Bola Masiku Ano

So it looks like my last few posts have been pretty negative. This is because my attitude towards things was fairly negative at the time, reflecting the reality that I was dealing with. Thankfully, things have gotten better, especially since that last post. Here are a few highlights from the last few weeks.

IMHO, this is the best time of year in Malawi (I wish I had some nice pics to insert here, but lucid writing will have to do the trick instead). The rains are starting to let up. Everything is lush and green. Glutony is rampant as malnourished villagers find that the pumpkins, potatoes, maize, and peanuts are starting to mature in their fields. With more food in everyone's stomachs, people are generally happier and there is less of a tendency to steal from each other and more of a tendency to share. All of these things are very good, and they greatly outweigh the negative aspects of this time of year, which include abundant mosquitoes and highly energetic children (they didn't heckle me as much in December when their stomachs were empty and they didn't have enough steam to yell at the white guy).

In spite of many delays and minor problems, most of the projects that I have been working on are solidifying and appear to be at least somewhat successful. The girl's hostel is mostly finished except for the painting. They're now building the kitchen and bafas (place to bathe), and we won't actually be able to let people start living in the hostel until these facilities are completed within the next few months. Even though we have many debts to pay off for this project and I have no idea where that money will come from, it looks like this is going to work out after we have spent almost two and a half years farting around.

With the food security project, I've discovered that it's imperative to find good people to work with. This project is assisting five different groups, and each of the five groups is having their own unique problems and successes. I told each of these groups from the beginning back in October that I would use this project to measure their respective competencies. I tried to make it clear to them that I would try to continue working with the good groups and abandon those that didn't seem to have their heads screwed on straight. I tried to take a passive role with this project in order to see which groups are mostly looking to rip off some donor money (unfortunately this happens to be most of the community organizations within Malawi, dare I say the entire developing world) and which groups are actually trying to fulfill their objective of assisting people living with HIV. As I expected, multiple groups have proven to be misguided and looking for an easy kwacha (buck). However, a few have stood out as honest and functional. Not surprisingly, the groups that I haven't had any problems with all have strong female leadership.

Once we harvest everything and wrap up this food security thing, I look forward to starting another project with the groups that aren't trying to pull my chain. We have a few ideas in the pipeline including mushroom farming, winter farming, and home based care training (this is basically giving these local people the skills and supplies to treat their neighbors for simple medical problems so that they don't have to worry so much about walking multiple hours to the nearest health center). I'm most interested with the idea of home based care, but I have to look into it more to see if it is something that we can actually implement before I leave 9 months from now.

You may recall that two of my students were living with me at my old site in Chadabwa. When I came to Mitundu last September I decided that it would be best to live on my own, with the benefits of more privacy and less mouths to feed (amongst other things). For security reasons, a handful of people suggested that I hire a guard or at least have someone to stay in the house while I was away. I consider this, but a guard was going to be expensive (plus there were men living in this house before me by themselves without a guard and they didn't have any problems) and it was difficult for me to find someone reliable and trustworthy to hold down the fort while I was gone, especially on short notice. Well, you could say that I was asking for trouble. I was warned, and I sort of ignored the warnings. Since I started living here in Mitundu, I've been worried about security, and perhaps I was getting lax with making sure to lock everything up tight and always be on my guard. I can also say that I expected a problem to eventually occur. Stories were prevalent of different people getting robbed all the time in Mitundu, and I had little reason to believe they were going to skip my house. I wasn't surprised when it actually happened (see the last post if you don't know what I'm talking about). However, I've learned my lesson the hard way and made a few changes that should prevent any more of my stuff from being stolen.

I invited the two boys that were living with me in Chadabwa to join me in Mitundu. Moses started living with me a few weeks ago, and Fred should come in the next few weeks once he gets done harvesting and selling his potatoes. This arrangement will work out well for all three of us. I'll have extra hands around for chores and people with weapons (we have an ax, hoe, panga knife, and a cleaver. People have been recommending that I buy a gun, but as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I'm not really supposed to have one.) in the house while I'm away to dissuade any crooks from coming in and picking through my stuff. Moses will take his university entrance exam next month (which requires a fair amount of preparation, more so than the ACT/SAT we take in the States), and in my house with electricity he'll be in a much better environment to study. Fred should be able to find more things to keep him busy (I'm thinking this will mostly be work and soccer) here compared to his home village where he is mostly loafing around these days with nothing constructive to do.

So I have roommates again. There are pros and cons to this, but it is the best way for me to keep things safe. It's become clear that the police aren't much help here; they're too busy getting wasted at the bottle store and blackmailing prostitutes (but that's a topic that I won't go into right now since it doesn't really belong on this positive post).

I've been staying busy the last few months studying for the MCAT. Most of you probably know that this is the big exam to get into medical school. I'll go into much more detail about all of this on a future post, but for now suffice it to say that I've started jumping through the hoops that lead to medical school, and I have decided that I want to be a physician. As for this beast called the MCAT, at one time or another, I knew all of the material that it supposedly covers. I'm finding that some of that knowledge is coming back to me quickly while other topics (electromagnetism has always been difficult for me to wrap my head around) are proving to be more elusive and are ending up on flashcards that I flip through whenever I have down time. This is really a thinking exam so memorizing a bunch of equations and constants doesn't help much if you aren't able to actually understand concepts and work your way through convoluted information that is provided on the test to answer the questions. Studying for this hasn't been as easy as it would be back home where I would have easier access to information, high-speed internet, and a testing center, but I'm trying not to feel too sorry for myself. I've been able stock up on prep materials (i.e. books) that are functional in rural Malawi where electricity is unreliable and most people don't have a real good idea of what a computer is. So long as I don't run into any major problems, I'm expecting to do decent enough on this brain-frying test. I'll take it on April 16th in Cape Town, South Africa. I'm really looking forward to this trip. I plan to spend about a week in Cape Town, which is supposed to be one of the most amazing cities in the world, particularly this time of year. I'll take the exam early on, and then I'll have a few days to relax and have fun. I'll let ya'll know how everything works out.

So as you can see, things are better now. Yes, life has its ups and downs, and I think its helpful to try to forget about the downs and remember the ups so that we at least have the illusion that things are good most of the time.

Some food for thought: I have multiple smaller project ideas that only require a little bit of funding (20-100$). I want to know if any of you are interested in helping out with the funding of these projects. If so, please contact me via email (bjvonasek@gmail.com) so that I can give you more information and we can iron out the details.

"The world is my expense,
The cost of my desire,
Jesus blessed me with its future,
And I protect it with fire." Rage Against the Machine

Ndabeledwa

It’s days like this when I really hate living in Malawi (before you continue reading I should make it clear that I have plenty of good days here as well, and hopefully there will be plenty more good days to come-but right now I’m not sure). After spending the night in the city I came home in the mid-morning. While approaching my house, I noticed from about 100ft away that my front door was wide open, and it immediately became clear to me that I’d been robbed. Strangely, my immediate reaction was curiosity (Are those @#$holes still in the house? Did they actually take anything, or did someone just open my front door (yeah right)? Is this really happening?). Then I entered the house, reality struck, and it hurt like hell. The first thing I realized was that they took two mountain bikes, mine and that of a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer whom is currently on vacation and was storing her bike at my house. “OK,” I thought, “Is that all they took?” No, absolutely not. Here’s the list that I’ve been able to compile the last six hours: Shortwave radio, new pair of running shoes that I got while at home during the holidays, Ipod, mattress, blankets, all of my silverware, battery recharger, digital camera, and the two mountain bikes that I have already mentioned. The funny thing is that a bunch of the items, such as the Ipod; battery recharger; and digital camera, will be completely useless to whatever idiot took them because they either forgot to take the charger or they don’t have the appropriate adapters and other junk to make those electronics work.

Another funny thing (I’m trying to look at the bright/funny side of all of this so that I don’t go off the deep end), is that a few days ago I was thinking about how lucky I’ve been that I haven’t had a single security problem in my 2+ years here. I guess I forgot to knock on wood. Many other Peace Corps Volunteers in Malawi have been robbed (actually most of them)-either at home while they are around or away, on the street, or even in the staff room while they are in class teaching. Perhaps I started to feel that this couldn’t happen to me and I became a bit careless, but either way I have received the wake up call.

Going back to the bright side of things, if they try to rob my house again, they won’t find much because they took most of the valuable stuff the first time around. They can go ahead and take my beans, other mattress, charcoal, and stained shirts; that’s about all I got now. The only things that I have left that are still valuable to me are my cell phone and computer, and I usually carry those two things on me so it will have to get ugly if they want that stuff.

The main thing that I’m concerned about right now is that this crap will continue to happen. Based on the experiences of other volunteers, it seems that if your house gets broken into once, it will continue to get broken into. It’s pretty obvious that whoever broke into the house was someone from nearby and they new that I was away last night. From now on, whenever I’m away for even one night, I’ll have to either expect the worst or look for another way to keep things secure. It looks like the best thing to do is have someone stay in the house while I’m gone, but this is a hassle because it requires more planning and it’s hard to find people that you can trust (plus, who’s wants to sleep in a house by themselves when thieves are expected to come?). If this continues to happen (this isn’t the first time, the volunteer that lived in the house before me also had an “incident” less than a year ago), it may be best for me to just get the heck out of hear, but for now I don’t want to think about that option.

Before I continue I should make it clear that all of this just happened so I may be a little emotionally unstable right now. Perhaps some of the stuff will be found and returned to me, and perhaps the people that did this will be caught. However, I doubt any of this will happen. When I filed a report at the police station they didn’t seem all that enthusiastic to help me out: “If we here anything we will let you know, or it you hear any rumors you should let us know.” (How about you getting off your butt and doing an investigation since your title is “Police Investigator.”) I don’t need all that crap anyway. Who needs a bike when you can walk? Who needs an Ipod when you can sing like me? Who needs silverware when you have two hands with all ten fingers? Who needs a digital camera when you have sharp eyes and a brain to remember everything? Unfortunately, without a camera I will be posting a lot less pictures on this blog. Hopefully you will find my writing interesting enough. It should be pretty interesting if exciting stuff like this continues to happen to me…

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Matthew 6:19-21

Opempapempa A Malawi Samachita Manyazi

In the States, we sort of understand how begging works, and depending on where we live and spend most of our time, we do encounter it from time to time. Growing up in the outer suburbs of the Twin Cities, I didn’t have much exposure to this. I recall going into the Cities as a child, usually with my dad going to a Twins game or something, walking through the city and coming across some down and out folks asking for cash. I followed dad’s lead, completely ignoring them, and then once I thought we were a safe distance away, I would start asking a bunch of questions: “What is he doing?” “Why doesn’t he have his own money?” “Why didn’t you give him any money?” “Do you ever give them any money?” I soon figured out that it is best not to hand out money to people in public, and if someone asks you for money, you should give no reaction at all and walk away at a slightly faster pace than when you were approaching. In Minneapolis, this usually seems to work, but in Malawi this often just seems to attract more attention (“this white guy doesn’t seem to be noticing me, maybe if I yell louder and act more like an idiot he will…”).

In Malawi, begging is completely acceptable. It is an acceptable form of employment, entertainment, social interaction, and way to start a conversation. Everyday I hear requests like:
“Give me my money.”
“Give me a pencil.”
“Can you borrow me 100 kwacha.”
“Boss, please help me.”
“Give me 1 tambala.” (This one’s supposed to be funny, a joke to get your friends to laugh. 1 tambala is about 1/150 of a cent. It never gets old, especially if you’re 10 years old and live in Mitundu.)
“Give me my Christmas card.” (This is my all-time favorite. A little girl yelled this to me, in English, as I rode my bike past her on some remote road in the middle of nowhere. I believe it was March)

It seems to me that here in Malawi begging can be divided into three categories: 1) Genuine. A lot of people don’t have the basic needs to get by, and at that particular moment (from their limited perspective) their best option is to ask other people for help. The reasons for them not being able to procure their basic needs can range anywhere from laziness to severe physical disability, but my point here is that genuine beggars are really looking for help and they are not begging for either of the following two reasons.

2) Comedic. If I’m having a bad day or not in a good mood, this kind of begging can really tick me off. Imagine a group of about five guys, most likely losers in their mid-twenties with nothing better to do, standing on the side of the road. They’re board out of their minds because they don’t have any initiative to find something constructive to do. They’re more than likely drunk (A common habit of many men in this area is to find a few hours of piecework (this is comparable to temp work, but its completely unregulated and usually disorganized) in the morning, earn 100 or 200 kwacha (about a dollar) by noon, spend all the money on enough local hooch to get sloppy drunk, and stumble home in the evening, only to realize that all of their children are crying and hungry, but they don’t have a single kwacha to buy dinner. But no lesson has been learned, and they just go and do it all over again the next day. With these two problems of food scarcity and alcoholism in this country, I would guess that we are one of the top ten countries in the world for percent of dietary calories coming from alcohol. However, I highly doubt this statistic actually exists. Please excuse me for going off on this tangent, but I think it gives an interesting snapshot of the situation here. Now, let’s get back to the stuff outside of the parenthesis.). So as they’re standing there, they realize something interesting is about to happen. A white guy is walking down the street, about to pass by them. One nudges to other, “Ask this dude to buy us some booze.” They all start giggling, and then the guy does just that. The white guy then get’s pissed off, tells them to go find a job, ridicules them for being morons, and says some other things that he probably shouldn’t. This happens here about once a month. Who’s the white guy? I’ll leave it up to your imagination to figure that our. Most begging from children falls under this category as well. I’m pretty sure that the first English phrase that Malawian children learn in school is “Give me money.” (I predict that their success rate would go up tenfold if they threw in a “please” at the beginning and a “sir/madam” at the end of the phrase.

3) From left field. From time-to-time I’ll be having a good conversation with someone, talking about anything under the sun, and out of nowhere they’ll ask me for something. Often times I can see the request coming (that’s usually what they call it, a “request”: “Bryan, I have a request for you…”—then I give them the stone face), but every once in a while I’ll be thrown for a loop. This usually happens when I’m talking to a stranger while traveling. I’ll be talking with them for a while, and when they see that we are about to go our separate ways, they figure they might as well give it a shot with something like “Sooo, I have I nephew in secondary school, but we aren’t able to provide school fees for him. Do you think you can assist us?” It never hurts to ask, but it does annoy.

Recently, we have started a project whereby we are distributing bed nets to women of children under the age of five. This is part of a larger effort with the lofty, but not impossible, goal of eliminating malaria. Most of the work (i.e. transportation of nets, distribution, and documentation) is done by Health Surveillance Assistants (HSAs) from Mitundu Community Hospital. HSAs are low-level medical staff that are being used to relieve some of the enormous strain on the healthcare system here caused by a dearth of nurses and doctors (amongst other things). These HSAs are assigned more rudimentary tasks such as organizing outreach clinics, vaccination campaigns, and basic healthcare education for rural communities. Anyways, the hospital administration and I decided that the bed net distribution should be done by these HSAs. This seemed like a good idea to me since the HSAs have the most direct contact with the people we are targeting with this project: children under five in rural areas. Also, these HSAs never seem to be that busy. A typical day for them entails some work in the field in the morning, maybe taking two to four hours, and then sitting in the shade at the hospital playing board games all afternoon. Therefore, I didn’t think that this additional responsibility, participating in the distribution, would overwhelm them with work, especially since there are about 50 of them, and this work is being divided up somewhat evenly so that each person is only doing about 90 minutes of extra work per MONTH. Not surprisingly they have been asking me to give them bed nets as well. Despite the facts that they are paid government employees, participating in a project to assist poor people in rural areas, and not doing a whole lot of extra work, they came right out and told me that they should have an extra benefit from helping with this project (I could go on about this-Malawian professionals and semi-professionals being addicted to allowance and extra benefits, but I’ll save it for a different post). To be honest, it’s been hard for me to deny them since I can’t really do this on my own. The begging has been even worse from non-hospital workers. After starting this project, I’ve been surprised by the number of people that now know my name. It seems like every time I step out the door I hear, “Bryani, kodi mutipatsa manet?” (“Bryan, are you going to give us a bed net?”).

For the most part, people are usually thankful when you assist them here. However, this doesn’t usually stop them from asking for more and more. For example, in previous posts I have been writing about our food security project for people with HIV. In the upcoming months the groups we have been working with will finally start benefitting from this project with what looks like what will be an impressive harvest. In general, (knock on wood) most of our fields look good, and therefore the families of the people in these groups should have plenty of food this year after a good harvest. Nevertheless, a few of the groups have already started asking me how I will help them next, after this project is finished. They are asking me this in spite of my constant reminders, from the beginning, that the purpose of this project is to eliminate their chronic malnutrition and struggle to find food so that they will be healthy and able to invest their time and energy into activities (such as starting a business, increasing their agricultural productivity, or spending more time doing HIV awareness outreach activities that most of these groups already do) that will benefit their respective families and communities. As a result, the idea was that this project would sort of wean them off of external support, putting them on the first step on the latter out of poverty, and allow them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps (ha-da-ya-like them metaphors?). Well, (sticking with the metaphors) weaning isn’t as simple it sounds, the first step on the latter may be relatively insignificant if you consider how tall the latter is, and if you’ve ever tried to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps (or if you don’t want to look like an fool, just imagine doing so), you know that this is completely impossible because the same force you use to pull your bootstraps up also pulls your upper torso down and you end up going nowhere. What I’m saying is that many of these groups expect, or would at least prefer, Bryan to keep helping them. (One more clichéd metaphor, this time with a twist:) It seems that a lot of times, I’m speaking about development in general, rather than giving a man a fish, or even rather than teaching a man to fish, we end up somewhere in the middle-just giving the man a fishing pole and saying, “good luck.” The man is excited to get the fishing pole, because its free and all his friends are getting it, but he soon loses interest once he realizes that he doesn’t know how to use the pole, and maybe he uses it for fire-starter or something. I’m a little bit worried that this is what is happening with the projects I’ve currently got myself into. But all we can do is try our best, evaluate, adjust, and try our best again.

“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
none but ourselves can free our minds.” Bob Marley

Ndabwerera ku Malawi

Living in Malawi for two years has taught me to live by the phrase, “plan for the worst, hope for the best.” This is exactly the approach I took when coming back here a few weeks ago. When I left Malawi for home in December, we had many different projects that we were in the middle of, and I flew back to the States concerned about how things would be going when I got back. Coming back to Mitundu, I was prepared to encounter some disaster that had happened while I was gone. Locusts destroying all of the crops in the area, my house getting broken into, a close friend dying, or the theft of the supplies for the girl’s hostel construction-I wasn’t going to be surprised if any of these things happened. It turns out that everything worked out fine while I was gone, not great but fine.

The hostel that we have been working on for almost two years now should be completed within the next month or so. Hopefully, it will start housing students by April, when the third term of the school year starts. In December, we were concerned about not having enough cement. We purchased enough cement, but the problem was that we purchased more than was available—in the whole country. One characteristic of a third would country: frequent shortages of basic commodities such as cement, fuel, electricity, and…food. Until now will still don’t have the cement that we paid for, but it looks like we already have enough to finish the hostel, just not the kitchens or bathing area. The girls will have to be creative until we get the later constructed.

Our food security project for PLHIV is going along about as good as I could have hoped for. We’ve spent the last few weeks since I’ve been back visiting the various groups that we are assisting. There are no major problems, just little things like one group’s beans not growing at all (this raised suspicion that the expensive hybrid beans that we gave them were never planted at all, but redirected elsewhere (ie stolen)), two groups having squabbles about lazy members that don’t show up to the field to do work, and another group with a field infested with witch weed-a nasty plant that starves maize of nutrients in the soil.

As you may or may not know, malaria is a big problem in Malawi, especially this time of year during the rainy season. One effective way to prevent the transmission of this bug is to sleep under a bed net, which prevents the malaria vector-a specific species of mosquito that only feeds at night-from sucking your blood and at the same time spitting some plasmodium (malaria) into your bloodstream. We wrote up and submitted a proposal in November to get 2000 (as a start) nets that we wanted to distribute to children under the age of five in rural areas where access to nets and halfway decent healthcare is hard to come by. When I left in December, we hadn’t heard anything back about this, and I kind of lost hope and forgot about it. Therefore, it was a surprise when I opened up the door to my little house and found 1000 bed nets inside. We had originally planned to store the nets at the local hospital, but recently there’s been a large turnover in staff at the hospital, resulting in disorder and confusion, so someone though it would be best to just throw all of the nets in Bryan’s house. It turns out this was the right decision to make, and the bright side to only receiving half as many nets as we requested is that I still have a little bit of room to walk around in my house. After some initial confusion and multiple changes of plans, we’ll start distributing the nets this week.

Another potential crisis that I had my eye on was the electricity in my house. I was worried that it would be cut because I haven’t paid my bill for over two months now. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the lights turned on when I first got back to my house. I was also surprised to see that I hadn’t received a bill for either December or January. To me, this was a cause for concern because ESCOM (the Malawi government’s halfway functioning company that has a monopoly over the country’s electricity) is know for causing bizarre fluctuations in one’s account balance, cutting one’s electricity out of nowhere, and doing other things to inconvenience their customers. To avoid any misunderstandings that would blackout my house for an indefinite length of time, I made a trip to their office to figure out what the heck was going on. It turns out that, from ESCOM’s perspective (which is the only perspective that really matters), I overpaid my November bill by about MK3500. I’m pretty sure this didn’t happen. I guess poor customer service and poor accounting sometimes works in the customer’s favor. Now I don’t have to pay my bill until around May!

So things are moving along. Obviously, they could always be moving along better, especially in this crazy place, but most of us are managing to live respectable lives.

"If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people." Chinese proverb

Kwanu ndi Kumeme Kuli Mtima Wanu

It was nice being home, and I’m excited to get back to Malawi. Most people don’t think of taking a vacation to Minnesota in the middle of winter, especially when they live near the equator. There’s good reason for that, but I enjoyed seeing my family and friends after being away for over two years. I had a lot of people tell me that they are reading this blog. I was always looking at the dearth of comments (by the way, the user-unfriendliness of the comments posting feature has been fixed; please refer to the previous post) and assumed that my audience was small, but I was pleasantly surprised to hear that many of you find this interesting. I’ll try to post more frequently this year. It should be easier now that I have a MacBook and daily Internet access. It will just depend on how much time, wit, and energy I have.

Peace Corps often warns and informs us about “reverse culture shock,” meaning that it is difficult to readjust into your original society after being away for a while. However, I didn’t see this as a problem. I definitely was awestruck by this place we call America at first, riding through Minneapolis on the interstate after leaving the airport when I first arrived was almost like a hallucination (ain’t no skyscrapers in Malawi), but I didn’t feel uncomfortable. A few other things that surprised me: HDTV is everywhere now. Driving was like playing a video game (especially with a few inches of snow on the ground). Bruno Mars and Rihanna completely dominate the pop music airwaves (I don’t think I’m exaggerating if I estimate that at least 75% of the time when I turned on the radio it was one of these two singing some lame, cliché love song. They are both great singers, but I can’t believe there isn’t more variety on the radio here. In Malawi, there’s only like ten people that know how to record music, but they still find a way to mix it up more than we do here). Last, I forgot that American women dress so provocatively, even in the middle of winter. If a woman in Malawi has a hemline above her knees it’s a good indication that she’s a prostitute.

Some things that haven’t changed and I’m happy to get away from:

1.Cookie-cutterness. Every freeway exit, town, house, park, etc. looks and feels the same. I went to Applebee’s a few times, and every restaurant had exactly the same floor plan (this makes it a lot easier to find the restrooms). This was the world I grew up in, and I always used to hear yuppies complaining about this cookie-cutter world we live in (Am I a yuppie now? Probably not, I bathe with cold water out of a bucket.), but it didn’t really bother me until I experienced it coming from another world. The other world being Malawi, where everything is different and a surprise, for better or worse (usually worse, but you can make it better with the right attitude-that’s just not very easy to do).

2.Ignorance laced with fear. One of the first things I heard when I set foot on American soil (concrete) was a guy in line with me waiting to go through customs security. He claimed that we should “just nuke the whole Middle East,” which would get us through customs a lot faster. Obviously he was joking and his statement was a bit extreme compared to how most (but certainly not all) Americans feel. It’s easy for me to preach and say this now, but we should be ashamed about how little we (collectively) know about the rest of the world. It is this ignorance that is pointing our country in the wrong direction, down a dark road where our politics are motivated by fear and our old friends no longer trust us.

3.Winter. Humans really shouldn’t live as far north as Minnesota, and I’ve decided that whenever I settle down it will be somewhere where the climate is hospitable.

4. Nevermind, three is enough. Complaining is for losers.

With all this off my chest, I can end by saying that this is really a great country. While talking with people about the last two years of my life, many eluded to the fact that we have it so easy here and we take a lot of things for granted. That’s true; we do have relatively safe and comfortable lives. It’s inspiring to remember that we have this safety, comfort, excess, and extravagance because we work our butts off, make education a priority for all our children, embrace diversity (most of the time in most places), and our quote unquote forefathers made many sacrifices so that we can prosper like we do. Down the road, we will be known as forefathers so let’s try not to screw things up too much.

Check it out, they put my ugly mug on the front page:

www.westshurburnetribune.com

"You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it." Paulo Coelho

Commenting is now easier

I've been informed that commenting on this blog is kind of a pain because you have to make an account and jump through a bunch of hoops. Therefore, I've opened up the comments section for anyone. So feel free to comment if you have a comment. Just don't get too out of hand or we'll have to revert to the old ways.

Ulendo wa kwathu

I think I’ve already mentioned my trip home next month, and I now have a few more details. It looks as though I will fly out on 20 December and arrive in Minneapolis on the 22^nd. I’ll then be in Minnesota until around 13/14 January. I don’t have any concrete plans at this time, but I’ll definitely be spending a lot of time with family and friends. Things I’m looking forward to include (in no particular order): going to the movie theater at least two times, getting a deep dish Top of the Line from Pizza Factory, giving a short presentation about Peace Corps to anyone that is interested at Big Lake High School, watching Bowl Games and college basketball (In the past I would also be interested in watching the Vikings, but for obvious reasons, that’s not the case this year), visiting U of M Medical School (notice-I didn’t write graduate school), not being stared at all of the time, being able to walk around without everyone around me paying attention to everything that I’m doing, drinking good alcohol and coffee, avoiding one month of Malawi’s rainy season, being dumbfounded by the fact that everything is available all of the time, and more than all of these things-seeing family and old friends (it’s certainly been awhile). I suppose there are a few things that I’m not looking forward to: bitter cold, inevitable hassles at the airport during Christmas time, repetitive questions about Africa (but don’t be shy to ask them, I’ll still answer you thoroughly and politely), and not being the most popular person in every room that I walk into (strangely enough this is also something that I’m looking forward to-I guess it will depend on the setting). Most likely, around 13/14 January I’ll be heading east (but not quite to Malawi yet) to New York City to visit some friends for a few days before I fly back to Malawi, leaving NYC on the 18^th and getting back to this beautiful chaos we call Malawi on the 20^th. I’m really excited about seeing New York. I’ll be meeting up with some good friends that I’ve made in Peace Corps and whomever else I might run into. Actually, I’m really excited about this whole trip. It will be refreshing to get away from Malawi for a month, just enough time for me to binge on America; get sick of it; and run back to my simple life here.

On a different note, last month I went on a little adventure with a few buddies of mine.

We climbed the highest peak in Malawi: Mount Mulanje. It was a lot of fun, with gorgeous views, good exercise, and interesting people along the way. However, it was a lot of work as well. It was about 14 hours climbing up. The first day was the hardest. What is commonly called Mount Mulanje is actually a massif, or giant plateau up in the sky. The first day mostly consisted of getting up onto the massif, climbing out of the hot plains and going up and up for about five hours, and then hiking for a few hours on rolling terrain to a nice chalet provided by the Mulanje Forestry Department. At this point, we were on the massif.

On the massif/plataue there are a handful of peaks, but we had our eyes set on one-Sapitwa. In Chichewa, sapitwa means something like “don’t go.” It’s cool to go up onto the plataue, but you’re asking for trouble if you climb Sapitwa since it is known by locals to be inhabited by unfriendly spirits. Well, the next day, going up Sapitwa, we didn’t run into any spirits (maybe my bandana and polarized shades scared them all away). I’ll admit that I feared for my life a few times. I’m not used to scrambling up mountains, but I steadily built up confidence to the point where I was a bit reckless on the way down and no longer worried about making one small mistake and falling hundreds of feet. The top of Sapitwa, which is the top of Malawi (OK, I know that’s not saying a lot), had a breathtaking panoramic view.

However, as I can imagine is the case climbing most mountains, the arrival on top was a bit anticlimactic. We took our time going down, and thanks to Newton’s invention of gravity, the descent was a lot easier (if my knees and quads had a conscience, they might not agree with this statement). There’s a nice pool/waterfall near the entrance to the park that we used, and we thought it would be wise for us to bathe our disgusting bodies in there before we returned to society. That was the end of the excitement. I then headed back north. I must say that I felt much more safe climbing the mountain than I did traveling back on Malawi’s killer highways with demonic minibus drivers, swindling bus conductors, drunken truck drivers, pot hole polka dotted pavement, and 120 mph BMWs. Nevertheless, I got back to Mitundu, with its easy-to-dodge oxcarts and bikes, in one piece-happy to be safe at home.

I don’t have much more to say right now. Work’s coming along slowly, but things should pick up a lot this month as the funding for our girl’s hostel and food security projects comes in. I’m also getting started with teaching about fifteen secondary school graduates (such as health and agricultural workers, primary school teachers, and other younger adults looking to improve their lot in life) in the evenings. The idea is that I’ll help them with a few subjects, most likely Biology; Physical Science; and Math, so that they can retake the national exams next year, hopefully do better than the last time they took it, and then ideally move forward on their career path. It might be a little chaotic leaving all this behind for thirthy days when I come home next month, but what isn’t chaotic in Malawi?

"It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err." Mahandas Gandhi