Fikani! (Welcome)

Tina and Margaret's Banana Bread
This is the very first thing I ever baked in country, way back when I first came to Malawi and was living in a mud hut in a village. I baked it with Tina (with the fire and baking parts being handled by her husband, Zeb). Since the two of them are headed home soon, and since this entry is about the new group, and them coming to Malawi and remembering how it felt to go through what they just did, it seemed a fitting full-circle to post it.

Ingrediants
2 cups of Flour
A bunch of really gooshy bananas bought from the market in a fairly intimidating experience involving hitching and a bit of squishing and quite a lot of lap-sitting.
1 tsp Baking soda (from the nearest little shop three miles away)
Two eggs beaten
One small bag of milk
Raisins sent to Z&T in a care package
3/4 cups Illovo brown sugar
1/2 cup Blueband (margarine, butter, plastic, whatever you got)
EXTRAS:
7 printed maps of the United States
Red and Blue markers
One wind-up radio turned to the BBC World Service
2 liter bottle of orange Sobo. (Blech, but I guess we didn't know better back then).

INSTRUCTIONS
1. Get your technical trainer to convince the school principal that the election of a president is a holiday in America, and thus the new Peace Corps Trainees will be spending the night all together in one house, and will have the next day off school.
2. Wind up the radio, start listening to election results, color in states on a map.
3. Start the fire so the embers are ready when you need them.
4. Cream sugar and Blueband, mix eggs and bananas, combine all dry ingredients. Do this all in separate brightly colored plastic plates.
5. Wind up radio. Keep coloring in map.
6. Mix all ingredients
7. Watch the meteor shower
8. Put ingredients in Johnny's non-stick frying pan. Put the frying pan on three upturned stones, and put a small amount of embers below it. Stick more embers on top. Replace embers as they burn down for about 1/2 hour, although constant checking is a really good idea
9. Wind up radio. Okay, Obama's going to win. You can stop coloring in the map.
10. Uncover amazing banana bread. Stand in shock and awe that your first baking experience (with no measuring cups used) turned out so well.
11. Sit down to listen to Obama's acceptance speech. Feel proud and happy and a bit nostalgic and wistful. Especially at the part about people listening in distant corners of the globe. Raise a glass of diluted Sobo to the new president of the United States. Walk back to mud hut to actually get some sleep.



Well, in and amongst everything that has been going on (eating at the ambassador’s, eating at the president’s, having COS conference) I forgot one pretty important development. The new group arrived!
This year’s new group was actually two groups, since the change of the school calendar forced Peace Corps to change the schedule and bring in the education group three months early, thus having their arrival coincide with the health group’s. I didn’t actually plan to have that much to do with the new group, but then I ended up being a volunteer leader during the counterpart workshop.
The counterpart workshop is the last week of training, and it’s when all of the headmasters (or another teacher from the school) come down to Dedza and meet the trainees. Both trainee and counterpart sit through a series of workshops designed to prepare the school for having a PCV, and the PCV for being placed in a rural school.
This workshop can be a bit overwhelming for volunteers. It’s the first time one is truly faced with the realities of the cultural differences between rural Malawi (and, more specifically, the teaching style that exists within rural Malawian schools) and almost any part of America. Our counterpart workshop, for example, was the first time any of us found out about witchcraft.
This was the first time current volunteers have ever been invited to help out with the counterpart workshop, and I think it was a really good idea to have volunteers there, because it’s precisely the point where trainees are going to have the most questions about what it’s like to live and work in the villages.
There are two schools of thought, though, as to how such questions should be handled. One school says that they should be answered with blunt honesty, best the trainees should know what they’re getting into before they get into it. The other school of thought says that information should be disseminated slowly, positively, and sparingly. After all, every volunteer’s situation is completely different, as are the challenges they are going to encounter at site, and the solutions they will have to work out as a result. Additionally, as a volunteer pointed out to me, in general, we can handle problems as they come up. However, if one knew all the problems that would crop up in village before they happened it would be pretty difficult to deal with. Put another way, a lot of times we’re stronger than we think we are. It’s almost the age old “rip the bandaid off” versus “take it off slowly” argument.
I’m sort of in the middle ground. I think that while it’s true you can’t address every problem, it’s nice to know about some general issues that tend to come up, and to have some information as to how volunteers before you have dealt with those issues. Thus we had a session on witchcraft and other challenges in the village, and another session (albeit on the sly) about corruption and methods for dealing with it.
In general the week went really well. The new group is awesome!!!! and it was fun to be leading workshops, to realize that I had been in the country long enough that I did have useful information to contribute, that I understood a lot of the cultural gaps, and the reasons for them, and had a few strategies for bridging them.
The one down side was that it was absolutely freezing. (Almost, though not quite, literally. I would guess it was in the mid-forties in the evenings and mornings, mid-fifties during the day. But when you don’t have heating, that’s basically freezing.) One night it was so cold (with freezing rain to boot) that we all went to dinner wrapped in blankets. My roommate and fellow session leader extraordinaire Meg actually slept under eight blankets, which is funny because her site, which is right on the lake shore, averages about 120 degrees.
Overall though, the nicest part for me about being at the workshop was just plain being back in Dedza. Dedza is the first place we were ever taken to in Malawi. The place we trained, the place we returned to every time we came back together as a group. After the last training I just assumed I would never be back in Dedza again. It’s a pretty area, it’s in the middle of a pine forest at a fairly high elevation, so the air is always really clean, and the sky is one of the clearest and brightest I have ever seen. I spent one night just standing outside (shivering violently) looking up and around at the scenery. It was very strange, but comforting, to be looking at this mountain I never thought I’d see again in this place I never thought I’d be again, and just being really really happy with the whole situation, even if several of my extremities were about to fall off from frostbite.