a pretty good mood, headed down to my COS conference. COS stands for Close Of Service. It is the conference all Peace Corps volunteers attend to learn about everything they will have to do to officially close out their Peace Corps service - so we learn about all the documents we have to fill out, medical exams we have to do, plus they throw in a few sessions on readjusting to America, putting together a resumé, and finding a job.

There’s really no way to explain how surreal it was to be attending this conference. Never mind that I’m not leaving for another ten months. The fact is that for almost the past two years I have watched group after group attend this conference and go home, and it simply does not seem like it should be my group’s turn. I have done so much in this country, experienced so much, changed so much, and yet when I think over it all it’s as if I just blinked. Nothing in my life has gone by this fast, and I don’t think any landmark in my life will seem as overwhelming as leaving this country will be, and this past week was a reminder of that.

As if that weren’t enough, every time I looked around the room it was with the realization that half the people I was staring at would be gone in a month. These people who have been my support structure, my family, the only other people in the whole world who, for the last two years, have truly understood me when I said “you know what I mean?”

All of this was somewhat mitigated, however, by the fact that the conference took place at a lake-shore lodge. So whenever I got too depressed I had my pick of a view of the lake, a nice room, or delicious food to cheer me up.

Additionally, since this was our leaving conference the whole thing had a very lax feel to it. One of our rules was we all always had to have bare feet, so I now have a great photo of our country director having a very serious discussion with all of us about how to improve the Peace Corps program while sitting on wicker furniture wearing a full suit and no shoes.

Have I mentioned the food? They did not stop feeding us. We got three large meals a day, two tea times, and then in addition to all of this one of our facilitators had brought us a bunch of food from America to eat while we were in session, including Godiva tripple chocolate brownies. Did I mention we got to order a soda every single time we ate? Including tea times? And that there was orange juice at breakfast? Like real orange juice? Like imported from good-and-not-totally-sour-like-Malawian-oranges South African orange juice? Awesome.

At the end of the conference we got to pick out a piece of pottery and decorate it. I picked out a bowl, and painted it with a lake scene. The bowl is blue, with two scuba divers and a couple of fish swimming around the outside. On the very bottom is the Peace Corps logo, and around the rim I put an American and Malawian flag, with two phrases in between them. The first is just “Peace Corps Malawi” while the second is three Chitumbuka verbs, “Kukhala, Kutemwa, Kusambira”. Translated, that’s “Live, Love, Learn”.