A Very TALULAR Christmas in July

Grettings from Mpalale, where it is currently July 28, or, as my comrades and I have deemed it, Christmas in July. Here's the backstory:

We're currently a little more than halfway through training overall, and we only have 2 more weeks of homestay, which will be full of model school. This morning we had our mock LPI, or language profiency interview, on which we need to score at least intermediate-high in order to swear in as volunteers (supposedly, although I've heard if you don't pass during training, you just hire a language tutor at site and retake the test a few months later). Anyhow, stress has been a little high, so a few weeks ago one of my fellow trainees suggested we have Christmas in July this week, since it's almost exactly 5 months away. We arranged a secret santa, but instead of buying each other gifts, we decided to utilize the principles of TALULAR (teaching and learning using locally available resources) and make each other gifts!

Needless to say, I had my normal anxiety from the pressures of being crafty and creative, especially because I drew my friend, Kay, who's in my language class and guessed that I had her within about 5 days. People got pretty creative - lots of us used paper from handouts we received, tape stolen from our trainers' houses, extra string from hanging our malaria nets, even candle wax as an adhesive. I eventually wrote Kay one of my favorite quotes about being successful by Emerson (it seemed especially fitting, as we fret about being good volunteers on the daily), and I made a mosaic-y frame out of little pieces of paper I tore up, colored with markers, and taped together. If I ever get on a computer I can upload a picture, but I forgot to take one on my phone before I gave it to her. Whoops! Don't worry, she loved it.

My gift was awesome - my friend Tall Pat (not to be confused with the other Pat in my village) got me, and he made this amazing mobile with 22 paper cranes that he folded and wrote all the trainees' names on. I can't wait to hang it up in my future home! Currently it's hanging on one of the nails holding up my curtain, next to the gourd Sam and her mom sent me for Sukkot!

All in all, it was a great Christmas, and a much-needed break between mock-LPI Chichewa madness, and model school madness. I think I mentioned model school in my last post (not that it's up yet), and I've been planning for it! I have a pretty good idea of how I hopd the general flow of each class will go, but I still need to do most of my detailed lesson planning. Teachers, you all have my respect! It's a lot of work to get ready for school!

Other snapshots of training:
I think I mentioned a visit to Camp Sky in my last post as well. We went to Lilongwe to visit it last Monday, which ended up being an even better day than I initially anticipated. I was able to sit in on a couple classes, including a bio class, and chat with a bunch of current volunteers I hadn't met yet. They all seem really great, and promised to help try to figure out our sites! I'm dying trying to figure mine out -  I know a bunch of our staff knows and just haven't told us yet. I just want to know!

Anyways, after Camp Sky, we convinced our training director to let us go get PIZZA in Lilongwe. Let me tell you, after over a month of not eating cheese (except once at the college, when we had weird fake cheese of spaghetti), it was possibly the most delicious think I've ever had! Even better - there was a soft serve ice cream counter next to the pizza. Amaaaaazing! Needless to say, I didn't eat any nsima for dinner when I got home.

We also got to run into the Malawian version of Target, which was in the same shopping center, where I found pasta to make for my family! My amayi had been asking me for weeks to make American food, and I was really stressed about what to make, since we don't have a ton at the market and tuck shops here, so I was happy to take the easy way out with pasta. I just made it tonight, and faked some sauce with just onions and tomatoes. It was funny to see a bunch of my extended family members taste testing in the kitchen, and my aunt took a bowl for my grandmother to try, but at dinner everyone else still had nsima in addition to pasta. I'm not convinced they loved it, but they said it was good (just needed salt, which everyone dumps on all their food here), so who knows?