Chiseka

I anticipated our first school not knowing what to expect but certainly looking forward to it. The night before we go to a school, we and our teaching partner get together a big container of materials that we will need for the next three days at the school. This school, called the Chiseka school, was not very far from the house. We leave every morning at 9am. When we arrived at the school, the team leaders go first to talk to the teachers and find where our classrooms will be. Just about every school has a large field, so this is where everyone goes for morning games and songs. Again, the “rugrats” are really interested in seeing us there and say “angunu,” which means white person. It takes awhile to get them out of the way but eventually they all stand barely outside the circle. Chiseka was still fairly large but still smaller than the Salima school. To begin, the students in standards 6-8 and the volunteers and 8 or so translators get in a big circle. The team leaders stand in the middle and announce why we are here. Then one by one the volunteers and teachers and headmaster are introduced around the circle and run into the middle, usually in some way to make the kids laugh. Then we go back out into the larger circle and sing some more songs with dances, like boom-chicka-boom. The kids seem to enjoy it. Then we divide everyone up into classes. My class was standards 7 and 8 and had 28 students.

Before entering the classroom we do some team building activities. One is called the circle sit where in a circle everyone faces to the side and we all try to sit on each other while balancing the circle. It can take a few tries but the goal is to get the students to communicate to make it work. Then we have a few games with a giant parachute. One of these games is called Lake Malawi, where we try to mimic the lake by shaking the parachute. Inside the classrooms, we did introductions. We asked the kids to say their name, age, and something that interests them. I’m not really sure if there are traditional Malawian or Chichewa names, but they seemed to vary with western names. There were two boys in my class named Gift (pronounced Geeft), a girl named Loveness, then a John and a Rebecca. The ages in the class varied from 11 to 18. The kids were really all shapes and sizes, but many did not look their age. Some of their typical interests are school, music, and football; they tend to repeat what is said before them. One of the boys in our class was hard of hearing. Some of the other boys helped him out but he certainly had no sign of hearing aids. Every class had to come up with a class name and song. We decided on “Kirk Range,” which I guess is a nearby mountain range? It sounded more like “Keeek Rage.” The kids came up with a song very quickly, saying something in Chichewa like “Kirk Range, strong team”.

What I noticed at first about this class was that they were very mature. They were great listeners and were very engaged throughout the lecture. All very smart and unique. The boys tended to stick with the boys, and all the girls sat in the front row. The classroom consisted of 4 open windows with concrete patterns in them and a blackboard, no chairs or desks. There were a few handmade posters on the wall. A lot of them depicted agricultural tools and carpenter tools. I wasn’t expecting a primary school like this to have a technical/agricultural emphasis, but I suppose it is suiting for the lifestyle here. Everyone sits on the floor, which was concrete. Most of the students introduced themselves in Chichewa, maybe one or two could do it in English. Sometimes outside the class the older kids would ask us something in English but they didn’t seem to comprehend anything from our answers.

What I wrote earlier about seeing traditional clothing is certainly not the case. All of these kids wear what look like hand me downs. A lot are full of holes and falling apart and dirty. Some of them have t-shirts from places in the US. All of the girls wear skirts below their knees and the boys tended to have shorts. All of the kids have shoes. A lot of them are flip flops or sandals. However, they do not enjoy wearing them. They prefer to go barefoot and it shows because their feet are incredibly dusty.

At the beginning of the class we handed out World Camp journals, which correspond with some of the activities we do. Our first topic is HIV/AIDS. A lot of the kids are familiar with the terms and what they stand for, but not much beyond that. We started with teaching the kids that you cannot tell if a person has HIV by looking at them; the only way to know is a blood test. Then we created an abstract character. With a poster we explained what t-cells are and how HIV destroys them. We tend to use the analogy that t-cells are like soldiers protecting the immune system. There are several interactive activities we do to communicate how HIV/AIDS affects the body. After this we talk about the ways in which you can contract HIV. A lot of times the kids will say that you can get it from sweat, saliva, or mosquitoes. They were familiar with sexual and blood to blood transmission, but no so much with mother to child. Then we discuss the three behaviors to protect against HIV: abstinence, monogamy, and covering up. In Chichewa these three things all start with Ku, so we call them the Ku Ku Kus.

After lunch comes the bananas. We do a full out banana condom demonstration. There are of course a lot of giggles, especially from the boys. But pretty much none of these students have ever seen a condom. The demonstration seemed to be successful. At the end of the demonstration we eat the bananas, to show that condoms are safe. One teacher at the school thought that lubrication could give you cancer. I think the curriculum we teach is a lot more effective than we realize.

After lunch we start to discuss deforestation. The main problem here is the typical Malawi definition for deforestation, which is always “cutting down trees carelessly.” World Camp wants to emphasize that cutting down trees is not careless; people have a need for trees for cooking, building, etc. We tell them that the key is replenishing the trees, either naturally or from humans. The kids were definitely the most interested in this section. They are familiar with erosion and drought and the other consequences of deforestation. They had not however, heard of global warming. One boy asked if it was hot in America, and we told him it was hotter and that deforestation is happening all over the world. I think the kids walked away with a good idea that cutting down trees has serious consequences. At the end we gathered in a large circle again for some relays before we left. The past World Camp volunteers said this was definitely one of the better schools they had been to, and overall the day was successful.

We leave the schools around 4. When we got back all I wanted to do was shower, I was covered in dust. We have bins and bins of materials to put away at the houses. After dinner we all sit in the living room for evaluations and discuss what went well during the day and what didn’t.

For my birthday, I was surprised with some incredible lemon squares, a candle to blow out, and happy birthday songs all day. They made it great!

The second day was Malawi independence day (the 6th), so not as many kids and teachers came to school. When we got there we got to spend some time with the rugrats. They started singing songs with us, and basically mimicked every move we made. It was kind of funny to teach them the chicken dance or some disco moves. They were just incredibly adorable, as you would expect. We repeated the morning games and songs, and did some new team building activities.

On day two, most of our day is focused on the topic of negotiating sex. For this we divide the girls and boys. Me and a partner, Maria (from UNC) were assigned a group of 15 girls, ranging from ages 11 to 16. We explain to them that our learning environment is completely confidential. Despite this, the girls were incredibly shy and reluctant to participate; it is a very uncomfortable topic to them. We start with the basics, like, the basic basics. Most children do not talk to their parents about sex, they usually get information from siblings or friends. We essentially went over the female anatomy and menstruation. It was amazing how much these girls did not know. The saddest part of this entire session was when we asked, whose choice is it to decide when to have sex? They all unanimously answered “the boy’s.” We explained to them that it is the women who deal with the consequences of sex, i.e. pregnancy and HIV, and that they have the power to say no. We talked about the ways to convincingly say no to sex with body language and had them do some skits based on what boys will say to them to convince them and how they would react. A lot of times money is involved in convincing girls to have sex. We also discussed the process of making decisions and asked them to think of some hardships and what they could do to overcome them. One example was not having enough money for school fees. Some suggestions for a solution were farming or starting a small business or getting a loan…so I think they have learned about microfinance. At the end we had a Q and A session where they wrote down anonymous questions in Chichewa. We gave each of them little yarn bracelets for them to remember our lecture by.

During lunch I decided to take a few pictures of the school, but instead I was bombarded by the rugrats asking me to take pictures of them, then they’d say what I’m guessing was “show us” in Chichewa and I’d turn the camera around to the LCD screen and show them, they were incredibly excited.

After lunch we returned to our first class and continued with the environment curriculum. We talked about population and its effect on deforestation. The point of this was basically to suggest family planning, which the kids were familiar with. The typical family size in Malawi is 8-12 kids…so we told them that more people require more resources. Then a fun hands-on activity: the solar oven. At orientation the volunteers were put into groups and tried to make a solar oven based on the curriculum’s directions; no one could do it. But it actually is very simple. It only takes a cardboard box, some reassembling, aluminum foil on the inside, and black paint on the outside. Apparently these solar ovens can heat food to over 100 degrees, but not quite to the point of boiling anything. We wanted to show the kids that firewood is not always needed for cooking. We are going to test them out on the third day.

Also on the third day, we have presentations at the end of camp. We tell all the kids to invite their parents, friends, and community members to come and see what they’ve learned. Each class has a different topic, and I assigned my class the topic of deforestation since they enjoyed it so much. At first it was difficult getting a group of 28 kids to compromise. But what surprised me most was how quickly they worked it out. Within 10, 15 minutes, they decided to do a skit and a song. After some rehearsal they showed us. All I can say is incredible. They absorbed the information so well and were able to communicate the important points across in the play. And the song was beautiful. They arranged it from scratch and wrote their own lyrics; it seriously sounded like a professional choir. I’m so excited to see how it will turn out tomorrow.