This week we had our third camp at Chilinda Full Primary school, which is about one hour away from Lilongwe...seemed like nothing after our eight our trek to Zambia! The camp ran pretty smoothly, by this point we are all very comfortable with the curriculum and dealing with the students, etc. I (Caitlin) was working with the teachers all week. I was very excited going into the week, and though it was a great experience, it was a little frustrating because I felt like the teachers weren't really opening up as much as I would have liked them to, which really restricts how much you can talk about and do with them. Overall, I'd say it was a success, but it's just so hard to imagine how much work these teachers do. There are 1,108 students at Chilinda and only nine teachers. That is over 100 students per teacher! I can't even imagine teaching 150 first graders, but that's what some of these teachers do every day from 7am to 4 pm. Riss got get another marriage proposal, this time in the form of a written anonymous question, most likely from a fourteen year old boy. I'm beginning to doubt whether she'll be returning to the US, or if she'll just stay here and get married. The girls in her class tried to teach her how to dance like them, i.e. booty pop like it's nobody's business, but none of us have really caught on no matter how many times we stand in awe and watch them.
So Thursday night we were all scheduled to stay over in the village on a home stay. During the day at camp Riss started feeling a wee bit under the weather, most likely due to real bad dehydration. (Even when we don't realize it, we are all real dehydrated 95% of the time, so when we get sick from dehydration here it means we're screwed). She sat in the bus for most of the day drinking rehydration packs, basically lots and lots of salt that you mix with your water that are supposed to taste like fruit. Erroneous. After trying to eat and feeling nauseous, she decided to go home and spend the night at the house instead of doing home stay. Quite a shitty situation, but it was definitely for the best. After camp, we trekked on over to the village to meet our home stay families. Me and Catherine were staying pretty close to the school in a house with a family whose names I do not remember and could not pronounce after four attempts. It was a husband and wife with their two children, Limbani and Cholani. After dropping everyone else off with their families, we went back to our house. Once we arrived they showed us to where we would be sleeping, a small room with a straw mat on the floor, and then we went outside to play with the children. Everyone in the village was there dancing and singing and having a grand old time. Each dance is done to a song that all the kids know and sounds kind of like a chant with clapping. For each dance, we all stood in a circle while different people would go into the middle and do the said dance. It's kind of like a game. African kiddos are amazing dancers, we actually can't figure out how they move they way they do. Even my host family's son, who is four years old, could shake his little booty like a pro. Needless to say, when I was pushed into the middle of the circle I looked like an idiot and all the villagers died laughing. Oh well. After a lot of dancing, we went to go make dinner with our family. The staple food here is nsima, which is basically boiled corn flour that has the consistency of polenta. Nsima is always eaten with some kind of relish, whether it's pumpkin leaves or cabbage or beans or whatever you want really. You eat nsima with your hands by picking off a piece of nsima, forming it into a little ball, and then scooping up some relish. We've all gotten relatively mediocre at it and can at least make it through a meal without getting everything everywhere. It looks like it would taste gross, but to be honest it's really not that bad. We eat it most days for lunch (I do anyways..). So we sat by the fire watching Virginia, our host mother's mom, make nsima and a relish of pumpkin leaves. She cooked outside over a fire set under some bricks, which were holding up the pot. After having eaten nsima a lot here, it was cool to see how it's made traditionally in the villages. I also do not understand how the women here do not die from respiratory problems. The smoke was blowing everywhere and Virginia was unphased by it. After making nsima, our family ate (we didn't eat any, as the nsima and relish were made with water from the village borehole which probably would have made us sick). Then we headed inside where our host dad sat with us, asking us to spell lots of words in english and then telling us how to say them all in Chichewa, the local language. It was really fun at first, and then I started getting veeeeery tired. We figured that once the sun went down and it got dark, people would go to sleep because there isn't any electricity...erroneous once again. After our little spelling bee/language lesson (I can now say lips, chicken, leg, road, goat, and cow in Chichewa), we were sent back outside for some more dancing. I can honestly say I've never been so overwhelmed and tired at the same time. After doing literally two hours of dances, the village kids wanted us to do some World Camp songs. We do morning songs every morning of camp, so the kids remembered some of the ones we did and wanted Catherine and I to show them to everyone. We agreed, and did every World Camp song probably five times each. Somehow we were rescued by our host mom and rushed inside to finally go to sleep. But first, Catherine and I figured we should go to the bathroom so we wouldn't have to go in the middle of the night.
The bathrooms here are basically holes in the ground in a little shed. We were told by our coordinator to "not look down" when we used the bathroom at night on homestay, probably because of all the bugs crawling around. So when Catherine went to go into the bathroom shed, I said, "Oh, Catherine, don't look down!" and she went inside, only to return two seconds later. She told me that looking down wasn't the issue, and that there were at least seven huge spiders on each wall. The bathrooms are about the size of a five by five box, so the walls are real close. We stood there (with an audience, of course), and tried to figure out what to do. Probably thinking we didn't know how to use the toilet (read: hole in the ground), our host mom came over and took Catherine by the hand, leading her into the bathroom. Apparently, she showed Catherine the correct way to squat over the hole and go to the bathroom. She then proceeded to stand there as Catherine peed. I was standing outside the bathroom and suddenly heard, "Oh my god I'm so sorry!!" Read that as you will. Then it was my turn. I bravely walked into the bathroom, only to see my hell. Huge spiders on each and every wall, waiting to attack me. Quickly I ran out of the bathroom, and was then ushered in by my host mom. She kindly showed me how to use the toilet, and then stood there while I went to the bathroom. Thankfully, I had better luck than Catherine, and had nothing to apologize for.
We headed inside, lied out our sleeping bags and got comfortable. This turned out to be impossible. It was a long long night of tossing and turning, and it seemed that each time I was on the verge of sleeping I heard a bug buzzing in my ear. Between that and my constant fear of whatever was rummaging around in the roof, I slept maybe two hours the whole night. I'm sure from reading this it seems like I hated it, but it was really a great experience. Seeing how people live in the villages of Africa isn't an opportunity that many people get in their lifetime, so being able to sleep in someone's home was really cool. We woke up around 6 the next morning, danced some more, and then headed to school for our last day of camp!
Riss returned from her night at the house, rehydration packs in hand, and proceeded to watch and document our soccer game we had against the kids that we were teaching that week. Caitlin has developed a new love for her soccer glory days, and it was amusing to watch and play in a skirt. Needless to say, it is significantly more difficult than playing in cleats, on a grass field, and in shorts. The ball kept getting lost in our skirts and would reappear when some kid would kick it out. Paul, our bus driver, basically won the game for us when he showed up fully dressed in a soccer jersey, shorts, and knee high neon yellow socks. We didn't even know he knew that we were playing a game. Also, we discovered he could do a standing roundoff into a flip post-goal. By far the best celebration dance we've ever seen. We finished the game up (p.s. we won) and proceeded to begin day four.
So this week, our last week of teaching, Riss and I are teaching together! We're teaching the standard 7 class, who's ages range from 12-16. On the first day of every camp, we choose a team name, which is usually something like the Lions, the Hares, the Elephants, the Monkeys, etc. This week, our class decided to be "the loving team." We were a bit disappointed to have our last camp team be called something so lame, but we had to go along with it. We started the first day out a little slow because our class was very quiet. They weren't answering many questions, but we gave them the benefit of the doubt and hoped that they would open up. Since then, we've been having a blast. We dance around with them before each day, and then it is so so so fun to teach together. Since we're friends (kind of?) it's easy to just bounce off of each other and figure out who should say what in class.
Today was "Day THREE camp FOUR!" (Lauren Seagraves...) and morning songs were by far the best they've been out of all the camps and days. The kids came up with a remix for our first song. The way it works is that the World Camp people say "And we're marching" and everyone else responds "to the beach, to the beach" and then World Camp says "I said, let me see you [insert shake your booty, stir that nsima, robot style, funky chicken, etc.]" then everyone else says "what's that you say?" and repeat. Then we break out in whatever dance was mentioned, Caitlin is particularly fond of the robot, Riss thoroughly enjoys stirring the nsima. So today, when we started dancing, all the kids were dancing in a very non-violent way (unlike the usual mosh pit that is created surrounding us, verrrry uncomfortable, and elbows generally get thrown) they began to remix the song, saying "to the beach ah ah to the beach ah ah". It was awesome, and is now going to be a World Camp remix, soon be recorded.
Tomorrow is our last day of camp (AH!), we can't believe that it's gone so fast. Tomorrow night we are going to Lake Malawi for 2 nights, which we are super excited for. We're technically not supposed to swim in the lake says our travel doctors... but we'll see what happens. It gets super hot under the African sun...
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