Term 1 is in the books!

My first term as a teacher in Malawi ended a few weeks ago. It blows my mind sometimes when I think about how fast time is moving. One year ago I had never taught more than a weeks worth of one single class and now I have four courses under my control. Isn't it incredible how one year can change your life? 

The term started kind of rough. It took me a while to get my footing but once I got my balance I could feel improvement with each passing week. I had been taught to be a teacher in the 21st century. Yet I found myself in a dirt floor classroom with open air windows and the occasional chicken pecking at the ground. I had learned to be a teacher in a place where SmartBoards hang on walls and sets of calculators sit on shelves. The adjustment hasn't been easy, and is no way near complete, but I'm starting to feel like I'm getting the hang of it. 

There are days here where I've felt like I've lived in Malawi my whole life. I don't embarrass myself greeting anyone in Tumbuka and my lessons go as planned. These are usually the days when I can catch a minibus to the market within 5 minutes without being crammed into the person next to me or a student offers to fill our water buckets at the bore hole. I would say the best example of a day like this was when I taught my first lesson under a mango tree. My form 2 class struggled with behavior at the beginning of the term. They are a tough bunch but after a few weeks it had improved. To reward them I decided to have a little fun (and by fun, I mean 'math teacher fun') and hold class outside. It was a beautiful day and I could tell the kids were getting a little stir crazy. I gathered them all under the mango tree and we did this lesson. It was a hit! Everyone loved it and I could tell they had improved their skills of reducing fractions and adding positive and negative numbers. Who wouldn't have fun when solving tangled ropes with math? It felt completely natural to be teaching outside, using only a chalk-board and rope as my materials. It was a day in Khwawa that I will not soon forget.

Conversely, I also have days where I wonder what I'm doing here. These are the days when I'm over charged for tomatoes at the market or the minibus fare from my village because I'm a mzungu (white person) or the days when I find children in my garbage pit combing through rotten food and empty boxes in their bare feet. I have days where I walk into class and after 20 minutes of struggle I realize students aren't paying attention to constructing a parallelogram because only 4 out of 50 of the kids have a straight edge, compass, or protractor. 

But what is life without the bad days to make you truly appreciate all the happy times? Overall, my first term at Khwawa was pretty amazing. I am incredibly thankful for the opportunities I've had so far and I'm looking forward to the next two terms!

Tough Decisions

This post is long over due. I want to tell you all about the school where I am teaching and living.

I have been teaching at Khwawa CDSS since the beginning of September. This week will mark the 9th week of classes for the 14 week term (2 of which are for exams at the end).

There are three types of government secondary schools in Malawi. To be selected to such a school, students take an exam in Standard 8 (8th grade). Only the top third of students are selected to secondary schools. Of that top 33%, the students are sent to either a National Boarding School, a District Boarding School, and a Community Day Secondary School. Most students are enrolled in a CDSS and it is the cheapest option for students.

Once students are in secondary school, there are two big exams that they have to take. The first is called the JCE (Junior Certificate Exam) and is administered at the end form 2 (the second year). This exam is to see how the students are progressing. The exam is pass/fail and it must be passed to continue in school. The second exam is the MSCE (Malawi Senior Certificate Exam) and is taken at the end of form 4 (4th year). This is the exam that will determine if students can attend university, a trade school, or even get a job.

At our CDSS I am teaching 4 different courses with 23 periods a week. I teach mathematics for form 1, 2, and 3 and Physical Science for form 1. Form 1 and 2 have about 50 students each and form 3 has about 25.   There are nine periods throughout the day starting at 7 am and ending at 1:20 pm. The students stay in their classrooms divided by form and the teachers rotate through the classes.

I'm also the Form Mistress for form 1...which means I'm basically the class teacher. I take their attendance each day and monitor behavior. I'm also in charge of registering each student, knowing their information, and assisting with bursary support if they receive it.

A few weeks into the semester, our headmaster, Mr. Kamwambi came to our staff meeting with information about a new government bursary (scholarships) that is being piloted for form 1 students. As the head teacher I was asked to assist the bursary committee with interviewing the students. About 20 students were noted as being the neediest of their peers and it was my job, along with one of the Malawian teachers, to help them fill out the application. The application was three pages long and full of questions to help the government gauge the neediness of the student. Here are a few of the questions:

• Does your family own any cows? goats? pigs? chickens?
• What is the roof of your house made of? (thatch, metal, tiles)
• What are the outer walls of your house made of? (burnt bricks, unburnt bricks, mud and sticks)
• Is your mother living?
• Is your father living?
• Who takes care of you?
• Does your household own a bicycle? radio? cell phone?
• How many children in your household are attending primary school? secondary school?

After listening to the heart-breaking answers of my students, many of whom I learned are orphans, it was then my job to rank each students by their level of neediness. How was I supposed to do that? How was I supposed to rank my students based on their neediness when ALL of them, including those who weren't interviewed, should be ranked number 1. How could I choose? 

Thankfully, Sami was there to help me. Ranking my students based on their applications was probably one of the hardest things I've had to do this term. It just didn't seem fair to me that I had to rank a person lower because maybe only one of their parents is dead, compared to two; or maybe they have burnt brick walls, where one of their peers is living with walls made of mud and sticks.

This process forced me to really open my eyes to the poverty my students live in every day of their lives. It forced me to understand the lives my students have outside my classroom and the reality they face when they leave the school grounds. Where do they get food? How far do they walk for water? Who is taking care of them?

Nyika and Vwaza

This past weekend Sami and I were invited, along with our neighbor Aaron, to go on a safari with a few other volunteers in the area. How could we pass that up??

There are four Aussie volunteers north of us at two different schools. In addition, there is also a Canadian volunteer here with Determined to Develop for a few months. Two of the Australians have a student whose father works for the National Park Service in Malawi. He offered to take them on a trip for free for up to ten people. All they had to do was split the cost of the gas for the hired car he would get us. As far as the food, all we had to do was bring the supplies and the staff would cook it for us. Score!!

On Friday afternoon, Aaron, Sami, and I packed our bags and set off for the stage at Khwawa. The stage is the bus stop just down the hill from our houses. It's where we pick up public transport or sometimes Matt will pick us up on his way to Maji Zuwa. We were picked up in a safari truck by the 4 Aussies, a Canadian, our guide (who was in posession of a rather large gun), and our driver. It was a 6 hour drive to Nyika National Park and most of it was on bumpy dirt roads. Nyika is the largest park in Malawi and it was also the first. The locals call is the Scotland of Malawi because of the rolling hills and frigid temperatures at night. We arrived late Friday night and stayed in the camping hostel that the park operates.

Saturday morning was safari time! We ate a quick breakfast of instant milk with corn flakes, and bread and peanut butter and headed out in the truck. We trekked through the park for hours and saw tons of wildlife. We saw antelope, zebras, warthogs, giant things with horns that looked like giant deer, and some awesome looking birds. Not only does Nyika have beautiful wildlife, but the scenery is gorgeous as well. In the park is the second largest peak in Malawi and a few protected Juniper Forests. Apparently Tolkien traveled through the area and based some of the settings in the Lord of the Rings books after the landscape of this park and the Zomba Plateau in southern Malawi. Our guide also showed us the fancy cabins and lodges in the parks that I'm sure a lot of international tourists stay in...not a volunteer's budget!

The next morning, Sunday, we packed up our hostel and headed out of Nyika in search of more traditional animals that you think of finding in Africa. Our guide was nice enough to get us into Vwaza Wildlife Reserve and inside the park we also picked up another guide and a random Peace Corps Volunteer who happened to be there that day as well. His name was Stony and he is stationed at the Reserve as part of his service. Inside Vwaza is a giant watering hole, reminiscent of The Lion King scene when Pumba recalls his traumatic experiences there. In fact, we talked a lot about the Lion King on our trip. How could you go on a safari and not sing every song? Anyway, back to Vwaza. Our first animal we met was a herd of elephants. They were heading back from the watering hole and we caught them just in time. The mother of the herd got a little territorial so we had to drive away, luckily enough we ran into a few more herds along the way. Once we finally got to the watering hole, there were TONS of hippos. Get it? Tons? Anyway, they were awesome. It was kind of surreal to see the elephants and hippos. They are such massive creatures and something you only see in movies or on TV. Also at the lake were some impalas and Kudu.

We had an awesome safari and I can't wait to hopefully do it again soon. Sami and I plan to travel to southern Malawi after our term ends in early December. We're hoping to hit up the Zomba Plateau and Liwonde National Park.

I'm headed to Livingstonia this weekend. Sami and I are hiking with a guide starting at our house in Khwawa. It should be about a five hour hike. On Sunday I will be attempting to skype with my church in Farmersville for World Communion Day. Hopefully I will be able write a few more posts on Saturday.

Life at Khwawa

I've lived at my house at Khwawa for a few weeks now and so far so good.

It's a small house with four rooms, an outdoor kitchen, shower, and latrine and we just recently got a fence around our yard. Woo!!

Luckily enough, our neighbor is a Peace Corps Volunteer from Texas who is starting his second year teaching at the school. He has been a huge help to us as we've gotten started. Seriously, I think I would be starving without him.

For water, we walk about 20 yds to the water pump. We have buckets that we fill up every so often and we even were able to buy a bucket with a nozzle. The nozzle is useful for washing our hands and for filling cups and pans.

A typical meal for us includes cooking on our mbaola (charcoal stove) or over an open fire. We eat a lot of rice, beans, and tomatoes! Sometimes we spring for a soda at the shop by the road and I'm very thankful for the Kool-Ade I brought from home! (hint hint ;)

Sorry the posts have been few and far between! I will try to post at least once every weekend. It's my plan to spend the weekends at Maji Zuwa or traveling around Malawi. This weekend I'm in Mzuzu with Sami and our PCV neighbor, Aaron.In Mzuzu we found pizza....and ICE CREAM!!! oooooh yeeeaaahhh. Also, we met two Ohians! One from the columbus area and one from Akron. What a small world!

Cobras, Lizards, and Crabs....Oh My!

Many who know me know that I am not an outdoorsy type of gal. I’m not a big fan of bugs or critters and I would be a happy camper if I never had to see a spider again. (Side note: I probably wouldn’t be afraid of spiders if I had not been subjected to the horrors of the movie Arachnophobia as a small child. Thanks, dad. I can still to this day only watch that movie in daylight.) A fact I’m thankful to know is that there are not poisonous spiders in Malawi….just really huge ones. I think I can get over that. The animals that are poisonous though are the snakes. Great. Awesome. Wonderful. Are you catching my sarcasm here? (Brenda Gisewite may want to stop reading at this point. Skip directly to the next paragraph.) One night as Sami and I were headed back to our rooms for bed, we met our night watchman, Nathan, on the bridge. He told us in a very matter of fact tone that he had just killed a cobra by our chalet and that he had put it in the ditch under the bridge. He was so calm that I didn’t even understand what he said. I think I had to scrape my jaw off the ground once I finally comprehended that a 60 year old man killed a massive cobra with a stick. A STICK. This is not a drill, this is not a ride at King’s Island in the 90’s, this is a real f@%#ing cobra that is usually only seen in zoos or Indiana Jones movies in America. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep very soundly that night. 

Let’s move on, shall we? The lizards are actually pretty awesome. They’re the same little guys you might see on a vacation to the Caribbean and I remember them from when I was in Honduras. These critters are on my side of the matter when it comes to spiders except I think they take it a little far. They EAT the spiders. Praise baby J! It’s almost as if they are my army in a war against the arachnids. ALL the lizards are welcome in my house and one of my favorite things to do is sit under the Mango tree and try to count how many are on the branches. 

Crabs. Did you know that there are crabs in Lake Malawi? Because I didn’t. I was in the kitchen cooking and had asked Sami to go to the boys’ laundry bin for an egg when I heard her shout from the other room. (let me explain why there are eggs in the laundry bin: The bin itself is a large wicker basket with a lid. The hen likes to go in there and lay her eggs. I don’t know why. It just does.) When she went over to the bin, she only saw the legs sticking out from behind and had thought it was a rather large spider, hence the shouting. When I came out to see what the ruckus was all about, I saw Fumbane (foom-bon-e) holding up the mop with a crab dangling from the end. It was something that both of us never expected to see but it was definitely a highlight from the past two weeks. 

I have made it to Malawi safe and sound. I’ve been spending my first weeks in country at Maji Zuwa, which is the place where I stayed when I visited two years ago. Matt was nice enough to let us stay here to become acclimated to the culture and to learn a few skills before we moved to the house at Khwawa Secondary School where Sami and I will be living and working; me for the next year, her for the next five months.

While at Maji Zuwa we have been learning a few key phrases in Tumbuka from the boys who work and live here. We’ve also been learning how to cook Malawian dishes over a fire from the women who work in the kitchen as well as from a few girls that live in the village.

The first Sunday we were here, Matt asked two of the girls who live in Sangilo Village to take us on a tour to meet their families, see their homes, the primary school, and the hospital. The walk around the village was also an opportunity for us to get out of Maji Zuwa for a while. Although this place is gorgeous and amazing, we were going a little stir crazy. We walked for an hour and a half and had a great time. While we were walking with Alice and Patricia (the two girls) asked for our surnames. After I told them mine Alice started smiling and I asked why. She replied that that was the name of her sponsor. This was huge news. My mom and dad are her sponsors! As her sponsors, they pay for her education in Secondary School including school fees, uniform and shoes, books, and a bicycle among other things. How often is it that you are able to meet the person that is benefiting directly from a donation or sponsorship? Another cool thing is that Alice will be one of my students at Khwawa CDSS (Community Day Secondary School). School fees for a CDSS come to about $15 and it’s more than most families can even think about saving for the children and in most to all cases, if there is a choice between education a son or a daughter, the son will be chosen as top priority.

Meeting Alice and learning that my parents sponsor her education was a great start to my journey in Malawi. A lot has happened since then but I plan to break up my posts into a few shorter stories instead of having one large one. Internet will be sparse so posting and checking emails will happen infrequently. I did get a cell phone and I am able to text a few times a week but calling out is really expensive.

Stay Tuned!

This blog is being set up so that I can share my experience in Malawi as it is happening.

Stay tuned as more posts surface.

I arrive in Malawi on August 2nd!