To Malawi: For rain storms on tin roofs that leave one deaf. For sima patties that fill me like I’ve never been filled. For friends in the village and in Peace Corps that I love more than I thought I ever could. For establishing a heartfelt appreciation in me for beers that are cold. For [...]
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Two years and two months is a long time to know that one of the core differences you made was inspiring just one person. Maybe not just inspiring, but the one person you sustainably inspired. Empowering them with inspiration that will actually last, or inspiration you think will last. As much as everyone says that [...]
Two years and two months is a long time to know that one of the core differences you made was inspiring just one person. Maybe not just inspiring, but the one person you sustainably inspired. Empowering them with inspiration that will actually last, or inspiration you think will last. As much as everyone says that [...]
Over the past three months or maybe four or five, six? I have lost my concept of time, various water bottles, small sums of money, my temper, my hope in my projects, my headlamp, all of my other flashlights, sometimes my hope in Malawi, I have puked off my back porch while the man I [...]
The black shoelaces tied his hand together making an odd composition of Malawian man in blue fleece, hands tied with fairly weak black string. Seeming more upset than sulky and more sulky than angry, he sat on a rock just outside the juniper forest looking down at his roped hands. We sat looking at him [...]
the goats have eaten my papaya trees. and I smell the dust coming in my window. shifted, lifted, by that truck passing by. I make make-shift leaves from incense smoke. they fade. But good news I won’t inhale their smoke. as inside and outside is dry season debris I lay dust still. someone will play [...]
In Malawi, when women are pregnant they tie the 2 meters of cloth they usually wear around their waist, right above their belly. For the first month or so I suppose it hides their burgeoning belly, but soon their overly patterned and bright cloth seems to just promote the fact that a small Malawian is [...]
I admit that constructing a sermon last minute is not perhaps the best of plans. Googling bible passages, writing in a trading center where the electricity flickers after a hard day of being active for 5 hours, staying late where electricity at least flickers, and having to take a bicycle taxi in the dark over [...]
My sister Eliza is trying to get to Malawi by raising money though kick starter by doing a project on looking at agriculture in both Malawi and Massachusetts through painting. More info at the link! Many Thanks, Yewo Chomene. Tawonga. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/481593819/sustenance-considering-agriculture-through-paint
Yesterday was the grand opening of the Rocket Tea Room. A Tea Room established with the goal of empowering women through environmentally conscious business. I hope that it will become a sustainable business, a place of creative baking and experimentation, a hub for environmental workshops and panels, and a Tea Room that though will probably [...]
Someone recently asked me how I had grown in my service so far. A tough question. Recently, I was robbed for the fourth time and it came to my attention that the last two times it has been completely my fault. For the past couple of months I have been running sort of an impromptu [...]
The school my sitemate taught at is right near a baobab tree, a tree native to Malawi, usually huge and really old with thick yet delicate branches and a crazy collection of roots. For her village farewell her community organized a ceremony right under it. As is typical for Malawian ceremonies it was excruciatingly long [...]
Most of you I am assuming are aware of the Run DMC song “She be Illin.” I would like to take this time to introduce a different version of this popular rap song composed by one of my relatives, Steven Beling. I find the subject matter to be quite compelling and relevant, and therefore feel [...]
The truck went over a bounce, enough to motivate a move from the edge seat to the floor. With a slip of pride the side seat is given up. Losing pride that comes with balancing oneself over bumps and inconsistent speed on a precarious truck ledge. Slipped down to rip at sugar cane cut into [...]
The behinds of 15 Malawian women covered in various chitenges moved with quite the force as I tried to back up in my chair from the encroaching dancers. I couldn’t help smiling at so much ass shaking in the front of a church on Palm Sunday no less. I was seated in a wooden chair [...]
As a coping mechanism to convince myself that someday I will come out of this experience having done something fruitful, I imagine myself on an Alumna panel at Wellesley College. I don’t think I have ever witnessed a non-impressive alumna so by just imagining myself on such a panel I am in a daydream where [...]
Since I just finished a bunch of ‘serious’ books along spiritual and academic lines, I decided that I could take a break and read the sequel to ‘Bridget Jones Diary,’ ‘Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.’ Both tales of Bridget Jones are formed in diary format with each entry beginning with her own evaluation of [...]
The rock group the Eels, sing a song that is one of those songs I could put on repeat forever. It was played for me at a friend’s house who lives north of me legitimately in the middle of nowhere. To get to his site from mine I first bicycle to my trading center (15 [...]
Hitching often has an epic component. But similar to many things, other hitch hiking adventures are more epic than others. This one began with a lot of waiting and frustration as USAID vehicles and UNDP SUV’s passed us by. One might think that a. vehicles funded and purchased by the United States government would consider [...]
She stood up too fast. Too impatiently she waited for the head rush and nausea to leave. She paced softly on the smoothed cement floor and punched the wall. Unsuccessfully. Or I guess just unsatisfactorily and not dramatically at all. Pieces of white paint and wall fell to the floor and she wrung her wrist, [...]
Tiwonge used to wash my floors and clothes and sometimes water my garden before it disappeared into shriveled brownness. For these tasks I paid for her school fees so that she could attend secondary school. I like Tiwonge, she’s feisty and smart though sometimes careless and uncaring but she pulls it off with also being [...]
It’s becoming a tradition to start off travels with passport drama. In order to go from Malawi to Tanzania, one does indeed require a passport. But that happened after Christmas when possibilities of Zanzibar started. A Christmas morning that included activities in a place that if someone told me I would be when I was [...]
In Lieu of presents as I am faraway and relatively penniless, or kwatchaless, I have written a blog entry devoted entirely to my family. Enjoy, and I know not everyone has my blog address and I don’t have everyone’s e-mail, so please pass it on to other family members and many happy holidays to all [...]
Littering the burnt mountainsides of Nyika, stand countless piles of sliced tree. In the 1970’s or maybe the 60’s a huge pine forest was planted in Nyika National Park. The pines, though not native to Malawi, have reached unbelievable heights and create this surreal piece of forest. As I am always telling anyone who happens [...]
I just finished reading the book “My Year of Meats,” by Ruth L. Ozeki. In it, the main characters inspired by the Japanese author, Sei Shōnagon, make all of these lists that pertain to their lives. Also inspired by lists, as a list maker myself, I have created some lists with headings from the main [...]
I spoke at a wedding this past weekend and I thought I would post the reading: enjoy! I often talk about finding home. Finding, constructing, building, creating, missing, needing, lacking, a home. In looking for home, I have found that it’s not about building with brick and stone but with love and trust. I want [...]
Women at the backside of the house pound corn, making solid corn pieces into powder with a frightening strength of arm. Diagonally back from them, more women sit on the ground surrounded by pink and orange flowers, branches, and leaves that they weave into funereal crowns. To complete the circle around the house compound are [...]
A middle school girl recently went door-to-door in her New England neighborhood selling homemade greeting cards. She is donating the money she collected from her neighbors to the women’s empowerment and environment center I hope to build. The girl goes to school where my mom teaches Latin as well as what her daughter is up [...]
Outside my door a collection of children harshly rap at a mango tree with a long pole. The tree whackers have to shield their heads as they go in to retrieve the green rounds out of the dust. I love how things so gently collide around my house. Mango trees to me are exotic, a [...]
Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. In fact I have never missed a Halloween. When I was around 9, I was very close to puking so I only trick-or-treated for a brief time, but I wore my princess Jasmine outfit and still managed to make it to a couple of houses. When [...]
When I ran meetings at college, I of course was the first one there, actually often not, but my somewhat frequent tardiness is not the point. Whenever I did (as the one running the meeting) manage to get there first, I often would get this feeling, this mixture of antsyness, anxiety, and dread. I cared [...]
Clothes cram up against clothes, up against walls, and people cram up against walls, and stalls, with stalls cramming up against stalls, and baskets, bags, and babies fill in the spaces between. After a venture past baskets, bags, and babies, and a careful avoidance of mysterious most likely toxic puddles, one may happen upon the [...]
In between the events of meals and workshops at the Peace Corps training center in Dedza, and engaging in activities such as accidentally tearing my dress open in front of many amused Peace Corps volunteers and embarrassed Malawians, one of my fellow volunteers started talking about the hopelessness of how often people’s reaction to beauty [...]
I came back to the states with a deep want for McDonald’s. I hadn’t had McDonald’s for roughly eleven years boycotting their history of unsustainable, unhealthy food and their often general evil capitalistic ways (note: I do happen to know someone who works for McDonald’s and fights the evil ways from the inside as well [...]
Going back’s always hard. Going back to something familiar that will have inevitably changed, yet still has that familiar tint, sometimes goes well with the changes and sometimes throws you off balance. But usually when thrown off balance, there’s a chance at gaining better balance and more importantly knowing how to reel it in and [...]
In the future I hope to complete my women’s enviroment center and attach to it a rocket tea cafe. While this center will hopefully make room for and inspire justice and sustainable environmental change, I also hope for it to be economically promising in a environmental way. At the center different types of stoves will [...]
When I began kindergarten my front teeth were missing and my two sharp incisors framed the vacant space at the front of my mouth. I entered kindergarten looking like a curly headed vampire. This past Thanksgiving I decided to end my days of vegetarianism as my vampire teeth seemed to be consistently longing to rip [...]
Papayas often look like dinosaur eggs. Which made me weary when a neighbor gave me one as a gift. I didn’t know it was a papaya, I just knew it came from a tree and was larger than my head, reinforcing the likelihood of its possible prehistoric origins. It wasn’t, however, it was a papaya [...]
The concept of fate is probably not the best to turn over in your mind late at night when no one but your cats stand to interrupt you and your persistent thoughts. It’s easy to get caught in destiny circles or fate cycles where one seems to lose both grounding and control. Fate is a [...]
I have always been an avid letter writer. From an early age I scotched taped trinkets to letters to friends who moved to Kentucky and included dramatic illustrations of whales dying from oil spills to letters addressed to President Clinton. There is something comforting about sending letters off, a comfort coupled with the hope that [...]
It’s difficult when people want your approval and help on something you know very little about. I have been approached by community members who will first offer their thanks for my volunteer efforts, then launch into how Malawians need the help of white people and how white people can help move Malawi forward. Clearly this [...]
Of course there is always a lot lost in translation, but I have to say I wasn’t expecting a full identity shift, as some of my identity has become lost in translation. I have been working with a chief in Kawaza who is amazingly organized and connected. He always arrives when he says he is [...]
I was talking on the phone the other day to my sister Eliza. Eliza is a painter who just recently got back from studying art in Iceland to graduate from Wellesley and start her new job as an artist assistant to two artists. While on the phone, Eliza was telling me how a woman had [...]
The same boredom that caused me to shave off all my curls now has compelled me to sit on a woman’s porch for roughly 8 hrs. while she sewed extensions into my hair. I now have a head of fake hair in the form of tiny braids that have this tasteful way of fading from [...]
So there is now a paypal account set up located on the side of this blog for people to donate to the woman’s community center I am going to build. Many projects started in my community seem to fail because of lack of space to fully work through the quirks of things like mushroom farms, [...]
Today I woke up after a night of torrential rain. The rain was so hard at times I thought maybe I was just dreaming or having an anxiety attack because the rain on my tin roof was so impressively loud. The rainy season is over which reinforced the apocalyptic feeling I had when I woke [...]
Today I was talking with someone about how in their opinion the Peace Corps ended up being more beneficial to the volunteer as opposed to the community or to development as a whole. From my observations as a volunteer in Malawi, this point makes sense.Volunters first off only come for two years and often seem [...]
I first heard the rapper K’NAAN when visiting my friend in New Mexico. Driving to the school she taught at we listened to raps on Somalia while barren and beautiful stretches of New Mexican desert went by. I often put K’NAAN on my headphones when cycling into town or to the next village and the [...]
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