Carolyn blurririly demonstrates the happiness of a giant Mariachi hat On the first night of New Years Alan and I went out to a Tex-Mex restaurant. Maybe I should explain. You know how there are twelve days of Christmas (theoretically I mean, I've only ever experienced one) well, in Edinburgh there are three days of New Years, which is referred to as "Hogmanny" (mercifully pronounced, Hogmanny).

We went out to Tex-Mex, because, even though Edinburgh is not known for it's latin flavored border cuisine, I had been craving Tex-Mex almost since I got here. This is because Tex-Mex is culturally inculcated into my system. It reminds me that no matter how far I travel, there are always cute waiters I can flirt with in Spanish, excellent friends, and a gigantic hat and mariachi band waiting for me back at home.
 So, on the Eve of New Year’s Eve Alan and I went out to a restaurant called “Pancho Villas”. That should have been our first clue. We sat down and were waited upon by a young man with a thick British accent (second clue) and I couldn't help noticing there were no tortilla chips on our table... or anyone else's (third clue, and we shoulda left).




Hey look, a bunch of people with torchesTo start, I ordered guacamole, which comes with a side of chips. The chips arrived cold, and when I asked the waiter if he could warm them up he responded with, “Like... how?” But then managed to take them away and imbue them with heat somehow. I then tasted the guacamole... and a small part of me died inside. It really did. I have never been more tempted in my life to become a chef, simply so that I could then go back to the kitchen, and make good guacamole.
 I fail to understand why Edinburgh - city of castles, enlightened thinking, celtic music, the deep fried Mars bars, and first (and so far only) Unesco world heritage site of literature cannot come up with good Tex-Mex food. It's really not that hard. It's tomato, cheese, salsa, and some form of meat or beans wrapped up in a tortilla. Every dish. You guys invented the telephone for gosh sake. You're the only society in the world that has managed to pull off having men walk around in skirts. You should be able to make good Tex-Mex!
 Don't get me wrong, the food was edible. It just wasn't... Tex-Mex. It was meat and cheese and salsa and beans and rice, but somehow... it wasn't quite right. Which was disappointing, but then we walked out of the restaurant into a very large crowd of people holding torches and I was reminded of why I love this city.

I should mention at this point that no one in the mob was holding pitch-forks, and that they were, in fact, part of a torch procession that wends its way throughout the city at the beginning of Hogmanny. In order to get to my dorm we actually had to wade through quite a bit of the crowd, which was fine for me as I'm small and fit through things, but a bit more nerve-wracking for Alan, whose head-height is most people's torch-height.
 My dorm is on the top of a hill. It has some pretty nice views of the city. These views are even more astounding when a huge line of people with torches (when I say huge, it spread for about a mile) is wending its way through the city. I immediately called Melissa, my photographically-inclined friend, to come down so we could get pictures. Getting pictures somehow turned into walking along with the crowd, and next thing we knew we were part of the parade.
 Here are some interesting facts about the city of Edinburgh: it closes when winds get above 100 km/h. In my dorm, we’re not allowed to prop our doors open, for fear of spreading fire and diseases. There are first aid kits on every floor of every building I have ever been to. And yet one day a year they allow an amazing influx of tourists (who are probably more-likely-than-usual to be inebriated) to carry torches all around the city.


Torch parade wending its way around the cityWitnessing this action, too, really does not improve one’s faith in humanity. A guy next to me, for example, decided not to use one of the many bins labelled “Put Torch Here” at the end of the parade route, and instead dropped the torch on the ground. Fortunately, in Edinburgh 90% of the days of the year dropping a torch on the ground won’t do anything. However, the torch did not go out. So the man began stamping on it. By the time the torch went out he wasn’t really paying attention, because he was now trying to stamp out the fire on his jeans. Which he did. But it still makes you wonder.
 At the end of the parade we climbed Calton Hill, which is an amazing lookout that offers fantastic 360 degree views of the city. Once on the hill we ended up standing right next to the place they were shooting fire-works off (again, from the city where it is illegal to prop my door open).

The next day was New Years Day. I was fairly excited to see what New Years in Edinburgh was like. There are two answers to this. 1) Crowded. 2) Crowded.

For New Years Eve Alan and I went out to an enormous street party, which I had bought tickets to because all my friends were going. And even though all of us did go, we didn’t really run into each other. That was because the party (which happened over a few blocks) was so crowded. How crowded was it? Well when my friends called to try to meet up with us, we couldn’t. We literally could not push a block through the crowd to find them. But then we listened to some celtic music, and watched some more fireworks, and I have to hand it to the city of Edinburgh, which was selling faux beer bottles that night. They look like glass, but they're plastic. Brilliant. Utterly brilliant. Every other city in the world should adopt this.

At midnight there were more fireworks, (always fireworks) and everyone sang Auld Lang Sine while holding hands in small circles of people. Which was really quite fun. New Years day Alan took off for Malawi, (I'm sure he was happy about the timing) and I packed up to go visit mom and dad in Kenya. More on that next week.

Recipe: Spinach Parmesian Risotto

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Ingredients

1/3c Rice

2c chopped Spinach

2 cloves garlic, chopped

1 small onion, chopped

1 tbsp Olive oil

Bit of parsley, if you so choose

Instructions

Pop the rice into the rice cooker. Meanwhile, sauté onions until translucent, add spinach and garlic and when spinach is just wilted add to rice. (So rice will be about halfway done in the rice cooker, and now you are just adding the spinach, onions and garlic in to cook along with the rice) After rice is finished grate in some parmesian and add salt and pepper to taste, add parsley to garnish.

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As classes started up this past week I began running into people I knew again, and starting up the old familiar conversation, “How are you, how was your vacation, how are classes?” a similar theme began to emerge. While everyone was (for the most part) happy with their classes, there was a reluctance to return to school. This is because while school is in session we tend to walk a well-worn path - home, school, library, home - and rarely deviate from it.

Then, suddenly, classes ended, and like patients waking from a coma we all suddenly realized we live in Edinburgh. There are numerous traditions, events, and attractions in Edinburgh. As I sat down trying to write a blog about the few of them that I experienced over the holidays I realized something: the blog was going to be ten pages long before I ever got through half. So here, in it’s place, is a small sampling of the things Alan and I did when I was FINALLY FINISHED WISH CLASS! (Finals were stressful, is that coming through adequately? I’m not sure, sometimes I think I’m too subtle).

1) Firstly, we went to bars. This may be shocking to some people who know me as not that big a drinker, but I’ll have them know that I ordered a whole pint of coke or sprite almost every night (no, seriously) and nursed it for a good three hours while listening to celtic music. The music in Scottish pubs is to me incomparable. Not least because it’s free, and certainly not least because you can join in (see photo). But only if you are Hannah.

Tree! (Photo cred Alan)2) We went out and (I) hugged some trees. Specifically Redwood trees. They were located at Edinburgh’s botanical gardens (about a mile from my house). The breadth of species in the garden is incredible. As are the number of birds. As is standing on top of a mountain filled with Chinese flora, and looking out over miles and miles of tightly packed buildings below you. Most incredible of all though, is getting outside and enjoying all six hours of daylight. Going to the library while it was still dark (at nine o’clock) and then coming home when it was dark (at four o’clock) was thoroughly depressing. (Really, finals were hard. Have I been clear about this?)

Attack of the birds (photo cred Alan)3) We fed the birds! This was really cool, as being able to throw bread in the air and watch the seagulls dive for it is amazing. I just wish I hadn’t ever watched “The Birds”.

4) We saw actual Reindeer (from Cairngorns National Park in Scotland)! I felt a bit sorry for them though, and wished they were back in Cairngorns National park.

Christmas Market5) We walked through the Christmas market. Or rather, sort of levitated with the flow of traffic through the Christmas market. But it was still cool to see all the food and kitschy stuff. The rides weren’t as cool. Especially as they took over Prince’s Garden, which is my running and peaceful space.

Stirling Castle6) We visited Stirling castle, which is the most beautiful castle I have seen so far in Scotland. It also has a very interesting history, which nice guides will tell you about for free, and has re-makes of the Unicorn tapestries (the originals of which are currently displayed in the cloisters in New York.) I tried asking a man dressed as the Queen’s regent if they were on display because they had once been in the castle, but apparently the actors in the castle all have to stay in character. It was very hard to phrase my question so that a man speaking as if the 16th century is present day could answer it.

Me: So those tapestries. Are they hanging in the castle now because they were here back in... now?

Regent: Excuse me madam?

Finally we worked it so that the regent said “we have records of different tapestries believed to be from the unicorn series on display over a few centuries.” Whoo!

7) We went to Edinburgh zoo to see the brand new pandas! Then watched the PENGUIN WALK! SO CUTE! (is it clear I think one of these is much more exciting than the other?) I then got kicked out early because 100km winds were knocking down trees. Which I thought was totally lame. It’s Edinburgh. Trees get knocked down. If you haven’t learned to dodge the errant flying trashcan yet, then you don’t belong here.

8) We headed down to London to see the sights. And the clock counting down to the Olympics. It was nice (especially an Italian dinner of buffalo mozzarella pizza) but I still prefer Edinburgh. I could spend a few weeks alone in the Victoria and Albert museum, though. The British museum may be bigger but to me nothing beats the sheer beauty of the Victoria and Albert. Maybe it’s something about layout, but the V&A makes you want to move in (or appropriate all the objects), while the British museum just makes me feel overwhelmed.

9) We travelled up to the highlands (because no one should come to Scotland without seeing the highlands). Initially, I was afraid the highlands would be cold, dark, and possibly slushy and dull. Instead, they looked like this. We stayed at the world’s cutest B&B by the seashore. It had a huge tub (with lion claw feet!) and I locked myself into the bathroom for about an hour, enjoying the bubble bath I had gotten for Christmas, and read a book. Though we didn’t go to Loch Ness, we did tour Fort George, an active fort, but also a historical landmark. Located on the Firth of Moray, it’s incredibly scenic, as well as being thoroughly interesting. There’s something to the highlands. Edinburgh is incredible, but it doesn’t have the same romance as the highlands. You arrive up there and you just feel peaceful - as though any minute sweeping music is going to start playing in the background. Everything you see seems straight out of a book, and eventually you realize that is because the highlands is what people write about. Whenever you open a book hoping to escape, the highlands, in one form or another, is where you are trying to go. Also, cows. CUTE cows!

10) We climbed Arthur’s seat at Holyrood park. Holyrood park is a tailor-made escape in the middle of the city. Here, Alan and I stand on top of Arthur’s seat (the historical significance of which no one can really figure out although they are quick to state Arthur is very frequently and validly associated with Scotland). Arthur’s seat offers great 360 views of the city. I could wander Holyrood for days.

RECIPE: ARTISPROUTS

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So for a while now, I've been buying most groceries from the farmer's market that happens every Saturday morning on the castle terrace. Now unlike at a grocery store, at the farmers market, the food doesn't tend to be labeled. Which is fine. Typically one knows the difference between a tomato and a pepper, and when it comes down to - for example - the difference between kale and spinach, no one is going to look at you funny if you ask. So it was that one day at the farmers market I bought a branch of what I assumed were baby artichokes. For the whole week I looked up artichoke recipes online and cooked artichoke dip, and artichoke pie, and artichoke pasta and at the end of the whole experience concluded I just didn't like artichokes very much. Which might be true. Except that about a week ago I was wandering through the grocery store (in which food is labeled) and realized that what I had been eating was in fact brussel sprouts. Now, I could use this as a jumping off point for my blog, which would then talk about how in life things aren't always what you expect them to be (which is very true) but I'm actually just going to leave it as a funny anecdote about vegetable mix-ups, and the blog is going to be about Scottish dancing. Which I think is much more fun.

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Me and Alan in Scotland, where it's just a tad bit colder than Malawi

A while ago my friend Jesi from Malawi came to visit. Just after she arrived she turned to me and asked, naturally enough "So, what is there to do around here?" To which I replied. "Well, there's going to class, and then there's going to the library." Because while I do tend to hang out with friends, or go to cultural events, while class is in session I don't really do too much touristy stuff.

Which is why, when classes ended and Alan (also of Malawi) came to visit me over the holidays, I was determined that we would not only climb every castle, tour every art museum, and stroll leisurely through all the parks Edinburgh has to offer (just google map it and look for the green if you really want to see how ridiculous that is) but also meet all my friends, shop at all my stores, visit all my favorite pubs, and in general, soak up every tiny little piece of culture Scotland has to offer.

This was, perhaps, rather unrealistic of me. However, despite the fact that he never visited Edinburgh’s second-hand bookshops, ate a deep-fried Mars bar or tried haggis, Alan maintains that he did in fact have an excellent time and experience a good amount of Scottish culture.

Starting with the Gaelic service at my church. I’d been wanting to go to the Gaelic service for a while, probably due in large part to my strange fascination with totally obscure languages (e.g. my history of taking Sanskrit in college, or my determined efforts to master Chitumbuka for the past three years). I also thought seeing how a Gaelic service was structured would be a really cool, very uniquely Scottish experience.

While I was right, what I had overlooked was that attending a service in a different language meant that I would not understand any of it. So it was that as I stared at the program I suddenly realized I didn’t know the hymns from the scripture readings from the sermons.

As it turned out the hymns were pretty easy to get the hang of. The music would start playing and everyone would stand up. My ability to follow along ended just about there though, because while the tunes were familiar ones (such as “Hark the Herald Angels sing”) they were printed in Gaelic. Which would have been okay, were Gaelic not the most un-phonetic language you can imagine. For example “ceilidh” is pronounced “kay-lee”, “Samhuinn” is “saw-ain” and - my favorite - “claidheamh mòr” is “claymore.” Of course. So looking down at the words while everyone cheerfully sings around you, one realizes one doesn’t have a prayer.

But it was still fun. The Gaelic language is beautiful. This impressed me most when I was listening to the soloist, who sang two really slow, almost sad songs. Strangely enough, they reminded me of the large fields in the highlands, long and lonely and slightly cold, but still gorgeous. Gaelic music can embody the words “hauntingly beautiful” better than anything I’ve ever encountered.

Conversely, it can also be incredibly cheerful, as it was later that night when we attended a Ceilidh (yet another Scottish cultural event!). I think I’ve mentioned them before, but Ceilidhs are

traditional Scottish dances. There are many different sets of dances that can be performed in a Ceilidh, and typically they are performed by pairs or small groups who stand around in a large circle. Ceilidhs are possibly my favorite thing about Scotland, and that is saying a lot.

My flat-mate Wendy twirling at the Ceilidh. Note the kilt. Ceilidh! I was pretty excited at the opportunity to drag Alan to one. Alan was, perhaps, less excited, as he is 6 foot 4 and has difficulties with events where children from the ages of 5 to 10 can reasonably be expected to be his partners. At the beginning of one of the latter pieces the caller announced, “now duck under the two people in front of you” and I heard from about three couples away “Duck? But I don’t duck!” a bit too late because the music had already begun and we were already whirling away in opposite directions.

I have long had this complaint against American parties: there is no communal dancing. Communal dancing is AWESOME. It gives you something to do besides eat and drink, and despite what you might think it actually does allow you to socialize with others. Above all, though, it is an expression of exuberance. And if you were not exuberant before you hit the dance floor, you sure as heck are after being whirled from partner to partner for a few rounds. I defy anyone to do-si-do, stomp, hop and spin without cracking a smile. Social dancing is wonderful, and as soon as I’m back in the states I aim to single-handedly reintroduce it at general social events everywhere.

Being able to kick my holidays off with a dance, was, I have to say, probably the best way I’ve ever found to mark the end of harrowingly stressful finals, and a pretty incredible beginning to a vacation. Despite the minor ducking incident (and the fact that he did not possess a kilt to wear) Alan mostly agreed.

Recipe: Christmas Gingerbread Castle

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The final product, viewed from the side.So for Christmas this year, I really wanted to make a gingerbread castle. So I invited a bunch of friends over, and we made one. For this, I am indebted to Melissa, who came over and actually made the castle while I decorated the kitchen and tried to make it look Christmassy and not so much like a bomb shelter. I think it turned out pretty well. In order to make the castle we (and by we I mean Melissa) cut out a cardboard mold of a rather broad horizontal rectangle (about the size of half a piece of paper) and another cardboard mould of a turret, which was basically a long skinny vertical rectangle with three squares at the top. We (again, Melissa) made 16 of the turrets and stuck them together in groups of four to form a cube. We (still Melissa) placed the turrets in a position where they marked off four corners of a square, and then placed one of the horizontal rectangles as a wall between each of them. It was delicious. Although offering less decorating opportunities than your traditional house, its fun to devour the gummy-baby army you had occupying the courtyard, and also awesome to make a moat. Plus: castle.

Melissa's dragon, Napoleon, is pleased with his new domain.___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Being in graduate school has taught me many things. I have learned about the various incarnations of development, about gold-mining in Africa, about how the world will end in 2050 when the population explodes/climate change takes over/we run out of food/we run out of fresh water. One of the most important things I’ve learned, however, is how crucial it is to live next door to a castle.

The castle. Side note: This is what Edinburgh looks like at 2pm in November. Living next door to a castle is important for many reasons. There’s the good views of the city it provides, the expansive royal gardens that inevitably get made into public gardens, and the satisfaction of - when someone asks the question “where do you live” - being able to answer “well, you know the castle?”

Apart from all that though there are the events. All year long, all the castles around Scotland hold various events. This is why having a Historic Scotland membership is handy. Not only does it get you into all Historic Scotland properties for free, for a year, for 35 pounds (I redeemed the value in two weeks) it also gets you in free for all events. Handy when you live next door to a castle. So far, I have attended two events at Edinburgh castle. The first was a fireworks display for St. Andrew’s day, the second a caroling session.

St. Andrew’s day occurs on 30th November, the feast day for St. Andrew, who is the patron saint of Scotland. As a result, fireworks are set off. From the castle esplanade.

Although I was in the middle of writing final essays at this point, I decided it was worth it to pop next door and watch pretty explosions in the sky. I didn’t realize in order to see the fireworks I would have to sit through a presentation on all the historic figures Scotland has produced. Tiny location like Scotland, you’d think the list wouldn’t be that extensive. Unless you’ve ever actually read a history book. For such a small landmass, Scotland has produced a ridiculous amount of persons who have helped to shape modern life as we know it.

So I sat freezing while a narrator read out the achievements of the likes such as Arthur Conan Doyle, David Hume, Adam Smith, Alexander Graham Bell, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, James Watt, James Boswell, and James Young Simpson. The greatest part of the presentation was that out of a list of names which included one man who invented the telephone, and another who invented anesthesia, it was Sean Connery who received the loudest applause. I’m not ashamed to say I was a large contributor to this. Anesthesia is awesome. But it’s Sean Connery.

Then the main event began.

I grew up in D.C. I’m used to some pretty impressive fireworks. I remember standing on the mall and being able to feel the reverberations of the explosions in my chest, and seeing displays so dramatic it seemed as if the fire was about to start raining down around me. It’s still not as impressive as fireworks backlit by a castle. Especially when they’re being shot off right next to you (this by the same people who won’t let us prop our doors open for risk of fire).

There were fireworks that corkscrewed into the air, leaving snaking trails of gold in their wake, there were fireworks that split in the air and buzzed around, there were the traditional large fireworks. Then there were more intricate designs, like the Scottish flag, which was created by shooting off a blue rectangle (cannot have been easy) and overlaying it with a silver X (really cannot have been easy). All in all, it was an incredible show.

In stark contrast to the fanfare was the next event at the castle. Christmas held inside the castle proper, in the great hall. Going to see the carols was my first time actually inside the castle, and in order to put the experience into context I have to explain that as a member of Historic Scotland I sometimes get advertisement e-mails. One of these was an e-mail asking me if I had ever considered marrying at Edinburgh castle. With pictures, the e-mail described how I could have a small ceremony at the lovely St. Margaret’s chapel, and then have an impressive reception in the great hall. So it was with this frame of reference that I first visited Edinburgh castle.

I peered into St. Margaret’s chapel, but didn’t bother going in for the simple reason that I wasn’t sure I’d fit. Okay, that’s a bit of hyperbole, but the e-mail said you could fit 25 people into the chapel, and reminded me of bit of the idea of clowns in a VW beetle. Not necessarily what I associate with a day of bliss but hey, maybe for some people?

As for the great hall? It is splendid. Simply breathtaking. It’s an old stone ediface (naturally) with sweeping high rafters carved and painted in an intricate diamond pattern. The walls are are lined with carved wood pieces, and there is a magnificent fireplace in the front of the room.

Happy Holidays (the tree is multi-faith)

There is also the small matter of all the weaponry lining the walls. Battle axes, swords, pistols, maces - the collection is in all different styles, from many different eras. Again, not, perhaps, the image I would choose to evoke on a day dedicated to eternal love. I also could not help thinking that for certain families the combination of a large gathering, an open bar, and that many sharp edges might not be a good one, but again, for some people, I’m sure it strikes just the right chord.

Oddly enough, it did for Christmas. The historic society had placed a fake log in the fire, a tree in the corner, and the national opera’s choir at the front of the room. They sang carols and I think it was the first time I had heard carols sung in over four years. When they started into “Good King Wenceslas” replete with British accent and all, I almost cried.

I’ve talked, year after year, about trying to find my Christmas. I mentioned that despite all my good experiences the last few years, the season still lacked a slight festive atmosphere. No more. Here in Edinburgh I have found jolly, I have found cheer, and they even have spiced apple cider. ‘Tis the seasons and there is tinsel and twinkle aplenty. And if it comes with a side of swords and battle axes, well, that’s just the castle’s way of adding in a little bit of culture.

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RECIPE: Tex-Mex stuffed pumpkin

Note: Use small pumpkins. This will also work with any winter squashes (like butternut). I can only speak for the efficacy of this recipe with British/former British colony pumpkins, as I really didn't eat any sort of squash in America. I sort of remember American pumpkins being sweeter, which wouldn't work, but maybe that's just because I only ever ate them in pumpkin pies form.

Ingredients

1/2 cup rice

2 small pumpkins

1 tsp cumin

Salt to taste

Pepper to taste

Handful chopped cilantro

1/8th (1/4th if you are VERY brave) tsp chili powder

1 tbsp olive oil

1 small onion, diced

1-2 cloves garlic

2 tsp lime juice (more if you like limey zing!)

1/2 tsp lime zest

Instructions

Use your flat-mate's rice cooker to cook the rice. As she describes it, stick your pointer finger in, and fill rice cooker with water up to the end of your nail. Cut the top off the pumpkins, gut them, then cook using your favorite method (either in the oven, or by steaming, which is my preference). Meanwhile, chop the onion and the garlic. Over medium heat, sauté the onions in oil until they are almost transparent, then lower the heat a notch and add the garlic and cumin and chili pepper. Take out the pumkins once they are soft, and scoop out the insides. Mix this with the rice. Add the lime zest, onion mixture, then the cilantro. Lastly, salt and pepper to taste, and put back into the pumpkin if you enjoy eating out of gourds. If not, just eat plain. Pumpkin is very healthy.

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So, it turns out this interesting thing happens in Scotland in the wintertime. The sun disappears. More accurately, it rises at nine and sets by four. The rest of the time the sky is filled with this dull grey light normally associated with early dawn, so that when you are walking around at about 2 pm it feels like 10 am and is going to feel like 10 pm in three hours. To make matters all the better, the beginning of finals coincides with this loss of daylight. No wonder they make you pay your entire tuition in October.

Now, however, I am done with exams and have found the bleak midwinter not quite so bleak when you spend all six hours of daylight outside, and are surrounded by a twinkling, tinseling, on-display city.

As this is the close of my first semester of graduate school, however, I have been thinking a lot about higher education as an institution. Even more so because in the UK tuition fees are currently being ratcheted up at an incredible rate (3,000 pounds per year for domestic students this year goes up to 9,000 pounds per year for domestic students next year).

This change doesn’t affect me at all, but it does get me thinking. UK students are getting extremely upset about this price rise, and quite frankly, I think they should, but the opinion of the American students is by and large “Are you kidding? Do you know how cheap that is for college?” because we’re sitting around paying about 40,000 dollars per year. And we will pay these fees, and more, because, rightly or wrongly, you need a college degree for most jobs, and over time the expense will pay itself off multiple times.

Then there’s graduate school. Which is needed simply to get some jobs, or to advance in others, and is typically another two years of school, and possibly another few thousand dollars. And top it all off with the fact that last month one of my professors said in class, “Of course you need a Ph.D. to really be taken seriously.” The depressing thing is not that he said this, it’s that he’s right.

To go into this issue in depth I would have to get very ranty and go on for a while, which is not the intention of this blog. I do want to bring up two things, though. The first is the question of the proliferation of graduate school, and the fact that college is becoming basic education and a master’s degree something you need for a specific profession. Which seems to me a bit odd, because I feel that somewhere in between thirteen years of general schooling and four years of higher education it should be possible to impart sufficient skills for a person to be ready for all but the most specialized profession.

Secondly, if college is to become the new basic standard of education (which it seems it already has) then charging as much as we do for it is indefensible, and I applaud the UK students for standing up to the changes now, before it gets completely out of control.

The generations entering the workforce now are qualified, competitive, and congested. With too many people and too few jobs the education system is tilting more towards... well, more. If this trend continues the next generation entering the workforce is going to have seven letters behind their name, a whole lot of debt in the bank, and thirty-five years of studying before they get their first jobs.

These were my post-exams musings. Post musings I toured about seven different castles, sunk myself in art, and in general got back into the Scottish spirit. More on that in a few days. In the meantime, I hope everyone has had a happy new years, and am sorry about the delay in blogging. I'm going to make up for it in the next week or so, and try to plan so finals don't completely take over my life ever again.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------RECIPE: Halloween chocolate fudge icing.

Ingredients:

1 Cup milk

1/2 cup chocolate chips

2 tbsp butter

1/3 c icing sugar

Instructions

Place all ingredients in a double boiler in order. Melt chocolate before proceeding to butter. Transfer mixture to a bowl once it forms a film when placed on a spoon and cool it. Spread on many things, or just eat it with your finger. Nom.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's always funny how Halloween means different things in different places. At home, Halloween was first trick-or-treating, and later partying with my friends. At college in Charlottesville, Halloween meant heading down to the lawn and watching parents take their adorable little children from lawn room to lawn room to trick-or-treat. In Malawi, Halloween was going up to the most remote location in the country and roasting an entire pig. No matter where I am, though, no matter how different Halloween gets, it seems there is always one conundrum every Halloween has in common: What am I going to be?

This Halloween the dilemma was compounded by two facts: 1) It was my flat-mates’ first Halloween, so I wanted to celebrate in style, and 2) I didn’t want to spend any money.

Me with my flat-mates I spent the weeks before Halloween in angst, trying to come up with creatively brilliant ideas that usually ended up being just plain weird. I thought variously about being: trash (sticking trash to me), popcorn (sticking popcorn to me), or a superhero (tying the pashmina from my bridesmaid outfit around my back). Running these various ideas by my flat-mates I received the same response. “Okay?” (The question mark is deliberate).

The day before Halloween, ideas still running around my head much like the proverbial hamster with its ever-faithful wheel, I suddenly thought about my coat. This particular winter coat is long, and black, has a hood, and runs down to my ankles. As a certain man in a bathtub once cried: Eureka! I would be Death. I turned to my flat-mate. “What do you think about me being Death for Halloween?” I asked. She tilted her head, thinking about it.

“Yeah,” she said finally. “Death is always good.”

While the costume idea fit, however, it didn’t have that flare of the original (read: weird) that I so desire in everything I do, so I mulled the idea over some more and came up with the second part much quicker than I had come up with the first. I WOULD BE DEATH FROM THE TERRY PRATCHETT NOVELS.

For those of you who have never read the Terry Pratchett novels, step away from the computer NOW and head to your nearest library. Mr. Pratchett writes a series of novels set in an alternate world known as “the discworld” so called, because the world is a flat disc. It is an obvious metaphor for our world, and his books are incredible. Witty, insightful, humorous, well-written. On days when I was down in Malawi, listening to Terry Pratchett on audio, my iPod lifted my sprits beyond belief. (“Going Postal” and “Making Money” are the best, in my humble opinion).

Which brings us to Death. In Terry Pratchett’s novels, Death is a character. He’s humorous without intending to be, AND HE ALWAYS SPEAKS IN CAPITAL LETTERS. No quotes. So, Halloween day I bought a scythe, wrote on a piece of paper I ALWAYS SPEAK IN CAPITAL LETTERS, and donned my coat. I felt pretty good about the whole ensemble.

Apparently, my feelings were justified. Standing out on the Royal Mile, I had at least four strangers turn to their traveling companions and say “Hey ______, get a picture of me with this girl!” stand next to me in some ridiculous pose while their friend snapped a photo before I could even react. A few people got my sign, and it was always nice to get that recognition, but even without it, I liked my costume.

Beltane fire society At nine o’clock, my flat-mates, my friend Melissa and I all thronged the street in front of Edinburgh Castle to watch the Beltane Fire Society’s festival for Samhuinn. In traditional Celtic culture, Samhuinn is supposed to be the time when the world of the living and the world of the dead are closest. In recognition of this, the society put on a parade, where people in black cloaks carrying torches marched in front of people painted blue and playing drums, people painted red, people wearing green clothes, and people carrying puppets and masks on poles and wires high above their heads. It was pretty neat.



Cool fire symbol that almost certainly has meaningWe followed the parade down to Parliament Square, where they were going to perform a show on stage. Almost the second the parade passed by it had begun to rain, so by the time we got to Parliament Square we were soaked, and umbrellas blocked the view. I managed to get on the side of a statue though, and got a pretty good view from there. I watched as, in a series of dances set to a drum-line, Winter and Summer fought, and Summer was beaten. (Awww, said Melissa, as Summer fell to the ground). At the beginning, when Summer was up, the society lit a huge symbol, which had been hung in the air, on fire. In the end, when Winter won, a new symbol was lit.

Even if we were soaked, the whole thing was pretty cool. I went home to my heated flat, and sat around in one of my flat-mate’s room, where we put on blueberry face masks. It may not be dressing up and getting bucket-loads of candy, but it was still a pretty great Halloween.

About ten years ago my friend Suzy and I were playing Super Mario on an N64. The particular part we were playing was not a level, but a secret bonus zone. In this bonus zone Mario would get a prize if one could manage to successfully maneuver a penguin down an iced race course in a set time.

It was tricky. The penguin had to go fast enough to beat the time, but going faster meant it was harder to steer, and the penguin would fly around a turn and careen off the edge of the course into space. Midway through playing, for some reason, I turned to Suzy and asked “Do you have a crush on Michael?” to which Suzy responded, “I don’t want to talk about it!” So we kept racing the penguin.

Fast forward ten years to when Suzy and Michael are standing in a pagoda in the middle of Brookside Botanical gardens. I am slightly off to the side, surrounded by three other bridesmaids. And as Suzy and Michael, in front of family and friends, exchange vows to love and care for one another their whole lives long, all I can think is ‘you know, we never got that penguin down the course in time.’

High school is harped upon a lot in American culture. There are movies about it, books about it, T.V. shows about it. In exploring these media I’m always struck by one simple fact - none of those representations seem anything like my experience.

Nobody in those stories sits around talking about how cool their teachers were. Nobody in those shows still carries around inside jokes so that people occasionally ask them why they are pretending to be a fish, or an existential block that sits around wondering what forces are acting on it. No one in those stories still calls up their friends from high school no matter where they/you are in the world, just to check in. But then, none of those people ever went to H-B Woodlawn.

People talk about how nice it is to be able to be part of a friend’s wedding. How wonderful it is to be able to share in this amazing moment of someone’s life. When everyone in the bridal party knows each other? Take that factor and double it. Then you get moments like two bridesmaids whopping a groomsman with their bouquets (he deserved it!) or the groom giving one of the brides a look that clearly says, ‘I saw you almost trip on that third stair’ or the bride swing-dancing with one of the bridesmaids because a bunch of you took lessons back in seventh grade, and could still sing the song you danced to for the recital from memory - if asked. It’s an amazing thing to share in a friend’s wedding. It’s even more amazing if almost everyone involved is someone you don’t feel you could have done without.

As for Suzy and Michael themselves, I can’t really explain what having Suzy and Michael as friends has meant to me. They’ve been with me through middle school, through high-school, through college, and have kept in close contact since then. Always. Michael is one of the best guys I’ve ever met, he’s kind, he’s easy to get along with, he’ll be there for you if you need him.

And as for Suzy... Suzy was on my speed dial my entire time in Malawi. I’m not sure how other volunteers got by without a friend at home they could call when everything was falling apart, because I know I couldn’t have. Having someone who understands why goldfish can be a main topic of conversation for an hour (and that’s not even touching on the different flavors) that’s incredibly valuable. Having someone who will listen quietly to you for an hour while you break down about how hard everything is, and how you’re not sure you can continue another day, and feeling at the end of that conversation that maybe you can, and maybe it will all be okay, that’s invaluable.

When I say I don’t know what I would do without them I’m being completely literal. I’m so glad our group of friends has Michael and Suzy, and I’m so glad they have each other. Happy Marriage guys!

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Recipe: Cinnamon Apple MuffinsApplesauce Two cups of apples, grated (it's easier than cutting)1 tsp of cinnamon 1/4 cup of sugar

Muffin batter 2 cups white flour1 tbsp baking powder 1/2 tsp salt 1/4 cup sugar 1 egg 1/4 cup melted butter

Instructions Preheat over to 375 and grease muffin tin. Cook the applesauce ingredients until they resemble applesauce. Mix dry muffin batter ingredients, then wet muffin batter ingredients, then combine dry, wet, and applesauce and mix together with a wooden spoon but not until the batter is smooth, just make sure the flour doesn't have a lot of clumps. Bake for about 20 minutes or until the knife comes out clean. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I meet Melissa down at “Greyfriar’s Bobby” bar. A bar named for the story of a small Scottish terrier who guarded the Greyfriar’s Kirk against grave robbers. There’s a ton of tourist merchandising surrounding the story, including a statue on the road across from the church - tourists standing back from it taking a picture always block me on my way to class. According to a girl in my master’s program, the whole story is a hoax, and there was just some dog who hung around the graveyard eating scraps. Everyone who has heard this bit of information finds it incredibly depressing, as the idea of a cute little doggie guarding the graves is irresistible. Nonetheless, the bar is nice.

I haven’t seen Melissa since I took a weekend foray back to America for my best friend’s wedding, and we are heading over to the Royal Oak - a bar that features bluegrass in the basement on Thursday - to reconnect and meet up with Hannah, a mutual friend. Hannah is the one who actually introduced me to the Royal Oak bluegrass basement. Her professor plays in the band and he intimated to the class that good will is engendered by students appearing in the audience. No word on how many grade points that good will translates into, though.

We settle into one of the booths as we wait for Hannah. The bar is small, but it attracts a large and eclectic crowd. Because of the size of the place, everyone has to scoot into the booth together. Two weeks before, I sat in the middle of a tour-group from England who marveled at the fact that I lived on a Royal Mile.

“Must be a real hardship for you.” One of the women had said to me with a smile.

Sitting down in the booth with Melissa, I pull out my notebook.

“You mind if I write?” I ask. “I have this assignment for my creative writing class where I have to stalk someone, and I just don’t want to stalk someone, plus I don’t have the time, and really, I just want to write in the bar, I mean look at this place, you have everything, students, atmosphere, bluegrass, locals. Heck, I bet you could write a huge essay on the ales alone. Why don’t people write in bars do you think? There’s so much going on here I could write all night. It’s much better than a café.”

“Noise, I guess,” says Melissa. “There’s so much noise here I would always be looking up distracted.” She yawns. “I took a nap after Welsh today, I don’t know why I’m tired.” She pauses. “Don’t write that down. Are you writing that down?”

Hannah walks in. When she sits down I pull out my iPhone (which, having flipped off data roaming and taken out the SIM card I use as an iPod touch) to show her maps of the city. We’re going to a nature preserve at 6 am Saturday morning to see pink-footed geese take off for the Netherlands. We plot out routes to the house where we’re supposed to meet, and then Hannah zooms in on one part of the map.

“You know there’s this really cool lane through the city,” she says. “It’s about a mile long. It starts around in back here...” Hannah has been exploring the city since we got here. Melissa did too, in the beginning, but recently she’s been bogged down in Gaelic (Scottish, Gah-lic) and Gaelic (Irish - Gay-lic) and Welsh.

“Melissa do you study old or new Welsh?”

“Middle.”

“Thanks.”

Recently she’s been bogged down in Gaelic, Gaelic, and middle Welsh.

“Margaret’s being anti-social and writing”, Melissa informs Hannah.

I look up. “I’m writing about you, actually, I hope that’s okay, I really didn’t want to stalk someone.”

“Why would you stalk someone?”

“Because that was the assignment.”

“I guess we’ll just have to have really intelligent conversations then.” says Hannah.

“And we should gesticulate a lot so she’ll have to write that down”, adds Melissa, moving her arms frenetically, a bit like a robot.

Although Melissa lives directly across the hall from me, I met her on a literary pub tour of Edinburgh. That was my first time in the Royal Oak. We were both sitting in the corner, listening to the Celtic music (which is played upstairs) and wondering if there would be more “literary” any time soon.

I met Hannah through Melissa. We were going out to explore some castles. The castles were each about twenty minutes outside of one of those Scottish postcard-perfect towns called North Berwick. The first one was on a seaside cliff, which offered spectacular views once we found the way up to the top of the castle. It was half ruined, so we kept having to wander around from room to room, ducking our heads as we went up this stairwell, or down this one, or through winding corridors.

The other castle was more intact, and had amazing gardens and a yard, as well as a circular dovecote with thousands of boxes still in place. When you stood in the middle of it and looked up you could see the sun pouring in from above, and it felt a bit like what I would imagine it’s like to live in a beehive. In that castle we wandered through an intact dining room, a latrine, and an enormous basement used for food storage.

“So, you know those old ships,” Hannah is saying. I keep wanting to listen to the conversation of the men next to us, because they seem interesting, but I never manage to pay attention. A bunch of younger people have walked in and are hanging out, standing, in the corner by the bar, and the bluegrass musicians are singing something about it not being love and it not being money, although what it actually is I never pick up because I keep getting lost in my writing, or in the flow of chatter passing around me.

“So, you know these old ships,” Hannah says. Hannah is interested in old ships. So is Melissa. Hannah also thinks that getting up at five o’clock in the morning to see birds migrate is a good time. And Melissa likes historical observatories and climbing the Nelson monument and quoting “Firefly” from 327 feet up. We’ve all read the enitre Horatio Hornblower series. This always seems to me emblematic, although I’m never entirely sure of what.

“So, you know these old ships,” In the booth with us, sitting beside the two older Scottish men are a couple, I’m not sure from where. They are nodding their heads slowly to the music, tapping their feet while drinking something that is the color of earth, and translucent. The musicians in the corner are now singing a fast paced song about a girl, and how she captured their hearts.

“So, you know these old ships,” Hannah is saying. “I really want to sail out and live in one.”

I look up. “Do you mind if I use this for a blog entry?”

Melissa turns, “Wasn’t the last one about us?”

This is, and isn’t, true. I’ve been trying for a week now to write about the castle expedition, but besides some funny tales of trying Irn-Bru (a Scottish beverage that outsells Coca-Cola in the motherland, and tastes to me a bit like liquid candy) and descriptions of massive amounts of sheep standing in the countryside, it’s not really coming together.

Melissa and Hannah begin a discussion on castles.

“You know,” I say. “It’s funny how we all think so differently, yet we’re interested in the same set of things.”

“Yeah,” interjects Hannah. “Things that are awesome.”

“Right,” I say. “But what I mean is...”

What I mean is that Edinburgh is a big city, and that the University itself is a big place. What I mean is that it’s not every day you find people who like going out to bars just for the music or think castles are a cool expedition. What I’m trying to say is something, in a limited sense, about Scotland, but in a larger sense about life, in general.

It has to do with the bar and the way it’s so small and cozy with only two worn-through booths and wooden tables. It has something to do with the group of students that come here every week, as well as the locals. It’s something about the truly ridiculous variety of ales available in this country, and all the different shades from light to dark that they create when laid out across the table. It’s something, most of all, about the bluegrass band playing in the corner and the sound of the fiddle and the guitar and the harmonics of the voices when they come together and sing.

Melissa has this theory (which she’s expounding on to Hannah right now) that there are, in fact, dragons in Scotland. That they are hidden in the lochs or among the castles or even hunkered down in the fields of heather, hiding in plain site. In the middle of the bar and the music and the sound of chatter flowing up and down the tiny room, I can almost believe that she is, in fact, right. That there’s magic in Scotland.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Recipe:Margherita pizza

IngredientsDough 1 2/3 cups flour1/3 cup water1 tsp salt1 package instant active yeast (if you are not using instant, make the water warm but not hot and dissolve the yeast in that and wait until the surface of the water is brown with small bubbles)2 tbsp olive oilToppings1 ball of buffalo mozzarella 1 large tomatoA bunch of basil leaves (for example, off the basil plant you grow on your windowsill in your dorm room)2 cloves of garlic, pressed or very finely chopped2 tbsp olive oil THE DOUGH There are two ways to make a pizza dough. Way one involves making it like normal bread, kneading it for ten minutes and allowing it to rise until doubled in bulk and then throwing it into the air to make a lovely pizza. Way two involves you having just come home from a bunch of castles, not having time to let it double in bulk. Not letting it rise at all, attempting to throw it up in the air, dropping it on the floor in front of all the people you are cooking it for, and then rolling it out with a rolling pin (which you are really not supposed to do with pizza). Way two still tastes really good.For either way two, or way one: Mix flour, yeast (!unless its not instant!) and salt. Mix oil and water. Add oil and water to flour mixture. Knead it. Add flour to the dough until it becomes elastic again. Then either pick way one or way two for making a pizza dough.

THE TOPPINGSIf you like your crust brown you can stick it into the oven for ten to fifteen minutes before adding toppings. Even if you just cook it with toppings on though, it will cook through. Brush the pizza with the olive oil, and disperse the garlic over the top. Slice the buffalo mozzarella and space the pieces out over the dough, do the same thing with the tomato and the basil. You can do so in a way you think aesthetically pleasing, or not. Bake the whole thing at 1800C (350) until the cheese is very melted, even a bit brown. The basil leaves will look withered and ruined. That's okay. If you don't like that look though, add them after baking. Take pizza out of oven, share it with your flat mates.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One of the most amazing things about living in a city, especially an historic one, is how much there is to see and do. For example, within a ten minute walk of my flat there is Edinburgh Castle, Prince’s Gardens, the Walter Scott Monument, the National Gallery of Scotland, the house that Robert Burns stayed in when he first came to Scotland, the Writer’s Museum, the National Library of Scotland, Greyfriars Kirk, the National Museum, and more. There is so much to do here. And I have homework.

This past week, on the theory that it was better to just get it over with, I signed up to do the first oral report in one of my classes. Day after day I sat in my flat, combing through piles of articles, looking for obscure bits of information on the Iron Age. After that report, I am perfectly qualified to wear a button that says, “Ask me about pre-colonial metal smelting in Africa!”

Saturday, however, I vowed to leave the whole day open, studying all night if I had to. This was because Saturday was Doors Open Day - a day where an incredible number of venues normally closed throughout the year let the general public in for free.

So, Saturday I took a break. I slept in. I went for a really long run in Hollyrood Park (an awesome location that must be visited if one is in Edinburgh.) I went down to St. Margaret’s Loch and did some bird-watching. (Since arriving in the UK I have seen lesser black-backed gull, magpie, blackbird, moorhen, muted swan and tufted ducks). It wasn’t that early, but for some reason all the tufted ducks were asleep, they had their heads tucked under their wings and were spinning slowly over the water like tiny tops. It was incredibly adorable.

At around eleven o’clock I set out for my first stop on my Doors Open Day tour - the anatomy museum. The anatomy museum is located in the department of medicine at the University. Normally, it’s only open to medical students and staff, but on Doors Open Day, anyone can visit.

It’s a pretty cool exhibit. The whole room features instruments used back in the good-old-days of surgery of yore, as well as aged textbooks, and life and death masks of various famous figures. Oh, and of course, there’s anatomy. Lots and lots of anatomy. Shelves and shelves of skulls. More shelves of spines. A few hips. Some random bones that were laying around storage. Then there’s the non-bones. I will not go into detail here, except to say that it’s remarkable how long tissue can be preserved when suspended in the right concoction. One of the main exhibits - right in the center of the room - was a mummified dissected body. Have I mentioned that there were quite a few young kids wandering around?

Of course, the real main attraction was the skeleton of William Burke. For those of you unfamiliar with the history, surgeons used to learn their trade by dissecting dead bodies. Of course, only executed criminals were legally allowed to be dissected, and there weren’t nearly enough of those to go around. Thus emerged the lucrative body-snatching business. For every body given, the University would pay twelve pounds (to put this in perspective, professors were paid fifteen). There was a tunnel that led underneath the building to a back entrance where bodies were picked up. There’s actually still a trap door leading to it in one of the classrooms today.

William Burke and his partner William Hare took it a step further, and started murdering people and making a rather lucrative business of it. Until someone left something at their house, came back the next day, and found a body hidden under the bed. Oops. Unfortunately, when Burke and Hare were arrested all the evidence against them was circumstantial. So, Hare turned State’s evidence, and got away scot free, while Burke’s punishment was to be hung, dissected, and have his skeleton displayed in the medical laboratory where you can still see it now, one day out of the year.

After this cheerful outing, we went outdoors to Calton hill, and the Old City Observatory and Astronomer’s House. Now, some events in Doors Open Day need to be booked days in advance. These tours were two prime examples. Fortunately, when I e-mailed them the day before, they had had some cancelations, and were able to squeeze me in.

We first toured the Astronomer’s House, which has been restored by the Vivat trust, a charity that buys houses, restores them, fills them with period furniture, and then rents them out for vacations. They did a very nice job on the Astronomer’s House. The building itself is entirely too precious. It’s small, but designed in a castle-y style. There’s a magnificent view from every window and a round tower that houses three different rooms. The middle one is a dining room, my favorite part of which is an 80-pound table that is the only piece of non-period furniture and is thusly covered with a plaid tablecloth that reaches to the floor.

In between touring the house and the observatory, we wandered around Calton Hill. Taking pictures of the view of Edinburgh, enjoying the sunshine (which has been going on for two weeks straight now), jumping off rocks, and then walking up a tower and taking quite a few more pictures of the view of Edinburgh. (From left to right: The Mylne's court crew at the astronomer's house. Me and Thomas, a friend from high-school and... FUN!)

The observatory itself is in the center of the hill, and houses two telescopes. One, on the bottom floor, is set on a straight track along the meridian. Another, inside a tower under a huge dome, was used for taking pictures of the stars, but now is just used for star-gazing. Every moving piece (including opening and closing the ceiling and rotating the dome!) has a piece of rope attached to it, so that the person sitting at the foot of the telescope can control it all remotely. I even got to make the dome rotate! It was indescribable amounts of fun.

At the end of the tour we went outside and looked through a special telescope that allowed us to see the sun. I’ve never looked at the sun through a telescope before, on account of not wanting to go blind, and I have to say, the experience is amazing. You don’t realize just how incredible the sun is, until you actually see it. I stated that it was very cool, but the astronomer overseeing the operation assured me it is, in fact, quite hot.

As we were walking home, we passed by one of the sites I had very much wanted to see, but hadn’t thought we’d have time for - the Robert Burns memorial. The reason I had wanted to see it on this day in particular (as versus any of the other 364 days you could see it) is that members of the Burns society were supposed to be reading poems, and performing them set to music.

Inside Burn's memorial When we got inside a three-piece band (banjo, guitar, vocals) called “Ragged Glory” was performing some of Burns’ songs. They did a gorgeous rendition of “My Love is Like a Red Red Rose” and finished with a tune called “A Man’s a Man for A’ That” (good rendition here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2pGWkjwOBw&feature=related). As they began the song, everyone inside the memorial started to sing along. The cool thing was, a good number of them were actually Scots, quite a few in full kilts, and you could hear the accent, and that everyone knew the tune as they sang.

There were quite good acoustics in the memorial, and I find that there’s just a certain feeling that comes from being surrounded by people singing for sheer joy. They got to the last verse, and everyone sang a-cappella. “That Man to Man, the world o’er, Shall brothers be for a’ that.” Singing along to Rabbie - really not a shabby way to end a pretty spectacular day.

Okay, so I know that's obvious, but I was talking more about the blog. From now on you can find it here: mashsdigests.blogspot.com. I'm still uploading all my old posts from Malawi, but I promise they will all be there.

-m

Recipe: Ming Wei's Hard-boiled Eggs in Sauce.



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This was a dish in our first flat-mate dinner, cooked by my awesome flat-mate, Ming Wei, who brought a rice cooker that could feed about ten people, Soy Sauce, and a muffin tin when she came here from Taiwan. Told you, awesome. Unfortunately, none of my flat-mates seem to measure when cooking, but their stuff always turns out great.



Ingredients


Green Onion

Garlic


Ginger

Chicken legs (cooked)

Soy sauce


Sugar
Eight star (star anise)


Hard-boiled Eggs

Salt (to taste)

Instructions


Fry green onion, garlic and ginger in vegetable oil. Then, throw the chicken legs in until they soak up the flavor. Take the chicken legs out, add soy sauce, sugar, and eight star (star anise) and wait 30 minutes with this on low heat. Add the eggs to the sauce.


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It seems that whenever you arrive in a new place, the first question anyone asks (well, besides, “What’s your name?”) is “Why are you here?” In Malawi, my answer was pretty standard, “I came here to learn, to teach, and to see more of the world.” In Edinburgh, my answer is a bit more multi-pronged. On the surface, I am here for graduate school, studying toward a Master’s in International Development. That, however, doesn’t go near to explaining why.

There are many reasons why I chose to jump across the ocean for my studies. For one thing, it’s cheaper, about three times less than a Masters in the States would have cost. I also liked the look of the program I’m in - its interdisciplinary nature allows me to take pretty much any class in the University, so long as I can link it in some way to development (and provided there’s space, of course). I thought living abroad for a year would be a cool opportunity, and that it would be interesting to get to know a new city and country. Most of all though, it’s Scotland, and ever since I started visiting here when I spent a summer in London five years ago, I’ve been searching for any excuse I could find, to get back. My flat-mates! So far, I have no cause to regret this decision. Since the moment I stepped off the plane, it’s been amazing being back in Scotland. I knew it was going to be a good experience when the customs officer (this is customs in Edinburgh) smiled at me, welcomed me, and wished me good luck with my studies. Riding out of the airport I shared a cab with Salome, a girl from Georgia (the country, not the state) who turned out to be in the room next to mine. There are three other girls in my flat, and they are pretty much the best flat-mates anyone could ask for. Wendy and Susan are from China, and Ming Wei is from Taiwan.

The building I live in is called Mylne’s Court, and it’s situated next to Edinburgh Castle, on the Royal Mile, which is one of the main tourist streets in Edinburgh. To get to my building you duck through a small stone archway that opens up underneath a building. After traveling through a small tunnel, you reach a courtyard surrounded by three interconnected buildings, one of which I live in. This means that my entire dorm, instead of lying on one street, is actually between two.

Mylne's Court, where I live The buildings themselves are converted tenement houses, which means that they have some more interesting aspects to them than I feel your typical new apartment complex would have. For one thing, the rooms themselves are formed a bit differently. My flat-mate Susan actually has a filled-in fireplace in her room, while I have a bookshelf built into my wall. When I first found out I was living in Mylne’s court, I was a bit afraid of what living in an older stone tenement house would feel like, but, in fact, it’s kind of nice. It’s gothic, but paradoxically enough, it’s gothic in a welcoming and homey sort of way. Of course it doesn’t hurt that my view is out the back of the building, over the spires of the Divinity School, on to Prince’s gardens, and back out over the city all the way to the harbor.

Perhaps my favorite part of the building, though, is that it illustrates one of the more interesting facts about the city: Edinburgh is built on top of Edinburgh. I was told this the day I moved in here, and saw it first hand when I crossed over a bridge and, looking down, saw another street level, thirty feet below. More recently I took a tour called “The real Mary King’s close” where we went below a building and toured streets that had been covered over centuries ago. At one point on that tour we went over a bridge and... you guessed it, when I looked down, I saw another street level, thirty feet below. Thus it is, that when you enter my building, you come in on the fourth floor. I live on the sixth floor, but on the back side of the building, and when you look down from my window, you find you are about ten stories up. Nifty!

View from my dorm window As for the school and city, both are pretty amazing. I still haven’t quite gotten used to living in a city that still has cobblestone streets, and a handful of castles; or the fact that I go to a school that was founded before my country. I went on a literary pub tour of Edinburgh where we went to various literary sites in the city - punctuated by breaks at pubs with live folk music - and it was incredible to see how many of these references exist in the city. This is the place of Darwin, Conan-Doyle, Stevenson and Hume (you know, last name type people).

Even modern day, my program is pretty cool. There are fourteen people within my major, and we’re from all over the world, with incredibly diverse experiences. As wonderful as undergrad was, I don’t remember being able to discus with other students what working for the EU for the past three years was like, or being with anyone who could list “helping in the revolution” as part of their extra-curriculars. I also don’t remember going to a huge dance hall called a Ceidelh (Kay-lee), which is a shame, because it’s unbelievable amounts of fun. Especially when a surley caller is looking out over the dis-organized mish-mash of the crowd shouting (in an extremely strong brogue) “Well, I sure hope yah all can run a government better than yah can organize tah dance”.

All in all, I’m looking forward to this year. Especially the part where I eat deep-fried Mars bars, Haggis, and black pudding.

A note: From now on my blog can also be found at: Mashsdigests.blogspot.com. All old posts from Malawi will be there as well, I am currently in the process of uploading them.

Recipe: Apple Crumble---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The first recipe I’ve cooked in America, Malawi, and Scotland. Apples seems to be pervasive in all three places and I feel like there’s something about apples, and apple desserts specifically, that are reminiscent of home.

Ingredients:

The filling

Four apples, cored and diced.

1/3c sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

The topping

1 1/3 c flour

1/2 c sugar

Enough butter to bind the flour and sugar (usually about half a stick)

Butter a 9 inch square baking dish, pre-heat the oven to 190C, 375F. Take about half of the diced apples and line the bottom of the baking dish. Sprinkle about half of the filling’s cinnamon and sugar over top. Repeat for the second layer. In a separate bowl mix flour and sugar. Take small cubes of the butter and use a fork to cut them into the flour and sugar until the whole mixture resembles a bowl of dried peas. Pour this evenly on top of the apples, and bake for 30-45 minutes. Longer is better because the apples become more mushy. Mmmm.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Over the past three months I’ve found myself living in three different places, in three different countries, on three separate continents. As a consequence, I have had to do a lot of moving and have realized there’s one aspect of moving people don’t talk about all that often: stuff. It is absolute incredible the amount of stuff that accumulates in the process of living somewhere. I’ve found this out in miniature every time I’ve moved, but none of it compared to (or really prepared me for) the process of moving out of the house I grew up in.

Moving out of the house you grew up in is in itself a pretty strange experience. On the one hand, I haven’t lived there in over seven years. On the other hand, it was always comforting to know it was there; that somewhere on the earth was my bedroom, arranged as it always had been, sitting in my house, surrounded by my yard, where I used to play. What I hadn’t realized was that there was also an attic-full of things that had been accumulating since my birth.

It’s fairly daunting to be faced with an entire room-full of giant boxes you have to sift through to decide what to throw away and what to keep. Even more so because there’s actually a strange phenomena of memory that plays into filtering through items from one’s past. Objects that you never in a million years would have remembered by yourself suddenly turn up and strike a chord of memory so profound that there is certainly no way you could ever throw them away. It is for this reason that in my permanent abode, whenever I finally get one, every available wall (including the bathroom) will be entirely lined with books, and all the surface areas will be covered with stuffed animals.

You find strange things when sorting through an entire house. Searching through my office I stumbled on the notebook I used for second grade Spanish. I should have just tossed it out, but when I saw the sentence “Estoy muy contento porque ayer encontre un pato con cinco ptitos (sic)” written in my enormous and awkward scribble I simply couldn’t. Ditto a valentine from eighth grade that says, among other things “I like ham, do you like ham? Ham ham ham.” Ditto a letter home to my parents telling them how much I was enjoying space camp, and especially a picture taken in seventh grade of me and my six closest friends at the time, all of us dressed up in ridiculous costumes and standing in front of a painted beach scene.

And while sorting through all of this stuff, and throwing a good portion of it out, was definitely a bit sad, what was really amazing to me was realizing how much of it is still relevant to my life now. I still speak Spanish on a regular basis, the sender of the valentine is one of my best friends, and I even communicate with a few of my friends from that year of space camp. As for the photograph from seventh grade, even though it was taken twelve years ago, I still saw everyone in it when I came home.

I went through a similar sorting process in miniature when I came to Scotland, trying to fit everything valuable of my life into the weight restrictions for international luggage. I brought a lot of necessities of course, warm clothes, a cookbook, various journals, but I also brought a journal for recording all my bird-sightings, a book titled “Goodnight Washington, DC”, a carving of a lemur I’ve had since I was about ten, a scarf knitted for me by a Malawian neighbor, and a sweater that declares that while I’m not from Wayne Maine, I got there as fast as I could (truth!). And in a very different way, those things are just as important to me as sheets or running shoes are.

There’s a reason we don’t just throw sentimental items out, a reason we continue to pack and re-pack items of varying importance, but of great significance. A reason we print out pictures and stick them in various albums and frames. Because wherever you are, the things around you aren’t just objects, they are touchstones, reminders of who you are, who you were, and how you got that way.

Malawi-Style Broccoli Cheddar Quiche

Ingredients Pie Crust:

1 Cup flour

1/4 Teaspoon salt

4-5 Tablespoons margarine

1-2 Tablespoons water

Combine dry ingredients, then cut in margarine with a fork until it forms small balls, add water. Use your hands to form the pastry into a big ball, then use a glass bottle to roll it out into a circle form. Grease your frying pan, and set the pastry in the pan.

Ingredients quiche:

2 eggs

4 Tablespoons milk powder, mixed into one cup of water

1/4 Teaspoon salt

1/2 Cup chopped broccoli (or greens if you don’t grow broccoli)

1 Cup cheddar

3 cloves garlic, minced

1/8 Cup onions, diced

Enough olive oil (or regular oil) to coat pan

Beat together eggs and milk in a bowl, set aside. Sauté onions in olive oil for about five minutes, add garlic and broccoli and sauté for five more minutes. Sprinkle on salt, then add sauté to eggs and milk. Pour whole mixture into pie pastry. Put over very few coals, then either put metal water filter lid or pan lid or tin foil over top, and pile on more coals. Bake for 30 minutes, or until knife stuck in comes out clean. Make sure you keep a small fire going on the side for continuous coals.

American-Style Broccoli Cheddar Quiche

Use same ingredients as Malawi-Style Broccoli Cheddar Quiche, except if you prefer substitute butter for margarine, and whole milk for milk powder. Pre-heat oven to 425 F. Use a well-floured rolling pin to roll out pastry, and place pastry in a pie tin. Follow same instructions for filling, and then place filling in pastry and pie-tin in oven. Bake at 425 F for 15 min, and then lower temperature to 350 F and bake for another 30 min until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

Busy-Day Broccoli Cheddar Quiche

Go to local grocery store. Buy broccoli cheddar quiche from frozen food section. Follow directions on box.

At the end of your Peace Corps service, at the Close Of Service conference, Peace Corps staff present a workshop on readjusting to life in America. During the workshop you are told that the two questions you will invariably be asked on coming home are “What was it like living in Malawi?” and “How does it feel to be home?”. They suggested that unless you wanted to spend three days straight answering these questions (roughly the amount of time it would take to accurately and fully explain the complexities) you come up with a neat one or two sentence synopsis. I don’t think I ever really figured one out for the first question, but for the second I came up with “It’s great to be back, but also a little bit strange,” and, although short, that has turned out to be surprisingly accurate.

It’s fairly difficult to quantify how nice it is to be back home. It’s wonderful to be around my friends and family again, to have ease of communication, to have electricity that stays on consistently, to have a wide variety of foods at my disposal, to be able to show my knees, and especially to be able to walk around in relative anonymity and not have strangers calling out to me requesting money or my hand in marriage.

As for the “strange” it’s probably not a shock to anyone that coming from one culture to a vastly different one after three years would be difficult, but I don’t think even I realized exactly quite how complex it would be. For one thing, I completely underestimated how much I’ve missed in the past three years. To illustrate my point, I have compiled a by-no-means-comprehensive list of things I missed out on while I was in Malawi: Obama getting elected, Twitter, That YouTube video, Lady Gaga, Everyone having a Smartphone, 3d movies, The Tea Party, That other YouTube video, Justin Beiber, Electric cars, The Arnold Schwarzeneger scandal, The Anthony Wiener (really?!) scandal, The Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, That other other YouTube video, you know, the one with the cute animal/stupid antics/girl who really really really can’t sing.

Trying to catch up on all of this leads to fun moments like me screaming and backing away from the MacBook pro mousepad (it moves in mysterious ways). Or me responding simply with “uhhhhh” when the nice man at the phone store asked me “and what were you looking for today?” Or making comments like, “well, I don’t really have a particular opinion, but I do prefer Earl Grey, no milk, no sugar, why?” during political discussions.

Something else that has been really strange has been seeing which negative portions of Malawian culture that I thought I was escaping from actually exist even here in America. For example, I understand why, in Malawi, politicians have to swear they aren’t witches, I don’t quite understand why Michelle Bachman does. I understand why, in Malawi, the government is currently trying to corrupt the constitution, and restrict voter rights, I don’t understand why so many states are, as well. And I really don’t understand why “The Onion” (which ran the headline ‘congress debates whether we should have economic ruin’ during the entire manufactured debt crisis) has suddenly become the most accurate paper in America.
 However, what is strangest for me about being back in America is that it is quite simply odd to not be in Malawi. It’s odd to have formed a life and routine for yourself in one place, and then to suddenly not be there. What has made this even tougher is that about a month after I left Malawi there were a number of protests against the Democratic People’s Party (DPP, the ruling party) where violence erupted, leaving political buildings burned, shops looted, and twenty people dead, half of those in Karonga and Mzuzu.

The protests have come as a result of a number of bad policies the president has been enforcing, but the most prominent are the fact that he is quite obviously making moves to try to stay in power for a third term, something that blatantly violates the constitution; that he has been paying civil servants in a manner that is best described as ‘sporadic’ for the past few months; and that he has refused to float the currency, something that has virtually eliminated the country’s ability to buy Foreign Exchange, resulting in a country-wide gas crisis that is driving inflation through the roof.

While a small part of me is happy to be safe and secure in America, a much larger part of me feels that I should still be back there. Malawi was my home for three years, and it’s strange to have to be calling people on Skype, sifting through blogs, the AP, and looking at posts on Facebook to see what is going on. While things have calmed down, I’m still worried about everyone over there (not so much in terms of safety, no one’s going to bother driving along the road to my village no matter how violent they get, it just wouldn’t be worth it). I’m worried about what will happen to them, and to their livelihoods if the country collapses more than it already has.

Outside of missing being in Malawi, perhaps the most difficult thing about returning to America has been adjusting to the American pace of life. Back in Malawi, when I thought about returning home, I pictured this idyllic life where I incorporated the best of Malawian culture (carrying stuff on your head instead of your back, eating fresh and local, chatting with all your neighbors, walking or biking most places) with the ease of American life (using a stove, going out to fun places to hang, enjoying parks and paved roads.)

When I got home, I was surprised at how accessible such a life was to me. It seems that the number of bike paths has almost doubled since I was gone, and we have a nifty new farmer’s market in Arlington that is about 1,000 times more pleasant than a supermarket (it’s outdoors and features a weekly musician and there’s more human interactions AND they let you sample their artisinal cheeses).

Yet, despite all of this, I find myself driving places or running out to the grocery store to pick something up. In this idyllic life that I had pictured for myself, I forgot that, as much as it’s easier to bake bread in an oven rather than over a fire, it’s even easier to pop all of the ingredients into a bread maker and easier still to buy the bread at the store. And surrounded by all that ease, I sometimes forget that I really like baking bread.

One of the coolest things about America is how much freedom there is to choose to live the life you want to. One only has to look at our culinary selection to see how easy it is to synthesize elements of another culture into ours. Knowing this, I think I didn’t quite recognize that in spite of that fact, moving away from a country means that there are elements of that culture that you will inevitably lose. It’s strange to try to figure out how to mesh two cultures together, and even stranger still to realize that there are parts of a culture that you once took completely for granted, and now are going to have to work to keep.

So I decided that since I'm now in America and can take advantage of all this high speed internet technology and what not to post some pictures of my time in Malawi. So the following is a collection of photographs, and their explanations. I hope. If I can figure out how to include photographs.

So this is a picture of the Peace Corps office in Lilongwe, the capital.

View of the airport runway. This isn't what most other African airports I've been to/through look like, Malawi is just small.

I remember the Jacaranda tree was pretty much the first thing we saw when we landed and I thought, "I've come to Dr. Suess land."

About a week after arriving we moved into a village. This is the one I was living in.

And this is my house. In front is my host mom for my first two months. She was pretty cool.

A view of my homestay village as seen from the top of a local mountain. It was always interesting to me to compare different places as seen from the air. Mozambique has just miles and miles of sheer uninterupted wilderness, Malawi is dirt houses and dirt roads, and South Africa is this incredibly mesh of countryside, farmland, small tin roofs, and suburban cul-de-sacs.

This is my village. I'm just not standing in front of any houses, but I assure you they actually are there.

This is my school. My primary project was to teach here, and I taught English Literature and Physical Science for three school years.

This is what a typical classroom looks like.

In addition to teaching I worked on a few secondary projects in Malawi. The largest-scale was camp sky, a two-week academic camp for outstanding students organized by the Malawi education volunteers.

My wildlife club sold donated school supplies to earn enough money to travel to the local national park where we saw these...

And these. (As well as Kudu, Water Buffalo, Impala, and LOTS of monkeys and baboons)

My sitemate and I also organized a one week camp in Nyika National Park (pictured left) for students in the north.

We taught them a series of income generating activities (IGAs, here; soapmaking) and the local villagers started coming to observe. Below are the girls with the beehive they built.

We also saw Warthogs, the common Duiker, Bushbucks galore, Impala, Roan Antelope, Eland, Zebra, Hippos and Elephants. For most of the students this was their first time seeing these animals. The photograph is a Roan Antelope.

It was probably the most fun time I had for my entire service.

Some random cultural things: these are the canoes they use on the lake. VERY difficult to balance in.At night fishermen lash lamps to the backs of the canoes and paddle out to the middle of the lake to spend the night catching fish. When you look out to the horizon all you see are a bunch of glittering lights bobbing on the dark surface, like a reflection of the night sky.

The guli wam kulu are a group of dancers in the southern and central region. It's a secret society which covers themselves with pieces of cloths and masks and dance at traditional ceremonies such as the swearing in of chiefs.

The fact that a National insurance company uses this as a sticker is a pretty good indication of how prominent Christianity is in Malawi.Baobab trees. They are huge. And old.

Oxcarts, they ain't fast, but they'll carry things around.

Graveyards in Malawi are always in a grove of trees. Unless you are burrying someone it's forbidden to enter them, and you can't cut down the trees. The central and southern regions would actually be far more deforested than they already are if not for this cultural norm.In weddings in Malawi the little kids are dressed up just like a mini bride and groom. SO CUTE!And of course you dance around and throw money into the air at the reception (the money is then collected and goes to the couple). It's a bit odd at first to just be throwing money around, but it helps them start their life, and it's kind of fun to be dancing in a confetti shower of money.And then you auction off the cake.The clothes market in Mzuzu is a square block of closed in stalls. In Lilongwe it's an open air market that you pay 10 kwacha to cross a VERY sketchy bridge to reach. The food market in Mzuzu is similar, but much more open, and pleasant, except for the fish part.

A clothing alternative is to just buy a long bolt of brightly colored died cloth (called a chitenje) and have the local tailor make you a dress, a skirt, or a shirt.

This is the president, Bingu Wa Mutharika, and his wife Calista. He had us over for lunch. It would be amazing if he could run the country as well as he could throw a party.

I found this in a monastery I visited one day. It's a quote from Matthew where Jesus says to the disciples, "I tell you the truth, whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me." Although I am not particularly religious, it does happen to be my favorite bible verse. I think it's been a long time however, since I've thought of what I was doing in Malawi as anything besides just living a bit of a different life for a while, and getting to be with a community, new family, and new friends. (But for any conservatives who happen to be reading this, you will clearly note that Jesus is telling you to raise funding for the Peace Corps.)

Recipe: Nsima

This is the first thing I ever ate in Malawi. Nsima is the staple food in Malawi. It is said that you have not eaten unless you have eaten nsima. There are three different types of nsima, cassava (condowole), finely ground corn (nwoyera, all the nutrients are removed in this one pretty much) and ground corn (mgaiwa). In their cultural commentary under "what have I learned from my volunteer" my village put "we have learned that nsima is not the only food."

Take ufu (corn flour, or cassava flour) and have it set beside your fire in your winnowing basket (chihengo). Boil a giant pot of water. Once it is boiling, add the ufu handful by handful and stirr with the lukheza (giant stirring stick) almost constantly. Nsima is ready when it changes from a liquid to a viscous material you have to basically flip to stir. At this point spoon it out with a traditional large wooden spoon into food warmers. Eat with your favorite dende (side dish) by balling the nsima up in your hands and dipping it in the food. Careful not to burn yourself!

For as long as I was there, it still feels very weird to have completed my Peace Corps service, to have actually left. Partly this is because it still feels as though my arrival in Malawi, my training, my homestay, all occurred sometime last week, instead of a couple of years ago now. Part of it is also that there were times (more than I’d like to admit) where I would look ahead, and see the rest of my service as a stretch that was absolutely unending. Most of it, however, is that throughout the last few years I’ve made a home for myself in Malawi - made friends, become part of a family - and the idea that I’ve left all of that seems almost inconceivable.

One of the best parts about how I finished my service though, was that I got to stay in Malawi for a month after I was finished, and mom and dad came over again for a visit. Having my parents at my village goodbye ceremony, especially, was wonderful. The nursery school children performed traditional dances, the women sang special goodbye songs, and it was clear that everyone really appreciated my parents being there.

After leaving my village we took a second, more southern-centric tour of Malawi. We celebrated Dad’s birthday with a beach bar-b-que in a remote harbor, and even had a cake (I won’t say how many candles, but I will say that he blew them all out). We were threatened by a black mamba, and then sat in front of a pack of elephants at Liwonde National Park. And we went on a tea tasting tour at Satemwa. (Tea tasting is really interesting, in that apparently it is taken almost as seriously as wine tasting, with one having to slurp the tea to circulate air, and then spit it out. If you are me, and the tea is black though, you’ll just skip step two and head to step three, the spit out, ASAP.) After the parents left, I spent another week in Malawi, before flying back home.

It’s strange being gone from Malawi, especially at a time when so many things are changing for the country. The president has been less and less subtly moving towards trying to secure a third (and possibly eternal) term in office. He has been paying civil servants extremely sporadically for the past few months. My teachers all had a two month stretch where they simply were not paid, and it was right in the middle of “hunger season” (post harvest, pre-rains). Recently he informed police officers they would not be paid at all, and would have to raise their own salaries. Which they have been doing by inserting road blacks every five kilometers and fining as many cars as they can.

A few months ago he kicked the vice president, Joyce Banda, out of his party, and then cut her budget because he was afraid that on official trips she would begin campaigning for the 2014 presidency (well what did he expect?) More recently he kicked the British High Commissioner out when an e-mail referring to the Malawi government as “corrupt” leaked out (ummmm), since then Germany and Norway have also withdrawn aid.

There are many interpretations for why all this is going on. Some people think that the president is an alcoholic who is now also sliding into idiocy. Some people postulate that he’s just turning into the same old African despot we’ve seen in other iterations in other geographical locations, but some people actually think this is a highly strategical move to see if the Chinese will pick up some of the slack, and if Malawi can actually do without donors, thus leaving the President free from international pressures re: human rights and democracy issues specifically. Honestly I’ve been right in the heart of it, talking to people from all different stratas of society and a few different nations and I still have no clue.

Peace Corps itself is also going through a few changes. Whether it’s motivated by congress wanting to see results for funding, or by the pervasive feeling the Peace Corps is being overrun by post-college immature party kids, there is a huge push throughout Peace Corps to recruit more highly-specialized individuals. Which I’m all for. However, there has been a corresponding failure to find highly-specialized positions for such individuals, leading to some extreme disillusionment, boredom, and apathy on the part of said volunteers, which really doesn’t make for the most productive service.

Ever since I joined Peace Corps there seems to be a stronger and stronger push towards making Peace Corps a highly functioning development organization. As it stands now the three goals of Peace Corps are: 1) Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women. 2) Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served. 3) Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans. If you’re looking at that, only one of those goals is actually about development.

In terms of my own service, I’m not sure how much concrete measurable development I did. What I am confident of is that I became part of a community, that I met, and lived with, people who will never forget me, and whom I will never forget. I am confident that I made big and significant differences in small ways, both to my school and for individuals throughout my community.

It seems to me that wanting Peace Corps to become a strictly development organization is redundant, it doesn’t concur with the original reasons Peace Corps was formed, and besides, America already has a fairly influential and substantial development organization. Peace Corps is the only existing on-the-ground community oriented organization in the world. So either one believes that striving to make small changes in the lives of individual people is a worthwhile goal, or you don’t. As for me, after almost three years of service, I am convinced that endeavor will remain the most worthwhile and the most rewarding of my life.

It’s strange, having been in Peace Corps for almost two and a half years, to be in my third year of teaching. It seems I’ve finally gotten into the swing of things. Day to day I have a schedule, a routine hammered out. Yet, this is Malawi, and life here is always dynamic. You’ll be going along with everything completely ordinary and then out of the blue incredibly strange or extraordinary events will materialize, sometimes right outside your door.

One such event was when FIDP (Farmer Income Diversification Program), a joint venture between the Malawi government and the European Union, decided to launch phase two from my village. This means that the Minister of Agriculture, the Ambassador of the European Union, the local member of parliament, and several other Land Cruiser-driving dignitaries all showed up at my school, which was transformed into a veritable fairground, tents and all.

There were several things that were surreal about this festival. The first was the fact that it was held at my school, on our football pitch. So, all of sudden, our little patch of grass, where we’re used to playing football and netball, had several rows of grass-thatched display stations, a podium, several benches and chairs laid out behind and around the podium, a giant European Union flag, a giant Malawian flag (new design, of course) and over one side of the enclosure, four giant circus tents.

In preparation for the event, and for welcoming all the dignitaries, our road, which is quite frankly practically impassable during the rainy season, and which people have been lobbying to get paved for the last five years at least, was completely re-graded. This means that when all the dignitaries, etc. passed over it, they did not get the normal, and slightly more authentic, experience of coasting down a hill sideways and staring at the nearby foliage not to admire its beauty but to look for handholds, but rather a wonderful smooth ride along a very well-maintained road. Nice for them, I’m sure, but not exactly an accurate reflection of the life of their constituents, or the people they are trying help.

Then, there was the matter of the displays. FIDP’s goal is to encourage farmers in Malawi to grow crops other than corn and tobacco. To this end, they provide seeds for other crops, help construct food storage facilities, enact irrigation schemes, and try to aid in small business enterprises involving a diversity of crops. As part of the phase two launch, farmers who had been part of phase one were to show off their different crops and businesses.

So, all along the bandstand, different farmers and cooperatives came to show off their labors. Except, when you know the stories behind the crops, it becomes substantially more interesting. Since one bee-keeping group hadn’t yet begun harvesting honey, they took a bunch of honey harvested from Nyika and bottled it, while the wife of the resident wildlife officer stayed up all night fashioning candles from bee’s wax she had gotten from who-knows-where. Most of the hybrid fruits were provided by the richest woman in the village - part of an independently wealthy family that moved back to the village because they wanted to return to, and help, the place where they grew up. Also on display were several bottles of spices and chutneys from the small business they run.

There were fish in buckets to represent fish ponds, which, if they exist in my village, I’ve never seen, examples of products from Mzuzu Coffee Cooperative, which only a very small handful of people belong to, and macadamia nuts, which people from Lilongwe have recently been trying to encourage people from my village to grow.

During the ceremony, the Minister of Agriculture (whose name is Margaret – pretty cool) spoke, as did the Ambassador for the EU and the MP. All of them had problems with the mike, and since two out of three spoke in Chichewa (although my village is Tumbuka, they were Chewas). I busied myself during their speeches by trying to count the number of Land Cruisers parked throughout the football and netball fields. I couldn’t. Both of the local traditional authorities were dressed in huge flowing robes with flat, round hats. Strange, when you consider that their regular attire is a suit. Although encouraged to sit with the various dignitaries, Scott and I chose to take our usual place among the hoi polloi (although I did manage to snag one of the cold bottles of water that was being passed out to all visitors – missed out on the soda and beer, though). Pretty soon, two children had settled into my lap, and soon after that they were asleep, leaving me to the awkward task of trying to constantly shift my legs into a comfortable position without waking them.

After all the speeches were done, the village had scheduled some dances and performances, which every school, including my own, had cancelled classes to practice for. However, it began to rain soon after the speeches were concluded and the various dignitaries all drove off in their Land Cruisers, over our newly graded road, back to Lilongwe, or Blantyre or Mzuzu, or whatever other city base they happened to call home.

On my walk home, I realized that although I have lived around several of their major project bases for over two years now, I don’t really know what FIDP does. A few weeks later, to remedy this situation, and also because I hadn’t chatted with her in a while, I went over to the house of one of my favorite women in village – an older lady who works extensively with FIDP.

Nyabwindi lives up and down a few hills away from my house. About twenty years ago she decided she wanted to get into farming and asked a chief for some land. The way she tells it, he gave her as much land as she could pace off, thinking it was bad land anyway, because it was on a hill and the soil wasn’t fertile. The first time I stepped foot on her land, a valley full of row upon row of diverse vegetation, which seems to magically appear out of the large swaths of forest, I thought I had stumbled upon the garden of Eden. It seemed to make sense that Eden would be nestled in a small country in Africa.

Characters, I have found, are an international phenomenon, and Nyabwindi is a Character. Though she is practically bent over double with age, she still teaches at the primary school, farms every day, and is a member of the smallholder cooperative, the farming organization that works with Mzuzu coffee. To see her re-enact her interactions with the chiefs as she asked them for land is hysterical.

When I came this time, she already had fresh pineapple cut up on the table, laid out for me to eat. I asked her how she had first become involved with FIDP and, gratifyingly enough, she launched into the story of her entire history with FIDP. Apparently, some environment workers had been asked to identify farmers who would be interested in growing different crops. For some reason unknown to Nyabwindi, and thus to me, they did not actually talk to the farmers, but instead they simply looked around at who was already growing different crops and gave their names to FIDP, who promptly dropped off different seeds.

“So I woke up one day, and there is a truck with 300 suckers outside, and I said, ‘eh, what is this?’ and they said, ‘they are yours.’ So I was up all day and all night planting. I tell you, no rest for me that night, because suckers, they got rotten very fast. Up at Manyuchi and Njunju, same thing.”

She also said the truck had come with a second batch of suckers, but the road wasn’t passable, so the truck had just left all of the suckers at Nkhomboli, telling people to come get them. Most people didn’t, so Nyabwindi ended up taking everyone’s suckers. Now you can stand in back of her house, and look at seemingly unending stretch of pineapple plants.

Her other garden, down in the woods across the street from her house, contains a more diverse assortment of crops, peanuts, coffee, apples, lemons, even young tree nurseries full of bluegums and pines. She also has fish ponds and beehives.

“I’ll try anything,” she says. “The people come to me saying I should try fish ponds, okay, now I have fish. They come saying I should grow coffee, okay, now I see coffee. Recently they came with Macadamia trees. Okay, I will grow those too.” As I left she loaded me down with fruit, mostly lemons, which she knows I like. I use them to make guacamole, something I’ve promised to teach her. As I cycled back home I pass at least six different FIDP signs. I realize I’ve passed these signs about twice a week for the past two weeks, but I still don’t know what varying levels of success these projects have had.

In the weeks after FIDP II, honey has started appearing in the market, filling tiny plastic bottles with FIDP labels made with the aid of a label maker donated by FIDP. They don’t sell particularly well, though. Money has been tight recently, civil servants haven’t been paid in two months, and farmers are having a tough time, since the value of tobacco and maize was low this year. Since honey is expensive, almost no one in a village can afford it, but getting it out to the city is a problem, the road, which stayed immaculate for two or three weeks, now having reverted to its original state of impassibility.

I think it was Benjamin Franklin who said that you could either live life, or write about it. Although my goal in life is pretty much to do both, I have to admit that it’s a lot harder to sit down and write when your days are already packed, which is a very long way to apologize for not having written in so long. However, December was pretty action-packed full of traveling, and January wasn’t much better, despite my resolutions to just chill in my last six months of service. So, we’re going to have to rewind all the way back to the end of November, when I got seriously burned out.

In retrospect, it had to happen sometime, and it’s not surprising that after just over two years living in a small African village, one maxes out. Fortunately, at the end of October, one of my good friends from my group (who is now doing Peace Corps Response teaching at a nursing college in Lesotho) had asked me if I wanted to go on a week-long vacation with her, her boyfriend, and her family in South Africa, which of course, I did.

Now, Joce has not been featured very prominently in this blog for a very simple reason. For our entire service we lived half a country away from each other, which made adventuring together rather difficult. However, one of the nice things about Peace Corps is every few months we have a training and get to reunite with all the members of our group, and during these trainings, Joce and I were always roommates.

We have a joke that our rooms kept getting upgraded, because our trainings got nicer and nicer as time went on. We started with just beds and electricity, moved up to beds, electricity and a bathroom, and from there to a beachside resort. We’ve pretty much decided that next time we reunite, it will have to be at the Ritz.

So, at the beginning of December, I got on a plane to Cape Town to meet up with Joce, and two other recently-finished PCVs. A word on plane flights after one has been living in a small village for a while: awesome. You have your own seat, people come by and offer you food and drinks, and there is a distinct absence of chickens or goats. Yes, maybe there is a baby crying, but when isn’t there a baby crying? I almost cried when the stewardess offered me a choice of different juice boxes (juice boxes are one of my treats when I go to the city).

The amazement did not stop when I landed in Cape Town. Elevators, escalators, sandwich shops, everything had me gaping. Fortunately, I was with four other Peace Corps Volunteers who had also just finished up two years of service, so we were all in pretty much the same boat. I’m not sure what Joce’s parents must have thought, we kept freaking out about the wrong things. While they were busy admiring the beautiful views, or historical sights, we were marveling at such wonders as multi-story buildings, highways (plural!) and chain restaurants. (Ohmigod it’s a Starbucks! When’s the last time you saw a Starbucks?!)

It was also cool to be around PCV’s from other countries just to compare experiences. Our group included three PCV’s from Malawi, one from Mozambique, and one from Guyana. Now, I like to think Malawi is pretty hard core, but talking to Tim and Charlotte was a sobering reminder that other places are, too. Since Mozambique is so huge, Charlotte had no other volunteers near her, and basically had to fly to get anywhere substantial. In comparison. in Malawi you can pretty much cruise up and down the country in one day. Not that you’d want to, but the fact remains, you could. Tim, the Guyana volunteer, had to get to his site by boat. And then there was something about crocodiles, anacondas and piranas. Whatever.

Our company split after Cape Town when Joce, Tim, Joce’s family and I all headed off to a beachside town where Joce’s family had taken a condo for a week. This meant that for a week I was living in a place with electricity, running water, and a great view of the ocean. The first day I put my clothes in the washing machine, sat myself down in front of it, and just watched them go round and round for a few hours.

The vacation itself was pretty low key. We would pretty much get up, relax for a few hours, then go on a hike. In the evenings we each took turns taking a night to cook. In other words, pretty perfect. My night to cook, I teamed up with Joce’s dad, and we did sort of a Tex-Mex-South Africa mix, cooking up ostrich quesedillas. The whole thing was pretty much ideal. At the end of the week, I got on a bus (double-decker, with a bathroom, and air conditioning, and they serve you coffee or tea) and headed back to Cape Town, then back home. While I had been gone, Malawi had gotten some rains, and the green was a nice welcoming site to fly back to.

I basked in the new rainy-season beauty for about a week before flying off to Italy to join the parents for Christmas. It’s strange, Italy didn’t bowl me over the same way South Africa did in terms of marveling at all the modernities. Of course, this could be because I had just been to South Africa the week before, but I actually think what it is is that it’s just really easy to switch over. Italy and America are just very clearly worlds apart from Malawi. So much so that its like entering a parallel universe, and you can’t marvel because there’s nothing to marvel at. It’s rather like not thinking things in a dream are strange. Of course they’re strange, you’re dreaming. Yet South Africa is still very clearly Africa, so everything there that could be straight out of the western world just seems incredible.

For whatever reason, though, I kept the marveling in Italy to a minimum. There was a slight issue of me completely freaking out when Mom and Dad took me to a breakfast buffet on the first day, but considering they had more types of fruit and meat laid out on one table than are available in the whole of Malawi, I find this justified.

The food situation in Italy was pretty much always spectacular. Despite the one hitch that they don’t seem to understand that bread by itself is not actually a food and one must cover it with either olive oil or butter, the eating scene there is pretty spectacular. Despite it being off-season, I managed to eat a passable number of blueberries and raspberry’s (one restaurant even somehow managing to scrounge some up on my request though they were not anywhere on the menu) and I had buffalo mozzarella in some form almost every day. Of course, this turned out to be near fatal as a few of my friends almost killed me when, on arriving back in Malawi to the suggestion we all go out to pizza, I stated that I was actually kind of sick of it.

Christmas was another nice perk to Italy. I think I’ve stated before that it’s just impossible to feel Christmassy in Malawi. Italy gets you a bit closer, and the parents were doing their best to aid in the season, bringing over a miniature tree complete with tiny lights, ornaments, and Christmas angel. We watched Christmas Specials on Christmas Eve (three of them. in a row.) and got blessed by the Pope Christmas Day. Still, even with the cold and the trees and the creches it wasn’t quite Christmas. All of which has led me to the conclusion that for me, Christmas will always be irrevocably tied up with home.

The final notable thing about Italy is, of course, the art. I mean one practically trips over great art there. Unfortunately Dad, Mom and I all take different approaches to art. Although I think all of us appreciate the genius of great works, and the amazing history encapsulated in the evolution of painting over the years, Dad and I tend to be a little more sacrilegious. So while Mom is, as the guidebook tells one too, admiring the landmark decision to have baby Jesus appear more human by playfully grabbing for Mary’s mantle, Dad and I are whispering to each other, “Does is look like baby Jesus is trying to strangle Mary to you?” (Seriously, pre-renaissance inability to draw babies makes for some really odd Madonna and Child scenes).

I came back to Malawi feeling pretty refreshed, and not longing too much for the cares and comforts of my December world. I guess the biggest difference is just that I feel able to appreciate Malawi again. Good times, bad times, throughout everything I’ve always been able to appreciate the interesting time I’m having here, and the different experiences I’m being exposed to.

But starting at about the beginning of November, I just lost that. There was a moment in church when the choir started singing a song, and for some reason at every chorus, a different member of the choir would hold up a stuffed elephant. Normally, something like that would have really grabbed my attention and made me marvel and think, but at that moment, it seemed passé. Then, a couple of weeks ago I went to an engagement party of two people in my village, and they were both led in completely veiled, then unveiled halfway through the ceremony and showered with money. The whole thing was just one cultural moment after another, and I loved every minute of it. Which makes it really good to be back.

This past week I had the opportunity to participate in what has unquestionably been the most moving and satisfying project I have ever done in my service. Since April my sitemate Scott and I have been planning and environment camp for children in the north. The camp was started by my predecesors at Lura, Pace and Laura, and was continued last year by Dan, another Rumphi volunteer. Both times the camp was held at the Ntchenachena Smallholder Association, an environmental conference center in the village next to mine.

This year though, I decided it would be a brilliant idea to have the camp up at Nyika, the local national park (if you need a reminder of what/where Nyika is I suggest reading through the parent’s guest blog again). This was one of those ideas that was amazing in theory, but a bit more difficult in practice. Originally I thought I would just do what I normally do, that is write up a blog summarizing the whole experience, but then I thought that everyone would more fully comprehend the many ups and downs of the situation if stitched the blog together out of excerpts from my journal (slightly expanded and revised).

Wednesday, November 3, 10 pm: Came to Mzuzu after finishing classes. Booked a dorm in CCAP (Church of Central Africa; Presbyterian) Resthouse. Didn’t feel like dealing with the crazy drunken (though always interesting) vibe of the Mzoozoozoo. Miraculously had a whole dorm room to myself. Spread my stuff out over four beds to celebrate. Plugged in computer, turned on lights, and spent night celebrating existence of electricity - that is; reading, writing, listening to music, watching T.V., and charging up every electronic I own.

Thursday, November 4, 10am: Slept in until six. Yes! Went for a morning run in pants that barely covered my knees. Was wonderful. Met up with Scott and Matt (another environment volunteer from Scott’s group, big part of organizing the camp). Room was wall to wall materials for the camp. Mostly food. Bags of ufa (corn flour for nsima), rice, greens, soya pieces, onions, and beans. Mostly beans. Matt and Scott planning to head up to Nyika with Andrew (head of the Nyika, Vwaza trust) around lunch. Talked over logistics, divied up tasks, parted ways.

Noon: Having lunch at Big Bite, local restaurant popular with PCVs because it serves Pizza and Burgers when Scott called. No diesel in Mzuzu. Of course. Diesel expected Saturday, but I should keep my eyes peeled for fuel before then. Worst comes to worse we’ll go to the black market.

1 pm: A man who identifies himself as Albert calls. He is calling on behalf of Amama Nyin, the woman from whom we are renting a vehicle (the parks vehicle, promised to us in April, rolled over a hill and is awaiting a part from Tanzania to be fixed... it’s been waiting since August.) Albert says that the truck is broken and will not be able to take us to Nyika. Promptly call Scott. He is remarkably calm, begins listing out the people we should call to get transport.

2pm: The one softserve place in Mzuzu is serving Blueberry ice cream. Is first good thing all day. I cover mine with sprinkles. Liberally.

4:30 pm: Go from place to place looking for transportation with Scott. Person from our village can only go up Monday, Wildlife offices recomends writing a letter of request to the prison service and to the agriculture office, local MP is not answering his phone, am about to fall to pieces.

5:30 pm: We get a name of a man with a truck in a friend of a friend of a friend type deal. Before meeting with him Scott and I have a powwow and decide we don’t care how much we have to pay, we only care that the man understands he can’t cancel. We talk with the man, who owns the Kaka motel (not even kidding just a little bit). He refuses to let us pay rent, Malawians should see their national park, he explains. He is part of the Nyika Vwaza trust, his driver and truck have been to Nyika so many times. “Even this man,” he points to the Group Village Headman sitting next to him, an elderly gentleman. “Even he’s been to the park.”

The man seems wonderful, the only problem is the truck is scheduled to go down to Lilongwe Friday, return Saturday. If there were any delays, a crash... there are too many variables, too many possibilities. “I’ll tell you tomorrow by noon if the man goes to Lilongwe,” George says. “It’s possible he’ll fail.”

11 pm: Since there’s nothing to do but wait the rest of the day is actually fairly stress free. I go about enjoying the electricity, and play Bananagrams with Sarah and Mike, two other PCVs who are also in town. It’s actually fairly relaxing, and nice.

Friday, November 5, Noon: Scott manages to radio down from Nyika. The reception is surprisingly good. An Eland has eaten half our food. He gives a revised list of things to buy. How’s the situation in Mzuzu? We have a car, but there’s still no diesel. “It is what it is,” says Scott. “At least we have a car.”

Saturday, November 6, Noon: All gas stations have been told that filled tankers left Daar (Daar es Salaam, capital of Tanzania) on Thursday. They should be arriving in the afternoon, unloading Sunday morning.

6 pm: Fuel has not come in. No one knows why. They are only radioed when tankers leave, not when they are en route. Everyone says they are pretty sure gas will come in Sunday night, unload monday. All stations have lines at least ten trucks deep. I don’t know how we’ll ever get out Sunday. I start searching for the black market. It occurs to me pretty early on that I’m the last person in the world you want searching for any kind of slightly shady venture, and that’s not including my directionally challenged nature. Heck, half the time I still have trouble finding the fruit market.

Sunday, November 7, 8 am: A man named Gift shows up on the porch of the Mzoozoozoo. “I hear you’re looking for some black market fuel.” He says. What, seriously? Things actually happen like this? “Yes,” I say cautiously. “But it has to be clean. None of this stuff cut with transformer oil.” He nods. “I’m a mechanic.” He says. “I know people who hoard some diesel in drums. Since it’s coming in today they’d probably be willing to release some... for a price.”

“Fine.” I reply. At this point I’d be willing to trade my first born/adopted/stolen for fuel.

11 am: George calls. There is fuel at the Petroda down by Luwinga. He got a tip it would be in the night before. He didn’t want to tell me because he didn’t want to get my hopes up. He is third in line. Bless him, bless him, bless him.

Noon: I go down to the station with two 25 liter containers to get fuel for game drives. The place is a war zone. Army men with M16s marshalling people. Policemen serving out the diesel. People and cars lined up three blocks deep. I get in line. It doesn’t seem to be moving. I don’t have a permit to buy fuel. My basic plan is to smile, speak Chitumbuka, and hope the nice men with the semi-automatics are feeling benevolent.

12:30 pm: George has another tip. He picks me up and takes me to the total down the street. It’s much the same situation as the Petroda. We walk to the front of the line and George introduces me to the gas stations owner. “Maybe he can help you.” George says.

“Hi.” The owner says to me. “You are very pretty.”

“Thank you.” I respond, and immediately switch to my Chitumbuka, which is halting but intelligable. I explain the situation to him. He halts the line, takes my Jerry cans, and fills them up. No one in the line is mad. On the contrary, most are smiling and three are actually on the ground laughing.

“Did you hear her,” one man is repeating as he laughs hysterically. “She was speaking Chitumbuka.”

6:00 pm: We arrive at Nyika, escorted by a 4’6” woman wielding an AK47 (there have been elephant sightings). I don’t think I’ve ever been so tempted to kiss the ground in my life.

9:00 pm: I put the girls to bed. I explain to them that they shouldn’t wander out of the dorms because there is a leopard around. They ask about going to the bathroom, I say that the leopard doesn’t hang out around there, because he doesn’t like the smell. Mostly I’ve heard he hangs around the boys dorm. Just around the boys dorm. Should be okay as long as you avoid the boys dorm.

Monday, November 8, 9am: I still can’t believe how rapidly things can change here. Woke up in the morning and went for one of the most beautiful runs of my life. It’s strange but when I came here in April with my parents I wasn’t as struck by the beauty of Nyika as I am now. It’s like every time I turn around, take a step, cross a new hill my breath is taken away. There is a family of bushbuck (including a baby) who hang around the dorms. On my run I got within about 50 feet of a roan antelope. It was stunning. Such a beautiful, big animal. With horns. Very long horns. Very long and pointy horns. Sent it warm fuzzy feelings, which apparently worked because it trotted away. Continued to send warm fuzzy feelings as I ran over the pond of dam one, where an Augur buzzard is currently living. Warm fuzzy feelings switched to downright praying as I passed some fairly fresh leopard poop.

“You’re fine as long as you stick to the path.” Madam Kumwenda (she of the gun-wielding 4’ 6”) tells me. Easy for her to say, she walks around with an AK47.

1 pm: Cannot believe how amazing Jo, Matt, Scott, Yoel and Mel are (the councilors for the camp - all environment volunteers). They led activities all day, with Jo filling in with impromptu games (screaming contest! elbow tag!) when there was a lag. I collapsed inside the cabin and had a nap.

“No one else spent all yesterday traipsing around Mzuzu looking for gas,” Mel reassures me. Well no, but everyone did spend the day either a) prepping for students’ arrival b) meeting students in Rumphi c) running around Mzuzu buying last minute food stuffs.

5 pm: Went on a game walk to dam three. Was supposed to only be to dam two but even though it was getting late and cold students insisted on walking on. Only saw animals from a distance, but was good as it gave students a crash course in binoculars (no, don’t stare at the glasses, look through them. Bring them close to your face, closer, closer, they’re not going to hurt you!) Also made printouts of animal shadows, feces, and footprints, which students thoroughly enjoyed. To the point where they almost tripped over their own feet because they were staring at the papers so much. End of the day animal checklist: Eland, Roan Antelope, Bushbuck, Reedbuck.

9pm: Asked students what their favorite part of the day was. Answers: mudstove making, tree planting, game walking. So, essentially, everything. Asked students if they are happy, do they have any problems. Answers: Yes and no, respectively. “Only,” says one. “Madam I truly desire to see the zebra, the leopard, the lion and the tiger.” Tell her we’ll work on the first two, but since the last two don’t actually live in Malawi it’s going to be rather difficult.

Tuesday 8 am: Come back from run to the smell of fresh bread. Nellie, Andrew’s cook, has baked rolls, which are sitting, still steaming, on the counter. “They’re not going to eat themselves.” Andrew says. He’s laid out jam, honey, margarine, marmite, and something none of us can pronounce. “It’s duck livers.” He explains. “Try some.” Wonder if I have somehow fallen into alternate universe.

5 pm: Students have learned to make (and eat) jam, peanut butter, and soap (well, no eating this one). “It is very good to have learned these skills.” One students tells me. “But we must also have business training, so that we may earn some money.” In fact we had that scheduled for today, but we’ve run out of time. Moving it to tomorrow. Andrew serves Escargot for dinner. What?

7 pm: Curl up on rug in front of fire. Scott, Matt and Yoel are singing bluegrass in the corner. Last clear memory is a hazy feeling that this is all very, very pleasant.

Wednesday, 10am: Matt somehow manages to pack one year of economics into a two hour session. Students are rapt. “What’s the equation for profit?” Matt asks. ‘Equation?’ I think. ‘Equation?’ “Revenue minus material cost.” A student rattles off. Say what? Oh well, I started off my career choices by joining the Peace Corps. We already knew I was going to be poor.

5pm: Went on a game drive then hike through a tropical forest. Tropical forest? In Malawi? It’s crazy, but beautiful. Birds are annoying me. Can hear them all over. By their calls you can just tell they are insanely rare and beautiful. But also, apparently, very good at hiding. Spot an orchid, Diker, Eland, Roan, and Reedbuck all much closer than before. Though they don’t say anything, it’s clear students really want to see Zebra, and Leopard. Not holding out much hope for the Leopard. Even I’ve never seen one, and I’ve been to four different national parks. Zebra though. They’ve heard about zebra all their life.

Thursday, 7am: In an effort to find the elusive zebra we go on a game drive at 5 am. This of course means that we are awake by 3:45 because some people feel its absolutely imperative to take some coals, start the fire in the stove (it’s woodburning) and boil some coffee. Really? Half an hour of sleep sacrificed for coffee? Students are all very groggy. 4:30 wakeup early even for them. All the counselors are holding our breath so hard. The students want zebra so bad, and because of this, we want it for them.

We spot the zebra about a half hour into the drive. They are over a ridge but Mr. Zgambo (our AK47 toting guard of the day, and counterpart extraordinaire from me and Scott’s village) takes everyone out through the ferns to try to get closer. We stop ever few feet so that the students can look through binoculars. Even from a great distance, they are over the moon. We walk in straight lines to try to avoid making noise. When we are about 100 feet away we can hear the zebra making danger brays, and we freeze. We’re able to get within about 50 feet after that. Five of them. Every student has a smile that stretches from ear to ear. “Madam,” one of the boys turns and whispers to me. “Now I am complete.”

9 pm: The rest of the day is dedicated to bee keeping activities. How to build a hive, how to hang a hive, how to harvest honey, how to process honey, how to make candles. I’m conspicuous in my distance away from the group. Mr. Zgambo laughs every time he spots me hanging out on the fringes. He’s seen this time and again, but it never ceases to amuse him. “Bees are very friendly,” says Yoel, who’s primary project is bee-keeping, and who gets stung approximately once a week. “Just don’t panic and they will leave you alone.” We’re standing a good distance away from a hive, but as time goes by more and more bees are coming over to investigate. I’m inching away step by step. “As long as you don’t panic.” Yoel says. “It will all be fine.” Whatever. I take another step back.

Friday, 7am: Yet another early wakeup (seriously guys, what is it with the coffee?) this time in search of elephants. If you’re lucky, you get out early, you can usually see some by the main gate. As we pull out of the park Matt takes out his guitar and begins a tune. Scott joins in on harmonica, and Yoel sings. It’s a pretty good tune, but the truly impressive part is the fact that they are carrying it off from the back of a very bouncy pickup.

9am: We have had to dig our way out of sand, push the truck out from between two trees, duck flat onto the truck bed to avoid a grove of thorn branches and have been sitting in a sun that’s been blazing for quite some time now. We better see some elephants. Fortunately Yoel, sitting next to me, happens to be an avid bird watcher as well. We sit, book on our laps, binoculars on our laps, picking birds out of the air and trees, occasionally pausing to look them up. “Fork tailed drongo.” “Turacoa!” “Red-winged francolin” “Augur buzzard” “Oooh, Stanley’s Bustard, check him out.” After a bird flits across the road Yoel flips furiously through the book. “Now do you think that was a buffy pippit or a black capped pippit?” He asks.

“Who cares we’re looking for Elephants!” Jo interjects.

(It was a Buffy pippit)

10 am: The call spreads out pretty fast once the first person speaks it. “Njovu.” Jo is so excited she doesn’t even switch to English. “Njovu?” She whispers. “Nkhu?” And she runs to the side of the truck. Sure enough, there in and amongst the trees is a herd of elephants. They aren’t close enough to be frightening, but they are close enough to inspire awe. There are about seven of them, with two babies, one that can’t be more than a week old. We watch them as they move around, even getting to see some reach their long trunks up, pull down a snack of leaves. It’s a big “worth it” moment.

5pm: All of the students have been safely returned to their villages. They have with them a bar of soap, some tea, and hopefully a few good memories. Despite a stomach ache that I pretty confidently chalk up to some accidental ingestion of dirty river water I feel better than I’ve felt for my entire Peace Corps service, and, quite frankly, for most of my life. I keep remembering the smiles on the kids faces, and, as I flip through my bird book, I discover I spotted almost nine new types. Score!

Well, after spending about three solid months bouncing in and out of

the city, I finally returned for my first long stay at site. It was

pretty much the same as it's always been. Except that it's dry season

right now, so there's not much food, the road has just been re-dirted

(it's kind of like being re-paved except well, you get it) and since

everyone is burning their fields there's a perpetual haze in the air.

Teaching is going well this year. A big part of that is because I am

no longer one third of the teaching staff. I really can't emphasize

enough how much of a difference this makes.

I also did not anticipate how wonderful it would be to see my Form

Three students again. These are the students who were Form Ones when I started teaching, and while it's extremely surreal to see them turning into mini-adults (a few of them got married this past year, to my extreme dissapointment) it's been so wonderful teaching them every day when I think that I could very well have been home missing them.

The food situation though, was a definite downer. You would think

that after two years I would have in some way adjusted to the fact

that I just can't have certain foods. Nope. Hemingway once said that

when he was poor and hungry it really focused his writing, and helped

him paint a clearer picture. While I understand the philosophy behind

this, I'm really not certain how it led to his short, sharp sentances.

My writing gets positively florid whenever I mention food.

I have one story that has simply stalled because two pages ago the

main character made the unwise decision to stop into a coffee shop for breakfast, and as of now he still hasn't gotten around to ordering a drink. The coffee shop, on the other hand, has expanded into a bakery/delicatessen/creamery/confectionary - and is still growing.

On the other hand, I've been able to have some food experiences here I would never have gotten in America. The other day, while visiting a wildlife worker friend of mine, I found that he was smoking out his bee hives in preparation for honey harvesting. While I positively cowered a few feet away, he opened up one of the hives and pulled out a fresh slab of comb. After making absolutely sure there were no bees in it, I sucked the honey straight off the wax. It was pretty amazing, and it definitely tasted different from honey you buy in a store. It was another one of those times where I sit back and think "I really couldn't do this in America" (well, that one I could, but I wouldn't) and those are the things that make being here, even after two years, still new and exciting and cool.

Useful with almost any cookie recipe:

Baking Cookies

Baking cookies is actually easier than baking most other things. As with almost anything baked, take a medium-sized sefrier (pot) and grease the bottom. Then pre-heat it thoroughly by sticking a lid on it and placing it over embers for about 10-20 minutes. Take it off the embers, put in cookie dough, leave off the embers for five minutes, put back on the embers for five minutes, then take off again. Open lid, let cool before removing cookies. Or burn the heck out of your hands in your eagerness to eat warm gooey cookies.

The reason there is cookie baking help for this blog entry is that I have spent a ridiculous amount of my time the last two weeks baking cookies. So I was going to write an entry all about coming back to my village after a long absence and baking cookies for people, and bringing them to my friends and neighbors, and how nice it’s been just to visit with people and chat, which it has been. Then, on Tuesday, absolutely everything was thrown into disarray when I found out that one of my very good friends, a former headmaster of a neighboring school, had passed away quite suddenly that morning.

As an outsider, the culture that surrounds funerals in Malawi can be incomprehensible and frustrating. Here, it is understood that whenever a family member, acquaintance, or person within a ten mile radius of you dies, you must drop whatever you are doing and attend the funeral. When you are managing a building project and your head contractor’s fifth cousin twice removed on his mother’s side dies down in Zomba, everything grinds to a halt for two weeks while he travels halfway down the country and back. This is really, really annoying. However, when someone you were close to passes away suddenly and you are shocked beyond rational planning, it’s actually quite convenient to find that everyone has already heard and you don’t have to worry about a thing except packing up and getting out.

This is the first really good Malawian friend I have lost in country, and one of the stranger things about the whole process has been going through the whole experience of loss and grieving from the perspective of two cultures. On the one hand I feel the loss, and internally deal with the loss, the way I have always done, as an American. On the other hand I have had to go through the whole public experience of saying goodbye in a Malawian context, which has brought with it it’s own set of emotions.

Malawian funerals have always been a bit overwhelming and incomprehensible to me. The process of grieving is so complex and personal that I think to understand it as any sort of outsider is always going to be difficult. However, living as a part of a village, Peace Corps volunteers attend a lot of funerals, which basically involves walking into a mass of wailing, sobbing people you don’t know and trying not to do anything completely culturally insensitive and stupid.

Attending the funeral of someone I was actually close to though, I think I got a bit better perspective, and although I spent all of Tuesday dreading it, in a lot of ways being at the funeral was helpful and comforting. Funerals tend to be a two-day affair. On the first day, everyone gathers inside and outside the house, sitting with the next of kin all day and night, and on the second day, everyone piles into pickups and heads out to the deceased’s home village for the burial.

Etiquette of the funeral dictates that close family and friends sit inside the house surrounded by a constant company of women or men (women and men stay separate at funerals) who alternate singing and sobbing and occasionally somehow do both at the same time. The yard is filled by a large crowd of those who knew the deceased to varying levels, who mostly sit around and chat. When you first arrive at a funeral, you go inside, greet the family, express your condolences, make a bungled attempt to suavely slip them money, and head outside.

So it was that after leaving my site at 5:30 Wednesday morning, and somehow getting a ride with a trucker who was in the middle of traveling from Durban to Lusaka I ended up at the funeral. I promptly went inside, sat with the family (also good friends) for a while, then went outside. Since the person who died was a Head Teacher at a Peace Corps school, there were four volunteers at the funeral. So, instead of sitting awkwardly surrounded by strangers as we normally do, we all sat together in a small group and chatted.

Which was nice. We would go from trading anecdotes about the Head Teacher to talking about how much we missed blueberries to talking about bunnies (aren’t they just so cute?) back to anecdotes. Which, I suddenly realized, was exactly what everyone else was doing. At one point I looked over and noticed a group of women playing peek-a-boo with a new baby. Which got me to thinking that in a country where travel is inanely expensive, funerals, where richer members of the community are expected to drive people around for free, might be one of the few times one has for re-uniting with people you haven’t seen in a while.

The coffin arrived from the hospital about midday and everyone went hysterical, crying and sobbing and screaming. None of us sobbed or screamed, but we did cry, and in a strange way it was almost nice having people around you falling to pieces, it was like a clear indicator “it’s okay, now you are supposed to be sad.”

After the body arrives there is a viewing, which is optional. Members of the church stand in two rows singing around the coffin, which is comforting, and you can file past to view the body. I actually did, just because everything was so sudden, I simply could not comprehend that this was really happening, and I thought if I saw the body, I might. In fact, I did not. Two seconds after seeing the body I spotted someone in the crowd who looked like him and on impulse thought it was him, and then consciously had to remind myself that this was no longer possible.

After the viewing, everyone processes down to the burial, and people stand and give speeches about how wonderful the person was. Then, and this part I still don’t understand, a man stands and talks about how much money and food were donated in condolence, listing exactly who gave how much and then stating the total. I suppose this is to show how much the person was loved, that people are willing to give so much, and that the reading aloud ensures that those who are able give more will, thereby supporting a family, who, in Malawi at least, actually do need the monetary support to pay for the coffin and transport and burial, but still.

On a personal level, the cemetery where the burial took place is in one of the most beautiful spots I’ve ever seen in Malawi. It’s on a beach backed by mountains, and the lake in that area is just completely crystal blue, while the mountains are this really stark green caused by a dense growth that’s almost jungle-like. I’m still not at all sure why I found that comforting, but I did.

After the funeral, we (that is the PCVs) went to the nearest volunteer’s house, where the executive decision was made in favor of comfort food, so we whipped up some Mac & Cheese from a care package and went to bed promptly at eight. Since then, I’ve still been trying, extremely unsuccessfully, to wrap my head around the idea that the person in Malawi who I knew as the most full of life is now gone, but then, that’s the nature of loss anywhere I suppose.

For now, it is nice to know that when I get back to site I’ve got a few dozen more cookies to bake, and quite a few more people who are going to be really happy to chat with me all afternoon, and who are going to make me feel extremely blessed to know them, and to have a few more months to spend with them.

Malawi Style Sangria

Ingrediants

1 jug of Taverna (the cheapest wine in Malawi that doesn't come in a box)

1 two liter bottle of Mountain Dew/Sprite/Any other soft drink with a lemon lime twist idea

1 flask of brandy

Lots of apples, pineapples, bananas and strawberries. (WASH the strawberries!!!!! Thoroughly!!! A tiny bit of waterguard wouldn't hurt. If you don't know what they do to strawberries here let me just say it involves the river by the clothing market and leave it at that.)

Instructions

Step One: Convince your boss that it would be a good idea to let the group that is leaving (and thus has nothing to lose) come over to his house to have a goodbye party.

Step Two: In a subsequent conversation convince him that having alcohol at this party makes it classy.

Step Three: Chop the fruit, while listening to music on an iPod and talking about all the good times you've had in Malawi. Try not to cry. If a few tears escape, say something about onions.

Step Four: Mix all liquid ingredients. Add fruit. Put the sangria away to chill in one of the three fridges available.

This past week all those from my group who took the option to leave early went back to America. Fortunately, I was able to get on medical hold because I need to have (another) full checkup before I can be cleared to extend, so with only a little bit of payment in poking and prodding and pain I was able to stay in Lilongwe all week to say goodbye.

I’ve had a few major goodbyes before in my life (a very few, actually), and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is just plain difficult to move from one stage of life to another, and to say try to say goodbye to everyone who’s been with you along the way. Of the three times I’ve gone through similar experiences though, I have to say this one was the hardest.

Still, we tried to make it as pleasant as we could. One morning we had a brunch (with bacon!!! Real bacon!!!!) One evening we went out to jazz at a local mall complex. We got to sit on the grass, to watch children playing, to see dogs frolicking, to have some good hookah, to chat. We had a dinner at our program director's house with kebabs and pasta salad and a two-layer chocolate orange cake and sangria and no one getting drunk (although that might be because dixie-cups make for very small serving sizes.)

Overall it was incredibly pleasant. Every activity was low key, we all got to talk and bond and reminisce, it was wonderful. And then, in the end, people went back home. See the reality of all those times when you mark the passing of an era, or a moving away is that no matter how fun or symbolic you make the events surrounding it (bacon, real bacon, double layer chocolate cake!!) the fact is that people are still leaving, and that's always going to hurt. No matter how much you sweeten it, it’s always hard to say goodbye, to think about all the time ahead that will pass before you see people again. I guess the only thing one can really take comfort in, after all of that, is having made friends good enough to miss. And I will miss all of them, quite a lot.

Malawi Style Sangria

Ingrediants

1 jug of Taverna (the cheapest wine in Malawi that doesn't come in a box)

1 two litre bottle of Mountain Dew/Sprite/Any other soft drink with a lemon lime twist idea

1 flask of brandy

Lots of apples, pineapples, bananas and strawberries. (WASH the strawberries!!!!! Thoroughly!!! A tiny bit of waterguard wouldn't hurt. If you don't know what they do to strawberries here let me just say it involves the river by the clothing market and leave it at that.)

Instructions

Step One: Convince your boss that it would be a good idea to let the group that is leaving (and thus has nothing to lose) come over to his house to have a goodbye party.

Step Two: In a subsequent conversation convince him that having alcohol at this party makes it classy.

Step Three: Chop the fruit, while listening to music on an iPod and talking about all the good times you've had in Malawi. Try not to cry. If a few tears escape, say something about onions.

Step Four: Mix all liquid ingrediants. Add fruit Put the sangria away to chill in on of the three fridges available.

Well, in and amongst everything that has been going on (eating at the ambassador’s, eating at the president’s, having COS conference) I forgot one pretty important development. The new group arrived!

This year’s new group was actually two groups, since the change of the school calendar they had to bring in the education group three months early, thus having their arrival coincide with the health group’s. I didn’t actually plan to have that much to do with the new group, but then I ended up being a volunteer leader during the counterpart workshop.

The counterpart workshop is the last week of training, and it’s when all of the headmasters (or another teacher from the school) come down to Dezda and meet the trainees. Both trainee and counterpart sit through a series of workshops designed to prepare the school for having a PCV, and the PCV for being placed in a rural school.

This workshop can be a bit overwhelming for volunteers. It’s the first time one is truly faced with the realities of the cultural differences between rural Malawi (and, more specifically, the teaching style that exists within rural Malawian schools) and almost any part of America. Our counterpart workshop was the first time any of us found out about witchcraft.

This was the first time current volunteers have ever been invited to help out with the counterpart workshop, and I think it was a really good idea to have volunteers there, because it’s precisely the point where trainees are going to have the most questions about what it’s like to live and work in the villages.

There are two schools of thought, though, as to how such questions should be handled. One school says that they should be answered with blunt honesty, best the trainees should know what they’re getting into before they get into it. The other school of thought says that information should be disseminated slowly, positively, and sparingly. Afterall, every volunteer’s situation is completely different, as are the challenges they are going to encounter at site, and the solutions they will have to work out as a result. Additionally, as a volunteer pointed out to me, in general, we can handle problems as they come up. However, if one knew all the problems that would crop up in village before they happened it would be pretty difficult to deal with. Put another way, a lot of times we’re stronger than we think we are. It’s almost the age old “rip the bandaid off” versus “take it off slwoly” argument.

I’m sort of in the middle ground. I think that while it’s true you can’t address every problem, it’s nice to know about some general issues that tend to come up, and to have some information as to how volunteers before you have dealt with those issues. Thus we had a session on witchcraft and other challenges in the village, and another session (albeit on the sly) about corruption and methods for dealing with it.

In general the week went really well. The new group is really awesome, and it was fun to be leading workshops, to realize that I had been in the country long enough that I did have useful information to contribute, that I understood a lot of the cultural gaps, and the reasons for them, and had a few strategies for bridging them.

The one down side was that it was absolutely freezing. (Almost, though not quite, literally. I would guess it was in the mid-forties in the evenings and mornings, mid-fifties during the day. But when you don’t have heating, that’s basically freezing.) One night it was so cold (with freezing rain to boot) that we all went to dinner wrapped in blankets. My roommate and fellow session leader extraordinaire Meg actually slept under eight blankets, which is funny because her site, which is right on the lakeshore, averages about 120 degrees.

Overall though, the nicest part for me about being at the workshop was just plain being back in Dedza. Dedza is the first place we were ever taken to in Malawi. The place we trained, the place we returned to every time we came back together as a group for trainings. After the last training I just assumed I would never be back in Dedza again. It’s a pretty area, it’s in the middle of a pine forest at a fairly high elevation, so the air is always really clean, and the sky is one of the clearest and brightest I have ever see. I spent one night just standing outside (shivering violently) looking up and around at the scenery. It was very strange, but comforting, to be looking at this mountain I never thought I’d see again in this place I never thought I’d be again, and just being really really happy with the whole situation, even if several of my extremeties were about to fall off from frostbite.

That was the happy part of this past month. The sad part was that about a month after the training I went down to Lilongwe to get my medical clearance for extending, and to say goodbye to half my group. In my experience there is never any easy way to move on to a new stage of life and, in the process say goodbye to friends you have made along the way. But we made a pretty good try of it.

We all stayed in the same rest house, and planned out various chill actiities where we could just hang out and reminisce. We had a group brunch in the morning (there was bacon! real bacon!) and in the evening a few of us went out to jazz at a classy outdoor bar. We sat on the grass and chatted, and it was almost indescribably nice just to be sitting on nice lush grass, chatting with friends. That's something I haven't done in over a year now. The fact that there was nice jazz in the background, icing on the cake.

Our sort of big goodbye even was on Monday when we held a semi-formal goodbye dinner at our program director's house, which ended up being a really nice low-key way to formally acknowledge that we'd all been together for two years, and now half of us were leaving. We grilled kebabs and had salad and even managed to pull of baking a two layer cake. We had a calm dinner, we did not get drunk on the Sangria (largely due, I think, to the fact that we drank it out of dixie cups. When you get right down to it, I think that's just too small a serving size.) All in all we had a really nice time together saying goodbye.

At the end of the day though, I still can't believe that people are gone. Every time I try to imagine some future event, or think about going back to my site and texting people, I still think of them as being here. We've been together as a group for so long, it's almost impossible to think of people in a different context, to think of them as being home.

Godiva tripple chocolate brownies, S’mores, Bubble gum, Goldfish, Lolipops, Banana Bread, Tortilla Chips Ingredients: The most awesome Peace Corps Staff ever, who, for some reason, love to spoil volunteers. To make: Complete two years of Peace Corps service in Malawi. Attend COS conference. Eat. Well, the end of July marked the end of the second year I have been teaching and even if the school year was switched around so that this one was shorter, I still felt proud, and, while I still love my job, pretty relieved to see the school year come to a close. For the next week I stayed in village and, for the first time ever in this country, I found myself with nothing to do. I kind of liked it. I did cross word puzzles, I read, I wrote, I ran, I did yoga. I played jump rope with my kids, I bird-watched, I sent people texts that said things like “How come no one ever told me there was this much nothing to do?” It was fun. Of course, by the end of the week I was pretty ready to get back down to business. First though, I had to attend a wedding. I’ve already attended one wedding in Malawi, but since it was in the city, and this one would be a true village wedding, I was pretty excited. I wasn’t disappointed. The wedding was a truly interesting mix of western and Malawian cultures. The night before the wedding the bride and her party came over to our compound (the groom was related to my family, though I’m still not sure how. I’ve stopped trying to graph the family tree - polygamy leads to way too many branches). We danced around outside the house most of the night while the bride and her party stayed inside wrapped in chitenjes, receiving visitors and in general looking miserable. I asked a friend why she was so sad, explaining that normally I felt one should be happy before getting married. My friend explained that in Malawian culture one is supposed to act serious the night before a wedding. Apparently it’s proper to be shy, because you are coming to the husband’s family, and sad because you are leaving your own. Bridal parties in Malawi are more extensive than in America. There is the maid-of-honor and the best man of course, but then there are two bridesmaids, two teenagers, two pre-teens, and two children - all with accompanying partners in tuxes - who also walk down the aisle and stand up with the couple. It was really fun for me to see everyone dressed up so nicely. The morning of the wedding the girls all came to my sisters hair salon to have their hair and makeup done, and they looked gorgeous at the church. The church itself was decorated with garlands of blue toilet paper and blown up balloons hanging from the rafters. Extra benches had been piled in and there was a keyboard attached to speakers, with an accompanying gospel choir for music. As for the ceremony itself, there was a lot more talk about wifely obedience than you typically get in an American ceremony, and half of it was conducted in Chitumbuka, but other than that it was pretty much the same. The reception was held outside, with the bridal party sitting under a long reed canopy while all the guests danced around and threw money into the air. At one point the bride and groom sat on a mat and guests literally showered them with bills. It’s rather funny to see all this dancing around and money flying through the air, just because Malawian currency already looks so much like monopoly money so the whole thing just has a feel of being in a game, or play. I left my village in a pretty good mood, headed down to my COS conference. COS stands for Close Of Service. It is the conference all Peace Corps volunteers attend to learn about everything they will have to do to officially close out their Peace Corps service - so we learn about all the documents we have to fill out, medical exams we have to do, plus they throw in a few sessions on readjusting to America, putting together a resumé, and finding a job. There’s really no way to explain how surreal it was to be attending this conference. Never mind that I’m not leaving for another ten months. The fact is that for almost the past two years I have watched group after group attend this conference and go home, and it simply does not seem like it should be my group’s turn. I have done so much in this country, experienced so much, changed so much, and yet when I think over it all it’s as if I just blinked. Nothing in my life has gone by this fast, and I don’t think any landmark in my life will seem as overwhelming as leaving this country will be, and this past week was a reminder of that. As if that weren’t enough, every time I looked around the room it was with the realization that half the people I was staring at would be gone in a month. These people who have been my support structure, my family, the only other people in the whole world who, for the last two years, have truly understood me when I said “you know what I mean?” All of this was somewhat mitigated, however, by the fact that the conference took place at a lake-shore lodge. So whenever I got too depressed I had my pick of a view of the lake, a nice room, or delicious food to cheer me up. Additionally, since this was our leaving conference the whole thing had a very lax feel to it. One of our rules was we all always had to have bare feet, so I now have a great photo of our country director having a very serious discussion with all of us about how to improve the Peace Corps program while sitting on wicker furniture wearing a full suit and no shoes. Have I mentioned the food? They did not stop feeding us. We got three large meals a day, two tea times, and then in addition to all of this one of our facilitators had brought us a bunch of food from America to eat while we were in session, including Godiva tripple chocolate brownies. Did I mention we got to order a soda every single time we ate? Including tea times? And that there was orange juice at breakfast? Like real orange juice? Like imported from good-and-not-totally-sour-like-Malawian-oranges South African orange juice? Awesome. At the end of the conference we got to pick out a piece of pottery and decorate it. I picked out a bowl, and painted it with a lake scene. The bowl is blue, with two scuba divers and a couple of fish swimming around the outside. On the very bottom is the Peace Corps logo, and around the rim I put an American and Malawian flag, with two phrases in between them. The first is just “Peace Corps Malawi” while the second is three Chitumbuka verbs, “Kukhala, Kutemwa, Kusambira”. Translated, that’s “Live, Love, Learn”.

Steamed Apple Ginger Muffins

So steaming is a new discovering for me and I really like it because, while I’m sure it’s possible to burn things while steaming them, I’m not sure exactly how. Whereas baking with embers, still, after two years, remains an inexact science for me. Steaming things is pretty easy, either:

Take a small pot (sefrier) and put it in a larger pot (sefrier). Fill the big pot with about a half inch of water, and fill the smaller pot with whatever you’re steaming. Stick the top from your water filter over the whole thing and voila! Although you do want to refill the water every now and again.

Take empty veggie/tuna/condensed milk cans and fill them about half full of batter. Stick em in the large pot with a bit of water and again, slap the water filter cap on it all. There ya go.

Ingrediants:

3 packets of apple cinnamon oatmeal (or a cup of actual apples, diced; one teaspoon cinnamon, and half a cup of sugar)

1/2 cup flour

1 egg, beaten

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp ginger

1/4 cup molasses (syrup from Shopright or Tutlas)

1/2 cup blue band (butter if you have it.)

2 tbs milk powder, + 1/2 cup water (or, you know, actual milk)

Cream sugar and blue band (butter). Beat in egg, then molasses. Mix up all the dry ingrediants. Add the dry mixture to sugar interspersing with the milk. Fill either the small pot or cans with batter. Stick in a pot over fire/charcoal/parafin/whatever you use to cook and steam it until a knife suck in comes out clean (bout a half an hour). Remember to keep adding water!

Before I begin this month’s blog entry, I would like to send an especial thanks out to Stephanie Meyer, author of the “Twilight” series, for sustaining myself, and countless other Peace Corps volunteers, throughout large portions of our service. True we have to stick “Dead Aid” book-jackets on them and when someone comments that they didn’t realize vampires played such a crucial role in globalization we have to think quickly and come up with some snappy comment about how of course they do and oh by the way have you read about Jeffrey Sach’s opinions on werewolves’ role in the Millenium Development Goals because it’s absolutely fascinating.

Still, it’s worth it. Worth it because while we may not have electricity or running water even a nearby road we have the certainty that Bella and Edward share a love that transcends mortality, age, and even the perils of high school. Or as a wise volunteer put it “We live in the middle-of-nowhere-Africa, you get your kicks where you find them.”

Now onto our regularly scheduled blog entry. Normally as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa I live a fairly obscure life. I’m on the internet about once a month, I can’t text about 90% of America, I’m not on twitter, and my address leads to a post box over three hours away from where I live. Even if you live in Malawi, getting to my house involves riding an hour and a half down a dirt road, getting off at the last stop on the bus route, and asking someone to take you to where I live. Generally more anonymity than I’ve ever had. Then there’s months like July.

July I ate at both the America ambassador’s house (with the ambassador), and at the Malawian statehouse (with His Excellency, Ngwazi, the President of Malawi and Chairman of the African Union, Professor Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika). Not too bad for one month.

I was at the ambassador’s, of course, for the annual fourth of July celebration, where all the American ex-pats in Malawi gather for a picnic. The picnic takes place on the ambassador’s lawn, which is just like any other lawn, really, except that his lawn can comfortably fit every American ex-pat in Malawi, a makeshift grill, a swimming pool, several craft and sale tables, as well as a bouncy castle. Peace Corps is assigned certain tasks throughout the picnic. Mine was face-painting, though I have no idea why. A five year old actually said to me “Well it’s nice, but it doesn’t exactly look like an American flag, does it?”

Despite my lousy face-painting skills, I had a great time lounging around, talking with friends, eating good food (all the traditionals of course - hotdogs, hamburgers, baked beans, coleslaw, and imported doritos) and trying to convince the bouncy castle guards that yes I am under four feet tall thank you very much!

Two weeks later we received a text saying we were again invited to Lilongwe, this time for a luncheon with the President. Since I didn’t want to take too much time away from site (and since travel was compensated by the Peace Corps) I decided to take the expensive and shiek night bus down to Lilongwe. You know the night busses in “Harry Potter”? It’s kind of like that. Except that so far as I remember, J.K. Rawling never wrote about a music video where a man shot lasers out of his eyes into another man, who then turned into a goat while a chorus of scantily clad woman in the background cheerfully chanted “Bye bye Satan!” (Although this bus is a step up from the normal busses, which stop every two seconds on the seven hour journey south, and frequently stuff not only passengers, but furniture, pounds of dead fish, and chickens in the aisles. There is a reason we hitchhike.)

In Lilongwe we each received an official invitation, which instructed us that the dress code was “evening wear, or traditional dress.” This was not too hard for the girls. Most of us have, at some point, bought a chitenje and had a tailor turn it into a dress or national wear. For the boys though, things were a bit harder. For some reason, not many of them had thought to pack suits when planning their two year service in Malawi. So most of them set off to the market and bought a suit. Not too hard. One thing, however, did pose a problem. I think the best way to explain it is by recounting a conversation between a friend of mine and two of our bosses:

Friend: Hey (boss 1), how are you?

Boss 1: Good, how’s site?

Friend: Oh it’s going well, yeah, so listen...

Boss 1 & 2: Oh boy

Friend: I’ve got this really great suit, dark blue with a really nice tie, but...

Boss 1: What size?

Friend: Uh, 11

Boss 1: Oh no. I’m completely out of size 11 shoes

Boss 2: I’ve still got a pair

I’d be willing to guess “providing shoes for volunteers to wear to a state function” was not in any Peace Corps staff job description. I have to say though, it was really nice to show up at the office the next day and see everyone all dressed up and free of the two coats of dirt we normally wear.

We showed up at the statehouse around eleven, and immediately the differences between an official American function and an official Malawian function were evident. As we pulled up to the wrought iron gates, guards with machine guns waved us to a stop and boarded our busses.

“Good morning!” They said.

“Good morning.” We chorused back, a bit uncertain.

“We just want to say most welcome. Feel free, feel at home, you are safe here, so enjoy. Most welcome, feel free!” And with a big smile they waved at us and got off the bus. After that it was a matter of showing our invitations, getting patted down briefly, and we were in the statehouse compound. To get into the ambassador’s house by contrast, we had to show our invitation, point out our name on a list, show our peace corps I.D. and walk through a metal detector.

Once inside we were led out to an enormous white tent, complete with chandeliers, flooring, and air conditioning. Now, I can list on one hand the number of buildings I have been in with air conditioning. So to be in a tent with A.C.? Crazy.

Two hours of chatting later and we were all seated at our tables where drinks were laid out. The drinks were: bottles of water with the President’s face on them, two types of fruit juice, Cabernet Sovignon, Champagne, and Amarula (chocolate liquer). Now, we had heard rumors that there would be an open bar, but I think most of us were a little overwhelmed by the selection suddenly laid out before us.

See, most of the time, we live in tiny African villages in the middle of nowhere. My nearest wine, for example, is three hours away, and it definitely comes in a box. Liquor is sold in tiny packets called “sachets” and is so terrible that the most popular chaser is a slap to the face to distract you from the taste. And suddenly there are three bottles of really expensive alcohol laid out on each table. As a friend put it, “I don’t want to get drunk at a Presidential function but... well, is it really right to let this go to waste?” Being the lush I am, I had three sips of amarula and an entire box of pineapple juice. Whoo! Party!

After lunch Vic, our country director, gave a very nice speech about the partnership between America and Malawi and how both countries will continue to strive for the development of Malawi. Then the President stood up and gave a speech that, to me, was surprisingly genuine, heartfelt, and touching. He said that he has travelled a lot, and that it’s always hard, and this is one of the reasons he so respects what we are doing. He said that what we are doing is one of the most important aspects of development, because we actually work in and with individual communities, and that, most importantly, we turn strangers into friends. He said he held the luncheon as a way to say thanks. When you consider that he could have just sent a card, that’s quite a nice gesture. Not to mention, it was really gratifying just to hear someone say, “You do good work here, and we appreciate it, thanks.”

The party ended with (very tasteful) dancing. After greeting all of us, the President left, but told us to keep dancing, so we did, eventually having the band jump down and dance around with us. About seven hours after we had first arrived at the statehouse we left again, having given, I think, a pretty good impression of ourselves, and Peace Corps as a whole.

Later in the night we briefly met up with the President’s stepson, who we actually had met a few times before (not actually that big a coincidence, remember that Malawi is about the size of Indiana here). After chatting with us a bit he had to head out, but quickly dashed back in, looking around and exclaiming quickly, “has anyone seen my bodyguard?”

Things I have occasionally left places and had to go back to look for: my purse, my phone, my camera, my jacket or sweater. Things I have never left anywhere or had to return to look for: my bodyguard.

Returning to site I was greeted by my ecstatic villagers, many of whom had seen me on T.V. (the whole luncheon having been broadcast) and told me that I had dressed very prettily. They also said they had seen me dancing and I had danced very well. The only way I can explain this is by stating that it’s a big aspect of Malawian culture to flat out lie if it’s polite. Even considering the widely televised dorky dancing, it was still a very nice shindig.

Pumpkin Enchiladas

(These are good, I swear! And if they’re not, well, you just haven’t been living in Malawi for the last year and a half. It can also be made into soup or casserole if you omit the tortillas.)

Filling

1 Ten/Twenty Kwacha pumpkin

1 tsp cumin

4/5 cloves garlic

Whole heckuva lotta salt (to taste)

1 small onion, very finely chopped

Tortillas

Water

Salt

Flour

Topping

Salsa

Cheese

There are a lot of theories on cooking pumpkin (bake it, boil it) I say quarter it and steam the heck out of it. After you’ve steamed it scoop out the mush, and give the peel to your cat. Mix the mush with the spices and the onion. Simmer on low heat (you know, if you can do that). To make the tortillas you just mix all the ingredients, flour a rolling pin (or coke bottle, nalgine, wine bottle) and roll em out flat. Put filling in tortillas, top with salsa and cheese and stick them in a frying pan. Cover with the top of your water filter and stick coals on that - just on the top. Cook til the cheese melts.

April and May are the months when I never want to leave Malawi. The fields are still green from the rains, with long grasses that wave in the wind. The skies are blue, tinged with clouds only where they hover in long ribbons above the crest of Nyika’s mountains. The roads are dry, the birds flit and the temperature is pleasantly mild. Then along comes June. Suddenly the temperature plummets like someone doing a cannonball from the high dive, the sun packs up and goes to the lake for his annual sabbatical, not to be seen again until August and slowly but surely everything begins to turn brown and die. It’s just not a happy time. But, so help me, I really love weather like this.

I have, however, corrected some errors I made last year, which have really helped me to cope with this cold season better. Firstly, I have talked my headmaster into letting me wear trousers to school, explaining that if I continued to wear a skirt my legs were in fact going to freeze and fall off. He was surprisingly reluctant about it, considering how supportive he’s been of almost every other issue I’ve brought up.

I’ve also started drinking coffee, finding that if I don’t have something hot and strong to kick me in the mouth in the morning, I’m not going to be able to get going. Cooking coffee in Malawi is rather a more interesting process than in other places, since we don’t have a coffee maker. It has been especially interesting for me, as I didn’t know how to cook coffee in the first place.

There are two ways to cook coffee. First, you can do “cowboy coffee”, boiling the water, then placing in grinds and running it through whatever sort of filter you can come up with - tissue, toilet paper, strainer, your hand, whatever. Or, you can get a french press. Most people, surprisingly enough, have the latter. I’ve started adding cinnamon to the coffee grinds, and putting chocolate powder, milk and vanilla into the actual drink. The result is something that may have resembled coffee in a past life and is truly delicious.

I’ve also been taking frequent breaks from the cold. My first weekend back at site I ran off to the lake to watch the football (soccer) game at a British couple’s house. The game was Britain versus America, and it was a bit awkward rooting for the opposition when your hosts are feeding you, letting you sleep in their spare beds, letting you use their water to take a scalding shower and letting you borrow their books. In the end though, we tied, so I guess it was alright.

I also skipped off to my sitemate’s village, which, although it is only twenty minutes away from mine, exists under its own sunny temperature bubble. Her parents had come to Malawi, and in honor of their visit she had organized a show of traditional dances. Watching the dances was really fun. They’re not really performed except at specific ceremonies, so I haven’t had that many chances to see them in the past. In the beginning of training I saw a bunch of traditional dances, but those were all Chewa tribal dances. These were Tumbuka dances, although they didn’t do Malipenga, which is the typical dance they did perform Vimbuza, which is a dance done to expel evil spirits, and Batoska, which is a women’s dance.

When I wasn’t busy running away to warmer climes I was busy planning a boys version of the girls workshop I did in March. The basic theme, as it was for the girls, was sex and everything attendant to it (relationships, diseases, pregnancy, anything else you can think of). Since the girls day was only girls, I had the boys day be only boys, and imported Zeb (1/2 of our group’s married couple) and “Tin Tin” (not his real name, though it would be so cool if it was) to run the classes.

They did an amazing job. Although I couldn’t attend the workshop (being a girl and all) I got to hear about some of the questions the boys were asking, and the issues that were covered, and it was truly amazing. Not to mention I had good reviews after from the male teachers who observed the workshop.

After the girls workshop we had decided that instead of having broad topics we should really just focus on sexual health. The point was basically to try to get the boys comfortable talking about sex. Malawi is very closed up about any issues relating to sex, the idea being, I think, that if you don’t talk about it it won’t happen. But when you’re talking about some place with a 1 in twelve infection rate clearly something isn’t working.

The only part of the workshop I really got to hear first hand was when Tina, Alyssa, and I went up to the school to drop of snacks. At that time, to emphasize the point that every topic was safe, that there was no embarrassment, the guys were having all the boys sing (at the top of their lungs) words that would normally be taboo. They were handling the topics with such maturity, and it was obvious that it was working, and that the boys were really loosening up and feeling comfortable. Meanwhile, in the other classroom, Tina, Alyssa and I are on the floor in stitches looking at each other like “hehe, they just said a dirty word.”

I travelled down to Lilongwe about two weeks after the workshop and found something rather surprising waiting for me in my mailbox... my close of service packet. It included, among other things, a booklet about readjusting to American life. It was crazy to see it sitting there. No matter how many times I say it, I still can’t believe I’ve been here almost two years. A majority of people from my group will be home in less than two months. I, on the other hand, am pretty sure I’m staying until June or July of next year.

I’ve been thinking about this decision since January really, but it’s never been anywhere close to final. Now though, it’s looking like a pretty set deal. I could still change my mind, or the paperwork might not go through, but barring anything unexpected, I’ll be staying here an extra six months.

The biggest drawback, of course, is that I won’t be home. I really can’t express how much I miss family and friends, how much I miss even little traditions or normalcies I always took for granted before. It’s something I thought would fade with time, but it hasn’t. I still get periods where I am almost drowning in longing for everything that is home. Despite that though, the fact is that I really like my life here, and the work I’m doing, and the people I’m with. And while home will still be there in an extra six months, when I leave Malawi it’s going to be for a very long time, and, more over, even if I came back it wouldn’t be the same.

I guess ideally I would love to be in a world where I could be in both places at the same time, or go home every now and again. Since that’s not possible, I’m going to stay here, and enjoy my life here just a little bit longer, and I guess be that much more grateful to see a plate full of tex-mex food when I get home.

Make shift manicotti.

Ingrediants:

Four tablespoons milk powder

One tablespoon vinegar

One bunch greens of choice

One cup macaroni

Any style tomato sauce.

Instructions

Mix milk powder with one cup of water. Put the water on a fire and almost boil it. Take it off the fire and add vinegar. Allow it to sit for five minutes (maybe start boiling the macaroni here, I usually do). After five minutes the milk should have separated into white flecks and water. Scoop out the white flecks. Add salt to taste. Congratulations! You've made PC Malawi style ricotta cheese!

Separately boil the macaroni and the greens (or you could sauté them). Mix the greens and cheese. Drain macaroni and add greens and cheese. Top with tomato sauce of your choice and parmesan.

The other week as I was talking to mom I mentioned that I really didn’t have anything to write about in my blog for this month. Things at site were going along pretty smoothly, and my last big vacation I made the parents guest blog (and didn’t they do a great job?!) so I was rather tapped out when it came to ideas. The irony Gods, as they always are, were listening.

The next week I went into Mzuzu (the city nearest me) to attend a GAD (Gender and Development) meeting. After the meeting our new boss, Jason Burns (yes, my boss is actually named Mr. Burns) conference called the Education volunteers to announce that due to the school calendar change we would be offered the opportunity to leave after this school year finished. In September. Suddenly I no longer had a problem trying to find something to write about for my blog this month.

As of now, about 90% of those in my group being offered this option (it’s only being offered to those being replaced) are thinking about taking it. This is not because they are sick of Peace Corps, or Malawi, or just really eager to get home. It’s because, in a lot of ways, leaving early just makes more sense. If one is getting replaced, it means you have to stop teaching in August, find new housing, find a new project to work on, and figure out how to balance being there for the new volunteer while still allowing them to craft their own path in the village. Or you could just leave in September. Travel a bit, but still be home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, get a job, maybe apply to grad school, see friends and family you’ve been missing for two years. It’s tempting, but more than that, for a lot of volunteers it really is the best solution, not only for them, but for the community.

I, on the other hand, already live in a house away from the school, I was already planning out a new project, and since I’ve been living about 5 kilometers away from a volunteer my whole time here, having another one around really isn’t going to make much of a difference. So at least for now I’m 99.999999% sure I’m staying until December. Another witches’ airplane lands in my village and all bets are off, but that’s where I am right now.

Probably the biggest downside to this is that I’m going to miss another fall. Missing major holidays doesn’t bother me but so much, but every time October rolls around I get nostalgic for the Blueridge, and apples, and pumpkins with funny faces on them (pumpkins in Malawi being purely utilitarian, I’m not sure how my village would react if I carved one and stuck it out on my porch). I spent about an hour debating what would be the best way to import a huge pile of leaves to jump in. At first I thought having Dad or one of his co-workers come over with a carry-on full of leaves would be best, but then someone pointed out that leaves - being so light - would be really cheap to send.

Thoughts of fall aside, it really is strange to realize that it’s time to start seriously contemplating my future. Do I want to go home in December? Do I want to stay in my village for another few months? Do I want to leave my village in September and try to get a more serious job in Lilongwe? And those are just the choices for the next few months. Looking even more ahead I’ve been looking at Graduate schools for a while now, a task made difficult because 1) I’m in the middle of nowhere Africa and 2) They actually want you to pick a major before you apply.

I’m leaning towards some sort of International Development/Sustainable Development/Social Policy/Peace Studies/Coexistence (Seriously, they have entire programs dedicated to coexistence. I am really curious what those classes are like. Do we hold hands?) But those still leave a lot of choices open, and I like choices, but not necessarily choosing.

So, to get away from it all, I decided to actually physically get away from it and I went and climbed a mountain. Mount Mulanje is the third highest mountain in Africa. It is, as Dad pointed out to me very blasé on the phone only 10,000 feet high. Let me tell you, when you are heading straight uphill over boulder and brush with a pack on your back 10,000 feet sure doesn’t feel like only.

Unless, of course, you happen to be a Mulanje native. There’s nothing like huffing and puffing and panting on the slope of the mountain, fighting off the spots in front of your eyes, only to see someone in bare feet over-taking you at breakneck speed. With a tree on their head. I thought living village life was shaping me up pretty well. I guess I still have some catching up to do.

As hard as it was, the hike was unbelievably worth it. We spent two nights in a cabin just a bit short of the peak and the view was absolutely breath taking. It’s crazy to live in Malawi for a year and a half, to travel up and down the entire country and feel you know the topography pretty well, only to end up some place where the scenery is completely different and it’s as if you’ve been transferred, not to a different country, but to an entirely different world.

Where we were staying clouds rose off the ground and were constantly shifting around us, birds flew below us, and flowers seemed to grow straight out of the rocks. The day we went to the summit we literally had to jump from boulder to boulder (first time in a long time I’ve been afraid of death from something besides an automobile) and trek through passages of low growing trees that seemed straight out of The Wizard of Oz. It was tough, but incredibly fun too.

Once we finally reached the bottom we celebrated our inability to move by going out for pizza. After the feast (we had a large each) we got another welcome surprise at the local grocery store. Every paper declared the the Malawian gay couple had been pardoned.

In case you haven’t been following the saga, about six months back a gay couple was arrested in Malawi for trying to get married. Despite outcries from the International Community, Amnesty International and Madonna (every newspaper lists her separately, I figure I should too) the two men were sentenced to fourteen years in jail. Just to put the sentence in perspective, rape here gets you six years.

The couple was pardoned after a visit from the Secretary General of the UN, who made it pretty clear that International Aid would be pulled if they weren’t. Although the president claims this had nothing to do with his decision, (it’s just that he’s suddenly realized that - while he doesn’t condone being gay - imprisoning people for “buggering” (that’s what they were actually charged with! I’m totally serious, check the court records!) is inhumane) you pretty much know it did.

I don’t think I really need to state how in favor of this pardon I am. If you are reading this blog I assume you know me pretty well, and if you know me pretty well, you know my views on the subject. But I’ve talked with Malawians a lot on this subject since the pardon (everyone is pretty eager to hear my opinion, which works out nicely, because I’m usually pretty eager to give it) and the answer I get pretty much runs along these lines, “well, I know the rest of the world maybe feels this way, but you have to understand, here, that just isn’t done. It isn’t.”

It’s a bit difficult to explain how different the perspective here is. It’s not that people here think homosexuality doesn’t exist. They know it does. Just - and here’s the crucial part - somewhere else. In Malawi, it’s a crime. Until the outside world comes in and informs you it is not. Which I’m absolutely in favor of, but only because, being from the Western world, I share those values.

I can’t help but thinking what if the situation were reversed. What if, for example, America was dependent on Malawi for aid and Malawi (which is pretty anti-abortion) told America it couldn’t receive any money until it made abortion illegal? In that situation, I’d be much less ecstatic and much more ticked.

One other aspect that seems pretty strange is that America, legally speaking, isn’t all that supportive of homosexuals. Last time I checked, only five states actually allow gay marriage. So is what we’re saying to Malawi basically, “well no we don’t think homosexuality is right either but that still doesn’t mean you can arrest them”? Am I the only one who sees something a bit hypocritical about that message?

So while I think the pardon is great enough that I bought myself a souvenir newspaper announcing the event, there are still a few things about the pardon and how it came about that give me pause. What is overwhelmingly positive about the whole thing though (arrest, international attention and eventual pardon) is that it’s at least gotten people here thinking. Before this whole saga got splashed across the headlines I had very rarely talked about homosexuality and when it did come up, I was usually the instigator. Whereas in the past week alone 90% of Malawians I’ve talked to have asked me my views on homosexuality. So it seems that at the very least, a bit of a dialogue has started here.

Parental Guest Blog

Something you don’t expect to hear your kid say when you are raising her in Arlington, Virginia: “You guys should try the fried termites while you’re here. Oh, I forgot, you can’t get termites right now, it’s caterpillar season.”

So, we just spent a little over two weeks visiting Margaret in Malawi, seeing quite a bit of the country, and visiting her village. She thought it would be cute for us to write the blog for this time period so it could be from the visitor’s perspective, instead of the resident’s perspective. Since we have always been terrible parents and spoiled her completely, we are now writing.

We saw and did way too much to capture in this posting in any significant way, so we thought we would just include a few little samples, or vignettes, of our experiences while we were in Malawi. Just to set the scene a bit, we will first give a tiny overview of the trip so you can see how it all fits together.

We left Washington, DC on Tuesday evening March 30. The weather was forecast to rise into the eighties over the coming days and the Cherry Blossoms were supposed to peak on Thursday or Friday. Opening Day for Major League Baseball was on Monday, April 5th and Obama was scheduled to throw out the first pitch. This would be the first Opening Day we had missed since the Nationals brought baseball back to the Nation’s Capital.

In contrast, when we landed in London on Wednesday morning, the temperatures were in the 30s and the snows in Scotland were severe enough that a bus on a school field trip had skidded off the road, killing a student. Nonetheless, we visited with a couple of Steve’s former colleagues on Wednesday evening in London and on Thursday mid-day in Greenwich before flying overnight to Johannesburg, changing planes, and arriving in Lilongwe around noon on Good Friday (4/2).

We spent Friday and Saturday getting organized and acclimated and then joined Mark, Cindy (parents), Candy (aunt), and Alyssa (PCV friend of Margaret’s) for a safari to South Luangwa National Park in Zambia (Vignette number 1), arriving back in Lilongwe on Wednesday evening, 4/7. On Thursday morning, we drove about 400 kms to the Satemwa Tea Estate in the Shire Headlands south of Blantyre (Vignette number 2) where we stayed two nights and hit the road again on Saturday, 4/10. We spent one night on top of the Zomba Plateau north of Blantyre and then drove 450 kms north along Lake Malawi to the Ngala Beach Resort (Vignette number 3), where we stayed for Sunday evening, 4/11.

On Monday, 4/12, we drove to Mzuzu, which is the “big city” closest to Margaret. There, we prepared for our visit to her site and the northern part of Malawi. We stopped by her site on Tuesday morning, 4/13, and then had lunch with one of her former headmasters, his wife, and another PCV. After dropping a student off at his school, we drove up the escarpment to Livingstonia and back down again to stay at another lakeside place for the evening (Vignette number 4). On Wednesday, 4/14, we worked our way south again, stopping by her site to change some bags and meet some more of her village family. We then stocked up in Rumphi for the trip into Nyika National Park (Vignettes 5 and 6). On Thursday 4/15, we toured a bit around Nyika and Margaret gathered information about a potential camp for kids from her area. We left Nyika on Friday, 4/16, and began our way back to Lilongwe for our Sunday, 4/18 departure. Unbeknownst to us, also on Wednesday 4/14 a volcano in Iceland erupted and the resulting cloud of ash closed every airport in Europe. This meant that when we got to the airport on Sunday, Steve left for some business in Kenya, and Jane stayed in Lilongwe for an extra week until she was finally able to get a flight back to the U.S. on 4/25-26.

Vignette number 1:

I am writing this sitting beside the pool next to the bar at a campsite lodge in Zambia. I am looking out over the Luangwa River, which eventually flows into the Zambezi on its way to the Indian Ocean. Also gathered around the pool are several interesting characters including South African safari guides, German campers, and “overlanders” (people driving around Africa) from Zimbabwe.

The river is full of Hippos, which bellow just about all the time, either to let the other Hippos know where they are or just because. They remain pretty much submerged all day to stay cool, but come out in the evenings to graze on the grass around the tents. Everyone was complaining this morning at breakfast because the noise of the hyenas killing a baboon last night had kept them up, but we slept through it, so we are feeling pretty fresh for the morning game drive.

A game drive is where a group goes out into the bush in a 4x4 to see what you can see. We are in a pattern in which we do one early in the morning (wakeup call is at 5am so we can be on the trail by 6am) and another one in the evening – two hours before sunset and two hours with a powerful spotting light after sunset.

The rains just ended here last week, so the rivers are swollen and the countryside is green. This makes it hard to spot some of the game because the animals can scatter throughout the park instead of having to gather around a few watering holes. It is particularly hard to see the big cats, because they can be just about anywhere. This is really frustrating our driver/guide, Philemon, because he saw a large pride of lions here just the other day. Except for one lioness, he has not been able to spot them again and our drives are mostly birds, antelope, elephants, giraffes, and zebra. I don’t think he understands that we don’t really care about this. We are thousands of miles from home in a place that is incredibly beautiful, looking at birds, antelope, and zebras by the score. We have also seen enough hippos, giraffe, elephants, and other animals we have only ever seen in the zoo to make it very clear that this is different. This is also most assuredly not “Lion Country Safari”, or one of Disney’s theme parks. From his perspective, this will not be a complete trip until he shows us lions.

The frustration for Philemon continues until the final night drive. About ½ hour into the drive, his radio goes off and another of the guides indicates that lions have been spotted, but that they are all the way across the park. He gives us the choice of driving at relative high-speed across the park (not stopping for much of anything). He says we will arrive at the lions just at sunset. We tell him to go for it. On the way across, we end up chasing a giraffe for a bit and getting a bull elephant sufficiently annoyed with us that he trumpets and nearly charges, but we reach the lions while there is still a little light in the sky. They are walking purposefully across the plain and Philemon thinks that they are heading into the bush where we won’t be able to see them, so he pulls in front of them to head them off. It turns out that they are actually stalking zebra and we have just put ourselves in the middle of the hunt. They walk past our 4x4 and freeze at the crest of the next hill before they pounce, but either due to our interruption or just blind luck, the zebras win this round, run, and stand at the top of the ridge to bray a warning.

Vignette number 2:

We completed our safari adventure and took the daylong drive back to Lilongwe. This is about 4 hours on unpaved road experiencing the “African Massage” of driving on washboard packed clay, followed by about 3 hours on good road. Luckily for us, the car didn’t break down on the relatively sparsely populated Zambian side of the border, but waited until we were only about an hour outside of Lilongwe.

The next day, after spending a couple of hours visiting some places and people that Margaret needed to catch up with in Lilongwe, we headed down to Satemwa tea estate outside Blantyre (about 4 hours from Lilongwe). I am not sure how to adequately describe the opulence, taste, and beauty of this place. This is the way the great plantation owners used to live in colonial times. This place is seriously gorgeous and in a stunning setting. The Shire (pronounced she-re) headlands are rolling green hills around the Shire River. Satemwa is a Free Trade tea producer and one of the smaller estates at only 10,000 acres, or so. The owners have moved to a newer house on the property and decided a couple of years ago to turn the original 1920’s plantation owner’s home into a lodge. Jane keeps saying, “How could they move? I could never leave this place.”

For two days, we treat ourselves to high tea on the croquet lawn, gourmet meals, and picnics and walks on the estate. We were in the Planter’s bedroom and Margaret was, fittingly, in the Nursery. Both were huge suites with French doors opening out onto patios. The beds are all four posters surrounded by netting. Next time you are in the neighborhood, we highly recommend it.

Vignette number 3:

We leave the South of Malawi and drive about 5 hours north along the lake road. This road is labeled the M5 and is one of Malawi’s two major north/south thoroughfares, so it is the functional equivalent of I-75 in the US. Despite this, almost all of the bridges are still one lane and the road is used by trucks, cars, bicycles, and pedestrians. It makes for interesting driving, but we still average nearly 100 km/h (about 60 mph).

Lake Malawi is the third largest lake in Africa (only Victoria and Tanganyika are bigger) and forms the Eastern edge of Malawi for much of the length of the country. At several points along the lake there are beach resorts where one can stay. Someone recommended that we try a place called the Ngala Lodge, which turned out to be a very charming and secluded lodge with its own stretch of beach, pool, lush setting, good food, and plentiful bird viewing. The lodge is owned and operated by Chris and Sandy from South Africa and Zimbabwe, respectively. They are wonderfully attentive and gracious hosts in a gorgeous, well-maintained setting.

Vignette number 4:

Did you ever read “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” when you were growing up? Much of transport in Malawi turns out to be quite like this. Malawi has a couple of major north/south roads – the M5 is the lake road and the M1 is the major road that goes from the southern end of the country to the northern end. These roads are quite good and traffic is generally sparse enough that you can motor along at 50 to 70 mph in moderate safety while only killing the occasional chicken. Since Malawi is a long thin country running generally north/south, this means that you can pretty much get from one end of the country to the other within a day, which is pretty rare in Africa. This might, however, lead one to believe that you can actually drive around Malawi fairly easily, which would not be accurate.

The primary case in point could be almost anything else that would show up as a road on a Malawi National map, but in this instance is the road from the lakeshore up to Livingstonia. Livingstonia, as it turns out, was where Livingston founded a Mission in the late 1800’s. It is a cute little town at the top of a bluff perhaps two or three thousand feet above Lake Malawi. It is a relatively steep drop from the top of the plateau down to the lake, which makes for some pretty spectacular views, but also has resulted in what must be one of the great roads from Hell up and down the cliff face.

We now know this because we took the road up - and then down again. We were supposed to be staying at the top of the hill one evening, but turned around and headed back down when we found the entire top to be a muddy quagmire and felt that another night down by the lake would not be such a bad idea after all.

The trip up is only 15 km, which, under normal circumstances, is just a little longer than a Saturday morning 10k foot race. It takes place on a gravel and mud, single-lane, series of switchback curves (numbered 1 to 20) that take close to an hour to traverse. This is assuming that you have a 4 wheel-drive vehicle that can actually handle it. We did, but the claw marks we left in the handholds as we gripped for our lives on the way up and down will be found by future users of this particular Land Cruiser for a long time.

In addition, you do occasionally meet people coming the other direction. When this happens, there is a delicate little 4x4 ballet as the two drivers try to figure out who is closer to a wide spot in the road and how you can get whichever vehicle is on the cliff-edge position safely by said wide spot so that everyone can proceed. Luckily, people in Malawi are generally quite friendly and this pas-de-deux only rarely results in one participant crashing end-over-end down the face of the escarpment.

Vignette number 5: Road stories continued.

We are struggling with how to describe just how bad the roads can be. We have driven up a cliff face for 15 kilometers on a dirt, gravel, and stone goat track with 20 numbered hairpin turns. It took us 45 minutes to reach the top and then we nearly got stuck in mud because recent rains had turned the red clay into something with the same coefficient of friction as a sheet of wet ice. We turned around and went back down the same goat track we had just come up. This particular road is considered good enough to show up on the national map (see above).

The next day, we traveled up to the Nyika plateau to visit the National Park. Access to the park involves 60 kms of dirt road before you get to the park entrance and another 60 kms of dirt road once you are within the park. We called to check ahead on road conditions and were told that we would be fine as long as we were in a 4x4 (lesson-learned, every time they say the road is good, you are in trouble). It took us 3 ½ hours and we frequently felt like we were driving much faster than we really should have been.

In the middle of the drive in, we reached a spot where we were already up to our axels in mud and stopped. Our driver, James, climbed out and over his door, clambered onto the hood (the bonnet, since these folks speak British, not American) never touching the ground so he could reach back down to the dial that engages the free-wheeling front hubs (for the full 4x4 experience). We then ground on through another 200 yards of mud and out the other side, where he reversed the process and we drove on as though this was completely normal.

Again, this road appears on the national map of Malawi. It is the primary access road to the first National Park in the country. We are the only ones who think this is unusual. Everyone else we have spoken to thinks that the road is much better now that the weather is starting to dry out.

Vignette number 6:

The first National Park designated in Malawi was Nyika National Park. Nyika is a unique biological zone in Africa. It is a plateau some 6,500 feet above sea level. Because of the altitude, Nyika is generally much cooler than the rest of Malawi

(particularly the parts down by the lake). During the cold months, there will frequently be frost on the ground in the mornings.

Much of Nyika is a high grassland plateau that is unique within Malawi and awesome in its beauty. We are here just after the rainy season, so things are quite green. The Eland and Bushbuck are grazing with the Zebra right outside the lodge and don’t run away as you walk by. They are not tame, but they certainly aren’t afraid, either. It should be one of the jewels of a visit to Malawi, but almost no one comes here. You have to pack in your supplies and you have to make sure that you have enough fuel for the round trip (240 kms) because there is no market or fuel here at the park. There is also no cell service, internet, or most of the time, power. They do fire up the generator for about three hours each evening, but that is about it. Nonetheless, we would come back here in a heartbeat if given the chance. It is stunningly beautiful and reminiscent of our place in Maine. While there is good wildlife viewing, Nyika is particularly noted for birds and orchids. Over 200 orchids make their home on the plateau, over a dozen of which are unique to this site.

Let me describe, “roughing it” at Nyika. We stayed in a “Chalet” which is a cabin-like affair with two bedrooms, a great room, and all necessary facilities attached. When you arrive, Jeremiah has already built a roaring fire in the fireplace and is standing at the ready to make sure that there is nothing else that needs to be done. Since we had already been alerted to Jeremiah’s talents, we had in fact come supplied with flour and yeast and said, “Sure, why don’t you go on a bake a little bread for tomorrow.” This is of course, what you do with a wood stove, and Jeremiah happily spent the evening baking away for the next day. We ate in the lodge that first night and it was quite good, but on the second night we gave Jeremiah a chicken, a tomato, an onion, and some potatoes and veggies and asked him to do whatever he could. The result was one of the best meals we have had anywhere and Jane continually was wondering how she could bring Jeremiah home.

The planned portion of our trip concluded with a gorgeous night drive at Nyika (similar to what we had done at South Luangwa, but focused more on the rolling grasslands), another stay at the Ngala Beach Lodge, saying farewell to Margaret, and the drive back to Lilongwe for our respective flights out. After Jane spent an unscheduled week at the Kumbali Lodge outside Lilongwe (it’s where Madonna stays when she is in town), she was finally able to fly out on Sunday 4/25 and arrived back home on Monday, two days after Steve had come back from Kenya.

Well, this last period at site got off to a rather interesting start when a “witches’ airplane” crashed in my village. Witches’ airplanes are traditionally made from chihengo (winnowing) baskets. When you think about it, this actually makes a bit more sense than the Western ‘broom’ idea since one can actually sit in a chihengo. This particular “airplane” however, was not a chihengo. Instead it was three sticks tied together with black cloth and decorated with painted black lotion bottles. I’m not exactly sure what caused the “crash” as I’m not entirely clear on the physics of what causes major malfunctions in magical airplanes, but there were scorch marks surrounding it on the ground.

From an objective standpoint witchcraft is a fairly fascinating phenomenon. I assume it’s a holdover from pre-colonial days, but presently it’s part and parcel with Christianity. Everyone believes in it. Well, almost everyone.

From the non-objective ‘a plane just landed in my village and now we have to have a witch-hunt’ standpoint, it’s not so interesting. More aggravating, annoying, and, when you get right down to it, bordering on scary.

Within two days of the plane’s appearance a child had come forward claiming to have killed her mother while possessed, five other children said they were kidnapped in the middle of the night and taken for rides on the airplane, and one man had been chased out of the village on suspicion of being a witch (yes men can be witches).

Things got serious enough that the local witch doctor was called in to scout out any remaining witches. The process was described to me thusly by second wife ‘he will put the powder on the ground and call out the witches and then they will come forward like this’ (pantomimes something rather like a zombie with a bad case of the morning-dizzies and an open mouth). There was also something about them being miniature and become big, but when I said “So they were little but then they will be big?” She looked at me like I was crazy and said, “No, of course not.” There are times, many times, where even though everyone present is speaking perfect English we still do not understand each other at all.

Not wanting to be plopped into the middle of any witchcraft situation really, I hopped on my bike and spent a weekend at my sitemate, Julia’s, village. By the time I got back to my village the whole witchcraft hubbub had thankfully blown over.

After that bit of excitement, things at site have been going remarkably well. We held “sex day” at my school the next weekend. Of course, the only place it was ever referred to as “Sex Day” was within the peace corps community. Within my community the official title was the “Focusing on our Future Girls Workshop.” In actual fact, the official title is a more apt description of the workshop. It just turns out that once you give something a moniker like “Sex Day” it tends to stick.

The workshop had four classes. There was a career panel; featuring the local tailor, a nurse from Mhuju, and a well-traveled Ph.D. who just happens to live in the neighboring village. There was a family planning workshop, given by the local nurse and featuring all the forms of contraception available at our local clinic (male and female condoms, two types of the pill and depo provera. We are so well-equipped and so under-utilized). Alyssa, Julia (my sitemate) and I put on a workshop of plays presenting obstacles to their future that girls might face. We had a lot of fun with it. I got to be a sugar-daddy and pick Julia up. The kids thought that was hilarious.

My favorite class though, was put on a by a woman named Tiwonge, who is head of the Bolero PLWA (People Living With Aids) group. Bolero is the town where the paramount chief of the Tumbukas lives. The PLWA group there does amazing things. They have various income generating projects which they use to finance home based care. Tiwonge also goes around speaking to different groups in Malawi to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS. On top of all of this she is incredibly open and willing to talk about her status, despite the huge stigma that still exists throughout Malawi.

This last part was crucial, as HIV is just NOT talked about in my village. Everyone whispers about who has it, but no one is willing to come out openly and say “I’m HIV positive.” Which is crazy when you consider that Malawi’s baseline stats are around ten percent infection rate and my village, as the district leader in infection rates (whoo, go us!) has got to be a bit higher than that. So to have someone say to my students “I’m HIV positive. I’m happy, I’m healthy, I’m living a good life” was incredible.

Overall, I was really pleased with how the workshop turned out. About 90% of my students (and students from Nkhomboli, the neighboring school) showed up, even though it was pouring rain. Hopefully they now realize there are women in the community, succesful women, who care about them, their future, and their well-being. On the down side, as is pretty much the norm with girls here, they were for the most part incredibly shy and closed in. Even broken down into small classes with no boys present, trying to get participation out of any but the two or three most outgoing girls is like pulling teeth.

I’m planning on holding a similar boy’s workshop sometime in the future, and I’m curious to see how they act in comparison to the girls. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to observe it myself, as the girls workshop was girls-only, so the boys’ workshop will have to be boys only.

As for other important developments at my site... MY LIBRARY HAS A ROOF. Okay, half a roof. And no floor. And no windows. Or doors. Or plastering. Or shelfs or books or anything that makes it a library really, but hey, roof! Roof is good! Roof is progress. As for the teacher’s house, they tell me it is almost done. The school just finished putting in all the money they owe, so just before I left I handed over the rest of my half to the school management committee. They say the house should be done in a week. They’ve been saying it for a while, but I’ve looked at the house, and it’s only missing windows and doors, so I think there’s a good chance it actually will be done within the next couple of weeks.

The new headmaster seems to be really good. He very clearly wants to develop the school as fast as possible. He comes from an urban school that had electricity and a library/lab and even a partner school in Scotland, so he has a lot of ideas for how the school could be improved.

It was a bit ironic. During the school break I was talking to Mr. Gondwe (my headmaster) about the status of the school, and trying to explain to him that yes, things are bad, but there’s so much potential. I caught myself just before saying something to the effect of “You could really build this school up.”

People always say similar things to me. It drives me nuts. People will occasionally say to me “Before you go, you must leave us something to remember you by, like a building.” To which I tend to respond with something like “How about I leave a photograph?” Honestly, it’s hard to come to a place and have people constantly demanding things of you.

But talking with Mr. Gondwe and having to resist the urge to throw myself at his feet and say, “please give us teachers, buildings, and oh, while you’re at it we could use some electricity” I suddenly felt what it was like to be on the other side. When you are dissatisfied with the state of things around you, and suddenly spot someone who can change it, it’s hard not to seem constantly demanding. At least in my case, I chose to come someplace with no electricity and the potential for hornets moving into my bathroom.

With Mr. Gondwe, the move was ordered, and it hasn’t been easy for him or his family. Moving from an urban area to a rural one in Malawi is slightly different from its counterpart move in America. In Malawi it means moving away from electricity, running water, and a larger variety of food. Additionally, village schools aren’t as good as the schools in urban areas, meaning most teachers have to send their kids to government or private schools.

Despite this though, Mr. Gondwe seems to be settling in pretty well. Which isn’t that surprising, really. Even if Lura can seem a bit sparse at first, it’s a pretty fantastic place. People are nice, scenery is gorgeous, ground is fertile and you can buy bananas super cheap!

Love Potion (yes this is for real, yes it exists in Malawi, yes it was one of my birthday presents; no I’m not commenting on whether or not I’ve used it/efficacy)


Ingrediants:

Top secret. See local witch doctor for information/purchases.

Instructions for use: Either put on center of forehead (where the third eye is in yoga, if you know about that) or make a cut on forearm (really) and pour into vein (really really!). Then either think of individual you wish to love you, OR attributes of a person you wish to love you. (Note the high quality love potion here, not only can you make someone love you, BUT you have a create-your-own-significant-other option. How cool is that?)

WARNING: If you do not think of an individual or specific attributes EVERYONE of the opposite sex will love you and that’s just plain dangerous.

So I’ve mentioned before that Christmas here isn’t really Christmas. This is actually the case with most holidays. It’s not that we don’t celebrate them, we do, but invariably it’s “Peace Corps Malawi” style, and while that’s always really fun, it never carries quite the right spirit. Christmas at the lake for example; wonderful, beautiful, but not exactly Christmassy. Even with carols blasting full tilt from the nearest bar. Killing a boar and roasting it? Great fun! But still not quite Halloweeny. Even thanksgiving, complete with a trip to the ambassador’s house and incredible amounts of food, still doesn’t feel quite right. After all, as much fun as chicken fighting in the ambassador’s swimming pool is (a lot, by the way) - it just doesn’t bring with it the same semi-somber sense of family togetherness and gratefulness that I tend to associate with killing a turkey.

The one exception to the holiday rule is birthdays. Almost everyone I know has had some of the most memorable birthdays of their life here. I think it’s because birthdays don’t have pre-requisites for how they are supposed to be. Whereas Christmas is supposed to be cold, pine trees, model trains, ornaments, and singing Silent Night a cappella at 11:59; and Thanksgiving is supposed to be family and Turkey and cranberry sauce and in general a lot of foods I don’t really like actually, birthdays are completely maleable. And Malawi is a country that lends itself well to such occasions.

So. My birthday. As a quick refresher, last year’s birthday was spent in village. Chickens were killed, cakes were baked, piñatas were made, a pretty fantastic time was had by all, and I ended up thinking “this is going to be really hard to top.”

It was. But we managed.

You know how there are the twelve days of Christmas? Well, this year I celebrated the twelve days of birthday. I should start by saying there are a lot of birthdays in February. So the weekend before my birthday almost my whole group went into Mzuzu to celebrate another guy in my group’s birthday. It was held at the Malawian equivalent of a truck stop. As we all agreed later, you wouldn’t want to go there in small numbers, but en masse it was actually quite fun. A cultural experience if you will. A different side of Malawi. A side maybe one doesn’t ever want to see again per say, but was good to see once. Just to know it’s there and such.

After this rather interesting celebration I hitched down to Lilongwe to pick up a suitcase full of presents. Digression/explanation: For a while it seemed like Dad would actually be in Malawi for my birthday. Which would have been cool chiefly because I was going to make him play softball with all the ex-pats. However, that fell through and while I was disappointed the whole thing was mitigated by the fact that a) both parents are coming in the beginning of April and b) dad still found someone willing to lug a suitcase full of presents to Malawi for me.

I recognize that I might, later in life, have birthdays that rival the birthdays I have had here. However I will never, ever, ever, get presents that rival the ones I get here. That’s because I will never want anything as bad as I want it here. There are a lot of things you simply cannot get ahold of in Malawi, and some things that while they are available, are not available to me, or anyone else living on a Peace Corps salary. And some of these things are absolutely life-changing. It’s been two weeks since I received said American parafanalia, and I still, still, look at my cabinets and think “oh right, dark chocolate, grits, instant meals, oh heck YES!” My new solar shower actually has water pressure. I’m no longer bundling up old shirts to handle my pots because I actually got - miracle of all miracles - pot holders. The list goes on, but I won’t.

Instead, here’s the best way I can convey this phenomenon: Imagine that you’ve been drinking water, and only water, for the past year and a half. Oh sure, every now and again you buy a coke, or drink some tea, but that’s just every now and again. Other than that, it’s been water. Just water. Every day for a year and a half. Then you get drink mix packets. Suddenly your water doesn’t taste like water, it tastes like fruit punch, or cranberry apple juice, or gatoraid. Okay, now un-imagine that and instead imagine that everything is totally normal and for some reason you drove out to the supermarket and bought a packet of coolaid mix. See the difference?

So, suitcase full of stuff. Pretty cool. Even cooler? Getting to eat dinner at the Sunbird with a few of Dad’s co-workers (and competition actually; one thing being here is teaching me, the international development community is small) who -extreme perk- all happened to speak Spanish. Sunbird=five star hotel in Malawi. Roughly same price range as the Hampton Inn. I think.

One word on dinner: buffet. Okay, two more words: Birthday cake. Well, just a few more: piece of birthday cake with a candle in it. With real icing. The cake, not the candle - a candle with icing would have been weird. So, birthday party number two? Pretty darn cool.

Then the next day Adam (guy from my group) and I are sitting around Lilongwe bored (that happens a lot in Lilongwe) when I turn to him and say, “Hey Adam, what are your views on swimming?” Adam, it turns out, is pro swimming. As am I. So, off to the Sunbird again, this time to pay a visit to their pool. Swimming in a pool is kind of like swimming in the lake. Except in the lake they don’t put fluffy towels on your chair. Of course you miss out on the awesome views of the mountains of Tanzania, but then again, you also miss out on the giant clouds of bugs that tend to obscure said view. So, tradeoff. Plus, the nearest beach is about three hours away from Lilongwe, whereas the Sunbird is... ten minutes. There ya go.

After swimming Adam and I were invited to join everyone for dinner “if you don’t have plans”. (Actually, we were going to catch a movie, then hit the ice cream parlor and maybe some mini-gol... no we don’t have plans!)

Having Adam along for dinner was nice not only because he lives in the south of the country so I see him approximately once every six months, but also because it was nice to have someone else freaking out in exactly the same way I was. So at dinner, while everyone else at the table was probably thinking “You know, I’m not sure grilled chicken was ever this momentous” Adam is sending me looks that say, “Are we seriously eating in a courtyard?” and I’m sending, “I know! Can you believe it?!!” Right back.

Unfortunately, after two days in Lilongwe I had to leave the comforts of the Sunbird to head up north. Not so unfortunately my destination was Nkhata bay, where a bunch of friends and I had rented a cottage. It was right on the lake, had a shower, a kitchen, a television, a porch, and a tree full of monkeys. Life really does not get much better than that.

First night in the cottage Alyssa, Tina and I invented a mixed drink called “Twizz-tastic” (mix of a grenadilla knock-off soda called “Twizza” and Vodka. It’s Twizz-tacular. And other such adjectives.) Our party was “crashed” (I’m not sure it counts as crashing if you pre-plan, text, and call people to tell them you are coming, but whatever) by a few guys from my group and from the health group who were out celebrating yet another birthday. Mostly we sat around and chatted, swam, watched movies, watched monkeys, and switched lights on and off for the sheer thrill of it.

We went out to dinner twice. First time, since we were in Nkhata bay (huge tourist area, much more leniant than the rest of the country) the girls all decided to dress up and actually show some knee. It was a little strange truthfully. I kept glancing down and then shifting my dress to try to cover up.

We ate at a restaurant where the food apparently takes forever, so after ordering I popped into the supermarket next door to buy some appetizer chips. In the middle of my errand one of my friends from my group came over to me and said, very subtly, “You need to put those down and come outside, okay?” So I walked outside expecting something. First on the list of things I was not expecting? A birthday cake. In the shape of a star. With the words “Happy Birthday Margaret” written on it. And a giant candle stuck next to it for me to blow out. Which I did.

Second (and last) night in Nkhata bay we traveled over to a nearby beach resort to eat pizza cooked in a mud stove and listen to local singer Michael Mountain (Phiri, meaning mountain, is one of the most common surnames in Malawi, so hearing “Michael Mountain” always makes me laugh) perform. Alyssa, bless her dear little heart, decided to have him compose a birthday song for me. Which he did. I don’t remember much of it, but the chorus is “happy birthday Ma-a-gret, it’s a day you’ll never forget.” Well yes, that seems a pretty safe bet.

Executive decision: Putting the recipe function back

Tuna Salad

One can (or packet) of Tuna fish (somba) - Best from a care package. But if you want that Tuna in oil stuff they sell at Metro for way too expensive kwacha go ahead.

Cucumber - optional. (cucumber) But definitely use it if your village has it (how???), if you grow it, or if you have a fridge and can get some from the city.

Onion (hanyezi)

Tomato (Mapuno)

Salt

Cumin

1 tsp Olive oil (mafuto) - Because Tutlas sells it now!!

Mix them all together in whatever quantites you choose. It doesn't really matter, you pretty much cannot mess this up. Although possibly if you put in too much salt. But probably not.

In looking over last month’s blog I realize I left out a pretty important event: I went to my fist wedding. It was down in Blantyre, the biggest “city” here (I’m sorry guys, a few office buildings, movie theatre, a food court, and an imitation Wal-Mart do NOT a city make).

Since it was in the city, and was between two fairly well-off people, I knew it wouldn’t be the same as going to a traditional village wedding, but I thought it would be an interesting cultural experience anyway. I was right.

After a completely sleepless night spent in the groom’s house (from which the groom was absent) listening to unbelievably loud music, myself and two peace corps volunteers set out at six in the morning for the church.

The wedding ceremony started out at seven, which is the first difference you notice between Malawian and American weddings. The second is the music. It’s the same song every time someone walks down the aisle, and it’s played on a keyboard. While this song is playing, the wedding party doesn’t walk up the aisle, they dance. Everyone. Even the tiny little children. Of which there are many. Not just flower girls and ring bearers, but also about three sets of a mini bride and groom, dressed up in tiny suits and tiny beaded wedding dresses. Adorable.

Once everyone is up at the front of the church everyone except the bride and groom sit. Then the preacher (who has already given the couple marriage counseling the night before) spends about an hour telling the couple that they can’t get divorced. No matter what goes wrong. Ever. The children won’t understand, God won’t understand, marriage is not an old car (both bride and groom work for Toyota Malawi) you can’t trade it in, you have to repair it. I was rather distracted during this speech with alternating pokes between the two other volunteers with me to try to keep them awake.

One of the cutest parts was when after this whole destruction-and-damnation-and-you-have-to-be-positive-about-marriage speech the preacher asked both bride and groom if they were sure they still wanted to get married. (I mean seriously, isn't there a better time for that than at the altar?) The groom responded “yes” but the bride smiled and said “very sure.” I should add that while all this was going on every now and again the best man and the maid of honor would get up and wipe the faces of the bride and groom with a soft cloth.

The wedding was really interesting, but the reception was out of this world. The entire wedding party sits on an elevated dais, with the bride and groom in the middle on a huge plush couch. Everyone else sits out front, and pauses only to come up to a blank space between the seating and the dais, dance, and throw money around. I know this part bothers a lot of volunteers, but I really liked it. Once you’ve accepted the fact that you are going to be giving away K500 (about three dollars - but for us it’s actually a lot to be spending) in small change it’s kind of fun to dance around while money rains down from the sky. At the end of each song a janitor type person comes in, sweeps it all away and brings it over to three people sitting at a table who count it an organize it. It was a really fun experience overall.

In the vein of cultural experiences, I got to see a baby being born. How this came about is actually rather interesting and mostly accidental. Allow me to elaborate.

The two nurses at my local hospital (who are wonderful and two of my favorite people in country) have been encouraging (read: pressuring) me to observe a birth. I’ve been less than enthusiastic about the idea because I wasn’t sure observing a baby being born in a rural health center with minimal equipment was exactly my cup of tea. Then last Thursday I walked into the midwife’s office for a routine pre-scheduled meeting and her face lit up and she exclaimed “Oh good! Now you can watch the birth!” which is the point at which I turned around and saw that the bed in the corner was occupied by a very pregnant very naked woman writhing in pain. It is a credit to how long I’ve been here that instead of yelling “Oh holy...!” throwing my hands up in the air and getting the heck out of there as fast as I could I half-curtsied to the woman, clapped my hands together in greeting and asked the traditional “how are you?” She actually managed an impressively chipper “I’m well and you?” I responded I was also fine, turned to the nurse and told her I was leaving.

“But you must see the birth!” She exclaimed. I pointed out that maybe the woman in question didn’t want me watching her give birth. In Chitumbuka, the nurse put the question to the woman this way: “A-Maggie has never seen a birth. Don’t you think she should watch you?” To which the woman replied, “Oh yes, it would be really good for her to see that.” Really? Really?!

So that was how I came to see a baby born. It actually wasn’t that bad. Not too much blood, everything went smoothly and, oh yes, women in Malawi don’t make a sound. (Actually, I’ve heard some do, but I know they really try not to). At any rate, this one did not. She grimaced a lot, gripped the bed really hard, but did not make a single sound.

The other strange thing was how the baby was treated. Within five minutes of it’s birth little unnamed baby boy was a) held upside down by his ankle b) carried around on the top of the midwife’s hand as if he was a platter about to be served up c) passed around to every woman in the maternity ward to coo over... except his mother. Poor little boy must have been pretty confused.

Other than that, things have been pretty stressful at site. A good stressful, but still. A lot of this has to do with my site mates (although they are not at all directly responsible.) See, since my old site-mate (an education volunteer) has been replaced by an environment volunteer my area now has a health, environment and education volunteer living within an hour of each other. I'm now thinking Peace Corps should do this more often and more on purpose because it's a really effective combo. You talk to your site-mates and suddenly it's like "Oh, I could do this and this, and that." So...

I'm thinking about doing a sex day (no actual sex involved) for girls, which, if it goes well, I think I’d like to do for boys as well. My wildlife club is busy trying to plan another trip I’m looking at maybe building a new school block at the partial primary school in the mountains behind my house (so they can become a full primary school) starting a people living with HIV group, and putting on an environment camp. I’m not sure how many of these plans will actually come to fruition, but just looking into them has me running around like crazy.

In addition, we’ve been switching Head Teachers. My old Head Teacher was accepted to Domasi, a subsidised distance learning school that gives degrees to secondary school teachers. It’s a really great opportunity for her, but understandably one can’t be a in charge of a school while one is also a student. So we got a new Head Teacher. Which was a hugely stressful process, because logistics and Malawi do not go well together. At all. Ever. So there was the process of getting a truck to move the new Head Teacher in, and figuring out where the old Head Teacher would stay while we moved in the new Head Teacher and the planning the goodbye party and then planning the welcome and I was about ready to fall over.

Then, of all things, on my hitch out of site I ran into a group of hospital workers whose first words to me were “We’re republicans, what are you?” They actually gave a lot of cogent reasons for their support of Bush, but there were a lot of not so sensible reason in there too. Among my favorites "we’re afraid of the terrorists” - ah yes, those massive terrorist plans against Malawi. Have to watch out for those. My favorite though, and I am absolutely NOT making this up “The T.V. was better when Bush was president. There was all this bombing and fighting and excitement on the news. Now all they do is talk about the economy.” Wow. You think you’ve seen all you can in this country, and then you run into something like that. You can say a lot of things about life here, but at least it isn’t boring.

When Dad came to Malawi at the end of last month (see post title!) one of the things he brought me was the “Best American Short Stories of 2009” book. The last story in the book is titled “Muzungu,” which completely shocked me. I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned it before, but Muzungu is what Malawians who are a) Unfamiliar with white people b) Under five c) just trying to be obnoxious -- call us. It means, roughly translated “rich, white, foreign.” We hate it.

Reactions to being called “Muzungu” vary among the volunteers. Some volunteers just ignore it, others will yell back. My default reaction, taken from Alyssa, is to say “Xena lane ‘mzungu’ cha!” (Literal translation -- “Name I have ‘Muzungu’ very strong negative command!”) Which has the dual effect of people understanding right off the bat that I don’t want to be called that, and making them wonder how the heck I speak Chitumbuka. Usually people will say something to the effect of “Oh, so what is your name?” Although if they’re jerks they’ll say, “But you are a Mzungu!”

All of which is a very circuitous explanation of why I was extremely interested to come across a story titled ‘Muzungu’. It’s about a white girl growing up in Zambia. Zambia is pretty close - culturally as well as geographically - to Malawi. They share the same major tribal language, eat the same staple food and even do greetings the same way. So, although I was reading a story about Zambia, the similarities were such the reading the story was like looking into a mirror. It absolutely knocked the wind out of me.

The story is about how the child in the story first came to realize she’s white. This happens when a baby sees her and begins crying, and its mother shoves it in her face and, laughing, says “Muzungu.” Let me just say that almost this exact situation has happened to me. Multiple times. As the narrator put it, this was when she realized she was “White as the essence of something, not the absence of it.”

In America, being white is not a defining characteristic of who you are, it’s just a part of you and so you just kind of go along being white and blending in. Here also, it is not a defining charecteristic of who you are, it is the defining characteristic of who you are. The minute you leave your community it is pretty much all you are, but even in your community you’re still ‘the white person.’ The difference is that you are their white person, so they love you and are proud of you and could only like you better if you were married which, by the way, they’ve mentioned several nice boys who have expressed a perfect willingness to meet you and marry you if it all works out all right so what’s the problem here anyway?

Just an interesting (hopefully) tangent I guess. Now back to our regularly scheduled blog.

So yeah, Dad was here! Yaaay! He came to visit for about two weeks early-December. And by “visit” I mean work. But I still got to see him, so it counts pretty much the same even if we couldn’t do cute site-seeing trips. And besides, going to interview rural clinics about the availability of electricity and their supply chain is sort of like going on a safari, right?

I actually dipped out after the first clinic. I really prefer to sit around and chatt with the people outside the clinics. On one stop, I got taken to meet Dad’s drivers’ family who were stunned that this person was sitting on their floor speaking Chitumbuka and not quite sure what this “pizza” thing was or what to do with it. Even after we told them (repeatedly) that you eat it.

Which brings us to the best part of Dad’s visit. Restaurants. There are in fact a number of good restaurants around Malawi. They’re just way out of my price range. Almost twenty dollars a meal in fact. At the first one I think I spent a good fifteen minutes just staring at the menu and flipping through the pages (that’s right, PAGES, plural!) It had Indian food and Chinese food and even something the waiter pronounced Fa-gee-tas which were, in fact, not, but were still pretty good. It was lovely. Oh, and getting to talk with Dad was cool too of course.

Right after Dad left the new group swore in. Swearing in ceremonies are really cool. Getting to see guli-wan-kulu (traditional secret-society-dancing group) perform? Pretty unique experience. Talking with the American ambassador as well as several higher-ups in the Malawian education department? Pretty awe inspiring. Seeing one’s illustrious country director - in suit and bow-tie - shaking it along with the best of the African Amayis? Priceless.

Which brings us to Christmas. I did several Christmassy things this year, ranging the gamut from tried and true traditions to completely new and strange. All enjoyable of course. They included, but were not limited to

Watching “A Charlie Brown Christmas” with some Japanese volunteers while eating a pork stew with chopsticks (try it some time... NOT EASY)

Baking - and decorating - cookies with my little siblings (God I LOVE that oven) and watching A Muppet Christmas Carol

“But wasn’t that one dead Auntie Maggie?”

“Yes, he’s a ghost.”

“A ghost?”

“Uhhh... he was dead but now he has come back to warn Scrooge to change or Scrooge will go to hell.”

“Like an angel?”

“Exactly!”

“And the socks are there because they mean to dry them?”

“Oh. No. We put presents in them.

“Oh... So why is the tree indoors?”

Cultural differences. Gotta love them.

Stayed in a house with a large branch stuck in a pot and decorated with paper ornaments.

Cooked a full on (we’re talking eggs, sausages and pancakes here) Christmas breakfast.

Found presents (washing powder, two twizzlers, a Christmas cracker) under said tree branch.

Yet, no matter what you do, Christmas here is never quite... Christmassy enough.

With the new year we went down to Lilongwe for our Mid Service Training. Since a transformer at Dezda college of forestry, our usual training venue, was struck by lightning a while back we had to move our training over to MEDI, a really nice conference center with a bathroom in every room, maids to clean every day, and grilled chicken for dinner every night. It was a real sacrifice, but I think we dealt with it pretty well.

Since a bunch of people had gone home for Christmas we got to catch up with all the news from America. (Parfait? Seriously? People are saying parfait? Parfait is a dessert, not an adjective.) Additionally we got to eat imported chocolates and drink other imported things.

The training sessions themselves were interesting, with information on community based issues teaching. They were even cooler after we invented a “Session Bingo” card, filled with things that are likely to happen during classes. Spaces included “a trainer falls asleep, someone uses the word ‘sustainability’, the electricity goes out, a chicken wanders into the classroom.” Since we were playing on the sly we had a bit of an argument over how one would announce a bingo. In honor of the president we had changed the name of the game from “Bingo” to “Bingu” so someone suggested you find a way to work the word “Bingu” into a question. Someone else, pointing out that was too easy, suggested one would have to work his full name and title (His Excellency, The President of Malawi, Ngwazi, Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika) into a question, whereas one guy suggested we just use the word “Albatross.”

The biggest issue addressed was the change in the school calendar. Our service ends in the beginning of next December. When we came to country school ended in November, so we had the perfect amount of time to wind down, wind up, and head home. Then the calendar was changed and school was supposed to end in September. Problem. Three months of “what are we supposed to do?” problem. Since then, it’s gotten even better and school is ending in early August. This means we can either teach four months and then leave -- and it’s highly unlikely anyone else will take over our classes -- or focus on secondary projects for the last four months. Additionally the new volunteers are coming in June. Which means we’re going to have three groups of education volunteers in country at the same time, and, if any of us want to be replaced, we’ll have to live with the volunteers replacing us for four months.

Basically the response was “okay, this is a complicated situation and I guess we’ll deal with it as it comes.” Which, really, is all we can do right now.

I went back to site in the beginning of January and stayed through the month, which was nice, because I hadn’t had a long stay at site in a while. Things are moving pretty fast right now. We’ve almost finished the teacher’s house. We’ve gotten a new teacher, and we’re scheduled to have a new head teacher by the time I return to site. On one hand it’s really nice after a year here to see so many things happening so fast, on the other hand it makes me wonder what country I’ve suddenly landed in.

At the end of the month I went to Zeb and Tina’s house and we cooked up the dish from splendid table. It’s a rice/veggie stew with usipa (tiny dried fish) used as a boullion cube. I have to admit we had our doubts but it was actually delicious. We did cut the heads off the fish though.

At one point Zeb and I got to talking about the rough times we’ve had in Malawi. The lead in to this was us talking about how nice things are now, which led us to remenisc about times that were not so nice. We were referring specifically to late August/early September, which was pretty much the roughest time a lot of us had since arriving. Tina walked in, picked up on what we were talking about and said “oh, you mean the point where we realized it wasn’t going to get easier.” What she meant (and I think I talked about this revelation at the time it came to me actually) was that for almost a year we all went merrily along thinking at some point it was all going to get easy. August/September was when we realized: It does not.

What it does get is smoother. You learn to appreciate the good times with every ounce you’ve got and you get through the not so good times however you need (on particularly rough days I put a sticker on that date in my calendar as a congratulations to me for making it through).

The three of us stood around ruminating on this and other various topics -- how to teach literature, who’s going to replace the current head of education now that she’s leaving -- as we drank some strawberry lime coolaid (Zeb and Tina get awesome packagaes). Then I pulled out my computer and we watched a few episodes of House before going to bed. In the morning I cooked up some french toast, which we ate with real maple syrup (seriously, awesome packages). Like I said -- you learn to appreciate the good with everything you’ve got. And right now, there's a lot of good to appreciate.

Well, this has been a very odd month, starting with the whole country running out of fuel, and ending with a series of earthquakes in the district next to mine ranging from 4.5-6.5 on the richter scale. Really, it’s been probably the oddest month I’ve had here so far.

Adventure started with the whole country running out of fuel. I knew something abnormal was going on when I rode into Mzuzu and saw a cavalcade of stalled out trucks stretching out of the city. The trucks weren’t just idling, they were parked - turned off, drivers missing, and taking up a whole lane of the road. It’s like this outside of every gas station. The way people have been getting around is at the beginning of each day there’s an announcement stating which gas stations will have fuel, and when, and before the appointed time people line up, stall out, and wait. It’s almost surreal, walking down the street and seeing so many parked vehicles, or seeing people walking down the street with giant oil drums on their head. Apparently we failed to pay our gas bill to Daar. It’s almost comical really. I thought I had gotten over the “oh my gosh, I live in Africa this is so strange” moments, but this definitely qualifies. I can’t believe I live somewhere that can just completely run out of a gas.

Second adventure was a hike. Since it is now summer break, Alyssa and I decided to go vacationing. The married couple in our group was going to do a pretty popular lake-shore hike down to a really remote lodge and invited us along with Audra, an environment volunteer, and Tessa, a health volunteer. I should note that this was pretty much their trip. They had planned it arranged it etc. etc. However at the last minute they were unable to go. So when the four of us met up we figured out we did not have a) Food b) utensils c) cooking implements d) any idea where to go. But we decided to do it anyway.

Sitting around waiting for the truck that was going to take us to the trail head we decided that any good adventure team needs an acronym name. We came up with W.I.N.G. I.T. -- Wildly Irresponsible Northern Girls Infinitely Trekking.

The hike was hard, but fun. There were mangoes growing all over, so basically we would just walk all day and knock some mangoes down whenever we got peckish. We would start hiking at six, but pause from about 11-2 for play-in-the-lake-and-avoid-the-blazing-heat time. At one point we ran into a bunch of children and they played with us in the lake. Alyssa met this one kid who was so shy he would duck under water every time she spoke to him, which was hilarious, so every now and again she would just turn to him and say “Hi Manuel”! and low and behold with nothing more than a small “bloop” Manuel would disappear under the water.

At night we would camp out on a convenient beach, which was always gorgeous, especially since it’s fishing season. In Malawi, fishermen go out at night in small dugout canoes. They tie lanterns to the back of the canoes and net the fish that are attracted to the light. Their hundreds of lights bobbing out on the horizon line seemed like a strangely bright reflection of the night sky.

The only scary part was one day when we were hiking a drunk guy with a panga knife in one hand and an ax in the other decided he owned a bridge we were all trying to cross. So he stood in front of us brandishing the panga knife and ax until his friends finally calmed him down and got him to move. As Audra pointed out later, it wasn’t so much that it seemed like he would attack as it was that it seemed like maybe he would trip and accidentally cut us.

As fun as the hike was, I think we were all pretty glad to finally arrive at the resort. By the time we rolled into the lodge we were exhausted, dehydrated, and everyone (except me) had incredible blisters. Alyssa was actually walking in flip flops, because they were the only shoes she could still stand.

We thought our adventure had ended when we arrived at the lodge but it was not to be. There are two ways to get out of the resort we were staying at. You can hike, or you can take a ferry down to a town that actually has roads. Since most of us (that would be everyone except me) was so injured from the hike that they could barely walk, we agreed to take the ferry back. Only problem was, the ferry was broken. So we rented a small fishing boat to get out. Then a storm blew in. I think “torrential” is an adequate adjective for it. Long story short we decided to ride out anyway, got thoroughly soaked, almost tipped over a few times, and had to wade to shore because the waves were too strong to land on the beach. Then of course we found there was no transport leaving the town until that night and we didn’t particularly want to wait that long so we went to the local hospital and convinced them to let us commandeer an ambulance out. Anyway, when all was said and done it was really quite a fun trip, and we all got out alive, and if some of us subsequently ended up in the hospital for two weeks due to resulting infections, well, that’s part of what adventuring is, isn’t it?

After adventuring all the first year education volunteers migrated down to Lilongwe for Camp Sky. Camp Sky is a camp the education volunteers put on every year for the best form three students. It’s a really really amazing opportunity for the students. For most students it was their first time seeing the city, their first time seeing what a government boarding school looks like, their first time being in classes where the teacher-student ratio is actually reasonable. The school we were holding the camp at, Lilongwe girls, had dorms, a library, a computer room, a cafeteria and several classroom blocks. It was amazing.

The first day at camp all the girls had a huge shower party because they had never taken showers before. We also had to have toilet lessons (we don’t stand on the seats, we push this handle down when we are done, this is toilet paper). In addition to our regular curiculum we had salsa dancing lessons, drum circles, and various business and Income Generating Activities. We also had a field trip to the airport. When the plane camp in to land around half of the students actually called friends or relatives on the phone and narrated the whole scenario.

In addition to teaching, my special job at the camp was “bell.” Allow me to explain. Most schools have a tire rim that you bang with a rock to signal the end of class. This one did not. Which meant that, at the end of every class the bell (i.e. me) would go out into the courtyard and yell “ding! ding! ding!” Despite my chief role being that of an innanimate object, I think camp sky is probably the most meaningful thing I’ve done here so far.

Almost forgot the earthquakes. There were a series of four earthquakes in Karonga (the district north of me) throughout December. The largest being a 6.2 that’s displaced somewhere around 28,000 people. Which is what happens when your houses are made of mud and you live on a fault line. We haven’t had anything near that big in my area (Rumphi), mostly we just get the echoes - four or five shakes a night that by the time you’ve woken up and had time to think ‘maybe I should go outside’ are already done. We’re still not sure why the quakes only come at night. Until I get regular internet access, this will probably remain one of the great mysteries of my world.

One thing I can say about spending a significant amount of time in a country with a culture completely different from your own - the holidays are always interesting. The most recent holiday celebrated was Halloween. In the north it's tradition to have a huge halloween party up in Chitipa. If you are looking at a map of Malawi Chitipa is waaaaaaay up in the uppermost lefthand corner. Right in that part that looks like it should belong to Tanzania. The one with no major roads leading to it.

So it was that, at nine in the morning I found myself in the back of a pickup, tearing over twisting dusty mountain roads in the full blaze of the sun on my way to one of the most remote districts in Malawi. Now, I've had some interesting travel experiences living in this country. I've been in cars with goats, with chickens, I've been on busses where I've riden on the head rest. The matola ride to Chitipa though, was definitely up there in the category of "interesting experiences." The drivers crammed more people into the back of this pickup than I ever thought was possible. I felt like we were all playing some strange sort of game of twister: "Right foot under that old lady; left hand in the babies face". I had my arms around two other volunteers I had previously not known all that well, and at one point I looked down and realized that most of me was in fact hanging out of the matola, and I was only staying in the truck by virtue of the fact that my feet were wedged under some maize sacks.

Hallowwen itself was pretty fun. There was a distinct absence of candy, but we slaughtered a hog, played volleyball agaisnt the Chitipa police (they KILLED us) and had a really nice costume party where everyone dressed to the nines. My friend Caitlin (who went as rainbow bright) acutally sewed together a series of different colored bottle caps to form a bikini top. Awesome.

Coming back home I was greeted with a bit of interesting news - the Ministry of Education, in all their infinite wisdom, had decided to completely switch the school calendar around. Surprise! Before the school year was going to close November 19th and open January 4th. Now it will close at the same time, but open December 7th. Instead of closing in November next year it will now close in September.

I'm actually pretty excited about starting teaching next year, even I will be starting off earlier than I initially thought. I feel as if I spent the whole past year just trying to acclimate to teachig. Now that I know what I'm doing (roughly) I'm really looking forward to seeing what I can do this coming year.

Giving exams at the end of this year only added to my excitement for next year. I had deliberately made the exams tough, because the exams the students have to take to get a high school diploma are ridiculous, and I want them to have some practice beforehand. At the end of his exam one of my students wrote, "Madam I have never seen a test so difficult!"

Despite the difficulty, I was really pleased with the students' performance. Day to day it's really hard to see students improving, and really easy to get discouraged, but looking at the exams I could see how far they've come, and it really is impressive, especially given their learning environment.

At the close of school I jumped on board a field trip that was being put on by some environment volunteers who were holding a wilderness camp in the village next door. We travelled up to Livingstonia, which is about an hour and a half north of me.

A note on field trips: they are a whole heck of a lot more fun when you are not in charge of them.

Livingstonia is beautiful. First we visited a bee-keeping co-op, so the students could learn about honey collecting. I was doing fine until they brought out pieces of honeycomb that I noticed had these little black flecks in them that, on closer inspection, I saw were still moving. Then I was out the door faster than you could blink while one of my students laughingly explained "Madam Sessa, she fears the bees." From outside I watched as they sucked the honey out of the comb, calmly brushing the bees off.

We had lunch on a rock facing Manchewe falls - a pair of streams that cascade off the Nyika plateau and join a river that runs to the lake. The falls are 50 meters high and breathtaking. I have to say, if you find yourself eating beans and rice with your hands across from one of the most gorgeous views you have ever seen, you gotta figure you took a right turn somewhere along the road of life.

The night before I left for the city I had a pizza and movie night with my little siblings. One branch of family just got an oven, so I thought making pizza would be a good way to christen it.

I made the oldest children read out the recipe, while the youngest followed it and if I do say so myself (and I do) the pizza turned out delicious! We ate it while watching the second Lord of the Rings movie. I explained that Aragorn is in fact my first husband, while Legolas is my second, and we spent the rest of the movie picking out husbands for everyone else. Dora, my 14 year old little sister declared that she didn't want a husband (which made me very proud of her)and the 7-13 year old boys spent their time joking that the others were married to various orks (sp?), hobbits, and evil wizards. It was a nice note to close out a year in village on. The next day I headed into Mzuzu, pretty satisfied with how my first year of work and life in my village has turned out.

Well, since I find myself still in the city, I guess we’ll go ahead and put up two blog entries for October. This past week has been pretty phenomenal, as weeks go. The first reason is that on Tuesday I got to participate in a recording session for NPR. I'll elaborate.

Remember how a few blog entries ago I said I thought it would be cool to e-mail the Splendid Table with a Peace Corps Malawi cooking challenge? Well it was. Especially when they e-mailed me back and asked if they could call me and have me do a recording of the challenge. Of course I said yes, and it was incredibly fun. I was surprised at how good the reception was. The ingredients I gave were tomatoes, greens, onions, rice and usipa (small fish that -- never having tasted either -- I imagine tastes like anchovies). The recipe I got back was a sort of rice greens tomato stew using one usipa as a boullion cube type thing.

I think the hardest part for Lyn the host was that I didn’t have any spices. I feel bad because I forgot that cilantro is basically a weed here (seriously, I actually had to weed about half of my cilantro out of my garden) but I did mention that mom had just sent me a bunch of cumin, which may have saved the day. There was one part where the host was telling me “So you’re going to add as much salt and pepper as you want.” I pointed out that I don’t have pepper here. She asked me if I had garlic, and I said you can buy it from the city, but that was ruled as illegal because it has to be locally available. At any rate, I plan to cook the stew at some point and try it, so I guess we’ll see how it turns out.

The other event that made this week really cool was that instead of doing my normal teaching schtick, I went down to Dedza to help out with training the new education volunteers. They’re currently in a part of training known as “homestay” which is where the trainees live in a mud hut with a family.

Now, during my homestay I lived in a village where all the roads were tiny dirt paths, the largest portion of the population was bovine, and I could stand outside at night and see the nearest points of electricity flickering a good three miles away. Imagining the trainees in a similar state of deprivation I baked them chocolate chip cookies.

Then I actually visited their site. Not only are they teaching in a school that is, no exageration, at least five times the size of mine, but they are about a three minute walk away from the main grocery store. So every day we had cold cokes. They also live a walkable distance from a pretty classy tourist resort, so the weekend before I visited, they had gotten cheesecake at the restaurant there. After finding all this out I really felt like they should have baked me cookies.

On Thursday all the Volunteers who were helping with training and the new group gathered at the college so we could lead some information sessions, and basically tell them about things they should be expecting from their service here. We had a session on finance in the school, a session on the different volunteer groups that exist in country, and, because we were bored and weird, we had a seance. We actually all held hands around a candle and chanted “ommm.” I guess the trainees were supposed to be visualizing how their service in Malawi should go or something. To be honest I was a little unclear on the whole concept. My only real contribution was I made everyone make a wish before we blew out the candle.

By far my favorite part of the week was just sitting around and chatting with the trainees. In the process of said chatting it came out that one girl’s parents actually read my blog, so I promised a shout-out. Hi Meg’s parents! I told Meg I was going to make up horrendous stories about how much trouble she was getting into, but my creativity reservoir seems to be running low, so instead I’ll just tell the truth, which is that the whole group is awesome, and they are doing really really really well.

This time last year I was making “if you stay in Malawi for another week I’ll stay in Malawi for another week” deals with a friend in my group. All this group can talk about is how excited they are to get out of homestay and into their villages and how excited they are to start teaching and to have their own projects etc. etc. etc. When you think about the fact that just three weeks ago they stepped off a plane basically into another world, that’s a pretty cool attitude to have. Personally, I think they're going to do okay.

In the middle of reading Moby Dick last week (which, since it is the middle of hot season, never fails to make me want to hitch East until I hit the ocean and grab the next ship sailing) where Ishmael says “everything in this life exists only by contrast.” I agree with this statement as a general philosophy on life, but it’s been especially applicable to my life since I returned to Malawi. September was one of the roughest months I’ve had since arriving in country. October has been well... a nice contrast.

For starters, a few projects that I’ve been working on all year have finally started coming together. With the teachers house, we have finally bought cement; the school payed for half, and I payed for half. It also is seeming like the school will maybe have bricks burned by the time I get back to site (that’s in another week, I’m spending this week training the newbies!). In Malawi brick making is a process. You mold them at the end of the rainy season, when mud is overwhelmingly abundant. You let them dry out in the sun for a bit, then stack them into huge kilns which you then cover with mud, stuff with huge amounts of firewood, light on fire, and let burn for a day. My school has had amazing numbers of molded bricks just lying around on the ground for the past five months. Just recently though, they actually stacked the bricks into kiln shape and on the day I left village, they were cutting down firewood. Normally I don’t like to get my hopes up, because they tend to get disappointed, but I’m making an exception this time, just because it’s nice to have something to get my hopes up about.

My biggest success by far though, was my wildlife club trip. My site is right at the edge of one of Malawi’s biggest nature preserves -- a major tourist attraction. Exotic birds are forever flying through my yard, and if you hike about fifty feet behind my house and you are actually within park boundaries, yet most of my students have never seen it. They were interested in a visit though, and I thought it would be a good idea to take them. The only problem is that taking them costs money, and I A) didn’t have any of that for a while and B) wanted to the students to earn the trip, at least in part.

At the beginning of this term, using school supplies donated from home, I started a shop at school, and had the students run it. Turns out you can make quite a profit when you have no initial costs and so can sell everything half-price for pure profit. After about a month in the shop they’ve paid for about a fourth of the trip. They’re going to keep running the shop through the end of term, by which time they should have earned enough to pay for half of the trip. My original deal with them was that if they paid for half of the trip, I would supply the rest.

I had it arranged so that the students could go on the trip for free, but would still have to work to go, which I was really happy about. I had arranged to borrow a truck rent-free from the M.P. (member of parliament, kind of like a senator) who happens to be second wife’s brother in law’s son or cousin or something. All we had to do was supply fuel. Dandy.

One thing I’ve learned about Malawi. You need to anticipate everything that could possibly in any way go wrong and solve it before it happens. This is not necessarily easy, and is always stressful. So, I spent the entire week leading up to the trip trying to pre-empt problems. By Friday the driver did not know he was picking us up, the truck was in the shop getting its brakes fixed, and I was still being told not to worry, everything would go smoothly.

My sitemate, who, luckily, had done a wildlife trip the year before told me her biggest problem had been fuel. They hadn’t put in enough fuel before leaving the city, so they had stalled out on the side of the road. So I called the driver and told him that I was just making sure that he had enough fuel to get all the way from Mzuzu (city he was leaving from) to Rumphi (town with the nearest gas station). He said that he could put in enough to get from Mzuzu to my town. When I pointed out that there was no fuel in my town he said, “Well then, you should probably go get some shouldn’t you?”

So. It’s one thirty on a Friday afternoon, I’m already somewhere between a conniption fit and a heart attack and now I’m wracking my brain trying to figure out where to get fuel. I’m calling everyone I can think of (I’ve got a twenty dollar phone bill at this point) and finally it turns out that one man in town actually stockpiles fuel. He lives up in this strange section of the village where a ton of really rich people are. It’s always surreal to me, bike for ten minutes up this side street and suddenly you are in an area populated by well furnished houses topped by satelite dishes with cars (plural) parked in the driveway. They all have stunning views of the mountains and you stand on the porch and think, “a person could get used to living like this.” Then you look down over the village at all these mud houses with thatched roofs and it just seems strange.

At any rate, I got ahold of the fuel, I was pretty sure the driver was coming (though not if he’d actually come in time) and then, as the last little trick, after telling me for a month I could bring 50 people, they lowered the number to 30. Fortunately, only 28 students showed up, and, since they were passing out fertilizer coupons only one community member came. Which meant that we were just within bounds. My last fear, as we drove through the park entrance is that we would go the whole day without seeing any animals.

We saw a whole herd of water buffalo within five minutes. They are huge. And scary looking. With pointy horns. I’m sure they are very friendly creatures, but something about their bone structure sets their default expression to “slightly peeved” which is intimidating. Especially when one is huge. With pointy horns. In addition to the buffalo we saw impala, elk-like things, tons of really amazing birds and a group of gazelles chasing a baboon. The gazelles were by far my favorite. They don’t run, they leap. Gracefully. So we got to see them leaping across the planes after this tiny baboon running pel-mel for the trees -- which has become I think my favorite Malawi moment so far.

Perhaps the most exciting part though, was when they let us out of the truck to take pictures with the buffalo. My students kept wanting me to snap pictures of them pointing to the buffalo or smiling with their thumbs in the air. I kept thinking things like “Caption: my form three boys right before they were trampled to death” but the buffalo just nonchalantly chewed their cud while still looking slightly peeved, and now I get to make my students write an essay about their experience if they want a copy of the pictures. Oh the joys of being a teacher.

Despite these two major projects though, I actually haven’t been doing that much work with the school this term. Teaching seems to be a pretty optional occupation third term. Sometimes the teachers show up, sometimes they don’t, and it seems like almost every other day is getting declared some random holiday.

With all the extra time on my hands I’ve been trying to get out in the community more. At the beginning of October I re-visited the nursery school, where I worked part-time first term. The children have gone from barely being able to softly introduce themselves to being able to say their ABCs, shapes, colors, and numbers 1 through 10. Their favorite time by far seems to be prayer time. Apparently they are under the misapprehension that in order for God to hear you, your voice has to physically carry up to heaven. Therefore they dutifully get down on their knees, clasp their hands and scream “OH GOD! BLESS US! BLESS OUR HOME AND FAMILY!” while Edinah, who runs the nursery school shouts to them, “Louder, I can’t hear you.” and I’m thinking, “Are you kidding? Tourists in Egypt can hear them!”

I also hiked halfway up the mountains in back of my house to go see the primary school up there. The primary school was built by Ben and Stacey Waterman, two environment volunteers from 2004-2006 who felt that six year olds shouldn’t be trekking an hour and a half down a mountain to go to school. Go figure. So far it consists of one full school block (two classrooms) and one kind of ramshackle classroom, a netball field, a football field, and a ton of bathrooms. They’re working on constructing an office, and when I asked what was funding it the headmaster said, “oh, the community” like it wasn’t a big deal. It was really great to visit the school. Not only are primary school children learning English adorable but I cannot describe how heartening it is to see something established by Peace Corps volunteers that is actually working, is continually supported by the community and seems to serve a really good purpose.

All in all, although it’s been difficult, October is shaping up to be a pretty great month. I guess one of the things that made September really hard was that I was under the impression that after a year here it would all be a breeze. I remember sitting in training and just wanting some volunteer to tell me, “no, it’s fine, just get through blank months, and after that you’re home free.” I’m not sure where I got the idea, but I thought that after a certain point this would all be easy. But now it’s October and I’m slowly acclimitizing to the fact that it’s not easy, and I don’t think it ever will be. Honestly, I’d probably be disappointed if it were. I think that in the end, while all the difficulties here can be really frustrating that’s probably what makes being here worth it, and what makes the things you do achieve so rewarding.

Well, it’s been a little strange being back, I have to say. I was hoping to kind of ease into being back into country by spending first a few days in Lilongwe (big capital city) and then another few days in Mzuzu (small city) and finally back in my village. The plan being to start teaching again after a good amount of downtime feeling fresh and re-vitalized. This plan failed the moment my plane touched down in South Africa. I went to the desk (after two hours of waiting for it to open) to get my ticket to Malawi issued and found... that the plane had been delayed. Welcome back.

When the plane finally came (an hour after the delayed time) the plane decided to stop off in Blantyre, to pick up more passengers on the way to Lilongwe. It was like being on a flying minibus. Except that when a minibus decides to make an extra stop you don’t have to file off of it, go through customs, pick up your luggage, get patted down, identify your luggage, and get re-issued a ticket before getting back on. The only upside to the whole process was that I got to skip past the huge “Other Passport Holders” line to the one labeled “Returning Residents”. A very nice perk.

When I finally arrived back my village I was absolutely ambushed by a ton of children, then absolutely ambushed by a ton of adults. For the entire first day I spent at site, from after lunch until they had to go home for dinner, I had a group of children marching around my house reciting celebratory cheers they do at soccer games. I was trying to plan lessons, so it was really distracting, but it wasn’t as if I could just go outside and say “umm, sorry guys, I’m planning lessons, can you please stop cheering because I’m back?”

About a week after I got back a lot of things started to go wrong. Since a detailed list would just get boring, here's a rough problem synopsis: 1) The school has somehow managed to spend 1.2 million kwacha (that’s a lot. A lot a lot) of Zimbabwean grant money to only half finish the library/lab. 2) One of my teachers got sick, so for all of September we only had two teachers. 3) I got sick. Which was painful. And boring. Really really really really boring. 4) Peace Corps announced that due to budget cuts we would have to close the Peace Corps respite houses in all the cities. 5) The main grocery in Mzuzu burned down. While we were in the city. As a result of which 6) The whole city ran out of water. In conclusion, for a while there, life was not fun.

But then, as they tend to do, things started to turn around. The first really bright spot has been the school supply shop my students have started running. While I was home my church donated a bunch of school supplies, and I’ve been having students sell them at heavily discounted rates in a shop. Originally the intent was to make enough money so the girls who were boarding at the school studying for exams could buy parafin. However, the girls decided to start making and selling scones, and just from that they had enough money to buy two bottles of parafin a week, which is enough. So, instead of having the money from the sold supplies go the girls, it has been going to my wildlife club, which has now earned enough money to take a trip to a National Park in early October. Very, very, very exciting. Especially for those of us who have never seen African wildlife live and up close. It's also looking like by the end of this month they will probably have saved up a good deal of money towards a trip next year.

My school finally had a budget meeting (meeting after meeting had been previously postponed or cancelled due to funerals in the area) where we scheduled a time to go into Rumphi and buy the supplies to finish up the teacher’s house. Hopefully it will be finished by next year, and we can move a teacher in.

On a more personal good note, they’ve put a really cool new health volunteer in my area. Her name is Julia and she lives at Mhuju, the major transportation hub about an hour away from me. Of course since she lives at the major transportation hub, everyone knows her. Now, occasionally when I’m riding my bike only twenty minutes out of my village someone will greet me by saying “oh, you must be Julia’s friend.” To which I naturally want to reply “She’s been here two months! Two months! I’ve been here a year! If anyone is a friend to anyone she’s mine!!!”

So overall, things are running back on a pretty even keel now. I’ve been listening to podcasts on my ipod every Saturday morning as I sweep the house. It’s a really nice touch of home to have Car Talk or Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me on the weekends. My friend Tina and I have decided we want to do the Splendid Table challenge, only Malawi version. In the normal Splendid Table challenge you call in and say what is in your fridge and the host has to come up with a meal. We’d do what’s available in our village. “Okay, I’ve got beans, rice, onion, greens, and tiny dried fish that resemble sardines. No spices except salt. Go!”

At the end of September I travelled down to Lilongwe for a meeting on the closing of the Peace Corps houses, and to welcome in the new group of Education Volunteers. By way of explanation, I should say that the houses are where we stay overnight when we go into the city. There are quite a few things that closing the houses is going to interfere with. These include, but are not limited to: Getting mail, getting paid, getting medicine, having computer access, and having a comfy place to stay when you are really really sick. When it was announced that the houses were closing there were definitely questions among the volunteers as to whether the office fully understood 1) exactly how many logistical problems the closing of the houses posed and 2) how committed they were to finding remedies for these problems.

On the second point - if the administration is not completely dedicated to fixing any and all problems we bring to their attention, then they are doing a heck of a good job pretending they are. The impression we received was that they will move mountains to get things running smoothly again, and they’ve got some pretty good ideas for potential solutions to the logistical problems we’ve raised so far. The problem right now is that getting these systems in place is going to take time, and it was pretty obvious that a lot of problems that should have been anticipated were not.

For example, when we pointed out that a lot of us in the north have to go to the city to get paid because there are only three ATM’s in the entire north of Malawi the response we received was, “what do you mean there are only three ATM’s?” So then one of the administration officials suggested we open up an account with our local bank. The problem with that is it’s a bit illegal (under Malawi law foreign residents are only allowed to have an account National Bank). When we pointed this out and the response we got was “Well, yeah. But you can still do it.” So, it’s a work in progress. But at least there is work being done, and there is progress.

Personally, I feel that the worst part of the houses closing has nothing to do with anything technical. The worst part is that in losing the houses, we are losing the one place in Malawi where we can just be. Now, I love my site. I love my Malawian family. I love my community. I love my students (most of the time). But living in a community where you will always be an outsider is HARD. Living in a completely different culture is HARD. Always being stared at and questioned and having to have a smile on your face because you are representing America and by God you want to give a good impression is HARD. But above all, doing Peace Corps makes you more lonely than you’ve ever been in your life.

Yet the minute you walk into Mzuzu house, you are around other people who understand that, and who are going through all the same things you are going through, and you step into a cultural bubble where you can be yourself again. Visiting other sites is really fun, but at the end of the day, you are still at their site, a visitor on display having to greet all the friends, relatives, and neighbors. It is interesting, and it is fun, but it is neither relaxing or revitalizing, and staying at the houses is.

I’ve gotten all my best ideas and advice talking to other volunteers at the house, and every time, every single time I have come back home after a weekend at the house in Mzuzu I am refreshed, energetic; eager to start about 15 million new projects, and excited to chat with the next 20,000 people I see. Having just that one safe haven where -- for just one weekend a month -- you can be yourself, and not be that one person who always stands out, there’s really no way to adequately express how much that means, and I’m going to miss it.

Moving on. After the meeting I went out to play a game of softball with a bunch of ex-pats. It was more chill than games I’m used to playing in (usually you can’t take your beer to the outfield with you) but really really fun. Someone from the embassy hit a line drive that actually smashed through center field’s beer bottle, which was really annoying to pick up, but insanely cool to see.

Two days later all the education volunteers who were in Lilongwe piled into a car and headed out to the airport to welcome in the new batch of trainees. We got there just as the plane was landing, and standing on the upper balcony of the airport we unfurled a huge paper and crayon “Welcome Edu 09-11” sign. It was actually really exciting watching the new group get off the plane. We kept scanning through the passengers and whispering “is that them, do you think that’s them, do you think they’ll get off soon?” When we finally did spot them we cheered from the moment they stepped off the plain until they cleared baggage claim. Then we all circled up in the parking lot for introductions.

I’ve had a lot of great moments in the past year, but I think in a strange way meeting everyone in the parking lot might actually be the best so far. At one point I just took a second to look around and think about what exactly I’ve been through. A year ago I was one of those tired, frazzled, overwhelmed, trainees getting of the plane wondering if I could actually do this. Now, what seems like such a short time later I get to be on the other side, standing in an airport parking lot introducing myself, and welcoming them home.

When we talk about home volunteers get an almost dazed, wistful look. As we stare off into space dreaming of faraway amenities a few key words usually come up: food, showers, toilets, movie theaters. But when I got back from America, and asked one of my friends here, quite seriously, what he misses most from home he replied “No question, friends and family.” So it is. As nice as having a large variety of fruit and vegetables available at one’s fingertips was (and it WAS) by far the nicest thing about being home was getting to see everyone again.

As much as I love it here, I do really miss just being around all the friends and family I'm used to having as a support system in my day to day life. It was amazing to get the opportunity to be back and to catch up on everyone's lives, to see what people are up to currently, and to just be able to hang out and actually talk to people about what my life is like here.

Coming back has been a bit strange. The flight into Malawi was delayed by two hours, and then the plane decided to stop off in Blantyre to pick up more people. Welcome back to Malawi transportation. From recieving phone calls from my family, to hanging out with people in the transit houses to just being able to climb into the back of a pickup again and watch the scenery fly by I have to say; it is undeniably good to be back home.

1) Family gathering for my birthday

2)Demonstrating pinata

3) I think they like it!

4) Trouble (Hande Mushali)

I got a pretty interesting reality check today as I was googling around the web for possible grants for teachers houses (I'm on vacation, really!) and got my own blog back as a hit. On the first page. It's really kind of easy to forget that all of this is in fact posted on a public forum where anyone can read it. Mostly when I write I'm actually just writing for me, to process what I've been experiencing, and then as an afterthought I edit and load it up. Now, talking to people, I realize you guys are actually reading this. Who would have thought? At any rate, I really enjoy writing this, so I'm glad you all are enjoying reading it.

At any rate I'm sorry this post is so late. I thought I would post as soon as I got home, but then I got caught up in the day to day relaxing that is vacation and... well, here is the post now.

My last three weeks at site before term break were great. On the netball front, we've actually started winning games, and -- even more surprising -- I'm actually getting pretty good. My favorite game was played halfway up the mountains behind my house. To get to the field we had to run up the mountain, then we played an hour of netball (won!) and ran halfway down. On the way back down we stopped at the team captain's dad's house to have some celebratory nsima and greens. While there I noticed they had a collection of... BUNNIES! Now, I hadn't seen any bunnies my entire time in Malawi, and they actually had baby bunnies! I suffered a serious cute attack and immediately grabbed one of the little babies and started playing with it. "What's its name?" I asked the wife. She shrugged. "Dende" ("sidedish"). After ten months here, you think I would have seen that one coming.

The most exciting event this time around at site though, was clearly the visit by my friends from Scuba class. The stayed with me for two days, and got to really see what village life is like. Besides a few “forgetting the word to call off the dogs” and “getting stuck in the bathroom with a hornet” incidents I think they really enjoyed their stay, and I know the community enjoyed hosting them. Weeks after they left people were stopping me in the streets asking “how are your visitors?” Ummm... they’re good I think, I’m fine too by the way, thanks for asking.

At school perhaps the most exciting event was a debate on whether one should or should not engage in pre-marital sex. Con had the lead pretty much the whole time, as Pro could never satisfactorily respond to “pre-marital sex can kill you and ruin your future.”

Then, in the last round, Con brought up that the bible says one shouldn’t have pre-marital sex. Pro asked for extra time to deliberate, I gave it to them, and then they came back with the most impressive piece of critical thinking I have seen in my entire time in Malawi. Before I continue I should point out that the Malawian education system does not encourage independent thinking. You are supposed to memorize facts and regurgitate. So I wasn’t really expecting much besides things I had already heard them say a thousand times before from this debate. Then Pro came back with something that was almost mathematically proof-like, and totally floored me.

"Con says the bible tells us pre-marital sex is wrong", pro began, "however, the bible also says that we should be fruitful and multiply, and that we should not commit adultery. The only way to do this is to have pre-marital sex. Therefore, the bible is clearly instructing us to have pre-marital sex."

It was the most hilarious moment we have had in class so far. Everyone was in stitches, and I had to award pro a win. For homework, I had every student in class write an argumentative essay on whether pre-marital sex is good or not, and with a few exceptions for “pre-marital sex is good because practice makes perfect” almost everyone wrote that sex before marriage is a bad idea.

The other big school event was that we received another shipment of books - this one from Worldvision. Not that I am anything less than completely grateful for books, but the difference between receiving American textbooks and Malawian textbooks can be summed up in a pretty short anecdote. I was reading a beginners book with my form ones and there was a dinosaur in the story. I asked them what a dinosaur was and received the answer “an animal that lives in Nyika madam.” Well okay then, cross that national park off the “to tour” list. Still, this is better than what one of the other schools received -- a whole shipment of American History textbooks... in Hmong.

Speaking of American History, I should mention that on the fourth every year the ambassador hosts a big party for all the ex-pats in Malawi. However, since I was leaving about a week after, and since it takes a day to get down to Lilongwe and another to get back, I decided to skip the festivities. Instead I went up to a friend’s site. He lives with a family also, and it was really nice to be at another site, comparing living-with-a-family experiences, and sitting around in a kitchen chatting with villagers.

An added perk of the night was that since he lives near the highway, we were able to get ahold of a steak from the market, which we then grilled, and ate with some bar-b-que sauce he had imported from home. Grilled steak eaten in an outdoor kitchen under the stars; not a bad way to celebrate the fourth.

My trip home was pretty uneventful. No plane delays, no unforseen circumstances, no holdups at customs even. I was pretty sad to leave, even though I knew I would be returning in a month, which makes me wonder how I’ll feel a year from now, when I leave for good. As for right now, I’m just enjoying being home, and the happiness being around friends, family, and an amazing variety of food can bring. (Seriously people, do you know how great restaurants are? Pretty amazingly great).

Well, these past two weeks have been some of the best in my entire time in Malawi. The first week started off with a bang when, on Monday, we received a huge shipment of textbooks at my school. They were from African Development Bank, and what made them particularly great to receive was that they were Malawian textbooks, and so are perfectly relevant, and culturally understandable.

Of course, this being Malawi, before we could lend them out to the students we had to stamp them with the official stamp. And then, of course, this being Malawi, we didn't have an ink pad, and ink pads are impossible to find in village. So, I was faced with the prospect of closing the library until we could get ahold of an ink pad, or, I could improvise. Fortunately, creativity has never been a weak point with me. I promptly got out my collection of markers, colored in the bottom of the stamps, and started stamping all the books that way. It worked wonderfully, but was rather slow.

Then I was hit with a brilliant piece of inspiration. I'm not going to go into the details beyond saying unless you are in particularly dire straights, I would not recommend using shoe polish as ink.

Monday also witnessed a gathering of the chiefs, called together by the head of the PTA, Mr. Chilambo, who wanted to establish which villages would burn how many bricks and when. Each village has now promised 2,000 bricks a piece, which is very good. Because I've been living here so long I'm naturally skeptical about whether this promise will be carried out, but just having the meeting itself was really great.

The most amazing part, for me, was that I had absolutely nothing to do with the meeting. I didn't suggest it, I didn't call it, I didn't speak the entire time it was going on. It was completely community motivated, completely community organized, completely community executed. As a volunteer who's going to be leaving in two years, those are the kinds of things you like to see. I really don't think I've ever been that happy to just sit by silently at any other time in my life.

Work has begun on the library/lab again. And stopped. And begun again. And stopped. At any rate, we are up to the roof. I'm at the point where I just want to pull on some overalls, climb onto the building and haul the timber and iron sheets on myself.

The last great development on the village front is that my chicken, Hamlet, despite the inevitable gender confusion having such a name must cause, has been quite reliably laying me exactly one delicious egg a day. She is a wonderful chicken, plump and well behaved and completely content to live in her khola, and not in my dining room -- which is a vast improvement over past chickens that shall remain unnamed.

Of course there have been a few rough patches too. The first is that Trouble (Hande) has been taken away by his Aunt to live with her in Blantyre, which is a good two day trip away. It's a good opportunity for him, as his Aunt is quite rich, and he will now be attending the best private schools, and living in the biggest city in Malawi, but it's hard to feel elated when he's very conspicuous in his absence.

His mom of course, misses him like crazy, but this really isn't that atypical a situation in Malawi. Children here don't belong to their parents as much as they do in America, they more belong to the family. A good illustration of this appears within the language itself, in Chitumbuka you call your Aunts "little mother" or "older mother" and your Uncles "little father" or "older father."

Still, I'm not sure how I feel about the whole situation. On the one hand he has a lot of great opportunities now that he didn't before, on the other he has just been pulled away from his parents, and the huge family unit where he was used to living and taken over two days away, to return maybe occasionally for vacations. It's hard to think that three weeks ago there was this kid who I used to play with, and read to, and make up bedtime stories for, a kid who would routinely just fall asleep in my lap, and now there's just a void.

The second hard time was that we had another budget meeting on Thursday. I hate budget meetings. I dread and loathe them with an intensity that surpasses my vocabulary. I really have no idea where any money is going, and that's not as simple a black and white issue here as it would seem.

I know my headmistress isn't stealing all the money (at least half of it, afterall, was spent on that stupid duplicating machine that we still haven't ever used) which puts my school above the roughly 50% of schools where the headmaster is stealing all the money, but I do suspect she's taking some. Which leaves me in a more complicated position than it would in America. There is a system for reporting corruption here, but it's less clear -- morally -- whether one should. This is not Enron executives stealing a few extra millions so they can buy that second yatch they always wanted, money that's stolen here goes toward school fees for your children, and health care, and food. And it's a hard judgement call to say someone should be punished for trying to provide for their family. So budget meetings drive me nuts. The one definitive measure I have taken is to say that when it comes to grants, because of the nature of the grants I'm the only one allowed to handle money. So at least on that score, I can be sure that that money is going towards the school.

Out of site, Alyssa and I both had five days off from school this past week, so we decided to head over to Nkhata bay, the local lakefront resort, to get scuba certified. We splurged on a lakeside Chalet (a whopping $20 a night) and it was fantastic to sleep on a real bed, and then get up to watch the sun rising over the lake.

Two backpackers joined us for the scuba class, and we ended up having a really great dynamic. You can tell we had an awesome group because we invented a sign that means "look, fish!" As our instructor, Johnny put it, "Yes, fish, in a lake, who would have thought?" But really, fish. Tons and tons and tons of fish.

Getting scuba certified in lake Malawi is what I imagine getting scuba certified in a tropical aquarium must feel like. There are fish everywhere. And when I say everywhere, I mean everywhere. Above you, below you, all around you. On the one hand, this is great, because it offers stunning views, on the other hand, it's fairly distracting. I'd be sitting on the bottom having to practice an "out of air" scenario and my thought process would be something to this effect "okay, I'm out of air, I'm going to signal that I'm out of air but that I'm okay, I'm going to keep a constant stream of bubbles going and then I'm going to… Hey! Lookit that! A purple striped zebra fish with orange spots and wait, why is Johnny (our instructor) signaling to me? Oh right! I'm out of air!"

It was really great to have a vacation. Having time to just sit back and relax and see the more touristy side of Malawi was a cool change. Still, though I respect what backpackers are doing, talking to people who are basically just trekking through the country has really made me appreciate what I have. Travelling is cool, but at the end of the day, it's really nice to live here, with a family, and to see a completely different way of life.

P.S. I can't believe I'm coming home in a month. That's absolutely crazy. Hopefully I'll see a lot of you then. I'm really looking forward to it.

May marks my first month back at site since our In Service Training. In Service Training is almost the last sort of right of passage marker we have. First you have to get through homestay, then training, then your first month at site, then IST. Once you pass that you are officially no longer a newby. I still can’t believe I’ve been here eight months now. It really does seem like just a little while ago that I got off the plane, passed by a ton of ramshackle wooden shanties in Lilongwe all labeled “coffin shop” and thought, ‘oh man, what have I gotten myself into?’ As it turns out; probably the best thing I've ever done in my life.

The biggest news here has been Malawi’s fourth ever elections, which happened – extremely peacefully – May 19th, and resulted in the re-election of the incumbent president, Bingu wa Mutharika. For the weeks leading up to the election there were people dancing for 24 hours through the streets, decked out in Chitenges and skirts supporting their favorite politician. I once even saw a pickup with an entire band – including huge Bose speakers – camped out in the back driving through our village.

My area, which is staunchly pro-Bingu, is thrilled not just with the results, but also with the fact that the elections went so well. They are extremely proud that elections were fair and nonviolent, and are excited about what this means for Malawi’s development. While I am also pretty thrilled and proud of how elections went, I think the real test of Malawi’s political advancement will come in five years, when Malawi’s constitution (which allows a maximum of two terms) calls for Bingu to step down and allow open elections. If he does, I will feel Malawi is a full-fledged democracy, as it is, we are a cute little tree seedling; developing well, but not yet sturdy.

Things have been going really well at site. Right after I got back from IST I joined a program with the National Library here where for ten dollars a year you get to take one crate of books a month from a back storeroom. It’s literally floor to ceiling books, and I love to just sit there for hours and sort through the boxes.

I gave Sylvester, Andrew, and Hope, my resident pre-teens, different books to read. Sylvester got “Bunnicula” and read it to me chapter by chapter in the evenings, sitting on the dirt floor in the outdoor kitchen while the women cooked nsima. It’s funny because I remember when Dad used to read it to me, but I had forgotten most of the story, so it was nice to have a review. I think the nuances of a vampire bunny story ostensibly written by a dog were sort of lost, culturally, on Sylvester, but he liked showing off his pronunciation. I gave a Richard Scary book to Andrew, Sylvester’s orphan cousin who lives with them, and ever since he has been copying pictures out of it, labeling them, and showing them off to me for approval.

School has also been going pretty well. Although having only four teachers, and consequently teaching a bazillion classes isn’t easy, it does let me off the hook a certain amount. I think most volunteers spend a lot of time wrestling with the eternal question, ‘is me being here better than just having a Malawian teacher?’ but now, I don’t have to. I don’t have to be better than a Malawian teacher, I just have to be present. Not that I think I’m a bad teacher. Far from it, now that it’s second term, teaching has been going really smoothly.

My form four (senior) class started off by working on careers. We talked about what careers they wanted, and how they planned to get them. To a person, when I asked “how do you plan to become a … ” they all answered, “by working hard.” Which is great, but I encouraged them to maybe come up with something a bit more concrete. Like deciding on a University to aim for. Almost everyone wanted the University of Malawi, the top college here, which costs around 1,000 dollars a term. This from children who have problems paying $17 a term.

I told one of the volunteer teachers, a doctor who works mostly with the form fours, about this and he asked me, “So do you not think they can achieve their goals?” I answered that I think they can, which is true, I just think they need to think of some alternative paths. There are plenty good technical colleges, or subsidized colleges here, but going to any post secondary education takes a lot of planning and foresight here. Not to mention usually some outside financial support.

In form three we have started reading Romeo and Juliet, which they do not understand. At all. However I quiz them often, so hopefully they will be able to memorize enough random facts to pass the test, and we are enjoying acting it out. Highlights from this include draping a black sweatshirt for hair over the head of “Juliet,” played by Ishmael, while Maggie and Ulem stood on their tiptoes and spread their arms out as trees so Weston (Romeo) could hide behind them. Another time Affick, (that day's Romeo), tried to get up and kiss Masida (that day's Juliet). I put a stop to that really fast. I mean you are part of a culture that sees warm hand holding as the greatest acceptable form of intimacy, and you think you are going to kiss someone? In class??!! Probably not.

(Side note, handholding in Malawi is a hugely complicated cultural act. For greeting, you have a respectful handshake, to console someone on a loss you rock your hand back and forth in theirs three times, with a good friend you link pinkies with them as you walk, if you’ve made a good joke you slap hands, and when you are greeting someone you haven’t seen in a while you do something that resembles a secret handshake you used to do in elementary school.)

The form ones are doing well. Teaching them is very very difficult because of the language barrier on top of whatever other material I’m having to convey. This was summed up pretty neatly in our reading practice. We are reading Lyddie, because it’s the only book we have enough of that everyone can have one copy. After the first chapter, almost every student said to me “Madam, I do not understand, why are they fearing the beer?” To which I responded, “That’s a bear guys.” Which led to Madam Sessa making a bear face to demonstrate. This has become one of our favorite things now. “Madam, show us bear!”

On the development front our biggest project right now is filling out a grant to try to get a teacher's house built. Working on the grant so far has been my most fun and rewarding experience in Malawi. I have been working with the head of the Parent Teacher Committee. I handed him the grant forms on a Monday, and by Wednesday he had a detailed budget and schedule ready for me.

The minimum requirement for any grant is that the community contribute 25%, either in services rendered or money. We are doing a combination of both; clearing land, digging a pit for the latrine, molding and burning bricks, as well as putting in at least 50,000K (roughly $300). I've been trying to work more closely with both the PTA and School Management Committee, which are the community organizations that have a substantial role in school development. It is occasionally frustrating, because there is a ton of suspicion and in-fighting and finger pointing in between all three groups. At my best I am really thrilled and excited about what I think we could get accomplished, at my worst I question whether anything will ever get done once I am gone.

After a two month hiatus the library is also being constructed again. To whit the builder has had: monkeys in his corn, a sick sister, elections going on, not enough bricks, and no water. "Monkeys in corn" has become something of a running joke in the community. As in people will say, "Well, I'm supposed to meet X on Monday, but who knows, maybe monkeys will attack his corn." Then laugh riotously. Theoretically, the library should be done by the end of June. We'll see.

The teacher's house started by Pace and Laura, my predecesors, is also still awaiting the finishing touches. As it is, we could probably finish the house by the beginning of next year, but since I would really like for us to have another teacher before then, I'm trying to raise some money from home and have the school put in the rest to have the house finished by the end of this term. We'll see how all that goes.

At my best I am very excited about everything that could get accomplished. At my worst I think the school will absolutely fall apart when I'm gone, that none of my students are actually learning, and I sort of wonder where all the money is actually going anyways.

On those days I become extremely grateful for my new pastime: netball. It's sort of a cross between Basketball and Ultimate Frisbee. I am just getting the hang of it, which means I get my butt royally handed to me pretty much every practice and game, but it's fun, and the other women on the team (netball is only played by women) clearly think watching me play is hysterical. The problem is no one told me Malawian girls can fly. So the ball is coming towards me, I'm prepared to catch it and whoosi flying Malawian girl and it's gone. Oh well.

In short, May has been one of my best months in country yet. Coming here, I honestly never thought I would be as close to the community as I am. I figured I would be friendly with them, but that overall I would derive comfort from my fellow volunteers (which, of course, I still do) and then I would gut it out at site to try to get things accomplished. Instead my community has become a second family to me. Thinking about where I was this time last year, walking the lawn with so many options open to me, I am just so grateful I ended up here, living this crazy hectic hilarious life. I love it here, and even on my worst "what do you mean monkeys are attacking corn, and my students aren't learning, and where has the money gone anyways?" days that is something that does not change.

So, my school is currently going through a "character building" patch. Or rather, a rough patch. Most of this hinges on the fact that we have not enough teachers, and can't get more teachers until we finish building teacher's houses. Here is where you come in. I am currently filling out grant forms for a program called the Peace Corps Partnership Program. What this program does is sets way where you can make donations to a specific project I am working on (in this case, building teachers houses). The donations would then be completely tax deductable, and go 100% to me. It's a really good program. However, in order to make sure that all the donations are going to a good place and should be tax deductable, and to make sure that the project I am implementing is solid and community motivated and sustainable and a whole bunch of other stuff a project over here absolutely should be, I have to fill out a whole ton of fun fun paperwork. So, while I am filling out paperwork, if you have been thinking to yourself "I think building teacher's houses in Malawi is wonderful and something I want to help with" it would be great if you could get in touch with either me, my mom or my dad, and say how much you would be willing to donate. This way, once I push all the paperwork through and get it down to Lilongwe (which is probably going to take about a month) I can know how much money to expect and get things moving on this side much quicker than I otherwise could. Believe me when I say that we BADLY need another teacher, need to build this house, and any help you can give would be really appreciated. Even small amounts, thanks to a wonderful exchange rate, go a very, very, long way. If you don't know how to get in touch with either my mom, my dad or myself, leave a comment on the blog and I will communicate with you.

Thanks,

me :)

Chocolate pudding – TALULAR style (Talular means using resources available)

1 avocado

2 tbs cocoa powder

1 tbs sugar

Mix ‘em, eat ‘em, love ‘em!

This past month has been filled with some of the highest highs and lowest lows I have had in my time in Malawi. Fairly strange, since it was 90% vacation and training. I should probably back up some though.

Beginning of April marked the end of school, and the beginning of Inter Service Training. For IST our entire group traveled back down to the Malawi college of forestry in Dedza to spend a week and a half together brushing up on our obscure tribal languages, learning about grants, and eating five times a day.

To get to Dedza we all had to pass through Lilongwe, which, at least for us northerners, was a bit strange. There are three major cities in Malawi; Blantyre (where, according to my students, you can buy superpowers), Lilongwe (the capital) and Mzuzu (my wonderful, wonderful, wonderful city). Blantyre, in the south, is the commercial center of Malawi, full of great restaurants, lots of bars, and huge businesses (or so I’ve heard, I still haven’t been there). Lilongwe (central) is pretty huge and sprawling, with affluent neighborhoods interspersed with ramshackle shanty-town places. Mzuzu (the north!) is a small city, about two square miles around, where you can walk anywhere you want to go, can circumnavigate the whole thing in about 45 minutes and people still greet you, instead of just brushing past rudely and possibly trying to grab your wallet while they are at it. If you could find varieties of cheese beyond cheddar and gouda here it would be just perfect.

So after having spent three months back and forth between villages, and the small city of Mzuzu, suddenly we were all tossed into a city with rushing cars, airplanes, mansions, and an actual grocery store. I was overwhelmed. One of the northern boys from my group commented that he couldn’t actually go into the grocery store because it was just too weird. It was definitely a culture shock.

After a weekend in Lilongwe, it was fun to go back to the college of forestry in Dedza. Last time we were there it was the middle of the dry season and Malawi pretty much looked like a desert. Suddenly we were back and there were wildflowers everywhere, and the ground was covered in a carpet of green. Also, it was cold! It felt like fall, and Tina suggested we should carve pumpkins. We didn’t, but just the suggestion was cool.

Being back in language class it was amazing to see the progress we’ve all made. In the village it is easy to feel like you aren’t progressing at all. You still can’t understand people, still don’t know quite how to express yourself, and typically they just switch to broken English after about two sentences anyway. But we really have improved. We were all able to actually hold classes in Chitumbuka, and to describe our villages, and the work we are doing in them.

At least the first hour of ever class served as a sort of group therapy session. It was so nice to be around people who understood where you were coming from when you vented, but who also understood that the venting didn’t mean you were miserable, just that you needed to get things off your chest. Being around people who had exactly the same frame of reference didn’t hurt either, it was sort of like “you hate it when they try to stone people in your village for being witches? I hate that too!”

In addition to learning about grants and doing language work the whole group had a chance to meet Vic Barbiero, our new country director, also known as the father of the girl we sold my first car to… right before the engine exploded. I had actually met Mr. Barbiero a bit earlier, right after Alyssa, Terence and I got into Lilongwe, and our conversation went something like this:

Mr. Barbiero: Wait… Margaret Sessa what?

Me: Hawkins

Mr. Barbiero: Hawkins? Are you by any chance Steve Hawkins’ daughter?

Me: Uh, yeah.

Mrs. Barbiero: Wait, who?

Mr. Barbiero: You know honey, the one with the car.

Mrs. Barbiero: Oh right! The car! (To me) Did you ever hear what happened to that car right after we got it?

That lovely first meeting aside, Mr. Barbiero is a fantastic country director, and his wife is wonderful. Both of them are very interested in all our projects, very eager to support us, and really seem to care about all the volunteers, about Malawi, and about the work we are doing here as a whole.

So back to IST. After training a few of us went to the beach on vacation, where we lazed on the beach and enjoyed more good eating. At the beach my brand new camera that I had just bought (the first one having broken, if you recall, on my first morning in Malawi) broke, and I was back to square one.

I spent a few days after the beach doing business in Lilongwe before making a rush pass through Mzuzu and heading back to site for one of the toughest weeks I have had since I got here.

I should mention at this point that one of my fellow teachers died over break. Mr. Caplusha was attending Domasi college, to try to get a more advanced degree. He was one of our best teachers and had endeared himself to me from the very start by wearing a huge pin with Obama’s face on it and the message “happy days are here again.” With his death we are down to four teachers full time teachers, two part time.

I spent the week sitting through meetings where we re-allocated classes (I am not teaching Life Skills to forms three and four, Literature to form four, English to forms three and one, and both Biology and Physical Science to form one), talked about whether we should have the school only serve two forms, how many students had transferred (about 60) and how we couldn’t get enough new teachers because we don’t have housing (for more information on how you can help with that, go to the next blog entry).

At this point I have talked to (pressured, yelled at, sat in office until they agreed, whatever you want to call it) enough people that we should be receiving another teacher in two weeks. My favorite moment from this whole process was when, trying to impress the urgency of our situation on a man in the northern education office I told him “we only have four full time teachers” and he asked me “excluding the dead one?” to which I, completely astounded, responded, “Well yes, we’ve tended to exclude him since he died. Fortunately the sarcasm was lost on him. Still, even if we do receive this teacher, it is a temporary solution. Until we get the currently half-built teachers house finished and more teachers houses built we are in pretty bad straights.

On the upside though, our budget meeting went surprisingly well. My two yelling poins were that 1) We bought a duplicating machine and typewriter for 140,000 (about a thousand dollars) when we still have teacher’s houses that need to be built and 2) Construction of the library has stopped.

They defended themselves on the duplicating machine, saying that it was a unanimous decision, and will be better for the students, and them a lot of work and money in the long run. I am still not happy about it, but it’s not my decision to make. It’s not my school, I’m just here to help where I can.

As for 2, I was told that the contractor had halted construction because monkeys were eating his corn, and he had to be home to chase them off. This completely floored me. I wanted to yell “well that’s no excuse!” but I couldn’t, because honestly, I don’t know. Is that a good excuse? Are we plagued by a scourge of corn-eating monkeys? I mean could be, we have enough of them around.

At this point though, the other teachers stepped in and started arguing saying, essentially, “well, we’re paying him, he can use some of the money to hire someone to chase off the monkeys.” They even ended up setting an ultimatum for him to come back to work or they’d hire someone else. An amazing feat in a place where people tend to feel, well it will happen when God wills it to happen.

On another upside, I have joined the community netball team. Netball is a game really similar to basketball, except you don’t dribble, and the hoops are made of tire rims nailed to posts. I think mostly they wanted me to join because I serve as a point of amusement. “Madam,” they tell me. “You play so well.” When I counter with “Boza!” (“You lie!” or “false!”) They say, “oh, but you are learning, little by little. Don’t worry, we will teach you.” I don’t really care if I learn or not, it’s a really fun way to relieve stress and hang out with the children in my community.

My surrogate family is also doing very well. I bought them some childrens books in Chitumbuka and Chichewa. I’ve been getting them children’s books in English, but we always run into cultural problems (what’s a ghost? What’s a babysitter? What’s a berenstein? Etc.) They really loved the books, and Andrew, my one brother who speaks Chitumbuka, thought it was hilarious to watch me struggling to read it. After all the times I’ve made him read English books outloud to me, I think he thought it was fair payback.

As for the littler kids, Trouble has, after months and months of saying only “nose” to refer to everything from his actual nose to my bike, learned to say “mah ears” and point to his ears. Patty (Patrick) the one and a half year old who was barely doing a tottering walk when I first came, is now running. He’s still one of the happiest babies I’ve ever met, and can’t stop laughing when I toss him into the air.

For now I’m enjoying a restful weekend in Mzuzu, filling out grants to run a workshop to get bookshelves built, and another to get funding for building teachers houses (again, for more information on that please go to the next blog.) I’ve also joined a program with the regional library whereby I pay them roughly ten dollars and can go into their storeroom and take as many books as I want back to site with me.

It’s pretty cool to see what we are all doing. Alyssa is trying to get a borehole built, Terence is forming a small business owner’s group, and Enrique is trying to get his corrupt-as-anything headmaster kicked out. It’s funny how fast the time has passed, it really does seem just a bit ago we were all being thrown, scared, into a village to live with a family, looking around at these small mud huts and thinking “what the heck am I doing here.” Now we’re at the point where we get to carve our path and decide for ourselves what, in fact, we are really doing here.

Pumpkin burgers:

1 small 20 kwacha pumpkin (use a 50 kwacha one if you are serving more than just yourself)

1 medium onion

4-6 cloves of garlic

2 tbs oil (sunflour or olive preferable. Kazinga is REALLY unhealthy)

bout a half cup flour

1/2 ts salt

To cook pumkin: Cut pumpkin in half. Remove the yucky inner part, feed to either the cats, chicken, piglets or goats. Cut the remaining parts into pieces and steam in about three inches of water while boiling peas, chickpeas, lentils or beans. You don't have to be boiling something else of course, but it's really a waste of firewood, energy, and sunlight if you don't. After about 20 minutes take a fork, scoop out soft and mushy part of pumkin into a bowl. Leave the legume of your choice in to boil for a half an hour longer.

To make the burgers

Chop up onions and garlic, mix them in the pumkin. Add salt. Take a forkfull or spoonfull and coat lightly with enough flour to be able to form the mixture into a patty. *It is important to COAT! Don't mix the flour in with the pumkin mixture! Just don't.* Heat a skillet on medium fire, coat the bottom LIGHTLY with oil of your choice, fry up pumpkin patty. They will be crusty on the outside, gushy and yummy on the inside. If you want them less gushy (but why?) you can either:

a) wait until the pumkin mixutre cools a bit

b) throw an egg, a quarter cup flour, and about 1/2 ts baking powder into the pumkin mixture.

Warning: Does not keep well. Unless you have a refrigerator, then I don't know. But really you should mix any extra pumkin mush with cinnamon and a TINY bit of cloves (unless you want to clear out your sinuses) and have it for desert.

So as is probably obvious from the recipe, it is now pumpkin season at site. Which has been wonderful. Pumpkin headlines the list of “things I didn’t like in America but love here.” Unfortunately pumpkin season also coincides with sick season in Malawi -- although I think that has more to do with weather/rain patterns and the population of mosquitos than with the sudden appearance of any particular squash.

So far there have been quite a few funerals around my village, but the only one I have attended has been for a student, who died right before I got back to site. Since the funeral was on Tuesday classes were cancelled, and the whole school went over to Lumbani’s house to pay our respects. It always suprises me how differently grief is expressed here. In America grief is a personal thing, private, hidden almost. When we are struck by a sudden loss more often that not we want to be alone. In Malawi your entire family, extended family, and really anyone within a five mile radius camps outside your house for two days and immediate family stays on longer, sometimes for around a month (this is supposed to make you feel better?). During the actual funeral people throw themselves down at the foot of the coffin (while the preacher or even another family member is talking) screaming and crying and beating the ground.

It was also very different to be at the funeral of a child. At the one adult funeral I went to (see my last post) there was, of course, a pervasive air of sadness, but also one of resignation, and acceptance. People kept saying things that roughly translated to, “this is a terrible event, but such is life.” Whereas at Lumbani’s funeral everyone kept saying “why, why” and repeating the phrase “he was so young.” It seems it doesn’t matter how much of your under five population gets taken out by Malaria each year; or if AIDS, malnutrition and meningitis are cutting a decent sized swath of your teens, there is a universal understanding built into our consciousness as humans that children aren’t supposed to die.

For me the whole funeral was surreal. I was impressed by the anthropological aspects of it as much as anything. Half of me kept wanting to ask, "so, why do you do this this way? What's the cultural significance." The other half of me couldn’t stop picturing Lumbani as I last remembered him -- taking chalk from me to write an answer on the board. He was smiling shyly, and as he took the chalk from my hand he made a sort of half bow.

The whole week after the funeral I kept staring at the space at his desk, expecting him to come back even though I had seen the lid of his coffin nailed on – usually a pretty good indicator you are not returning. The whole thing made me want to hug each of my 15 siblings and inform them they are not allowed to die until they are 105 and have accomplished every single solitary thing they wanted in their life… and then some.

I thought about this as Trouble (the three year old -- his real name is Hande) lay in my lap, absolutely burning up from Malaria. I want to believe (as everyone else here seems to) that because I am white I can magically solve any problem. I want to think that if any one of my siblings was ever in real danger I could save them – by finding and commandeering a vehicle and rushing them to the city, or paying all their medical bills, or giving them medicine from my kit. As if vehicles charge to take you to the hospital (they don’t) or I could magically make a vehicle appear out of nowhere (that’d be cool) or dry up the roads to make them passable when they are pure mud (probably not good for the environment, even if I could) or as if any of the medicine in my kit was actually safe for children (really, really really not.) But still I want to believe that even though things happen to other children, my kids are immune. As if by caring for them I could keep them safe. As if the price of living in this world isn’t, and hasn’t always been that you have to love people, without ever being able to protect them. (I should add here that Trouble came through the Malaria okay. Twice. He really bounces back into being a meddlesome brat remarkably fast.)

Despite the circumstances, this past stay at site probably ranks as my best time yet. The highlight was probably my trip to Livingstonia. A while ago, Terence, a guy from my group, had mentioned that he was going to Livingstonia, and since you have to pass through my village to get there I decided to tag along. Since the road is actually a nice combination of dirt, rocks, hairpin turns and hills, there’s really no reliable transport to Livingstonia. So we basically started sitting in my market around eleven in the morning, waiting to grab a ride with whatever passed through. We were really lucky and in about an hour managed to get into a small car with a family heading up to visit some relatives, and we only had to get out and push the car through mud once.

Livingstonia is unequivocally gorgeous. It’s set into the mountains like my village, except the forest is much more of a jungle, and it’s higher up in the mountains, so you are looking down over the lake. At night or early in the morning I would catch monkeys jumping through the trees. It also has two huge waterfalls that plummet over a cliff over 150 ft. high down into a river that cuts through a valley that is the definition of “verdant” if ever a valley was. Other than the general peace and tranquility and beauty though, there really isn’t much “there” there. Terence and I ended up visiting a Dutch couple who live in the middle of the forest there (in a truly amazing house) and do agriculture work. They told us about a really interesting program the Malawian government is doing where they plant lots of different food plants around a school and then give the crops to the students to eat throughout the school day. Considering my students ball up paper and eat it throughout the day, I’m really interested in this, and am going to try to get my school involved. We’ll see.

Other than that, Terence and I mostly hung out with Ali (a second year health volunteer) and her mom, who were coincidentally staying at the same place as us. They taught us a really cool group rummy game, as well as Bananagrams, a sort of personal speed scrabble, which is now my favorite game ever (watch out Grandma, I'm taking you on in Maine).

After seeing Livingstonia Terence and I hitched a ride with Ali and her mom down to Chitimba. The road is dirt, and punctuated by no less than 20 switchbacks which all serve to remind one that every time you get into a car in Malawi you are accepting your own mortality. About half way down we encountered a six foot long brown snake sunning itself in the middle of the road. It was not nearly as excited to see us as we were to see it, and expressed its sentiments by rearing up on the back to thirds of its body and waving its head menacingly at us. Since we were in a car this didn’t really have any effect except that Frank, the driver, rolled up his window. Turned out it was a black mamba. COOL!

Chitimba is quite possibly my favorite place in all of Malawi. I wouldn’t want to live there (it’s way touristy and H-O-T!) but sandwiched between the mountains of Malawi, the mountains of Tanzania at the very edge of the lake; it’s unbelievably beautiful. Mr. Misuli, Meg’s old headmaster, had been transferred down there, so we stopped in for lunch. We ate beef (“we would have prepared fish, but we know Madam Maggie does not take it”) nsima, greens and cola outside, all while Misuli and his wife apologized, explaining they would have prepared more if they had had more advanced warning we were coming.

After lunch a card-playing team (not even kidding) from a neighboring village came in, so while Misuli engaged in some very competitive Uno (also not a joke), LB (that’s the wife) Terence and I went down to the lake. Since there were girls bathing naked (still serious) Terence decided to hang back and play with some local kids. I jumped in anyways (try getting me within a mile of water and keeping me out of it) Thus is was that I ended up playing tag with a bunch of naked girls, while LB yelled at me from the shore anytime I got in past where I could touch (Madam Mag! What will I tell your mother if you drown?!) It’s funny, sometimes I get so used to being here, I forget I’m actually living out in a village in the middle of Africa. Then moments like this happen and I remember that oh yeah, this is really quite different.

We spent the night at the house of the British ex-pat couple who hosted the Christmas party. Talk about different. We watched the sun set over the lake from atop a small mountain in back of their house, sat in the yard drinking fruit juice, and then had lamb chop, fresh bread, real butter, and squash soup for dinner. Followed by ice cream floats for desert. Then we sat on the couch and watched ESPN. Now, I’m used to seeing movies, Zambian T.V. shows, and random clips of the B.B.C. here. But sports? American sports? Wow.

In the morning I went to the local secondary school, which is a public boarding school, simply one actually funded by the government, to try to get one of my students enrolled. I was told I needed an official letter from the head of my school, signed, and then stamped with the official school stamp (which I had.) Then I was told I needed to take this letter to the head of transfers at the Education Office in Muzu get an official (signed and stamped) letter of transfer from them, bring it back to the school, and then the student would be enrolled. Lord. Sometimes it seems to me Malawi kept all the worst of British culture (ruddy beauracracy) and left behind the best (parks, theatres, and scones.) Oh well.

Back at Lura school was effectively over, since all we had to do was give exams. I’m not sure how to sum up my first semester of teaching. I feel like now, after three months of teaching, I’m finally ready to really start. Now I know what I’m doing, and have a pretty concrete plan of what I want to accomplish, and how I want the year to go. I also have all these ideas and paths I’ve started for things I want to accomplish in the next two years, but when I sit down and really think, “what have I done?” It’s hard to point to anything concrete. My biggest accomplishment is probably that each one of my sibling now comes to my door asking for “buku” and has a favorite book. Eta, a four year old girl, goes around saying “cookies, cookies” (her favorite is a cookie monster story). Unfortunately she applies the term "cookies" to any baked good. I’m trying to get her to differentiate – "No Eta, that's a cake, that's a muffin, and that's a baguette. Can you say baguette?"

Mostly I’m really proud of what I’ve done just being here. I’ve sort of got this “yes, I have survived in Africa six months!” feeling. I have lived without electricity for half a year, gone without cheese and chocolate for a whole month at a time. I can get get my own firewood from the forest, carry water on my head and not only cook, but bake over a fire. And I have not killed a single one of my siblings, even on the really stressful days when I come home and they are already in the living room, cards and cushions and markers and books sptrewn all over the floor. Milkshakes and happy penguin dancing all around!

So because I actually type up my blog entries on my laptop while I’m at site my last blog entry doesn’t mention my prior visit to Mzuzu. Which was somewhat more exciting than most because I biked. I started off at about 6:00 a.m. and get in around 1:00 p.m. The ride is I think just under 100K, and the first two hours are over dirt roads, which, thanks to some heavy rainfall were less road and more shallow stream.

Still, I arrived in Mzuzu safe and sound, and the first five hours of the ride were actually very pleasant – staring at the mist shrouded mountains, listening to the call of various birds and watching them flit around (we have really exotic birds around my site, and they are brilliantly colored. To see them is like watching a box of escaped flying markers). Then my right hand brake broke and all my gears below 2.7 froze. I spent the last two hours riding/walking and by the time I got to Mzuzu I was in so much pain I was practically crying.

But it was all okay because when I walked into the house I was met with a huge pile of packages. And five of them were for me! Since the mail here went on strike for almost all of December, everyone’s Christmas packages had just arrived beginning of Feb. Since I wasn’t entirely sure I could remain standing long enough to take a shower I stalled and downed an entire bag of M&M’s and five chocolate cookies.

You would think, given that most of the time we are stranded in the middle of nowhere with straight sugarcane being our closest source of candy most volunteers would hoard anything we receive from home. But in fact, we actually share quite liberally. Within about an hour piles of dark chocolate, sweedish fish and candy canes were laid out around various tables for all to enjoy. Almost everyone from the northern region was in the city that weekend since it was payday (we get our pay in three month installments that you have to go to the city to collect). Given that I slept (or more accurately did not sleep) in the living room of the house, the whole weekend lies in my mind as a rather pleasant haze of people, food, and candy.

My favorite time was Sunday night. There’s a hammock at Mzuzu house that is by far my favorite place to be. It’s on a tiny little porch area right outside the kitchen, and lying on it you can just see enough sky beyond the porch overhang to have a good view of the moon and stars. Sunday I felt like I needed a breather from all the company, so I stuck some cookies in the oven and stepped outside. Alyssa was baking granola and keeping an eye on my cookies, and for a while it was just the two of us doing our separate things, After about a half an hour an environment volunteer named Tim Strong stepped out with his guitar and started tinkering around, playing and singing bluegrass and old folk songs, quite a few of which I actually knew, mostly thanks to Dad’s musical tastes. Somewhere in the middle of thinking how pleasant and peaceful the whole thing was I fell asleep.

Back at site teaching is still going fairly smoothly. The irony of me teaching grammar does not escape me. A lot of times I’ll be reading my various textbooks on teaching grammar to ESL students and I’ll have these “oh that’s why we do that” moments. A lot of times though, English just doesn’t make sense.

Next semester I’m going to be teaching literature, which I am really excited about. Granted, we don’t actually have the required books (Smoldering Charcoal, Searching for a Rain God, and Romeo and Juliet) so I’m not entirely sure how the students are going to read anything, but we’ll figure it out.

One of the most interesting aspects for me comes not from the students but from the fact that, since we are ridiculously short on teachers, half our staff is actually preachers moonlighting as teachers. They’re really curious about American lifestyle so we end up having very open conversations. Both sides are always very respectful of the other’s opinion, and so far they’ve been really good.

Malawians on the whole are very very religious (and not just superficially) and naturally it affects their outlook on life to a great extent. Sex before marriage, for example, is extremely taboo (of course it still happens. A lot). In talking to the teachers though, we figured out that both Malawians and Americans start having sex around the same age (17-20 although, yes, I know, exceptions on both sides) it’s just that in Malawi you are usually married at that point.

I’m also very open about my views on homosexuality – which are pretty contrary to this countries’ beliefs – but are totally accepted as legitimate views on my part. It’s strange. At first I thought there would be rampant anti-gay sentiments but more than that there’s just a huge misunderstanding of what homosexuality is.

I was talking with Edina over dinner one night (Second wife’s first born daughter, fully grown and with three kids of her own). I told her my parents had gone to Paris to spend Christmas with a friend of my mom’s.

She asked me if they stayed with him and his wife, to which I explained well no, not exactly since he is in fact gay and has a husband.

To this Edina nodded, and then said that in Malawi being gay is not accepted. I replied that I knew that, but I wasn’t going to hide my views. She thought this was good, and proceeded to say to tell me they were very open in her family because they had seen a lot of western movies. She then asked me when he had joined,

Naturally I responded with something to the effect of,

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Being gay,” she repeated. “When did he join?” (I should specify that this conversation was in English, so nothing was a translation error.)

I explained that being gay is something you are, not something you join.

“Oh,” she replied. “I thought you had to join.”

Of course, later on in the evening I accidentally asked her if she was a witch, so hey.

Edina’s husband died just two weeks ago. (I counted, and with his death only 6 of my 15 brothers and sisters still have both parents). Funerals in Malawi are all night affairs that occur in a person’s living room. They clear out all the furniture and spread a bamboo mat on the floor and a rotating line of members from the community come and console. It’s a strange mix of singing then wailing, singing then wailing. Even if you don’t know the person, if you live within a certain radius you are supposed to come. If you are family or a close friend you are supposed to stay all night, sleeping on the mat. Edina’s husband, however, lived in Mzimba, so after four hours she and the children boarded a matola and the crowd dispersed.

My birthday was the next weekend, and I was worried. The family had previously promised to have a celebration for me, but I figured it would probably be called off since the house was still officially in mourning (still is in fact) and outpourings of relatives were coming in from distant cities every few days to offer their condolences.

On Saturday I biked to Rumphi (the nearest town… ish thing) and met Alyssa and Tina there. We ate at a local restaurant and then Alyssa and I biked back to my site. Alyssa had made me a homemade card, and gave me three snickers bars, a jar of peanut butter and raisins as well as a Spanish book she had stolen from her library.

On Sunday morning we made French toast for breakfast and then baked a pumpkin cake… which we finished within a half an hour. We were so full we couldn’t move. Fortunately two hours later we were hungry again, which was good because the family invited us over for lunch. Both Angelina and Alinafe had made me extremely detailed and colorful cards with roses and hearts drawn outside and poems inside. Even my littler siblings had put together makeshift birthday cards. Temwa, the youngest one able to write made one that simply said, “Happy Berth Mag, my name Temwa, Goodby.” Which is pretty much the extent of his English. I was really touched.

Alyssa and I ate at second wife’s house with about half the family. They had cleared out the furniture so that everyone could fit on the floor. Since you eat with your fingers in Malawi someone passes around a basin of almost boiling water and you have to wash your hands in it. To not wash thoroughly is really impolite. I’ve gotten to the point where I barely grimace and can keep my hands in for almost three seconds!

We had nsima (the staple food, it’s made of corn. It’s a patty. It’s really not comparable to anything in the U.S.) ntchunga (beans, my favorite!) and an nkhuku (that would be chicken) that they had killed just for my birthday. Alyssa and I had brought the desert, a pumpkin pudding we had made but not tasted. We were really scared as it was spooned out, but it turned out well, thank God.

Alyssa and I had also made a makeshift piñata from part of a package covered with construction paper. We filled it with gum and mints and hung it from the mango tree out back with my shoelaces. The kids came out and we did the whole thing – gave them a stick, blindfolded them, had them turn three times – in the end Sylvester, Edina’s oldest, busted the piñata wide open and even the adults went diving for masweeties. The piñata’s top and bottom had fallen out, so we put the rest on Sylvester’s head and he wore it around all day like a crown. All in all, one of the best birthday’s I’ve ever had.

So in my last post I mentioned that probably my best accomplishment, emotionally, was learning to ride out the tough spots. I really can’t emphasize that enough, it’s not just learning to ride out the tough spots though, it’s really amazing how much simply understanding that time will pass here – good moments and bad alike – does to improve attitude.

During homestay we all were given monthly calendars, and we would cross the days off one by one. That’s because being in homestay was actually quite a lot like being in prison. As Tina, who was also living in my village, put it “just crossing off the days gives me a feeling of accomplishment.” Light at the end of the tunnel was how I initially thought of it. But then I realized that in depressing moments unfolding the calendar and seeing how many days I had crossed out actually made me feel a heck of a lot better than looking at how many I had left.

This is precisely why, when I moved into my house, one of the first things I did was place my Blueridge calendar right on my door so when things were dragging I could look back see how fast time really flies. And oh man does it ever. Just yesterday I was moving in, not yet teaching, wondering how I was ever going to get through the next two days not to mention the next two years and now suddenly it’s February and when did that happen?

Of course, if it’s February, that means Barack Obama is now our president! (And I know Barack Obama is a strange name, but it beats the pants off Bingu Mutharika). I actually got to see Obama sworn in. Meg’s (my sitemate) headmaster had us over so we could watch the innaguration on T.V. It still amazes me how much people in Malawi will bend over backwards to accommodate you. It doesn’t matter if they’re poor and barely have enough to live, they still have enough to share. Meg’s headmaster served us soda, tea cake, cookies, and a full meal with eggs (that’s a really big deal, they’re very expensive here, so serving guests eggs is a big statement in hospitality, second only to killing and serving a chicken which you do a) at Christmas b) when hosting visitors in celebration; for example, a wedding.) He even pulled out wine after Obama was sworn in.

It was really strange to watch because Obama and Biden’s oath was the same oath we had to take when we got sworn in as PCV’s. We kind of had a “yes we can” theme running through our group swearing in speech, so at the end of swearing us in Ambassador Bodie added “heck yes you can.” We really like him :) And he seems to really like us (PCVs as a whole) too, which is good, because he hosts the Thanksgiving and Fourth of July parties; and we’d really like it to stay that way.

I believe I’ve mentioned it before, but it is really quite incredible the degree to which food has become important to me here. It controls my attitude to an unbelievable extent. It’s not even a lack of chocolate or ice cream that gets to me the most (although that’s up there, believe me) but rather the lack of variety. My first two weeks at site with just rice and tomatoes, tomatoes and rice, I really felt like I just couldn’t do this. So I took a deep breath, and went grocery shopping in Mzuzu. I’m happy to report life has vastly improved. Oatmeal as well as peanut butter and jelly, some garam-marsala spices and cinnamon have completely revolutionized meals. The most exciting development on the food front by far though has been cheddar cheese. My family has a fridge, so I am actually able to have cheese at site. I cannot adequately explain the joy this brings me.

Other than day dreams of food, teaching is of course occupying most of my time. A lot of the problems I have here are problems I never anticipated back in the United States. For example, when it rains here (not uncommon) I actually have to stop talking, and teach just using sentences on the board because we have metal roofs and you can’t hear anything over the sound of pounding water.

While some things are vastly different though, some things are rapidly becoming universal. The other day I had to confiscate a cell phone because I caught a kid texting in class.

My biggest extracurricular concern right now is the library/lab. Made possible by a generous donation from the Zambian government of all things, our former hole in the ground is rapidly rising to great heights. Which is strange because our teacher’s house (needed a bit more urgently, seeing as how a new teacher, which we badly need, won’t come until it’s erected) has stalled about halfway up the door.

Right now I’m chiefly concerned with plotting how to get books, bookshelves, and lab supplies so that when the building is complete, there is actually something to put in it. Dad did some checking around at the American Libraries Association conference when he was there with mom, and it looks like there are a few organizations that donate books to Malawi, so he’s checking things out from that end, and pursuin a few leads from this end; hopefully something works out. I’ll keep updates coming. Bookshelves and lab supplies might also prove elusive. We have a carpenter in town, but strangely enough, he likes to be paid, and we’re not rolling in dough (cornflour, yes; dough, no.) Also, I’ve seen his bookshelves, they’re not exactly beauty-and-the-beast-library quality.

Even if we don’t get any books before the library is finished, it really is quite good we are getting a library in itself. Currently we are using the storeroom in back of the teachers’ office as a temporary library. When I started teaching it was laden with chairs and hardware. I stayed late one Friday to organize, and managed to clean it out pretty well. Midway through Mr. Kaperemera, who is probably the best teacher we have (and who also moved to Mzuzu at the end of Jan. reducing our number to five teachers for the whole school, augh!!!!!) came up to help out. I put him to work organizing the science books, and a few minutes in he turned to me and said, “Maybe you would like to organize the books in the closet too.” To which I naturally replied, “What closet?”

“The closet in the back of the form four classroom. The one full of books. You have never been told?”

As a matter of fact, I had not. Unfortunately, the closet was locked and we couldn’t find the keys.

“Maybe we could break in.” I joked.

“Do you have one of those all purpose knives?” he asked. Malawians have this problem of not being able to detect sarcasm.

“Not with me, no.” I said.

“We’ll use this.” He replied, and picked up a file from off the headmistresses’ desk because hey, what’s a school without a file?

After a few minutes of Mr. Kaperemera jiggling the file under the deadbolt, the door swung open. Inside were wall-to-wall books. There were some that were really cool and useful (like workbooks!) and some that were not (like the entire box of pocket sized psalms and proverbs.) Pocket-sized bibles would have been extraordinarily useful, considering bible knowledge is a standard class here, but having just the psalms and proverbs is like having a textbook with only chapters one and seven.

I didn’t do too much with the storeroom, because I was already pretty tired, but I plan to have it so that at least one copy of every textbook is in the library, with no more than fifteen on the shelves at any given time. My biggest goal right now is to introduce the concept of reading for fun. About ten kids checked out books on my first day on library duty, and I think all but one were textbooks so they could study over the weekend. Which is great… but there’s more to school than that. I actually stopped a form one (they barely speak English) from leaving with a book on constitutional law. He took out a collection of stories instead. I am so making these kids a reading list.

As for my Malawian family, life as a character in “Cheaper by the Dozen” is still working out pretty well. Occasionally I want to hit my little brothers over the head with a frying pan, but for the most part I love them, and love having them around. I have started reading to them regularly. My two-year old brother’s (I call him Trouble) favorite book is “The Song and Dance Man.”

A few days ago I was reading to my seven year old brother, Lusuwiro (Lusus), and he just started pointing to everything in the book while I would say its name in English. He learned “House” “chicken” “cat” and “dog.” The next day when I was playing “nose” with Trouble (you poke the other person’s nose and say nose) he poked my nose and said “chicken.” So I turned to Lusu and said, “Is this a chicken?” And pointed to my nose. “NO!” He yelled, and ran out of the house. He returned two minutes later holding a squacking chicken. “This is a chicken!” He said to me proudly.

So basically life=good. I really really really love this site. I still forget how beautiful it is and have to catch my breath sometimes when I see the mountains. It really reminds me of Maine here. This is a good thing, because it makes me feel really comfortable, but bad because occasionally I feel I should be able to just go downtown to the library, check out a few books, sit on the couch reading all day, and then take a dip in the lake. Also, I have a constant craving for blueberries. The other day Allysa asked me where I wanted to live when I got back to the States. I really couldn’t think of an answer and for the first time I realized that I can’t even conceive of living in America right now.

Mom keeps saving grad school information that looks interesting for me; which is nice. Right now I’m leaning towards some combined English/Spanish colonial comparative lit. thing (sort of an anthropological look at colonization through literature) but my current pipe dream is to retire somewhere in the northeast and open a bread and breakfast in an old New England farmhouse. I’m not sure about all the details, but I know I’ll serve all organic free-range food, have a huge library, a loom, and floorboards that creek. I haven’t yet decided whether I’ll use the hypothetical barn to raise goats (so that I can sell different goat cheeses to local markets of course) or convert it into a restaurant. I guess I have a bit of time to decide. And somewhere in the interim hopefully I’ll also figure out what I want to do before then. Meantime, I’m pretty content to be where I am right now.

Well, I didn’t expect to be updating for a while, but then I ran out of money. Completely. Had enough to travel, bas. Turns out the only ATM we can use is in Mzuzu, so anytime we run out of money we have to come back to the city. On the plus side, anytime we run out of money we have to come back to the city.

Before I start with this entry I should say that Jenn and Tim are both okay and have been released from the hospital, but Jenn will not be allowed back into Malawi because her spleen was removed. Stupid spleen. Of course we’re all extremely relieved they’re okay, but I’m really miffed she can’t come back. Ok, now onto our regularly scheduled blog.

I have a chicken. Her name is Henrietta. Actually, she belongs to my landlord so I have no earthly idea what her name is, but I figure if she is living in my dining room (she is) and has laid eggs in my house (she has) and will soon have a bunch of annoying squacking chicks getting under my feet (unfortunately) then I get to name her. Plus Malawians don’t seem to be big into naming things. Whereas you can hardly pass a spoon in front of my face without it acquiring a name, rank, and possibly complex back story, Malawians tend to call the cat “pussy” or “chona” (cat) the dog “soldier,” “police,” or “ncheve” (that would be dog) and even kids have a rotation of only about ten names (Hopeful, Blessing, Awesome). That combined with the fact that there are only about three different last names in the whole country makes being a teacher interesting. You could almost set up a comparative bingo card. “Really? You have three Gift Bandas in your class too? Great! Now all I need is someone with a Mercy Kandawiri.”

Of course, every now and then accidents of originality happen. For example; Boneface. (The parents were going for “Boniface” and somewhere in there tripped over an unfortunate spelling error.) The fact that “L” and “R” are completely interchangeable in all tribal languages here also leads to some great names. My favorite is Helbert, but Rucy and Frolence in my class also crack me up.

Back to the original subject, in addition to Henrietta I will also be getting a puppy. Meg, my sitemate, has a dog that just had puppies, and I get to pick. I got to hold them when they were only eight hours old. Very tiny, but not as cute as kittens. No worries on that front though, I met up with a VSO (British volunteer) last weekend who is leaving, and promised I would take on her cat when she goes. So between those three animals, the mouse in my cupboard, the birds living in my wall, and the new two year old always underfoot I’ve acquired quite the menagerie. I of course asked my landlord if owning a cat, puppy, and his twelve new chicks simultaneously would not perhaps be a conflict of interest, but he said no. Or maybe he’s just not counting his chickens before they hatch. (Sorry, I had to).

Other than that these past two weeks have probably been the hardest I’ve had since I got here. Comparatively, the magnatude of difficulty has not been nearly the same. Whereas when I first got here my emotions ran somewhere along the lines of “What am I doing here, why are all these people staring at me I wanna go home I wanna go home I wanna go home now!” the past two weeks my emotional narrative has more followed a trend of “Well jeez this is hard, I really want my mommy and some ice cream and a taco would be great..” I have yet to get used to how raw, emotionally, we are here.

After three months I thought I would have gotten tougher skin, but no. When I’m happy, I’m ridiculously happy, and from the littlest things. For example, I made guacamole the other day, and felt roughly the equivalent of having just climbed Everest. Any accomplishment, no matter how small, is a huge trail blazing triumph. On the flip side, sometimes you just trip into a pile of depression and are completely unable to figure out why. Perhaps my biggest accomplishment, emotionally, is not figuring out how to overcome these moments of depression, but realizing that if I just ride them out I’ll pass to another moment of blazing triumph, or at least one weird enough to distract me.

My biggest problem this past week was that although I was supposed to start teaching Monday, the government didn’t release the results of the standardized exams students need to pass to move up, so students had no idea which grade they were in.

So, instead of teaching I inventoried all the books we have back in the storeroom (we are in fact constructing a library, but it’s currently a hole in the ground). It is an eclectic collection to say the least. While we have, for example, 27 copies of Roget’s Thesaurus, 53 Liddy’s, five Canterbury Tales, and even an Introducion a Matematicas we lack your basic fun teenage reading – Goosebumps, Animorphs, Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, I would gladly trade our “Cultural Anthropology Throughout the 1900’s” for any of them.

I promised to go into the Malawian education system in more depth a while back, and now seems as good a time as any. Basically it’s a tier system. There are government funded schools, which are typically boarding schools. Private schools, and Community Day Secondary Schools (CDSS). Government funded schools and Private schools are amazing and their facilities leave me absolutely in awe. To get into one you need to a) test in and b) be able to afford it. If you miss either of those criteria you can go to a CDSS, which you still have to pay for, and which you still have to test into (it’s just a lower price, lower score sort of deal) and receives no funding at all from the government. To me the system seems completely designed to enforce the socio-economic divides already in place. Of course, I feel the same way about the U.S.’s system, even if it’s not as extreme as Malawi’s.

So, the CDSS’s typically lack materials, sometimes including desks. Mine, for example, doesn’t have doors. Perhaps the biggest drawback though, is a lack of good teachers. I’m lucky, my school has really dedicated teachers (although we are unbelievably understaffed). A lot of schools have teachers who show up drunk, or don’t show up at all. There’s really no incentive. The salary is abysmal, and you’re living at the corner of podunkville and that nice bush. Anytime I get too depressed about the CDSS’s though, I remember that they are really new, and a step up from what existed before –a rough correspondence program.

That said, I really love teaching in mine. I like my students a lot. At first they were completely baffled by me. They are used to just memorizing facts and spitting them back at you and they are insanely good at that. But when it comes to actually processing the information and applying it, not so much. The first time we played a game in school they were floored, but by the end of the week they started catching on, and the form 1’s (freshman) started laughing and enjoying themselves. The Form 3’s still seem a little unsure of how to take me, but it’s harder with them. They had Laura, another Peace Corps Volunteer, for two years. So I have to work really hard to challenge them, and to figure out exactly how much they know. I also think there’s the matter of “you’re white, and yet you teach different from Laura – does not compute” going on.

Other than teaching, food has been foremost on my mind. For the past two weeks I’ve been mostly eating rice, tomatoes, and onions -- the food available in my village. Evenutually I just stopped eating because I couldn’t stand to take another bite of rice. They say back in the middle ages starving sailors would actually die rather than eat hard tack. I can relate. Now that I’m in the city I’ve bought a bunch of pasta, flour, cheese and canned veggies. Hopefully that will help add some variety to my diet.

When I’m not teaching, eating, or hanging out with my family I’m reading. Mzuzu house has a ton of books, and we operate on a book exchange system, which is awesome. I read so much here, and everything I read I just want to read more. Typically I’ll be reading one non-fiction and one fiction at a time. In addition I’ve got some philosophical reads I brought along, basically amounting to a book on Budhist philosophy Suzy sent me, and “Dinosaurs at Easter” a collection of sermons by George Booth (he used to be a minister at my church, for those reading who are not of the rock spring community).

I think “Dinosaurs at Easter” helps me through the tough times the most. I realize Rev. Booth wasn’t writing with the intention that some day a girl in the middle of nowhere Malawi would be reading his sermons, but they are very applicable. I just really enjoy and admire his views on life, and how we should live. I also of course sneak in the occasional sordid romance novel. What can I say, they are comforting.

So overall, I’m still really happy here, and definitely still think coming here was the right decision. I remember in the beginning we all wrote down our reasons for being here and they struck me as being very selfish. Most of us put down things having to do with self-discovery, or getting to understand a different side of life. No one put down something to the equivalent of “make the world a better place.” Now, looking back, I think that’s actually really good, and may be the reason none of us have chosen to go home. I think you have to feel that just being here is enough. That just interacting with your neighbor, or getting a smile from your two year old brother or even being able to think about the world in a new light, is good enough. Because you are always going to wonder if you truly made a difference, or changed anything for the good, but if your only goal in being here was just that, to be here, well then, odds are you are doing okay.

Disclaimer: It’s been a pretty crazy past two weeks, most of it good, but with a few notable really bad incidents. I debated on whether or not to put them in the blog, but in the end I decided that I am doing this blog so that you guys can see what life here is like, not just to keep a running account of Margaret’s cheerful happy fun exotic adventures in Africa. That said, I’m still extremely happy here. I’ve been meeting great people, hanging out in beautiful places, eating wonderful food, and I’ve been completely healthy for three weeks straight. Go me!

My holiday adventures began Tuesday, the 22. Alyssa and I had agreed to meet in Mzuzu, and Jenn had said she would join us. I texted Alyssa as soon as I got up (5:30) with “Rock Mzuzu! Whoo!” and briefly wondered if the other two were as excited as I was. Fifteen minutes later I got a text from Jenn asking what time I planned to arrive in the city.

Travel out was smooth, with only one slightly problematic incident. It’s rainy season now, not throughout the whole country, but definitely at my site, which is pretty perpetually buried in clouds, and since I’m 45 min away from tarmac the roads are all mud. At one point going down a hill the car I was in fishtailed and spun around. We were going really slow the whole time though, so it was much more fun than scary. Even if we had skidded off the road, we were surrounded by fields, so there was nothing we could hit, and we were only going 25 miles an hour, maybe, so I wasn’t too worried about safety.

I got into Mzuzu at about ten o’clock, and immediately bought a jar of homemade peanut butter and homemade honey, unfolded myself on the hammock and began to eat them plain. It was pretty heavenly. Jenn and Alyssa rolled in a bit later, followed by Tina and Zeb, our group’s married couple. Three of the first year environment volunteers stuck around and we all had a really nice night, playing Christmas carols on some ipod speakers while cooking baked macaroni and cheese and chocolate chip cookies. Malawi has three transit houses for PCVs to stay in. Of the three, Mzuzu house has a reputation for being the most chill, and I have grown to love the nights small groups of us just hang out talking and cooking.

Jenn was planning to spend Christmas with some other people from our group up north, while Tina and Zeb wanted to return to site, while Alyssa and I were heading south to Senga bay. Alyssa and I hitched down to Lilongwe with a really great couple who had just moved back to Malawi from Botswana. They told us there education is free, and they feed the children lunch. Oh government funding. It would be so nice to have it. I hitched down to Senga bay with Tim-O, a volunteer from my group and the two of us picked up a ride within five minutes on a pickup truck that, conveniently enough, was transporting a couch. So we sat on a couch the entire way down.

We arrived in Senga bay Christmas Eve, and everyone was in a pretty strange mood. Here we were looking out over the lake in 80 degree weather while in the background radios blasted “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.” Senga bay was amazing, but there was no getting around the fact that it was Christmas Eve, and no matter how nice a beach we were at, we weren’t home.

For dinner Enrique Tim and I decided to go to another resort to eat. As we arrived Mom called, so I stepped away from the group to talk to her and Dad. When I returned I noticed Tim was gone, and asked Enrique where he was. Enrique told me a boy had drowned in the water a few hours earlier and people were now combing the water for the body, Tim had gone to help. Even though we were near a fishing village, most people don’t know how to swim and when his canoe had capsized the boy splashed around, but didn’t ever call for help. No one knew he was drowning until it was too late. Tim came out of the water after half an hour, the search having been called off; the village would just wait for the body to surface, which it did two days later.

Tim sat down next to me and when I asked him if he was okay he just sighed and said, “Merry Christmas.” I had a thought then, very acute, that this was one of those moments in life that you tell stories about later, under the heading “the worst Christmas Eve I ever had” and you end it with “but I got through it, and things got better after that.”

And that’s what happened. We ended up having a really good dinner, talking with some people from South Africa until almost eleven. On Friday half the group decided to go home, so the rest of us actually switched over to the other resort and hung out with the South Africans we had met.

At the resort Caitlin, Alyssa, Joce and I took a canoe and paddled it out to an island in the middle of a lake. We will now take a slight interlude for facts. Lake Malawi is known as the calendar lake because it is 365 kilometers long, 52 kilometers at its widest point, and fed by 12 major rivers. It is home to the largest amount of freshwater tropical fish, most notably cichlids (I think that’s what they’re called?). They’ve discovered over a thousand species of cichlids, but they discover a new species almost every time they look, because the species varies very easily, a separate type popping up once a generation. Basically every new habitat they find they speciate (biology people, is that the right word?) almost immediately. So Fred the cichlid will turn to his girlfriend and say “hey babe, I heard property in the lower portion of the water column over by some rocks was looking really good right about now, what do you say we settled down and start a family?” and bam, new type of cichlid.

So we took a canoe out to this island and spent the day jumping off rocks, having a picnic, swimming through crystal clear waters, and staring at bright purple, blue, and even zebra striped fish. Alyssa and I swam around the island, both of us freaking out on the backside. Me because I could see the bottom, and this for some reason still unfathomable to me shook me up, Alyssa because she thought she saw a baby crocodile. I maintain it was a monitor lizard. Because I saw it. And it was.

Alyssa, Caitlin, Garth (one of the South Africans) and I headed up to Nkhata bay, a beach in the north, Saturday. We got some nice hitches in the beginning, but ended up on an Axa bus, which stopped every two minutes and where I was riding on the headrests of the seats because all the seats and aisle space was taken up. Never. Ever. Again.

Nkhata bay more than made up for the trip. It reminded me of Maine. We stayed in a small lodge that stood on some rocks overlooking a small harbor in the lake. We had free snorkeling equiptment and canoes so we alternated playing in the water with reading in the lodge’s wicker furniture. They had ice cream floats. And good food. We had planned to only stay one day, but quickly opted for two. The second day we literally ran into Meagan, Terence, and Danny (the first two are education volunteers from our group, Danny is a year ahead) while we were walking to lunch. So all in all we had a really great group just hanging out.

Although I hate to admit it, part of the appeal of Nkhata to me was how touristy it was. The only Malawians there worked there, and there were hardly any Africans. It’s strange because most people come here craving a taste of the traditional. They want to see how the villagers live, are intrigued by their traditional ceremonies and foods. I live that. On vacation, all I wanted was to get away.

I was also trying very hard to live on a Peace Corps salary. Part of my intent on coming here is to see what it’s like to live on a fairly meager fixed income. After all, my villagers live on less. I didn’t manage it. I ended up having to borrow 20 dollars from Alyssa (which I have now paid back, since we just got paid). The problem is when push comes to shove, if I really want an ice cream float, I’m going to buy it. No matter how little money I have in my wallet, I know I have over 100 American dollars stored up in Lilongwe just in case, that I’m in a group that lends each other money like it really is just paper, and that if I was ever really in a bind I have connections in America, I can get bailed out. I will never get to a point where I eat nsima three meals a day for weeks on end because it’s dry season, and that’s all I have.

Fortunately for the money situation, Meagan and I managed win a free nights accomodation. We took out a native dugout canoe, which tip very easy, and managed to paddle it around a float and back, a feat only accomplished by seven couples in the past ten years. We’re pretty proud, and bragging to anyone who will listen.

The bad party: Halfway through our last day in Nkhata, Danny got a call from someone in the Peace Corps office telling him Jenn and Tim W. (another Tim in our group) had been in a car that flipped, and were now in South Africa in the hospital. He didn’t get any more information than that and we took off for Mzuzu pretty soon after; worried, depressed, and wanting information. It was pretty shocking that Jenn and Tim were in a hitch when they crashed. Experience has taught us that hitches are by far the safest way to travel. The pickups and minibuses that make up the public transportation system here are incredibly unsafe. The drivers drink and speed ridiculously, the vehicles are overcrowded, and you hear plenty of stories about huge accidents where pickups flip, killing over thirty people, or the sides just give way and people fall into the road. We’ve even heard stories where a minibus is rolling happily along and the floor just falls out.

In hitches, best case scenario is you are in a car with a seatbelt, worst case is you are in the back of a pickup where the driver is not drunk and probably not speeding. Additionally, if you feel uncomfortable about a potential hitch, you can just pass it up. We kept wondering what had happened to flip the car, was the driver drunk? Speeding? And how were Jenn and Tim?

It turns out that the whole thing was actually a pretty freak accident. The car was speeding (not surprising) when a tire blew. Tim was wearing a seat belt, so he’s okay although with a pretty severe concusion. Jenn was not wearing a seatbelt (sometimes seats have them, sometimes they don’t) so she’s pretty beaten up, but stable last we heard. We’re all very relieved and keeping daily internet tabs, hoping for a speedy recovery. Happy New Years everyone, and Happy Birthday Ri-Ri!!!! I return to site tomorrow, where I will start teaching, should be back online in February.

So I am now officially a sworn in PCV. Swearing in was really cool, I would like to put up a copy of our speach and the oath we had to take, but I have to get ahold of them first. Our speach had kind of a "yes we can" theme, and so when we took our oath ambassador Bodie added on to the end of it "you bet you can." It was really sweet. We really like him, and he seems very fond of us.

Then we all set off for site. I love my site. When I say I have one of the most gorgeous sites in Malawi I am not bragging and I am not exaggerating. I live right outside of one of the chief tourist attractions here, the Nyika plateau, smack in the middle of cloud capped mountains. I am replacing a married couple, Pace and Laura, so Peace Corps volunteers know where I live and they always say “god your site is gorgeous.” Or one time, “Well, we know you’re not going to ET.” (Go home early). Unfortunately I’m 45 minutes off the main road, and that’s in a good car in good whether.

I’m living with a polygamous family, which, if you had asked me two years ago what I thought I would be doing after college, is probably not the answer I would have given. But, despite the fact that I get a lot of jokes from volunteers asking which number wife I am, I really like it. There are a lot of things that bother me about the way women are treated in this country that I really can’t stand. But this isn’t one of them. The wives (there used to be four, but two died) all get along very well. They are treated well by their husband, which is unfortunately rare up here, and the children are given very free reign. They are all in school, and the girls occasionally wear pants, which is a HUGE deal here. It was illegal just fifteen years ago. Because I live in the middle of a family compound (my house actually belongs to the village headman) I feel really safe at night, and know my house is watched when I’m not there. There are always children around, and they are really well behaved and fun. I love them all, especially the baby, Patrick. Not only does he not cry when he sees me, but he is one of the most smiley babies I have ever seen in my life. He loves playing peek-a-boo, loves it when I beep his nose, and thinks being tossed in the air is the best game ever.

Patrick's father died earlier this year of Malaria. It’s very possible he was HIV positive and that contributed, but I don’t know and it’s not something I will ever ask. I’m pretty good friends with Patrick’s mother, she showed me pictures of her husband. It’s very strange to see pictures of someone young and handsome, and realize they are gone. But that happens a lot here. The average life span in Malawi is 40. You learn pretty quickly that it’s not that most people live to 40. There are plenty of older people here. It’s just that a lot more people die a lot younger of pretty sudden things, Malaria, Meningitis, even Tuberculosis (although that last one might as well be AIDS). I remember at the beginning I thought that Malawians were much more adjusted to death, and then when my language trainer was writing the date on the board one day she remarked, “ah, and we buried my mother seven years ago today.” I don’t think anyone ever really adjusts to death. We deal with it because we have to because it’s part of the human experience, but we never really adjust. Anyways, onto more cheerful things.

Biking. I have an awesome 21 speed bike, it is red and silver and I have named him Henry. The plus side of being far away from the highway is you can just hop on a bike and go. And I do. First day I just started biking and was having a great time. The scenery was amazing, I was chatting with people, and at some point a group of women asked me if I was going to Livingstonia. I said I thought it was far and they replied, “no, no pafupi. Like five kilometers.” So I figured I might as well bike there. I forget about the Malawian concept of distance. An hour later it was still five kilometers away, and I turned back because we are not allowed to bike after six o’clock at night. As previously stated, I live in the mountains. This does not make for easy biking. An hour into my ride back I was staying on the bike until I got too tired to peddle, walking until I was too tired to do that, and remounting. I stopped at a small roadside shop and collapsed against the side. I was too tired to even stand up, so I just held my hand up to the counter with the appropriate amount of money and had them hand the food down. I ended up chugging down six bananas, a can of fruit juice, and a packet of cookies. I finally made it home, and was too tired to cook dinner (I have to cook everything over a fire I make myself) but the family saw that I wasn’t eating and so made me come over for dinner.

That weekend I decided to go to a Christmas party I had heard was going on in Karonga. I had heard about it from Tim (an environment volunteer) who told me the whole thing was being organized by Jim. So I called Jim. Jim said just show up at the house of this girl named Sabrina in Chitimba. Well okay. So the next day at 6:30 I hopped on the back of a pickup heading out of my village and headed up to Chitimba. It was really nice after three months of being carted to and fro, always being told where to go, what to do, when to be there, to be moving on my own. I talked with the people in the back in Chitumbuka, trying to practice my language skills. It was very difficult to understand, but anytime I messed up they just slowed down, or laughed and thought my bungling attempts at language were really cute.

The ride up to Chitimba was probably the most beautiful I have ever taken in Malawi. We rode up through mountains that seemed covered in tropical forests, and I saw these flocks of tiny brightly colored birds – red, blue, and yellow – almost everywhere I turned. At the top the mountains parted, and spread out before me was lake Malawi. At first I thought it was clouds, it was that expansive. It had tendrils of mist rising off the surface meeting with clouds and these huge brown columns I later found were bugs. There was sunlight falling in shafts through the trees and it was absolutely gorgeous, like something out of a movie. Everyone on the motola was laughing at me because I was just gaping.

I got off at the road block, and almost as soon as I had alighted a woman selling mangoes on the side of the road asked me “Mukuwona Sabrina?” Why yes, I am looking for Sabrina. So they just kept pointing me along until finally I came to a row of houses. I went up to a group of men playing bowa (marble game) nearby and asked which house was hers. They responded “Apo.” (Over there). So I pointed to all the houses, one by one, it was like playing warmer colder. They made different sounds as I pointed to each house, it sounded kind of like “eh, eh, AHHH, eh.” All of the languages in Malawi are very tonal. They don’t actually have a word for dissaproval, there’s just this sound “Eh-AH” and it is universal across all the around 2 billion languages they speak here.

So I show up on Sabrina’s doorstep – literally – and without even blinking she says, “oh, you must be Margaret, let’s take you up to see Jenn." Jenn is in the group I came over with, and has a house on the lake in Chitimba, I had sent her a text the night before saying I was coming over. If she had actually received that text she would have been much less surprised to see me when I showed up at her house.

So the two of us hung out at the lake all day, which was really nice. You can see the mountains of Tanzania across the way, and the lake is really clear. It’s always suprising to me to have this body of water that seems like an ocean and then to be able to duck under water and open your eyes. I hadn’t brought a bathing suit, but I just jumped in fully clothed, even though everyone around us was swimming naked. Small cultural steps. It was a very strange feeling to be swimming around in what was essentially a tropical paradise. I was doing flips and handstands and just enjoying being in the water again. At some point I remarked to Jenn that this wasn’t exactly the life of self-sacrifice I had pictured when I thought of the peace corps. But that’s how it is. You sacrifice a lot day to day, so you live it up when you can.

We got a nice hitch up to Chilumba, where the party was happening. It was hosted by a British couple. I was so tired I fell asleep on the guy next to me. When we got to the house I was immediately hugged by a woman in reindeer antlers. There was soda and chips laid out, and a group of PCVs rolled in right after we arrived, having biked to the house, some from as far as 60k away. There were nine of us in total, and the x-pats had arranged several party games for us, including a race on wooden skis in pair and a three-legged race. They had Christmas carols playing and a Christmas tree and a house that was decorated in a manner that gave us a glimpse of what we could do if we actually earned a salary. Their house overlooked the lake, and they had a tree chock-full of these yellow bird that build hanging straw nests.

Dinner was turkey, grilled veggies, stuffing and cranberry sauce. There was white and red wine, and I actually had half a glass. I was feeling all proud of myself for finishing it and actually enjoying it when our host, Don, refilled my glass. So I leaned over to the guy sitting next to me and told him to switch our glasses when he finished his wine. Still not that big into alcohol. Then for desert we pulled open Christmas crackers, had a flaming Christmas pudding and each of us received a present and recycled paper stationary home-made out of elephant dung. I had M&Ms for breakfast. My stomach did not thank me, but the rest of me did. I ended up spending another night at Jenn’s house, because getting transport back to my site on Sunday is really difficult, and it was really nice to just have time to sit and talk.

Returning to site was really nice. It was great to see “my” family again, to talk with people in the village. I basically spent the whole week hanging out on my porch, writing Christmas cards, playing host to the various children that like to hang with me and making sure I got into the main market at least once a day to buy tomatoes, greens, onions, eggs and, more importantly play bowa and draft (a game like checkers) at the local hang-outs.

One night I went over to the store next door to my house, which has a DVD player and TV and watched old music videos with a lot of men from the community. The music videos floored me. I suddenly understood why Malawians have such a skewed view of America. Sean Paul doesn’t exactly highlight homelessness in his songs. Even so, I was shocked when I saw a panorama view of Miami in one shot. It seemed so extravagant, like some fairy tale land, and I know that I’ve been on the very highway that was being filmed. It just seemed unreal to me. It’s crazy to think that after just three months my home seems like something you would dream up.

Hi guys,

Alright, I'm not that into blogs, but I figured it would be easier to set up a blog than just to e-mail everyone a massive e-mail to keep you updated. I'm still going to be writing e-mails/letters/texting as much as I can, but I know that people will probably want general information on how things are going, and this is an easy way to make sure everyone who wants information on how I'm doing has it. If we didn't have that urge, facebook probably wouldn't exist anymore. Oh, also, this blog will be bilingual. I know most people reading this are too, but I need to practice my Spanish while I'm gone, and this helps. Please excuse my grammar.

So here's my general info and timeline right now. Currently I'm in Charlottesville Virginia working part time as a Sports Reporter for the local paper, and part time as a Raspberry picker for a local farm. The latter job pays more. I leave Charlottesville on the 19th, and I will be home for a week before I head up to Philadelphia for staging. Staging is basically a two day crash course into what to expect when going to Africa, and also a good way to get to know the group in a more relaxed setting.

Our plane leaves for Africa on the 28th. It arrives in Cape Town, South Africa on the 29th. We then fly out the next afternoon for the capital of Malawi, Lilongwe. Before I begin Peace Corps service I have two months worth of training in Dezda, Malawi, which is an hour outside of Lilongwe.

I'm really psyched about going to Malawi. The country looks beautiful, has a giant lake (yes!) also giant spiders (eep) and is known for being extremely friendly. It's a very small country to the southeast of Africa between Tanzania (great Safaris) Mozambique (for everyone who speaks Portuguese) and Zambia and Zimbabwi (hi Victoria falls!!). Although English is the official language, most people speak Chichewa, a tribal language. I've been listening to language sessions online that are provided by the Peace Corps, and so far, I've mastered "hello" (Moni). After that things get waaay complicated.

Well, this is getting longer than I wanted too, so I'll sign off with just one more thing, which is my address until December 9:

Margaret Sessa-Hawkins, PCV

PEACE CORPS/MALAWI

BOX 208

LILONGWE, MALAWI