Little House in the Woods

The past 24 hours have featured some of the most significant, joyous, and simply heartwarmingly domestic moments in Malawi so far.  Friday marked the 3-month anniversary of my arrival in this country, the 3-week anniversary of my move to my permanent village, the finale of my first week teaching a full schedule of classes, and the first real, shining, honest-to-goodness moments of feeling my house becoming a home. 
This has been my first weekend with a fence around my yard, pictures on the wall, vegetables resting on a real table, and not just one but two kittens perpetually resting in my lap or perched on my shoulder. All these little things together have built up a lazy, consummate sort of contentment that is exactly what I’ve been needing – the soft mental hum of a slow Saturday spent in my own space, with the autonomy to do whatever I want.

But before I get too caught up in the present, let’s retreat back to the land of last month’s news: when it comes to permanent sites, I lucked out.

            My village is a mysterious land that goes by many names: a place in Mzimba district that is locally known as Mtangatanga, sometimes conflated with the nearby village of Chikangawa, but most often just known as Raiply (pronounced “rye-ply,” not “rapely,” as I originally thought), the name of the timber company that employs most of the area’s residents. In fact, Raiply built most of the local houses and the school where I teach, resulting in something that feels less like a remote village and more like a piece of Malawian-flavored suburbia.

Topping my list of favorite things about my village:

- The fact that it is the last major outpost on a windswept plateau at the edge of the largest artificial forest in Africa, and yet…

- it’s still on the main highway and only a one-hour minibus ride from Mzuzu, the northern region’s largest city.

- I have fantastic Malawian neighbors, all sweethearts, who drop by several times a day to chat in Chitumbuka and make me feel loved and supported in every possible way

- …along with equally fantastic Indian neighbors who give me delicious food and free rides

- …and a community of vervet monkeys that come just close enough to be entertaining and a little thrilling, but not close enough to be scary or annoying

I'm staying in a little brick house with (usually, but sometimes just theoretically) electricity and running water, two freshly painted rooms, an open porch, and a bathroom with a shower and sit-down toilet (in the former there’s only cold water, and in the latter the seat is actually missing…but still). The company has generously donated the space, the fence, and the furniture, while footing all my utilities-related expenses, and any worries about my safety while living alone can be assuaged by the fact that I’m located within a guarded compound that is itself within another guarded compound, located within the grounds where the senior staff stay.

And this iiiiiiis...Annie and Elsa! They like stealing my oatmeal and jumping on my shoulders from high places when I'm not expecting it. And they have snobby taste in books. We were meant for each other.

Decorating is a work in progress, but I’m shooting for a kind of colorful sub-Saharan whimsy, like if Karen Blixen’s house was furnished from an Anthropologie catalog. Stay tuned for bookshelves, chairs, chickens, and a PUPPY.

Pardon My Chi...tumbuka

The two- to three-month period known as “pre-service training” in the Peace Corps is often likened to boot camp (an analogy that would probably offend anyone who has actually experienced boot camp), but I’ve heard it repeated so often that it must bear some kernel of truth, and there’s no doubt that the challenges were legion: often physically uncomfortable, sometimes emotionally exhausting, always mentally taxing.

We faced the wider community’s constant scrutiny, along with a host of new bacteria ready to invade any and every orifice. Under the glut of weekly vaccinations, copious handouts, strenuous language sessions, restricted movement, tightly reined schedules, and the looming threat of giardia and schistosomiasis in every body of water, those first two months were basically about learning how to live in a place that wanted to hurt us. (But with daily tea breaks. And sometimes doughnuts.)

The sudden loss of independence was the bane of our collective existence, but it also happened to be the greatest gift we could have gotten. We floundered and stumbled and babbled in an unfamiliar world while there were still hands all around to guide us, and to me that was by far the best (and most interesting) thing about those first two months. Stripped of self-autonomy, I had the experience of a second infancy – but with all the self-awareness of an adult.

Everyday felt like an episode of Sesame Street, filled with elementary greetings and songs to help us remember things. My host mom packed me a lunch to take to school, protected my baby hands from scalding pots, and worried that my ten hours of sleep just wasn’t enough. I slowly gathered the basic tools of survival, such as cooking banana fritters and knowing (at least theoretically) how to start a fire. But most of all I was aware of another channel in my brain being opened – of the sights, sounds, and smells around me packing new labels and layers. I looked at a chair and the word “mphando” flashed above it. I was offered peas, honey, peanut butter, or eggs and each one seemed to be tagged with invisible ink: sawawa, uchi, chiponde, masumbi. And there was such meta-cognitive magic in all of this – in learning a language and being able to reflect on the learning that was happening.

There is an obvious downside to learning a geographically isolated Bantu language spoken by a minority ethnic group in an already tiny African country: it’s likely that these two years will be the only time I ever use it. But for everything it lacks in long-term practicality, Chitumbuka makes up for it in sheer musicality. You can’t help but fall in love with a language whose word for “difficult” is nonono, or whose word for “car” (galimoto) literally means “shining fire,” or that calls the morning “mulenji” and the early morning “mulenjilenji.” Chitumbuka’s lexicon is limited, so it blends a lot of the same sounds into different combinations to achieve a kind of semantic gymnastics. The result is charming: if chomene means “very much,” then “especially,” obviously, is chomenechomene. It has bouncy mouthfuls like Ichi ni chivichi? (What is this?), 14-letter monsters like tamupokererani (You are welcome), and bright little phrases like chimodzimodzi (the only English word that comes close to capturing its spirit: “samesies.”) It’s a tongue of multi-syllabic mazes, framed within a series of coos. During homestay, to say where I was living and with whom, I had to spew a ratatat sequence of k’s: “Nkukhala ku Katsekaminga kwa Nkomba.”

And though my rhythms are still a bit halting and staccato, stringing words together all feels like play (or at least a very rudimentary form of it, like punching out the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” on a xylophone). By having new sounds to describe familiar things, I get to hear the world strike new chords – and my oh my, Chitumbuka is full of them.

            Trainers and current volunteers have been repeating the same words of wisdom again and again: “Everyone has different strengths, so everyone’s legacy in his or her village is going to be different, and that’s okay.” Some volunteers are always out-of-site (and therefore out of sight), but their contributions arc toward the concrete, such as leaving behind a well or a library; others become a visible, integrated member of their communities, sticking to collective memory in more abstract, personal, but no less important ways (e.g., “She came to every wedding and every funeral, and she always greeted everyone.”) It’s way too early to tell what my impact will be – in fact, I’m supposed to just focus on my own survival for the next three months or so – but I can already tell where people think my forte lies.

            On one of my good days, I pointed to a burning pile of trash outside the teacher’s lounge, muttered the slang word “viswaswa,” and was met with a veritable firework-show of praise. It was declared that I am “now officially a Tumbuka.” (If I’d known that was the code word, I would have said it a lot sooner.)

At this point in my service, the idea of leading teacher workshops or starting an income-generating project or applying for grants still kind of overwhelms me, but I study Chitumbuka and think, “Okay, this. This I can do.” And while I build up the confidence to shoot for more tangible things, it’s wonderful to know that I can walk into my village, point to some viswaswa, and feel like a success. 

Amayi Nkomba, cooking sawawa

Aisha and Patrick, my favorite host siblings. (Don't tell Precious.)

Clearly I was their favorite as well.

Ratface, the most devoted member of Katsekaminga's canine fan club.  Name self-explanatory.

The greatest picture imaginable of Sarah and Agatha

Highlight of this day: listening to Herbie Hancock on top of a mountain.

For the Love of Maggie

All of the Peace Corps language instructors are fantastic, but our Chitumbuka teacher, Maggie, was inarguably and incomparably wonderful. With her vaguely Whitney Houston-esque appearance, her bookish air ruffled by an undercurrent of mischief, and her generally soft-spoken manner counter-balanced by an adorable tendency to screech when excited, she was immediately easy to love. Her particular brand of humor was less about what she said and more about how she said it – in a way that was so distinctively her, so thoroughly Maggie. And these Maggie-isms were exactly what made our language classes so fun and so often full of giggles. (Many of them were stress-induced and Meflaquin-prompted, I’m sure, but they were giggles all the same).

Around week three, I finally started writing a few of these Maggie-isms down, and now I’m letting them make their internet debut with a couple of disclaimers: a) that they’re presented with absolute love, and b) that they’re probably only funny to a handful of people in the world.

Cam, Donald, Nick, and my fellow Katsekamingans – this is for you.

While introducing the word kumwa, meaning “to drink”:

“If you use this word alone, they will simply conclude you are a DRUNKARD.”

Nick: “All these goats and cows, there’s got to be some cheese in this country.”

Maggie: [a long pause, followed by absolute bemusement]

 “…My god.”

Briefing us for a market visit:

“There will be a lot of things being sold like the mandazi, the tomatoes, the WHAT AND WHAT.”

In response to a buzzing bee: “Ah, HEY, where is it from? What is this boozing?”

“Aw. Boza.” – in an absolutely sweet, indulgent tone, in response to Cam’s announcement that he would be having cheese for dinner. Meaning: liar.

Discussing the subjunctive tense and the verb kufwa, meaning “to die”:

Student: “So can you say ‘mufwe’? ‘You should die?’”

Maggie: “Ah. No.”

Students: [disappointed silence]

Maggie: “But you can say ‘mukafwe.’ ‘You should go and die.’”

After writing the example sentence “Maggie steals”:

Student: “Maggie, how could you?!”

Maggie: “THIEVES STEAL.”

During a conversation about the Malawian fondness for food that is super-sweet and super-salty:

Student: “But you don’t have to add salt.”

Maggie: [thoughtful pause]

 “…You do here.”

No context needed:

“That was ah-wu-sohm.”

And no context desired, probably:

“So you can say ‘kujulika mnthumbo’ to say ‘I have opened my bowels.’”

Some of us had a hard time staying awake near the end of training:

“Not everyone likes sleeping. It depends on what someone WANTS. Some will even take their blankets, cover their heads…[slipping into giggles, looking at Donald]”

Because we’re all mature adults, the lesson on Chitumbuka curse words was particularly fruitful in the way of giggles.

-       Introducing the word thako: “Those are butticles.”

-       In an ultra-conservative country, the schematic for cursing is really very simple: “You can use any private part.”

-       And one insult is the worst of them all: pathako pako, meaning “on your butt.”

o   Maggie’s take on this phrase: “If you hear them use this, that is now the time to get MORE ANGRY THAN EVER.”

o   Alternatively, there’s the insult pa munthu wako, meaning “on your head”: “If you say this, it is now less tense.”

-       And then, of course: “Kugonana. This is now sex.”

In a conversation about dogs:

Student: “Those are man’s best friend.”

Maggie. “Yes.

               ….

            And then we beat them.”

The collective favorite:

“I usually don’t speak Chichewa. I HATE IT.”

And my personal favorite. One day I miraculously remembered the word kugomezga, meaning “to hope.”

Nick: “How’d you remember that?”

Maggie: “She’s a dreamer.”

[A poignant pause offered just enough time for me to think, “Oh, I’ll remember this forever.” And then the next statement made certain that I would.]

“…She’s a witch.”

Oh Maggie.

"Books before boys because boys bring babies."

-- a great example of alliteration/an important life lesson for us all, brought to you by one of my Form 3 students

Notes From The Warm Heart

Last week marked my one-and-a-half-month anniversary in a place where pine trees grow next to banana trees, electricity is scarce but cell phones are ubiquitous, photos of Madonna hang next to images of the Madonna, and the question “Where do you pray?” takes precedence over “What do you do?”

I’ve been skirting around the task of detailing all that has happened, in large part because so much of it defies summary. The bare facts are important, certainly, but they only skim the surface: I’m more than halfway through training, I’m nearing the end of my six-week stay in the village of Katsekaminga, I’m practice teaching at a local secondary school, and I’m learning the minority language of Chitumbuka while living with a Chewa family in an overwhelmingly Chichewa-speaking community (sort of akin to learning Italian among Spaniards). By this time next week, I will finally know the name of my home for the next two years, but for now all I know is that it will be in the north, the region with the highest literacy rates, smallest class sizes, longest history of missionary-led education, and lowest population density.

But this paints only a skeletal outline of my life here; it is missing the flesh of my days. It lacks the little glimmers that, in many ways, matter most of all: the inky nights, the smoky mornings, the gecko on my wall, the permanent film of red dust coating everything I own, the pack of dogs that has become our fan club, and the gang of children who know me as “Jane.” I like those better.

So, to chase down an illustrative gleam, here are some selected-straight-from-my-journal moments that capture the ups, the downs, and the in-betweens of one month of life in the warm heart:



July 3, 2012

I watched my amayi cook sima [the hearty, gooey, intestine-clogging, amorphous, porridge-like staple of Malawian cuisine, which appears in similar forms but under different aliases all over sub-Saharan Africa] for the first time a few days ago – a process that removed some of the mystery surrounding the food, but was, fittingly, presented to me in near-darkness.



In the mud-slab-and-concrete theatre of the kitchen hut, the stage was set. My amayi sat hunched in one corner, nursing the charcoals and ladling corn flour into a rickety pot; my ten-year-old sister Aisha stood poised in another, balanced one-legged in a flamingo contrapposto and pointing a flashlight at the floor; and the mixture itself groaned and popped between them, beginning to rise into a thick mound of maize-paste as it was beaten and spun by the twirl of a spoon.



The effect was alchemic, and the potion grew fast – building in ferocious little spurts, big billowing rumbles, and intermittent soft sighs until the mass seemed to move almost with a life of its own, bucking and twisting and growling as if in protest. It wasn’t long before plumes of smoke were spouting through the windows into the fading evening glow, creating a scene of high drama worthy of a painting. This was no longer merely the preparation of dinner; this was war. By the epileptic pulse of the fire, everything seemed to be cast in chiaroscuro, a play of light and dark flashing over my amayi’s focused gaze, illuminating my sister's ballerina-at-rest pose.



Finally, my amayi sat back with a sigh, poked the last gas bubbles out of the sima, and watched it deflate. "Eet ees a very biiiiiiig job," she announced, corralling it into six plate-sized patties.



As she finished the task, half-haloed in light and half-obscured by shadows, all I could think was how impressed I was – by the show, by the process, and undoubtedly by her – but most of all by sima, the only corn-based food that has to be tamed before you can eat it.



July 8, 2012

Priceless moments:

- My Chitumbuka teacher Maggie, after realizing she has kept us ten minutes late, rocket-ships the marker in her hand onto the table while screeching, "SOOOOORRRRY." I lose it.

- My amayi, noticing me gingerly testing the temperature of my sima, reaches over and begins slicing it into bite-sized pieces with a spoon. I laugh and say, "Oh, I'm just like a baby." She laughs and says, "Yes! You are my baby! Janie baby, baby Janie."

- Greeting from a very drunk, notably bra-less woman in the market today: "I KNOW YOU HAVE LOTS OF MOOOONEEEEY."

- Agatha, one of the Chichewa instructors, crafts the greatest pun of all time: "Chimnastics." (A chim = a pit latrine demanding nearly acrobatic precision. Agatha = a non-native English speaker. The moment = explosively funny.)

- My host brother Patrick, in a scene that is certainly one of my favorite mental photographs so far: picture an eight-year-old boy clad in shorts and green rubber boots, buried under a fur-trimmed parka in 50-degree weather (hood up), working on a popsicle while watching the Chichewa-subtitled version of Kung Fu Hustle.



It’s at times like these that Pliny the Elder’s words keep cycling through my head: “Out of Africa, always something new.”



July 10, 2012

We get ferried between villages via Peace Corps jeeps, which affords the unique privilege of getting a sense of topography at 40 mph. Usually it's accompanied by giddy revelry, but tonight we pulled away from Mpalale half an hour late, in fading light, and something felt different.

Everywhere I was struck by the rustling of human life tucking itself in for the night – the hills were lit in a constellation of cooking fires, the roadside punctuated by groups of children no older than ten huddled around their own tended flames. It was a landscape completely without electricity but still studded with lights, each connected to a person. There was something about being surrounded by such bright, visual evidence of human presence –– and about being aware of myself hurtling past, spitting out dust, encased in a box of steel and plexiglass on wheels – that left me feeling very close yet very far away. That basic sense of imbalance is such a large part of why I'm here, but it's also such an unwieldy emotion – difficult to define, tricky to unpack, and even more difficult to place into appropriate action.

We passed a woman in her forties carrying a pail of water on her head – a pretty ordinary sight around here, but something about the splash of the liquid and the steady directness of her gaze that caught my eye. She was taking slow, rocking steps through the darkness from a borehole of unknown location to a destination of unknown address, probably making a trip she makes everyday, likely several times a day, and Ke$ha was playing, the abrasive whine of "Tik Tok" grinding from someone’s speakers. As the water was sloshing out, the woman glanced in our car and met my gaze for a split-second, and the moment passed unnoticed by everyone else but it filled me up and sucked me dry all at once, leaving me lurching with a feeling I still can't quite place. "E'rbody getting crunk, crunk / Gotta slap him if he's getting too drunk, drunk," the song continued, and the juxtaposition made me reel. But what I felt was not quite pity and not quite guilt but mostly vast, vast space: a sort of separate, distant awe.

There's a passage in A Tale of Two Cities that has been reverberating in my head for the past 24 hours or so, and I'm sure it's at least tangentially responsible for my frame of mind tonight. (It may also be aided by the fact that I took my weekly dose of the malaria drug Meflaquine today):

"A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! [...] In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?" (Dickens 8)

Even while living among Malawians, I’m still hurtling down a dirt road listening to a song about brushing your teeth with Jack Daniels. And the more I think about that woman on the road, the more I am astounded by the fact that we inhabit such distinct, disparate, and mutually unknowable worlds. But there is one thing that staggers me more: the fact that we all do.



July 18, 2012

Recent eye-gems from the market:

- A boy of about fourteen walks by, pushing a makeshift model car made of chicken wire and bottle caps. He’s heartwarmingly conspicuous – gangly and puppyish, sparkling with ingenuity, but perhaps just a little too old to be playing with toys.

- The crowd parts to reveal a man running full-tilt after an escaped ox who happens to be heading my way. People are scattering off the road in a rush; the ox ambles by in no particular hurry, in no particular direction, and allows itself to be caught near a patch of grass.

- A woman walks by pushing a wheelbarrow – or rather, the skeleton of a wheelbarrow – with the support beams intact and the basket missing. A toddler stands in the middle, walking along where the basket ought to be, in what I can only assume is the Malawian equivalent of a stroller.



August 4, 2012

On a Saturday afternoon not long ago, I had a cake-baking date with a Chitumbuka speaker named Aida, an assignment that required the procurement of eggs, milk, and flour (known colloquially, and pretty darn adorably, as flawu). The baking powder, salt, and sugar (the ishuuuuug) would be provided, I was told, and the eggs and milk did not take long for me to find and barter for in the market – but I decided to wait on the flawu. “Your amayi will have some,” someone had said, apparently with enough sagacity that it seemed unquestionably believable. “Just buy some from her. You don’t need that much.”

After lunch, with elaborate mime and stilted Chitumbukewinglish, I approached my amayi with what I assumed would be a simple proposal – I asked if she had a half-kilo of flawu I could buy. She assumed the typical expression that appears anytime I try to voice an unrehearsed thought: a sort of squint-eyed straining, halfway between looking askance at a solar eclipse and recoiling from a beginner violinist, but always paired with a smile. After taking a beat to process my wobbly sentences, a flash of recognition passed over her face.

“Flawu?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“You are making cake?”

“Yes.”

“Half-kilo?”

“I think so. You have some? I have kwacha.”

“Mmmmm.” Another pause, for mental calculations. “One-fifty kwacha.”

“Okay! Great! Thank you!” I said, handing the money over while thanking her profusely.

And with that, I thought the task was over. I expected my amayi to walk into the kitchen hut and emerge with a scoop or two, or perhaps to pull out a bag from the grain storage room, but instead she dipped into a semi-bow, spun on her heels, and slipped out of our compound briskly, imploring, “Wait – I am coming.” Already I could tell there had been a misunderstanding – or rather, a false presumption – on my part.

Ten minutes passed, and I prayed that she had just gone to a neighbor’s house.

Twenty minutes passed, and I began rehearsing an apology in Chichewa.

Thirty minutes passed, and I resigned myself to the fact that my amayi was making a trip all the way to the market, which I had just returned from, to buy me the flawu that I could have gotten myself.

Forty minutes after the original question had been posed, my amayi trotted into the compound, sweating and panting a little, and I burst out of my room spouting every apology in every Bantu language I could think of.

Her reaction could not have been better: joyous, uproarious mirth. She laughed the loudest I had ever heard her laugh at that point (a record that was later shattered when I tried to stir sima for the first time), gave me a rib-crushing hug, and said, “Ai, no, mami! Don’t worry! Be happy!”

And that is the story of how I fell in love with this place all over again.



Epilogue: the cake was a minor disaster, burned on the outside and ciabatta-like on the inside. I presented it to my amayi in crumbs and pieces stuffed in a plastic bag. She devoured it and loved it.

And so it begins.

"All news out of Africa is bad. It made me want to go there, though not for the horror, the hot spots, the massacre-and-earthquake stories you read in the newspaper; I wanted the pleasure of being in Africa again. Feeling that the place was so large it contained many untold tales and some hope and comedy and sweetness, too -- feeling that there was more to Africa than misery and terror [...]" 

-- Paul Theroux*, in the opening lines of Dark Star Safari (2002)

Thesis statement for the next two years, right there. 






*Interesting side-note: Theroux (a wildly talented travel writer and novelist) was a member of one of the first volunteer groups sent to Malawi in 1963, and he became one of the most controversial figures in Peace Corps history after being declared persona non grata by Hastings Banda's regime. I don't intend on following in his footsteps.

The Things She Carried

I leave in about a week and the scales and calculators of my brain have been working hard -- weighing the benefits of bringing quinoa against the lifeblood necessity of packing Nutella, chasing down the shapeshifting mirage known as "business casual" (which I've decided is actually a mass cultural delusion that doesn't exist), and having little logical glitches where I say things like, "Okay, tell me honestly what I should do here, because if I don't bring a towel I think I can fit like, six more books." And, at least a few times a day, I've been feeling the heft of the next two years -- trying to glimpse them through the haze, and marveling at all the possibility they contain.

If there's one really, truly, supremely maddening paradox about this whole moving-to-another-continent business, it is this: in order to live with fewer possessions, one must first acquire more possessions. And if there's one parallel skill that helps when squeezing your life into 2/3 of your bodyweight, it's being good at Tetris.

Good news! I'm pretty okay at Tetris.