ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Chalo is getting downright strapping. And you don’t have to take my word for it.

Two rave reviews from Mrs. Mbowe, who is one of my favorite teachers at my school for reasons that will be self-explanatory:

-                    “He is becoming as handsome as my late husband.”

-                    “I love his blackness. It inspires me.”

See? So handsome.

Annie is getting more beautiful.

Elsa is getting braver. So are the bats.

I'm getting tanner.

Everyone is learning to sit in one place for more than a few seconds.
(Or, in Chalo's case, for thirteen hours. He traveled to the lake
with me over Christmas and endured the hot sun, the confines
of my lap, a nightmarish bike taxi that literally almost killed him, and
drunk strangers kissing him on the mouth. What a champ.)

First step of my first bucket of homemade wine. That's mashed-up mango, yeast, and sugar.

And the second step, several weeks later. It tasted better than it looks.

r-e-s-p-e-c-t

A conversation I had this morning with my neighbor Luca:

Luca:    Madam, your chicken, she has been captured by a predator. A very big cat.

Me:       Oh. [surprised]

             Oh. [a little sad]

 Oh. [a little relieved because I see sweet, placid, quiet Diana Ross in the distance, which     means Aretha Franklin was the victim. Aretha was…difficult.]

Oh, that is sad. So now Diana is alone.

Luca:   Yes, you must eat her.

I’m not going to eat Diana Ross. But I am going to tell a story about Aretha Franklin, the big, brassy-voiced hen who (visually, at least) was everything I hoped my first chicken would be: quaintly scalloped feathers and sturdy, faintly prehistoric self-carriage, like a Saurischian-inspired teapot. Chickens can be beautiful. Chickens can be dangerous. Aretha was both.

I found her roosting on my roof once. I found her sleeping on my bed twice. I found her on my kitchen table too many times to count. I lost thousands of kwacha in precious food because of her. (Literally fives of dollars.) I was jolted from deep slumber at least a few times each week because I was certain I heard the telltale flap-and-squawk of a chicken leaping someplace she isn’t supposed to be. (She was actually innocent in this case because auditory hallucinations are a side effect of the anti-malarial medication I’m on – but it does paint a picture of the mental hold she had on me.)

Her magnum opus was fittingly presented to me in the most devastating way possible.

I came home one day in November to find my kitchen torn apart: bags of flour ripped open and flung across the cement; just-bought tomatoes partially eaten and thrown on the ground; a loaf of bread pecked apart lengthwise, so that half of it was gone but all of it was inedible; Aretha dozing on my hot plate amid a Jackson Pollock painting of her own feces. But then, lo! There on the floured floor, to complete the hellish scene: a single egg lain in the middle of it, like an offering.

She contributed absolutely nothing of any value after that.

R.I.P. Aretha Franklin (2012-2013)

We barely knew ye…and yet, we also kind of felt like we knew ye enough

Moments

Life in Malawi has mostly leveled into a cozy plateau of normalcy, but there are still little surprises – the best of which are the moments when all the joints pop into place, all the hinges swing open, and I’m left internally chanting, “I live here. I am doing this. I can handle anything.”

One such moment: I’m waiting on the road for a lift to the post office. It’s a slow day, I’ve been standing in the midday sun for nearly 45 minutes, and a minibus finally appears.

“How much to Chikangawa?” I ask in Chitumbuka, feeling sixteen pairs of Malawian eyes swivel onto me (and up me, and down me, and back again).

“400 kwacha,” the conductor says, shamelessly giving me the mzungu price.

“Pssh. Ah-ah. 200.” I scoff, sunburned and impatient, feeling crisp in more ways than one.

The conductor nods in assent. I step aboard.

The entire minibus erupts in applause, accompanied by excited murmurs of “She knows it! The girl understands! She is Malawian!”

I get congratulatory high-fives from six people.

***

Experience and common sense have carved out a special category of exceptions to my “chat with anybody and everybody” rule: men yelling at me from bars. On one particular Sunday afternoon, when a slurring gentleman beckoned me to come closer, I pulled out all my signature moves. I avoided eye contact. I didn’t smile. I kept walking. I said, in the vernacular, that I was busy and going home.

But this one was persistent. He stumbled across the market and caught up to me. It had all the characteristic signs of a confession of love and/or commentary on my appearance and/or inquisition about my lack of a husband at the ripe old age of 23. I slowed down anyway (a little huffily, I’ll admit).

But this is why the benefit of the doubt is so great: people surprise you.

“Madam, you are teaching one of my children,” he said. “And I just wanted to tell you…thank you. You are doing a great job. Thank you so much.”

And then he shook my hand graciously – chastely, even – and staggered back to the bar.

***

During a listening exercise with my Form 1s, I read a passage about Nelson Mandela to my kids, asking them to write down the important details. They seemed confused.

“Madam, who?”

“Nelson Mandela,” I repeated, surprised that they hadn’t heard of him.

“Who?”

“Nelson Mandela – he was the president of South Africa.”

A wave of recognition passed. “Ooohhhhhh. Madam, you mean Nail-sohn Mahn-day-luh.”

“Right, Nell-sun Man-dell-uh.”

Uproarious laughter. “Nooooo, Madam! Nail-sohn Mahn-day-luh!”

“Nail-sohn Manh-day-luh,” I said in my best African accent.

And the class burst into a sort of half-laugh, half-cheer, which is one of my favorite Malawian idiosyncrasies, and which makes it impossible not to fall in love with this place a little more every time I hear it:

“AHahahaha [pause for breath] EEEEEEHHHHH!”

***

Near the end of the first term, news broke that several kids had dropped out of school to get married. A special assembly was held to address the issue, which is actually quite a widespread problem in Malawi.

Picture yours truly undermining that seriousness in front of the whole school. Tears pooled in my eyes from holding in the laughter as my headmaster announced in total earnestness, à la Mean Girls, “If you get married at an early age, you will die.”

***

I’m walking with purpose and a puppy, scanning a long mental to-do list. A man on the road calls out to me with a common question: “What is the name of your little dog?”

 “Chalo,” I say.

            “Madam, I could sue you!” he shouts in mock outrage. “You have stolen my nephew’s name!”

            I pause in the dust – here’s somebody with a set of jokes I’ve never heard before. “Oh, please don’t! I don’t have a lawyer!” I plead.

“You need to get one. How long has your dog had this name?”

“About four weeks,” I reply.

“Ah, my nephew has had his name for five years. You are sure to lose in court, Madam.”

The charade gains momentum and keeps rolling, building into several minutes of rapid-fire smack-talk about an imaginary lawsuit. But then it occurs to me that there has been a misunderstanding.

“Oh, but sir – do you mean Charles? This dog is a Tumbuka. His name is Chalo. You know…like chalo,” I explain, gesturing to the soil at our feet and the hills on the horizon.

            The man nods in understanding.

“Ah, I don’t have a case then,” he says dryly, tipping his hat to me and boarding a passing minibus.

****

I loaned a six-month-old copy of Scientific American to one of my best Malawian friends, Blessings – a security guard who also happens to be one of the most intellectually vibrant people I’ve met in a long time.

When he finished it he came to me breathless, in part from dashing to catch up with me, but also from the sheer thrill of what he had read. “Madam. MADAM. That book – I must tell you – I have loved it so very much.”

            Between gasps, he spouted a string of statistics from the article, and I was reminded why we are friends. For twenty minutes, we nerded out over neurons, evolution, and super-computers, talking about the scope of human potential, reveling in shared amazement at how far we can go and how much we can know – but also at how much we still don’t know – and feeling quite big in light of that smallness.

            When Blessings turned back to his post at the main compound, I spent the rest of the walk home in a misty-eyed haze for reasons that came from all directions:

-                    partially because mutual nerding-out in a completely noncompetitive, pure-hearted way is my absolute favorite way of bonding with another person

-                    partially because it’s a pretty rare thing to find in general

-                    partially because I don’t get enough of it here and I miss it terribly

-                    partially because, in a country where books are scarce and reading for pleasure is considered a bit odd, it’s truly extraordinary

-                    but mostly because of the sheer poignancy of finding such unassuming curiosity in a person who, for reasons beyond his control, never finished high school.

            Blessing’s story is, unfortunately, all too common in this country. Orphaned as a teenager, he moved in with grandparents; they could not afford to pay his school fees (equivalent to about $15 USD per term), so his education was put on hold for more than a decade. Just this year, at the age of 33, he took his secondary-level exams, but he is now dangling in a crucial limbo, waiting to hear about the national exam scores that will ultimately decide whether he can start pursuing the dream he won’t stop talking about: enrolling in university correspondence courses. In the meantime, he spends his days posted at the front gate, devouring every book he can find.

He just started reading A Brief History of Time. I can’t wait to hear what he’ll say about it.

Update, as of November 17, 2012:

The national exam scores have been posted.

….Blessings passed.

Malawian chaos theory, in a sentence

“Yes, it will certainly happen, unless otherwise.”

burn baby burn

Big changes are afoot at Mtangatanga CDSS. 

Thanks mostly to the deep sense of community in this village and the truly tireless vigor of George Chirambo, the buildings have been wired with all the inner organs needed for electricity. (All that is left to do is to coerce the notoriously unreliable Malawian electrical company to bring them to life, Frankenstein-style.) Two different locally operated but foreign-owned companies have generously offered to donate computers once the electricity arrives, but in the meantime, the school now has its own laptop. (Which proved invaluable in typing the end-of-term exams, especially when my own laptop was murdered in an unfortunate incident involving playful cats and spilled wine.) 

The most significant ongoing project, though, is expanding the school itself in a way that will directly impact students -- and the dream of building teachers' houses, a library, a computer lab, and a science lab is just now getting off the ground. In what easily ranks as my favorite experience in Malawi so far, the whole school banded together to build a kiln -- teachers and students together, on their own time, working side by side in the sun and the mud, to finish the preparation of several thousand bricks. Pending additional funding for the rest of the materials (which I'm working on right now), I hope I see the whole project come to fruition by the end of my time here. 

The soil is really that red.

Gender roles in action. Girls carrying water for the mud walls...

...boys chopping firewood to burn the kiln.

Mrs. Mbowe at right

Photography by George Chirambo.

From left to right: Mr. Maukila, Mr. Kaluwa, Mr. Muyira, and Mr. Ng'ambi

The two ladies in chitenje: Mrs. Mhone and Mrs. Kanyimbo

goin' to the country, gonna eat a lot of peaches

Many, many weeks ago, my best Malawian friend and I hiked over hill and dale to her grandmother's farm to pick peaches. It happened in Chalo's infancy -- and it basically made him the dog he is today.

Madam Chambezi

Life in the developing world has forced me to become comfortable with what it really means to be uncomfortable, but not in the ways you might expect. It has nothing to do with pit latrines, bucket baths, cockroaches, or catcalls (even though my life right now is full of all of these). Rather, for me, the feeling is tethered to having a specific job to do, guided by well-laid plans and lofty visions of how I’d like it to go, only to find obstacle courses and lessons in chaos theory barricading my every move. No matter how much I love this country, no matter how head-over-heels I am for this continent, and no matter how culturally fluent I become, I still marvel at how often the rug gets pulled out from under me – and how often I find that I was never standing on a rug to begin with.

It’s tempting to compare my Malawi experience so far with the distant golden idol of everything Tanzania was (which has been galvanized, cast in soft light, and encrusted in rhinestones by my memory), but the comparison is not really a fair one. Tanzania was a heady, perfumed rush even in the face of greater challenges than I’ve seen here, while Malawi has been a more measured, balanced mix of positive and negative, reflective (perhaps) of a more mature, independent perspective. But that perspective also parallels the nature of the demands – there’s not really anyone holding my hand anymore. It’s up to me to figure things out.

And perhaps this is why it has taken me months to find the words to talk about the real reason I’m here – to teach – and how it is going.

The landscape of the Malawian education system is, in short, nightmarish. It is No Child Left Behind taken to an extreme – a machine that hinges on the idea of teaching to the test. Secondary school students must hurdle over two major national exams to pass between junior (Forms 1 and 2) and senior classes (Forms 3 and 4). The Junior Certificate Exam (JCE) determines who gets to move on to senior level, while the Malawi Schools Certificate Exam (MSCE), taken in the final year, determines students’ ultimate fate. The results are destined to dog every job application they ever submit.

The national exams also determine how students are filtered through the system. Kids with the best scores and the most financially secure parents go to well-supplied private institutions or government boarding schools in the cities, while everyone else trickles into Community Day Secondary Schools (CDSSs) – the chronically understaffed, underfunded, overcrowded, mostly rural bottom rung of the educational pyramid. This is where Peace Corps comes in. And this is where I fit into the puzzle.

This first term has been spent figuring out a) how to teach, but also b) how to teach in Africa, which are two different animals. There was the daily game, for example, of fairly distributing 13 textbooks among 50 students without planting any imagined seeds of favoritism, while also weaning them off the idea that textbooks are the only way to learn. There was the surprise of showing up prepared to teach on September 3^rd only to be told that no teaching happens on the first day because none of the students come. There were delays in grading the national exams, which meant that the Form 1 and 3 students – my kids – didn’t start coming to school until late September. And there was the maddening feeling of living in a Salvador Dali painting, of watching the clocks melt into distorted floppy pizzas all around me as staff meetings that could take thirty minutes instead drag on for hours (the record, so far, is six). The weekly assemblies scheduled for 7:00 a.m. always happen around 8:00 because no one (teachers included) shows up on time.

This is a world where rote memorization is the rule, where “teaching” often means leaving the students to copy notes from the board while the teacher drinks tea in the staff lounge. It is a world where geography classes are taught without maps, literature classes have ten kids huddling around the same book, and the main material required in the science lab is imagination – because there is no such thing as a science lab. And as a result, it is a world where learning stays frozen at the abstract level, rarely stretching out into practical, tangible application.

I’m vexed by the same challenges faced by any first-year teacher, but they are compounded by the fact that my kids have to translate everything I say two or three times over. How do I challenge the girls in the front corner who groan, “Yeeeeees,” every time I slowly, patiently ask, “Is this clear?” At the same time, how do I get through to the boys in the back who don’t even understand the question, “Do you understand?” I sometimes daydream about what it must be like to enter a classroom with a projector and individual desks and enough books for every student, or to be able to make a stupid joke and get appropriately sized laughs. (Not extravagant ones! Just little and polite, the kind usually given to authority figures. Even a small smile or two would be fine.) 

When I look out on the sea of faces, some are lit with flaming expressions so desperate to understand that it nearly breaks my heart, while others are dimmed in resignation. And it is hard to know why. Is it because they had to wake up at 4:00 a.m. and walk two hours to make it to school on time, and now they are (understandably!) exhausted? Is it because their parents don’t have a stable source of income and there hasn’t been enough to eat? (Uncommon, but certainly not unheard of, especially in the months before the rains come – nyengo ya njala, the time of hunger). Or is it because (and this is the scariest possibility of all) I’m just not doing a very good job? Add on top of that the lack of electricity or running water, the fact that we have a schedule but no one really adheres to it, that there are 50 kids in each class with a huge variation in language ability, and that really the only tool at my disposal is a chalkboard, and it becomes easy for the downs to feel abysmal.

But here’s the bright side: I love it. And I love it for the same reason that I harbor affection for harsh landscapes full of stark sharp lines, dry air, and animals and plants and diseases that could kill you: the roughness makes the highs even more exhilarating.

More specifically I love these kids, who are sweet and funny and who generally try very hard. I love the days where there is laughter, engagement, and visible improvement. I love the girls who draw me pictures and the boys who salute me when I walk in the room. I love being christened with the Malawian surname “Chambezi,” which sounds so similar to my own. I love the blossoming sense of rapport that is leading more and more kids to chat with me outside of school, to borrow books from my personal library, and to shyly seek extra help at my house. I’m in awe of the kind of determination – and courage, really – that it takes to come to your teacher’s house with only a faint grasp on the language of instruction and an even fainter idea of what you’re even trying to ask. One day, to help students apply for a World Bank bursary initiative, my headmaster walked into the croom and asked, “Who here has lost one or both parents?” In a moment that cemented my indomitable sense of respect for these kids, one-third of the students in the room stood up. Many of those same students make a four-hour roundtrip walk every day. I struggle to punish them for being late, really, because I’m reverent of them for showing up at all.

            Near the end of the term, several of the other teachers said something to me in the staff room that still gives me goosebumps: “Jaime, we’ve been watching you, and we think that you were born to be a teacher. We can see that you must continue, and we don’t care how you do it – if it’s at a secondary school or a primary or a university. But we know that you must. We think you were meant to do this.” (And then I excused myself to cry a little.)

I’m entering Term II with a lot of resolve, a lot of new ideas, and a better sense of what I need to do differently – but most of all, with the feeling that, at least for now, there is absolutely nothing else I’d rather be doing.

Form 1 kiddos writing letters to my friend Emily's class in South Korea

Petros, Thoko, Jacob, and Maggie: four of my favorite Form 3s. Malawians' favored pose for pictures is a solemn stare, and I have no idea why -- it's precisely the opposite of how they typically are.  Literally, they burst into laughter right after I took this.

Mtangatanga CDSS, as viewed from the main road

The row of latrines

Main courtyard, with the senior classroom block on the left,  junior block on the right, and the staff block in the distance

The school has four identical classrooms, one for each form. A major difference between the American and Malawian school day: the students stay in the same room, and the teachers come to them.