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.
