6 July
Posted By Sika on July 8, 2007
Yesterday we went to the Lighthouse, which is a HIV/AIDS testing and treatment place near Lilongwe. The presentation was actually pretty good, but once again communication issues got in the way. We were told that we would open our bank accounts and then we could finally get phones and access our money from the safe to do so, and then go to the Lighthouse for an hour or two after a pizza lunch (instead of goat, nsima, and rape greens). OK, so that is what was supposed to happen; here’s what actually happened:
We arrive in Lilongwe a little late because of a flat tire. We mill around the PC office for a while, but the guy to open the safe isn’t there and there’s no mail either because the day before was a holiday (for the PC office, not the country). Eventually we realize that the guy to open the safe is at the bank working on our accounts, so we go over there, finish up, and end up back at the office to wait for another hour, fruitlessly, until we’re told that we’re late for the Lighthouse. We are promised that we will still get our phones. We get to Lighthouse and Ann, the ex-PCV training trainer at Lighthouse, tells us that there will be no pizza. We are ready to do bodily harm. She tells us that she can still squeeze the material in even though we’re an hour late. She hands out the schedule, it lists the final item as starting at 3:30. All the shops close at 5 and there’s still about 21 of us who need to get into the safe. We are ready to kill.
The talk is interesting, the information is important, but we can’t stop seething. Some of us feel bad for Ann. Others of us feel like she’s way too perky anyway, so it’s ok to hate her. Vicki tells us that we will get pizza; Peace Corps did not realize that the Lighthouse was going to provide lunch and so had already ordered the pizza. There will be a Malawian lunch first, which is good since there won’t be tons of pizza. And PC is going to pay for it all. Ann comes back and talks about lunch and pizza, and then says, “So you should all pay before you go get lunch; it’s MK250.” To which we sit, astounded, just staring at her until Vicki says, “no, Peace Corps’ got it.” So then we eat lunch. The chicken is actually pretty good, and there’s cabbage salad, which is basically nutritionally void, but pretty nummy. Robin says that he and Vicki talked and we’re going to leave at 3, which should be enough time to get everything done. Then Ed (The PC Crisis Corps volunteer) comes and says that the session is going to start again, the pizza is here but we’re not going to eat it until the next break in an hour, and by the way, the lunch costs MK250, so if we could all pay on the way back in. . . .
Eventually that all gets straightened out, and we sit through the rest of the afternoon, watching the clock, asking minimal questions, anxious about whether or not we’ve been totally played, feeling bad about how we’re acting and yet really being unable to get fully into the session because of the anxiety about being able to communicate with our friends and family. Eventually, everything does work out, although we get back to our villages about 2-3 hours late and our families were worrying about us, because of course nobody told them anything.
This is when I decided that Peace Corps staff tries to communicate solely through psychic powers (saves on paper, dontcha know?) despite the fact that nobody actually has psychic powers. I also realized that they will work really hard to come through for us, especially when they’ve fucked up.
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