Holiday update

So apparently I’m not going to be great at this whole, updating every couple of weeks thing on this blog… I’ll at least attempt the whole, I’ll update when I can even if it means every couple of months! A lot has happened since I last updated. A lot of highs, a lot of lows. Had my lowest low yet and almost booked that flight back home. Luckily I have an amazing support system both here and at home and I am still here in my little brick/mud house!

Updates about Malawi:

Hot Season: Holy cow they are not kidding! While I am very lucky to be placed within the mountains, it was still so very hot. I had many nights where I would lay in bed not wanting anything to touch me, dripping sweat. A trick Malawians (and PCV’s) use is to get a chitenje wet and use that as a sheet since the evaporating water will help to cool you down. While it helps for a bit, eventually the water is gone, or your sweat has just made it more wet and you are back to tossing and turning trying to find that one position where the sweat doesn’t drip into your eyes or tickle the back of your neck. I say all of these things knowing I didn’t even have the worst of it. My poor friends down south live literally in a swamp… I don’t think I could have survived. Malawians also do not do work when its this hot. Makes for an unproductive season (which turns out is most seasons)… unless you want to wake up at 4am.

Rainy Season: Again, no joke. Chitipa has been lucky according to my neighbors and friends in the village. Rains started sporadically in October allowing for farmers to begin working the soil in preparation for planting pretty early. Most of October was rainy, the equivalent of spring in Iowa with rainy days mixed in with nice sunny ones. Thinking this was the beginning of rainy season I was expecting the farmers to begin planting their corn, but it turns out there is always a preview of rainy season before it actually starts. November was pretty dry. Many farmers did plant corn early which made me nervous. There are so many horror stories of farmers planting too early or too late and having their entire crops washed away, or dried up in the sun. For a country that depends so much on this harvest, I wanted to yell at the farmers to be more careful and really think about what they are doing! I quickly realized though that this is their life. They know far more than I ever will about when and how to plant corn… I kept my mouth shut. Rains began to fall consistently at the end of December. Every single morning I wake up to foggy mountains and watch as giant thunder heads build across the border in Tanzania eventually making their way over late afternoon. The rains here are at least courteous enough to give you plenty of warning before their skies open up. The thunder rolls in hours before you feel a drop, the air gets heavy and you can smell the rain on the breeze that gradually picks up before the downpour begins.

Huge drops begin to fall all of a sudden. Most Malawians in my village live under tin roofs (less maintenance and has become a type of status symbol), including myself. The noise is deafening. If I have someone visiting in my house, I can’t hear them talk even though they are right in front of me. It’s the same feeling I would get being in a cave and not being able to see my hand that was 3 inches from the tip of my nose because it was so dark. I have been fortunate enough to only have one leak that occurs with only a specific type of rain (has to be gentle and the wind has to be going a certain direction) so it doesn’t bother me much. I generally enjoy the rains. I heat some water over my charcoal stove, drink tea and snuggle up with a book in my hammock. I can gather more rain water than I know what to do with (my clothes and self get cleaned more often now!), and its like a free mop for my floor! Plus the rains have turned everything green again. The trees have leaves, the corn and sunflowers are growing like weeds in front of my house, the cows are happy to be eating actual grass, even the birds are bumping.

There are definitely negatives to the rains though. For myself, its nearly impossible to dry clothes. I have about 2-3 hours of sunlight if I am lucky in a day which makes timing of laundry very important. No one wants to go outside when it is raining. This has delayed many of my projects and I’ve come to realize that not even teachers or students will go to school if it is even drizzling… Travel is becoming more and more difficult as the dirt roads to my village turn to mud and the creeks begin to fill up turning into river crossings (there are no bridges on my road). I had to get out of the mini bus the other day and walk across some running water to judge the depth since the minibus driver sat there for a good 5 minutes just looking at the water running across the road not sure what to do. Cooking has become an adventure as the rain has moved me into my actual outdoor kitchen (I used to just cook under my passion fruit trellis). My kitchen is dark, dusty and has windows the size of a mans wallet which does nothing to help ventilate the smoke when I’m trying to start a fire. Plus, now every time I forget something inside the house I have to run back and forth between the downpour to where I store my food and dishes. The kids next door get a kick out watching me as they sit on their back step playing in the mud. One day I was more forgetful than usual and began doing little dances between my kitchen and my house in the rain which had them on the (mud) floor laughing. It’s the little things.

The south has gotten the worst of rainy season so far. I’ve heard many things about the disaster that is going on down there currently including the fact that it didn’t stop raining for 10 days, they got 2 feet of water in just 2 days, flash flooding, mudslides and much more. They had to evacuate most of the southern volunteers to Blantyre. A couple volunteers’ houses collapsed, along with storage and bathing buildings. Here are the stats a week after Malawi declared the south a disaster zone: 121,000 people displaced, 54 people killed, 153 missing, 200,000 students not able to attend school due to flooding or use as a temporary shelter (415 schools), and 638,000 people affected by this disaster. Its been a frustrating situation for the volunteers who live in the affected areas for many reasons. First, they all recognize the fact that they are lucky enough to work for an organization that makes sure they are safe and takes care of them, but with that privilege comes a strange sense of guilt. When your entire village is being washed away, and people are suffering in a place where you are working to try and make things better its hard to not feel like you are abandoning them at their greatest time of need. Its also frustrating to be taken from your home, not knowing if when you return (if you are allowed to return) your house will even be standing anymore.

There's also the long term effects this disaster will have on Malawi. Farmers lost entire crops, herds of cattle/goats and pigs, not to mention their tools, fertilizer and the very basic things they need to make a living. Families lost homes, cars, and their possessions. Water filled up chims (bathrooms) and spread disease into all water sources and across the affected areas. Most of these things are catastrophic in developed countries, but are even worse in a country where people do not have access to the same resources. Most families cant afford to travel to their nearest relative, cant replace their possession's, will be struggling against famine, poverty and disease on an even higher level than usual for years to come because they lost their income and food source this year and are not able to buy clean water. It’s really hard to fully comprehend the impact these floods will have on the already 4^th poorest country in the world. I would say, thank goodness for the aid that is sure to come flooding in from other countries, but there lies the root of a lot of the dependence that Malawians have developed on foreign aid in the past, which in my opinion has really only hurt Malawi in the long run. I could go on for pages about this, but I’ll stop for now. Just be sure to count your lucky stars that we live in a country that has the resources and privilege that it does.

On the work front:

Things have come to a standstill since the rains came it seems. I still meet with the girls group at the local secondary school, but if it is raining there are only a handful that will show up. We are planning on doing the pad project in the coming weeks (THANK YOU THANK YOU to all who donated or have sent us supplies!!!! You are the best!!!). We are also looking into creating a drama to educate the community about Malaria for the upcoming Malaria month which will be very exciting. The girls love everything that has to do with dancing and acting so this should be fun!

I am working to create a bee keeping group. So far my meetings have been canceled every time due to rains, funeral or general forgetfulness. I am still working on a grant to get equipment that these villages can share to get their bee operation up and running. I am hoping that with the end of rainy season, I will get more people involved, but we’ll see. It seems that the only time people actually show up to meetings is August through October (hot season, rainy season and harvest seasons are all too time consuming).

I think a lot of my work in Malawi is going to take place outside of my actual village which I have come to terms with. I was accepted as a resource volunteer which means I will help create the training schedule for the new incoming health and environment group who arrive in March in addition to leading training for a week during their PST. I have also applied to be a counselor for Camp Sky which is an education camp geared towards helping form four (equivalent to seniors in high school) study for their exams which determine if they are able to attend university. That, being a coordinator for Camp TIECH (an environmental education camp) and serving on the diversity committee equals me being away from site a lot. I’m ok with this. I have always enjoyed working with students more than adults, and Malawi students actually get excited about the things that I have to teach which is very different from the adults who tend to get defensive or think the things I am talking about are crazy azungu ideas (foreign person).

The holidays:

Well, the holidays were rough in many ways. I don’t want to go into details about a lot of it, only because it does not reflect on what I believe is true Malawi, but basically everything that could have gone wrong did (mostly). Volunteers were assaulted and robbed, the place that 40 or so PCV’s were supposed to spend Christmas was robbed at gunpoint the night before we were to arrive, and people got sick. Everyone is ok now. But I was victim to a robbery the day after Christmas where I lost my entire pack, everything in it, my tent, sleeping bag and pad and then was pick pocketed the day after and lost most of my money. Because of this I ended up spending New Years at Joy’s place which has become like my second home in Mzuzu. It was my own little safe haven where I could lick my wounds. A couple of other volunteers came and we had a very low key holiday before I headed back to my village. If it were not for the constant support of my family here and back home, I don’t know that I would have come out of my slump. I second guessed my want and desire to live in this country where things like this are common place, but realized that the holidays are always a little more dangerous as people are a little more desperate for money. Same thing happens in the states. I am lucky though to have plenty of clothes and another bag in which I can lug my stuff around as I continue to travel this beautiful country. Plus, I have already arranged with a second year volunteer to buy his tent and camping gear when he leaves in April. Things always work out.

The worst part of the holidays was my site mate getting sick. She nicked her leg on her bike and the wound got infected. So much so that her entire leg swelled up twice the size and she was sent down to South Africa to receive treatment the day after Christmas. She is still there receiving treatment, so send healthy thoughts her way. I always knew that I was lucky to have a site mate living right down the road for me, but never really understood how much I depended on her positive and motivating personality to get things done in the village and get out of my house!

 So there's my little update for the past couple of months. I'm hoping to write some more interesting stories about things that have happened in my village soon. Miss you all as usual!