10 June 2008
Posted By Sika on June 13, 2008
I am at Mid Service Training right now. (Do you know what this means? I’ve been in Malawi for a whole year. Can you believe it? I mean, I know every second of the last year has just dragged by for y’all, what with me not being around and all, but for me it has just flown by)
Thanks to selective dropping of text messages from Celtel, I missed the 4th of July celebration at the ambassador’s house on Sunday, but that’s ok: it’s not as bad as if I had missed thanksgiving.
Another volunteer in our group, Meghan, was medically separated, and so our group heads into our second year with 16 of the 21 volunteers who came to country. We don’t even fill one of the hostels here at the college of forestry, when we used to overflow into the second one. But it’s ok: our group now is pretty tight, and while we think about and miss those who’ve gone home, we’re pretty happy to have each other.
I have learned one very important thing this week. It is a skill that I will take home with me and use often. Maybe even every day. Now, because of my new skill, I can open a bottle (sans twist-offability) with another bottle, by leveraging the cap of one under the cap of the other. I’m pretty sure I can market this skill and make millions of dollars—as long as I don’t try to make millions of dollars off it here in Malawi where nearly every guy in a bottlestore can do it better than I (I still have an annoying tendency of spilling the contents of one or the other bottle all over myself).
We went to our villages today. I didn’t particularly want to go, but kind of felt obligated since everybody else from our village who didn’t ET was going. It’s not that I don’t like them—I do. And it’s not that I don’t appreciate them—I do. It’s more a convergence of several factors. The least important factor is probably that, as I get further away from training and living with them, the debt that I owe to them becomes more and more amorphous. How I get through this country and these years is due to so many people now. Also making it difficult is that I wasn’t planning on going back to Mterera. So I didn’t bring any gifts. And I knew that they would be giving me gifts. And I have so much and they have so little, it’s too imbalanced to be comfortable: it’s the same problem with many relationships between azungu and Malawians writ large, or rather writ so small that the true breadth of the problem can be seen.
Also, my Chichewa is not too hot. People at work switch to English so readily that I don’t get much time to practice non-market, non-silly Chichewa. When I told Agatha this, she mock-cried, indicating quite clearly that the problem is my own and than my excuses are rather feeble, which of course is true. But that is my excuse, as poor as it may be, and my lack of fluency does cause problems. Especially in a language where saying, “Please speak more slowly” is also saying, “Please speak more quietly.” I am much likelier to elicit rapid-fire whispering than to actually make anyone slow down enough that I can reassemble the building blocks of their speech into something that makes sense to me.
The visit went better than I expected. Martha and I decided to tackle our families together. This had also been our plan at IST, but her amayi and my abambo had run out to us simultaneously and hauled us into our respective compounds. This time we managed to sneak into Martha’s compound before my family saw us. Cecelia was standing at the chipisi stand outside her compound, but apparently didn’t tell her family that I was back. She was wearing the same shirt she was wearing in nearly all the photos I’ve taken of her. She gave me the stink eye, but I wasn’t sure if she remembered me in particular, or just that azungu girls who come visit her family are bad news in general. We chatted for a few minutes with Martha’s family and then told them that we needed to go see my family before checking on our shallow well project and going to the M1 to catch transport back. Amayi wa Martha insisted that she had already started making us nsima and no way could we leave without eating. So we told her we’d go visit my family and then come back to eat at her house.
Apparently, we took too long with my family, ‘cause Martha’s host mom came over with nsima and ndiwo (side dishes or relish) of eggs and greens. Martha and I dutifully (and also with pleasure) ate some of the food, although we had just eaten spaghetti with the strange tomato-less meat sauce they make at the college* for lunch and weren’t that hungry anyway. When we were done, we tried to get up and go, as we were supposed to meet everybody else at the well in about 2 minutes, but amayi wa me said that she was cooking nsima and we had to stay and eat. We reminded her that we had just eaten nsima, and she told us that no, we hadn’t. Nor ndiwo, nor the spaghetti at the college. Also, we were going to stay in Mterera and not go back to the cottage. Oh, and also, we weren’t full, and we didn’t have to go. It was pretty funny, and all three of us were laughing the whole time, but nevertheless Martha and I sat back down and began eating nsima and eggs (scrambled instead of boiled) and greens (pumpkin leaves instead of rape). When we began to leave again, my amayi came to us again, this time with a coke, a fanta, and a package of biscuits (cookies). We drank the minerals (soda and/or pop) and eventually convinced her that really, we were too much full for biscuits. My amayi and abambo and Martha’s amayi and abambo insisted on walking us to the well, a bag full of potatoes on the heads of each of our amayi.
The shallow well was working, but kind of poorly because some part of it had fallen into the well. When asked, however, they said that later on in the dry season, when he water table drops a bit, they should be able to send someone into the well to retrieve the lost bit and fix the well. It does work, just not as well as it should. The well in Paolo, though, is working, and neither of the wells was working at IST, so that’s a good thing.
*Just about the only tomato-less ndiwo in Malawi. It’s so strange that it’s with something that we so strongly associate with tomatoyness.
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