Done with Domasi and on to Lilongwe

Not much happened at Domasi for the rest of my time there. Olivia, Margo and I went to Nhkotahota one weekend for Olivia’s early birthday party. A few of her friends met us there as well. It was there that Olivia received a puppy for her birthday…I’ve come to decide that it is the best and worst give ever. I mean who doesn’t like a puppy? And he loves to cuddle. On the other hand he is a Malawi dog, which isn’t entirely safe and other assortment of problems. Luckily I was only there for a few days before I left Domasi for good.

On the 24^th my time teaching at Domasi came to an end. It seemed like the month went far too quickly. My last lesson I gave a super short assessment. The kids had to write a short essay about one of the following topics.

1.      Locomotion in Fish

2.       Locomotion in birds

3.       Types of Muscles

4.       How muscles bring about movement

5.       The different kinds of Joints

6.       The different kinds of skeletons

7.       The structure of human bone.

I didn’t give anyone below a 50% because it was my last day because I was feeling generous. A few of them definitely deserved it also…The test only took 25 minutes of the class time, so for the last 15 we just talked. It was very spur of the moment. I was saying good bye and then someone asked me a question and it went from there. It was nice to have a talk with the kids as a friend instead of as teacher, superior figure. Some of them were thoroughly shocked to learn that I was only 19.

The administration also gave me a little far-well party as well. Since it was Olivia’s birthday as well we had a joint party. It was actually more like a picnic. We sat outside ate cake, cookies, bread, tea and soda. It was a formal farewell from the teachers. After which all the teachers tried to convince me to sell them my stuff. I had to insist multiple times I didn’t want to sell my computer.

Silas picked me up that same day and I had a farewell day with him and Margaret. We went and had a nice lunch at the Hippo Lodge and then went on a short safari. I got to see elephants, antelope, warthogs and much more. Malawi isn’t known for its wildlife so it didn’t really compare to other countries like Botswana, but for $2 it was totally worth it.

Silas also invited a few friends over for dinner that I had met over the course of my time there. We had a literal feast. I also got to cook a chicken starting from the beginning. I won’t gross you out with the details but I’ll put 2 pictures:

Before:

 After:

After dinner we all said our little thanks and that we really enjoyed each other and what not. That day was a really great way to end my time in the southern region. Silas and Margaret would always refer to me as their grandson. At first it was just a joke but by the end I cared about them. Silas was almost like the grandfather I never had. I’ll miss them for sure.

The next day I got the bus up to Lilongwe for the final part of my trip in Malawi. In Lilongwe I am going to be doing legit mission work. Tad Juma is the Youth Director for the Nkhoma synod of the CCAP. I’ll be working with him and some of the people in his office doing mission work. Tad picked me up from the bus depot. I learned pretty quickly that the next day I was scheduled to speak at a CCAPSO meeting. CCAPSO is a student Presbyterian organization among secondary schools in the country. I was supposed to be talking on higher education and career building. My first response was to say no, but I didn’t come halfway around the world to stay safely in my comfort zone doing only was I wanted to.

The night before the event I spent about 2 hours preparing my sermon.

The next day Kennedy (one of the youth department employees) and I got public transport to Madisi Secondary School. When we got there I was a little blown away. It was complete sensory overload. First off Malawians, have an obsession with blasting music to the point of going deft. Also there were about 200 teenagers there all dancing to the music. Not like a school dance or anything, they were all just dancing to themselves.

After sitting there for a while I was the first one to speak. Kennedy stood next to me and translated the entire time. I wasn’t used to talking in front of so many so I muddled my lesson a little. I got my message across and people told me good job though! For a first time I called it a success. I prayed about it so I guess God came through for me. The next two speakers after me definitely did better than me but considering I was a 19 year old American kid and they were legit church workers and pastors I wasn't surprised.

I’ll be doing this kind of thing for the next two weeks until I leave for home on June 11^th. Wish me luck!

Cape Maclear

Cape Maclear

Since Malawi has so much to offer aside from the places I am staying it can be nice to travel within the country a little bit. This past weekend a few friends and I decided to travel to Cape Maclear. If you Google it you can find out a lot about it. It’s one of the touristiest spots located at the bottom of Malawi.

Since Monday was a public holiday it was a perfect weekend to go. I also taught a class at night on Wednesday, to make up for the Friday that I was going to miss. Since I don’t otherwise have class on Thursday I didn’t feel bad about going on vacation.

I left on Thursday morning, and first went south to meet Owen in Blantyre for a night. In Blantyre we stayed at a lodge called Doogles. It’s the most well know joint in town. It’s a great place to go and have a good time but not if you want to sleep… It’s a local hang out space with a great area, so at night it gets pretty busy.  Owen and I hung out there for the night catching up and having a few drinks. We also managed to get a little sleep.

The next morning we got an early start at around 8. That’s when I got to experience the joy of third word public transport in all its glory. In Malawi most of the public transport occurs in mini-buses. They don’t exist in the US but image a car about the size of a minivan with 4 rows of seat super close together. Usually you are in a minibus with about 12 other people but today it seemed like luck was against us. The number of people was constantly changing. At least it was 12 people but we maxed out at 27 people in the car at one point. Now ride that for about 6 hours.  Not to mention most Malawians don’t shower that often…Luckily we didn’t have to switch buses. Sometimes people are forced to switch into another bus, or ride in the back of a pickup for a little. We managed to get all the way to the Cape Maclear turn off in relatively good time. From there Owen and I hitched a ride the last 20 km,with a guy driving a sugar truck, to our lodge.

There we met Rachel, her friend Jill, Josh, Fika, and Mia, all who knew Owen previously. I ended up becoming good friends with everyone aside from Jill. I also met a bunch of med students doing research in Malawi.

The rest of that first day we didn’t do much. We swam in the lake, went to a local club place for a few hours then went to bed. The local club was fun because it was essentially 100% expats dancing to anexpat DJ. Man, were there some characters dancing… One man was literally in a rainbow dress, with Tevas and socks on.

The next day Owen, Josh, Mia, Fika and I rented kayaks and snorkels for five hours. We kayaked out to an island a km or so off the shore where you could snorkel. The snorkeling wasn’t amazing but the fish were all really small and beautifully colored. That is what Lake Malawi is known for; its biodiversity. After a quick lunch we kayaked over to a peninsula we saw and went cliff jumping. There were a few great spots where I could show off my backflips. The water at Lake Malawi is beautiful. It is very clear, and a perfect temperature year round. It provides perfect relief from the sun and heat. 

After hours of kayaking we were all absolutely exhausted. After a quick snack and shower we all took a nap. After that we went for dinner, which was quiet possibly the longest dinner of my life. Customer service isn’t a priority so it took 90 minutes to get out dinner. Which we ate in ten. I taught all my new friends the movie game, which they seemed to get a kick out of.

After a long dinner we went to another lodge where we were meeting the med students. We were only there a few minutes before a boat arrived to pick up the med students. It turned out they were invited to a birthday party down the lake. Not having anything else to do we hopped on the boat as well. It was a little sketchy because none of us really knew where we were going, who the guy was or what the party was going to be like. It turned out to be a regular beach party. We arrived and there was a fire with locals playing on drums and a bar. The birthday boy (Thomas) was also paying for everyone’s drinks. There we sat for a few hours talking and enjoying the fire. I even grabbed a drum and joined the circle of drumming Africans. We went back and fell into bed around 1am.

The next day (Sunday) we were all not operating at 100%, so we just relaxed. There was a pontoon raft about 100m off the beach shore which we swam too and hung out for about 2 hours. I laid in a hammock for maybe an hour. We had dinner. Not much really happened that day. At night we sat on the beach with a drink and watching the sun set. It was a refreshingly uneventful day.

The next day I got up at 7 to find out a different friend staying at Cape Mac had found me a ride home! She had had a crazier night than me and met a guy traveling back to Zomba the next day. He offered the take her, and she smartly put my name in there as well. So Robin took me and Margo home in his comfortable car in about 2 hours and 45 minutes. Then our good fortune continued when we got a ride up the hill in the bed of a pickup truck.

It was at the house that our luck ran out. Margo and I had left the key with Olivia in Cape Mac. It wasn’t the end of the world though. We called Billiot who forced his way into the house by breaking the lock.

All in all a great week! The only downfall is the fact that I probably have Schistosomiasis now. The chances of contracting when swimming in the lake is like 50%. It’s not a big deal though because I take the medicine in 6 weeks and it kills it if I have it.

Tough life living in Malawi!

I’ve been teaching at Domasi school for about three weeks now. As I said before I’m teaching form three biology (junior year). So far I’ve enjoyed it. I teach at least 1 hour a day and some days I teach about 3 hours. It varies from day to day. The other teachers are full time and teach a few hours each day, but since I’m only a temporary teacher I only teach a little during the week.

Since the class that I teach only gets a few hours of instruction a week, it takes a little longer to get through topics. So far I’ve been able to get through one topic. I finished the topic of respiration on Monday. This includes aerobic and anaerobic cellular respiration, respiration in fish, humans and insects and other things of that nature. I was almost fun to relearn it. But at the same time I wasn’t an expert by any means and the kids would ask me tough questions sometimes. Most of the time I am able to give them a relatively acceptable answer but sometimes I just half make it up. Am I a terrible teacher? Probably.

Almost all the time I know what to teach and do teach them. There are always the few who obviously don’t need any instruction, but most of the kids seem genuinely interested in learning. Except that African learning is different from the developed world. We put an emphasis on understanding and analytical thinking while they purely memorize what I tell them. They don’t really LEARN it in the sense that we mean. That difference has made it hard to teach because of our different ways of thinking. For example, if I write something on the board I tend to paraphrase to make it easier and quicker. But it really confuses the kids. I had to literally write everything out for them. It’s just a different way of learning.

After finishing the chapter on respiration I gave a test. I didn’t really anticipate the amount of time it would take to grade the tests. I have 124 students and it literally took nine hours to grade the tests. In the end the grades ranged from 12% to 92%. This is the test:

1. Write the reactants and products of the following reactions (both chemical equations and names are acceptable:

a)      Aerobic tissue respiration

b)      Alcoholic fermentation (anerobic)

c)       Lactic acid fermentation (anerobic)

2. What are three of the four differences between anaerobic and aerobic respiration?

3. How do small organisms such as diatoms and amoebas perform gas exchange?

3. Describe the process of gas exchange in humans.  

Breathing in

Gas exchange in aveoli

Hemoglobin

Exhalation c02

5. Describe how the following two chemicals are transported in the body.

a)      Oxygen (O₂)

b)      Carbon Dioxide (CO₂)

6. What body part regulates breathing and how does it work?

7. What effect does exercise have on breathing? 2

8. Answer the following questions about carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning.

a)      How does it occur?

b)      What are two things you can do to treat a person suffering from CO poisoning?

c)       What are two ways to prevent poisoning?

9. What are the three main things in cigarette smoke?

10. Describe how respiration occurs in Fish.

Open mouth and water entry

Close mouth up buccal

Water out

Gas exchange

11. Describe how respiration occurs in insects.

12. What adaptations do fish and insects have.

Do you think you could take it and get above a 50%?

Anyway, since Monday is a public holiday I decided to take a long weekend and head up to cape maclear. Right now I’m in Blantyre with owen, and we’ll head up there tomorrow. So expect another blog post soon!

Zomba and Domasi

After my week long stay at Likhubula house in Mulanje I went back to Zomba to stay with Silas at the theological college. The dean of the college, Gertude, had one or two things she needed help with and seemed to think that I could help out with.

What they had me doing was creating an excel worksheet with all the grades from the first semester for all the students. I was the one who decided to do an excel document because they wanted me to do it in Word, but that would have taken much, much longer. Because computers in Malawi are still a relatively new thing, they weren’t computer literate enough to figure compile all the data in a timely and efficient manner.

In total there are about 120 students and each year takes about 5-6 different classes. What I had to do was take all the exam grades and then all of the cumulative averages for semester, then do a weighted average to find the final semester grades.

It wasn’t that difficult, I just had to short through a mountain of paper to find the grades.

It took me about 3 days to do the whole thing. So, by Friday I was completely done. I had planned to stay in Zomba central for a few more days at Silas’ house. We were thinking about going on a safari about 45 minutes away where I could see elephants, hippos and other animals (no rhinos though, those are too rare). However, Silas had to go to a meeting that he didn’t originally plan on attending so I had to go to Domasi school on Friday.

When I got there, there it was the end of the school day. I walked around met some of the teachers and students. Everyone was very friendly and seemed glad enough to see that they had another (white) teacher. Westerns have a reputation for teaching differently making the kids enjoy it a little more.

On Saturday and Sunday I did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. The too other volunteers here were still on holiday in Zambia, so I had the place to myself until they got back. Since there was also no internet and very spotty service I had nothing to do aside read, watch movies or wander. I wandered a little but the sun was really hot so that didn’t last long. On Saturday and Sunday I also kept busy by going to see a soccer game at the local field. I also cooked, which passed some of the time as well.

I know. I live an exciting life right?

The two other volunteers arrived on Sunday. Their names are Olivia and Margo. Olivia is technically from France but lived in England for the past eight years, and Margo is from Australia. I realized pretty quickly that we were going to get along pretty well. Both of them were very easy going and had a good sense of humor. Both of which are necessary when travelling, especially in Africa.

All three of us went to go see the headmaster to see what I would be teaching. He said that I would be filling in for either Olivia or Margo where-ever needed. That wasn’t really going to fly with me. I didn’t want to teach one class a week and do nothing the rest of the time. I came to Africa to do something new that put me outside my comfort zone, and learn from that. With that in mind I went on a search of a class to teach.

I could have taught elementary school but that’s more difficult because their English is pretty terrible. That left me with the opportunity to teach secondary school, which is the equivalent of high school, through that isn’t the case intellectually. In most cases the kids are a few years behind and tend to learn at a slower rate. That’s not always the case though. One of two kids are very bright! Which can be a  problem...  they ask me tough questions I don’t know always know the answer too.

After some search I found out Mr. Black was looking for someone to take his Form 3 biology class. I accepted the challenge.  In form 3 (junior year) there are two classes both containing, wait for it, 70 kids. Yep. I’m teaching over half of my graduating class in just two class rooms.

Monday was a public holiday so no classes. Tuesday I told Mr. Black I’d like to teach his class. Wednesday I observed his class and was introduced. Thursday I would have started to teach but there aren’t any bio classes on Thursday. So finally on Friday I was able to teach for the first time.

When I observed Mr. Black teach, he was just starting the topic of respiration. He taught aerobic respiration. I was going to pick up with anaerobic respiration. The material to teach isn’t terribly difficult; it’s just a matter of reviewing it the night before. For example, during respiration I mention glycolysis but don’t mention the Kreb’s cycle or anything difficult.  On Friday I had to teach a double period, which means I had to fill 1 hour and 20 minutes, for both classes. It may seem short but for someone who has never taught before it’s an eternity.

During that time I was able to get done with tissue respiration and also gas exchange in about an hour. For the last 20 minutes I decided to have a competition. Whoaaaa bad idea. I had this picture in my head of what I did in high school. Two teams each with a player at the board trying to write the answer quicker than the person next to them. Wrong. Try two kids up at the CHALK board, no clue of the answer, and 68 other students yelling at them the answer. I’m pretty sure you could hear us all the way at the top of the mountain. At least the kids had a fun time.

That was four days ago. I taught again on Monday again. I find that I get excited about teaching. I enjoy teaching bio because I get to relearn everything in the process of preparing my lesson plans. That surprised me a little. After not having any schooling or homework for close to 11 months I’ve realized how much I miss it and enjoy it. Go figure.

Aside from that I’ve officially been gone a month. It doesn’t nearly feel that long.

 Taken at Mount Mulanje

 Multi-tasking. Eating sugar cane, carrying a baby and balancing a load on your head.