Tsiku ndi Tsiku - Day by Day

Let’s talk about my everyday life.  The past few times I’ve updated, I’ve probably seemed positively ebullient and effusive about my life so far in Malawi.  And, overall, I’ve been enjoying it, and I’ve legitimately been excited when I’ve written.  Today, I’m in a similar state of mind – I’ve come back to Liwonde for the weekend, to celebrate Rosh Hashanah with a few people up here, and once again, I get to use electricity(!), the internet(!!), and maybe even a shower(!!!).  All of these things, plus seeing friends and fellow Peace Corps Volunteers, make me very happy indeed.  Plus, it’s not bad to while the day away, sitting at a place called the Hippo Lodge, overlooking coconut trees and the Shire River, just waiting for a hippo to swim into view.

But, as you can imagine, that’s not usually how it goes.  Nor should it – the Peace Corps was very upfront that there would be conditions of hardship, loneliness, mood swings, and probably cockroaches.  In the past couple weeks, I’ve gotten my fair share of this stuff.  Sitting here today, sipping a coke and typing on a laptop, it doesn’t seem so bad, but to be honest, it’s pretty hard to adjust to site.  Just ask my parents, who get to hear about the times I was up sick all night (yep, that’s happened a few times, and since my phone still won’t text America, I have to call them to tell them about it).

The most frustrating part of my day is usually school.  Not because the students don’t want to be there, or because I don’t like the staff – quite the contrary.  Yet even though I thought I was prepared for the chronic understaffing, the lack of a schedule, and the language barrier, it’s hit me pretty hard.  The first week, only half the students (if that) were present – members of the Form 2 and 4 classes.  Future Form 1 and 3 students were still waiting for their exam results, which the Ministry of Education had not yet finished marking (please note that the Ministry administers the exams, grades the exams, and also sets the school schedule.  Why they can’t make school start after they’ll be finished Form 3 – so they’re already 2 weeks behind in the 12 weeks they have for instruction this term. 

Additionally, somewhere in the Ministry-headed school system, someone makes the decisions for transferring teachers.  Apparently, rural CDSSs without electricity are not hot spots for teachers; three of the teachers who worked at my school, St Mary’s CDSS, last year received permission to transfer.  Somehow we still don’t have replacements for them; we have been promised one, but he is still arranging his move to the area, and hasn’t begun teaching yet.  He has been assigned classes, though – so during the periods he will be teaching, the students do not receive instruction.  Possibly, at some point this term, we will receive one or two more teachers to replace the ones who left. 

Especially disconcerting to me, we basically don’t follow the schedule (or timetable, as we call it here).  When the deputy head teacher brought it in last Monday and hung it in the staff room, I was bubbling with excitement for the order and stability it promised.  Those of you who’ve worked or gone to school with me know how much I like being able to anticipate what’s coming up.  I was excited, too, for the students, who basically hang out in and around classrooms, waiting for a teacher to pop by with a lesson.  How can they study and prepare for class when they don’t know what class they’ll be having?  Yet we never seem to follow the timetable.  Mondays, we begin the day with an informal staff meeting of 2 hours or so, followed by an assembly, nevermind the fact that lessons are actually scheduled all morning.  Moreover, numerous (of six) teachers were gone on various days this week – for managerial meetings (head and deputy head), meetings on how to utilize computers (except that we can’t use computers without electricity), a funeral in another district, and dealing with parents who had come by to address the issue of school fees.  I myself will be absent with my head teacher in a week or so, off to the division headquarters to meet the division head.  Yes, I recognize that these meetings are important – but when teachers have been gone, they haven’t even asked for someone to sit in on their class, or left a lesson plan to follow.  One morning, before the head teacher left, he asked if I could go into the Form 4 class (which I don’t teach at all) and do some biology with them for a period or two, since they wouldn’t be having much instruction that day.  I half wanted to say no, ask me a day ahead of time so I can prepare something next time, but I ended up going in and talking about mitosis for a couple hours with students who could actually understand my English, so all in all that was a good day.  Since there were so many other commitments this week, teachers just sort of go into an empty class to make up for missed periods whenever they’re free.  At any given time this past week, there were teachers with only one or two of the classes present; rarely were all three classes being taught at a time.

All of this has been confusing, frustrating, and unsettling to me.  I like order.  I like to plan for what’s coming up.  I like to know what I’m expected to do, and I like to know that my colleagues are doing what they should be doing.  My school and head teacher are not truly at fault for most of my frustrations – they can’t control when the division calls meetings, or the fact that we have no substitute teachers or administrators or custodians (students do the sweeping and mopping before each day of classes – can you imagine that ever happening in America?  Because I can’t).  But I don’t know what to do with myself half the time.  Mostly I’ve just been trying to keep to the schedule as much as I can, and hopefully, eventually, everyone else will do the same.  But it’s ridiculous to me that these students aren’t receiving the education that many of their families are sacrificing significantly for (this is a topic for me to ramble about at length another day).  I haven’t totally decided how I’m going to deal with this frustration – maybe it’ll work out on its own?  On the other hand, I don’t want it to make me go crazy if it continues – although I’m   definitely going to discuss the idea of strictly following the schedule with my head teacher, and other members of staff.  We have enough challenges as it is, including, of course, . . .

The Language Issue.  I knew it was going to be a problem, even before model school demonstrated that it would be.  So far, I’ve been teaching one class to Form 2 (Physical Science), and two to Form 1 (Biology and Physical Sciences).  When Form 3 comes, I’ll be teaching them Biology as well.  Form 2 has been ok, at least at understanding what I’m saying, if not the actual content, but Form 1 is a whole new ball game.  I’m pretty sure they don’t understand my accent at all.  I’ve been speaking my best Malawian Teacher English (excellent diction, at about 1/5 my normal speed of speech).  Sometimes my students surprise me – I read a passage about insects, and they were able to identify all the parts of the body I hoped they would.  Yet I remain concerned that, even if a few students are picking up the gist of what I’m saying, the majority aren’t.  Nothing makes me feel like crap like having to send a student home for being more than 15 minutes late to the first period (school policy, not my own; I’m trying to follow it and see how it goes before challenging that system), and they don’t understand my repeated explanations that they may not come into class.  Especially when other teachers don’t go to class until later than that. 

My consolations, for each of these problems so far, is the myriad of texts I’ve been sending and receiving to and from my fellow new PCVs, all of whom are having the same problems.  No one’s Form 1 students understand them, and no one is on schedule yet.  We’re all still adjusting.  More than that, I’ve been trying to do something fun every day – putting pictures up on my walls (send me more!  I miss your faces), watching a tv show on dvd, talking to my parents.  The best was in the middle of my surprise Form 4 lesson, when my site mate stopped by with mail.  Mail!  From friends I hadn’t heard from in months!  What a treat!  It’s easy to be positive on the weekends, chilling at a lodge and looking at facebook, but a little mail in the middle of the week does the trick.

So write me letters!  Chonde!  (Please!)

For the record – I still am really liking this overall experience.  Malawi is kind of awesome.  Every stressful experience is made worse, I think, by the Mefloquine.  And the heat.

To lighten the mood, I was going to add some photos, but they're taking to long to upload.  I'll try again later!