Tatsegula nyumba ya asungwana!

Life moves on in Malawi. This time of year, people are harvesting their crops, reaping the benefits of the work they have done in the past year. As with the past few years, tobacco prices have been very low, and I wonder why people aren't catching on to this (I often ask people: "Every year you work your ass off, spend lot's of money on inputs, and end up with nothing after selling your tobacco harvest. Will you cultivate a different cash crop this year?" The common answer: "No sir, we always depend on tobacco."). At least half of the economy in Malawi is tobacco-based, and these low prices (not to mention a lack of innovation) will have negative long and short-term effects on this already deeply impoverished country. But the soya bean farmers are doing well. The prices of this easy to cultivate, legumous, soil-enriching crop are through the roof, and I can only hope that more people will grow this food-crop in the future instead of the low-grade, (child) labor-intensive, environment destroying, unprofitable crop we call fodya (tobacco). However, I have come to realize that it takes a long, long time for people to change their ways so I don't see any real changes coming any time soon. I guess it's most effective when we learn the hard way.

The girl's hostel is finally being used. It isn't really finished, but we decided that it's close enough to start having residents. About half of the rooms don't have windows (apparently we ordered 40 instead of the 60 that we needed, oops!), the kitchens aren't roofed yet, and the contractor and his workers haven't been paid in a while. These first two problems aren't really a big deal (from a rural African village perspective) since we don't expect to see much rain until December. In spite of these deficiencies, 16 girls started living in the building last week. I live a safe enough distance (15 kilometers) away so that I don't have to hear everything about the hostel, but it sounds like things are going well. The girls haven't started killing each other yet, and they even did some much needed landscaping last weekend. We decided that since the school year is almost over, only the Form 4 (equivalent to 12th grade) girls will live in the hostel for the rest of this school year. In this manner, starting with fewer boarders will hopefully allow us to iron out some of the wrinkles before we fill it to full capacity at the beginning of next school year in September. This is all good news. I certainly have some concerns about how this hostel thing is going to progress, but I won't go into all that right now. Here are a few pictures of the almost finished but still being used building:

I mentioned in my last post that I was eagerly awaiting my MCAT results. Perhaps my delay in writing about these results is an indication that they ended up sub-par, but that is not the case at all. Avoiding the urge to brag (J), I will just say that my MCAT results will not hinder my chances at getting into most schools. These results ended up being almost exactly what I expected, and I am satisfied with them. It's the rest of the medical school application that I have to worry about now. I'm still working on getting together and polishing up my personal statement, letters of recommendation, transcripts, and other odds and ends so I can send out my primary applications in the next few months (if any of you would like to edit my personal statement please let me know because I need all the help I can get). My tentative list of schools that I will send primary applications to includes: University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and Duluth, University of Saint Louis, Creighton, Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, Rush, Rosalind Franklin, and Loyola (the last three are all in Chicago). Anyone!, Everyone!, please send me an email (bjvonasek@gmail.com) if you have any advice about what schools I should apply to or what schools I should add to this list. I certainly don't have the best idea of how to go about doing this, but my general strategy is to not waste my time applying to out of state public schools. I'm targeting public schools specifically in Minnesota and private schools in the upper mid-west. Because applying to medical schools is expensive and I have the budget of a Peace Corps Volunteer, I'm trying to limit the number of schools that I apply to while at the same time not hurting my chances of matriculating next August (I absolutely don't want to do all this application crap over again next year!).

Right now my first choices are UM-TC and Duluth (if I decide that I really want to work in an underserved rural area I think UMD will be my top pick (because they are one of the best in this area), but I haven't decided that yet). If I get accepted to either of those schools, then that is where I will end up going. All of the other schools are just back up plans. Perhaps I am misguided? I don't know. Let me know what you think (via email, I haven't heard from a lot of you in a while, and it's nice to get an email from someone other than Amazon.com or Wells Fargo from time to time).

Once the schools receive the primary applications they send out secondary applications to almost everyone that has adequately completed the primary application. The secondary applications include a handful of essay questions and other odds and ends, and this is also where the schools start profiting from the application fees. Ideally, these secondary applications are submitted late summer/early fall, and if you make the cut, you are invited for an interview. Interview season tends to last from September to March (it varies a lot depending on the school). Unfortunately, I may be at a slight disadvantage with the interviews because I probably won't be back to the States until around the Holidays, but I'm hoping that I'll land a few interviews and have a chance to get in somewhere by convincing some school that this brute from Africa might make a decent doctor someday. We'll see what happens.

I never thought that I would say this, but life is becoming somehow ordinary here. I believe how you wake up in the morning is a good indicator of how things are going. If you wake up without gumption and apathetic, not looking forward to the next 16 or so waking hours, then you probably need to make a few changes in your life and take things in a different direction. If you wake up eager to tackle the day (or even better if you can't sleep because you're so excited for the next day), then things are going well and you're on the right track. I think most of us wake up somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, not really excited by nor discouraged by the ordinary day ahead. This is where I'm at right now. I'm not saying that I'm having a hard time here but that the novelty of Malawi has worn off and there's not as much excitement as there used to be. Maybe I need a vacation or something.

"Whatever is subject to origination is all subject to cessation." Gautama Buddha

Ndabwerako ku John

Cape Town may be the most beautiful city I have ever seen with my own eyes. This isn't saying a lot since it is coming from me (what am I comparing it to? Lilongwe? Saint Cloud? LOL), but my five days there were well spent. I flew down there from Malawi on Thursday with the plan of staying there until the following Friday/Saturday. However, once I realized that I don't like traveling by myself very much and Cape Town is an expensive place to move around (at least from my perspective with a sub-minimum wage Peace Corps "allowance"), I decided to cut the trip short a few days so that I could be back in Malawi by Wednesday to hang out with my friends over the long Easter weekend and save some kwacha.

But back to Cape Town: wine, sun, and lots of white luxury compact cars. My first few days there I laid low. Like I said, I got there on a Thursday (the evening of 13 April to be exact). I settled into a nice backpackers' place (for you Americans that probably don't know what a "backpackers'" is (don't feel bad, I had never heard of this kind of establishment before I came to Africa), it's similar to a hostel, where you can sleep in a dorm-style room, self-cater if you want, meet other usually slightly strange travelers, and pay relatively low prices) called Atlantic Point Backpackers. It was a good place for me to relax and get focused for the real reason I came to Cape Town: to take the infamous MCAT.

I was set up to take this test on Saturday morning so, upon arriving, I had about 36 hours before I went to war with the computer on the third floor of 80 Strand Street, Cape Town, South Africa. On Friday, I thought it would be a good idea to go and check out 80 Strand Street and make sure things were ready to go for 8am Saturday morning. In the afternoon, I showed up at the exam center. I presented myself at reception: "Hello, I just want to make sure that I'm at the right place for my MCAT exam tomorrow." "Ummmm, tomorrow is Saturday, and we're closed on Saturdays." This is the point where I almost fainted. I was further informed that I should have received a conformation number from the private company that runs the MCAT all over the world. "No, I never got an email like that." "Okay, let me call them. Please have some coffee and take a seat in the waiting room." The last thing I needed while having a nervous breakdown was coffee. I waited for about half an hour, trying not to have a panic attack in front of everyone. The receptionist then asked me to give them a few hours to figure things out. "Please come back at around four. We should have things figured out by then." So I wandered around the city for a few hours, wondering if this was going to turn into a disaster. I had been studying for over three months, spent lots of money on plane tickets and such, and the only other way I would be able to take this exam for the upcoming admissions cycle was to go back to the North American continent. I went back at four. The receptionist was on the phone, and she gave me the most beautiful thumbs up I have ever seen. After finishing the phone call she told me that she would come in tomorrow morning (Saturday) to administer the exam and that she cleared everything up with the folks back in the States. What a relief. All that stress, and I hadn't even taken the exam.

The next morning everything went well. I showed up early, went through the necessary procedures, and beat my brain to death for about four and a half hours. I felt as confident/uncertain about my answers as when I was taking my practice tests, and since I was doing good enough on those practice tests to get into a medical school, I am hoping that I will also do good enough on this "real thing" (yes, I am knocking on the wood of my dining table as I type this, better safe than sorry, and I'm not ashamed to say that I have become slightly more superstitious after living in Africa for well over two years now). As the website says, I'll have the results back on May 17, 5pm Eastern Time. I am waiting anxiously.

After getting the MCAT out of the way, it was time to start being a tourist. There were only a few things that I really wanted to do while I was there, and I didn't want to (nor did I have the patience or money to) linger around for days on end drinking to much and getting sun burnt on the beaches of the far east Atlantic Ocean. I trimmed the trip down, miraculously booked flights back to Malawi on Wednesday right before Easter weekend, and had some abbreviated fun seeing the stunning Cape Town area. I went on an interesting historical tour of Robben Island. This is where Nelson Mandela, amongst countless other political prisoners, was detained for 18 years during later years of the apartheid era in South Africa. This is where the Nobel Peace Prize winner spent most of his time:

In the wake of last year's World Cup, Cape Town has been jazzed up a lot. They now have an open-top double-decker bus that you can ride for a cheap, two-hour tour of the city. I did this one afternoon, getting lots of great pictures and a burnt red nose.

South of the city stretches Cape Point, which arbitrarily distinguishes the boarder between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The southern portion of the point is a protected national park with great views, shrub land, and lots of little critters running around. The park ends where the continent drops off into the ocean, where you think you can see Antarctica but that's crazy since it's hundreds of kilometers away. I went on a day trip in the park with an operation that offers "alternative tours" of the point. This included some hiking and biking, and there were a handful of interesting people to bum around with.

I also went on a wine tour. Like I said before, I quickly realized on this trip that traveling alone isn't for me. I thought the wine tour would be awkward with me guzzling reds and whites and ports by myself amongst other people separately having a good time. It turned out that although the others on the tour were in little groups, they also had the intention of getting their money's worth of alcohol, and it was therefore easy to fit in and have a good time. I don't plan on making a habit of downing a glass of champagne in the middle of the morning and then drinking through the afternoon (it makes for a drowsy evening and an early bedtime), but I thoroughly enjoyed touring the wine farms of the region, hopping from drink to drink.

That was about it. Again, Cape Town is a beautiful, fully developed city. It was like being back home in the States where things are expected to work properly (as opposed to a place like Malawi where it is a pleasant surprise when something works as it's supposed to). Besides the scare on Friday with the test, I had a great time. It was nice being somewhere where diversity is the norm and people don't hoot and holler at you while you walk down the street just because you're a foreigner. There is a lot of money in this city: sick cars, multi-million dollar (rand) beach houses, and even skyscrapers. Here's a perhaps controversial message to all you taxpayers back in the States: "Maybe South Africans can (or should be able to) take care of themselves, and there is no need to have hundreds of Peace Corps volunteers farting around in the country." Certainly there are problems there, but at some point, with all the millionaires cruising around in their Ferraris; Audis; and BMWs, we should probably just let them take care of their own problems since they are clearly able to if they only had the compassion for the poor that us Americans have (I'm not sure if my sarcasm is coming through here). I'm not saying that Peace Corps Volunteers don't fart around in other countries (for example Malawi, you could argue that I'm farting around right now), but I feel that our farting around is more useful in places the don't have Apple computer stores and eight lane highways and World Cup Soccer stadiums. Or maybe I just don't have a good enough perspective on things.

Anyways, it's good to be back in Malawi without that damn test hanging over my head. I'm looking forward to the next eight months here before I come home (hopefully just before the holidays). We have a bunch of work stuff and fun activities in the pipeline so I should be staying busy. However, after getting a taste of the developed world, I can't tell you how excited I am to get back to America. In the meantime, I'll be chugging along here.

"Progress consists, not in the increase of truth, but in freeing it from its wrappings. The truth is obtained like gold, not by letting it grow bigger, but by washing off from it everything that isn't gold." Leo Tolstoy