First Week of October

Well friends, Luviri Community Day Secondary School put me in charge of the Debate Club and today we had our first debate. We met on Tuesday briefly to discuss formalities. We elected a chairman and treasurer, etc. I thought it best to leave strategy and general how-to’s until after we had our first debate, so I could see what they already knew about building an argument. For our first topic I wanted to stay light and easy so I told them to start brainstorming for a debate over whether boys or girls were better. As what I thought was a creative twist I told them boys would have to defend girls and vice versa. We were scheduled to meet after classes but today three of our seven teachers could not make it to school so in an attempt to alleviate the short-staffing issue I suggested we reserve the end of the day for a school-wide debate. The other teachers were enthusiastic so for the last two periods we called together the whole school. To discuss which gender was better.

            “In respect to teachers and fellow students,” the first volunteer, a male, began, “it is better to be a girl because girls can move about freely and keep company with boys.” I laughed with everyone else but looked to the other English teacher who was there hoping he would assist me in explaining the need for logic and facts in a debate. He laughed and clapped his hands, “Very good!” he called, “Girls? Who will crush the point?” Aha.

Next a boy argued that it is better to be a girl because they have the option to wear either trousers or skirts and boys could only wear trousers. I was happy to hear this point not only because I thought it would be easy for the girls to counter, but also because I have been trying to build up the nerve to wear trousers in my village. A girl quickly raised her hand, “I crush the point because women that wear trousers are prostitutes.” Oh.

            Soon we had the inevitable boy suggesting that it is better to be a girl because they look nice with breasts and boys do not. I looked to the other teacher to see if he would step in at this somewhat inappropriate comment. But instead of telling the students to remain professional he was laughing as hard as they. I laughed as well and attempted to curb the lewdness of the comment by repeating his argument as girls being more attractive; I suppose that’s at least relevant.

When shortly thereafter another boy suggested that it was better to be a girl because they had wide hips which they could swing and then began to demonstrate I marched over to the other teacher to discuss with him how to keep the dialogue modest but he thought I needed a translation and so before I could say a word he repeated the point and then imitated the demonstration to a lesser degree. I didn’t know how to address the students’ level of appropriateness after that so I merely suggested that the point of attraction had already been covered. He agreed and we moved on to the next point. I had high hopes now that attractiveness was off the table-- now we could have more comments about inheritance, employment, dowry, expectations, gender roles.

            But my hopes were crushed more sufficiently than the points when a boy stood up and said it is better to be a girl because they have monthly periods. The other teacher who was trying to keep his interference to a minimum stood up. ‘Finally,’ I thought, ‘at least there are some boundaries.’ This is, after all, a culture that does not even allude to bathrooms (in training the bathroom was marked as Room 27—Malawians value discretion). “And what,” he said, “is one benefit of that?” Ok, yea, let’s ask for more details. I waited for the boys to defend their argument but a girl had already stood, prepared to fight. ‘Good,’ I thought, ‘she will certainly put him in his place!’

“I crush the point,” she started, “because boys have wet dreams.”

“Point crushed!” exclaimed the other teacher, “Well done.”

Huh, well I don’t really know where you go from there, except to the debate’s riotous conclusion which ended in a tie when a student made the last minute point that it was better to be a girl because, “girls wear blas.” And no one could dispute that.

            I know I often try to make some sort of connection about what I am learning or whatever, and I could say something about how I’ll get the debate club to argue efficiently, “pochoko, pochoko,” but really, some things, like this debate, don’t need a point.

Snapshots:

--A man in a tee-shirt reading “Party Like a Porn Star” in sparkly letters

--A man in business slacks, collared shirt, and tie, wearing a white lab coat as his jacket    

--A male youth, late teens or early twenties, wearing a pink plush princess hat. Not a crown but that tall kind similar to a witch’s hat with a long streaming ribbon coming from the top

--Friday, wanting more milk, somehow finding her way to the school and trotting into the staffroom

--My first African thunderstorm—it combined the attributes of the first good post-summer rain in Washington where the air takes on the tinny smell of dirt, with the Southern summer storm where you can see the clouds roll in, the thunder is deafening, and the rain is a fantastic downpour

--I constantly struggle to understand my students’ accents. This week I asked for an example sentence using a proper noun. I asked the volunteer to repeat himself twice and finally repeated back to him, “Columbians are here?” Everyone laughed; he was saying his own name, “Tobias is here.”

--The biggest spider I have ever seen that did not live in a cage crept under the roof onto my bedroom wall this week. It literally took half a can of bug spray to kill.

Fourth Week of September

The thing about Luviri is that although it can frustrate me to no end, it can also always cheer me up. Like someone that knows how to push your buttons but is impossible to stay mad at. Some days I’ll get myself all worked up because while breaking up reeds to start my morning fire I break into a nest of earwigs. Then maybe I’ll go to school and find myself unable to explain prepositions to the Form Ones; whether because of the language barrier or my ineptitude or both is impossible to say. I’ll be on my way to teach Literature to Form Three and realize there are only two books remaining of the original seven because students have “picked them” so I’ll have to teach over thirty students with two books. Coming home I might be exasperated, wanting nothing more than to hide in my room and read a book, just me and Friday. Then out of nowhere a swarm of children will descend upon my house, “Rebak! Raba! Labek! Odi? Odi!” When I go to the door they will shout for my bao board, or a ball, or paper, or Friday, or sweeties. If I give them Friday or bao they will start out nicely but will shortly be yelling, fighting over bao, or running screaming from Friday only to come back to do it again. The children who are not occupied with bao or the cat will stand in my doorway and at the window peering in, pointing at things, watching me read or write, asking for paper and sweets. Just then perhaps a student will arrive carrying a phone that someone has sent them to have me charge with my battery. At this point it would not be uncommon for a three or four inch spider to dart out from behind the door.

            But then maybe my friend Edward will come over and ask me to go to the garden. There my spinach has sprouted and Edward has spread manure over my small plot. I’ll spend an hour or two barefoot in the dirt helping Edward carry water, first to my plants, and then to his cabbages. As we walk back I might see a fellow teacher who will greet me and say I must be becoming an expert at gardening. If the children see me walking home they will return to my porch, noisier even than before. But another teacher will see them, and break from teaching open school (an afternoon school for adults that never finished high school) to come to my house and lecture them for ten minutes on being respectful to “the madam.” The penitent children will then quietly gather around me as I read them a story, occasionally supplying the words in Chitumbuka and correcting my pronunciation. Then they might invite me to play ball with them. Possibly I need water and as I am walking home with it hear a student laughingly call my name so she can take the bucket from my head and carry it the rest of the way for me.

            Sometimes I get frustrated or annoyed with the circumstances. But more often than not I am just in a state of increasing frazzlement. Though my nerves may be frayed there is rarely a reason to be truly angry or upset with anyone. The kids are annoying, but I think it’s a rule that children have to be irritating. Everything else is just a cultural difference and being as I came to experience another culture it seems a little counter-productive to get mad at my neighbors for coming to visit me, even if I am napping.

Third Week of September

It is almost mean how big the spiders are here. How big and how numerous. I am living in one of the most notoriously spider-infested homes of Peace Corps Malawi. Though Haakon’s sister and I convinced him to kill some of the more obvious spiders. And when I moved in I swept the many exoskeletons off the walls, and removed almost every item in the living room and kitchen to clean behind and under everything, they just keep showing up. Just when I think I’ve seen the biggest of them an even bigger one runs across the wall. Or pokes its legs out of my favorite box of tea. Like just now as I was sitting in my bed propped up on some pillows I glimpsed a tell-tale scurry out of the corner of my eye. A spider considerably larger than my palm had crept out from BEHIND MY PILLOWS. Though I was able to get in a few good sprays of Doom the poisoned scoundrel escaped under the shelves next to my bed and I have resigned myself to yet another night of spider plagued dreams. Three months of living in Malawi telling myself it is ridiculous to be scared of spiders and I still stop breathing every time I see one, sometimes frightened even to the point of nausea or dizziness. 

            My arachnophobia is so great it ranked with ‘missing family and friends’ in reasons not to join the Peace Corps. I once slept on a couch for a week to avoid a spider in my room. In Kindergarten a spider crawled out of my tennis shoe onto my hand, so I checked my shoes every single day until high school and still do sometimes. One of my earliest memories is a nightmare where I was Goldilocks and had to choose between staying in the Three Bears’ house with a spider and going outside where the forest was on fire. Occasionally some shoddy arachnophobe attempts to compete with me, swapping anecdotes as evidence of our fear. These challenges inevitable end in the other party suggesting a change of subject because I have obviously started to sweat and red blotches are cropping up on my neck. What I’m saying here is, I’m pretty scared of spiders.

            Yet here I am, just living away in this African spider den. And though writing the above paragraphs has given me cottonmouth, I can now sleep peacefully in a house I know is filled with spiders (Well as peacefully as you can sleep with leaves and fruits falling on your tin roof and birds nesting above your head). I know there is one

living behind the map in my sitting room, one is behind the picture next to my table. I know they come in the windows at night and under the roof during the day. I still believe arachnids are the physical manifestation of evil on earth, but I also believe in balance. Some spiders are good of course—they do at least eat other bugs. And killing every spider in Africa is a slowly failing strategy so it stands to reason that I will somehow have to learn to adopt the fiends into my perception of reality instead of trying to make reality fit my perception. Living in harmony with spiders I don’t think I could have ever achieved. I think mainly because absolute necessity is the only force strong enough to face this fear. It turns out that absolute necessity can make you do almost anything you don’t want to do. So, pochoko, pochoko, pochoko, pochoko, pochoko. You know what they say—Grant me the serenity to accept the spiders I cannot kill, the courage to kill the ones I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.