Head 'em up and move 'em out

Sitting in the airport, we spot a "Skyband Hotspot" wireless sign and realize we actually have an active skyband card with us, so here I am positing from my last moments in Malawi.

We're pretty ridiculously laid back considering the upcoming week + of travel and transatlantic move. As we always seem to, we planned and stressed way in advance, made to do lists and crossed things off. We must be getting better at this "massive life change" stuff, though, because we were in total ready-to-go, chill-with-friends mode starting at around 1:30 yesterday. The fact that a routing change knocked a ground-stop in Lubumbashi off our itinerary at the last minute was a sweet bonus, and we spent our extra two hours playing Wii bowling and lunching at a cafe. Not sure if the months of stressing over next steps and logistics were worth it, but it sure feels like it right now.

The last week has been somewhat hilarious. There's no opportunity now to post pictures of Nathaniel eating dinner with a giant wooden spoon after we sold all our flatware, or of my students taking their social studies exam under the tree, or of Nathaniel sleeping on a 6 foot beanbag in our three nights at our friends' place, but you can hold your breath in anticipation of in-person stories sometime soon.

Malawi's new flag

Around the time we arrived here, last September, there was a national uproar over the decision by HE (His Excellency; Bingu wa Mutharika) to alter the Malawi flag. Since independence its three bold stripes had been background for the image of a half-risen sun. No longer. Malawi, HE announced, was past those early days and the image of a fully-risen sun would more accurately represent the country's state of development. Hence, the new flag.

Fast forward nine months to today, past the expulsion of the British High Commissioner, the loss of donor budgetary support, the loss of IMF support, depleted foreign exchange reserves and days-long queues for petrol and diesel. The Minister of Natural Resources, Energy, and Environment's response? "Get used to fuel crises." The response on the ground? Maybe it's time for another new flag:

What I can say is that I picked it the same from that one. Are we together?

Every profession has its own jargon and every region its own language or dialect. What happens when you have a room full of nutritionists for whom English (and a quirky descendant of colonial British English at that) is a second language editing a technical document drafted by an American who trained as an engineer, not a nutritionist? Well, all things considered, remarkably little confusion. There may be the occasional question of uptake vs. intake (no, we’re not talking about eating) but on the whole there is a remarkable degree of cohesion. In other words, we’re together.

I may still have only rudimentary Chichewa, but one thing is for certain: listening to myself Tuesday morning as I facilitated discussion of the Strategy for the Prevention and Control of Miconutrient Deficiencies (formerly known by the far less sexy title of “Micronutrient Strategy”) I realized I speak pretty darn good Malawian meetingese. How can I tell? Let’s just say I picked (i.e., grasped) it from that one (the meeting). It would be presumptuous of me to simply declare that as truth, but that’s what I can say. Are we together?

Under the Tree and Teaching

Three weeks ago, I show up to find twenty new students in my Form One class. All bright, to be sure, but without the year of critical thinking, vocabulary and cross-accent comprehension building that I’ve done with the other forty-five kids. The untimely arrival is additionally frustrating because we’ve been waiting for this “second distribution” of students since September, and only now has the government gotten their act together to paste a list of twenty names on the window of the school.

Thus, we’re already struggling along a bit when I show up to school on Monday and find that all of the classrooms have been filled by national exam takers and we’ll be learning under a tree for the last two weeks of school. And taking our end-of-term exams there as well? Unclear, as of yet. There is an extreme shortage of classroom blocks in most of rural Malawi, and many students, the country over, learn under trees year-round – it’s pretty much a running joke / ongoing source of pessimism in Malawi as a whole. And here I am, getting to experience this stereotypical challenge first hand. 

Verdict? Tough but not impossible, thanks to all those years of forced creative adaptation at PBHA. Being heard and understood over the wind, and the unsupervised Form 3 students out in the field playing football has left my voice a little raw each afternoon. And I manage to sunburn my nose. Keeping kids focused the last two weeks of school when they’re outside on the football pitch, certainly not the easiest, but I think we’ve managed to putter along without it being too big a waste of time. We’ll have to see how end-of-term exams go…

Check out my classroom under the sky!

One year later...

…or six and a half, depending on how you slice it. Hard to believe that it’s already been a year since we tied the knot in Santa Fe!

After allowing Christmas, New Year’s, our “since getting together” anniversary, Nathaniel’s birthday and Valentine’s Day to be total non-events, we decide to actually mark the occasion of our first year as a married couple. There are plenty of gorgeous getaways in Malawi, but many are an unfortunate distance away in a country where driving is even more than normally stressful due to petrol shortages and pot-holed, pedestrian clogged roads. And, of course, there’s the fact that we traveled seven of the nine weekends in April and May. Solution? Staycation!

Kumbali Lodge is only about twenty minutes from our house on the outskirts of Lilongwe and, despite the fact that it’s the place where Madonna and Bill Clinton stay when they’re in town, it’s not too ridiculously priced. We arrive and are settled into a lovely room with soft cushioned chairs (we’re so tired of our uncomfortable wicker seating that we’ve already earmarked the dough for a big, cushy couch for our next place) on a private veranda overlooking a gorgeously landscaped garden. A sunset stroll, afternoon sundowners, a custom mini-mexican buffet (amazingly tasty), quiet country sleep, and delicious breakfast later, we’re back home on the khonde feeling totally noodle-like and quite pleased with our celebration-venue.

There’s something great about lodges. They’ve got the same family-run feel of B&Bs, but most are slightly larger and more spread out, combining the best of privacy and comfort. And here in Africa, we haven’t been to a lodge yet that doesn’t have amazing open indoor-outdoor spaces for lounging. Kumbali, for all its high powered guests, is refreshingly unpretentious. The tissue box in our room has a big 600 kwacha price scrawled on top in magic marker, and sits right next to the fancy mirrored tray full of mini-toiletries.

The proprietor, a chain-smoking South African with a huge beer gut wearing shorts and crocs, sits down and shares the story of the lodge’s founding. He bought it as a dairy farm when the government privatized. (I know from prior conversations that the farm was built by Canadians and gifted to the Malawi government who ran it into the ground. The Canadian legacy? A small Malawian village called “Canada” on the road to the lodge.) In any case, the dairy was going under when someone told him they needed a place for three Brazilians to live for five months. He and his wife gave up their own house and camped out in the fields, using overdrafts from the bank (official loans demanded 60% interest at the time) to finance the gradual construction of the current buildings. Is he worried about the current political situation?* Nope – they attract mostly business clientele, he claims, and more problems in the country just means more NGOs spending the big bucks.

And, as we take a stroll through the farm’s maize fields this morning, and consider, with awe, how many Malawian farmers it takes to plant all those stalks, it seems somewhat obvious that the unpredictably organic growth of this locally rooted business has probably had a much greater and more positive effect then all the NGOs. But then again, where would he be without donor dollars to pay for business trips and bills? Reading and many conversations have not helped us draw any final conclusions about aid work and money – harmful in some ways, definitely, but the root of all evil as some claim?

As for us, it feel equally tough to predict how this crazy first year of marriage will play out in the long run. How weird will it feel to get home, open the safe deposit box, and switch back to our “real” wedding rings, which we actually only wore for a summer before replacing with the simple silver ones we brought with us? Like stories we’ve heard from so many of the career expats we’ve met here, will the US feel a little (or a lot) stifling and disconnected or will we just appreciate the creature comforts of the developed world that much more? All questions aside, Nathaniel has made me promise this won’t be our last big adventure – it just makes it that much more of a challenge that we have to constantly balance desire for boldness with those type-A, multiple-contingency-planner personalities!

And now for a photo montage…

*A leaked internal email in which the British High Commissioner allegedly said that the President is becoming “increasingly autocratic” resulted in Bingu kicking the British ambassador out of the country. This, in turn, resulted in Britain freezing their direct budget support to Malawi’s government and a domino effect in which many other funders withdrew their money as well. Big deal? Well, direct budget support covered 40% of government expenses in 2010-2011 and the losses for the 2010-2011 fiscal year alone will be more than USD 100 million. 

Pizza for Every Meal (aka Back on the Minibus)

After a delightful weekend up on the Zomba plateau, the big red truck was headed back to Lilongwe... without me. I was headed to Blantyre, Malawi’s commercial center and setting for tomorrow’s National Fortification Alliance meeting. But I’m getting ahead of myself. For breakfast Ben had whipped up scrambled eggs and reheated leftover slices of Melody’s delicious veggie pizza from the night before. 8:30am, pizza number one.

After winding our way down from the foggy heights of the plateau, I parted ways with my erstwhile traveling companions and, after learning the next bus to Blantyre didn’t depart until two, schlepped over to “Tasty Bites” a freshly-painted coffee shop on the edge of town. “Coffee with milk, please.” “Do you want strong?” “Sure.” And sure enough, after a delay long enough that they could’ve been custom roasting the beans, my coffee arrived—strong enough that it took me the rest of the morning sipping to finish it off. Come noon it was time for lunch. The only veggie option on the menu? You guessed it: pizza number two.

With “fuel in the tank” so to speak, I trekked back over to the bus depot and sat down to wait for my departure. Two o’clock came and went, with nary a sign. I didn’t have a ticket (“buy on the bus”) and or any particular customer loyalty, so when a fairly functional-looking minibus with a Blantyre sign in the window started inching forward through the mass of touts, vendors, and assorted hangers-about I buttonholed the driver, learned the price (500 KW or ~$2.75) and hopped in.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should reveal that I’m currently about half way through Paul Theroux’s “Dark Star Safari” a by turns nostalgic and disillusioned recounting of his overland travel from Cairo to Capetown in 2001. Did his waxing rhapsodic over the truth to be found in traveling by chicken bus sway my decision? Perhaps. I will admit that travel in this manner, squeezed four abreast into the bumpy bench seats and hugging my daypack atop hiked-up knees with the open window blowing my hair back, has it’s charms. No meaningful other activity (reading, laptop, etc.) is possible so one’s objective becomes simply to arrive. And without the possibility of effecting the speed (or lack thereof) of travel, gone too is all responsibility for timeliness. We’ll get there when we get there, and that’s all there is to it. And when the bus stops in a totally unrecognizable market town somewhere outside of Blantyre, well, I’ll just get on another one. Having to rely on the kindness of fellow travelers to point me the right way, traveling light, and walking the last stretch to the hotel all took me back to an earlier time, when I wasn’t trying to solve any problems beyond how to get to the next town, where to find some decent food and a warm bed for the night.

But that was then, and this is now. After checking in it was back to reality; working email and the phones, trying to convince people to take the next little step, that their effort and engagement are needed, that nobody else can sort this out for them. Not exactly grueling physical labor, but still work enough to build up an appetite. Lo and behold, what should the hotel food court offer? Veg pizza. I suppose I could’ve ordered a salad, but what fun would that have been? Reading more Theroux and nursing a Fanta Orange I went for the hat trick: pizza number three. All in all it was a delicious day, a welcome departure from the norm.

Life Map

So what have we been doing in the weeks between these gauntlets of travel? Working, cooking, and watching the ever-evolving life-map branch ahead of us -- circling around and around the upcoming forks in the road. Answers are hard to come by through discussion alone, and though frustrated by the fog of decisions-yet-to-be-made-by-others-that-will-impact-us, we’re trying to be patient and let things fall as they will.

The clarity around my own career choices I hoped would come with time and distance has coalesced into one not-so-helpful conclusion: There are structural problems in educational systems the world over, but there are also young people across the globe who need the kind of support and opportunity that comes from close relationships with mentors and teachers. I enjoy both sides of the work and have my own strengths and weaknesses in each area, so which direction to choose? In the end, perhaps it’s the fact that I love working with a team that will make the decision – traditional classroom teaching is a somewhat solitary pursuit and I miss the excitement of brainstorming a really amazing and spot-on training curriculum with other passionate professionals.

And, of course, there are other considerations and constraints. I was determined to move to Athol with Nathaniel next year, try out living in a rural community, elements of which we both miss from our childhoods, and take whatever job I could find in the area. As of now, it seems like the opportunities for compelling work are slim – hopefully some teaching jobs if any open up in the nearby tiny school districts over the summer, maybe some student affairs jobs at local colleges if I’m willing to commute a ways, certainly nanny and tutor jobs if I’m willing to just take anything. An email from a search firm looking for a nonprofit manager in Boston made me realize how much I love that side of the work as well, how much my network in Boston might make it possible to find not just a decent job but a great job, and how much I miss the closeness of community we’ve already built in the city. So, live partially apart for a year and face tough geographic decisions again at the end of farm school? (Boo) Invest in Athol and, if we don’t love it, or the right opportunities aren’t there, start over again in 2013 (exhausting thought!)?

Of course it’s not as bad as all that. From a different perspective it’s a choice between great options and we count ourselves incredibly lucky. Updates as we find answers!