Calling All Knitters!

A while back a group of women in the village asked me to teach them how to knit. While, I do know how to knit and crochet, my greatest accomplishments have been scarves, which any knitter knows are the most basic. However, I do know a few students at our school who know how to knit and crochet (one being our worker), so we are starting a knitting club. I am modeling it after what a couple other volunteers are already doing in their villages. I recruited the reverend's wife to help me as well because she is interested in business and a leader in the community and she can help with language because her English is pretty good. We held our first meeting and 30 women showed up. It was a lot more than I expected, but after talking to another volunteer who has 55 women in her group I think it can work. At the first meeting we just discussed how the group would work and elected officials. Every Malawian club has to have officials, so we have a chairperson, an assistant chair person, a secretary, a treasurer and committee members. Right now I am buying yarn in Lilongwe at wholesale price. Each woman in the club will get their first skein free. After that they will be charged the wholesale price which they can pay for after their item is sold at a profit. Some of the profit they will keep, and some of it will go into the group fund. As the group fund grows the women will be able to take out loans from it. Ideally this will help empower the women who do most of the work in the family, but may have little control over the money and decision making.
I brought about 10 crochet hooks and 4 sets of knitting needles with me, but we are going to need more. We will probably make some from bicycle hooks. If anybody has yarn, needles or hooks they are willing to donate we will gladly accept them!

How do you say "Uff-da" in Chichewa?

For months now we have felt like our lives have been so slow at our site. For the most part what we have been doing has been focused on the school. SInce our school is a boarding school, it can feel like an island between two villages. The teachers are definitely in a different economic situation than the surrounding villagers. Recently we met "our guy" to connect us to the village. He has been helping us with our gardens for free, but essentially in exchange for our help with development projects in the village. He is actually in the farming group that we are connecting with the groundnut sheller. Suddenly we feel busy (busy as in I am still reading a book a week)! We have been meeting with the chiefs, the reverend, and the community to assess the needs. An interesting side note is that "want" and "need" are the same word in Chichewa, so Malawians frequently interchange the two. Most of what they listed are truly needs though. It will just be impossible for us to do all of it, so we will have to narrow it down a bit. Here are some of the things they came up with:

*Some kind of orphan rehabilitation and orphanage
*Care for those living with HIV/AIDS
*Care for the elderly
*Another borehole (they only have one in the village)
*Some kind of pump for irrigation in fear of the coming food shortage
*Fixing a diesel powered maize mill that supports orphans, elderly and people with AIDS
*A fence to keep goats out of a garden that provides nutritional supplements to people with AIDS
*Soccer ball for the youth group (CHECK! We had one from Peace Corps but were waiting to identify a group. We are also able to give them a solar powered radio that they will be able to listen to radio shows directed towards preventing HIV/AIDS)

My response, "Uff-da!". Brian's response, "I just want to play hockey." No really, we do plan on focusing on a couple of issues, but are investigating the resources that already exist in the community. We also need to look into what grants are applicable to these needs. We will keep you updated!

3rd Anniversary on the Ilala

To celebrate our 3rd anniversary we took a trip on the Ilala, a ferry on Lake Malawi. We had been hoarding our care package goodies to take on the trip. We were on the boat for about two days, leaving from Monkey Bay on the southern lake shore to Nkhata Bay in the north. Unfortunately we had a pretty rocky ride and both ralphed up our treats from sea-sickness. Perhaps a sign that at 3 years the honeymoon is over??? We did manage to get a few good sunsets and sunrises.

Saturday Morning Activities

"What do you think would happen if I started painting on our walls?" Kristy asked Brian.
"Probably nothing," responds Brian.
And thus we have it, a big orange Baobob tree.

Peanut Butter!

We have recently hired a woman in the village to make us peanut butter. She roasts the peanuts, adds a little bit of salt and sugar and smashes them up. We are buying the jars for 200MK each from her. They are about 220MK in the store, so it is cheaper for us and a lot of money for her. She started making extras that we are selling to other Peace Corps Volunteers. The orange tub is actually a Gatorade container sent in a care package from Jack and Bonnie. The other containers are just old peanut butter jars that we have used. Jif has got nothin' on this stuff.

We are applying through Peace Corps Malawi for a Groundnut Sheller to help a farming group we have identified in the village. Then hopefully the local villagers will grow less tobacco and more groundnuts to make peanut butter. Check out the Fully Belly Project and a short 9 minute video that shows the sheller in action. In exchange for the sheller, the community must provide for one bag of Portland cement, or the kwacha equivalent to pay for it. This bag of cement costs about MK2,600, or about $18.50. The cement is then used to make more GN shellers. We have been told that the device will shell the same amount of groundnuts in one hour what it would take a person to shell by hand in one week.

Gule Wamkulu

Gule Wamkulu (literally meaning "big dance") is the name of the traditional African religion in Malawi. Guide books tell us roughly 15% of the poplulation practice African Traditional Religions (ATR). We don't know much about it other than they have initiation ceremonies and it is highly secretive. They occasionally make appearances in costume for different ceremonies. This is from a funeral ceremony. They call it a Chilumbo, or "beast". The kids are from the primary school next to ours.

Book Donations

Last Sunday night a student came to our door and said we had a visitor in a car. Confused as to who it might be we went outside to find this huge truck with boxes. Friends of Malawi donated tons of books to Peace Corps so all the education volunteers got them at their schools. Some school district in Oregon donated all the books. As we are two volunteers we got twice as many books (39 boxes!). It was like Christmas in June. Better yet were the boxes they came in that reminded of us of home. One was even in a Pop-Tarts box! We now have tons of literature books, easy readers, grammer books and even a few biology books.

New Routine

Before sunrise we now run 5 times around the football pitch, do situps and pushups, and play fetch with Baxter. Not sure how long the new routine will last, but we like it for now. Baxter really needs the exercise because we keep him in the back yard most of the day while we teach. Other dogs roam freely, but since they are malnourished and sometimes beaten, they usually just lie down in the dirt. Since we feed and play with Baxter, sometimes his energy translates into chicken and goat chasing, and our neighbors will have none of that. Understandable since chickens and goats equal income and food.

More Art Club

Art club is painting these days. We just had our last meeting for a while because exams are starting and then a term break. We just received some more art supplies from Katie and Joe and our math department just got some calculators from The Willows via Karen and Jay. Thank you so much!

Weekend Activities at Site

Life is real exciting in the village on the weekends. Some of our exciting activities include burning our trash and roasting peanuts. We manage to find time to read as well.

Giving Water Treatment Demonstrations

Here I am giving a demonstration to village women on a new product put out by Population Services International, funded by USAID. We use their product, Waterguard, in our own water. The new procuct, Waterguard Wa Uffa (uffa meaning flour or powder) treats the water and makes all the sediment fall to the bottom. This is perfect for the village woman who get their water right from the river. Instead of giving out the product free, PSI charges a small amount and the rest is subsidized. The idea behind it is "social marketing". They have found that when they give out free procucts like Waterguard and mosquito nets, people don't value them and don't use them. When they charge a small price that villagers can afford they sell like hot cakes and people use them.
P.S. Brian had a role in this demonstration too. After all the sediment magically fell to the bottom of the bucket he would come over and look in the bucket excitedly saying "wonani! wonani! (look! look!)"

4th of July at the Ambassador's House

We tasted a little bit of Americana at the ambassador's house for the 4th of July, which we actually celebrated on June 7th. We celebrated early because the ambassador is ending his term in Malawi to move on to a new country. As you can see many games were played including a water balloon toss, potato sack races and a tug-of-war between Peace Corps Volunteers and missionaries.