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Integration Continues

A Peace Corps Volunteer’s first three months at site are referred to as the “integration period.” The two main goals during that time are to integrate into the community and to assess community needs.

Simple enought, right?

Wrong. No road map exists to achieve these goals, and each PCV has to determine how to approach them. And when they fail, they have to find another approach and try again. Many aspects of integration sound easy but require a lot of effort.

Imagine that you just moved to a new neighborhood in a different state in the U.S. You might slowly introduce yourself to neighbors in passing. You’ll use Google Maps to find the nearest shops and restaurants to try. Maybe your new coworkers will invite you out for a drink after work.

Will digging our first garden bed in our backyard.

Now imagine that you have only been learning the local language for a couple of months. Google Maps doesn’t know of any shops or restaurants in your neighborhood. Drinking isn’t socially acceptable, and it’s not clear what the best way is to socialize. Oh, and also, your entire job relies on your community accepting you, trusting you, and wanting to work with you. That’s a little taste of what a PCV walks into when they move to their site.

Will’s and my approach to tackling these seemingly simple yet impossible goals can be summarized with five key strategies:

1. Learn the language, and use it. Throughout PST and our time at site so far, we have put in some serious time studying and practicing Chichewa. Every interaction with community members is in Chichewa, unless the other party switches to English (there are a handful of people with whom we have English conversations; for the rest, we try to switch back to Chichewa). We now have two Chichewa tutors, whom we meet with for a total of 8-10 hours per week. We also have Chichewa story books, grammar text books, dictionaries, and flashcards at the ready at home. We have chosen to take language learning seriously, because we know that it will set us up for success in both a professional and personal sense while we are here. We could easily rely on speaking with the few coworkers we each have who are confident in their English skills, but as soon as we walk or bike to more rural villages, English speakers are hard to come by. Most people assume that we only speak English, and oftentimes, their whole demeanor towards us changes when they hear us introduce ourselves in Chichewa. In our community, language is clearly a critical component of integration.

2. Be seen. Staying home is the easiest and most tempting thing to do during the integration period, but we found that it was crucial to fight that urge. Early on, we would go for walks together, with the simple goal of greeting everyone we passed (as appropriate in local culture). It was uncomfortable. We didn’t know where we were going, we still fumbled with rattling off the appropriate greeting or response quickly, and we didn’t recognize a single face. Regardless, I think that those early walks were important. We started to recognize people. We learned names and faces, paths and shops. We asked questions and made connections. Community members learned our names and faces too, and they learned that we aren’t just visitors. We still follow this rule now, although usually not with walks. We accept invitations to go to new church services. We choose to buy eggs at a local shop, even though they’re less expensive in the city. We go to weddings and funerals and initiation celebrations. Some days, even going to the office or to the clinic is more about being seen than about any obligation we have there that day.

Enjoying a cold Coca Cola after a market day shopping trip. A perfect way to “be seen” in the community.

3. Be nice. Will and I still need to remind each other of this from time to time. Because of our previous experiences in Kenya, we both came to Malawi with a talent for ignoring shouts of “azungu,” and a tendency to drive a very hard bargain, knowing we’re likely to be overcharged for goods and transportation. We remind each other to “be nice,” because impressions matter, and word spreads. One day, I’m rude to the man who tries to charge me five times the typical price for tomatoes. The next day, he tells a story about a stuck-up azungu he met to his neighbor, who happens to be my coworker. Suddenly, everyone in my workplace thinks I’m rude. This scenario didn’t happen to me, but it easily could! We try to be nice, even when we’re exhausted and annoyed and overcharged, because every interaction matters. (Obviously, we could aim to be nice to everyone everywhere, all the time. But you know how on some days, you ignore someone when you pass them on the street, and other days you say, “Hey, how’s it going?!” with a smile on your face? We’re shooting for the ladder.)

Sharing a meal of falafel with two friends in our community, Maxwell and Keith.

4. Ask questions. We try to learn something from every conversation with a new community member. This is often limited by our language skills, but we can almost always learn something. Mumakhala kuti? Where do you stay? Mumalima chiyani? What do you grow? Muli ndi ana angati? How many children do you have? Questions and answers like this help us to expand our understanding of our community, little by little. In our situation, assessing community needs doesn’t take the format of a mass survey or a bunch of perfectly representative focus groups. Most of our community needs assessment has been conducted by asking questions, following leads, and finding multiple perspectives. We’ve talked to community health workers, community agriculture advisers, farmers, teachers, shop owners, elders, mothers, children, chiefs, district-level supervisors, and the list goes on. Each conversation adds to the story of our community and helps to pave a path forward.

Meeting with a group of caregivers of children under five years old, to learn what their group does and what goals they have for the future.

5. Exercise patience. We felt a lot of pressure to begin planning and implementing projects as soon as we arrived at site. Nearly everyone we met asked, “What’s your program? What’s your project?” as if we would have a pre-established plan of what we’re here to do. While it might have been easy to slide into that line of thinking, and to have tried to form new clubs, plant community gardens, and make big promises, we decided to take our time. We are very cautious about initiating unsustainable projects and about implementing interventions that reflect our (white American-minded) priorities more strongly than their priorities as long-term community members. To avoid both of those concerns, we have tried to maneuver through our integration period with thoughtfulness and intention. We explicitly told colleagues and community members that we would not be initiating any new activities in our first few months here, because we needed to learn about the community first. We also made it clear that we won’t be implementing any projects that aren’t prioritized by the community. For example, we can share ideas and information about the importance of hand washing in creative ways with lots of energy. However, if community members do not want to prioritize building their own hand washing stations and buying soap, then we cannot force them to. We’re here to share ideas, transfer skills, build capacity, and work with community members to focus on their priorities. We aren’t here to decide what the priorities of the community should be, based on our own perceptions. In order to accomplish this, we need to take our time. We need to learn everything we can about the community. We need to meet with many different groups and community members. We need to listen more than we talk. And we need to work with community members to piece together which community priorities we can try to build and expand on, given our training, experience, and resources. We also need to work together to find sustainability in those projects, so that they continue on after our service here ends. Community projects and programs shouldn’t start with us or end with us, and we need to exercise patience to ensure that is not the case.

After four months at site, we are still integrating and working to understand community needs, assets, and priorities. Slowly but surely, we are making plans with motivated community members. We don’t have big numbers to report yet for any given intervention this fiscal year, yet we are satisfied with our progress. Every volunteer’s service pans out a little bit differently. For Will and I, we decided that we needed to act with a lot of intention in order to lay the groundwork for successful projects and programs in the future, and we have been doing just that.

P.S. If you’ve read this far, you might be interested to know that Will and I started producing weekly audio updates to send to family and friends. In a short, 10ish-minute podcast-style recording, we summarize some highlights and interesting tidbits from our week, as well as answer listener questions. If you’d like to “subscribe” to our weekly audio updates, please reach out via email, Facebook, or WhatsApp so that we can add you to the list! We will continue to use this blog to share our experiences in a bigger-picture sense.

The content of this website is mine alone and does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or the Malawian Government.

Please Help Us Support Maxwell’s Education

As you (probably) know by now, Will and I were evacuated back to the United States along with all other Peace Corps Volunteers worldwide in March 2020. I wrote a post for the Peace Corps blog here about finding out we needed to leave and what happened to the programs we had been working on. Long story short, our friend Maxwell continued carrying out all of the programs we had started together. His dedication to his community and to his commitments was absolutely incredible.

We have stayed in contact with Maxwell, and he recently started a diploma program (sort of like community college) in Business Management in Blantyre, Malawi. We were able to send him funds to get started, but we aren’t able to fully fund his program right now on our own. That’s why we’re asking our family, friends, supporters, community members, and even strangers, to help support his educational and living expenses for the duration of his two-year program. Maxwell completely shaped our time in Malawi for the better, and we are dedicated to help support him on this new path. This diploma will open numerous new doors for him. You can find more information about Maxwell’s story, his plan, and a breakdown of the costs written out in the GoFundMe. Please contribute if you can, and share Maxwell’s story and fundraiser with your own network.

Thank you for supporting us when we were in Malawi, and thank you for helping us support Maxwell now.

Remembering an Impactful Leader

The air was heavy with humidity and grief as we parked our bikes and found an open patch of ground to sit on among a few thousand other people who had gathered. The clusters of seated mourners overflowed from shadows cast by trees, as people sought refuge from the afternoon heat. Many had been seated for hours; we would remain for a couple hours more.

A few weeks ago, Will and I attended our first Malawian funeral. During PST, we learned about funerals from our culture trainers and from other PCVs. We heard about cultural norms related to death and funerals, and I took mental notes:

Men shouldn’t cry, except when paying their last respects.

Women should grieve outwardly– crying out, wailing, throwing their arms up.

Community members should contribute something, either ufa (maize flour) or some cash.

Many funerals last a whole day, and they are held in and outside of the house of the deceased person.

Other volunteers shared stories of attending funerals in their communities. Volunteers often attend funerals for community members they’ve never met, as it can be an expectation from their community. I assumed that my experience with funerals here would likely be similar: a cultural learning opportunity, and a time to show my commitment as a member of the community. While that was true to some extent, those were not the driving factors that led us to attend our first funeral.

Rewind to our first couple of weeks at site. Will and I had been feeling overwhelmed by the large size of our catchment area, and we were struggling finding a place on which we should focus. One day, Will came home from an event that he had attended with coworkers. A goat-raising project in a village several kilometers away had hosted a ceremony to hand off some young goats to a new household. Will excitedly told me about the project, and then he spoke of a local leader who had been part of the ceremony, Group Village Head Chikapa. He said GVH Chikapa was excited to meet him, and he invited Will and I to come to his house to eat nsima with him.

A couple of weeks later, we make the trek across the river and through the woods and spent nearly two hours chatting with GVH Chikapa at his home. We told him about the Peace Corps and why we are in Malawi. He told us his life story that led to his role as GVH. After growing up in the village, he left for secondary school and then university. He built a career in agricultural research, which took him to Israel, Germany, Mozambique, Zambia, South Africa, and all over. Eventually, he returned to Lilongwe to create a business of his own. In the early 2000’s, his home village called him. They were struggling, and they were in need of a leader. He left his life in Lilongwe to move back to his home village.

GVH Chikapa told us of some of the issues he found people there facing– a major one was the spread of HIV. He worked with doctors at the health center to develop a plan for his area. A major focus was reducing mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Together with other community leaders, interventions were implemented to educate the community. The following year, only 1 out of over 100 new births resulted in mother-to-child transmission of HIV. GVH Chikapa rattled off statistics for several of the following years, clearly proud of the progress that was made. But even then, he wasn’t fully satisfied. He again talked with doctors to determine why there was still one birth that resulted in HIV transmission. What could they do differently? He learned that the one case was a young mother, who had been trying to hide the pregnancy. He saw how early marriage and rape negatively affected the health of his people. So he set to work trying to facilitate change in those areas. Men who married young women were punished. He asked, why are families letting their daughters marry so young? A prominent answer he found was that families struggled to feed everyone. The sooner a daughter married, the fewer mouths left to feed. GVH Chikapa, drawing from his background in agriculture, worked to develop “Chikapa Organic Fertilizer,” which he taught farmers to make with locally available resources. Farmers who used it saw improvements in their maize yield, up to three times their previous yields. He reasoned that if families experienced less food insecurity, they would feel less pressure to allow their young daughters to marry.

GVH Chikapa continued to find ways to improve the lives of the families in his village. He wanted better access to healthcare for his village, so he led his village development committee in raising funds door-to-door for a community shelter. They were successful, and the health center now holds a monthly outreach clinic in that shelter. GVH Chikapa wanted his village to be led fairly. Just a few weeks before we met him, elections had been held for the board of the village development committee. When the results were tallied, he noticed that the people with the most family members won all of the seats. He called for a repeat election and stressed the importance of voting for a board who could be the most effective. New board members won in the repeated election.

Toward the end of our visit, GVH Chikapa took us on a walk. He showed us the community shelter. He pointed out a few trees that were hundreds of years old and told us a story of protecting them in the village bylaws, because of their ties to the history of the area. He took us to see a fish pond, where community members farm fish each year during rainy season.

Even with all of these accomplishments under his belt, GVH Chikapa was not done. His next major goal was for his village to become independent of food aid. He told us his vision of community silos, where each family could store a few bags of maize, which would be returned to them later in the year. When we reminded him that we can only bring ideas and energy, not money, he reassured us that he remembered. He wasn’t asking for our money. He was just sharing his dreams for his people.

Before we left, GVH Chikapa told us he wanted to organize a meeting for us to meet with his village development committee and other village leaders to discuss our goals and find ways for us to get involved in the area. Will and I walked home, gushing with excitement. We had found an area in which we could focus our work. We found a leader who wanted to work with us. He was intelligent, determined, dedicated, and full of hope. In our eyes that afternoon, GVH Chikapa represented the best of Malawian leadership, and we were thrilled to be building a relationship with him.

As you may have guessed, GVH Chikapa is no more. I received the news in a WhatsApp message from a colleague that he had unexpectedly collapsed in his home. It was well-known that we had met with Chikapa and were excited about working with him.

So on a Sunday afternoon, we found ourselves biking over the river and through the woods. We dismounted our bikes and leaned them against a tree. We seated ourselves, joining the crowds gathered under the shade of the three giant protected trees. While listening to several speeches and prayers, Will and I were quietly approached and asked to join a group of distinguished mourners who would go into the house to pay their last respects. We nodded and got in line. I peered over at an empty bench outside the house, which we had sat on a few weeks earlier. We filed into the dark house, hearing cries of grieving women. GVH Chikapa laid in a casket on the ground, with a glass window to show his face. He wore his traditional headwear, as usual. We shuffled around the casket, following the line. We passed through the wails in the air, the gazes of women whose worlds had changed, and passed men who we knew were only allowed to cry in that very room, in that moment. And then we were ushered back outside. I took a breath and looked out at the mass of people who had been sitting on the ground all day. Will and I stood in silence, our faces wet with tears.

This was not just a cultural experince, or a strategic opportunity for community integration. We were grieving. We grieved with a community for the loss of a respected leader. GVH Chikapa had given us the greatest sense of hope we had felt in Malawi, and my heart ached for his family and his village. Malawi is full of people who want the best for their communities. I hope we will encounter more leaders like GVH Chikapa during our service, and I hope we will use the energy and commitment that he exuded to continue working to best serve the villages around us, including his home village.

Rest in Peace, GVH Chikapa. This little corner of the world is a lot better because of you.

The content of this website is mine alone and does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or the Malawian Government.

Nyumba Sweet Nyumba

Taken on our first night in our new home

On the same day we said goodbye to our host family, we boarded a minibus and headed off to a place that was completely new to us at the time– our permanent site. Will and I were placed in Zomba district in southern Malawi, in a trading center called Thondwe (pronounced like toned-way). In many ways, we won the lottery when it comes to luxurious sites. But what is luxury, in terms of Peace Corps Malawi?

Luxury is close proximity to a paved road near major cities. (Only a quarter of Malawian roads are paved.) Our house is located near “the tarmac” (as paved roads are called here) and is only a few hundred meters from both of our workplace offices. We have excellent access to public transit, and we can reach Zomba town (the fourth largest city in Malawi) within 20 minutes or Blantyre (the second largest city in Malawi) within an hour.

Bundled up on a chilly late September evening

Luxury is living in the highlands. Although we’re in southern Malawi, our hot season will be the shortest and least intense in the region. During rainy season, flooding is less likely here. Overall, our climate is more moderate than many other areas in the country, which I consider one of the greatest luxuries on this list. Besides the climate that comes with it, our area has beautiful landscapes.

Luxury is a well-stocked market that’s only a five-minute walk from our door. As I am becoming familiar with the area and its residents, I often ask people, “What do you like the most about living in Thondwe?” Nine times out of ten, I receive some form of the response, “There are many vegetables here, and they are very cheap.” Because we have not been to other trading centers on market days, we have a limited scope for comparison, but I will take our neighbors’ words on this one. Our trading center has market days every Wednesday and Saturday. Currently, we are able to find tomatoes, onions, green peppers, hot peppers, carrots, peas, green beans, okra, eggplant, bananas, apples, strawberries, garlic, ginger, potatoes, cucumbers, leafy greens, cabbage, and eggs, all fresh at our market. We can also purchase various dry goods, such as rice, beans, popcorn, and flour. Besides foodstuffs, vendors sell pots, pans, hardware, shoes (Will recently invested in a bright blue pair of Malawian-made Crocs!) baskets, secondhand clothes, and various other items.

Our beautiful market haul from last week

Luxury is a well-constructed house with electricity. (About 11% of the total population of Malawi has electricity.) While our house is fairly small (comprised of three rooms, each 9 ft x 9 ft), it is sturdy. We have a light in every room, and one electrical socket. So far, we have experienced several blackouts (during which the power is out, for an unknown reason, for an unknown period of time). One blackout lasted for a full week, while most last for a day or even a just a few hours. As annoying as they can be, having electricity the rest of the time certainly makes our lives easier.

Luxury is working with Malawian counterparts who are kind and professional. Peace Corps uses the term “counterpart” to refer to a host-country national in the community who works with a Peace Corps Volunteer. Peace Corps assigns us one counterpart, and then we find others in our community throughout our service. While we have a lot left to figure out regarding our work here, Will and I are both fortunate to have counterparts who can help us along the way. Will’s counterpart is an agricultural extension officer, who also happens to be our neighbor. He and his family have helped us tremendously as we have settled in. My counterpart is a Senior Health Surveillance Assistant who checks in with me nearly daily to make sure I am satisfied with how my work is moving along. Both are kind men with whom we feel very comfortable working.

In all of these ways and more, we are very fortunate to have been placed in Thondwe. When we accepted our positions with Peace Corps Malawi, we mentally prepared ourselves to live an hour bike ride from the tarmac, with another few hours of travel to a major city. We were expecting to live without electricity, without reliable phone service, and with easy access to only tomatoes and onions. Through a site-assignment process that is beyond our control, we have been afforded more luxury than we anticipated. We are thankful for many of these luxuries, and they also come with an interesting twinge of guilt. If our past experiences have taught us anything, it might be that guilt is part of the package when it comes to living in rural sub-Saharan Africa as a white, middle-class American. Of course, our service won’t be all rainbows and butterflies. We also already have many challenges, questions, annoyances, and uncertainties here at site, which I’ll dive into in future posts. For now, rest assured that we are living the high life, Peace Corps Malawi style.

The content of this website is mine alone and does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or the Malawian Government.

This time, it’s “Tidzawonana.”

With the wind blowing fiercely and the sun shining brightly, the weather was an obvious omen on the day of our much-awaited swearing-in ceremony. For Will, me, and 62 others in our cohort, change was quite literally in the air, and our futures looked bright. We officially swore in as Peace Corps Volunteers on August 16th at the soccer field in our training village, in the presence of the U.S. Ambassador to Malawi, supervisors from our future sites, our host families, and many others. The day felt surreal; one that we had looked forward to for so long.

Will and I with our host family at our swearing-in ceremony

Before we had even started packing our bags to come to Malawi, I had dreaded pre-service training. Of course, I knew that it was a crucial step on the way to a meaningful service, but I had also read enough blogs to know that PST wouldn’t be a walk in the park. Intensive language learning was a welcome challenge, but the loss of autonomy (over my sleep, meals, bathing, pants-wearing, and privacy) was slightly less welcome. After ten weeks, it was finally time to continue on.

As I stood there at the ceremony, I felt a wave of emotions. Anxious excitement, for all of the possibilities ahead when we moved to our site. A strange longing for family in America, as it was bizarre to have them physically absent at such a meaningful milestone. A sense of fraternity, with fellow PCVs, both by my side and around the world. Joy, as I thought about all of the little freedoms that would come with moving to site. And sadness, as this milestone also marked the end of our time living with our host family.

It’s hard to imagine ever wanting to go through PST again, but I also feel a lot of gratitude surrounding my experience. I feel thankful for the time I spent with my language teacher, PC staff, fellow trainees, and my host family.

I already wrote about our lovely amayi, but our three sisters who lived with us also played an integral role in our PST life. Chimwemwe is 19. She helps run the household, and she also helped teach us Chichewa with all of the patience and grace I could ask for. Tadala, our 13-year-old sister, loves to play cards and give seemingly sassy replies that we usually could not understand. Agnes is eight. Her shy smile constantly beaming, she seems to like helping around the house, and she absolutely loves going to church on Sundays. I remember sharing a small package of cookies with her one time– three for her, three for me. I noticed that she nibbled on one, but held the rest in her hand. A few moments later, she found her friends and sisters and split up the cookies in pieces among them. Malawian culture is communal in nature, but I’m not sure that most 8-year-olds would be so quick to share a special treat like she did. Agnes has an unwaveringly kind nature, the type that you rarely encounter.

After spending ten weeks becoming part of this family, it was no surprise for us to find tears streaming down our faces the morning after our swearing-in ceremony, as we carried our bags to the buses that would whisk us away from them. We used the best Chichewa we could muster to express our gratitude to our amayi and our sisters. Our amayi insisted that there was no need to cry– we were happy when we lived with them, and we’d be happy at our site. I tried to believe her, but when I caught Agnes wiping away tears of her own, I couldn’t hold back. Was this fair for her? Did Agnes understand that we were required to leave? Did she know that we love her? I scooped her up and, in Chichewa, I told her, “I am thankful that you are my sister.” She nodded and looked away as we both brushed away another tear.

After painful minutes of goodbyes, we were prompted to board the bus. I gave out a last round of hugs and said “Tiwonana.” It’s a very common phrase used for goodbye, although it literally translates to “We will see each other.” Chimwemwe grabbed my arm, and gently said, “Kelsey? This time, it’s ‘Tidzawonana.'”

By adding the “dza,” it changes the verb tense to far future. Instead of the possibility of seeing each other anytime, such as later that day, it means that we’ll see each other again, but sometime in the future. And Chimwemwe was right. Sometime in the future, we will return to see our family again. For now, I see them all over our new site. I see Amayi in the strength of the women carrying water from the borehole. I hear Chimwemwe and Tadala in the giggles of teenagers in the youth club, as I attempt to speak Chichewa. I see Agnes in the shy smiles of the young girls who stop by our house every afternoon to ask if we want to play. For now, those reminders are enough. Tidzawonana, banja langa.

The content of this website is mine alone and does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or the Malawian Government.

Who Runs The World? Amayis.

Who wakes up by 4:00 every morning to start a fire to make tea?

Who helped us wash all of our clothes after our house was fumigated (story for another time)?

Who always wears a warm smile as she talks to us, even as we struggle through Chichewa conversations?

The answer to all of these questions is: Amayi.

Amayi is the Chichewa word for “mother.” (It also means “woman.”) It’s one of the first words we learned in Malawi, and she was the first member of our family who welcomed us. Our amayi’s name is Leniya. She is short in stature and has a beautiful glow. She takes care of us and our family, and smiles and laughs in the process. She has taught us how to sweep, start a fire, carry water, cook, wash dishes, and nearly every other task we have worked through.

From my experiences and interactions in our training village, many amayis share these hardworking / superhero-like qualities.* They can carry a 50-liter bucket of water on their head while carrying a baby on their back. They pick up burning embers and hot pans with their bare hands and do not get burned. They bend over all the way to the ground for hours a day to sweep and wash clothes and dishes. They stoke cooking fires in smokey kitchens without crying and sniffling. And then on Sundays, they sing and dance in church with all of the energy I wish I had. Amayis are truly remarkable.

Reader– you may think I am exaggerating many of these claims. I hear you. How could a woman touch coals without burning her hands?! How could she carry her own bodyweight in water on her head?! How could her eyes not water when flooded with smoke? Well, Reader, I honestly do not know the answer to these questions. I promise you that I witness them with my own eyes every day. I do know that I am incredibly thankful for everything that our amayi does for us. I highly suspect she has the ability to fly, but is waiting to show us until right before we leave.

I took a step back and considered that most of the village, most of the country, and even most of the world, depends on women to maintain the household and raise children. It is easy to see this as oppressive, or maybe even a sign of weakness. Today, I see this as a role that requires an enormous amount of strength, patience, and perseverance. If every amayi in our village decided to stop cooking one day, most people would go to bed hungry. These amayis are powerful. They keep the village running. Women everywhere keep the world running.

I feel grateful for all of the amayis I have in my life, near and far.

*Studies have shown that the idea that black women are “strong” has resulted in lower quality of healthcare for them in the United States. I do not want to perpetuate this idea through this post. Rather, I want to acknowledge the incredible amount of work my amayi does that I am simply unable to do. She has grown up carrying out these tasks, so she has mastered them. I am endlessly impressed by her work ethic, attitude, and expression of love for her family.

The content of this website is mine alone and does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or the Malawian Government.

One Month in Malawi

Aloha from Malawi!

Just kidding. We are in Africa, not Hawaii. People don’t say aloha here. As I write, Will is chopping wood to stoke the fire that heats water for our nightly bucket baths. Our lives are quite different from when we first came to Malawi four weeks ago. During our first week here, we stayed at a fancy motel and conference center. We enjoyed running water and electricity as we attended introductory training sessions. That luxurious life didn’t last forever, as we soon moved to our training village to live with homestay families for the remainder of our Pre-Service Training.

Here in our training village, our cohort of 65 trainees attends training sessions all day, Monday-Saturday. We have training for health and safety, culture, language, and our respective sectors (Health for me; Environment for Will). Outside of training sessions, we do chores and spend time with our host families. Some training staff are staying in the village with us, while others drive here from a nearby town.
Will and I are living with the same host family, and they have been very hospitable. We have an amayi (mother), an abambo (father), and four achemwali (sisters). Our abambo speaks a tiny amount of English, but for the most part we communicate with our family using our ever-expanding Chichewa knowledge in conjunction with a continuous game of charades.

During Pre Service Training, we are required to practice certain chores around the home. So far, we have mastered the following: carrying water, starting a fire, cooking nsima*, sweeping our house, washing clothes, washing dishes, and sweeping the yard* (*more on these in a later post). We still need to learn a little more cooking, how to clean the shower, and how to clean the toilet, among other tasks. We are very fortunate to have the help of our amayi and sisters in completing these tasks.

Next week, we will learn our site placement– where we will live and serve for two years after training. We are nervous and excited to see what our site will have in store. In the meantime, we are enjoying spending time with our host family, getting to know our cohort, and honing our Chichewa.

Will popping a warm Frozy to celebrate his birthday

Please let me know what questions you have about our experiences in Malawi. We are thankful for the support we’ve received from family and friends, and we feel content and motivated to be finally starting our journey in Malawi.

Tiwonana!

-KK

The content of this website is mine alone and does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Government, the Peace Corps, or the Malawian Government.