Busy busy

Hello all! I'm sure you've been wondering, "Gee, what's Allison up to? She got that fancy schmancy smartphone yet still disappears for weeks at a time!"

I guess it's sufficient to say that I've been busy. After I got back from my surprise 2 week trip to Lilongwe, I've been trying to work hard and still be able to visit with friends on the weekends, some of whom are leaving soon. It's part of the PC/volunteer expat culture that there's a constant rotation of people entering and exiting the country (cue "Circle Game"), but it still bums me out that some of my friends are leaving, so I want to see them as much as possible!

Other than that, I've been busy at site. Term 2 is nearly over, which means we are already in a whirlwind of preparing forms 2 and 4 for their national exams in a few months. I've been trying to come up with creative ways to teach such riveting subjects as organic molecules and the phylogeny of organisms to non-English speakers (first step: not using the word phylogeny). Aside from that, I still have the odd Mothers' Support Group and PTA meetings to attend at school, and have been having more meetings to get involved in a local HIV community-based organization and the Catholic Relief Services project in my area. Recently, I've gone over a grant proposal they were preparing to submit and prepped a few activities for a training they want to do with primary school prefects (confidence, effective communication, teamwork). It's nice to get involved in projects I'm interested in after all the stress that comes with working at a school that lacks teachers, resources, and often motivation.

That being said, exciting news at St. Mary's CDSS! We have a new female teacher! The head teacher was so excited to tell me that I won't be alone anymore because there's another lady teacher. So far, she seems very nice and chatty with me, so I hope I can get to know her better.

In other news, it hasn't rained in about a week, and even though it's been sunny, it's slowly starting to get cooler. Amazing! Maybe one day in a few months I'll get a blanket. Also, my local market has been having more and more vegetables, like carrots, green peppers, and green beans! It's amazing. Although I still miss mango season, these veggies, plus avacadoes, guavas, and the occasional pineapple help a lot.

Most exciting, though, is the news that in a few months, I am officially travelling to meet my parents in Paris! I am sososo excited to see them and drink coffee and wine and pretend I remember my high school French. It's mostly been replaced by Chichewaat this point.

For now, I leave you with the following conversation which happened a couple weeks ago in the staff room:

A form 3 student wearing a blazer walks into the staff room and chats with another teacher for a few minutes.
Malawian Teacher: That's a nice jacket. Why are you wearing it?
Student: Because it is swag.
MT: What?
S: Swag. Ask Madame, she knows.
And that's when I nodded and explained the concept of swag to some fellow teachers.

That's right, my students have swag.

Tiwo, nonse!

Nthawi Yamvula - Rainy Season

What's up, readership? It's been a busy past couple weeks, with a trip to Lilongwe that turned from 4 days into 2 weeks. It was fun, expensive, and I got to hang out with lots of important PC staff people (see Mom? I'm schmoozing to improve chances for a better letter of rec in a year. I'm planning for the future!). Unfortunately, the low point was a weekend spent in agony over crippling stomach cramps, followed by the PC dr handing me a cup and requesting a stool sample by 2pm . . . But as they say, it wouldn't be Peace Corps without a rogue bacteria or two.

Anyhow, what's done is done. I realized today that I hadn't done justice to explaining rainy season, so I thought I would try to paint you a picture of it! With words, of course, since I have some serious technological handicaps.

To clarify: during rainy season, it doesn't rain everyday, or all day when it does rain. Some days aill be clear and bright, a blistering memory of hot season. It's always humid, so even when it doesn't rain, your clothes still won't dry.

The following are a collection of 100% true things that have occurred during rainy season:
-The field in front of my house and the church has been transformed into a field of maize. Where there is no maize, grasses grow, until someone like my night watchman cuts them down, because there are snakes. "don't worry," he told me in Chichewa, "I slashed the grass and they all left."
-While this kind-hearted slashing was occurring, my guard left the gate open . . . And my kitten escaped. I miss it and remember ot fondly.
-Even though the area in front ofy house is clear, it still feels like I'm walking on a jungle path when I leave to go to school everyday.
-Planting is growing season, so lots of students stay home from school to help plant and farm. Or they show up an hour or more late. Today in my form 3 class, only about 20 students were present, although there should be about 50 of them.
-Speaking of teaching, have you ever tried to teach while rain is pounding on a tin roof? It's hilarious. Thank goodness I'm loud.
-Today was the first day in about a month I got a sizeable amount of laundry done, due to frequent travels and storms.
-Storms = blackouts. As soon as I hear thunder, I look at my dinner cooking on my hot plate and wonder if I can finish it before the blackout begins.
-Still, that's better than the time there was a blackout all day and I had to put on rainboots before going outside to cook over my little charcoal stove.
-Mangoes, tragically, have left the market, and I miss them astronomically. The current combination of guavas, cucumbers, and avacadoes isn't cutting it, although it's helping.
-I have continued my crusade to be the most casual member of staff at school by teaching in rain boots. Unprofessional? Perhaps, but at least my feet stay dry.
-Everyone at school is sick, teahers and students alike. Most of them sound like they just have nasty colds and coughs, but that's probably because if they have malaria, they're staying home.
-The cockroaches, flies, and mosquitoes that live in my chim swarm out any time I lift the cover. Today I also saw a scorpion there.
-There are more bugs, spiders, and lizards living in my house thab I have ever seen in my life. It's remarkable.
-Bread has gone moldy after about 2 days at my house.

All things considered, though, I think I prefer wet season to hot season. Many nights I now sleep under a sheet and enjoy it!

Eeyore Thoughts Followed by Tigger Thoughts

Sometimes, being at school is frustrating. For instance, when:

-I arrive at 7:15 (and class starts in 15 minutes), and only 2 other teachers and about 5 students are there. Today, I taught biology to 2 Form 1 students for nearly a half hour before other students began to arrive. There should be around 80 students in my class. Sure, it was raining today, but yesterday (when it didn't rain) it wasn't much better.

-Remember when I had my staff meeting the other week, and we resolved to minimize surprise staff meetings during the week so we teach all our classes? My head teacher certainly doesn't. He called meeting during break that continued for another hour and a half, cancelling the next two classes for the whole school.

-At the staff meeting last week, I received the note I've been waiting for for awhile: I don't put enough notes on the board. Come on, Malawi, let's get on the student-centered learning bandwagon! Luckily the parents were really receptive to the ideas that everything on the board counts as notes, even if it doesn't look like the same format they've been taught and even if fellow students are writing the notes on the board. I also encouraged the parents to urge their children to ask me questions on concepts they don't understand, and not to be embarassed by lack of confidence speaking English. After all, I'm so bad at Chichewa I needed another teacher to act as a translator to speak with them! Sl I understand tbe difficulty in learning new languages. Hopefully it helped.

-There's nothing quite like a walk past the seldom-used bulletin board, which now bears the results of a test given to a class, complete with students' names, scores, and a charming heading that reads: "CATASTROPHE".

-I lost my cat. I am a terrible pet owner. I think it escaped my backyard when my night guard was slaahing the grass around my house? I haven't seen it since Saturday and am losing confidence that it will ever return.

On another note, I've decided that my school is like the Malawian version of The Office. My head teacher, the Michael Scott character, really likes to lead meetings and hear himself talk; the students collectively are Toby, always doing something wrong and needing to be called out; the staff room is literred with various characters just trying to do their jobs. I feel like a weird hybrid of Jim (trying not to laugh at everyone), Kelly (as the only female, and the one who uses my special job as an excuse to get out of things I don't want to do), and Angela (who has strange hobbies and frequently disapproves of everyone else).

So thats a lame attempt at bringing the mood back up. Here's some more:

"Our school has a shortage of slashers! We need some more!" No, not to kill students, but to cut the grass! Duh.

-There is a giant cornfield now in front of my house. Lots of the corn is already well over my height. Telling my mother about this the other day, she made an ingenious suggestion: corn maze. (or maize maze? Even better!!)

-Sometimes I just have to think, wow, I'm really in Africa. Like when I'm driving around bar-hopping in a land rover repurposed into a safari vehicle.

-Going into Lilongwe next week for a VAC meeting and a meeting about Camp Sky! I should hopefully also get a chance to chat with the PC IT man about my sad, dying laptop, and upload pictures!

-The best teaching moment of the day, by far, happened during my 2 student private biology lesson in Form 1. We were reviewing a list of things I had assigned the students to classify as "alive", or "not alive", based on a list of characteristics of living things we had studied during the last class. So far, their book had only introduced animals and plants as living things, but I challenged them by putting mushrooms on the list. "Ah! Madam! Mushrooms are not alive!" exclaimed one boy.

"Why not?" I asked in full teacher mode, eager to encourage critical thinking.

"They don't have seeds like maize."

"But how do we get new mushrooms growing, then?"

"God."

Pros and Cons

In my sorority, come election time, we would repeat the refrain time and again: for every con there is a pro. Here are mine:

Con: last week's staff meeting lasted for 5 and a half hours. After teaching until noon. And we didn't even get through our agenda.

Pro: I like to think I started a mini-revolution when, as our head teacher was disparaging the distinct possibility (probability) that our students won't be ready for exams, I suggested that we actually teach all the classes on our schedule (instead of allowing random staff meetings to take over staff time, cancelling class to practice for sports only a small fraction of our students will actually play, etc). Another teacher totally jumped on board, saying we should come to school early on Mondays (gasp!) and move swiftly through our staff meeting and assembly to ensure that our students miss as few classes as possible. We'll see how this goes.

Pro: I have electricity and running water!

Con: They frequently turn off, randomly, making cooking a slightly stressful experience, as it could be over at any moment.

Pro: it's no longer hot season! Break out your umbrellas, or stand under Rihanna's, because the rains are here!

Con: I now understand why we sleep under mosquito nets, because those bugs are EVERYWHERE. I get many new bites everyday, even wearing repellent.

Pro: I got a kitten!! He/she (I'm not confident of the gender, as I've heard conflicting opinions from locals, and I'm very sensitive to this issue after a certain college experience with a female cat named Arthur) is a big fan of eating lots of cockroaches and spiders.

Con: He/she is also a big fan of keeping me up all night with meowing. Constantly and loudly. Hence banishment to my backyard for nighttime hours.

Pro: I managed to talular my own litter box for said kitten!

Con: apparently you're supposed to change litter really frequently, and to this I have to collect te sandy soil near my house. Meaning once again, I will be seen as an incredibly peculiar mzungu.

Pro: I finally ran into my neighbor, the catechist's wife, having lunch outside yesterday and shared some nsima and vegetables with her! This is called integration, people.

Con: I'm pretty confident that I looked like an awkward idiot eating nsima with my hands after such a long absence. I totally spilled crumbling nsima on myself.

And finally,
Con: I am about to attend a PTA meeting which, as important as I'm sure it is, will be at least 3 hours of people talking really quickly in a language I mostly don't understand. Oy.

Pro: after this I'm done for the week! That's right, I changed up my schedule for this term so I finish teaching on Thursdays, so tomorrow I'm going to vist Liwonde and celebrate my site mate's birthday!

Thus begins the term of making suggestions

Malawian Teacher: Why don't you like to teach after the second break? (12:15-2 pm)

Me: The students are so tired then! Plus they're hot, and hungry, and thirsty. *mime student falling asleep on a desk*

MT: You really think that affects how they learn?

Me: . . . Yes.

MT: But we have a borehole right here!

Me: But do they ever drink from it?

MT: Yes! . . . No.

Me: Plus they're hungry. They walk from far away to get here by 7:30 and don't eat until after they leave. Don't you think they get hungry? I do.

MT: But they can have lunch when they get home!

Me: I think we should start bringing lunch to school. Or snacks.

MT: Hahaha!

Just me being a crazy azungu. At least hot season is technically over and I finish classes by 12:40 at the latest! Because even if the students are supposed to make it till 2 without lunch, I can't. I am officially packing myself snacks, too, and I'm not sharing with anyone who guffaws at that idea.

Wisdom From my Head Teacher

"If you have a girlfriend, take her out into the jungle and study there!"

-explaining that only students reegistered at our school should use our classrooms to study

The Papaya/Paw-Paw Conundrum

I don't know why, but this kills me: the word for papaya in Chichewa is papaya. Malawians are taught that in English, papaya is paw-paw (thanks, British colonialism). No matter how many times I tell people I say papaya, they persist in calling it paw-paw. Which, naturally, makes me constantly think of the only pop culture reference to paw-paw I know of, in the song "The Bare Necessities" from the Disney classic, The Jungle Book.

Such are my daily thoughts. In other news, my papaya tree fell down, shortly before round 2 of papaya season is supposed to begin. Apparently a papaya disease is going around Malawi killing trees.

Oh, and in other news, I got electricity!!!! It arrived while I was off on Christmastime travels, so we set it up when I got back. Let me tell you, nothing makes you feel like a rich mzungu like 4 or so young men digging a ditch to connect you to the church's electricity, then doing the same thing a day later to connect to water!!! That's right, not only do I get electricity, but I also have my very own hose. It's practically America over here with all these amenities. Yesterday, I just sat on my floor with my fan blowing into my face, eating cheese cracker snacks from a care package. This is bliss, people.

Of course, today I woke up to a blackout, with no clue when power will be back. Oh well.

And now back to my regularly scheduled programming: grading tests and lesson planning for Term 2, which begins on Monday!