Monday, November 8, 1993

7 PM

The first week of teaching has gone by quickly. So far it’s fun, although the students are slow and don’t get much through their heads. I think I’m changing some, though. Marking is a time-consuming procedure – I was up until late last night. I hate to think what it’s going to be like when Form I students arrive.

I had a pretty good weekend. Friday night was macaroni and Trivial Pursuit at Gary’s. Saturday morning was chess at Chancellor College with Joseph and his friends John and Pearson. I lost miserably to Joseph. The afternoon was filled with a football game putting our Zomba Red Lions against the Blantyre Hardware Stars. I certainly looked out of place in the crowd. The players of each team sat on the grass and prayed in silence with their heads bowed before the game began. The game was fun – it’s good to just forget about everyone and everything and watch a game on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

The evening came and I ventured to J+J’s place with Eva’s bike. Food was good and we talked and played cards all night. I stayed overnight because it was raining too hard and slowly made my way back home Sunday afternoon. I just had supper now so I think I’ll read or work on my mural for a while.

Postscript 2010: Well, writing that the students were “slow” was rather undeserved (not to mention unkind). The fact was I had been dumped into this school after a single two-hour interview, a few days training in Canada before leaving and a mere 5 day training in Malawi on cultural adaptation (Peace Corps volunteers, by contrast, received 8 weeks). Not much more to the preparation I received apart from a medical kit that included a bunch of Band-Aids, a grisly but handy book titled Where There Is No Doctor and 6 condoms. But more about all that later. Nothing prepared me to be a teacher – I had not been one in a past life, not even a teaching assistant. No one told me how to teach (or how not to teach), or what to teach. In fact, I was so clueless on my first day that I handed students a quiz which I thought they would ace but in fact most got well below 30 percent. The reason: I gave them questions from a test meant for students one year ahead.

Any “slowness” was more aptly a conditioned lack of response created by authoritative school figures, from headmasters and headmistresses to teachers. Students were not used to speaking up, of for showing any kind of emotion during class time. The teacher would walk into class, students would stand until you told them to sit down (nobody clued me in on that one, either. Strange showdown when I walked into my first class and all the girls stood. “Good morning, everyone?” I ventured, more as a question to see how they would react. “Good morning, Mistah McAdams,” came the chorus, then they sat).

While the students’ lack of responses (lack of anything) was the norm in my classes at the beginning of the year, it was, thankfully, not to last. But for the first few days, I really wondered what sort of impact I was going to have.

This post is notable for another point, and that’s the emerging friendships I was forming with Malawians, Joseph among them. An avid chess player, he wanted to spend his free time playing the game with me, introducing me to his friends, and learning more about Canada. As was the case with so many Malawians I met during my stay, he was kind to a fault, gentle and willing to share with me the things he cared about. I visited his family, and as is mentioned in this post, he took me to a football match at the local community centre, the only one I would go to during my stay. While the rest of my time in Malawi was memorable for so many reasons, one regret I have is losing touch with Malawian friends during my second year. For reasons I’ll delve into later, I got sucked into a somehow-inescapable vortex of volunteers who sometimes got together for no other reason that the fact they were expats.

And with no TV, no girlfriend, and not too many good books to read, any quiet moments I had to myself I used up by drawing a mural on my living room wall, an idea which initially reminded me of writing on a prison wall. But it offered me hours of solace, and helped occupy more than a few lonely nights that were to come.