Bingu's 77th

Monday morning, my new teaching assignment, Form 4 (12^th Grade) Life Skills, gets me worried about how little time there is left in the term. This particular subject only receives two, forty minute periods of attention per week, which means I’m down to ten periods before exams…or so I think. I’m confirming with my friend Ann, who casually mentions that next week is a mid-term holiday. Instead of just Thursday (Martyr’s Day), as I’ve anticipated, we have the entire week off. What?! That reduces my class time by one fifth! Sometimes Form 4, which is gearing up for the all important Malawi Secondary Certificate of Education tests in July, comes Saturdays and during holidays, I’m told. Wait and see…

Tuesday, I’m preparing to make the best of the week before the holiday when a buzz starts in the teachers lounge. My Form 1 (9^th Grade) students have been summoned by the president’s event crew – he needs more performers for the public birthday celebration Saturday. As the school attended by the children of the gardeners, housekeepers and guards at his estate, we are an obvious choice. The students are understandably excited and riled up. They charge out to the parking lot to wait for the bus. And wait. And wait some more. One of my periods has evaporated by this point. I go and call them in, telling them we’ll wait in class. It would be unfair, at this point, to give the Social Studies exam they prepared for, so instead we try to push forward with English for the week. One period is all I manage to squeeze before their distraction takes over and they boil back out of the classroom. I arrive the next day to find that, in fact, the students waited three hours beyond the end of school, missing all of their later periods, and the bus never came.

We’re clicking along in the morning and just before my class, a huge, open-sided army transport truck pulls into the car park. There's a rumor that the president’s organizers think that we’ve blown them off in a deliberate attempt to snub the country’s leader (actual story: there was no diesel for transport). The head teacher decides that the entire school had better attend in order to show our commitment.

The kids in the back of the truck are a photo opportunity missed. Packed in like sardines, but smiling, waving and having a great time, they’re fun to watch as a few other teachers and I pile into my car to follow our students to the stadium. We arrive in time to see the army, police and prison guards practice their elaborate marching routine, accompanied by a combined police / army band. But even their thirty minute routine barely cuts into our new wait time.

Hours pass and we still have no instructions. Across the stadium, the primary school students are well organized and sounding good with their songs, synchronized clapping and spelling out of “Happy Birthday” with their bodies. They’ve been here an entire week already. Teachers are called out to the parking lot and we think we’re getting directions, but no. They’re just passing out the commemorative Bingu’s 77^th Birthday chitenje. (The other teachers are angry that we’re only given two meters – not enough for a full traditional top and skirt.) Then comes lunch: a bottle of soda and enormous bread roll for each of the 800 or 1000 students who have been recruited for the event. Passing this out would be a logistical nightmare in the states, but Malawian order and  respect for elders prevails and we accomplish it with relative grace. Just at the end of lunch, an organizer comes by: “You have three minutes! Three minutes!”

Our students, it turns out, will be doing a marching and scatter-formation routine to form a redundant “Happy Birthday Bingu 77” on the field. Their final position? Kneeling prostrate on the grass/mud.

By this point, about 3:30 in the afternoon, I’m feeling completely heat exhausted and sun burnt. It’s good to be part of the teacher crew and participate in the adventure with the rest of the school but at the same time wearing to constantly ask what’s going on and fry in the sun, all the time feeling frustrated about the learning time being missed. At least the kids are having a blast! I use my volunteer teacher status, as well as the fact that, not understanding Chichewa, I’m not much use as an organizer, to beg off and head home. After another three hours of chaperoning this morning, I’m playing it by ear on the rest of the rehearsals and attendance at the event itself on Saturday… 

Weekend Getaway

After a month and a half of relative downtime and routine, I’m going stir-crazy in Lilongwe by the time Nathaniel gets back from a week of meetings in Blantyre. Although he’s exhausted from nights spent in the not-so-comfortable confines of the Hotel Victoria’s twin beds with foam mattresses, Nathaniel manages to rally for a weekend out of town. (After all, we have to somehow make up for the fact that Nathaniel’s Valentine’s Day is spent in said hotel which, to add insult to injury, refuses to serve him dinner on the holiday unless he wants to pay for the expensive, “romantic” prix fix.)

Some friends have raved about the new Bua River Lodge, about 200km away in the Nkhotankhota wildlife reserve, and we decide to give it a try. In all, we can’t ask for a better weekend: gorgeous weather, diesel shortage keeping big trucks off the roads, friendly lodge staff, amazing value for money.  I won’t rub it in too badly, for those of you still suffering through winter, but check out a few pictures of our trip!

“Petrol Shortage Hits Crisis Levels”

On Monday, I stalk a petrol tanker truck. We’re down to 1/3 of a tank. Back home, I’d be planning another dozen trips across town, driving Nathaniel crazy with my tendency to let the gauge drop below empty before hitting a gas station. Here in Malawi, with the newspapers reporting a complete outage in major cities the previous weekend and an ongoing dry spell to come, this is a major concern. I drive past the Total at Bisnowaty Center on my way to the grocery store and notice that they’ve blocked off a bunch of parking spaces – a hint, someone once told me, that the petrol truck will be coming soon. A quick stop past the attendant confirms that fuel will be coming “any time from now.” I hit the Shoprite and return, agonizing over whether I should join the 30 car queue – short, really, for a petrol queue – at the Petroda. I decide I’ll take my chances and continue on. There’s still no truck at the Total. I drive past, hoping there will be petrol on the outskirts of town where I need to go to pay our mechanic. A block down the street, I pass the tanker! I whip round the rotary and back into the station, managing to weasel into a spot one car from the pump. A forty minute wait while the tanker unloads (at least I'm parked rather than constantly inching forward) and I’m the proud owner of MK 10,000 worth of petrol. Thank goodness for being second in line! They’re limiting most people to MK 5,000 (about four gallons worth at $7/gallon) but don’t quite have their act together yet when I pull in. Safe from strand-ation for another week!

The petrol crisis in Malawi is less a crisis and more an ongoing reality, like power and water outages, of living here. Things will seem fine for a few days and suddenly, one day, there are queues stretching a hundred cars around the block. Intimately intertwined with Malawi’s perpetual forex shortage, the petrol crisis only serves to highlight the country’s economic situation.

Over breakfast, Nathaniel and I question why we feel so much more aware of the economy here than in the US. Is it the tiny size of the country and the economy (fifteen million people living in a country the size of Pennsylvania)? The fact that we live about a mile from the presidential palace on one side and parliament and capital hill on the other? Is it that we pay for everything with cash, making us hyper-aware of every dollar spent? Maybe it’s the fact that the newspaper is still the primary means of communication here, and we read it cover to cover rather than picking and choosing articles from NYT.com. Or perhaps it's because when we were last in the US we were both gainfully employed in an industry that, given grant cycle delays, had not yet been hit as fully by the economic crisis. Whatever the reason, it has been fascinating to learn about the flow of money and goods here.

The Malawi kwacha has been kept at an artificially low level (150 vs. 200 to the dollar) to attempt to curb inflation – an average inflation rate of 7.4% for 2010 was cause for celebration. Unfortunately, this means that no one wants to buy the undervalued kwacha and there is never enough foreign currency in the bank to pay for imports. Adding to the forex problems, Malawi has only a few export crops – burley tobacco, tea, coffee, sugar and sometimes maize – and none of the lucrative fossil fuels and precious metals / gems found in other African nations. (Of course the ongoing peace in the country may owe a lot to the lack of blood diamonds…)

“BRUTAL TRUTH: Malawi has no means to replace tobacco soon” In 2012, new policies outlined by the WHO’s Framework on Tobacco Control will go into effect, making the burley tobacco grown here (the type currently used in 50% of the world’s cigarettes) much less valuable, and perhaps totally unsellable. Given that burley tobacco accounts for 60% of Malawi’s export earnings and that the industry employs two of Malawi’s fifteen million people, this will be a major blow to the economy. Virginia tobacco, which isn’t banned by the new regs, apparently requires much more land and huge investments in infrastructure for industrial curing.

This just highlights how much Malawi is constantly buffeted by the demands of the UN, other, more powerful governments, and international development partners. If the WHO tried to screw with a major cash crop of the US, you can be sure they would somehow magically change their tune, but somehow Virginia tobacco survived the new regs despite (according to one article) blatant admissions by the WHO that it is equally harmful to people's health. 

In 2005, then newly elected president, Bingu wa Mutharika, ignored the demands of the IMF, World Bank and others (who wanted to force Malawi to participate in the global free market economy as a net importer of food) and introduced fertilizer and seed subsidies, ending a deep famine that had taken hundreds of lives. The subsidy program worked – Malawi has actually been a net exporter of maize for the last few years – but raises ongoing questions about sustainability. 

This week, the country is in an uproar over Germany’s 50% cut in aid over human rights issues and threats that the US won’t sign the Millennium Challenge Corporation grant, which promises $350 million to strengthen the nation’s electricity infrastructure. The Minister of Justice’s (fair, in my opinion) response: “We are not ready to change the laws to satisfy donors. We have to understand that as a country you need to have certain principles.” Of course I would prefer that Malawi have gay rights, but it’s not like our own country has figured this out. Why should we, or others, be able to demand such hypocritical acquiescence by a sovereign nation?  

Vignettes II

Chitenje Pants!

African fabrics – called “chitenje” in the local vernacular – are gorgeous and diverse. I love the bright colors, and the way many of the nicer wax prints integrate metallic gold. My friend Haley thinks the “nature” colored fabrics in tones of brown and green are simply stunning. Nathaniel neglected to bring any lounge pants on our journey and, considering that we spend a fair amount of time in the evenings reading, playing scrabble or otherwise puttering around, this was something of a miss. Inspired by our friend Finn’s brightly colored, tailor made, version, Nathaniel commissioned me to sew him up some pajamas. After weeks of waiting for Nathaniel to venture into the fabric isle at the market with me, Haley and I take matters into our own hands. 

I copy my Old Navy standbys, with a few adjustments for the guy’s size.

Of course the fabric I picked for myself is a little more wild…

An Embarrassment of Avocados

Nathaniel purchases six softball sized avocados from an affable gentleman near his office for the incredible price of $2.90. With Nathaniel in Blantyre for a few days, I am left with almost too many of these gorgeous fruits. I cut one open to make some guacamole topping for my rice and beans and can just stare in wonderment at the most perfect avocado I’ve ever seen. Inch thick flesh, a perfect pea green color, extends from the pit to the skin on all sides. Unlike avocados earlier in the season, which had a strange, liquid texture (like guacamole you buy ready made from BJ’s or Trader Joe’s) this one has just the right mixture of firmness and creaminess. I use only a quarter and have more than ample quantities to garnish my one-woman meal.

Every time I learn to cook something using this local produce that seems so decadent to me (avocado soup, pineapple cream, mango rum crumble) there is some corner of my brain occupied with the concern that I may develop addictions that will prove dangerously expensive upon our return to the states. Our friends Dave and Haley, normally from San Diego have two words for me, “Southern California.”

Learning Patience

Have you ever waited six minutes (literally…this is not “Typical Harms Exaggeration” here people) for your gmail to load and then merely been happy to get through at all? You’ve read the descriptions of hours long waits in bureaucratic queues and weeks long waits for mail to arrive (if it gets here at all), but it goes beyond that too. Mostly, I’ve lead a crazy, hectic life for the past…10 years? 15 years? Just finding ways to entertain myself with the much slower pace of life here is increasing my attention span more than I would have expected.

Given the general lack of free time in our Boston life, Nathaniel and I had gotten to the point of having mostly joint hobbies to ensure any QT at all. Here, with evenings and weekends stretching out long, Nathaniel’s attending permaculture classes, teaching himself to play the guitar and, of course keeping up his extensive reading practices. Luckily, my need to demand attention is decreasing apace. In fact, I’m so absorbed in The Hunger Games trilogy (highly recommended) over the weekend that Nathaniel is the one who keeps wandering in, lonely and demanding assistance cooking up his sixth batch of molasses cookies…

Torn From the Headlines

This just in: small, landlocked East African nation embarks on bizarre campaign to garner international recognition by generating negative press….

In case you haven’t been raptly following the Malawian news, I’m not talking about Madonna reneging on her pledge to build a girls academy near the capitol (yeah, the villagers of Chinkhota who were kicked off their land are pissed) I’m talking about the controversial Local Courts Bill of 2010, the one which the Minister of Justice claimed would make farting a criminal offense.

Of course there was an immense media flap (even the BBC picked up the story) but it appears the air has been cleared, so to speak: Dr. Chaponda has withdrawn his claim that the law (the actual text of which reads “any person who vitiates the atmosphere…”) should be interpreted to include the maligned yet familiar “trouser cough.”

Looks like we can all breathe a sigh of relief… just not through the nose.

What’s black and heavy and (mostly) round?

That’s right, the 28” wheels on my new commuter. In retrospect, the entire trip to purchase a bike was ill-conceived. We set out on a Sunday in a light drizzle and promptly had to turn around when we realized neither of us had brought the kwacha. Traffic was light (so far so good) but the reason became apparent once we got across the river in old town: only a handful of places were open. Still, we’d come this far….

After trudging up and down for a while and rejecting likely bike because the owner wanted us to purchase it then pay extra to have the tires inflated we stop into what we decide will be our final shop. At this point we’re still harboring the vague dream that we’ll be able to find something that both of us can ride. Ha! Of course all of the tires are flat on these bikes as well (this, we now realize, is how all new bikes are sold) so we can’t actually try them out per se. We waffle. The portly old Indian proprietor gives us the hard sell, and when he throws in the headlamp for free we crumble. Of course, now we have to find a mechanic to actually pump up the tires, etc., etc.

Finding a mechanic turns out to be fairly easy, and it’s a good thing we looked – the bike doesn’t even have grease in the bearings. We wait as he does far more tuning than one would think necessary on a new bike. Finally I get to take a test ride and realize immediately that the seat is too low. But, it turns out, that’s as high as it goes because the seat post is all of four inches long. Great. We try to load the bike into the car and continue on our way – no dice, too big. It might fit if we took a wheel off, but then (sans tools) how am I to get the wheel back on? So… I’ll be bicycling home. Annoying, but not the end of the world.

Roughly a kilometer into my ride, having just coasted down a nice long hill, there’s a whumph and my back tire blows out. Fuming I pull off to the shoulder and call Ariel. She’s already back across the river and has just discovered that our time spent waiting at the mechanic means the supermarket is now closed. Great. I volunteer to just go back to the mechanic and get it dealt with and start trudging back up the hill. I then fail to hear my phone ring when Ariel has a change of heart and comes to rescue me, and we both end up back at the mechanic. “Ah,” he says when I explain “tubes no good – not strong.” We open up the tire and, sure enough, it isn’t a pinch flat or a puncture – there’s simply an inch-long split along the seam.

Sending Ariel home, I stalk off to the market in search of a replacement, cursing the man who sold us the crappy bike and my own stupidity in caving to the hard sell. After some wandering about I find a stall with four guys selling strips of tire. Close enough. I ask about tubes and eventually, after some gesticulating at a bike that is fortuitously wheeled by, we understand each other. No, there are no tubes here – I need to go to Senga market, five blocks away.

After resisting the allure of piles of flip-flops and vinyl loafers, mismatched slacks and polyester blazers and every conceivable type of unnecessary car accessory (Steering wheel cover? How about fuzzy dice? Jesus is Lord window decal?) I locate the stall selling tubes. Fortunately I’d gotten the price from the mechanic and am able to bypass the 2,000 kw “made for Africa” (read: made for azungu) option and get the 850 Chinese versions. Ten blocks later and I’m back at the mechanic’s patch of sidewalk (he’s a low-overhead operation) with the new tubes… just in time for it to start raining.

Finally, new tubes in place, rain subsided to a drizzly I gingerly set out again. The front wheel’s lack of roundness gradually becomes more and more apparent, but apart from that and the persistent danger of whacking my knees on the handlebars (damn it – who makes a four inch seatpost?!) things are going relatively well… until it really starts to rain again. At this point I’m soaking wet, fuming at the bike, myself, and the world in general as I furiously pedal towards home. And suddenly, up drives Ariel in our housemate’s car. Apparently she’d gotten worried at my delayed absence and, when I again failed to hear my phone, come to rescue me should I be lying mangled somewhere in a ditch. Thoughtful? Yes. Caring? Absolutely? Well-received given my state of mind? Well…. let’s just say I snarled something less-than-grateful about getting the car muddy and pedaled the rest of the way home as penance for my stupidity.

And that, my friends, is how I came to own the splendid piece of shit. Gears? Who needs ‘em? Cables, housing and functional brakes? First-world frippery. What matters is style, and this baby’s got it from the painted fenders and chain guard right to the spring-loaded plastic seat.

[Edit: I wrote this post a week ago but was waiting to publish until I had the chance to take a suitably hilarious picture of me on the thing, tie flapping in the breeze and laptop case in tow. Sadly (?) it was not to be. When I got in to the office last Wednesday it was gone from its home in the building's back stairwell. Apparently the motorcycle cable lock was not deterrent enough. It looked pretty much exactly like the picture below.]

Where do we go from here?

One of the best things about living here, and about not working full time, not having a jam-packed calendar of social events and, yes, not having to do my own laundry, is that I feel like I have had the time to recapture my own learning. For years, school and work have provided enough “required” learning tasks and mental challenge that most of my reading has been crappy romance novels or other similar “brain candy” – things read for sheer entertainment value rather than knowledge gain.

I brought an ambitious fifteen books on education theory, ranging from William James to bell hooks to Diane Ravich. I initially envisioned a blitz of reading in the first few months here, intense reflection during that brief time and then a return to my usual hectic work and social schedule with, of course, my life all figured out. The reality of my study has been much more meaningful, although I am just beginning to see where the threads may lead.

To date, I’ve slowly read and absorbed a critique of No Child Left Behind and testing (the author encourages curriculum reform as the answer), a “teachers will save them” proscription for running classrooms like well ordered machines and ensuring not a minute is wasted in the pursuit of college readiness, a self-congratulatory home school father’s account of his freewheeling educational approach, a psychologically-based examination of teaching and learning strategies, and I’m halfway through a radical analysis of racism and sexism in schooling. Added to this, I’ve been teaching in a school that is, in all the ways that matter, facing exactly the same issues as American schools, despite being in a purportedly “third world” country.

My core questions up leaving PBHA: I have come to believe that America’s education systems are broken. Are they fixable? If yes, in what way? How can I most meaningfully participate in reform in a way that is also satisfying and sustainable for myself and my family?

I still don’t know the answer to these questions. And, if anything, I’m coming to see how circumstantial the life choices we make are. But my deeply held belief this morning is that, whatever the solution, and whatever my involvement, it needs to help people to recapture their delight in learning.

In preparation for teaching my new students about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the point where the previous teacher left off last term), and in an attempt to bolster my (embarrassing) lack of knowledge about world history, I began reading up on colonialism and the world wars in a few donated text books. Then I got absorbed and starting reading alternate interpretations. Nathaniel mocked gently; here I was, sitting on the khonde with a whole afternoon of potential leisure stretching in front of me and a giant history tome on my lap. It has been a long time since I have had the mental capacity or the desire to engage in this kind of totally self-directed learning. And, of course, my retention is broader, my analysis sharper and my critical questioning deeper due to the intrinsic motivation leading to my study.

At school, some of the kids come up with lists of vocabulary words they want explained during the break – eager to expand their knowledge of literature and the English language – but too many have the “I’m just sitting here because I have to” attitude that traditional classrooms seem to engender the world over. Self-congratulations aside, I was compelled by the home school tales of self-direction leading to genuine curiosity, deep immersion in interesting subject matter and the development of an integrated understanding of the world.

Unfortunately, from my current vantage point, it seems like it is impossible to bring together the worlds of public schooling and deep but informal learning, at least in any sort of systemic fashion. And I’m loving teaching again, but with each occasional encounter with nonprofit training for adults here in Malawi, I realize how much I miss guiding mature minds in acquiring skills they really want. So where do I go from here? Revelations hopefully to follow…