St. Brigid Roman Catholic Church
Journal Entry - February 12, 2003
No e-mail or web access for over a month now. Either the server has been down or the phone is out. I haven't been able to access my yahoo e-mail account very often, so we are all getting our e-mail through one e-mail account of the Canossian Sisters on the other side of town. You can get messages to me by writing to bakhita@sdnp.org.mw Just put "For John" somewhere in the subject line.
I'm definitely settled in and we are in our 5th week of the first term in the secondary school...time is flying by. I'm teaching Form 1 (9th grade) Math and Physical Science. In March we open the Technical College for Business, Accountant, and Secretarial Studies. There will also be a "Home Management" course offered for those who didn't pass the qualification exams for the other programs. I will teach Business Math and/or a Math Review course for each of the programs and I'll be the class advisor for the Business and Accounting School. We decided not to teach shorthand at all- whew! I don't even have my full load of classes yet, but I can tell you that teachers don't get paid enough. It takes a lot of work to plan the classes, prepare for the lecture, and give feedback on the homework and quizzes. I've got 14 class periods per week now, 4 hours of it is "Math Club" tutoring, and then I'll have another 11 periods when the college starts in March. I've been getting up at 5:30 and going to bed at 9:30 or 10 p.m.
I'm healthy and I'm grateful for that because a few of the others have had some problems. Justyna, a volunteer from Poland was the 1st to come down with malaria. She was treated and recovered quickly. Two of the Canossian Daughters of Charity, Sister Salo and Sister Calista, came down with worse cases of malaria. They couldn't keep any food down and they had to get intervenus fluids. Lisa, a volunteer from Washington DC, had worms and also underwent treatment for amoebas, but she still wasn't feeling better, and so she went to the hospital again and they found that she had ecoli (sp?). We don't know much about it and it's not discussed in our medical books. They gave her some anti-biotics, but no improvement, and now an Italian doctor who is visiting another mission is trying to figure things out. She is now running a fever and has flu symptoms. She quit taking her malaria medicine because she was worried about drug interactions and the effectiveness of the medication. We've all taken the worm medicine as a precaution. We have 2 or 3 students out every week with malaria. Everyone treats it more like a legitimate cold or flu than a serious disease, I gues because it is treatable. They say that the mosquitos virtually disappear after the rainy season. I'm tired of sleeping in the mosquito net. I'm in a small bed and I often wake up all tangled up in the net.
As far as food goes, rice and beans are the main staples. We get a chicken about every other day and one time we were in the market when they killed a cow, so we got some fresh beef-tough, but a treat. We also get pumpkin leaves from our garden and we've had fresh green beans lately which are really good. The season for ngumbi, or "big termites," is over, so we have to wait for next year for more. They're not bad at all - after the first time you eat one, you pretty much forget that you're eating bugs. Plus it's cool to eat them when others won't (yet.) One night I was in my room and heard people whispering outside my window. Without turning the light on, I looked outside and saw two guys gathering the ngumbi from around the light. One of them was eating the ngumbi alive. I felt so bad for the guy, I thought that he must be starving. Then I found out that , yes, ngumbi are a delicacy here in Malawi. They only swarm out of the big termite mounds after a good rain followed by sunshine in the afternoon. I got up in the middle of the night to collect them and give them to our neighbors outside of the complex. They were very excited about the ngumbi.
My roommate in Rome, George from Louisiana, showed me how his Grandma made a "reaux" for gumbo and that's been a pretty big hit here the 2 times that I made it. We've been having the power go out pretty frequently, but we are accustomed to cooking over charcoal for the meals.
We are living in the village of Mponda, a little over a mile from the market in Balaka. Everyone lives in little familiy groups of mud huts with grass roofs. There are a few with tin roofs, but they get really hot in the sun and there are some western style houses around as well. The school is quite a contrast with the huts. The village has 3 chiefs, or "mfumu," that handle the politics of the village. They are more like public administrators than any type of royalty. They are respected by the people, but one always complains of being hungry and asks for food when we go by. We've gotten to know a few of the little kids along the road into town. Many come running out to see us and call out "Udzungu! Udzungu!" which means white people. They thought we were Italian at first because the Italians do a lot of missionary work here, certainly over the last 25 years. Now they know we are American and call to us by name. We must have been the talk of the town, and maybe still are, because many people call out to me by name that I've never met. Some of the really small kids are afraid of us, which is understandable, but eventually warm up to us when all of the other kids gather around. We've been having rain almost every day. They had just planted the fields when we arrived in early December and now the Chimanga (corn) is close to 3 m tall in some places. It seems like no ground goes to waste - if no one walks there or lives there, then there's likely to be corn growing there. Everything is very green with all of the rain. There are people mowing our grounds and along the highways by hand with "slashers" or blades that they swing back and forth. I think that they are declaring last year's famine to be over now with a pretty healthy crop.
Christmas was very well celebrated here, and the new year as well. The Christmas Masses were 3 hours long and filled with singing and dancing. Well, the Masses every Sunday are at least 2 hours, so it's not really such a big change, considering it was Christmas. It was great a great feeling on New Year's Eve and think back over the last year and think of all of the changes that I've made. When 2002 came in, I knew that I was going to be making some sort of changes at work, but I had no clue of how big of changes would come my way, and I couldn't have imagined that I'd be living on the other side of the world in Africa. Come to think of it, I don't think I had heard of Malawi, or at least taken note of it before March '02. 2002 was a good year and I'm looking forward to 2003.
The country is really pretty. There are lots of mountains and hills. We went to the "Zomba Plateau" a couple of weeks ago and it was really cool. We saw a baboon and a monkey in the wild. We got rained out of a hike to the top of a local peak, so we'll just have to go back. There is a really good cloud build up almost every afternoon. There are plenty of rainbows in the afternoon and a lot of beautiful sunsets, with great colors even in the eastern sky as the sun is going down. Sunrises are just as good. We've had a few clear days and it gets real hot. We can only expect the clouds for about another month, and then it will get hot. Even one of the locals was telling me of the sun getting "scorching hot." Stay tuned. It is supposed to get much cooler in June and July, then hot again September into December when the rainy season starts again. We had some really heavy rains just before New Years an it washed out a bridge and water lines into the town. The town of Balaka was without water and for about 3 weeks people were going to the wells to pump their water and then they would carry it home in buckets on their heads. That's when the power and phone line problems started as well.
As far as my language proficiency goes, I don't speak Chichewa as well as I thought I would after living here for 2 months. We go to language class twice a week, but the study pretty much comes down to cramming in the homework before going off to class. It is a way to encourage me to study and it'll come along. It's been good to talk with our teacher, Fr.Pino about the culture. He is a Comboni Missionary Priest from Italy who has lived in Malawi for 25 years. The culture is just so different and there are so many things to try and understand. I'm continuing to get it all straight in my own mind and then I'll try and put some info about the culture into a future update. Everyone is so friendly. Everyone gets greeted by everyone going down the road. Big smiles and "Hello, how have you woken?" or "How is your evening?"
The whole idea of living in solidarity with the people is pretty difficult and virtually impossible as long as I'm in the complex and they are in their huts. There have been some good examples of the Canossian Sisters addressing the root causes of someone being hungry. They will give them a little food if they need it, but they work more towards finding them some sort of sustainable work. The main idea is that teaching is the best thing that we can do to to address the causes of the many problems being faced in this country. I couldn't be as good of a teacher if I was struggling to live. We need to stay healthy and be ready to teach as much as we can, as well as we can. To help with this, we've hired a maid to cook and clean for us during the week. It's employment for her and we spend time preparing for classes rather than washing dishes and clothes.
I'm eager to hear about what's going on back home. we listen to the news from the BBC. Some of the locals gave us condolences on the loss of the space shuttle. We are listening for updates on the impending conflict with Iraq. We are all praying for a peaceful resolution. The local papers had a funny reacttion to Bush saying "I'm sick and tired of ..." They questioned, "If he's sick and tired, why would he want to go to war?" The local paper also carried a story about Michael Jordan setting the All-star game career scoring record. Speaking of news...apparently there are some phone cards for Africa at Costco or Sam's Club and maybe even some cheaper ones at "Nobelcom.com." Get one and give me a call! The country code is 265 and the number is 8 861 453 (from the US at 011 265 8 861 453.) With the time difference (10 hrs from SD), the best thing is to call early in the morning or late in the evening your time. I got calls from home and the gang at St. Brigid's New Year's Eve party and it was really great to hear from everyone.
I received some care packages from home for Christmas - THANK YOU! It was great to get the treats, but it is just so expensive to ship things; and they can't be insured. There hasn't been any problem with things disappearing or anything, but you never know. There is a big western super market, like Walmart, in Blantyre, about 2 hours from Balaka. Most of the stuff comes from South Africa...but we can get oreos and Jiff peanut butter and all that stuff. With funds so tight at the school, it would be better to donate the money. It costs $39 dollars per student per term. The typical daily wage for construction workers is $1 or $2 a day, so it is still tough for most families to send their kids to school. We are starting to put together some guidelines for a scholarship program for the students who can't come up with the tuition. It's going to be tough to make a judgement and define the criteria when there is no way to verify the families' incomes. Until we figure something out, we are putting the money donated specifically for students into the bank. The banks pay 20% interest in order to attract people to deposit their money, since the kwacha is devaluing at 10-15% against the dollar. (Many people have an urgency to buy things that they know they will need in the future, so they spend their money before it's value goes down.) Once we get the capital raised, we can fund a few students on the interest.
When it's all said and done, I'd rather get a note from you with your news rather than get some candy that cost an arm and a leg to send.
The books that we collected in San Diego, all 75 boxes of them, arrived here on 23 Dec. They are making a big difference in the classes. We had enough basic "Study Skills" books for each student. We hope that these study skills carry over to the other subjects.
I've had a couple of reminders here of my life at HP... I was waiting for someone to open the library and I looked down into a mud puddle and saw the corner of a box from the HP51645A print cartridge. It was a fun reminder of life back at HP, working on the Proto and Intro Lines. I also saw an empty one in the road next to the curb that had been run over a few times. It's certainly a world market.
Well, it's been almost exactly a year ago now that I started looking into making a move into volunteer work. I've been gone from San Diego for just over 6 months now. I have come to appreciate the life I had and the great people in it much more than I used to. I feel that I'm providing a good service to the kids, I'm learning a lot about the world and about myself, and I'm glad to be here. I miss everyone and I look forward to going home, but I'm glad to be doing what I'm doing. I hope that you're doing well and are able to send me some news as it comes. Thank you for keeping me in your thoughts and prayers. Take care and may God bless you, as he has been blessing me. - "Mr. John," as my students call me.
