Good times in Malawi: October 2009

I’ve always found the idea of blogging intolerable, a form of masturbatory exhibitionism that seemed to embody much of what is wrong in the world. And yet given my present circumstances I see how such a thing could be useful. In writing home I often end up writing the same basic information several times over so here goes my very first blog. For those of you who are interested……
So going back to the being it was a hell of a trip here. After the emotional clusterfuck of saying goodbye I boarded the plane prepared to ponder weighty thoughts maybe shed a few more quiet tears while watching Portland disappear. Instead we sat at the gate for an hour as the plane was experiencing “problems” which were ultimately resolved by turning the plane off and then back on. It was a strange and anticlimactic experience but amusing in its own right. It was also foreshadowing for the flight out of DC which was delayed a mighty four hours. Three of those hours were after boarding, long pain staking hours but I now know I can survive any flight. We spent one night in Johannesburg which some of the volunteers refer to as Joburg a word that makes my skin crawl and I’m pretty sure I die a little bit inside every time I hear it. There’s a girl in my group who spent some time in South Africa and she talks about Joburg at great length, that and Swahili. I’m sure she’s a nice enough girl but there’s only so many times you can hear Joburg and Swahili in any given day. I digress…
I wish I possessed some sort of talent with the written word so that I could properly describe my experiences here but alas one can only be blessed with so many talents. My first impressions of the continent… When we flew in to Dakar I remember thinking red, it was a strikingly red place and there’s a smell. One of the girls in the group said Africa smells spicy and as ridiculous as that sounds, there’s some truth to it. I don’t smell it anymore but there is a particular, maybe spicy smell here. Really I’m pretty sure what it is a continent of people who don’t have electricity and therefore use fire for all activities of daily living, producing a distinctive smell to the unaccustomed nose.
As we were taxing in I looked out the window and noted a large group of people at the airport, a loud screaming group of people. Oh the moment of realization that, that was our group of screaming people, I spotted a Peace Corps welcome banner. It was a touch overwhelming. There were maybe twenty volunteers who came to great us, I’ve since learned most of them come to assess the attractiveness of the incoming group and to have a trip into the city without using vacation days. The country director and other members of staff were there to greet us and help us through customs. We made it through, got our luggage, and had the first of what would be numerous introductions and group photos then we loaded into a large van and set off for the Dedza College of forestry and wildlife where we would stay for the first week of training.
I won’t lie Lilongwe is an ugly place even now having been here awhile I still think its pretty ugly although not some much so as the first time I saw it but once you get out of the city you get a better sense of what the country looks like…. Dedza, although deforested is still a very beautiful, I hesitate to call it mountainous but I suppose it could be described as such. Dedza’s at a higher elevation and thus its actually a pretty cold place, the thermals I brought with me were no doubt one of the best investments I made. Towards the end of homestay it got real cold, cold enough that miss naked sleeper here, took to going to bed in thermals top and bottom, pajama pants, leg warmers, two pairs wool socks, and a fleece while sleeping under a wool type blanket and in a sleeping bag, it was good times.
There’s much that could be said about training but I’ll try to be concise. It was an eight week program. Week one was orientation and spent at the College in Dedza at the college. We were split into two groups, there are twenty of us in total, twelve people went to Chapitali village for four weeks of home stay and the remaining eight, my group went to Sila Village. The two villages were about a ten minute walk apart but most of our time during homestay was spent in class, so as a rule most of ones time was spent with the groups from the village you were placed in. A typical day during training was language from 8 to 9:30 technical training from 10-11:30 then lunch till one then language from 1 to 2:30 and technical again from 3 to 5. Training is busy time which can be taxing but it served the purpose of warding off homesickness and the like and of course there’s language. Oh language.
There are numerous languages spoken in Malawi. The village we stayed in was a Chewa speaking village, Chewa (and English) is the national language of Malawi thus the education system uses Chichewa and at the secondary school level English so most everyone here speaks passable Chewa. As I was going to be sent to a site that speaks a different language, Chitonga, I spent my time in language class learning a different language from what was spoken in my homestay village. This was a source of much frustration as I wasn’t able to see the fruits of my labor in language class as no one in Sila spoke Tonga…. For those of you who know me and my unnatural relationship with food you may appreciate this story. Tonga and I got off to a rough start, I was finding it incredibly difficult to be learning Tonga as what I really wanted to be able to do was to communicate with the people around me and Tonga got me nowhere in that regard and the first week we were all learning the basics of Chewa. Although Tonga and Chewa share many similarities the differences are enough that it can be confusing as shit, so anyhoo the first oh two weeks of Tonga were tough times indeed but….I distinctly remember the day that Tonga started to make sense, when I had a language awakening if you will. And what day was that, food day, I truly believe that my love of food pushed me over the hump and into the realm of some form of communication. From that point on I spent a lot of time talking about mbuzi (goat) and how much I dislike it. Ndiyanja mbuzi cha, mbuzi fungu, mbuzi cha ( I don’t like goat, goat stinks, goat no) these were things I managed to work into daily conversation. Thankfully my language trainer Beatrice, who we called Ama, the Tonga equivalent of Amayi, also disliked mbuzi so she encouraged my goat rants.
After four weeks of homestay where we were supposed to gain cultural competency, language immersion, and technical skills we went for a week of language intensive training. Language intensive is predominantly for the minority language speakers like yours truly who weren’t able to get immersion during homestay. Of the group of twenty, three of us were learning Tonga and four people were learning Timbuka so we went north. The Tonga group got the privilege of going to Nkhata Bay for language intensive which was pretty nice…. I digress into the minutia of life here. I’m writing retrospectively, currently I’ve been at my site as an “official” Peace Corps volunteer for three weeks and I’ve just now gotten around to attempting to write about my experiences here, so you’ll have to bear with me. After language intensive we were sent to our sites for a little under a week for site visit, then it was back to Dedza for wrap up and swear in.
Training was an interesting time, being thrown into a group of twenty strangers, many of whom are ever so young and fresh faced, under stressful circumstances tests the patience of the best of us. At times I had homicidal thoughts but as a rule it really wasn’t that bad by the end I came to appreciate the other trainees. I won’t go into the whole shared culture thing as it nauseates me a bit to even entertain the thought of bonding over Americaness but I will say anyone that you can chat with about who crapped themselves first, I assure you it will happen to us all at some point (just for some of us sooner rather than later), its kind of right of passage in Peace Corps, is a person with whom you share a bond of sorts with.
I enjoyed homestay, the family I stayed with the Banda family were very nice people. I spent a lot of time in the kitcheni with my amayi just sitting in sweet sweet comfortable silence watching her cook or assisting, and by assisting what I really mean is getting in her way. Bless her heart she was ever so patient with my inability to perform what to her were the simplest of tasks and my abysmal Chewa. I must say Malawians and my amayi in particular have a real flare for English. For example amayi would often say “it has become damaged” say if food was dropped on the ground or clothing fell off the line, then of course theres the ever popular “its too much” used kind of as an exclamative. There was one day a bunch of the amayis myself and another trainee played a game of net ball (sans net, think a group game of keep away) at the end of which my amayi says to me “I love it too much”. Or in talking me down from my spider phobia “fear not this one”. Spiders or tandaudi in Tonga are a story in and of themselves. Oh so large, unnaturally large, I could write at some length about spiders and my interactions with the foul beasts but I’ll leave that for a later date, I’m not sure my nerves are up to it this late in the evening. Back to homestay, we were immensely pampered during homestay, although we were without electricity or running water, we had someone bringing us water, heating our bath water, cooking. I can’t say I ever felt completely comfortable with the experience. I came to Malawi in hopes of figuring out how to be an efficient development worker, to find a way towards reducing global health disparities, but to be this American, this privileged person, who can go home and turn the water on in multiple rooms in a house not made of dirt, to know that’s the reality of the situation and to watch someone haul water for you is disconcerting. I know my homestay family liked me and I very much enjoyed them, I’m glad I had the opportunity to stay with them I just often found myself asking what have you done for them, other than to be a tourist in their lives. I’m sure this is the sort of thing I will ponder for much of my time here but hopefully as time goes on I’ll gain greater competency in creating programs that have a positive impact on the lives of the people here.
If you’re still reading then I salute you. Sadly there’s so much more rambling that could take place about my first two months here but as I’m kind of a lazy person by nature with a short attention span, I’m opting to move to the present, as you can only imagine how much I have to say about things that are fresh in my mind. I’m actually going to put down the computer for the evening before I get into a description of Dwanbazi and my most entertaining comings and goings here but I think I’ll first throw out some pearls of wisdom….. Things I have learned:
-not all pit latrines are equal. Pit latrines have a bad name but really a good pit latrine is superior to many forms of indoor plumbing here and there is immense variation between chims. My latrine (chimbudzi/chim) is actually quite luxurious, concrete floor, sanitation platform (basically a well fitted cover for the hole), and a door. That having been said when darkness falls pissing in a bucket has never looked so good. During site visit I discovered there was a bat living in the pit of my latrine. I’m not afraid of bats but I can’t quite convey how horrifying it is to have this swiftly flying creature what seems like inches away from ones exposed genitals. Thankfully I believe the bat has died ( I haven’t seen it in some time) but still, what I learned from this experience is that a pee bucket is a beautiful thing, as an additional bonus the contents of said bucket turn into fertilizer for my plants, I know I am the epitome of sustainable, its magical isn’t it.
-mosquito nets are next to godliness. Dwambazi is ground zero for malaria, really hot and very close to the lake and a river. Anytime of the year there’s a fairish few mosquitoes and it is sweet relief to sleep under a net but a mosquito net is about so much more than mosquitoes. I mentioned the spiders, really I don’t like to talk about them, it can be mildly traumatizing, but they’re here, I know they are, so how do I sleep at night? Thanks to my safety net as I like to think of it I am able to sleep even when say I can see a giant spider hanging out on the wall. This actually happened to me during homestay, I looked over saw its evil presence and thought killing you would take a lot of time (it was in a hard to kill location) and get me all jittery so I’m just going to stay right here under my net and pretend your not there. Mosquito net = sanity. I awoke later to find that my friend the ginormous spider had moved right next to the door. This was deeply inconvenient as I had to pee which meant coming into very close proximity to the vile one. After a previous episode with a spider, in which I may or may not have wet the bed as a result of refusing to leave me safety net, I decided that the only way forward was to kill the bastard and be done with it (I think one episode of soiling oneself due to spider encounter is justifiable but to make a habit of it, that’s just poor form). So yeah that spider got kufwa-ed, it was my first successful kill, if only it were my last.
-urination not a passive process. I have been struck by how much more I think about peeing here than I did at home. Sitting down on a toilet allows ones mind to wander, as where if I were to not think about what I was doing in the chim, disaster. I’ve always been repulsed by men’s restrooms and offended by what I assumed was their laziness that resulted in spatterings of urine around the urinal, not to completely let our man friends off the hook, I still think there is some measure of idleness involved, but now that the chim has come into my life I have a greater understanding of the perils of aiming.
-sour cream I see you in my dreams….. I could write at great length about food but I’ll save that for a later tangent. I eat well here there are just certain things (many certain things) that are inaccessible here, such as cheese, sour cream, raspberries, Mike’s chicken chili and spaghetti, ice cream, blue berry yogurt—sweetest of sweet succulence from trader joes. I digress, I just miss certain food but aside from longing for certain items like the brick of life-cheese, I’m in good shape, I’m getting all my vitamins and essentials and figuring out how to cook tasty stuffs with limited resources.

So, Dwambazi. Dwambazi is in Nkhotakota district and is the northern most point of the central region, so although Dwambazi is technically the central region its really more of the northern region. Its located right on the border of Nkhotakota and Nkhata Bay, I have yet to find Dwambazi on a map, the closest point of reference I’ve found on a map is Dwangwa which is about 40 kilometers south of Dwambazi. I’m about 3 kilometers from Lake Malawi and maybe 50 meters from Dwambazi River. The northern region is in my mind much prettier than the central region. Although not so mountainous as Dedza and at a much lower elevation, its much greener here. It seems like Dwambazi’s in a bit of a valley, on the one side you’ve got the lake and the other side very lush hills, its quite lovely to say the least. I live right by the hospital along with the rest of the hospital staff-One medical assistant, six nurses, and nine health surveillance assistants. The set up here is that the Ministry of Health runs the rural health clinics and hospitals and they provide housing for the clinic or hospital staff, so were all grouped together in our own mini village. My house is pretty much like all the other staff housing, all the staff houses are either brick or cinder block (mines cinderblock) and have concrete floors and tin roofs. My house has a small front room which I think of as the living room and then two small rooms, one of which I use as a kitchen, which the vast majority of my neighbors find to be very strange, cooking indoors (I invested in a hot plate as I have electricity and it makes all the difference) and the other is my bedroom. I have a little enclosed back area, which I sometimes refer to as my courtyard, you step out the back door at its like the house extends about five more feet but theres no roof, so there’s privacy walls and concrete flooring, this is where my tap is located and theres also a small storage room, an outdoor kitchen and my bafa which has a shower head which is magical in every possible way. That having been said the first three weeks that I was here the water was out which meant a lot of water hauling and bathing every fourth day (although the waters been back on for a week and a half now and I’m still only bathing every third day, one has to time their shower just right, when your hottest, dirtiest, and done working but its still really hot out, it’s a bit of a science). The tap when functioning is a real luxury but it’s inadvisable to drink water from that tap. For drinking water one must go to the borehole which is behind the hospital, maybe a hundred meters or so away from my house.
The house has been lived in by one other volunteer and he left me pretty well set up. I have a bookshelf, a bench, two chairs, and a table and a larger chair, it’s just the same as the table but there’s a cushion on it and you can put the two together to make a bed in the living room. All the furniture is wood and was made locally, so when I say two chairs I mean two small hand-made wooden chairs. In the living room I also have a map of the world, Obama on the cover of Rolling Stone and a chart of all the natural medicinal plants available in Malawi, courtesy of the former volunteer Alex. The kitchen room has a large table where my dearest friend the hot plate resides and where I do all my cooking and a smaller table where I store cups, plates and the like. There are also grass baskets hung from the ceiling that serve as part of my food storage system. Roaches are an issue, the ones in the kitchen are thankfully the small variety but still I’m fighting them back. Alex was clearly a neat and tidy guy but I think in the three months between him leaving and me moving in, the roaches were able to build up there numbers. The point is my kitchen is very clean as is the rest of my house the roaches really aren’t that bad its now under control but one never wants to give them a food source, so all my food is either in the hanging baskets, Ziploc bags, Tupperware, or plastic buckets. The bedroom is pretty spartan, one metal twin sized bed frame courtesy of the hospital and four small grass baskets one the floor. I’m having a local carpenter make me a shelf and a table for my room and a drying rack for my outdoor area.
I would go on with my enchanting descriptions but again it’s late in the day here so before I call it a night here’s what I did with my day today. It’s Saturday the 29th, normally I work half days on Saturday but today I did not. I woke at half six, (most people don’t say six thirty but half six which I kind of like), made tea, (Malawi’s made me a real fan of tea, I take it with a fairish bit of sugar and powdered milk, its quite delicious, but I’ll never turn my back on coffee, dearest coffee) and got myself ready. With the assistance of Ada Chipalasa my neighbor and HSA, I hired two young guys to build me a fence so I can extend the garden Alex started and for privacy purposes. By privacy I mean so I can hang my underwear one the clothes line without having to try to hide them amongst the other clothes (public displays of underwear, very much taboo) or dry them in the house where they never get fully dry and in the humidity of Dwambazi not fully dry underwear are a yeast infection waiting to happen. So there was much discussion of fence building, going to buy the bundles of grass, etc. I washed my sheets and blanket, went to the market to buy some food stuffs and some seeds, mopped my floors, reorganized stuff in the bedroom, planned the layout of my garden, puttsed around in future garden, took a shower- it was a bath day, made food and ate dinner with Freddy (I’ll explain about Freddy later he’s a story in and of himself), washed dinner dishes, drank two glasses of homemade wine-purchased from a volunteer who started an IGA-income generating activity in wine making, and typed this majesty that you are now reading. It was a lazy, quiet sort of a day………

At the end of the day I tend to be all in hence why writing up this blog (I had to choke that word out) is taking the better part of a month. But I do like to read at the end of the day and of late I’ve been rereading Mountains Beyond Mountains. I mention this because for those of you who have read the book (those of you who haven’t should read it immediately if possible) I think it’s a good point of reference for what parts of Malawi are like. In describing a particular town Kidder writes, “It had intermittent electricity, radios playing at most hours, a small section of paved road at its center, ramshackle kiosklike stores beside the road, and a few places where you could buy a beer or a glass of the potent white rum called clarin”. Substitute Chibuku for clarin and he’s pretty much described Dwambazi. I’m just off the M-5 one of the main roads in Malawi. M-1 is the major road here that I believe runs the whole country north to south, M-5 five is called the lakeshore road as it runs along the lakeshore for a decent stretch of the country. So if you’re going along M-5 you turn off on this poorly paved side street and there you’ll find Dwambazi trading center. There’s a small market in addition to the many little kiosks. These little kiosks called either stores or groceries, sell a wide assortment of things, from soap, buckets, units for the phones, cigarettes, eggs, cookies etc. At the market one kind find tomatoes, mphangwe (mustard greens), dried usipa (small fish not unlike sardines) bananas, and if your lucky onions, there’s also sometimes intermittent sales of papaya. One Friday which is market day, vendors come the surrounding area and as a rule sell the same things they sell most days just in greater quantity, but on market days one can find cabbage, if you go early enough, I made the mistake of going late last week due to work and alas no cabbage (cabbage has become a real treat), onions, electronics, chitenge, and lots of clothes, that have made there way here courtesy of goodwill. If you go past the market and turn onto a dirt road and go about ½ to 1 kilometer you’ll come to the hospital and just past that, to the left, is my house. Although I’m clustered around the hospital with the staff we’re right next to the village of Dwambazi, maybe 30 meters or so.
So I’m sure you’re dying to know, what does a Peace Corps volunteer do? That my friends is a good question. After keeping us ever so close during training, they drop you at, wave goodbye, and wish you the best. From here on out I’ll have limited contact with Peace Corps staff, really it will depend on what sort of projects I’m doing, and structure in the Malawian health care system is a different sort of beast from the states. I’ll be honest the first week was no joy. There was a lot of aimless wandering around the hospital. My first three months I’m supposed to be observing and doing community assessments, I would remind myself of this as a would blunder from one room to another at the hospital, looking lost, confused, perhaps forlorn. But now I’m actually pretty busy. Lets not mistake busy with productive, I sense it will be sometime before I can feel as if I am doing something of merit here but for the moment busy will most certainly suffice. My second week here I did a daily commute to Dwangwa for a training on IRS or indoor residual training. Another health volunteer contacted me about the training as Peace Corps country director is encouraging all volunteers to participate, and I was most grateful that Jillian contacted me as its good to have some sort of “purpose”, I use that term loosely, early on. Before I expand on IRS I just want to mention my daily commute to Dwangwa.
Traveling is a tough experience to describe, when done infrequently it feels like an adventure, when done daily it brings out things in you, you didn’t know were there. Dwangwa’s only 40 or 50 K, by car its 20-30 min but by matola its over an hour. That is over an hour of ones life spent in the back of a small pick up truck with no less than 15 other people and lots of stuff (katundu), such as bags of maize, flour, live chickens, usipa which stinks like none other, crates of beer or soda, on one journey there was the top of a chip frying stand. And in addition the mothers, babies, and general humanity there’s always one drunk. If was a proud moment on my last matola ride when the belligerent drunk was falling over on me, and I was able to say in Tonga, you move over there, move now. I was also on another occasion able to get out in Tonga, I don’t talk to drunk people, and it worked, temporarily. So doing that much traveling (twice a day, every day, for six days) has left me with the sense that I can survive any and all forms of transit, but it did no doubt age me a couple of years.
Back to the IRS project. There is a USAID funded project through the presidents initiative on malaria that is spraying the homes in Nkhotakota district (this year has expanded to include Salima district) in an attempt to kill the mosquito that spreads malaria thus reducing one of the leading causes of under five and child mortality in the country. Now I’m spending the vast majority of my time doing work pertaining to this project. After the week of training, we started holding community meetings, and then this past week we have been going door to door and marking the houses that are to be sprayed, that is everyone who will consent to the spraying. I believe we start spraying a week or two from now and at that point I’ll be doing a lot of the monitoring and surveillance which means going through a crap ton of paper work. When I’m not out in the community putting stickers on houses, I’ve been spending a lot of time at the under 5 clinic weighing babies and registering their weights and vaccination status, which has gotten me thinking about some potential projects I could start once I figure out how to write a grant, get a better sense of the community, and collect some data.

9-01-09 Today has been an around the house day. My fence is complete and now that the chickens, innumerable chickens, are gone from my life I can attempt to plant a garden, which is what I have been up to most of the day. This means I have been spending a lot of time with Freddy. Freddy is a young boy, I believe hes fifteen but he could easily pass for twelve, he lives in Dwambazi village right by my house, he was buddies with Alex and he loves to practice English thus he is around all the time. Freddy was one of the first people I met when I came here as he presented himself almost immediately upon my arrival. Thankfully Alex had given me a heads up about Freddy so I was prepared. Freddy comes to my house at minimum twice a day but more often three or so times. I often find myself feeling like a horrible person because one can easily get annoyed with Freddy, for example when at 6:30 AM he appears outside my bedroom window saying , madam, madam, odi madam, madam, anya Banda (my Malawian name) for a solid two minutes or so. In Malawian culture one doesn’t just knock on the door you call to the person, saying odi, and should the person be home they would respond odini, hence my early morning wake ups from Freddy. Explaining to Freddy that I don’t want visitors before 7:30 or 8:00 has made for a huge improvement in our relationship and as much as he can get on my nerves sometimes, he’s a good boy and is really helpful. The first three weeks I was here my water was out which meant walking to the borehole, where you pump water, and hauling it back to the house. The boreholes a ways and water here is carried on ones head. I know I don’t have to carry water on my head but it gives people a hell of a laugh to see me at it and frankly it would give me pride to master twenty liters on the head. I have to walk past the hospital with my water and my public display pleases people and makes for good conversation which I can actually have in Tonga. It goes a little something like this, “Nya Banda, mwapinga maji pa mutu” (Nya Banda you’re carrying water on your head),followed by laughter, then I respond Ndiyesa ukongwa kweni ndiphinga maji ngamana chifuka magi ngakulu (I am trying very hard but I carry small water because lots of water..) and then I mime falling and everyone laughs and as I walk away I inevitably spill some of the water. Really everything with the exception of babies is carried on ones head, I have seen women literally haul trees on their head, thirty or forty liters of water, no problem. A ten year old child could carry almost twenty liters on their head a ways, a feat which I still can’t manage to pull off. This brings us to Freddy because bless his heart he would just show up and bring me water. He’s very concerned about the status of my plants, so he’ll take it upon himself to water them. One of the first days I was here, he asked me for some beans, and then returned a little while later with lunch that he had made from the beans. This was before I had my hot plate and I hadn’t eaten all day as I was struggling forward with cooking on a parofin stove (Alex left one here which was nice but I’ll be honest I hate the damn thing, cooking on fire is preferable) so anyway I nearly cried when Freddy brought me the beans (even though I despise beans, these beans were delicious, and now a days I eat a fair bit of beans). So yeah he’s a good kid, although my MA was very concerned about whether I was letting Freddy in my house, as he said there were rumors that Freddy stole. I gathered the basis of these rumors are in part that Freddy has an older brother, Blessings whose been in trouble for stealing multiple times and as they would say in Malawi, “his family they are many”, so Freddy pretty much fends for himself hence its by in large Freddy’s responsibility to feed Freddy, thus I think he might have been known to nip food here and there. I think the fact that Freddy looks after himself is a large part of why he’d around so much, as he hangs around here a lot and helps out its then becomes my responsibility to look after him a bit, which I don’t mind, despite what my MA said I think Freddy’s a good boy, even if he’s a little over eager. If I’m up in the morning when he comes by I take him some tea or coffee, if he’s around when I’m eating I share my meal with him, and I normally send him home with some small dende (literally means side dish but really refers to any food that is eaten with nsima) like an egg, tomatoes etc. Although there are moments when I’m sure I’ll explode when he appears yet again, I do appreciate his help, and I try to help him out as well, and as much as there have been times I have had homicidal thoughts towards him I always keep it together, I’ve never been mean to him, maybe a little short sometimes but how else do you respond at, no joke 6:10 AM on a Sunday.
Other fun facts about my life in Malawi:
I’ve been given a Malawian name, Nya (pronounced Anya) Banda, which means child of Banda, the Malawian equivalent of Ms Banda. I chose Nya Banda not in honor of Malawi’s former “life president” Kamuzu Banda, although that would be tender, but because my language instructor was Beatrice Banda and I was quite fond of her, hence when people asked, “you’re Nya who” I told people to call me Nya Banda. Megans a bit of stretch for people to pronounce so Nya Banda it is. Sometimes the MA, Lembani calls me Ama Bwana which always tickles me. Bwana in most contexts means boss, so Ama Bwana would literally translate as boss mother. Although bwana means boss it’s also used as a way to signify respect, hence you’ll hear a lot of Ada Bwana or Ama Bwana. Peace Corps volunteers use bwana to mean something is lavish and I’m pretty sure that meaning would be understood in Tonga or Chewa.
Places I’ve traveled to: Dedza, Lilongwe, Dwangwa, Nkhotakota boma, Nkhata Bay boma, Chande Beach, Mzuzu…. Once I’m settled and get a sense of what I want to be doing in the way of projects I want to go south and see Mt Mulanje, Monkey Bay, and Blantyre. One of my big dreams here is to save my kwacha, no small task on a Peace Corps stipend, and travel to Tanzania and see Mt Kilimanjaro and try to go to the coast of Mozambique. During the first week here when I was feeling kind of out of sorts and during rough patches in training, I would remind myself in those darker moments that even if Peace Corps just isn’t working out and I’m despising the experience, that I’m in Africa, and in the worst case scenario, theres always travel. Although this was a contingency of last resort (as much as I want to travel, first and foremost I came here to work), it was calming on tough days to be like, “well if anything, I’m going to save and see the shit out of this country and the neighboring countries”. Thankfully it hasn’t come to that, I like my site and hopefully I’ll get a better sense how to be an efficient public health worker in a developing country, so work should come along in time, but I still want to be doing some traveling, so perhaps this time next year I can make a break for the border.
I’m learning to make wine. We all know I enjoy a beer or two at the end of the day but beer can be a it lavish of Peace Corps budget. A Carlsberg green (Carlsberg is the main beer here) bought at a grocery store in one of the larger towns cost 90 kwacha roughly 70 cents but to have two beers a night gets a little pricey so I decided it was time to learn to brew my own tasty goodness. One of the environmental volunteers-Mike whose pretty close to me, showed me the way, so now we’re just waiting for the fermentation process to end. I’ve got another 5-7 days so we’ll see how she turns out. I used papaya, lemon grass, and a bit of black tea, wish me luck. In the interim I bought some wine from one of the groups in Mikes community that sell the wine, its not half bad, its no PBR but such is life.

9-03-09 The first week here, an out of body experience if you will. The second week travel cluster fuck but on the road to productivity. The following two weeks were pretty good weeks, kept busy, did a lot of outreach, started mulling over project ideas, and had some Tonga break throughs. The last couple days have been a bit tough. Not entirely sure why, I’ve been feeling slightly off, not sick per say just not one hundred percent and I think that’s made me more irritable and sensi. I also took my mefloquine a day late last week and I truly believe that’s done something to my mental and physical health. Thankfully I’ve not suffered any adverse side effects from my anti malarials, I’ve had the odd vivid dream but no hallucinations or crippling depression. That having been said it took me awhile to adjust to the mefloquine, it kind of toys with your sleep, for some people more than others. For me I would wake up two or three times a night for the first month or so but then, sweet relief, the every few hours of waking up started to wane, that is until this week. Thursday is what I think of as malaria day, meaningly when I take my mefloquine, so today I’ll be taking that little beauty on schedule. There’s a funeral today, there have been a lot of funerals this week. This is disconcerting in that this isn’t the season for lots of deaths that would be rainy season, when diarrhea diseases and malaria hit in mass and it’s just been harvest season so malnutrition is at its lowest point of the year. During training in Dedza we had a session of funerals and now I see why. One is expected to go to funerals, even if you don’t know the person you still go, really the whole community goes to a funeral and it helps to know the protocol. I probably should be at the funeral now but I panicked. I went this morning and sat with the women in the house for an hour or so and paid my respects to the family. Here prior to the funeral women go the house of the deceased and sit with the body and sing until the actual funeral takes place, some women begin cooking preparations and the men go and prepare the grave. So I went this morning but then I left as I had to pee and I wasn’t sure what the protocol was for just walking back over, where would I go, theres just a shit ton I don’t know about cultural norms, which can be challenging at the best of times but when it involves death, what do you do, so I just came back home and worked on somethings I’ve been putting off.
I mentioned that I took Spanish in high school and college to Ada Oswald, a nice guy, even though he’s the pastor at the Pentecostal church. I really like his wife Nya Chirwa and their children Shalom and Dume. Oswald is a friend of Lembani’s (my MA) hence how I know him. When I said I had taken Spanish he was like you must teach me so I agreed to write up some Spanish for him, this was weeks ago, and I feel really bad about putting it off but trying to learn Tonga and then reflecting on Spanish seemed like an unfortunate combination but as I was feeling like an ass for not attending the funeral I decided to sit down and finish, which I did and I feel better about that at least. One time I had dinner at Lembani’s house and Ada Oswald and Nya Chirwa were there and I mentioned I couldn’t make nsima as I don’t have a nsima spoon (I’ll clarify this later) and bless him if Ada Oswald didn’t bring me one from his house. This brings me to a story I appreciate involving Oswald but as with all my stories theres a back story. So a getting to know you question in Malawi is, Muphemphera pani, where do you pray? I’m not sure why but maybe the second time I was asked this question I just replied that I was Jewish. It seemed much more honest than claiming a Christian denomination and as it came out I just rolled with it and as I have yet to see a synagogue here being a fraudulent Jew has the bonus of discreetly getting me out of public worship. When I told Oswald I was Jewish he was intrigued “Ah a Jew”, his eyes lit up as if he has discovered a treasure. Although I believe my favorite was the women I met on a bus ride to Mzuzu who in response to my saying I was Jewish said, “Ah I like the Jews, you are a very intelligent people”.
Completely off topic but I opened the last bottle of wine I purchased and alas paraffin. Bottles get reused many time over and this sprite bottle apparently was once the container for paraffin hence the wine carries a distinctly oily smell and taste, delicious for sure and no doubt toxic as hell, it’s a shame but I think I’m going to have to dispose of it, alas. Its past lunch time and I’ve been wanting to make myself a little something for sometime but as I left the funeral early and I would have to walk by the home where the funeral is to go to the market, I’m laying low and waiting for the funeral to end. I could make some phalla, but I feel like I’ve been eating a lot of starchy maize based goodness so I think I’m going to hold out for tomatoes, eggs, and mustard greens.
This brings me to a discussion of food I’ve wanted to have for sometime. So nsima, you haven’t eaten unless you’ve taken nsima is the Malawian perspective on food and thankfully I don’t mind nsima. Some of the volunteers think I’m crazy but I make nsima several nights a week, it’s really not half bad and you eat it with your hands which makes me a fan. Nsima is made from maize flour and I think the best way to describe it is as follows. Think cream of wheat, that’s essentially how nsima starts, maize flour and water cooked tell it begins to make porridge. Now when it gets to the cream of wheat stage we would call that phalla, or in Tonga ba, (in the case of phalla milk is added if possible) but to go from phalla to nsima you boil the porridge for five to ten minutes and then you add more maize flour while stirring vigorously, its tough as shit stirring nsima, I mean it really takes it out of you, done over fire is particularly challenging. So you stir in more maize flour tells the porridge is more the consistency of say the stuff tamales are wrapped in after stirring for a few minutes you take the nsima off the heat source, take your nsima spoon (a large wooden spoon) which you have soaked in water and you scoop the nsima out, making nsima patties. Nsima is served with dende and to eat you take a small piece of nsima, and roll it into a ball in your hand and then dip that into your dende. So yeah I eat a bit of nsima, plenty of rice, mustard greens are the mphangwe of choice, eggs, and soya pieces, and every now and then I cook myself some beans as one can’t be too picky about their protein sources. I’m hoping to expand my cooking repertoire, what I’ve been making is tasty enough but I tend to make the same three meals over and over again and I’m starting to get a little bored. That having been said I was eating something fierce during homestay and training. When we were at the college we had three squares a day, tea time twice a day and during homestay three meals a day and tea time once a day, my amayi was an excellent cook so I ate plenty and to top it off we sat on our asses most of the time, granted we were “learning” but I don’t think I’ve ever been so sedentary in my life, the point is I got myself a little chubblly during training, so reigning in my eating habits isn’t doing me any harm. I have been thinking a lot about chicken. I don’t cook meat, as its expensive and storage is a problem, but I’m going to Ngala Beach tomorrow to meet up with some of the other volunteers, so I’ll track down some chicken then. Presently I’m a little short on kwacha, I still have plenty from this quarters pay but its in my account, at my bank, in Mzuzu, and my stash of money here is running low but one of the kids I’m meeting in Ngala is going to Mzuzu, so I’ll have him get some money out for me and then I’m planning a shopping trip in Dwangwa so I can start branching out from rice and soya pieces. I’m thinking of attempting tortillas and fish tacos.
There’s a group of volunteers who have taken to calling themselves the Tonga Alliance. These are the volunteers closest to me who are along the lakeshore in Tonga speaking villages. Tonga’s take great pride in their language, nearly all Tonga’s can speak chewa but if you speak to a Tonga in chewa although they’ll understand, ninety percent of the time they’ll respond in Tonga. Hence the volunteers who live in Tonga regions become pretty proud of their Tonga and in addition to that the last group of volunteers in this area became pretty good friends thus the birth of the Tonga Alliance. So that’s what tomorrow is in Ngala Beach, Tonga night, I heard rumor of pizza, I’m not sure how or where this will happen but I am eager to find out.
9-11-09
I’ve been trying, no doubt in vain, to describe my life here. I find that there are so many things I am leaving out but bringing to life all the people I’m meeting and experiences that I am having is, I fear, nearly impossible. I hope I have provided a reasonable overview. I am back at site, I went to Ngala and indeed there was pizza. We went to the Ngala Beach Lodge and as it caters to tourists, pizza there was and it was delicious. Not sure how I feel about going to places like the lodge, it was nice to drink beer and eat pizza but as you can imagine there’s a reasonable amount of discomfort that comes with being at such a place when you know how the vast majority of the people from the community in Ngala live but as I’m not as decent a person as I should be, I found myself there. The Tonga Alliance was in fine form. I’m pretty fortunate that all of my sites mates are pretty fucking chill people. In fact my two of my closest site mates, Courtney and Melanie are very cool girls. Strong women, who believe passionately in human rights and justice and are particularly interested in women’s empowerment. I hope that I can collaborate with them on projects in the future, once I get a better sense of what it is I can do in the way of project implementation. I also ended up going to Mzuzu this weekend. We have a new country director with Peace Corps, I think hes a bit of a bow tie wearing jackass but he is a health person, so as long as he’s an asset to the program my personal feelings are of limited importance. I mention Vic, because he has decided to close the Peace Corps resthouses. This decision is only part and parcel of why I think Vic is a douche; the closing of the resthouses is going to make travel a real pain in the ass. Mind you when I say travel I don’t mean traveling around the country, I mean Peace Corps work related travel. For example the only place I can use free internet is Peace Corps main office in Lilongwe, which is also the home of many of the resources I will need to get projects off the ground and maintained as well as any packages sent to me and medical supplies such as my anti malarials. Lilongwe on a good day is five hours from me on a tougher day its about seven, so going to Lilongwe requires a place to stay overnight. Lodging is expensive on a Peace Corps budget so not having the resthouses is no joy.
I mention this, as the Mzuzu house will be closing at the end of the month, at which time traveling to Mzuzu will also be extremely difficult, so I decided to go while I still had the chance. I traveled back to Dwambazi with another volunteer and they showed me the way, the light, and the truth of hitching. I’ve been wary of hitching for several reasons, one I’m still kind of new here, two the Axa runs the M-5 and its reasonably cheap and reliable and finally most of my travel is along the M-5 which is a less traveled road making hitching tricky, or so I have been told but I’m beginning to believe that was all lies. I feel like we only waited, no more than a half hour, before we caught our first ride and maybe the same for the next ride which took us the remainder of the way. It was a pretty magical experience traveling the lakeshore road (M-5) in the back of a pick up with just the two of us and no constant stopping. So now I’m back and I’m still trying to establish some sort of routine.

9-12-09
Last night the spirit did not move me in the way of writing, so I’m at it again tonight. Part of what has motivated me is a traumatic experience that I will share with you now. Perhaps I have mentioned this thing called the wind scorpion, also known as the train spider. Volunteers around the lakeshore have described it to me and it sounded horrific in every possible way, nearly unimaginable, and yet tonight we had our first encounter. Let me begin by stating what I was told of this monstrous creature. Its fast, really fucking fast, hence the name wind scorpion and although I believe its technically a scorpion, the name train spider because its like an unusually long spider, and its very large. Its aggressive, as Courtney said to me, “If your going to kill it be sure about it because once you get near it, it will come after you”, Courtney also described as looking like a spider with the head of an ant. And I was told it appears at the beginning of hot season, which apparently is now. The loathsome creature I encountered was still immature, perhaps the size of a silver dollar and yet still so appalling. Fast doesn’t begin to describe the movement of the wind spider, it was able to cover a good two and a half feet in a second. Think about it, this one was the size of a walnut and yet it could cover that much ground, its not right. And aggressive, oh yeah, in response to the first blast of doom it came at me like a bull, it was clearly out to get me. This is not my fear of spiders causing irrational exaggeration, no no, it charged me, the only thing that stopped it was the insane amounts of doom it took to kill it. Really what was most horrifying about this experience wasn’t so much this wind scorpion, as it was manageable, it was the idea of what a wind scorpion four times that size would be like, and that’s a conservative estimate in size. Even as a small creature it was terrifying looking. I can’t even begin to describe it, unmistakably spider like and yet theres a little something else to add to the magic. A head like an ant is pretty correct and I believe it had scorpion like pinchers. The small silver lining is that I had my encounter outside in my back area, as opposed to the sanctity of my home but I still feel really creeped out, hence I am writing this from the safety of my mosquito net, even though its only 7:15, the thought of being out with the potential of those things is just to much this evening. I’ll be sure to keep you a breast of any other exciting incidents of this nature.
In a different vein, today’s activities. As its Saturday I worked a half day, I ran the under five clinic in the morning. I’m beginning to feel somewhat competent at this particular aspect of our health delivery services and the under five clinic is one of the areas where I want to focus my work and future program implementation. I suppose this is an appropriate segue to the services offered at Dwambazi rural hospital. We have the under five clinic which is daily and falls under the category of what used to be called child survival programs. Nearly all children in Malawi have what is called a Health passport, which is a small unlamented book and costs fifty kwacha. The book includes a vaccination schedule, growth chart, and a section for diagnosis if the child has become ill. So at the under five clinics, mothers bring their children and their health passport book and we weigh the children as to monitor their growth. Mondays are vaccinations days at the under five clinic, we also do under five outreach clinics, and every other Friday is the supplementary feeding program for moderately malnourished children and pregnant and lactating women. We have a voluntary testing and counseling center, and by center I mean room and the ability to test, for those who want to know their HIV status. We provide antiretroviral therapy for those who have HIV and AIDS. There’s a nutritional rehabilitation unit (NRU) for the children who are severely malnourished. We have a women and mens ward and a maternity ward. I would say the bulk of the people we see are through the outpatient department. Come half seven people queue up to wait for most of the morning to see either the MA or the nurse, they’re seen for no more than five minutes (the ratio of doctor to patient is rough), diagnosed, prescribed one of the treatments we have on hand (are drug supply is limited and yet we are a well stocked health center).
So that’s my hospital. There’s a lot of potential for sure, theres just a shit ton of need. I’ve been thinking a lot about doing projects that work with the NRU, the under five clinic, and the VCT center. I have dreams of expanding the VCT center from just a room to an actually building that functions as a resource center as well as a VCT center. At this time everyone knows anyone who goes to that room is getting tested which doesn’t do a whole lot in the way of confidentiality and a resource center would be an amazing project to get off the ground as well as remove the stigma of going to get tested, as it would hopefully be a space that all members of the community would have reason to access. I’m envisioning a place where there would be say a resource book that lets people know what community based organizations (CBOs), NGOs, and the like are in their community. Or say if someone wanted to learn to make jam as an income generating activity, they could either find a local group doing that, using said resource book, or schedule an appointment to learn how to do such an activity. My dreams of a resource center tie in with my hopes for expanding the NRU. At this time when severely malnourished children are admitted, we give them milk, porridge, and plumpy nut (nutritional peanut butter) get them not to anything resembling a decent weight just away from dying and we set them up with the SFP program and send them home. There aren’t resources here to follow up or to intervene in the circumstances that caused the child to become malnourished. As I write this I feel disgusted as there are plenty of resources in this world and theres no reason that I find acceptable, as to why with all that there is, that one should see a child who at seven months, weighs six and a half pounds or the two year old child who weighs about twelve pounds. This particular child wasn’t admitted to the NRU just put in SFP. This was the first severely malnourished child I saw, I can’t describe to you how terrible he looked and yet by definition he is not severely malnourished, just borderline, so we give his mother phalla and peanut butter and hope for the best. I want to create a program that intervenes in these circumstances and goes beyond just trying to keep these children alive, but does something to improve the conditions in which they live, to change the circumstances that caused them to not have access to food.
I see all this need, I have these ideas, but I’m still stuck on making them happen. And I suppose thats the real test of my character. We can all agree that a child slowly starving is terrible, we could all look at that seven month old child and feel horrified but what do you do with that. I know these things I see are intrinsically wrong but what will I do with that is the question I have yet to answer. I’ve also been thinking a lot about something I hear many of the volunteers say (thankfully not the volunteers I have any sort of frequent contact with) which has really begun to enrage me. During preservice training I heard a lot of talk about motivation. A community has to show motivation for a project, they have to show that they want it and are invested. As much as I agree with striving for projects that are sustainable and agree that community investment in a project is critical to success, this tossing around of motivation as the baseline for providing the most basic of services is fundamentally flawed. I find myself asking what did I ever have to do to prove I was motivated enough. Did I have to show motivation to get a pair of shoes, drink clean water, go to the doctor, to school, really what are Americans or anyone fortunate enough to be living in a developed country asked to show in the way of motivation. No we don’t have to prove much of anything, just show up, its there, and do with it what you will. I’ve been trying to get these volunteers who talk about the lack of motivation they claim to see, to acknowledge the fact that the only people in this world asked to prove their worthy of say clean water are poor people, mainly poor black people, the bulk of them women. These are the people who we demand prove their worth. I mean we’re talking about the most basic of resources, nobody has to prove that they deserve their human rights, and the next volunteer who suggests that’s the case is going to feel my wrath, cause pre service training tested my patience with educating people who are supposed to be delivering essential services not passing judgment. I mean we’re not talking about college admissions here or a great fucking job, we’re talking about electricity and running water, something I know I and any of the volunteers here never had to prove we deserved.
9-23-09
Today was a most notable day, full of exciting firsts. To begin at the under five clinic this morning I had my first successful independent wrapping and weighing of a child. I believe I have explained how children are carried here, but if not, an explanation is in order if you’re to appreciate the magic that I made happen this morning. Children are carried on ones back wrapped in a chitenge, if you’ve seen my pictures on facebook then you have some image of how this happens as there are pictures of me nobly attempting with much assistance to wrap a child. Any Malawian women or child older than five can wrap a baby but in my mind it’s a complicated procedure. You take the child, bend forward a bit, and then place the child on your back. This is where an unnaturally sense of balance comes in as you balance the child on your back take your chitenge put it around the child over your back. Then you adjust the chitenge so that its around the child just so, bringing one half of the chitenge under your left arm and the other over your right and then you tie the two sides of the chitenge between the old breasts and mission accomplished. When it comes to child weighing, after you have wrapped the child on your back, you shift them, still in chitenge, so that they’re over your hip. Then you slip out of the chitenge by pulling it over your head, child still in it, chitenge still tied and then you take the child who is now in a wrapped chitenge and hang that chitenge from the scale. It’s a tricky business and although I am getting better and have yet to drop a child I still cannot do this completely on my own but this morning was close to victory. I was running the under five clinic when a rare occurrence took place, a man brought me a child. I asked this fine gentlemen in Tonga if he knew how to put the child on his back. The group of women at the under give clinic were deeply amused and one suggested that I assist, so I undressed the child, tossed them on my back, and with limited assistance got them wrapped and by some form of divine intervention I was able to extract myself from the chitenge and without having to rewrap got the child weighed, it was a proud moment. Today was also the first day of the spraying program. Yesterday was actually the first day but I had gone to the under five clinic where there were a slew of unassisted women and by the time I finished my work there the spraying teams had left. This is one of the glitches in the spraying program, everyone goes, so very little functions at the hospital and as communication technology is severely restricted here, theres limited ways to let people know that services such as the under five clinic or VCT are not available. Frankly I would prefer to stay and run the under five clinic but as I attended the training on the IRS program its most certainly my job to go and theres a lot to be learned and every opportunity to be out in the community at large is a huge benefit. Although the program is a logistical nightmare in many respects its still amazing how much gets done with so little. The team leader I worked with was a really cool guy and he assisted me in todays second notable event, dog acquisition.
I know I swore up and down I would not get a dog while here for several reasons. One after Yin died I felt that I should take some time off from owning animals and of course what are the ethical considerations of getting an animal here and then having to leave. So how is it I got a dog, well probably selfish rationalizations but what tipped it in my mind is that given the life expectancy and living conditions of the average Malawian dog even if you had to have the dog euthanized when you left (which I doubt it would come to) you have given the dog two years of decent living that they otherwise would not have had. Anyway I’ve been keeping my eyes open for a dog but they’re surprisingly hard to come by but today at one of the houses we were spraying there was this scrappy ass little puppy and I told Lloyd (the team leader) that I would take that dog if I could, so he said he would ask and that was that. So now I have this wee scrapster. Bless her shes a tough looking little thing, she looks about eight weeks old but is more likely 12 or so weeks. Shes brownish tan and her back feet have white on them. Probably because shes malnourished her head looks exceptionally large and particularly her ears. I should be clear, the people I got her from were not mistreating her or being unkind given the context of life in Malawi. Dogs fend for themselves here, most people at minimum give them some nsima, some people like my neighbor Ama Bai do more but as a rule a dog here is expected to feed itself, as this dog was recently weened she’s looking exceptionally lean as she’s not able to find food particularly well yet. I just wanted to make that point, I believe that animals have rights and should be treated decently for sure, and its tough some of the things you see with dogs here and some of it is inexcusable but by in large you see skinny dogs because you see skinny children and malnourished adults, its not an issue of malice just lack of resources.
I’m not sure what I’m going to call my little friend yet, I’m waiting for her name to present itself to me. I’ve toyed with Uchi (honey), Fipa (dirty), marvin, and Soni (shy) but I’ll let you know when it comes to me. At present she’s sleeping, I’m sure its been a big day for her, out of the blue accosted by some stranger carried into a car packed with people and then driven to a strange place. But the plus side for her was she got some delicious usipa and egg which might have made up for the bath she received. Shes a good little dog, she came with me to get water today and she followed me like a champ even when she was attacked by a chicken she soldiered on, bless her.
Water is on the fritz again. As we’re quickly approaching hot season they have begun to ration water which means my tap only functions between around 10 AM and 1 PM, hours that I am rarely at home. When I’m working at the hospital I can just excuse myself for twenty minutes or so, fill my buckets, water my plants, and return to work, but when I’m in the field for extended periods of time it becomes a real pain in the ass. Water for washing, drinking, and cooking I can get from the bore hole, it’s a lot of water on the old head but it can be done, but watering my plants becomes damn near impossible if I’m hauling water. Thankfully my neighbor Ama Bai is awesome and told me to bring her my buckets in the morning and she will fill them when the tap is on saving me a shit ton of work and the lives of my plants. So yeah that’s been my day, baby wrapping, out in the field, dog getting, and lots of water hauling. I managed to squeeze in a bath which was magical (it had been awhile) and drink a bit of my hooch wine. We should be done spraying the Dwambazi catchment area around the first of October and I’m going to try to head to Lilongwe not long after. I think there’s Peace Corps transport passing through this area around the 12th and I’m hoping to catch a free ride with them if possible. I’m going to need to do some banking as well as talk with some of the staff about possible projects and my community assessment I’m supposed to complete in my first three months. The moral of the story is I will post this when I go into Lilongwe so you all can share in the joy of my life and all its glory. It is nearly nine scandalously late for me these days, I’m going to take my wee dog friend out for a pee as I’m letting her sleep in the house for the time being, and then call it a night. I’m sure I’ll write a bit more before I go in to town but if not god knows I’ve babbled enough for a lifetime…..
9-28-09
As it turns out I will be going to Lilongwe sooner rather than later. I’m leaving on either Wednesday or Thursday so I figured I should add a little something more to this, the worlds longest blog. So the water situation has reached critical mass, it went from rationed to non existent, how I miss showering, dumping cups of water over yourself just isn’t the same. But blessed be today we’re back to rationing so I’m hoping this will continue to be the case until raining season (November) at which time water will be a different sort of problem. As I write this I realize I’m being exceptionally spoiled about the water situation. One I have a tap, even if it isn’t always working which is something most Malawians don’t have and two, the first month I was here there was no water, so four days of dried up tap really isn’t a big deal. In other water related stories, I’ve actually been laid up for the past few days due no doubt to the mass of untreated water I was drinking while out in the field. I treat my own water as it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me not to and I’m mindful of what I eat and drink but you have to build up some sort of a tolerance and I refuse to live in constant fear of germs, thus I’ll eat out, eat in peoples homes, drink water when its offered to me basic stuff. But while we were out spraying I think I crossed a threshold on the amount of untreated water one should be drinking and I paid dearly. In all honesty it could have been much worse; there was just a night of vomiting and a few days of severe exhaustion.
So yeah those might very well be the most exciting events of the last few days. My small dog friend is doing well, I took some pictures of her that I will be posting shortly. I started calling her Uchi but my friend Mike suggested Biscuit which pleased me, so I call her Uchi Biscuit but tell people her name is Uchi as I don’t have the heart to tell my neighbors and coworkers that I am calling my dog Uchi Biscuit. I spent most of my day at home today as my house was sprayed which meant that most of the furniture needed to be removed, all things taken off the walls, food out of the house and me out of the house for two hours. I don’t have a ton of stuff so it wasn’t super time consuming except that I took this as an opportunity to do a thorough reorganization of the house. Theres still a bunch of stuff that’s Alex’s that I didn’t know what to do with, so I went through all of that and did a super deep clean as well. I’m sure you are amazed at the fact that while working as a health volunteer in Malawi I can manage to prattle on about house cleaning, I too am amazed. All things said and done I’ll be glad when the spraying is over, it’s a great program, in terms of malaria vector control, so I support it whole heartedly, but its not my favorite kind of work, I’m looking forward to getting back to the under five clinic. While I’m in Lilongwe I’m going to do a bunch of prep work on my community assessment and do a little research on some potential projects that have presented themselves. I was approached by a man who leads an HIV/AIDS support group about working with his group and Nya Chirwa approached me about starting a women’s group so I need to sit down in Lilongwe, and look at what projects have been done in the past that were successful, where did resources come from etc. Hopeful this is where my talent or skills will manifest themselves, I’ll let you know how it pans out.
This past Sunday I was invited to the house of a women I met at the hospital at the under five clinic, Ama Alice. I had spent the morning carrying her baby Mbumba around and as she was kind enough to hand her child over to me I told her she should stop by my house some time, which she did with a huge bag of rice and then she in turn invited me to her home. I was slightly nervous going there because every interaction has the potential to be a cross cultural clusterfuck and the language barrier is substantial but I’m super glad I went. I sat on a mat surrounded by about twelve children who were all speaking very excitedly at once. I brought some markers and paper and asked the children if they could write their names which ended up with me writing the names of all the children which they shouted at me in unison, there was some singing of the ABCs, the children lost it when I hit LMNOP. When I got to her house which took a bit of navigating and digging into my Tonga reserves Ama Alice ran to me and hugged me. I’m not sure how to write about this in a manner that properly conveys my thoughts and feelings on the subject but here goes. When I got that super enthused greeting I was touched for sure, you’d have to be a robot to not be moved but what it symbolized makes me uncomfortable. What I mean by that is people look at me and see this white person who they assume is rich and who can in turn help them and therefore they are so grateful for your time. Its not people thinking I’m rich and that I can give them things that I dislike although its not always fun. The reality of the situation is comparatively I am rich. I may have no money in the bank but I can leave here and go to a country with roads, electricity, schools, public transport and get a job and live in a house with running water, these are things beyond the reach of most Malawians. I want the people of Malawi to have access to these things in their own country, people work so hard for so little, the work the average eleven year old Malawian girl does in a month is probably more exhausting work than I have done in my life. What I’m trying to get at here is it breaks my heart to see people so excited to see this usungu thinking it might change their fortunes because they deserve so much more. I don’t think white folks, or people living in the developed world have done near enough for places like Malawi, really are economic system hinges on places like Malawi so to see someone like Ama Alice getting so excited because maybe I can pay to send her girls to school fucking sucks because her girls should be able to go to a functional school not because some beneficiary comes along but because all children have the right to education. I don’t think I in any way captured the situation in a way that does it justice but I thought an attempt was necessary.
There are good days and bad here as there are anywhere but as a rule I am happy, I could see a life here, which I suspect is a good sign and once I get a handle on work I suspect my contentment level will rise exponentially. That having been said I miss you all more than I can tell you. Your letters, phone calls, packages, and just having had you in my life brings me solace in tougher moments. I know I have been so fortunate to have such amazing people in my life I take great pride in you all and I hope as I move forward here and through my actions I can return that to you.

Good times in Malawi

Monday, October 5, 2009

Heading home

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Wish List

Friday, October 2, 2009

Longest blog ever

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