Can Cows Jump Rope??

Well maybe??...I’m sure no one has ever let them try before!...you never know! ;-) Haha…What I do know though is that the cows in Dzuwa love to watch me jump rope! On days in the village where it is too rainy and wet to run I take my jump rope and exercise bands over to the clinic where they have a huge covered porch (for all the incoming patients to wait on) that is the perfect place to workout. It is very spacious with a high roof so you don’t have to worry about hitting anything and it protects you from both sun and rain! The other day it was raining so I grabbed my gear and headed over to the clinic for my workout. I was surprised though to find all of the cow herding boys and their cows there when I arrived! The boys were sitting under the porch sheltering themselves from the rain and were taking turns going out into the field in the pouring rain to round up the cows. Some days I really hate when I find kids hanging out at the clinic b/c I just want to workout by myself and not have 20 kids staring and laughing at me the whole time. Today though I didn’t really have a much of a choice because I really really wanted to workout so I changed out of my rainboots and into my running shoes and started my jump rope/strength-training circuit/ladder routine (shout out to FUVB). The boys thought I was hilarious as usual and were laughing and trying to imitate me. Then before I knew it they had herded all their cows over in front of the clinic so they didn’t have to keep going out to get them. So there I was working out with 5 cow-herding boys and close to 25 cows staring at me while I worked out!!! A pretty hilarious scene!!! I wish I had a picture!  What is so funny though is that the cows were perfectly content to stand there and watch me jump rope!!! Only in Malawi!

Mixed Emotions About Tobacco

In America today from a very young age kids are taught about the dangers of tobacco and smoking. We always hear about all of the new research that is coming out on how awful it is for your body and all the different cancers it causes. This is all so great and so important. I often wonder why the government doesn’t just get rid of tobacco and cigarettes all together! (money that’s why! So dumb!) Here in Malawi though I am getting a whole new and different perspective on tobacco, which is leaving me with very mixed emotions. Almost everyone it seems in Dzuwa’s fifteen surrounding villages harvests tobacco. Everywhere you look you see the big long tobacco shelters filled to the brim with hanging tobacco right now. Majority of the time I visit the feeding program women in the villages I find them sitting stringing tobacco leaves together to be hung too dry. What I understand from what the people in my village tell me is that Malawi is one of the WORLD’s leading tobacco exporters! (haven’t done my research just reporting what I have heard so correct me if I am wrong) It’s not just the villages around me growing tobacco it’s the entire country! And apparently big businessmen from all over the world come to auction houses here in Malawi to buy our tobacco. Harvesting tobacco if you are really good at it can make you a lot of money too! So it is what is really sustaining life and providing for the people here. Can you see my dilemma?? Tobacco and cigarettes are some of the leading causes of some of the top killing diseases in the world today…BUT…at least in Malawi…it is also helping people survive! As much as I want to walk up to every person I see smoking and chewing tobacco and say to them “What the heck are you doing?! Do you know how dumb it is to smoke/chew and what the risks are associated with it?! Do you know that there are over 100 known carcinogens in one cigarette? You are basically just saying I want to die its ok bring on the cancer! And you are putting all of us at risk too from second hand smoke! Ya gerk!” now I also want to in some ways say “thank you for buying tobacco that is helping to provide money to families in Malawi so their children don’t starve!” Yikes!…thoughts anyone??

Insights into the Government and Teaching

Something that is also very interesting to me being here in Malawi is that I get to hear first hand what the Malawian people actually think about their government! I don’t just have to rely on research books and articles to provide me with information! It just about floored me to hear their thoughts on their presidents. A couple research papers I wrote in college required me to research extensively about the history of Malawi and about their government. Malawi’s first president was Dr. Hastings Banda. From all of my research I came away with the picture that Banda was a very corrupt leader (after all he did try to declare himself president for life) and decided that I didn’t like him. But here in Malawi the people love him!!! I just can’t believe it! They believe he really did a lot for the country here even though he was a corrupt leader! They even consider him a martyr! The president right now everyone likes as well. I think he is pretty all right too as he is really doing a lot to make great changes and develop the country. It is hilarious to me though (and really awful) that when the evening news comes on majority of the program focuses on him!!! Typically on the nightly news we only get 3 or 4 stories and the program only lasts 15 minutes at the most!!! (so different than American news!) Well the other night I timed the radio segments…7/15 minutes was devoted to talking about the president and his new book…6/15 minutes was devoted to talking about the president’s wife and a fake bridal shower fundraiser she was doing…and ONLY 2/15 minutes was spent on mentioning with no real concern at all the situation in Libya!!!! I couldn’t believe it!! No offense but who really cares about the president’s book and a fundraiser when there are riots and governments being overthrown in Libya and Egypt…and other MAJOR stories about other African countries as well (can’t mention anything else specifically b/c I have no idea what exactly is going on b/c I don’t get any news!!! Haha I really have no idea what is going on in the world right now!!). The government is just sooo focused on everything that the president does they can’t even present us with unbiased news.

            Ok now to move on to talking about school, teachers, and education here. It is also so interesting to hear from the teachers what they think of the government and about how they handle education. Just recently the government switched they way they pay their teachers from giving them straight cash to direct depositing into bank accounts. Although I think this could be a good move in the long run it caused soooo many problems!! The government had to wait for all teachers to get registered before they could pay the teachers and a whole other host of problems came up…but what it all resulted in was the teachers from my Dzuwa school were not paid for 2 months straight. From Dec 23 to Feb 27thish they were not paid! But yet they were still expected to go to school and teach and survive on NO MONEY! Many of the teachers only meals each day was the phala from school just like the kids! And even when they got paid they were only paid a 1 month reduced salary!!! No wonder the teachers aren’t very motivated to be good teachers as they never know if they will reliably be paid! In many other areas there were teacher riots b/c of this situation. Also there were and still are (no one has stopped them as far as I know) corrupt government education officials that were/are going into the system and creating fake rural schools and fake teachers and putting them on payroll, and then taking all of that money for themselves! How awful and totally unbelievable!!! Please be praying for the education systems in Malawi- that the corrupt officials would be removed and that God would place His servants in the office!

Ok now to wrap this thing up with a cool story…

Lena all wrapped up

Me & 1 day old baby Lena  

I NAMED A BABY!!!

So crazy I know! Here is the whole story! (oh an mind you all of this talking was done in Chichewa!! J with no translator! J but with a lot of grace and repeating themselves from the women haha)...I was walking to school one morning and one of the older girls, Misozi, who I am closer to at the school caught up with me. I asked her why she wasn’t in school the day before and she answered because her mom was sick. I then asked her what was wrong and she said her mom had had a baby!! I was sooo excited! She then said I could come visit it after school if I wanted to…of course I said yes!!! So later on that afternoon I walked to Misozi’s village to visit her, her mom, and the new baby. I didn’t really know what to expect when I arrived but I found the mom and a bunch of other women sitting in their house shelling beans. Misozi was holding the little one-day-old baby! So only a day after giving birth the mom was already up walking around doing household chores again! Amazing! So I sat and talked with them for a long while and got to hold the baby! The women even commented on how much the baby looked like me the azungu with its light colored skin! haha At one point I asked what the little girl’s name was…the mom replied “oh she doesn’t have one yet…why don’t you name her!!!”…I was so taken aback! Naming someone else’s kid is not a common thing in America (I found out later that it is very common in Malawi especially in the village). Mothers and Fathers spend hours and hours thinking up the perfect name for their kids and it’s a very special process...so I was shocked that the mother wanted me to name her baby! I mean really…mothers have 40 whole weeks to think up names and this mother was asking me to name her baby in a span of like 20minutes!!! Talk about pressure!! So I sat there holding the baby trying to think up a good name. I wanted to give the little girl a meaningful name as her older sister Misozi’s name means “tears”…very sad…so I sat and thought and thought…and decided I didn’t know any really easy meaningful names in English…and my Chichewa vocabulary isn’t good enough to give a very good meaningful name either…so I just tried to think of a name I liked that I thought would fit well into the Malawian culture…the name that kept popping into my head was Lena…so I said “what about Lena” and they all said yes! So I hope they really like it! So the little girl will be called Lena and her mother will now be called Magalena (as women don’t go by their names but by Mother of ___  Maga____ *insert child’s name*). I looked up the name on babynames.com later and found out that Lena means woman of Magdala. It’s a Hebrew name. So that’s pretty cool I guess. What an experience! So surreal. When I was leaving too the family gave me 4 pieces of corn and a bunch of tomatoes and vegetables!!! I was soooo taken aback!! They need to be eating that food not me! I am still blown away by the generosity of Malawians!! I bought some super cute baby clothes today so I am excited to take them back to the village and give them to baby Lena J

Love to all!!!

Steph

Prayer Requests:

-       For Family back at home

-       For guidance from God about where He might be calling me when I return home

-       For continued provision for the Feeding Program at School

-       For my health- my allergies are going crazy right now and I don’t have any allergy medicine and continued protection against malaria and waterborne diseases in the rainy season