Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2001

From: Abigail Stamm

Subject: more on malawi

Moni nonse!

I think I'm back online for a while, at least whenever I am in Lilongwe. There is a 12-month-old rumour that we are supposed to get shared internet accounts in Blantyre and Mzuzu "any time from now". Well, at least the Mzuzu house has a computer now. For anyone interested, important phone numbers are as follows:

Blantyre: 620-127; Mzuzu: 334-847; Lilongwe transit house: 751-596; Peace Corps Malawi: 757-157; Ulongwe CDSS (my site): 542-642. All international numbers begin with 011-265-. I hardly have any of your e-mail addresses anymore.

This message is scattered and i have done no editing. I want to get it out before I leave Lilongwe. The next one will be more organized.

At the moment, I am sick with some virus in Lilongwe, though I should have started teaching this week. Jeremiah just left for the airport :( He is returning to the States, Pittsburgh I believe, to begin Medical School next week, and he only found out a week ago that he had been accepted. Never to my knowledge has anyone gotten through the Early Termination process so quickly. He was one of my closest sitemates, 1 1/4 hours away in Balaka boma, and the only one with a reliable phone. Rumour has it that he will not be replaced.

For those of you who do not know, my parents just visited me. First, we spent a week in Kenya, mostly at a resort in Malindi, where I was usually bored. I enjoyed visiting former professors in Nairobi and my homestay families in Mombasa and Taita, who were thrilled both that I remembered them and that I had brought my parents to meet them. Then we came to Malawi and baffled the poor Customs official at the airport when we told him the luggage was full of donated supplies for my school and we could not put a monetary value on them. Fortunately, Malawi thinks very highly of Peace Corps volunteers, so we had no trouble and were not charged any duty. We stayed the first night at the Transit house in Lilongwe, then the next day we went to Mua. Mua is a well-known Catholic mission with an excellent museum that describes the cultures of the Chewa, Ngoni, and Yao groups of Malawi. We stayed the night there and the next day, we left for my site.

Before I continue, a short geography lesson for those who like to follow my adventures on a map. Lilongwe is the capital of Malawi and the headquarters of Central Region. (Mzuzu and Blantyre are the headquarters of Northern and Southern Regions respectively.) To reach Mua, we left Lilongwe heading east almost to Salima. At Salima Turnoff, we headed south to Mua, located between Ntakataka and Garimoto. Leaving Mua, we continued south to Balaka, my district headquarters, then east to Mangochi Turnoff, just before Liwonde. From there, we went north to Ulongwe, which is at the western entrance to Liwonde National Park.

The first couple days at my site, we did nothing exciting. It seemed everyone wanted us to eat with them and my mom enjoyed meeting and teaching the students in Forms 2 and 4, who were meeting over break to prepare for the national exams. Saturday was market day and after visiting the market and eating the local catfish for lunch, we went to Malawi Children's Village. MCV is an orphanage based in Mangochi District just south of Nkopola Lodge on the lake. It was started by a former Malawi PCV who later joined the Rochester, NY Rotary Club chapter. It is almost completely funded by various chapters of Rotary Club International. That was my parents' only chance to see Lake Malawi, but not swim as the southern part of the lake is full of schistosomiasis/bilhardzia.

Sunday we went to church, then took bicycle taxis to Liwonde National Park. Erin, my new sitemate, was not at home, but her counterpart Mr Dzimba was. His daughter is in my Form 1 class, so he knew of me, though we had never met. He brought us to Mvuu Camp, a kilometre walk through woods overrun by elephants, then a short boat ride across the river. He carried a rifle over his shoulder to ward off elephants in case we met any. At Mvuu Camp, we met a couple other relatives of students at my school, stayed for lunch, then took a boat safari up the Shire River. We saw a herd of seven elephants, a crocodile, herds of impala and waterbuck, cormorants all over the place, and several groups of hippos (mvuu is Chichewa for hippo).

Monday my parents met and tried to teach Forms 1 and 3, my classes. As with the other forms, language was a problem. They had trouble understanding the accents and many of them sadly still hardly understand any English at all. I do not understand how I am supposed to teach students who do not speak my language and complain when I refuse to use Chichewa. The national language of all secondary schools is English and most good jobs require that applicants be able to speak, read, and write in English.

That afternoon, we left for Dedza (south to the turnoff, west to Balaka, north along the Mozambique border), left our luggage with my Baptist missionary friends, and stayed the night with my homestay family in Katsekaminga. Pierce, my training sitemate and "cousin" (our homestay mothers are sisters), had just brought his father a couple weeks before, so our family was feeling very lucky. Next day, we walked to my training school, then to Mozambique, a five-minute walk across the street, to the old Portuguese ruins that had been destroyed in the Mozambiquan civil war. Later, Pierce's "mother" brought us to the Dedza District Hospital, where she works, and enjoyed the presige of having an American nurse (my mom) visit her family, then her workplace. From there, we visited Dedza Pottery, several kilometres away, for lunch, then hitched a ride back to Dedza boma and left for Lilongwe, roughly north along the M1 highway. Lilongwe was not exciting. My parents left the next day. I asked them to write up their version of the story, which should be much more interesting than mine.

Teaching is going okay. I feel a lot less pressure than I did in Los Angeles and there are fewer and less severe discipline problems. I miss my LA students' language ability and access to learning that students here do not have. Teaching anything here is much slower than it was in LA. Students rarely do homework and I am sick of enforcing it. Students in Form 3 skip my class regularly and I don't care. I love to teach the students who want to learn. The ones who don't shouldn't be there. So I focus on the students who do their homework, participate in class, come to me outside of class for extra help and attention, even if they are consistently failing, and almost ignore the rest. I am harsh to students who cheat though, both in my tests and other tests that I proctor. Some teachers take of ten points for cheating. I disqualify them, give them an F for the term, and write a note to their parents in Chichewa on their term reports. Apparently this is not the normal response, but some of the other teachers like my approach.

I am annoyed that teachers here complain about students cheating, then do nothing to curb it. They complain about students who can not think, problem solve, or speak English, then do nothing to teach them and are horrified when I fail over half my class for not having those skills. I am amused that about half of Form 1 learned pretty quickly and now many of the students are improving. None of them skip my class consistently. That is not true of Form 3, who whine that I am too harsh because I expect them to do something more than memorize. As many of my teachers may recall, if the US education system were based on memorization alone, as Malawi's is, I never would have graduated from high school. I have told my students this, but only a few Form 1s understand it. Not surprisingly, they are the ones who already could think through a problem when they started in my class.

I am also involved in the Peace Corps community. I tend to come to Lilongwe for major celebrations, such as Thanksgiving and July 4th. I am a member of the Diversity Committee, a group that is impossible to explain. Basically, we are working on projects to educate volunteers about differences within the group and to teach Malawians that not all Americans are the same. I enjoy helping with the "sessions" during trainings and attending meetings about four times a year. It gives me a chance to get out of my site and see other volunteers every month or two.

The three types of volunteers in country are education, health, and environment. Education is broken down further to math, english, physical science, and biological science, designations that we find silly, as most of us teach more than one of those four things and one of the subjects I teach, Integrated Science, is a combination of physical and biological sciences. Since education is the only group with set vacations, one at the end of each trimester, or term, the other groups tend to travel at the same time so we can go together.

For the first week of August Break, before I went to Kenya, I traveled north to Mzuzu, then east to Nkhata Bay, mostly to see friends. Nkhata Bay is a growing tourist trap that still has low prices, so we tend to go there to buy our curios. Curios are often too expensive for us in Lilongwe and Blantyre. Many volunteers also go there to get their diving certifications as it is said to be the cheapest certified place in the world and schistosomiasis is not usually a problem that far north.

Some of you have asked about a typical day at my site. First, my site is not typical, since I have electricity and live 30 seconds or so from the tarmac. And my school has a phone. Some of my friends live two hours from any of those things. My house does not have running water, my toilet (chimbudzi or chim in Chichewa) is a walled-in hole in the ground, and my bathing area is a reed box with a concrete floor. I have a worker who cleans, waters my plants, carries my water from the bore hole (about 100 metres), and guards my house when I am away. It feels strange to me that I pay her the equivalent of about $7.00 a month and am told that is high for my village. Of course the exchange rate is fluxuating wildly right now, from MK70 to the dollar to MK80, then MK65, and the next projection is between MK100 and MK130. MK means Malawi Kwacha. There are 100 tambala (literally "rooster" in Chichewa) in each kwacha.

Back to my village. I tend to wake up/get up sometime between dawn and 6:30 am. Miriam, my worker, usually arrives between 6:30 and 7:00, often when I am eating breakfast. Then I prepare for school. If there is extra time or I am poorly prepared, I revise lesson plans and grade papers. I do not live at the school as most teachers do, but I enjoy the 5-or-10-minute walk. At school, I monitor the laboratory, teach, help in the library when needed (my job is to frisk the girls, something I never expected to do again after Night Owls), and attend the random meetings that inevitably occur during class time. I reserve the right, which is heavily frowned on, to leave the meeting when my class begins. The idea is to hold meetings during breaks, but as the breaks are only 15 minutes long, twice a day, and always start 5 minutes late, that's impossible.

I never go home for lunch unless I do not plan to return that day, so I bring fruit and sandwiches with me. I go home most days between 2:00 and 3:00 pm, after school ends. I have tried to run the writing club and help with the edzi toto (anti AIDS) club, but clubs in general are difficult to run. Most students eat little for breakfast before they walk or bike one to 15 kilometres to school, then they eat only a mango, cassava, or piece of sugarcane for lunch. By 2:00, they are exhausted and hungry and all they want to do is go home. As a result, I have changed roles from club patron to the teacher who will help with english or AIDS information between classes. Some students come to me for help with everything they write. Others come only for competition essays or biology help. My favourite work is helping students outside of class, whether or not they are in my class. My last job is to type up exams (except Chichewa) and any random official letters, but when I am taking a break and just playing with the typewriter, students are welcome to try typing on it. I am not supposed to do this, but the other teachers don't say anything and the students, especially some of my Form 1 girls, love it.

If there is random dead vegetation around the school, such as trimmed branches or sugarcane tops, I collect them to bring home to my compost pile. The Malawians' reactions are amusing. The first day they just watch. The second day one or two daring souls ask what I am doing. The third day almost everyone asks me why my arms are overflowing with branches. By day four, some start asking to help.

Once at home, I bathe. Half the year, it's the only part of the day warm enough. The other half, all 24 hours are really hot, but that's the hottest time. Then I cook something to eat, often yesterday's leftovers. Once the sun starts to think about setting, I go to the market if necessary. My vegetable, fish, and meat market is every day. Back at home, I may read or sew or write. If I have decided on fish for dinner, I gut the fish. I try to do all my school stuff at school, but may need to check books at home or get demonstration materials from my personal collection. This is about the time Miriam comes to water the plants. I cook my cat's food either just before or after mine, then continue whatever I was doing before dinner. I go to bed around 10:00 or 11:00 pm. Most Malawians go to bed about 9:00 and shut off radios and televisions about that time. I enjoy the silence afterward.

I am not the most social volunteer in the world, but I chat with the students who come to see me at school and if I am restless, I chat with the teachers. At least one teacher comes to the lab every day either to see me or to find supplies. After school, I go to my neighbors' house to get my house key (Miriam leaves it there when she is done with chores) and may stay a few minutes or a few hours. My neighbors, the Zembanis, are my closest friends in my village. Mr Zembani is the deputy headmaster at the primary school and Mrs Zembani inherited a large shamba (field) where they grow most of their food. They also raise chickens and pigeons. During the cold months, Mrs Zembani sells second-hand clothes in the local market to make extra money. She does not speak any english, but I am learning enough Chichewa to be able to understand at least the idea of what she says. I am always excited when I understand one of her jokes. She has a wonderful sense of humour. My other neighbors that I know well are the Ngozos. Madam Ngozo teaches at the CDSS with me. CDSS means Community Day Secondary School. Mr Ngozo works at the government clinic nearby and has a small electronic/mechanical repair business on the side.

On Saturdays I go to the market, since it is the day that all the clothing vendors come. If I was asked beforehand, I also go to the school for a while, either to help teach saturday classes or to watch the football and netball games. Football is soccer and netball is similar to basketball, but without the nets.

On Sundays I go to church in the mornings at the local Catholic mission. Sometimes I visit with the nuns or the priest and seminary boys after mass. Most times, I walk home with the Zembanis who are also Catholic. The rest of the day I update lesson schemes and sketch the week's lesson plans, or do work completely unrelated to school. I do not have any secondary projects in my village. I am not interested in doing extra projects, so I just concentrate on teaching and on the lab, over which I have complete control. My school had a pile of lab equipment in the deputy head's office and had just built four new classrooms, so I appropriated the only classroom with a lock to make into the lab. The other science teachers are glad, as they can now find what they want without digging too much and I have a pretty good idea of what we do and do not have in the lab. (Thanks for typing up the chemicals, Sarah. The list is very helpful, and one or two teachers now refer to it instead of to me.)

Speaking of "thank you"s, I asked my Form 1 students to write several at the end of term for some people who have donated things. I will ask them and the Form 3s to write more at the end of the school year. Unfortunately, the teachers are not interested in thanking anyone and simply take it for granted that I brought so much equipment. I wonder what they will do when I take much of it when I leave. I have several students interested in pen pals. Anyone interested in helping to find some? (Dad, I typed up most of the pen pal requests, but left out Mercy Medium. You have her letter and she included some nice drawings in it.)

That's all for now. I will try to e-mail again when I am in Lilongwe about September 28. I still prefer snail mail though, unreliable as it is. My address is:

At site: In Lilongwe:

Madam Stamm Abby Stamm

Ulongwe CDSS Peace Corps

PO Box 43 PO Box 208

Ulongwe, Balaka Lilongwe

Malawi, Southern Africa (same)

Yes, one of my letters did get rerouted to Malaysia and others' letters and packages have gone to Mali.

Love to all, Abby