Out of Africa: Part Two
NEIRAD enilno edition
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Some of you may have read about the beginning of my trip to Malawi in the Neirad Print Edition for March 2008. But for those of you who didn’t, this past February I traveled to Malawi in southeast Africa to build a school for a village through a program called “Building with Books” that has a club right here at Darien High School.
I spent two weeks immersed in Malawi’s rich culture where I learned about many different aspects of the people’s lifestyle. Each of the students on the trip stayed with host families in the village who were generous enough to provide us with a place to sleep. My hosts were the Choves: a young couple and their four-month-old daughter, Olipa. They went through great lengths to make me and my roommate, Vanessa, feel comfortable and were somehow able to provide us with our own little mud hut with a thatched grass roof which soon became our second home.
On the average day in Malawi, as students, we would wake up bright and early at 6am. When we rose, which was actually an hour after most of the villagers got up, we would roll up our hard sleeping mats, gather our work clothes and head up to the worksite where we meet to have breakfast each morning. My hut was fortunately only a short, five-minute walk to the site, however, other huts such as the one DHS junior Claire Concannon stayed in required a good 20- minute trek. During this walk we would be stopped by every person that we passed and asked “Mwadzuka Bwanji” which means “Good Morning, how are you” in Chichewa, the local language. I would respond by saying “nDadzuka Bwino, kaya inu.” (I’m fine and you?) They would then respond with “nDadzuka Bwino” and we would both say “Zikomo” (Thank you) and continue on in our different ways. What I loved about these little conversations was how this interaction reflected the leisurely pace of the villagers. No one was in a hurry to get anywhere; everyone had the time to stop and simply ask how you were doing that day.
After a meal of rice porridge, which we ate every morning for breakfast, we would take either the morning or the afternoon shift at the construction site. One work shift consisted of four hours of various tasks such as making or transporting bricks or shoveling sand. However, most of the time we mixed concrete using shovels, which ended up being a lot harder than we initially thought. The second half of the day was spent learning an aspect of the Malawi’s culture. We would have Chichewa lessons; we learned how to do traditional dances; we learned about traditional stories that the villager’s passed down from generation to generation; and we met with the village elders and exchanged questions about each other’s lives in Malawi and America.
My favorite cultural activity was a trip that we took to an orphanage in a nearby village. In Malawi, any child that has lost either one or more parents is considered an orphan. They are classified as orphans because their families rely so much on both parents that the family would be unable to survive with just a mother or a father. Madonna brought worldwide attention to Malawi's orphan crisis when she adopted a little boy in 2006.
Three women decided to start up a little community center in the village to provide support for the orphans. We visited this community center one day and learned how the center helps orphans. The center was a little mud hut with a thatched grass roof — just like the villager’s houses, with mud benches that were built into the ground. We walked in and saw all of the orphans quietly sitting. Throughout the day we realized that these orphans were clearly not like the other children. They each had a sad look on their faces, they didn’t wave at us, or smile at us with curiosity like the other children. It was extremely sad to see how their lives had been affected by the loss of their parents — most of whom died from AIDS or malaria. The orphanage was designed to help provide emotional support for the children and make sure they were attending school and being treated well where they lived. To get to know a few of the orphans we asked them to stand up and say their name, age, favorite subject in school and what they wanted to be when they grew up. One girl stood up, hesitantly and quietly, and said her name was Diliama, she was 12 years old, liked learning math and wanted to be a doctor when she grew up. We asked her why and she said that she wanted to help all of the sick people she knew. Diliama quickly sat back down as if she was embarrassed at what seemed like such a ridiculous goal. It broke my heart to see how she felt as if her goals were limited due to where she lived and the small amount of resources she had around her.
The two weeks that I spent in Malawi flew. By the end of the trip, we had completed digging and building the foundation and the concrete floors for the school, and began building the brick walls. I will never forget all of the children who were incessantly laughing at me, yet also constantly making me laugh. I will also never forget the kindness that my Malawi host mother showed me by opening up her home to us. Although it’s nice to be back in America, I still long to be back amongst the hundreds of beautiful people who were able to live in harmony with little to nothing and with only this meager existence were able to teach me lessons that are beyond anything that I have ever learned.
