1. I have five nipples at the moment. At a time and location unknown,
actuated by motives that remain unclear, a mosquito has bitten me
three times in a neat line across my chest. It’s beautiful.
2. We cooked African cake with our deputy headmistress a couple of
weeks ago – it’s quite easy, you mush up bananas into baby food, add
maize flour, and deep fry – but she gave us some freshly cooked
‘mandas’ – basically deep fried sugary bread – and they were
absolutely incredible. Unfortunately Michael (my hilarious partner)
managed to convince me that the mystery liquid in a bottle in the hut
was golden syrup. I dipped and ate. He laughed. I swallowed,
unimpressed and slightly confused by the taste. He gleefully informed
me that it was pork fat. From a week ago. Yum.
3. I took a ride on an ox cart the other day. Michael drove it for a
while – but was quite ineffective – it turned out this was because the
driver encourages the oxen by prodding their private parts with his
foot.
4. Cooking in a rural Malawian kitchen – mud oven thing inside mud hut
with no chimney, in which you burn firewood – is more challenging than
I had imagined. I tried to cook some eggs there because I couldn’t be
bothered to start our fire – and found myself coughing uncontrollably
and completely blinded by the smoke! Brian told me to sit down on the
floor or just let his niece do it – this worked well. Never let a
stupid westerner use Malawian technology.
5. A big thunderstorm blasted a lot of whitewash off one of our walls
the other week (we were lucky, one teacher’s fence collapsed and
another watched his whole kitchen hut as it was dislodged by the wind
and thrown into his house – the house survived intact, the kitchen not
so much). It’s now been resurfaced, but they had no whitewash so it’s
mud grey. So our house has now got quite a funky art-deco feature-wall
look. Some students from the school also ‘resmeared’ our mud floor,
which is great, it just raised the floor level a bit, which meant I
had to scrape away some of it with the back of a fork to allow the
door to actually open!
6. I climbed a tree at school the other day, and I’m pretty sure I
could see for 10 or 20 miles across the savannah to the mountains. I’m
getting strangely accustomed to spectacular beauty.
7. Last week fellow teacher and general legend Mr Robins Kamanga came
into my class and asked if he could have some of my learners who had
missed the manual work after school yesterday. I wasn’t a big fan of
them missing lessons, but I supposed if a few of them had tried to
skive, they should have to do it like everyone else. He said something
in Chichewa and my class promptly dropped in size from 70 to 15.
8. This morning we drove back from Mua to Mtunthama, leaving at
4 in the morning. The main road for this route includes driving through
a game reserve. This meant we were treated to the sight of a whole family
of baboons on the road, including a couple mating. Not the sort of thing you
usually see on your morning commute.
9. This Sunday I am doing the talk at the evening church service of
Kamuzu Academy student chapel. I was going to talk to them about how
they should not be stupid and western like me, but I think now I’m not
going to try and tell them what to do, I’m just going to read the
parable of the lost son, and tell them how incredibly, personally, and
permanently their Dad in heaven loves them. So please, if you pray,
ask God to calm some of my nervousnesses about that and to speak to
them through what I say.
10. Finally, I’d like to boast about how manly I am now. The other day
a little kid thought it’d be funny to throw a live caterpillar through
the window into my classroom! There was some commotion, I established
the cause of it, took a deep breath, walked through to the back where
it was, picked it up, and threw it right back at them. MAN.
No comments:
Post a Comment