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.