Standing Inside a Tornado!

Yep! Thats right! I have stood inside a tornado (or Kavumbu in Chichewa)!!!! Now mind you the tornadoes in Malawi are much smaller, less powerful, and less dangerous than the ones back home...but still its kind of cool to say I have stood inside a tornado! :-)

Thanks for all of your prayers these past two weeks. I finished my perspectives paper last Friday. I spent the entire day (8am-5pm) researching and writing and managed to get it finished and sent just as the internet cafe I was in was closing! Praise the Lord!!! I was sooooo exhausted after but so thankful I finished. As for the meeting with the chiefs...it happened! But we are still waiting for them to give us all of the land we need. Right now we only have 2/6 acres promised to us. Pray that we get the remaining land before it starts raining!  And my immigration papers...well I am still working on them. I "expire" on Nov 25th so I need to get them turned in before then. I need to provide them with a copy of my return ticket which I am still working on getting right now! So please be praying that I am able to get a return ticket home so I can turn my papers in!

Now for a bunch of random comments...

Airplanes: In Pittsburgh an airplane flies over my house about every 30 seconds (I timed it once when I was laying outside looking at the clouds)...In my village of Dzuwa we might see a plane fly over once a month! The other day I was sitting outside journaling and heard an airplane...I immediately jumped up and ran off the porch where I was to try to see the airplane. After I had watched it until I couldn't see it anymore I sat back down to continue journaling. I started laughing though thinking how HILARIOUS it was that I had just ran to see an airplane!!

Skirts: In the village all women wear skirts. You would never ever ever ever see a woman in pants because it is soooo against their culture. In the city pants are becoming more acceptable though. Anyway skirts...although they are great at keeping you cool in the over 100 degree weather and make using the chimbutzi (the hole in the ground bathroom) super easy...they are sooo impractical for so many other things!!! Like playing sports! All the girls love to play netball here and they are pretty rough with each other (in a loving manner of course). Girls fall in the dirt all the time...but who would have thought that the first thing you should do when falling is to hold your skirt closed instead of catching yourself!!! So sometimes these girls fall straight up flat on their faces because they are too busy worrying about flashing someone! HA!!! Also they are very impractical for riding motorbikes and bikes! I mean really who even rides a motorbike/bike in a skirt! Malawians that's who! I was riding a bike in my skirt down the main street of Kasungu the other day and a huge gust of wind came and blew my skirt up! I shrieked and tried to pull it back down without crashing. Needless to say all of the Malawians around me were laughing at me not only because of the skirt thing but because I was riding a bike too (Malawians in my experience don't think Americans are capable of anything like riding a bike, carrying things on your head, doing your own laundry, cooking...I think they think we just sit around at home with people serving us).

Growing Creativity: Yesterday in my standard 1 (kindergarten) class we had art day. I brought in crayons and glue and told the kids that they could do whatever they wanted (color on paper, on rocks, pick flowers or leaves to glue...). When asked if they all understood they said yes. I told them they could get started and they all proceeded to sit and stare at the crayon boxes!!! I had to go around and open the boxes and continue to tell them over and over to draw a picture. Eventually they got the hang of it and started coloring. But while I was having a blast coloring a rock and then gluing leaves and flowers to it they just sat and colored with one color. Most of them just drew one stick figure person. A few really had fun with it gluing and coloring rocks but that is only like 3 out of my 90 kids! I hopefully will continue to have art day occasionally hoping to encourage their creativity and teach them how to color pictures with more than one color crayon!

Mangos: Its almost mango season in Dzuwa. They are just starting to rippen on the trees!!! Very exciting! There are so many of them that you can just pick however many you want from whatever tree you want (without paying!!) as long as you don't ruin anyone's growing crops. Its funny...before coming to Malawi I didn't like mangos dried or fresh...but now I LOVE them!!! I can't get enough of them :-)  All of the kids at school know this too. This past Tuesday I climbed the mango tree at school (I love climbing trees and had sooo much fun...sooo refreshing!) to try to shake some mangos down. All of the mangos close to the ground had already been picked so I had to climb up pretty high. Despite all of my best shaking efforts (while the kids watched and laughed at me) none fell down! :-( But no worries one of the boys was nice enough to climb up a little higher than I was willing to go and picked me one! :-) The kids love to give me mangos. The super funny part though is that most of the time the mangos they give me are already half eaten and covered with dirt!!! Now who would want to eat that?! But I smile and gladly accept their gift (its very rude in Malawian culture to turn down any gift) and sometimes eat the mangos (after washing of course) and other times I regift the mango to my little sister at home :-) Haha  Mangos!!! YUM!!

Poverty: I continue to grow more and more disgusted with the poverty here in Malawi as time goes on. As I have been told the hungry months here are Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb, Mar! 6 months out of the entire year!!!!  But as I am told and as I am beginning to see Dec, Jan, & Feb are the absolute worst. Kids are continuing to come to school more regularly and my class continues to grow everyday. We are even having to use extra pots to make enough food for all of the kids. Working with the feeding program at school is VERY frustrating some of the time because the kids just don't like to listen. Especially when it comes to time to get seconds if there are leftovers after all of the grades have been served. The kids push and shove and fight to get in line first to make sure they get more pala. The even lie to me to try to get in other shorter lines (they line up by grade) to get food. It makes me soooo mad that they are so disrespectful and don't listen! But then when I take a step back and really think about it...if I was starving and trying to get enough food to survive then I would probably be doing exactly what they are doing!!! Ahhhhh!!!! Grrrrr!!! Lord why does it have to be like this?!!! I am sick of hearing about women having miscarriages because they are just too malnourished for their bodies to support a baby! They are so common here in the village! I am sick of watching the students I have grown to love continue to waste away to nothing. There is one girl here in the standard 7 class who literally is just skin and bones and it hurts soooo bad to even look at her! Please be praying that the Lord would continue to provide for our programs here so we can sustain these kids through the worst months.

Slow Internet:  Grrr I hate slow internet. I am sooo thankful for the great access we have in the US. I tried posting more pictures to facebook but the internet is just too slow here today! Sorry maybe next time.

Hope everyone reading this is doing well. Thank you so much for following me here and praying for me!!!! It is so encouraging to know I have such a solid group of people praying and routing for me at home!