Peace Corps' Job Description

"Waiting on people forever at the risk of never meeting the deadlines."

I don't think Peace Corps mentioned this in the job description. Yet that was what I've been doing for the past three months. This past month has been a bit hectic since I was trying to organize last-minute details for the proposal I’m working on.

Currently, my biggest assignment has been writing a proposal to the USAID (in joint partnership with Peace Corps) for funding to build an 8m x 12m shelter next to my health center where the under-five children can be weighed and immunized, as well as for youths to meet. As of right now, the mothers and their children (screaming ones who don’t have diapers, mind you) often wait up to an hour or two outdoor, which can become problematic during rainy season or hot season. This is one of the several factors that our under-five immunization coverage rate has been one of the lowest in all of Malawi (the penultimate one to be precise).

The other issue that challenges the youths is the lack of a venue for meetings and recreational activities. The youth-friendly health club I’ve been working with has been struggling a lot with attendance for various reasons. I don’t want to divulge too much here about the problems the youth club faces, but I know that they do need to have more activities to look forward to, like sports, games, movies, etc. I’ve also been encouraging the health staff to take a more active role in encouraging and advising these youths, especially regarding reproductive health.

With that said, I’m hoping that this proposal will pass and come October, we’ll be able to start building!

I’ve also been working on a few more proposals to fund other projects. The one that I’m most focused on right now is Nutrition Clinic. Before I came, the World Food Program withdrew their Supplementary Feeding Program for moderately to somewhat malnourished children from my health center, so we don’t even have an outpatient therapeutic program for these children. I’ve been trying to work on this one for awhile. Initially, I started a record book to monitor underweight/malnourished children over a period of 3 months, but the mothers were failing to show up the next month and/or the health workers were not following up when they were supposed to.

In an attempt to improve attendance, we designated a date each month for the mothers to come – the same day as the family planning clinic – so that they would have an easier time remembering and coordinating their hospital visitations. In addition, we added an educational component to the clinic that would promote self-sufficiency. After we’ve measured the children’s nutrition status, we’d educate them on different sustainable topics each month – basic nutrition groups, kitchen garden demo, food preservation demo, jam-making demo, and cooking demo. We’ve just gone through the nutrition groups and kitchen garden demo. Next week we’ll be presenting the food preservation demo: how to dry tomatoes and mangoes.

The kitchen garden demo has been a huge undertaking in addition to the work I’ve been doing for the shelter. I dragged one of my health workers with me to town to buy the mesh wire (to keep out the chickens) and the 100-pound metal pole, and it took four of us all day long to dig a 5x2 meter (x knee-high) pit out of a rock-solid floor. (Seriously, I thought we were digging up bricks and rocks. It reminded me of the time my brother and I dug up a pond in our backyard when I was in third grade.) But the point is that we want to show the mothers that they can build a small garden within their home compound, instead of going into their maize fields, and turn a dead ground into a piece of life. We’d add compost into the pit before sowing the seeds, so the seeds would then grow into a healthy bed instead of the dead rocky soil. The really cool thing about this kitchen garden is that there’d be a variety of food, alternating by legumes (i.e., soy beans), fruits (i.e. tomatoes), greens (i.e., spinach), and roots (i.e., garlic). They’re arranged in a way that would support the others. For example, the legumes nourish the soil, so the roots would benefit most from being next to them, and some of the roots (i.e., garlic and onions) are natural pest repellants from which the greens and fruits would benefit. To encourage the mothers with applying the knowledge, we also explained to the mothers that if they also dig the beds within their home compounds, we would visit their homes and provide some of the seeds. Since it’s still a work in progress, I won’t be able to know the effectiveness of the program, so I’m just hoping that it’ll be successful or be somewhat helpful to the mothers.

To take a preventive and more wide-scale approach, I also wanted to educate the villagers, not just the mothers with underweight children, about nutrition and proper food preparation techniques. Since men are the ones who usually buy the food or provide the money for food and the women are the ones who prepare the food, it is essential to include both men and women. My workshop will target mainly the Village Health Committee who was elected by their village to communicate and monitor health issues within their community. It’ll be a fun workshop with lots of cooking practicals and recipes! :)

My final major project is a natural medicine workshop. I’ve talked a lot about natural medicine in my previous update, but I didn’t want to just stop there. I want to host another workshop for Villages AIDS Committees and support groups for people living with HIV/AIDS. They’ll be able to learn about simple treatments for common colds and illnesses, as well as natural products they can use to generate incomes.

I’ll be continuing my secondary projects in November. My mentorship program fell apart for awhile because of all the exams and other problems (one of our mentors ran away after Camp GLOW and never came back), but when the new school year starts in November, I’d like to polish the program a little and start over. I might also consider teaching Life Skills at the secondary school again, but… I didn’t have the best experience last year, so we’ll see. And then there are the youths, of course. I’ll continue working with them, even though I’ve been facing a lot of challenges with them lately. I’ve also been involved with the youths at my church, though it’s not considered a Peace Corps assignment but a personal one.

I can’t believe how much this all sounds, but it really doesn’t feel like I’ve been doing a lot! I’m only here for 10 more months! I feel like I’m running out of time to accomplish all these things! I know it’s ironic that I mentioned helping people who don’t want to help themselves in my last update when I’m talking about the billions of projects I’m doing here. Will they all just go down the drain? I just hate the thought of giving up on people. I’m hoping that someone somewhere will actually learn something and think, “You know, maybe that is something worth trying and changing my life for.” Maybe they’ll start to hope and strive for a better life. :)

My yard while I was digging up a pit for my kitchen garden... using a hoe

My counterpart mixing the compost of our kitchen garden demo

A little eye candy

This was my agogo at homestay training cooking nsima

My homestay family eating in July 2008

These were the kids from my homestay village

These were 3 sisters - so cute!

My neighbor's baby is sooo cute! He's starting to talk now but can only say "Bye!",

so he always yells "Bye!" whenever he sees me! :)

This is the future Shaq O'Neill - Hope! He's huuuuge and he loves to laugh!

Baby Elaine! My friend named his baby after me!!

This little sweetheart is Kingsley, my co-worker's kid.

He's learning the alphabets now, so whenever he gets to "L",

he says "L-N-E" ("Ellen-e", get it? haha) and does a little dance! haha

A baby at church. She's sooo - yes it's that word again - cute!!! :D


I love the babies here, so I hope you don't mind me posting pictures of the babies and kids! haha


But here's a non-pediatric picture...


This is a toilet. I don't have one like this, but the cool thing is

the family (former Peace Corps Volunteers who stayed in Malawi)

uses the refuse and throws it into their compost to fertilize their gardens.

If that ain't recycling, then I don't know what else is!

For more pictures of Malawi, go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/26853368@N04/sets/72157605200076398/

Enjoy!

The Unappreciated Agogo Generation

I can't believe I didn't post about this before...

Meet my agogo, Ellen. She was born and raised in South Africa, met her Malawian husband while working as an au pair, and then moved back to Malawi with their newly built family. She has lived in Malawi ever since since 1950-something.

Doesn't she look like Mother Teresa? :) She may as well be dubbed Mother Ellen! She has been my greatest source of support since I've stepped into Malawi. She's one of the very few people I trust in my community, whose company I thoroughly enjoy. I spend every Saturday (when I'm not busy with other things) sitting outside her house at the tap, washing and scrubbing my clothes for 2 hours while chatting it up about food, South Africa, Malawi, history, culture, hardships, and all that good stuff, but mostly about food. :)

She has shown incredible strength that I've never seen in an 82-year-old. She has watched 9 of her 11 kids die from malaria, yet she keeps fighting to live with meaning in her life. She still works as hard as any other 20-something-year-old would. She wakes up before dawn everyday to sweep the ground and clean up the mission's house. And then she farms until all the weeds have been pulled up. And (keeping in my mind gender equality is still an issue here) she cooks for her grandson(s) 2-3 times a day. As embarrassing as it is for me to admit this, she's also the one I turn to when I want a chicken killed and gutted... :/ But if it weren't for her, I wouldn't be getting my monthly intakes of soysauce chicken! She's my lifesaver!

Meeting her has made me realize how incredibly undervalued our grandparents are, because I think they have a wealth of knowledge about culture and history that we can really gain from. I didn't live close to my grandparents at all to learn much from them, but from the few times I've learned about their history - from fighting with the British in World War II to hiding in the moutains with the guerrilla to escaping Communism - I've always wished that I could learn about their whole history and record it.

I'm also starting to realize more and more how incredibly spoiled our generations have become. We've been untouched by war and poverty that once plagued our great-grandparents, grandparents, and even some of our parents' lives, so we take all the things we have for granted and are never happy with what we have. How did materialism and greed take such reign of our lives? We now expect to get a car in high school, a free college education, and the latest iphone. Sometimes I wonder if it's even a good thing for developing countries to learn about the things we have, because then they'd think "Why can't we have that?" when the options are readily available to us, and I want to tell them, "Because that's not going to save your life." Other times I wonder if perhaps we, the West, are better off living in poverty so we'd actually appreciate each day we live, each bite we eat, and each thing we own. But on the contrary, I think that even poverty cannot teach us the most important values in life. I've been baffled by why the youths in Malawi feel so entitled to nice clothes, expensive (and unhealthy) food, Western music, etc. and spend all their time complaining about their poverty but not appreciating their education or the value of hardwork and self-sufficiency.

It's been interesting for me to interact with people from different generations and trying to understand the reasons and justifications for these dichotomies. I think a huge part has been the influence of development, which may have a worse influence on developing countries than we'd like to think. A lot of us volunteers always agree that it is so hard to "help those who don't want to help themselves". That has been one of the greatest struggles for me as well, partly in fault because of the way a certain NGO has worked here.

Anyway, I think I'll stop here, because it's starting to become one of those emails where I just draw out my thoughts incoherently and prolong the conclusion. But I'll send another email in a few days to update you of my projects! I'm at the Peace Corps office to work on a few proposals, so I'll be using the free internet while I can! :)

Mother Nature

There’s always so much I want to talk about, but I never know where to start!

The first thing is that I got my electricity back! Hallelujah! Actually, I got it back two months ago but forgot to mention it in my last update! It’s nice to be able to cook and heat bath water… even though we’re now in hot season. :( That means the next nine months will be a period of enduring mosquito bites, especially during rainy season (November – February)! That means lots of DEET (I apply it liberally like lotion!) and burning cow dung (which I don’t have) and basil. And planting lots of marigold and lemongrass.

That brings me to my next issue… we have been preparing ourselves for malaria season (during rainy season when mosquitoes breed like crazy). In July, our health workers (the overworked social workers/medical assistants/community advisors combined into one) ventured into the villages and recorded the names of under-five children who didn’t have insecticide-treated nets. About 17% of our catchment population are under-five (roughly 3,000), but most of them didn’t have nets. I think it was only about a quarter of those under-five who did have them. (Of course I don’t know how reliable the data is, because I heard some mothers would lie.) We just received the nets last week to distribute to the mothers, but there was a shortage of nets so some remained without them. In fact, the shortage of nets (and everything else) is so substantial that the donor withdrew distribution of nets to other targets. The original targets included the under-five children, people living with HIV/AIDS, orphans and vulnerable children, and other needy people, but the nets were so scarce that they could only distribute them to the under-five children.

I’m not sure who the donor is for this campaign, but I do know of a few who are trying to battle malaria. At the forefront is our very own Presidential Malaria Initiative. In 2005, Bush pledged millions of dollars to eliminate malaria in 15 countries with the worst cases of malaria. Malawi was one of them. Malaria is actually the number one killer here (as you may or may not remember from my update about “death season”); HIV is not. So many die from it that anytime a person is sick, the cause is assumed to be malaria – no questions asked. Not “What are your symptoms?” or “Were you tested?” It’s “Oh, you’re sick? Poor you. You must get malaria medicine.” But as I mentioned, the millions of dollars Bush pledged are going into the nets and medicine.

Another donor is PSI/Malawi. Their nets are usually given to the Ministry of Health who use the nets to promote incentives for women and children to attend the health facilities (instead of the traditional birth attendants and traditional healers who sometime put their lives at risk). Pregnant women usually receive a net during their antenatal check-ups (so the health professionals can monitor their health) and another one upon delivery (so they can have a proper and safe delivery that doesn’t involve putting herbs into their vaginas). And usually babies who are starting their immunizations would receive nets too.

At one point, UNICEF (or some other organization) was distributing nets to health centers to sell at a cheap price. But it was stopped for some unknown reason. I remember asking someone in the Peace Corps office about it and the response was about some unknown “higher up issue”.

On the one hand, there’s a huge demand for nets. I don’t know why there’s such a shortage of nets (isn’t it cheaper than DEET?), but I can understand why mothers are trying to scam the health workers to purchase nets for themselves. To them, malaria is the face of death.

But on the other hand, even with a sufficient supply of nets, they’d all be distributed by now if it weren’t for the “scammers”. While some people want to use the extra nets for themselves so they don’t have to buy them (most people wait until the free ones come even though they’re meant for children), others use the extras to sell for profit. By the lake, fishermen were using them for fishing. It’s beyond me why people refuse to spend money on a net (it was so cheap that it would only cost them maybe about 1.5 sodas’ worth) when the money they spend for treatment at a private facility or transport to a public facility would cost them 4-6 times what the net’s worth.

And that brings me to my next point – malaria treatment. My in-charge told me that before the Americans stepped in with their large-scale campaigns, people died from malaria without any hope of survival. Medicine was and still is so expensive that even private pharmacies couldn’t afford to buy them in Malawi. In fact, the plant used to make the medicine – Artemisia – is worth $300! Holy macaroni! The reason it’s so valuable is because it’s the only treatment that can effectively treat all strains of malaria (yet another reason why it’s so hard to combat). I heard the Chinese had known about the plant’s secret for centuries and refused to share it. It wasn’t until recently that the scientists discovered the secret after ten years of research. Since its discovery, some people have taken great effort to introduce Artemisia as a natural treatment. If you look at our health center’s front yard, you’ll notice a little tree that looks like a Christmas tree – that’s the miracle tree.

I think it’s amazing that there’s so much value in one little plant that it’s such a shame to think of so many potential medicinal plants being destroyed by deforestation and environmental degradation. Though natural medicine has been around for eons, the movement to use natural medicine as a complement to western medicine didn’t start until about ten years ago (perhaps coinciding with the discovery of artemisia’s secret?). You can learn more about it at http://www.anamed.org/.

I’ve been trying to set up natural medicine workshops for villagers, but the challenge is that we already have traditional healers (herbal doctors) are often associated with witchcraft. In reality, not all traditional healers practice witchcraft but because they both use natural means of “treatments”, natural medicine carries a negative stigma.

To be honest, I wasn’t interested in natural medicine much before I came here. My knowledge went as far as the bitter concoction my parents made for my colds (and which I adamantly refused to drink) and the “cuppings” and “back carvings”, but that was about it. I have yet to use acupuncture. Since I’ve been here, I have a newfound appreciation for our ancestors’ knowledge and methods of Eastern treatments. I think that we overrate Western medicine to the point of neglecting our ancestors’ methods that have worked since the beginning of time. What I like about ANAMED is that they actually try to experiment and see if a specific plant is effective or not, so we’re not blindingly believing in a plant’s potency.

So to advocate the use of natural means of improving your health, I’ll give you a few pointers! (Keep in mind that they’re not cures but are complementary to other forms of treatments to improve your health.)

-Garlic is good for boosting your immunity and memory, and reduces high blood pressure. It can also treat amoebas, colds, and fungal infections like athlete’s food
-Chilli pepper is good for flatulence and hemmorhoids! as well as rheumatism and hair loss. It can also help a woman with labor pains if you stick a chilli in her mouth!
-Lemon is good for coughs, fever, cold, and herpes labialis (canker sores).
-Eucalyptus is good for coughs, sore throat, and helps with diabetes and urinary infection. (It can also be used to make toothpaste!)
-Ginger is good for nausea and vomiting (especially during pregnancy) and hookworks.
-Onions are good for improving memory, gastrointestinal infections, and fungal infections.
-Aloe is good for burns, wounds, ulcers, conjunctivitis, and loss of hair.
-Pineapples are good for amenorrhea (lack of menstruation flow), oedema, external inflammation, and indigestion.
-Peanut leaves are goodf or sleeplessness.
-Coffee is good for migrains and nausea.
-Pumpkins (yes we eat them here!) are good for tapeworks and stimulating lactation after giving birth.
-Honey is good because it tastes good! :) It’s good for exhaustion (sleep is good too), heart diseases, liver damage, and most especially wounds.

There’s a whole lot more (see? isn’t it fascinating?) but I don’t want to write incessantly (or is it too late?)! I think it’s so interesting that the plants we live with and are used for ornamental or seasoning purposes can actually have medicinal purposes! I hope this gives you a newfound appreciation for Mother Nature and her gifts to us!

Baobab tree - the oldest tree in the world!

It's about 5,000 years old - can you imagine someone like the pharaoh passing through and embracing this tree? I'm sure once upon a time, it was worshipped by the Malawians. But this tree also has a lot of medicinal properties (and other uses) as well!

(By the way, can you see me standing next to the tree? haha)

Camp GLOW was a GO!

“When you educate a woman, you educate a nation.”

I just spent 10 days with a group of 78 teenage girls with raging hormones. These are girls who like to wake up at 4 AM screaming and singing at the top of their lungs; clog our toilets and flood our floors with water; walk around their dorms stark naked; start their mornings with gospel songs and dances; and end their nights with laughter and conversations that could be heard from miles and miles away.

And I loved it.

The girls on stage singing and dancing in the morning

Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) was a huge success. For those of you who contributed to the camp – WE THANK YOU WITH ALL OF OUR HEARTS. We are truly grateful for all your support and wish you could have seen just how much you have helped to change these girls’ lives.

Though I was a bit stressed with planning all the recreational activities, competitions, prizes, AND being a counselor, my favorite part was just hanging out with the girls. I have to admit that I wasn’t too excited at the thought of being with teenage girls, but they had exceeded above and beyond my expectations of them and for them.

We invited 80 girls from all over Malawi who had great potential for their futures. The camp was preceded by two days of training for the counselors, followed by six days with the campers. Each day consisted of smaller sessions, assemblies/speakers, recreational activities, and competitions revolving around the theme of the day – Women in Malawi, Environment, Health, Self-Esteem, Career, and Future. We had special visitors from Opportunity Bank, USAID, Peace Corps, and the U.S. Embassy. They learned about things, from gender roles to vertical gardens to journalism. But the most important thing was that they walked out of the camp with more confidence and dreams of becoming Malawi’s future leaders.

One of my girls drew a picture of her future goal - to become a nurse

I don’t know how else to describe the success of the camp except through my perspective, so I guess I’ll talk a bit about what I’ve learned and experienced. I had nine girls in my group: some were quiet and shy, a few loud, a few strong, etc. One of the highlights was pillow talk- a time allotted before bed for girls to ask us questions and discuss their choice of topic. It became apparent that these girls are smart and brilliant. They were asking me questions I had no idea the answer to: “Why do STIs cause esotopic pregnancies?”, “Can a 3-year-old boy transmit HIV to a 3-year-old girl?”, “Why does gonorrhea cause blindness in babies?”, etc. Uhhh, yeah… I’ll get back to you on that.

And then we started talking about their initiation ceremonies. A few girls who had participated explained how the ceremonies influence girls to get married at a young age by talking of things that are meant for adults and things that are not ever spoken in public. I’ll spare you all the details. But I encouraged the girls to think about how girls can maintain this important rite of passage into womanhood without encouraging early marriage. We then started discussing about the impact of HIV/AIDS from initiation ceremonies.

The other highlight was the night activities. We had a cultural showcase (broken up by tribe), quiz bowls, poster contests, cake-decorating competitions, an indoor relay race, talent show, and a disco dance. I tell you – these girls LOVE to sing and dance! It was so much fun watching these girls become like little kids!

My group of girls - the Canadians!

(Don't ask me about the name - I have no idea how they came up with that)

The best highlight was to personally watch the camp transform their lives, especially for a special girl in my group. Here was a girl who displayed so much potential, maturity, intelligence, diligence, and respect. She was one of those girls you’d see in class raising her hands, answering questions in her almost perfect English, diligently paying attention, interacting with all the girls, and well-mannered in every sense. The last day of camp, she sat down with me and started telling me her life story – one that touched me and inspired me. Orphaned by both parents at a young age for an unknown reason, she lived with her older sister, who also had a family of her own to care for. Unable to support her school fees, she had to turn to other financial sources. Since she didn’t know her father’s family at all, she tracked down her relatives and sought assistance. They provided the finances for a short while before they stopped supporting her. She then turned to her mother’s sister for assistance. With seven children of her own, it wasn’t long before she had to stop financially supporting her. In the end, she turned to the director of the Ministry of Education who agreed to assist with her school fees. After explaining her challenges to me, she told me that Camp GLOW had changed her life and has really encouraged her that she really can do anything she wants and be anyone she wants. In her parting letter to me, she wrote, “I will never forget you, because you have really changed a lot of things and I will never be like those girls who always let themselves down.”

Another girl in my group also wrote, “I tell you, ‘I can do anything’, it’s a lot like a song, but really from now [on], ‘I CAN DO ANYTHING!’”

At the end of it all, I sat there thinking, “Wow, these girls are so amazing.” I’ve always taken gender equality for granted, but these girls have had to face so many challenges and obstacles – from their parents’ lack of encouragement or lack of parents to the pressure to bring some source of money into the family whether by farming or working for “sugar daddies” – yet they’ve persevered in spite of them. I can only hope that Camp GLOW has encouraged them and empowered them just a bit more so that they won’t give up on becoming the generation who will fulfill the purpose of “gender equality” and make Malawi a better place for girls. These are the Girls who will Lead Our World.

Once again, thank you! Even though you are halfway around the world, YOU have also made an impact on Camp GLOW and the girls at this camp. Thank you for supporting girls’ education in the U.S.; for creating gender equality in the classroom and workplace; for defending women’s rights when no one else believed in it; for encouraging them to fulfill their dreams and aspirations; for telling our sisters, daughters, and friends that “Girls can do anything”!

Power to the Girls,
Elaine

P.S. My work with gender will not stop here. I’m part of the Gender and Development committee for Peace Corps Malawi, working on ways to promote awareness about gender equality and gender development.

P.P.S. I apologize if my thoughts seem scattered. I had insufficient and inadequate sleep for the last 10 days. But feel free to ask me more questions about anything!

The group of girls in my hostel

The girls made origami birds that I taught them (you can see me behind the right arm)

Me and two of my girls

And finally... a non-GLOW picture...

Me and my coworker's baby Hope - isn't he so cute?? :)

Nostalgia

Sometimes I have these flashbacks of my first days (more like months) in Malawi and I remember just how harsh and foreign the conditions can be. The days of building fire. Unsuccessfully. Of hovering by a candlelight. Of drawing water from a water pump. Of my hands numbing from washing my clothes in the freezing cold water. Of bathing with cold water.

It all started with a man’s $7,000 mistake (cutting down a tree by himself instead of with others) resulting in destroying our whole mission’s electricity transformer… meaning I don’t have electricity. Yes, I know, it’s a privilege taken for granted all too much, but sadly, I actually rely completely on it since I have no alternative mean of cooking and heating water without it. Usually, I would stress, but it has happened so many times (that is… black outs, unpaid bills by the mission, bad wiring, melting sockets, etc., but not a destroyed transformer) that I have resorted to just shrugging and telling myself, Oh well, I’ll figure something out.

Even though we were told the transformer would be replaced in two weeks’ time, I somehow doubt it will be. Another site about 16 kilometers has been waiting three months… and the site where my friend is located 8 km from me has waited two years. It doesn’t surprise me, since Africans don’t have a good sense of time… even if they are the only electric company in Malawi.

I’m starting to contemplate the idea that I might have to live my last year of service without electricity (which was what I thought coming to Malawi anyway), so I’m trying to adapt as quickly as possible. The first thing I did was, after a week of waiting for market day (Tuesday and Saturday), buy a charcoal stove... which I still have to master. (It can’t be harder than building a fire… can it?) I’ve been making paper briquettes, so I don’t have to use regular charcoal… which is just too expensive and too detrimental for the environment. I just have to pretend that I’m camping everyday!

And I’ve resorted to taking cold baths… even though it’s winter (which was exactly what I had to do last year when I first moved to my site). It’s not the most pleasant experience, but I’ve learned little things like… NOT pouring cups of cold water on myself! Instead, I’d scrub myself with a loofah while squatting to maximize contact with my body heat. And I’ve mastered washing my hair without touching my face and body. Granted, I’m not as clean as I’d like to be… but I figured it beats losing all my body heat through the water vapors. (By the way, if you don’t know this already, I do bathe outdoor.)

But in all honesty, it wasn’t that fun losing electricity. It’s one thing to not ever have electricity and become accustomed to building fires and all that good stuff, but it’s another issue to be totally unprepared when you rely completely on electricity.
My situation really isn’t that bad, but the unfortunate issues are:
1) our health center operates completely on electricity, so it’s crippled without it,
2) our water taps also depend on electricity, so our whole mission is crippled without water, forcing people to walk to further to water pumps, which might cause…
3) the water pumps to dry out earlier than usual since it is dry season and is currently overused by my mission

Other than the electricity ordeal, I also had these other moments. I had become so accustomed to the lifestyle here that I have forgotten so easily how strange they once were to me. I tried to think… if YOU were here, what would stick out to you? I thought of things like… the roosters crowing at the break of dawn and often at my door… the hens and chicks parading around, digging into my garden… the Land Cruisers (private vehicles) and Toyota caravans (public vehicles) rumbling over the rocky roads and kicking up dust… men on bicycles carrying their usual katundu (“parcels”, i.e. firewood, boxes, chickens)... women carrying buckets and pots of water or vegetables on their heads… the children running around barefoot twirling some old bicycle tire… the pounding of maize and women’s heaving breaths before the sunrise… the overwhelming smoke and smell of burning plastic and leaves… the eee and the ah-ahhhh and the ohhoooo departing their mouths… the tinsmen pounding into the metals fashioning watering cans and charcoal stoves… the acapella chorals reverberating in perfect harmony in an abandoned house on a Sunday morning… Palibe wina opanda nanu…

Amazing, isn’t it? They created this… indescribable feeling within me. There are some days when I feel at such a loss about why I’m here or what I’m really doing… some days when I’m bubbling with anger within me… some days when I just yearn to be at home in my own bed eating watermelon… some days wishing that I could do away with all the guilt within me… some days wondering if I should be doing something more than just reading and thinking… some days when I think that people just have absolutely no idea… But when I stepped out of my own shoes for a moment – just a moment – to see the little niches of Malawi that makes it special and my life different, all I can think is, Life ain’t a cakewalk, but right now, it’s worth the walk for a piece of that cake. :)

Conate to Camp GLOW Online!

Thanks to those of you who were waiting patiently to donate online! Thanks to those of you who have already sent your non-tax-deductible checks!

If you would still like to make tax-deductible donations, please...
1) go to www.peacecorps.gov
2) click on "donors", then "donate to volunteer project"
3) type in "malawi" under keyword search
4) you will see this: MALAWI Camp GLOW 2008 - Perlman M. - MD 614-196 - $3,014.27 (the amount we're trying to raise)
5) make your contribution!

That's it! Thanks again for your continual support!

I'm actually pretty excited about this camp! I'm one of the camp counselors, as well as the activities coordinator, and there will be 2 girls from my area who will be attending!

Let me know if you have any questions!! Zikomo!