Today was the first day back to school! This morning when I woke up, I went to the center of the village where a few women sell donuts, greens, biscuits, and thobwa to sit with them and watch all the kids walk by in their royal purple school uniforms. It was great fun to just sit and watch (and not be watched by others)!! You know you're integrated (or as integrated as a mzungu can possibly be) into the community when you can sit in public without people staring at you too much. Watching the day unfold in this way is so fun to me as we saw kids sprinting and laughing on their way to school, plenty of bicycles loaded with bananas and pineapples going to far away markets, and women with this toddlers coming from the health center to buy them donuts.
Later in the morning, my landlady and one of my favorite SOLID trainees came over, and we enjoyed tea together in my house as they, of course, pointed out the variety and absurd amount of random things in my house. I don't have a ton of visitors IN my house, so it was refreshing to have people to chat with and spend time with in my own space.
This afternoon, my counterpart and I did a session with women whom we'd previously worked with in the village (doing cooking demonstrations and nutrition lessons) and taught them all about menstruation and pregnancy. If you had told me when I was in 5th grade and learning sex ed for the first time, that someday I would be the one teaching all about vaginas, periods, and sex to grown women in Africa, I would've never believed you. But, we did it! We explained the female reproductive organs and the menstrual cycle (complete with giving out period beads as a natural method of family planning). Some of the funny occurances during this lesson were:
-Before we began, one of the women saw my female reproductive system chart and proceeded to test out her English by repeatedly saying "your vagina (pronounced vag-ina) is very big," toward no one in particular
-The faces and responses when we asked if you can have sex when on your period
-The question of whether one ovary releases girl eggs and the other releases boy eggs
-Women using their menstrual cycle beads as necklaces and then people asking after if they could have necklaces too
My trip to get water today was interesting because I think I've officially hit the mark of "integrated." Normally, when I go get water, if there are a lot of people, then someone lets me go before them so I'm in and out fairly quickly. Today, I sat and waited like the rest of them. There were almost 13 buckets ahead of me, and the sun was setting. I was about to go home with empty buckets, but I knew that would spur a lot of questions from everyone I would pass. So I waited and waited. It was only maybe 30-45 minutes, but damn. Can you imagine having to wait that long just for two buckets of water?!
Tonight, I again enjoyed dinner with my neighbors as the kids told me about their first day of school (one teacher didn't even show up today- a sadly normal occurrence here in Malawi) and I debated with the parents about how girls need to learn about periods earlier than they do (to which I learned that if a girl younger than 12 is taught about periods, that person must go to the chief and pay him money....wtf?!). I hung my headlamp up on the roof rafters so that it cast a nice fluorescent light upon our feast on the dirt porch and made everyone's freshly shaven foreheads glint in the light. (All heads must be shaved for school!)
I realized when I returned to my house just how accustomed I've become to this simple lifestyle. Going to eat with my neighbors used to seem like a big deal, like whoa-I'm gonna integrate today, but now it's the normal routine. The same with getting water or leaving the house in general. Even at night, I'm falling into a better sleep pattern where at 7:30-8 PM I'm getting tired, and I wake up at 6 AM even without an alarm. I'm finally feeling completely comfortable in the village and not like an outsider just staying here. Well, as comfortable as you can feel when it's over 100 degrees from 11 AM to around 3 PM and there's no AC.