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July 31, 2014

This has probably been the busiest week in my service thus far.

I returned to my village from Lilongwe on Saturday evening. Sunday, I spent the day washing clothes, organizing my house, and meeting up with my counterpart to discuss what I’d learned at my malaria training. After that, a man in my village came to get me to go for a run. He was wearing converses. We jogged to the main road and back (about 6 miles) climbing up and down the rock laden dirt roads while people sat outside their homes and yelled greetings to us as we passed by. I think it was the first time I’ve gone all the way down and back up my road without walking—and man was I tired after!

Monday, as I was on my way to the health center to help with the family planning clinic, I noticed that it was deserted. I walked to my counterparts house but was redirected to the guardian shelter (where pregnant mothers stay when they are close to popping out a baby). I found him helping to fix a water pipe outside the shelter. I watched (along with a crowd of children) the ones trying to fix the pipe by wrapping thin strips of plastic around the places where water was spewing out into the muddy puddle that surrounded the pipe connection. Malawians are jacks of all trades by the way; they can fix anything and everything.

Anyway, he noticed that the women staying in the shelter were using their mosquito nets as blankets rather than hanging them up and sleeping under them. Since I was fresh from my STOMP training, I rushed home to get my materials—educational pictures, string, scissors, etc—to teach them about why it is so important for pregnant women to protect themselves from malaria as well as to help them hang their nets. After about an hour, three nets were hung and five amayis were (hopefully) wiser. 

That afternoon, my counterpart, three HSAs, and I went to Nkhuta village to do a combined community assessment and sanitation program. After I finished my part of the program, my counterpart pointed out that my friend Eunice lived right behind where our community meeting was happening. Since I wasn’t really doing anything at the meeting, I wandered over to her house. She was on her front porch with three other teenage (ish) aged girls putting braids into a younger girl’s hair. 

As I sat there chatting with these girls (in English and broken Chichewa), I thought about the concept of friendship. I would consider Eunice my closest Malawian friend who is around the same age as me, but what is it that qualifies someone as a friend? Making friends in Malawi has been difficult because there’s so much that differentiates Americans and Malawians. Yes, we are all global citizens and have the same needs—food, water, shelter, safety—and the same wants—love, good health, relationships, more stuff—but there’s something that separates us: a barrier that can be tricky to cross. We’ve grown up with opposing backgrounds. In America, we have access to constant entertainment—educational toys as a child; books, television, and sports as teenagers; and laptops, cell phones, and cars as adults. All children go to school, and, for the most part, our school systems are thorough. Kids have babysitters until the age of twelve or thirteen and don’t go out alone. We don’t give a second thought to basic services such as wifi, electricity, and indoor plumbing. Our food comes from grocery stores stocked with hundreds of varieties of anything you could want. The water out of our pipes is potable and treated, and sewage is properly taken care of. We have privacy, sidewalks, advanced health services and specialized doctors, refrigerators, paved roads, and freedom to make our own decisions. 

I can only speculate what growing up and living in a rural village in Malawi is like based on what I’ve seen or experienced, but here’s what I’ve come up with. It is not uncommon for kids to skip school because they don’t want to go and their parents don’t force them. They run around all day playing in the mud, rolling old bike tires along bumpy dirt paths, playing with “soccer balls” made of crumbled up plastic bags secured with old yarn or string, and hitting or running after each other with sticks for entertainment. Adults don’t typically have a high education level, so they’re stuck in manual labor jobs. People cook over three brick fires with wood from trees they've cut down in the yard. Candles or small battery-powered lights are all that are used to wander around mud huts after sundown. There are spiders, scorpions, lizards, mosquitos, and other bugs crawling around their homes. Paper and pens are valuable items, and markers/crayons are unheard of. A bed consists of a bamboo mat laid on the floor maybe with a blanket and mosquito net. Clothes are washed by hand by pounding and scrubbing them on rocks until the suds form muddy, soapy rivers. Walking a few miles to the market or the maize mill is a daily activity. Produce is bought from roadside stands made of bamboo pieces or bowls sitting on chairs outside one’s house, and the selection is limited to tomatoes and onions the majority of the year. Bathing is done with a bucket of cold water, soap, and maybe a cup. Personal space and privacy are nonexistent. 

It’s incredibly eye-opening to experience this lifestyle, but to what part of it can I relate having grown up in such a privileged way comparatively? It’s literally like living in a different world. So, after being transplanted onto this continent just 5 short months ago, how I can truly grasp the concept of what a Malawian’s life is like and what they go through? About what can talk with my friend Eunice—how I want to travel the globe when she will probably never leave Malawi; how the kids laugh at me and stare everywhere I go and at everything I do when she’s guilty of doing the same thing; my lofty goals and dreams about furthering my education after this experience when she may not ever be able to afford the application fees for nursing school? It can be difficult to find some common ground for conversation. Thankfully, there’s always a little bit of overlap between cultures; things that everyone can understand and discuss: love life, the weather, and how beautiful Mulanje is/how much we love pineapples. I’ve had to accept that relationships here will probably never be as deep rooted as the ones I have back home, but that doesn’t mean that they will be any less meaningful. You learn something from every relationship, and, in the case of my Malawian friends, I will probably learn a lot.

Anyway, off of that tangent and back to my productive week. 

Tuesday morning at 4 AM, I woke up to what sounded like a waterfall pounding onto my tin roof. It was pouring rain, and it continued off and on for most of the morning. My plan of going for a run was spontaneously abandoned, so I decided to spend the morning writing up lesson plans for a training group I’m hoping to start in my village and then creating a malaria big book to use to teach kids about malaria and mosquito nets. That afternoon my counterpart and I discussed future plans, set up a date to begin the training group, and conducted a net survey. We walked around to about six random homes and asked them an assortment of questions about mosquito nets such as how many nets they had, how many people in their household slept without a net, and how they maintain their nets. 

There are many issues when you start looking at mosquito net usage in rural villages in Malawi. People are stingy regarding nets. They always want more; and honestly they probably always need more. In almost all households, more than one person sleeps under each net. What kills me though is when people say things like: “there aren’t any mosquitos right now: it’s dry season” or “we don’t have enough nets for our kids to sleep under” when they have two nets hanging as a fence around their garden in the back yard. Someone at our training made a valid point: malaria is to Malawians what the flu is to Americans. We don’t see it as a big deal. In America, get a little bit of a head cold and say ‘I have the flu,’ or we have a running nose but ‘it’s just the flu; it’ll be gone in a few days.’ It’s the same for Malawians. They have a headache, but it’s ‘I just have a touch of malaria,’ or they are cold and have a fever but ‘it’s just mild malaria, I’ll be fine.’ Malaria is a complex issue, and, as of right now, I’m just trying to get a feel for how my community views it and hopefully protect themselves against it. 

On Tuesday afternoon, my friend Andy came to Bondo because he was doing work on my side of the mountain. I swear every time he visits my village, “bush radio” goes wild, and Emma and her amuna becomes the headline of the gossip station. Wednesday morning I showed Andy how to get to the trail that leads up to where he was going to work. He had to cross the Lichenya river, but since it had rained the entire day before, the water was much higher than usual. We spent about 45 minutes wandering through fields along the river trying to find a section where he could cross without getting waist deep in the river or swept away by swift currents. When a random man finally arrived and escorted him across, I took off for a run with the crowd of kids who had gathered to watch the mzungu cross the river. After about ten minutes, all but two had dropped off, but these two stuck with me the entire 50 minutes of my run. 

When I got back to my village, I wandered around some buying a few bananas and a bundle of chinese cabbage with my 11 year old friend, Elena. She helped me carry my goodies and navigate my way through the small paths winding through the thick of the village. At one home, an amayi rushed out and presented me with three sweet potatoes. Her house had half of a roof; the other half had fallen in. I tried to give her some kwatcha for the potatoes, but she refused it. The extreme kindness and giving nature of Malawians never ceases to amaze me. They may not have a lot, but they’re always willing to share. 

The remainder of the morning, I dug up garden beds in my yard before going to Khanyizira village to do a village assessment. The program wasn’t too different from the other ones we’ve been doing, but I was pleasantly surprised by the ‘needs’ that came up during the meeting such as some sort of youth club or group to keep kids busy/prevent risky sexual activity and cooking demos to address the lack of nutritional knowledge. 

Thursday morning, I woke up to my alarm blaring Spice Girls at me at 5 AM. I heard people talking at the water tap outside of my window despite the fact that it was still pitch black outside. I grumbled and muttered to myself about how people should not be awake right now before dragging my butt out from under my warm blankets into the chilly air. After layering myself with clothes and grabbing a granola bar to go (thanks Melanie!), I sauntered off to my counterpart’s house with my headlamp blazing the trail. We journeyed about three miles or so to the tea estate next to us to thank them for giving me bamboo to make a fence in my yard. Along the way, we ran into some girls (ages 11 and 13) walking to the maize mill (about a 45 minute walk) with bags of corn on their heads…at 5:45 AM…by themselves. I couldn’t help but compare this situation to America, yet again. I cannot imagine an 11 year old waking up at 5:30 in the morning only to go for a three mile morning stroll with a heavy bag on her head to the mill so that her family could have food for the day. My counterpart called it child abuse as we saw dozens of more kids on their way to and from the mill on our walk. Adults use their kids to help them do chores, he commented; they don’t know how to be parents. I agreed. 

After our trip to the tea estate, we hurried back to the health center for our under five clinic. Mulanje Mountain dominated the sky line as we walked back and was definitely living up to its nickname of “Island in the Sky” as there were clouds around the base of it making it appear as if it were floating. Fog drifted up from the valleys between the mountains, and the more I stared at the view, the happier I felt. Views in Mulanje have a tendency of doing that to me.

The under 5 clinic was hectic as ever, weighing all the babies with the soda scale, updating immunization records, and analyzing how many children were underweight and normal weight. My counterpart had me do a malaria talk for all the amayis (probably close to 100 of them) with about five minutes warning—classic Malawi planning.  

In the afternoon we conducting more random net surveys. There was only one house from the ones we visited where every person in the home slept under a net. Afterward, I rushed home to grab my things and travel down to the boma. As I was leaving my house, a boy came by with a dvd player and wires and tried to persuade me to hire him to connect my house to the electricity cables. I was in a rush, but we discussed the price—mk50,000. That is almost a whole month’s stipend with Peace Corps. I said I’d think about it. I like that I live here without electricity and will really accept it when I return home. However, it might be beneficial to have it in terms of saving time cooking and/or to charge my electronics during rainy season when I doubt I’ll be able to use my solar chargers. Who knows what I’ll end up doing. 

All in all, life is wonderful here. I’m finally beginning to feel at home, and I feel like I’m finally doing what I came here to do: help people. Even if they aren’t at the point where they’re changing their behaviors yet, I’m doing the best I can and can’t imagine spending my time/life doing anything else. 


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