January Wrap-Up

Time to wrap up January. I’m currently on my last leg back to Colby…. Flying from DC to Portland. It’s been a crazy last two weeks, as probably illuded to by my lack of postings. We spent both weeks at Mkoma Full Primary School, the primary school located right next to Mchezi CBO that we’ve worked with extensively in the past. Days were once again full of teaching. Reinier and I worked with the teachers at Mkoma, but it was tough because they could only gather from 11am-1pm, which was always during our empowerment sections which meant no observation. So we focused more on discussions and activities than watching WC teachers and their interactive methods. While I think this was sometimes beneficial, it was often difficult to talk about the benefits of discussions, games, and science experiments without seeing them in action. It was also rough that the teachers didn’t hear all of the basic facts about HIV in those lessons, so discussions were sometimes sidetracked by lessons on exactly what a t-cell is and why the immune system is important.

Homestay these two weeks was fun. The girls stayed with the headmaster of Mkoma and his family. The headmaster himself was super busy so we rarely saw him. His wife was wonderful although it took a good bit of work to convince her we wanted to help with chores. We cooked dinner one night (but didn’t finished until 9pm), started a fire, and cleaned our own rooms. We couldn’t convince her to let us help with dishes or the cleaning she normally did during the day. The family also really liked to give us our space, which made interactions difficult. They ate dinner in a separate room after us every night but two, when we insisted they eat with us. The kids were incredibly shy and would walk really quickly through any room we were in. We finally got Happy, the 18-year-old boy, talking our last day because we’d attended a church service with him the night before. He wants to be a preacher and is really passionate about Christianity.

The church service itself was unlike any service I’ve been to before. I think it was just the prayer group that was meeting, not the entire congregation. There were about 8 Malawians who attend extra meetings Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights for a few hours. We joined their numbers in song and dance. Twice during the hour or so we were there, the group broke up so that people could pray individually. Those from Mchezi paced, yelled, swayed, hit the walls, and lay on the floor. The rest of us prayed in ways I’d seen before: bowed heads, kneeling at a pew, and always silently. The energy in the room was phenomenal but I was incredibly unprepared for the format.

And now it’s Feb. 12, I’ve been back at school for just under two weeks now and am still trying to get back into the swing of college life. Funny story. One of the interns from January was actually in the DC airport with me, somehow we hadn’t realized it before. So we ended up hanging out for about an hour near my gate. It was great to look through some pictures together and start to process the month. Then I finished my trip home and finally got back to Colby.

We wrapped up the session in typical fashion at the lake, complete with our trip to Lake Malawi. We had a bonfire, ate yummy grilled cheese sandwiches, and read by the water.

Now I’m just looking forward to graduation, summer sessions, and living in Malawi! The plan right now is to do some year-round programming for World Camp. I’ll hopefully work on sustainable aspects of our program, things like continuous support for the World Camp Clubs we set up, testing to see if kids remember what they learned a few months after our regular program, setting up project menus so professional volunteers can complete a project that will really support preexisting efforts of CBOs and schools instead of planning what they’re interested in, and working with our Malawian staff to place them in year-round and bigger roles in our programming. Needless to say, I’m super excited and can’t wait for May!

Take the Bad with the Good

So this week I worked with two wonderful teachers for four days at Chimutu Full Primary School. I thought we had a great time, and we did. We talked about some really serious issues and debated everything from gender roles to teaching methods. We also talked about our families, personal goals, and present realities. The standard 7 teachers assured me they would continue to teach what they’d learned with World Camp this week.

But today, after getting home after our final day, one of our translators told me the teachers thought I didn’t care about them. They had wanted to be paid for their time but weren’t. They were upset I hadn’t checked in with the headteacher every morning when we arrived and every afternoon when we left. They also wanted me to update him on our daily activities. (In my defense, they pointed this out to me on the second day and I checked in every time after that but he never asked about our activities and I never told him). They also thought I served them Sobo from the same cups we used for our deforestation demonstrations, the same cups that hundreds of kids have touched and sit on the dirt floor of every classroom they’re used in.

Yet they told me none of this. They didn’t ask me for money (which I wouldn’t have given but would gladly have explained why we didn’t provide a stipend), they went to a Field Staff. They didn’t tell me they’d wanted me to keep the headmaster up-to-date on our program. They didn’t ask whether the cups were the same or not, they just assumed. And they concluded I hadn’t respected them enough to bring clean cups for Sobo.