From: Abigail Stamm

Subject: Katsekaminga

(Transcribed by her father)

Moni everyone

Right now I am living in Katsekaminga, a small village in the Dedza District of Southwest Malawi. I am very close to the Mozambique border, so close that the school where I will receive teaching training (Katsekaminga Community Day Secondary School) was originally a food distribution center for refugees during the war in Mozambique.

;My house (nyumba) is simple. It takes one or two people about a week to build a house like this: 5 days for the brick walls (homemade bricks) and 2 days for the thatch. I laughed when I heard a radio ad the other day. It was a cement block company saying we should buy their blocks because homemade bricks tend to crack and fall apart during the rainy season. My nyumba has a kind of mud plaster over the bricks to make it a bit more weather resistant. There are three rooms, a bedroom (where the cockroaches play by night), a storage room (mostly kitchen supplies) and a sitting/dining room. Some houses have only one room. I am lucky to have not only three rooms, but a bed, table, and set of chairs. Other houses have rooms for the kitchen, toilet, bath, and multiple bedrooms. Some also have electricity and indoor plumbing. Not me, or this would be typed. (Please make a copy for my personal records). Some people also have phones, but very few.

For baths, I use a little thatch-walled house with no roof. I like it (I am still planning a moonlight bath sometime), but it's a bit drafty when the wind blows. I am also not quite sure what I will do when the rainy season comes. My amayi (home stay mother) boils the water for me so I always have a nice hot bath. I am pretty good at bucket baths now, but still have not figured out the best way to wash my hair. My toilet is a hole in the ground, surrounded by brick walls and a thatch roof. Suspended from the roof, which I thought was clever, is a wooden cover to cut down on flies, cockroaches, rats, and snakes in the hole. A thatch fence covers the entrance, since there is no door. How do you keep from walking in on someone? Just make noise as you approach and anyone inside is supposed to respond.

I do not get much work done in the evenings because my only light is a torch (aka flashlight) or lantern, neither of which agrees with my eyes long enough to write very much. So I go to bed about 8:00 pm, which feels really early to me. It gets dark very quickly here, almost exactly 6 pm.

We eat a lot of vegetables here with rice, nsima (flour and water; like ugali), potatoes, eggs, powdered milk, goat, and white bread. A lot of people also eat beef and chicken, but not me. My favorite foods are nsima and beans. My least favorite foods are white bread, chicken, and beef. I have also tasted cassava, antelope, various green leaves (pumpkin, grape, etc.), and a couple fruits I don't think translate. The tea is not as good as in Kenya. They find it odd that I do not add sugar and half the time I don't add milk. A few people drink coffee instead because is cheaper. They don't understand why I don't like coffee. A few people have offered to teach me how to brew the local alcohol. I declined the offer. Malawian donuts are better than Kenyan ones, less grease. Even with problems of malnutrition (most families live on nsima, which is just flour and milk and maybe a little salt), I have seen no wheat, grain, or nut bread here and the only rice is white rice. I thought brown rice (or whatever it's called) and flour with nutrients would be encouraged.

Chichewa is the language I am learning. It is a Bantu language related to Kiswahili. Some of the words are the same, but most are different enough to confuse me. It also has intonations and harsh and soft sounds, and silent letters, which Kiswahili does not have. Also, "R" sounds like "L", so I often have trouble understanding their English. My amayi, homestay mother, speaks very little English, so communication is difficult. It's easier now as my language ability improves though, unless they are talking really fast.

My banja (family) consists of my amayi, Consolata Chikalema, and her three children. I don't know ages since I keep hearing different ones from different people, but I think Liness and Gabriel are between 6 and 10. Another local girl, Precious, aged 6, always plays with them and they all look exactly the same to me, Her other daughter, Maureen, is about 16 and is in the Malawi equivalent of Grade 8. Consolata is about 32 I think. She says she is not married, but I sometimes hear about a man in South Africa, possibly the father of her children. She lives in a cluster of houses with at least two sisters and their families and her mother. Her father died in 1971. For Peace Corps policy reasons, I have her house to myself and she is staying next door with a sister. The closest trainee to me is Pierce, who also has his family's house to himself. His abambo, father, has been building a second house and I frequently ask him to describe the process to me. He speaks fairly good English. Pierce's amayi is my amayi's older sister. I ate with them last night since my amayi did not return home until after dinner. I walked with her to the Mozambique border to visit more relatives, including her grandmother, who is approximately 100 years old. Each Sunday she brings me to a new relative's house.

Pierce is one of the English teachers of our group and is in my Chichewa class. Also in my class in Tuong Vi, whose family is Vietnamese. They also teach at Katsekaminga, as do Karen and Pat, our cluster's two Chitumbuka speakers. Patience, Karen's first time on a plane was to go to DC for our pre-departure staging. Karen is from Alabama, Pat from Florida, Tuong Vi from near DC, and Pierce Born in Singapore but most recently from Boston. Also in the training group are Ellen and Jennifer, the two I am closest to. They are both science teachers. We have 9 boys total and 12 girls, aged 21to 27, and all unmarried. One boy brought his computer. We are the only two really begging for electricity, but few sites have it. I'll know in another weak and a half. I know I am heading to south or central Malawi.

I have taught a few times. My first class I was confident enough and was pretty good at addressing the whole class and calling on both girls and boys, but I spoke way too fast and did not enunciate enough. My class if Form 1 integrated science, similar to 9th grade in the States. There are about 75 students in the class, but there are always a few absent. There are often a few teachers absent too, and no such thing as substitute teaching. If the teacher does not show, the students just sit alone in their poorly lit classroom and study their notebooks. They do not have textbooks. Many of the teachers are trained only for primary school and do not understand the subjects they are teaching. For science, there is no equipment and for math no calculators. My second class went better. I spoke much more slowly, enunciated more, and started to incorporate Malawian teaching strategies. They are taught almost solely on memorization and being very poor at memorization myself, it is very difficult to teach that way. I also taught half an hour past the end of the class, but since ;the next teacher never showed, no one cared except maybe the kids. I am also much better at writing lesson plans, but still poor at judging how much material I will cover in a day. Pronunciation is also tough. The students call me Madam Stamm, but the teachers call me Abigail and pronounce it "Ah-bee-gayel" with the stress on "Ah".

I think I was the last trainee to meet our country director since I was in class when he stopped by our school. He served in the Peace Corps in Kenya and worked with the Luhya. He greeted me in Kiswahili and caught me completely off guard. Our PCMO (medical officer) has also served in Kenya. Due to the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, her favorite topic is condoms, but in a Christian country with a culture unaccustomed to birth control, condoms are hard to encourage. There is also a huge problem with denial. The president acknowledges the problem and the need to address it and condom ads have started to appear on the radio. I have no idea what to teach for sex education, hygiene, and diseases. At some point we are supposed to be trained in HIV/AIDS education.

Packages are on my mind lately. There is nothing yet that I strongly desire, not until I get to my site and know what I'll have there. I want my books I left in a pile in dad's office - dictionaries, science activity books, any good physics, chemistry, earth science, or biology books in my room. Also I want my Philip Pullman books and if possible a paperback copy of the third book, "The Amber Spyglass". It just came out October 10th, so I don't own it. Later on, I will want pads and tampons packed in corners, chocolate candy (M&M's - plain, pb, peanut; dark chocolate; small candy bars) because when it is available here, it's expensive, maybe kool-aid type packets or a variety of herbal teas. Also later, after I am settled in, I may want some of my beading things. When you mail things, say they are for religious reasons or they are "feminine products". Include things like my King James Bible (a good thing to have here anyway), a couple of my rosaries, or the Christian Children's books I don't want anyway. Craig should know which ones they are. That's all. Given the prevalence of very generous missionaries here and their access to e-mail and Malawians' habit of not messing with them, I may be able to use that later. For educational things, contact "Friends of Malawi", since they may be willing to help with postage. More after my site visit next week.

Last Saturday was exciting. The US Ambassador to Malawi, a former PCV in Sierra Leone, visited Pierce's and my homestays. Of all 21 to visit, he chose ours. We were very excited, but I know it was political. Our village is the most like a traditional village. Our families were honored and Pierce's abambo, who called him the high commissioner, even recemented his floor and rethatched part of his roof. My amayi was much more laid back about the whole thing. We will visit the ambassador's house on Thanksgiving day to be good thankful Americans. This weekend, our village had a wedding. My amayi's niece was the bride and I saw the pre-church part, including 24 hours of drunken dancing that made it hard to sleep but stayed at Ellen's last night, so I missed the post-church partying.

Ellen's home is nice. It's very big with a metal roof and electricity. Her family has a lot of animals too, including goats, pigeons, dogs, cats, chickens. They did have a cow and rabbits too. They have a large garden behind their house, so they don't need to walk to the fields and they can cook in the same house they live in. A lot of the trainees have metal roofs and maybe half have electricity. Very few have running water. Ellen is a biology teacher and teaches at Mchisu CDSS, the school closest to mine. We are both learning Chichewa. We hope to be placed near each other, but will not find out about our sites until Wednesday. I think I will be in the south. I will be teaching science and will be asked to teach math, English, history, geography, and Bible knowledge, but plan to decline. Bible knowledge is a nationally recognized subject on the national exams and Malawi is a very Christian country. There are still witch doctors and traditional healers in the rural areas and other evidence of traditional practices and beliefs. More on that after I have been here a while.

I won't write any more now because I want to send this out.

Love to all. Please pass this on.

Abby/b