The views expressed in this blog do not represent the United States Peace Corps or the US government in any way.

A Definition of Peace Corps, according to Urban Dictionary:

1. an ambiguous government agency designed to quash the idealism of recent American college graduates over a two year process
2. an international American government organization with continual rotating foreign staff and a fleet of white Landcruisers aimed at catching volunteers out of site.
3. two years of one’s life determined in a brief 20 minute interview after 15+ hour international flight.
4. committees, sub-committees and exploratory committees for both.
5. the automatic and immediate forfeiture of four of the first ten Amendments.
6. a mechanism for those who cannot get laid stateside to remedy their situation and for those who could to forget how.
7. groups, flipcharts and markers.
8. commonly preceded by “Oh shit! I just graduated with a degree in international relations”
9. A whole lot of seriale (often dubbed over)
10. where CD, PTO, AO, PM, LCC, SSC, TM, PCMO, FA, GSM, and GSA speak to PCVs and PCTs about SPA, PCPP, MSs, WWS, ICE, IRC, and RA as well as EAP, ET, MS, and COS in acronyms.

So far, I can tell you that number 10 in that list is definitely true. At the beginning of Orientation, they gave us a manual which included a long list of acronyms and what they stood for, but I don’t think it even has half of the ones we’ve encountered so far. I’ll include a long list at the end of this post and whoever can identify the meaning of the most acronyms will win a prize of bragging rights.

Some people are confused about my timeline and situation. So for clarity’s sake:

• June 5-7: Staging (Philadelphia, PA). Staging is basically where they prepare us to come to the country and describe what Peace Corps service looks like.
• June 8-12: Orientation (Dowa, Malawi). Orientation took place in a hotel in Malawi. During this time we’re in Malawi, but we’re pretty separated from the actual culture. Malawians and current volunteers prepare us for life in the village and teach us the basic skills we need to survive and not be offensive to people.
• June 13-August 24: PST (Kasungu, Malawi) stands for Pre-Service Training. It’s what we’re in right now until the end of August. This is a time for cultural orientation, language learning, and learning the skills we need to do our jobs. Basically, it provides us with all the skills we need to live and breathe in Malawi. We live with a host family in a village and go to classes with cultural trainers every day.
• August 24, 2017-August 24, 2019: Site Placements (???). So for exactly two years I’ll be somewhere (we find out in July) teaching English, living on my own in a community where I’ll likely be the only American. That’s why PST is so important. We need to learn the skills here that we’ll need to have later when we’re living alone.

We met our host families today. The whole village was dancing as we came in. Our CD (Country Director) told us to keep in mind that we might be the most exciting thing that’s happened here in a while. She said, “imagine you’re from a town of less than 1,000 people and suddenly 66 people from Bangladesh all show up.” You would notice. I think I saw nearly everyone crying tears of joy when entering into the village, which was a struggle because Malawians don’t cry when they are happy and they find it very difficult to understand when we do. So everyone was choking back tears from feeling so welcomed.

My host family is Catholic and my abambo (father) farms and owns a small teahouse. He also makes bread. We had dinner and I showed them some pictures on my phone. They laughed when I told them that people in America asked “where is Malawi?” When I told them where I was going.

We also got our language assignments. I will be speaking…Chichewa! Chichewa is the national language of Malawi (aside from English, which is used in a lot of business transactions). Out of the 66, 12 are going to speak Chitumbuka, a language spoken in the northern region, and just 3 will be speaking Chitonga, a language which is essentially only found in Nkhata Bay district, right on the lake.

I am pretty interested in language and can be obsessive about it so I prepared more than some people said was necessary before I came. Peace Corps is known for being good at starting languages from scratch and during orientation I thought maybe it was pointless to have any sort of head start. However, upon being with my host family for a few hours, I was glad I did. I’ve been able to have several basic conversations that I wouldn’t have been able to have had I not known a good amount of vocabulary already. It definitely wasn’t necessary but I think it made and will make my time during PST much easier. One current volunteer said that one of the only times he considered ET (early termination of service) was his first night of homestay. He said it was awkward to not have any idea what your host parents were saying to you and then just to have them stare at you and you stare at them and say nothing (brief aside: it’s totally okay to just sit in silence with people in Malawi. Unlike America, where we feel like we have to constantly be speaking or saying words, in Malawi “silence means golden” as one of our training staff likes to say).

And it is beautiful here. Case in point:

Seeing that view sort of makes me never want to leave (don’t worry, Mom. I’m sure that will change at some point).

Ndasangalala. This means I’m happy. Doesn’t it just make you laugh when you say it?

There are three sectors in my cohort in Malawi: Education (my sector), Environment, and Health. Education used to come at a different time of year than Health and Environment simply because Education is a significantly larger sector than the others. We are the first cohort to be combined all into one training class, which means we are the largest training class they’ve had in Malawi: around 66 people. A little over 30 of us are education trainees and the other half are education and health. The reason for combining them is so that we can hopefully placed in clusters somewhat near each other and work on cross-sector projects with one another.

On the plane to Lilongwe, I met a Malawian man who asked me what I’d been looking at before coming to Malawi and I told him I had been listening to some of the music and he said, “oh, who have you been listening to?” I told him Faith Mussa (one of the most prominent Malawian musicians) and he said “Oh, he is from the same place as me. He calls me uncle. Do you want his number?” Faith Mussa is a pretty big deal in Malawi so this felt really odd but I accepted and put the number in my phone, just in case. I will keep you updated on whether or not it’s a real number. Although, I saw his conversations in WhatsApp with Faith’s name already in his phone and I feel like that’s something random to just make up. I also don’t really know what to do with it now. Just call and say “Hey, some random guy on a plane gave me your number and I wanted to call and tell you your music is cool?” [Update on this: since I’ve gotten a Malawian phone number I can now see his status and it says “for bookings contact: ________” so I’m pretty sure that really is his number. But I saw a headline in a newspaper today that said he just left for the U.K. So we’ll see]

Riding through Malawi is something we’ve only done once so far. They took us from the airport to a hotel and we were pretty isolated from seeing the Malawi outside its walls for a while. Riding through Malawi made it more real to me that I am here. I have been to poor areas of the world before, so I thought I knew poverty, and I was warned about the extremity of the poverty here, but as always, it is different hearing about something than seeing it with your own eyes. I thought, “Oh, I’ve seen poverty before; I can handle it.” That isn’t to say poverty doesn’t make me grieve. I guess I just felt I have seen it before. But this is different.

Malawi is the poorest country in the world.

Some people say it’s actually the fourth poorest country, but realistically, that’s not much better. If you measure it by GDP, it is the poorest. Malawi’s annual GDP is slightly more than $200. I encourage you to Google and compare that to that of the USA, U.K., China, etc.

Nearly every facet of poverty is a cause and effect. That is why we refer to it as a cycle. Let me try and explain it better

Facets of poverty in Malawi:

1. Deforestation. Almost everything is dirt. You hardly see any trees when driving. Its deforestation rates are some of the worst in the world. But this is only my experience driving by. Because many people don’t have electricity, they have to use firewood to cook and do many other things (boil water to clean it, perhaps), and a lot of people illegally cut down trees in forest and national park reserves for firewood out of necessity. Also because Malawians don’t have any infrastructure for waste management, they burn all of their trash.
2. Natural Disasters. Mainly floods and droughts. Rainy season used to be much longer and more predictable than it currently is. The effects of climate change are much more visible in Malawi than in most places. This causes huge problems when you have a dry season. Let’s say you prepare all rainy season to harvest corn (nsima, Malawi’s staple dish, eaten with almost every meal, is made from corn) and then a few weeks before harvest it floods and ruins all the crops. What do you do? If you have no irrigation scheme (and most people don’t), you’re pretty much out of luck. That is why when there is famine in Malawi, many people die. The government tries to intervene but it often can’t do so for everyone.
3. Lack of Education. School fees are a problem for most people, especially subsistence farmers (80% of the country). The test to graduate from secondary school is in English which many students can’t speak well enough to pass. When there is hunger or drought, children won’t walk to school because they need to conserve the energy so that they won’t die. Most children walk 3-7 miles to school everyday. One way. The sun also sets early here and by the time a child reaches home, if the sun has gone down and they have no light by which to study, they will fall behind.
4. Lack of Female Empowerment. If you’re not a fan of the term feminism, I don’t think I mean what you think it means here. The dropout rate among girls in school is significantly higher than boys. There are multiple factors for this, but a major one is feminine hygiene. Schools are not outfitted with proper bathrooms or areas to change and if someone doesn’t have feminine hygiene products, they will simply miss school one week a month, until eventually they fall so far behind that they drop out altogether.
5. Child marriage. This is another reason girls drop out of school, actually. Typically, they think an older man has money (or often he does) and he needs children or her family needs money so they will marry her off. But often what happens is that the man will leave her once he’s done with her. Joyce Banda, the last president of Malawi, began a pretty concerted effort to stop this practice but it still goes on. The current president, Peter Mutharika, is also attempting to put measures in place to stop early marriages.

If you re-read those, you can see how they all uphold and support the others. There are more, I am sure, which I am not aware of yet, and misinterpretations of the ones I’ve just listed here that I’m sure I’ve made which will come to light the longer I stay here.

Something else that has also been confirmed so far is the nickname of the country: The Warm Heart of Africa. That is true. Malawians are quite possibly the friendliest people on the planet. And resilient. It’s so easy to think about poverty paternalistically or patronizingly, but even in the short time I’ve been here, I’ve been filled with more hope than I have in a long time simply by hearing Malawians speak. Their drive and passion and motivation gives me hope and the knowledge that it isn’t just Americans coming in and directing what to do is so reassuring. Many people here are so capable and intelligent. They know what they need.

We heard the US ambassador to Malawi speak on a variety of different issues. One thing she said that was interesting was that Malawi has a great trifecta for development work. It’s very small, it’s politically stable, but still very poor. The US and most major powers have no strategic interests here, which is actually a good thing. There’s not as much of an ulterior motive from the outside as there might be in say, DRC. That means the focus truly is on development.

One of the goals of Peace Corps is encouraging world peace and friendship. Our CD said that reporters often scoff at her claim that this is what her job is, but she truly believes that it is what she does. Thus far, so do I. This is a cultural exchange. (Our host families actually have extensive cultural orientation classes about Americans, just like we do for them, which I find interesting).

The hotel we were put in is very nice. I think they’re trying to gradually ease us into the Malawian lifestyle. There is even hot water (sometimes), wifi (allegedly), electricity (maybe), and seats on the toilets (some of them, anyway).

Some current volunteers who have been here a year come each week (it changes every week) to help orient us to life here, which has been really amazing. They were in our shoes last year so they know what it’s like but can also answer many of our questions about things down the road.

I’m actually writing the bones of this post (though I’ve added more now) at 4:25am because I can’t sleep (jet lag) and even though I’m under the covers with a bed net tucked around me, every time I hear a buzz around my head, I have a mini panic attack. They’ve really tried to make us paranoid about malaria so that we’ll take our medicine.

The Malawians doing the cross-cultural training are amazing. One of them in particular is very creative and hilarious. He had a fake radio show skit sort of thing (not really sure how else to describe it) when doing the introduction to language. When we got our name tags, we stood in a big circle in a pavilion outside with the name tags in the middle and sang a song together and had to dance to the middle in order to get our name tags.

I’ve had extremely basic conversations in Chichewa, typically followed by laughter, which I prefer to take optimistically and generously. One of the people on our LCF (Language and Cross-Culture Facilitator) “radio show” panel told us, “Peace Corps is the only profession in which you are allowed to commit first-degree murder. You can butcher the tenses, murder the conjugations, etc.” The main thing is that we be understood. He went on to say, “We have a warrant for the arrest of two dangerous enemies: shyness and fear. If you find these enemies, please notify us of their whereabouts immediately.”

I feel like I’m finally getting the hang of everyone’s name. We were separated during staging into two groups because we were so large so now I feel like I know everyone who was in my room but not many who were in the other room. Everyone here is interesting though, that’s for sure. It also kind of feels weird to be around so many people with similar interests and passions and motivations. It’s not like I haven’t been around people in the past with similar passions and motivations as me in the past, just never so many in one place. And to be honest, they’re pretty hard to come by in Kentucky because most of the people who have them leave. It’s also been cool to meet people from all over the US. I’ve never been in such a diverse group of regions and states. As much as I think about cultural adjustments to Malawi that we’ll all have to make, when I talk to fellow trainees, I’m reminded that we all have our own separate subcultures as well that might be difficult for one another to grasp.