Orientation

After a good 30 hours spent traveling, I arrived in Johannesburg. My flight from RDU to Washington-Dulles came late and got even more delayed since there was lightning, so the flight was an hour behind giving me pretty much zilch time to find my way around a huge airport to my South Africa flight. I got to the gate completely sweaty and frantic but made my 15 hour flight on time. However, my luggage was not so fortunate. So I arrived in Jburg basically just happy that I had made the biggest part of the journey…I didn’t get annoyed about not having “stuff” until I was stuck with the same pair of underwear and realized I had to actually take the hotel’s complimentary shampoo and body wash.

I didn’t get to see much of Johannesburg besides a five minute drive between the airport and the hotel. I met two other volunteers who had to stay the night as well. The next morning we departed for Lilongwe. Looking out the window on the plane, the landscape truly signified AFRICA. It was really exhilarating to finally have arrived at our small destination that took me 3 and for some volunteers 5 or 6 plane rides to get to, after months of planning and anticipating. We were greeted at the airport by some World Camp program coordinators and drove to the house. The drive was like a first glimpse of Malawian culture. People walk and bike right against the road, sometimes selling or transporting goods. Many are barefoot and wear traditional clothing. (By the way, all the driving is done on the left here since Malawi used to be a British colony.) The closer we got to Lilongwe and the real part of the city the more trees and activity we saw. The World Camp house where we live is secured on all sides and has a gate with a huge logo on the front. The house is beautiful. Outside there is a driveway for our three Land Rovers, a pool, foosball and ping pong table. Inside there is a spacious living room, huge kitchen, office, and four bedrooms with bunk beds covered with mosquito nets. We were introduced to the volunteers who had already arrived and some who also did the first session and are staying till August. Total there are 19 volunteers and 5 program coordinators, who have participated in the program before.

In the living room we all introduced ourselves, broke the ice, etc. People are from all over the US, go to school everywhere, are majoring in everything and anything. By the way I just want to add that I love these volunteers. They are all so much fun to be around and we all bonded very quickly. I am actually the youngest volunteer here; some volunteers graduated college a few years ago. We talked a bit about the problems in Malawi and what we would be encountering in the schools. Apparently the former dictator Hastings Banda was a disaster – extremely abused government funding. For example when we got to Lilongwe we passed a huge blue glass building that had once been a conference center and received more funding than for all of healthcare the year it was built. He also mandated that all Malawians eat two meals of the traditional food, nsima (pronounced sima), per day. Nsima only fills stomachs but has no nutritional value – it’s made of corn meal and usually served with relish. It seems like being with the kids will be somewhat difficult. We have to be very careful to think before we speak in order not to offend anyone personally and make it easier on the translators. Every class has a Chichewa translator because in rural villages English is rarely spoken. The volunteers from the first session seemed to have really enjoyed it though – no one wanted to go home.

Early the next morning we headed to Lake Malawi for our orientation. Luckily there were some clothes and left over sunscreen, bugspray, and toiletries from the house that I was able to borrow. We all stuffed into the Land Rovers. The 2½ hour drive was really inspiring. We witnessed the true rural and poverty stricken Malawi. We passed many small huts with straw for roofs, a few goats traveling on the roadside, the typical African mother balancing a something heavy on her head with a baby strapped at her back, along with some vendors selling firewood or mice on sticks. Everyone seemed very busy and dedicated with the job they had to get done that day. Schools along the way were easy to identify because the kids wore uniforms. Some were really excited to see white people and gave us thumbs up or waves in the bigger village of Salima. One of the volunteers from last session said that here we are basically treated like rock stars – kids are always excited to see us and are curious about who we are. Overall I was surprised to see so many people even in these rural areas. I imagined Malawi to be more sparse because the life expectancy is so low. Another thing I noticed was that families seemed to have very separate duties during the day. Men with men, children with children, etc. Little children walked in groups alongside the road with no shoes and often without any supervision. Most of the people here have short hair, so you can only tell gender in children based on what they’re wearing.

The landscape on the way to the lake was very interesting. The coordinators said that 20 years ago you could stay on the road in the dark by following the canopy. Now deforestation is killing Malawi. We saw some underbrush on the way, more on sloping hills. There are hardly any large trees still standing. Some were overturned and hollowed out near the road. There were more trees as we got closer to the lake, partly because fishing is an alternative income to selling firewood.

I noticed a few things that reminded me of Oaxaca. There were a some stores with painted logos of products, taxis with signs on the dash for far-away destinations, as many people in the back of a pick up truck as you could cram, and bridges above highways for pedestrians.

The lake was absolutely beautiful. It sounded just like the ocean. When we got there it was windy and choppy, we never ended up actually going swimming. Lake Malawi is the third biggest lake in Africa and 9^th largest in the world. Walking along the beach, the sand was extremely soft and sometimes black and glittery.

We passed a few groups of women doing laundry in the water and grinding clothes against rocks on the beach. They all greeted us very nicely and sometimes started singing and dancing.

I saw a washed up cichlid on the way back. We stayed at a small resort right against the lake called Cool Runnings, like the Jamaican bobsled movie. Some people camped outside but since I didn’t have my sleeping bag I stayed inside a small house with 3 bedrooms. There was a long dining table outside where we sat for most of the orientation.

The purpose of our orientation was to familiarize ourselves with the curriculum and structure of teaching. We went through a 65 page curriculum over the course of 3 days. It is definitely a lot to memorize. At the schools most volunteers serve as teachers in the classroom with the kids; others are called team leaders who make sure everyone is on track and everyone and thing is where they are supposed to be, and then there are teacher meeters who talk with teachers about our curriculum so they can teach it in the future.

Just a note about the food – World Camp gives us all our meals except breakfast. Peanut butter with honey or jelly are our typical lunch believe it or not, and then a small group cooks dinner for all of us. At Cool Runnings, they served us eggs on toast for breakfast, tomato, cheese, and avocado sandwiches for lunch, and something with vegetables for dinner. World Camp tries to make everything vegetarian. I haven’t had anything that exotic yet except for this excellent hot sauce called Nali, and a beer called Kuche Kuche, which translates in Chichewa to “party party all night long.”

On the second day we walked five minutes to the Senga Bay school in Salima, for the past volunteers and program coordinators to do a condensed day of teaching and show us the works. Little did we know, the school was much much bigger than we expected. When we arrive at the schools we only teach standards 6, 7, and 8, which can have children ranging in age from 11 to 18. At every school there are younger kids that World Camp calls “rugrats.” They are eager to see us but we have to tell them to leave because they are too young for us to teach. So the first challenge when we got to the school was separating the rugrats from the older students. When we get there we all stand in a giant circle with the students and teachers. We sing songs and introduce ourselves. Then we divide into the standards and go into the classrooms. There were two classrooms here with about 60 students each.

The past volunteers said that usually there are about 20 kids per class. Meeting these kids was really overwhelming to me. They all want to introduce themselves and shake hands and ask us “muli bwanji” how are you; they are just beyond adorable. Some of the kids used what English they knew to ask us if we had pennies or money for them, it was just so sad to say no because we cannot provide for all of the students. We will be learning lots of Chichewa while we are here, words for good morning, and listen, and go away and sit down, goodbye, good work, understand? The program coordinators know a lot.

After a hectic few hours we returned to the lake. Apparently this school was a lot different than most of the schools we will be going to. At the lake we went through more curriculum and met two of our eight translators, Sirus and Chisomo. They are from Lilongwe and have graduated from one of the three colleges in the country. On the third day we decided to pack up early and go back to Lilongwe. We stopped at the airport because my bags had arrived! and picked up one other late volunteer.

Tomorrow we are going to our first real school. It's 40 minutes away and more rural. I will be a teacher and my teaching partner is Yael. She is from California and we both spent the night in Jburg. In order to prepare we had to make sure we had all the supplies we needed. Going to the schools requires a lot of planning ahead of time because we use a lot of materials in the classroom and also serve the children nsima. The volunteers make our own PBJs for lunch the night before. Early tomorrow we will be packing everything up in the Land Rovers. I’ll go into more detail about what we teach later on.

Some other random notes: the weather here is perfect, sometimes chilly at night but always bearable. Every night someone yells out "Has everyone taken their malaria medicine today?” And today we went on an unpaved road: basically a roller coaster. Let’s just say it’s a good thing I brought motion sickness pills which were supposed to be for the plane.

Happy 4^th of July! We didn’t really celebrate but had barbeque for dinner. Tomorrow is my birthday, so we’ll see if anything special happens. Now I have to keep going over the 4 hours worth of curriculum, songs, and games. So far Africa is so good!!

*Just to note I'm not sure how often I'll be uploading photos - the connection here is really slow but I'll try when I have time!