let me paint a picture for you

A woman in my village has started a business selling baby hats. Let me say that again: baby hats. And these are not just any typical, functional baby hats to protect from cold and sun – these are glittering, decorative caps for the discerning infant, meant to be perched jauntily on a little head for pure STYLE. And business is booming. Many of the wealthier babies in my village can now be seen wearing tiny top hats in vibrant shades of red and purple, bedazzled in sequins and feathers.

It is so great I almost can’t handle it.

That is all. 

year of the dog: or, what an african village mutt has taught me about pedagogy, patience, and people

When it comes to animals, I’m a fool.

In Malawi alone, I’ve lived with four cats, three chickens, a few injured bats, and more than one serious consideration of a donkey (the idea of having one to ride to school is getting harder to resist – talk me out of it, please.) In recent months, my menagerie has dwindled to one: just Chalo. This piece of canine Velcro remains my ongoing project, my shadow, my bed-warmer, my running partner, my bodyguard, my plus-one to every village event, and honestly, on a tangible, daily, physically-right-there basis, my very best friend in the world right now. He turns one year old this week, and I can’t imagine how different my Peace Corps service would be without him. When nothing goes right – and in Malawi, that’s pretty often – he is a bright little spark who keeps me here, restoring my faith in my ability to teach something. My students might struggle to understand me, but I’ll be damned if I can’t teach a dog to give high-fives.

There’s something very compatible about these twin rites of passage: about raising the first puppy of my adulthood while completing my first year of teaching. They run parallel. They harmonize. The setbacks and successes of training and teaching flow together and stem from the same source (me), and beg the same questions: what am I doing right, and what can I do better? Chalo and the other animals in my life have been responsible for many of these revelations.

Here are the top 5 things I’ve learned about learning as they’ve been teaching me about teaching.

1. Rewards rewards rewards

Anything that is rewarded is repeated. Anything that is rewarded is repeated. Anything that is rewarded is repeated. It’s such a simple principle, but such a powerful one when harnessed properly. A lot of behaviors are bad, but in the moment they’re self-rewarding, so they happen again and again (like when Chalo runs out the gate without permission, or when my kids cut class). And punishment alone often isn’t enough to deter those ingrained bad behaviors, which my school proved to me early on: kids got threatened and punished everyday, but they still followed the same patterns. Negative reinforcement just wasn’t enough incentive to change. But through good old-fashioned counter-conditioning, I’ve been able to make a dent, weighting the behavior I want with big, meaty, happy rewards (praise! candy! high-fives!) so they start following that pattern instead. Positive reinforcement is, in most situations, a much better motivator – and I realized that thanks to Chalo, who didn’t start heeling on a loose leash until I rewarded him for what I wanted, instead of just punishing him for what I didn’t want.

2. Anger and intimidation really don’t work. Fair, firm corrections do.

This is huge, and maybe my biggest objection with the disciplinary style I see in Malawian schools: a lot of threats, a lot of yelling, a lot of bullying, a lot of public shaming. And it is made doubly jarring by the fact that I have been blessed with some really wonderful teachers in my life – true virtuosos who have modeled boundaries, limits, and control without showing anger, silencing a classroom of teenagers with a look, creating an environment where students want to do their best just to impress them. It is the same presence I’ve felt among really talented horsemen: a sense of extraordinary stability, calm, and “feel,” earning respect by giving respect, often without saying a word. I admire and aspire to this.

And no matter how many Malawians say I am wrong, I cling to these ideas: adults should be able to keep their emotional balance among children. Teachers should be better than their students. Intimidation does not belong in a classroom, and rage has no place among dogs, horses, or kids.

3. Review review review

If I think my students know something after one try, they don’t. If I think we’ve reviewed too much, we’ve probably reviewed just barely enough. If I want Chalo to always come when called, he needs to practice in the yard, in the kitchen, by the road, in the market, on a train, in the rain, on a box, on a fox…everywhere. And if I want my kids to use the past progressive tense consistently and correctly, the same idea applies.

4. Expect high standards, but don’t make them impossible to reach.

I’ve seen horses that, if asked to do something beyond their abilities, will just shut down: eyes glazed, a withdrawn expression on their face, every part of them in a far-off place. I’ve seen Chalo check out if he gets too confused about what I’m asking. And I’ve seen the same look from my students if I’ve pushed too far, too fast. I don’t want to bore them, but I also don’t want to demoralize them, so finding the happy medium between a challenge and an impossibility remains a tricky balance for me. I hope to get a better hold on this in my second year.

5. No matter what, and no matter what species you are, ah-ha moments are magical.

Those flashes of cognitive connection are pretty dazzling. I have no idea what I’m going to do after the Peace Corps, but the joy of chasing down that moment could keep me a teacher for the rest of my life. Whether with dogs or with people, I swear to god, there’s nothing better.

Happy birthday, Chalosi.

madam chambezi, year two

To be honest, there’s a lot I’m dreading about my rapidly approaching second year of teaching: the intricate bureaucracy, the sap-slow staff meetings, the focus on punishment instead of praise, the throng of school practices that defy logic, the demands placed on me as a white foreigner with connections and a computer. But there’s one thing I can’t wait for: seeing my kids again.

The student I’d predict to be most likely to go to university is Samson. He announced in the first week that he hoped to become a priest, and he did so in a sort of high-strung, highly enunciated, holier-than-thou manner that made me not like him very much – but he has since become one of my favorites. I marvel at his sincerity, his effort, and his limber way with language. He works miles ahead of anyone else in the class, forms sentences with varied structure, and has definitely reached the same neighborhood as fluency. And he is always smiling.

Jacob is the other star of Form 3, but he’s a little trickier to figure out. He perpetually wears a knowing smirk, and for good reason – usually, he does know. He readily raises his hand and jumps at opportunities to perform, but always with this slow, sly swagger, a posture that seems to say, “I don’t care that everyone’s watching me, but I know everyone is watching me.” Mysteriously, that classroom swagger fades on the street. He lives closer to me than any other student in the school, and yet he never comes up to me on his own. In fact, he is downright shy. I can’t explain it, but obviously the image you choose to project can be complex, especially when you’re 16.

There are other students who are less intellectually flashy, but whom I’ve been lucky to get to know. Petros is one of my favorites – he has the look and walk of a young Barack Obama, but presented in a wildly friendly, almost puppyish way. He drifts easily between the school social circles, but always sits alone in class, seemingly by choice. And he puts a heartwarming degree of effort in his English, despite the fact that it isn’t his best subject, and despite the fact that he is not the brightest in the class. He is hard not to notice.

There are others as well, of course: quiet, contemplative Richard, who prefers to just listen but writes spectacularly when given the chance; sweet, eager Elijah, who leaps at the opportunity to erase the board for me; sassy, straightforward Thoko, who is a girl with the air of a woman; and beautiful, brave Maggie, the first of any of the girls to approach me on her own, often the only girl to speak up in class, and the student who delivered an argument so passionate, cogent, and bold in one of our Life Skills debates that I consciously thought, “I want to be like her.” There’s whisper-voiced Felix, who I sense does not get treated well by his classmates, but whose time will come, and there’s multi-dimensional Benjamin, who runs with a rough crowd and comes to school erratically, but has started to glitter under the right light, turning in essays with surprising fluency and looking at me with more engagement and fascination. It’s hard to say who will still be here next year – my guess is the two suspendees, Bornface and Hastings, have slipped away for good. But others are harder to pin down, like Stanley, the boy who disappeared from school for weeks, was put in jail for attacking a woman, and then came to my house on a Saturday afternoon asking for help with his English. We’ll see.

The ten-year age difference between me and most of the Form 1s creates a much different dynamic. They’re more boisterous and bouncy, eager to talk because they’re less self-conscious about what they don’t know, but terribly difficult to talk to because everything they don’t know happens to be a lot. It’s a very female-driven room, too – Judith, Chance, and Bubile would run the whole show if allowed. (And to be honest, they could, undoubtedly). It’s harder to get to know the Form 1s in the sea of faces, but there are some standouts: adorable Cecelia, always in a pink jacket and ready to offer a guess, even if she is (unfortunately, usually) wrong, and mischievous Chiku, who means well but can never be trusted. (On an end-of-term survey, in response to the question “What did you like about this class?”, he wrote “You because you are so beautiful and wonderful and delicious.” Oh god.) There’s quiet, sharp Prince, who confided in me that he hopes to become a teacher “just like you”; Salayi, whose grades from the beginning of the term are almost unrecognizable compared to her final exam results (in a great way!); and sweet Divason, who sits in the back with rapt, faintly lovestruck attention, sending encouraging smiles my way that really help, whether he realizes it or not.

I admire them and I’m maddened by them. They disappoint me and they amaze me. And I cannot wait to see them in two weeks.

August

…has been a ridiculous whirlwind. Let me count the ways.

•        - stupidly jumping off a truck and landing in a stupid way that has stupidly rendered me unable to walk for the past two weeks
•      -    having my first ever x-ray at my first ever Malawian hospital, and discovering it to be one of the most surreal experiences of my life
•          reuniting with the other 16 remaining members of my original Peace Corps family at our glorious mid-service training
•         catching and playing with wild hedgehogs – a phrase I never imagined I would utter in Malawi
•           meeting the nearly 140 other volunteers in-country (many of them for the first time ever) at an all-volunteer conference in Lilongwe, and finding it both invigorating and overwhelming
•         witnessing the swear-in of the 20 new education volunteers, administered by the Director of Peace Corps
•         chatting with the U.S. Ambassador to Malawi over a Fanta…while limping ridiculously
•        accidentally brushing off the U.S. Ambassador to Malawi when she apparently said to me, “I hope your heel heals soon!”, and I limped away (ridiculously) and ignored her. Good-bye, career in Foreign Service.
•         celebrating the 50^th anniversary of Peace Corps Malawi by attending a gala at Kamuzu Palace, the home of President Joyce Banda…while limping ridiculously
•         giving a speech in Chitumbuka in front of the President, the Ambassador, the Director of Peace Corps, and Vanessa Kerry…while limping ridiculously
•         participating in a dance circle with the President…while limping ridiculously

Here’s to the next ridiculous 12 months.

ku amerika

I’ve now spent the past two Independence Days in the company of government-issued friends in a dusty, faraway land. And in the months between those two fourths of July, they have taken on deeper meaning, as I regularly catch myself fantasizing about a place where things are easier: where people show up on time, where I am not a spectacle, and where I do not lie awake thinking about all the different kinds of sandwiches, unable to sleep through all the Pavlovian drool. Mostly – and quite notoriously, at this point – I cannot think of the United States without feeling a huge, swelling appreciation, and a subsurface urge to cry. Malawi has made a sentimental patriot out of me. From 5,000 miles away, I finally see how incredible we are: how rare and precious it is to come from a hodge-podge nation of mongrels held tenuously together by the ideal that we are all the same, that we are born free, that we deserve to be happy. We fail, over and over again, to live up to these ideals, but still we reach for them – and that is extraordinary.

And yet I know, on some level, that I dream of a cartoon America. In July I went back home, and I saw something with more shadows, more complexity. I heard the verdict of the Trayvon Martin case while sitting in a Burger King. The only other diners were construction workers, sitting startlingly separate and in stone-faced silence: black men at one table, white men at another. I went to a public forum where people in my small Missouri town voiced opinions about a proposed human rights ordinance that would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation – and my jaw dropped at some of the things that were said. A bevy of citizens stepped up to announce, “I’ve never seen anybody complaining of [discrimination] in our town, so it’s a non-issue. We’re wasting our time here.” I couldn’t stop thinking of Malawi, where homosexuality has long been illegal, and of how many battles we all have left to fight.

In late June, in the middle of my mid-service “what am I even doing here?” crisis, I was given an incredible gift: being one of the first people to meet the group of twenty new Peace Corps volunteers. I was with them when they experienced, for the first time, the very things I have become numb to: bumping along in the backseat of a range rover on a red dirt road, dodging goats and chickens, sensing our mere presence send ripples in every direction, leaving a trail of stares, waves, and cheers in our slipstream. They were delighted. They were enraptured. They found it beautiful. And I did too, just by seeing these Americans’ fresh reactions to this wild, wonderful place that I find so frustrating, so infuriating, so slow, so joyous, so hilarious, so warm. It was so powerful I nearly cried, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of it just now, as I hugged my family good-bye for another year, choking back a very different kind of tears in the security checkpoint.

It’s easy for us Peace Corps volunteers to paint one-dimensional pictures of America and Malawi, to pine for everything we had on the other side – but god, we have so much, in these perfect people, in these two deeply imperfect worlds, and in all the gifts scattered between them.

encounters with the acirema

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about good intentions, development practices, and that famous article about the Acirema people, with all their unfathomable body-related habits, their tile-lined altars to hygiene, and their masochistic, horror-inspiring beautification rituals. (Spoiler alert, if you never took an Intro to Anthropology class: the Acirema are us, and we are weird.)

I say this because my village imposes two competing yet somehow coexistent roles on me: one as “hapless, naïve outsider who must be looked after and taken care of,” the other as “encyclopedic expert on all things in the universe.” You would think these roles would be mutually exclusive, but somehow they are not. At the beginning of rainy season, when bizarre thatched oval pods started cropping up in inconspicuous gullies and side-paths around my village, I hypothesized about their possible uses (e.g. mushroom growing nursery, compost storage area, wilderness chicken coop, or sexy rendezvous meeting place for two humans lying really close). And we all laughed when I learned how wrong I was, and how obvious the answer would be to a Malawian. They were traps for catching flying ants. Duh.

But a few Sundays ago, when a package from Canada arrived at one of the churches in my village, I was thrust into the opposing role. The box was filled with toys and trinkets, sent with the best of intentions, and expected to bring some small joy to children imagined to have very little. But in reality, the gifts ushered in confusion more than anything else. No one (not even the teachers I work with, many of whom own laptops and televisions and are comparatively worldly) had any idea what these items were or what they were for.

And so, over the course of several days, dozens of people approached me with these Acireman artifacts. First they skirted around the issue with the elaborate greeting ritual – a string of how-are-yous, how-did-you-wakes, and how-is-home that circled around the central topic and approached it politely from the side, following the Malawian concept of courtesy by way of circuitousness. (As opposed to the American concept of courtesy by way of efficiency.) Then and only then would they show me their item: a canister of play-dough, a yo-yo, a bottle of mouthwash. And I would laugh each time – not at them, but at the serendipity of seeing an ordinary item from home and realizing that it is the first one I’ve seen in almost a year. I now react the same way to airplanes. (Or rather, airplane. I’ve seen one in the past twelve months.)

I found myself being presented items from my culture and explaining their uses in simple language, while kind of enjoying the Malawian interpretations even more. The most common questions: “What does it do?” followed by “So, you do not eat it?”

Chance, one of my Form 1 students, called me over at one point. “Madam, can you identify this one?” She did not have the item, but rather a rough sketch of it, which she narrated in faltering English. “It is a long instrument, with ujeni [whatsit]…different colors and…I don’t know, it is what, Madam?”

I had no idea what she was talking about, and after several wrong guesses, I asked her to just bring it the next day.

When she pulled a deck of watercolors out of her bag the following morning, I laughed again – in part because I hadn’t seen art supplies for such a long time, and in part because all of her descriptions were so far from the actual reality of a watercolor set. The artifacts of Acirema culture are totally inscrutable through the eyes of the outsider, even when they are reflected back upon an Acireman.

I demonstrated the basic idea of watercolors on a piece of paper, a crowd gathered.

“Ohhhhh, we thought it was for this,” one girl said, sweeping the paintbrush over her eyelids.

And as they admired the cat I had painted, a boy asked for clarification: “So, Madam, it is not for eating?”

“No Paul, it is not for eating.”

 “It is for ujeni,” said Chance, “for beauty pictures.”

note to self: you're living the dream. don't forget it.

I just wrote a rather lengthy diatribe about my recent frustrations, including, but not limited to: encountering fundraising roadblocks that feel downright insurmountable, rallying (with little success) against misplaced priorities that are hurting our students, witnessing Ministry of Education officials laughing about endemic sexual violence in schools, witnessing my own headmaster announce that boys deserve education more than girls do, witnessing countless people declare that women wearing trousers turn good men into rapists, fending off my own share of increasingly weird unwanted advances, and seeing an uglier side of myself come out -- one who suspects the worst in people, who gets stingy with smiles in order to protect herself, and who loses her emotional balance and proclaims someone else's beliefs "patently ridiculous."

But then I made a misclick and everything I wrote disappeared. I'm going to take that as a sign.

Here's what's really good right now.

I'm learning cool things in beautiful places.

I'm having adventures.

I live somewhere where THIS is just a short ride away from...

...this.

...and this.

And most of all, I have this wildly wonderful job where I get to spend my days talking about books and words with sweet, hilarious people who desperately WANT me to be there. 

And I get to bring my dog to work. 

an alphabetic tour of life as of late

A is for absurdity, which colors my life with a heavy brush these days. Here’s a sample.

            A conversation in the staff room:

Mrs. Mbowe: “Jaime. I must ask you something. It is quite serious.”

Me: “Sure, of course, what is it?”

Mrs. Mbowe: “Well, are you sure I’m not disturbing you?”

Me: “Of course not, go ahead, please.”

Mrs. Mbowe: “Okay, well, I must ask you: Why does Chalo not wear shoes? How can you let your son walk without shoes?”

My headmaster, during a beginning-of-term assembly, threatening our students about the dangers of violating the dress code: “I WILL SWALLOW YOU ALIVE.”

There’s this new kid in my neighborhood – surely no older than ten – and he has inordinate spunk, this sort of intimidating aura of confidence, and an inexplicable London accent. His name his Gomez, and he is a fascinating mystery to me. Our first conversation went like this:

Kid [looking up from a game of marbles as I walk by]: “You failed to introduce me.”

Me: “I’m sorry?”

Kid: “You failed to introduce me.”

Me: “Who?”

Kid: “You. To me.”

Me: “Oh. I’m Jaime.”

Kid: “Gomez.”

Me: “Gomez?”

Kid: “Gomez.”

Me: “That’s a Mexican name.”

Kid: “Thank you.”

B is for bananas, which I will confidently assert are the most consistently mediocre of fruits. (Mushy, disagreeable texture and a sweetness that, though not exactly unpleasant, is definitely forgettable? Ugh. Give me a mango, a fruit that exists on purpose.) But I’m definitely in the minority here, because when the banana-selling ladies come around, the air in the staff room changes in a big way. One teacher announces, “Ntochi! Ntochi are here!” and the others pop up from their desks like prairie dogs, echoing “Ntochi ntochi ntochi!” and hurrying out to get a look before anyone else. Malawians do not, as a rule, like to hurry, but they do when bananas are involved.

As a loyal customer of the avocado man, the mango ladies, and the occasional guava woman, I don’t go out to see the banana ladies anymore. I have not gone out to see the banana ladies since November, actually. But this pattern seems to escape the other teachers, whom I still have to explain it to every time the bananas come. Every. Time. It is now April, and I had to explain it again today.

“Jaime. Ntochi. Bananas are here.”

“Oh, yes, thank you, I know – I just don’t really like them that much.”

A ripple of surprise. “What?” “What do you mean?” “You don’t like bananas?” “She doesn’t like bananas?!”

“…no, not really.”

“But you must! It is so good to eat bananas! There are so many kinds – sweet, very sweet, not really sweet, fat, very fat, very very fat…”

The best part is when the teachers walk back in with their bounties: armfuls and bunches of bananas of different sizes and colors. They always have big anticipatory grins on their faces, and they sometimes even pump their fists, cheer, and announce (with disproportionate gusto if you ask me): “I am eating BANANAS toniiiiiiiight.”

I have tried every type of banana. I have learned all of their indigenous names. I cannot muster that kind of enthusiasm. The magic eludes me.

C is for chimponde, the word for “peanut butter,” which is dangerously close to chiponde, the word for “dead person.” I learned this the hard way.

D is for devaluation, which is currently happening to the Malawian kwacha at an alarming rate. Prices are rising everywhere, fellow teachers are complaining about their low pay, and people are forming long lines outside ADMARC centers in an attempt to get fertilizer before it runs out (…and I’ve seen them lining up at 8:00pm just to get a good place in line. It’s a grim, foreboding sign in a country where people’s survival depends on their garden, and where the economy is already downright fragile. I fear for the coming months).

E is for eggs. So I imagine, at least. The grand total my hen has produced so far: 0.

F is for “foolish,” a word that recently caused quite a stir when one of the Form 2 students anonymously wrote the phrase “foolish teacher” on a desk. The staff decided to get to the bottom of the mystery through – I kid you not – handwriting analysis.

G is for gestures, my favorite of which is a sort of half-high-five, half-handshake, half-hand-slap that is shared when someone says something funny (which actually leaves you with one-and-a-half greetings, if you were counting, and which is quite fitting because I never know when it is supposed to end).

H is for “hippopotamus in the water,” a phrase one of my favorite teachers likes to use a lot, and which I think pretty well sums up the absurd environment at my school. One day the other teachers speculated about its possible meanings: some guessed it to be about the unwieldiness of an enormous blubbery animal, while others assumed it referred to the grace of a creature doing exactly what it was born to do. Both were wrong.

            Mr. Muyira: “Oh, it means nothing.”

            Mrs. Mbowe: “What do you mean? It has no meaning? Why do you say it?”

            Mr. Muyira: “…because I love words and I love hippos.”

            And then he proceeded to repeat the phrase “a hippo in ze vata, a hippo in ze vata” in an increasingly exaggerated accent, building to the grand finale: “Look everyone, I am French!”

            I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

I is for ice cream, which I recently realized I probably technically could keep at my house if I really wanted to/really saved up for a refrigerator. Informal poll: should I save up $100 or so to buy a mini-fridge as a one-year anniversary present to myself? (A lot of people in my village already have one, and it would be a game-changer in my village life, but I don’t want to spoil myself.)

J is for Jane, which a surprising number of people in my village still insist is my name.

K is for “Kid or Kid?,” the favorite game of many a Peace Corps volunteer. When you hear an ear-splitting wail on a minibus, at church, at school, at a bar, or in your bed at 9:00pm, you ask yourself and anyone around you the question: “Is that a (goat) kid or a (human) kid?” The answer often surprises you.

L is for laughter, and there’s a lot of it in my life – coming from me and created by me, sometimes intentionally, usually not.

M is for mami, a term of utterly platonic endearment that I’m pretty endeared by myself. Usually people call me “Madam,” a term of respect that I appreciate but feel kind of distant about, but I get the occasional “Yes, mami!” and “Hello, mama!” And I love it every time.

M is also for mononucleosis, which might be the funniest disease you can get while living alone in an African village. And boy did I get it.

N is for nsima, the staple food of Malawi. I ate it everyday for the first three months and have gone to drastic measures to avoid it ever since then. As I stretch toward the one-year mark, I’ve been building stronger barricades around my culturally sacred idols, the things I want to keep holy for the sake of my own sanity: namely, the right to privacy and the right to eat whatever I want. And I never want to eat nsima ever again.

O is for (o)rranged marriage (whatever – just pretend). Apparently my headmaster (who is sort of a boisterous, larger-than-life character) has been approaching male volunteers in my group and offering them his sisters’ hands in marriage. I can’t leave George alone for a moment.

P is for puppy, who is basically all I talk about these days and who is getting harder and harder to raise as he explodes into full-fledged 7-month-old adolescence in a place where crate training is laughably nonexistent. People here either a) let their dogs run loose and allow them to live as scavengers, or b) keep them chained up their entire lives. I refuse to do either of those things. (So far the moral high ground has cost me the following: most of the pages of my Peace Corps cookbook, an especially precious pair of wool socks, a favorite necklace, a radio, and several rolls of toilet paper. This was possibly the most upsetting loss. That stuff is important.)

I took Chalo to the city to see the veterinarian about two months ago, and I learned several things:

-       Young white women in Africa have no trouble getting rides. Young white women with dogs in Africa DO have trouble getting rides.

-       It is easier to sell this through a kind of entrapment: hide the dog behind you, and do not reveal him until the car has already come to a full stop and you have smiled at the driver and greeted him in the vernacular. Better yet: get a body part in the car so they can’t leave without you.

-       When the driver starts to pull away in fear and you are pleading, “No, he loves everyone! He will sleep on my lap the whole time,” make sure the dog in question did not just sit down on a swarm of army ants, because if he does his eyes will start rolling wildly at an unseen demon. He will spin, snarl, snap at the air, and twist around in a rodeo-like way while you shout, “He doesn’t bite! He is calm and gentle! Really!”

-       Make sure all the army ants are off of him before you climb in the car, or the dog in question will continue to writhe, moan, and flash his teeth for the next half-hour. The mother sitting next to you will cower and hide her baby.

Q is for questions, which my students are getting more and more comfortable asking me. Within five minutes of my return to school after a week-long absence, I had this gem of a conversation with a Form 4 student:

            Boy: “Hello, Madam, good morning. I have some questions for you.”

            Me: “Sure! Go ahead.”

            Boy: “Firstly, how was your trip? Secondly, why is ‘practice’ sometimes spelled ‘practice’ and sometimes spelled ‘practise’? Lastly, what is sodomy?”

R is for religious conversations, which I seem to be getting drawn into more and more lately, especially on public transport. There was the man on the bus who asked me if I was born-again and did not find my answer of “No, once was enough” very funny. There was the man who first asked for my hand in marriage, then my phone number, then tried to get me to join his church – and when all of these failed, he tried to get me to give him private prayer lessons. (What does that even mean?) Then there was the day when the staff room practically burst into flames over whether women are biblically permitted to wear trousers. And of course there is the general omnipresence of religious talk, especially in a country where Bible Knowledge is a required course, gospel music is played at school, and official gatherings of all kinds always start with a prayer. And then there is me: someone with a lot of deep-seated, highly concentrated, but ultimately very generalized and very private spiritual feeling. Because religious matters are treated very openly but very literally here, I struggle to answer all the questions. I often wish there was a more succinct way to explain, “I was raised Methodist, kind of, I guess, and there are elements of it that move me deeply, but mostly all I know is that I can’t think about the Law of Conservation of Energy without getting goosebumps.” If anybody knows a word for that, let me know.

S is for strikes, which were recently held by civil servants nationwide (teachers included) to demand a raise in salaries that will compensate for the devaluation of the kwacha. I cannot comment upon it, but I can say that the extra sleep I got was exquisite.

T is for kuTengwa, the feminine version of the Chitumbuka word for getting married. (A pretty revealing little linguistic window on the gender dynamics of this culture: kutengwa is only used with women, and it means “to be taken”; kutola is only used with men, and it means “to take.”) And everyone wants to know if I am. Taken, that is. My go-to answer in 2012 was, “No! I’m too young!” But now that I’m 24 that feels a little false even to me, so I’ve started giving lengthier explanations about education, opportunity, adventure, and the fact that the biggest decision of my life isn’t one I intend to make quickly, or even in this decade, necessarily. This can be a difficult thing to explain in a culture where most women my age are mothers – or at a school where, if a girl stops coming to school, the reason is usually that she has gotten married.

U is for uranium, a major export and a very big deal. When trucks full of uranium come barreling through my village, it is quite the picture: everything stops. Women in colorful chitenje slow and turn with teetering buckets of water on their heads, men on their way to the factory pause in the road, and children stop mid-game to watch the long row of semi-trucks zoom by, each vehicle practically screaming “DOLLARS” while flanked by screeching police escorts. Life doesn’t resume until the swirl of red dust comes – the only thing left in its wake.

V is for vula, the word for rain, which practically constitutes a weather emergency around here. Life halts – people come late or don’t come at all, choosing instead to hole up in their houses and sleep. I like this custom.

W is for “WOW,” my favorite (verbal) student response when I brought pictures of my sisters to school. They were unanimously declared staggeringly beautiful. Several kids asked to keep the pictures, and I caught a few boys drawing their likeness on their notebooks. (My favorite non-verbal response was from a little Form 1 boy. I caught him smirking and raising his eyebrows pretty lasciviously at a picture of Maddie.)

W is also for wine, which Chalo spilled and consumed entire bucket of. And that’s how I saw a drunk dog for the first time.

X is for excellent, which is how I feel about the news that my deputy headmaster stays up late at night writing essays for one of those U.S.-based cheating websites. The irony of the whole thing is sort of infuriating but gorgeous to me: a lazy college student orders a 10-page paper on the Ottoman Empire, and a Malawian man who speaks English as his third language researches the topic using 50-year-old textbooks in a dilapidated storage room in a rural African village and gets paid $100 to do it. More power to him.

Y is for yembe, the word for mango. I’m already counting down the months until next mango season.

Z is for za kuno, the phrase for “come here,” because I’m running out of steam and I don’t know any other “z” words. 

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Malawian

            I’ve decided there’s a reason why movies about idealistic young teachers in rough, undersupplied schools often hinge on the redemptive power of language. It’s because the cliché is true: the written word breaks down walls.

            I introduced a weekly journal ritual this term to address a few issues: to build up my students’ writing stamina, to push them to use the language more, to encourage creativity over regurgitation, to give me a better way of measuring progress, and really just to get to know them better (something I desperately wanted from the beginning).

            They’ve surpassed my expectations in wonderful ways. Kids who used to approach assignments with lackadaisical disinterest can now be found bowed over their desks, writing past the bell, and smiling shyly when they hand in their work. There are kids who use their journal as a chance to keep an ongoing dialogue with me, kids who spill secrets and share dreams, and kids who sign off every week with “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to write about this” or “Thank you for listening, Madam.”

The first prompt I ever gave them was this: “Tell me about a memory from your childhood.” Their recollections were so distinctively African, so unintentionally humorous, and yet so touchingly universal – the smell of mangoes, the trauma of early loss, the freedom of playing in mud puddles, and the joy of hanging out with your dad. They made me laugh, they made me cry, and they paint a picture of life in this country better than I ever could.

I cannot resist sharing a few of them. So, behold, a sampling of the mingled sweetness and tragedy of a Malawian childhood.

Games

“When I was a child I liked playing different games, as well as crying and beating my friends. I was good at feeding my grandfather’s goats, cows, and sheeps [sic]. I was also good at running when my mother called me to get a bath.” – Nyuma

“I played football so I enjoy on that because I am a player man. Am have power energy.” – Jordan

“Firstly is that when I was young I was not respecting my parents because my mind was not yet ready to think about respect. Secondly is the type of playings. I and my friends we were playing in places where as I’m talking I can’t play in that places. These places are: in the stagnant water, in the rain, in the mud, etc.” –Jacob

“I played with toys like cow, farm cart, axe, hoe, and bridge.” – Benson

[I love this. An axe as a toy – how Malawian.]

“We were taking wires and making cars for playing with, as like the real car like Toyota.” – Jacob

“When I am watching things like basketball I fill happy and not only that but comfortable.” – Maxwell

“I was like playing bao game, draft, playing football very much. I also liked to go to the forest to pick natural fruits. I was also like swimming at Kasito dam.” – Benard

“When the rain were raining me and me friend we were dancing by the rain and we were very happy.” – Jacob

Food

“…also I was unforgiveness or glutton glumandaiser [???]. If someone have got snatched my food I was crying.” – Wellings

“It was very easy to get food without any problem.” – Jacob

“My favorite childhood memory I remember that when my mother come back to work every day she was take chips or a biscuit. So now she didn’t take chips or biscuit and everyday when I come back from school my sister first hugs me and she asks me Thoko today you are learning about what?” - Thoko

“In 1999 when I was young my mother was telling that I love so much eating bananas and up to now still I am loving bananas.” – Junior

Violence and Punishment

“I don’t want to slap my friend because am very happy when I have with many friends.” – Lontia

 “At first day at secondary school near Mzuzu, the headmaster told me to sweep in the staff room and around the classes. Because I was too late and he struck me. I was surprised.” – Peter C

“When I was starting my school in Standard 1, I was bothered so much with unkindful guys who were in high classes. They seized my notebooks, pencil, and other school material. They ran away from the school campus. I was started crying and when the teacher came it was when they have already gone, so I told the teacher about it. Later she asked me to show those guys. So I was helpless because I was not recognized them.

So this is one thing I remember in my life.” – Richard

“When I was childhood I like to beat my friend. Also I like to crying and I liked my mother to live together each and every time. […] If my father say I don’t have a money I start crying. I crying crying and my father give 20 kwacha and buying some sweets and biscuits then I stop crying. My mother was slap me because I was say my daughter if you grow up you have to be a thief because you love money so much. This is all.” – Maurice

“When I was a child I liked to cry and sleeping for many hours. The one day when I crying my mother she slap me with a stick and tell me don’t cry again. And that day may don’t eat anything with a whole day.

Another day when I sleep under a tree the snake was fallen down from tree and my brother came to pull me, so that snake was ascending in that tree again. From that days when these two kind of bad behavior I was change because I knows that this is a childish behavior.” – Milliam

Memories

“There was a lot of things which I was following when I was young. I cannot forget some of it. And also I already forgot some of it. I remember that when it is Sunday day I always going to church to pray. And during the school day I didn’t want to go to school without any food in my bag. Also I didn’t want to miss any period in the classroom. If a period has gone to tell us that it is time to go to our home, I was not going home directly but I was going to the bush with my friend to pick some masuku [a small sour reddish fruit that grows wild here. It defies description and I have no idea what it is in English]. And I’m arriving late in the home. My mother always she is chatting to me day and day.” – Maggie

“My parents were living in village therefore my life is of village. My parents brought me up in the spiritual life and this made me to grow honest and kind. Firstly, the most interesting thing is that when I was 3 years old my parents commanded me that there is God, the creator of the universe. When I was 5 years old I had several question in my heart about God. If God created everything include a man, now who created God?” – Samson

“I like my mother because I was living with my mother for a long time. My father was die in 1998. I am growing up with my mother start reading with my mother this is a reason I like my mother.” – Isobel

“I was young in 1997. My father buy me something like shoes, caps, fishnet, not books. And those day my father encouraged me to school and gave structure when complained school. A money is not problem because next you can be educated man it’s easy to find jobs.” –Dan

“In 2006 when I was in Blantyre I saw a person who his name was Bololo. He was a very good grand. He was loving babies.” – Junior

“I remember that my mother was liked to buy a pair of shoes for me because I disliked to walk barefooted. When the time come I was six years old my mother sent me to start reading. I was working hard although I was young I remember in standard one, term one, I was pass number two. My mother gives me a drink and biscuit. I was happy and my mother was happy too.” - Isobel

[The 2002 famine was a common motif in the journal entries, made especially striking on a personal level because I remember that year so clearly in my own childhood. This student, who wrote about it with unusual introspection and maturity, impresses me on a regular basis.)

“If I can remember in my childhood, I was enjoying without knowing that there are problems. It was in 2002 when there was starvation. My parents and sisters could complain about hunger but to me it was nothing. […] Indeed childhood is very interesting because one can enjoy even if one can face difficulties. But to child does not take matter.” – Samson

Southern African Living Magazine

I have shelves now, and I don’t live out of a suitcase anymore! …six months after moving in.

If Southern African Living were a real publication, it would probably have recipes for ant-and-avocado salads and articles about decorating your pit latrine (1^st step: remove spiders, 2^nd step: add potpourri). And my house might be in it. So wallow in visions of my domestic bliss and feast your eyes on all this TALULAR chic.* Mostly this is an excuse to show you pictures of my dog.

*TALULAR = Teaching and Learning Using Locally Available Resources. It’s not just a catchy acronym or a means of making do in an African classroom; it’s a way of life.

Sometimes there are idyllic sun-soaked afternoons.

And sometimes there are Old Testament-style disasters. These are flying ants (harmless, delicious, but annoying and messy for the way they crawl under doors, fling themselves at lights, and then proceed to die all over your floor).

changing lives with David Attenborough

Best moments from the first meeting of Wildlife Club, which featured the experience of watching BBC’s Planet Earth with a roomful of Malawian teenagers, many of whom had never seen a nature documentary before:

- a collective cringe of “Eeeeeeeeeeee” in response to shots of windswept, snow-laden Arctic landscapes

- a collective “Ahhh, pepa, pepa” (sorry, sorry!) in response to my explanation that my homeland usually has at least three to four months of winter, followed by amazement that humans can even survive in places where it snows.

- explaining the lifestyle of the Inuit to kids who think 50-degree weather is worthy of fur-trimmed coats.

- explaining that the taiga is not the same as a tiger.

- David Attenborough states that all living things depend on the sun for their energy. A hearty round of “Yes! Yes yes! The man is right!” hums through the room.

- utter astonishment at the news that many Northern Hemisphere birds travel south when winter comes.

- another collective “Ahhh, pepa pepa,” this time at a male bird of paradise’s failed attempts to woo a pretty lady. (One Form 4 boy knew he was doomed before anyone else: “I can already see that he is not really impressing her.”)

- At the sight of a pack of short-haired, black-faced African wild dogs, the entire room shouts, “Chalo!” My dog hears his name and comes crashing out of the forest, peels across the school grounds, tears into the classroom, and collapses happily in the crowd.

- As that same pack of African wild dogs chases down an impala, the room takes on the the feel of a football game, full of shouts (in Chitumbuka) of “RUN! FASTER!” and “INTO THE WATER.” The impala leaps into a lake, leaving the dogs waiting at the shore. A roar of applause.

- A troop of baboons wades through the Okavango Delta. “Hey, those are our relatives!”

- A whole smorgasbord of moments of communal awe, shared with people seeing many of these things for the first time, which served as a good reminder of several things I already know but need to get booster shots for every now and then: the waxing and waning of the seasons IS incredible, animals ARE awesome, and the world we live in IS staggering.

And I walked home that day with that Antoine de Saint Exupéry quote playing on repeat in my brain: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

Portraits

With the much-feared national exams looming just a few months away, the students in Forms 2 and 4 were in need of official IDs, and I was asked to take the photos. Over the space of several weeks, with a red cloth draped over a spare blackboard in the shadow of a mango tree, I took a portrait of every kid in Day School (the 7:15am-1:35pm regular sessions, which I teach) and every non-traditional student in Open School (the abbreviated afternoon sessions, which are dominated by middle-aged learners). And the results were kind of beautiful. Credit it to the magic of rainy-season-filtered natural light, or to the fact that I know these students well and see them everyday, but there was something pretty moving about putting a camera in front of people who don't get the chance to be photographed very often and watching them transform. Clowns suddenly affected a glassy-faced calm, smiles bloomed across shy girls' faces, and some hammed it up in a way that only Malawians seem to understand (with a forced far-off gaze and a pained expression).

Chalo also had an ID photo taken to add fuel to the village-wide running joke that he's enrolling next term, which is being taken more and more seriously with every new word he learns, and which is a joke that will never ever ever get old.

The Seven-Month Itch

I recently celebrated my seven-month Malawiversary by spending the day sick in bed, which gave ample time to think about everything that feels so far away, but also to take stock of all the gifts that have been ushered in.

 [Inspired by the lovely Rita, whose blog can be found here: http://malawhee.tumblr.com/.  If you don’t know her that’s really a shame because she gives great hugs and her favorite song is “Ignition (Remix).”]

I ache for:

-       The easy, unapologetic intimacy that only comes with people you’ve known and loved for years.

-       Libraries. Bookstores.

-       Transport that does not feel like one of Dante’s nine layers of hell.

-       Knowing what is going on, exactly when it is going to happen, and being able to count on that.

-       Foods that are the subject of many lusty daydreams, including but not limited to: whole wheat bread, dark green spinach-based salads drizzled in balsamic vinaigrette and sprinkled with sunflower seeds and feta cheese, pineapple pizza, salmon, tofu stir fries, chocolate chip cookies, macaroni and cheese, asparagus, brownies, baked potato soup with cheddar and chives, grilled cheese, honey mustard, poppyseed muffins, burritos, yogurt, General Tso’s chicken, chocolate milkshakes.

-       Fast-paced banter. Wordplay that needs no translation.

-       Resources. Everything classrooms have that I always took for granted: posters, markers, crayons, books, paper, electricity, running water.

-       Anonymity.

-       Feeling truly head-to-toe clean.

-      The United States as an idea – what we’re about, where we’ve been, and what we can be.

I really appreciate what I’ve gained, though:

- a community.

- a belief that humans were meant to live in villages like this.

- a general laissez-faire joyousness.

- a work environment where people come in laughing and leave laughing.

- a fruit lover’s paradise, with pineapples, mangoes, papaya, and avocado galore depending on the season.

- a renewed conviction in the transformative power of education.

- a feeling of adventure that permeates even the mundane (e.g. riding the bus! ordering furniture! buying tomatoes! look at me, look at how integrated I am!).

- the ability to walk everywhere I need to go on a daily basis.

- 100 funny, sweet, generally hard-working students who are openly appreciative and (usually) a joy to be around

- prowess in a minority language that is spoken by few outsiders.

- a taste of what it feels like to be a local celebrity.

- the feeling that I have become someone that 10-year-old me would have wanted to meet: an independent woman doing interesting things while surrounded by animals in a small African country.

- an untouchable inner strength, getting steelier with every passing day.