Happy
Thanksgiving y’all! I just got back (to my Liwonde, my second home) from a
delicious and amazing Thanksgiving in Domasi, with a smattering of Southern
PCVs. We had chicken (unfortunately no
turkey, known in Chichewa as a “crazy chicken”), mashed potatoes, green bean
casserole, mac and cheese, biscuits, apple pie . . .Lots of delicious food
cooked by people with electricity. I
brought margarine and a box of wine.
Recently, I’ve
been out of site a lot recently for a couple different trainings. First was a week-long PC-sponsored Life
Skills training in Blantyre. It was tons
of fun to catch up with my friends, several of whom I hadn’t seen since we
moved to site, and meet volunteers from other sectors. Unfortunately, the training wasn’t incredibly
useful, since mostly we learned about resources and kits we don’t have access
to. Additionally, about half of the
volunteers at the training, including myself, got a really vicious stomach bug
from drinking water (I thought Blantyre water was safe. . . Apparently
not. I am all about the bottled water
these days when I haven’t filtered water myself), and I spent a few days
lolling around my super bwana hotel room under a ceiling fan (while the
electricity was on), running to the bathroom every 20 minutes and popping
pills. Anyhow, I’m feeling better.
So I was
gone for a week for this training, came back to my site for a few days, and
Wednesday morning my head teacher calls me into his office and says, “Camfed is
having a training in Blantyre for 2 or 3 days starting today, you should go.” To which my questions, “What is Camfed?”
(Campaign for Female Education, a British NGO), “why do I need to go?” (because
I’m the female teacher), “shouldn’t I teach the last week of class before Term
1 exams?” (apparently not as important) took a while to be answered. Until the second day of the training I wasn’t
even sure if it was ending on Friday or Saturday. But, even though I didn’t understand most of
the Chichewa training, I was really excited to be attending this training with
my head teacher and two PTA members, discussing the importance of community
involvement in ensuring that girls have access to school fees and materials necessary
to complete their education. I’m really
hopeful that my community buys into what this organization was pushing for, and
I’m excited to help out with any sort of projects they may decide to start
working on. Sure, we were staying at a
shady Malawian rest home (my room was alarmingly close to a bottle shop, aka
bar, so it was a noisy few nights), and it was certainly a different experience
from PC training in a nice hotel the week before, but I think it was definitely
a valuable experience to see how Malawians work on implementing projects
supported by international NGOs.
Other points
of note: Rainy season is struggling to
begin. Every once in a while there’s a
crazy flash flood/thunderstorm, occasionally resulting in a flood in my
house. I think there’s a scorpion living
in my house, in addition to the many lizards and giant, hairy spider I saw a
few days ago (probably 6 inches long; I was proud of myself for not screaming
at it). My school starts Term 1 exams
next week, and if my students get more than 50% on them, I will be
ecstatic. I may or may not be getting
electricity in the near future (we were supposed to get a transformer last
week, so who knows). And I finally got
my dresser last week, so I am officially no longer living out of my
suitcases! Hallelujah!
The week
after exams, I go my in-service training (IST), the big 3-month milestone for
PCVs. I can’t believe I’ve already
gotten to this point! It’s going to be
so great to see my friends living around the country and hear about their sites
and experiences, and brainstorm for things I should be working on in Ntaja.
