Some commemerative thoughts

So in commemoration of being back in America for almost 2 weeks now I thought that I would throw out some observations and answer some FAQs and provide some of my infamous lists from my time in Malawi as a sub-Saharan spaz. 

A lot of people have asked me multiple questions like: 

 “So, how is it to be back?”

Since all anyone wants is a short answer, I give that to them, but the people that really care I tell them that it is really good to be back and see Sarah and my friends and family again although I miss Malawi and all of my friends there. I am excited to get my back taken care of ASAP and it is nice to be back at Carinos.

“What do you miss most about Malawi?”

I think that other than people, I miss the free time, especially that which I devoted to reading. Since January of 2008, I finished 169 books and finished half of Pride and Prejudice. In the two weeks I have been back, I have read approximately 10 pages – total.

“What is the weirdest thing about being back?”

 The fact that I am not leaving again soon. It feels weird to think that I am not heading to Africa and have no plans to head overseas anytime soon.  Also, eating good food and drinking good beer whenever o would like; that is really strange. Oh, and there are overweight people EVERYWHERE. Coming from a country in which malnourishment is one of the biggest problems, moving back to one of the “biggest” countries in the world can be a bit of a shock.

“What is next now that you are back?”

Well Sarah and I are getting married in August, then, after our honeymoon we are moving to Austin. Sarah will be doing the whole nursing skewl thing and I will be teaching and working on my Master’s degree in Science Education. For the first bit of time there I will be substitute teaching and working at Carinos while Sarah will work as a nurse’s assistant. We are both really excited to see what the Lord has planned for us!

  

Well I think that that covers most of the FAQs. In my next blog I will include some of the lists that I have made including “You might be a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi If”, “Quotes of the Day”, “Things Spencer Has Had Stolen From Him”, etc… If you have any other questions or comments please don’t hesitate and I look forward to seeing yall soon. 

Osadandaulu Sangalalani “Don’t Worry Be Happy”

 

Back Home

Well everyone, if you didn't know already, i am back home and done with the Peace Corps. After talking with the doctors, we decided that the best decision for me was to come home and try and get my back all healed up. As much as I miss Malawi and all of my friends there, it is SO good to be home with my friends and family here - especially a beautiful girl named Sarah.
I am starting back at Carinos next Monday am am excited to get back into the groove of things here. Pretty soon I will have some more blog posts including my famous list of "You Might be a PCV in Malawi if..."
Anyhoo, thank all of you for your support and feel free to contact me anytime. I will catch u later!

Back problems and a good school term

Well everyone, I thought I would write a bit more about the action here in the big MW! School is in full swing even though the school is not close to being finished. For those who don’t know, I want to tell u a bit about my lovely school. First of all, when we were doing site announcements I was told that I would have a fully stocked lab with electricity and running water. Awesome right! WRONG… I am supposed to have those things since the date of completion for the construction is October…2007!!!!!!!!!!!!! As it stands right now, it isn’t even remotely close to being finished. And now the builder has gone bankrupt. “Well” you say “that is a relief, because now we can get a good builder who can finish the project”. My thoughts exactly… then I found out that the law says that you have to give him 90 days to earn the money before you hire a new contractor. AWESOME – that is one whole term! I now hold out no hope that I will be able to see the completed school before I leave Malawi.

School is going very well this term. Going home and getting a fresh perspective was really good and this year starting out I knew what to expect and how to manage the classes in Malawi better. I really wish I had known that teaching in Malawi is a totally different profession than in the states. I knew it would be different just not how different. I am really having a better time this term and part of that is the fact that I have figured out what really works as discipline in my classes. Since I have 100+ students sitting on the floor at any given day, if a student is talking, not taking notes, doing the exercises, etc…I tell them to get out because they obviously don’t want to be here. It works like a charm. If the whole class is acting up, I leave until they come and apologize and ask me to come back. It all helps with classroom management and making the classes a more manageable size. I would never do any of that in the States but here there is no other immediate recourse. Grades don’t matter and they really don’t care about any other recourse that I can think of.

I am in Lilongwe, the capitol city, right now because of my back. I have had a bad back since I was 18 and it has been getting worse here. Normally I ride my bike about 55 Km/ week (roughly 35 miles) but now I cannot even ride for more than 10 minutes without my back really starting to tighten up and spasm. I am getting an X-ray on Monday and going to an orthopedic surgeon on Tuesday and maybe getting an MRI soon. From there I may have to have surgery but we will see. If any Peace Corps Volunteer is out of the country for 45 days then that Volunteer is medically separated. I don’t want that, and if I have to have surgery it might be cutting it close. The timing might be strange as well because I am getting married to the most incredible woman on the planet in 6 months!! Woot woot! I love you Sarah.

I think that is all for now. Please feel free to send me any questions or comments and I will talk at yall later!

a bit o' fun

Hey friends family and whoever else might be around and reading,

In honor of Sarah leaving me here and the first year rapping up (September 23rd I will have been here for a full year!) I just wanted to dedicate a blog to some fun stuff and forget about the nitty-gritty for now. I am sitting at the Teacher’s Trainer’s College in Kasungu and having trouble seeing the mountain which the town is named for because of all the haze and dust in the air. When the rain is not around everyone’s favorite pastime is to burn garbage. Therefore Malawi gradually turns into what you would expect from Mecico city or LA only not as grey – just hazy. By the by, the aforementioned mountain comes from a Chichewa word. If you would like I will let you guess what this word means ….. no guesses? Well when you put the prefix ku- in front of a word that means little. –sungu comes from the noun which mean pimple or zit. Kasungu, then literally means little pimple. If you have seen the mountain then you can gather where they get the name from.
Here is a list of my favorite Malawian names – I am not kidding I know all of these people. Keep in mind that most of the time “L”s are “R”s are interchangeable. This first group is funny from the exchange of the letters and after that are just plain funny. Gradess, Gelsom, Lowlence, Mollis, Halord , Grolia, and Frolence. Then we have Esnart, Eveless, Loyder, Loveness, Goodluck, Mel Gibson, Giraffe, Rejected Stone, Obvious, Washington D.C., Whisky, Archangel, Henery and his twin brother Henury (from Ali’s class), Nashion, Diet, Gribetta, Funny, Happy, and then my student who on the same test spelled his name Alinaphy and Alinafy.
At a future date I will have a list of my favorite words that they say when the letters are mixed up (e.g. do you think Barack Obama will win this eLection?). I do want to say that I am not making fun of my friends here, I just find this amusing and thought u might want to see another aspect of the culture that we experience here.
Life has been good (aside from Sarah leaving and adjustments there) and I am really excited to come home at the end of November and see everyone before coming back for my last year!

a bit better

Hey everyone! I just wanted to throw aout a quick mesage that like all Peace Corps volunteers i have ups and downs and the last blog was me venting during one of the down periods. Life is a bit better now and things are pretty good. I will talk more next time, but i wanted to say dont worry about me (for now) hehe! luv ya!

Full of Frustrations

Hey everyone (by everyone I mean the 2 people who read this blog – so hello you 2 lovely people.)

Sorry it has been so long, but I haven’t been very motivated to do a blog… for that matter I haven’t been very motivated to do much of anything. Some mornings I wake up and say “if I don’t go to school today it wont matter…same difference.” Now this isn’t true but many days it feels that way. My form 2 students just took an end of term test with a whopping average of 41%. I had one student with a 94, three with 80s and then it goes straigt to 64. the worst paper was an 8. The thing is that the exam wasn’t even that difficult. It was Vastly easier than the test they will take to pass form 2. It is very difficult here sometimes.

One of my favorite things about teaching in the states is when the students have an epiphany experience and are able to go beyond the material. That doesn’t happen here at all because my students (who are great people by the way) have so much trouble with the language very few of them have a chance to understand something as complicated as chemistry or physics.

Dr. Erfan – part of the amazing medical staff we have in country – told me that I am exhibiting some depression symptoms. He said that a big part of my frustration here is my expectations. I thought that I came with some high but reasonable expectations, but I am realizing that they were too high. Dr. Erfan told me that I need to adjust my expectations about my time here and then like where they are at. I am working at that but it is not easy.

I don’t want it to sound like everything is negative here. I am really excited about a blood drive that I am starting in my village. I am also taking 15 students to a workshop for the blood drive in a nearby town. It should be a lot of fun.

Either way, I am glad that the term is over and I get to travel around Malawi for a bit again with my good friends and the love of my life. It will be a good break although I am bummed that Sarah will be leaving at the end of August. I have loved having her here as we get to know each other better and I have to constantly pay her money to act like she is really in love with me. It seems like a great investment.

Well, I don’t have much time for much more, but I wanted to throw out an update for anyone who is interested. Please keep me in mind and pray for me if u are the praying kind of person. Please keep in touch, whether by phone, letter or electricity. (for the first two look at previous blogs and for the latter mrmartinteacherman@hotmail.com or facebook me). I will be in Lubbock almost the entire month of December and would love to see anyone who is around. thanks yall!

Sarah and I are heading to visit an AIDS clinic close by to see what it is about and about helping out so I will let u go. Tiwonana Anzanga (see u later friends!)

Malawi at last and with a phone at that

peace corpsMalawi Blog


Ladies and Gentlemen Boys and Girls: Welcome to the first installment of Spencer’s Blog in Malawi. I just wanted to update everyone a little bit, tell you some news and funny stories. So, fasten ur seatbelt, its going to be a bumpy road. Ok, maybe it won’t be that exciting, but I hope that u will enjoy it. By the way, I really want to express how much fun I am having, but how much I miss everyone. There happens to be one beautiful girl named Sarah that I happen to miss more than everyone else!
Well first off, I am writing this on my laptop at the Malawi College of Forestry in Dedza, Malawi. MACOFO is situated in the beautiful Dedza District in Central Malawi. We have a great small mountain behind the college that most of us have climbed at least once and some as many as ten. I just finished a very important period of the Peace Corps experience called Village Home Stay. I lived in a large (compared to the other villages that PCT’s stayed at) village called Kanyama for 6 weeks getting adjusted to the culture and language while at the same time getting involved in practice teaching at Makota Community Day Secondary School (C.D.S.S). It was a lot of fun and although I am glad to be getting closer to my own site, I will miss my family that I stayed with. They we a lot of fun and we always had people stopping by because the Amayi and Abambo (mother and father) Binga have 9 kids that all live close. For the first week I met another member of my family at least once a day.
I will write more about VHS later, but I also wanted to tell about my future site. I will be living in the Central Region in the Kasungu District. I cannot tell any more details than that because of Peace Corps Safety Guidelines, but you can learn all about the district online if you want ;) I will be teaching Physical Science and whatever else. Physical Science here in Malawi is a eclectic mix of Chemistry and Physics that the students are tested on in the 2nd and 4th form (Sophmore and Senior year). I am also really excited to start a garden at my house if I will be able to do that while leaving plenty of time for Bao and Draft which are the local board games.
Here are a few of the cultural observations about Malawi (aka things that I think are funny, different, or neat): Malawians are big on formalities in the sense of introductions. There are understood scripts when greeting people in this country. They are not, however, big on the formality of being on time. This I feel will probably be the most frustrating aspect for me. I have heard that you can schedule a meeting and receive acknowledgment for one time and Malawians can easily come 2-5 hours late. Apparently, if you are not the last person to arrive, you are not late!
On the whole they are friendly, patient, and all around nice people. I really felt very welcomed to the village and the country. Every time I arrive someplace new it seems I am welcomed with song and dance.
The language that I am learning, Chichewa, is a Bantu language and is a very simple language in the sense of it having a lot of consistency. It is very difficult in the sense of it having almost no similarities with English, pronunciation, and the fact that you can have one-word sentences that are close to 30 letters long. A short and easy example is Ndidzakulemberani – which means I will write a letter to you. I am really excited to get better at Chichewa and eventually to become fluent.
Ok, before I finish this blog, I want to tell a funny story about the language experience. Malawians are very shy about bodily functions and parts as well as sex. If you mention certain awkward anatomy in public than people will think there is something wrong with you. So, with that background, let me tell you a brief story. I was walking to one of my brother’s houses to take a picture of his family. Vitaliano and I were walking in the road and I looked up at a beautiful cloud formation and said “Ndimakonda Mitumbo!” he quickly corrected me and said “Ayi, Ndimakonda Mitambo” (no I like clouds/sky). I didn’t think too much about it until later that night when I realized that Mitumbo means anuses. So if u didn't catch that, I told my Malawian brother that I like anuses instead of the sky. Oops!!! Anyway, I thought I would share that with you. I will be getting a cell phone pretty soon and would LOVE to receive phone calls from everyone. Also, please continue to send letters and packages. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to receive things from the states! Much love, and I hope to hear from many of you soon.

p.s. i have a phone which u can call or text. it is not too expensive using an internet program like JaJa (sp?) if u do please remember the time difference: here it is 0112659118490. I hope to talk to u soon!

the time aproacheth...

Well two weeks from today will end my current routine of life. I will finish up at FUMC in my very important and life changing job as a recreation/fellowship assistant. This job entails sitting a desk and doing whatever I want until someone, somewhere needs me which might happen once a day. It is at this illustrious job that I now sit addressing all of you fine people.

Two days after I finish up at FUMC I will no longer work at Carinos either. Although I don’t like it, it seems as if complaining about that job is a job description to work there – I am continually guilty of it. Although I have enjoyed working there for the last year, I cannot say that I will be sorry to see it go. I will miss my coworkers most of all but the fact that I will no longer have to sort dirty silverware of people I have never met and may not care too gets close to making up for it.

After completing my employment tour of duty, I plan on taking a brief road trip to East and Central Texas to say adios to friends and family. After that I will be heading to California to visit a good friend of the female persuasion that I happen to like quite a bit. (if you don’t know, then I have been trying to avoid something like this since I knew that I was heading to the Peace Corps, so I am very angry at two girls named Sarah – and yes I meant to say two… long story.)

Just to kind of give everyone a clue of what my time will look like in Malawi I thought I would talk a little bit about what my schedule will look like. I will arrive in Malawi on Sept. 27^th after quite a bit of flying. After that, I will begin my Pre-service Training. That entails about 12 weeks of intensive language and cultural training during which I will be staying with a village family. We will have class from mon-sat. and have very little free time. I will have no phone or internet access for my first 3 months, so PLEASE WRITE ME!!! After a few weeks I will also begin a kind of teaching internship in a local school. After the 12 weeks are finished I will be placed at a site where I will stay for the next two years. There I will teach physical science and some other subjects to high school students.

If any one feels the need to send me a care package (hint, hint), I would love it!!! If you would like any ideas, I have a couple. Candy is always good. Cereal, books, parmesan cheese in any form, pictures, letters, burned DVDs and CDs (i will have my laptop and occasional electricity), and other little comfort items will be great. Either way I am looking forward to this adventure as well as sharing it with all of my friends and family. Tiwonana Posachedwa (see you soon!)

A couple of goals and expectations

This is the Flag of Malawi

Moni (hello) - i have been practicing my survival Chichewa which is what i will be speaking.

So I wanted to let everyone know what some of my goals are going to be while in Malawi.
Daily Goals:
- read
- practice the harmonica
- exercise
- practice the language
- write in my journal
- write letters
- love people

So those are a few of the things that i would like to do every day and maybe get a schedule down. A couple of problems present themself. 1) I cant play the harmonica - just purchased one. 2) I will prolly not have electricity so reading becomes difficult after dark. 3) I do very poorly when it comes to doing something every day (see: exercise) 4) there is no formula for love. All things considered I hope to meet these goals as often as possible.

A few of the expectations i have involve the time i have spent in developing nations (Mexico and Morocco), people that i have talked too, and things that i have read . I have never before been surrounded by as much poverty as i will be in Africa and i expect it to be very eye opening. I expect to miss my friends and family. I expect to be discouraged and encouraged by my experiences. I expect to become very good at squatting over a hole to take care of business. I expect to have a great time. I expect to get sick. I expect to not have much flavor in most of my food. I expect to become a part of the culture. I expect to make lifelong friends. I expect to see a lot of death. I expect to see a lot of life. Finally, I expect to learn to take a shower out of a bucket and enjoy it.

I will have no internet or phone access for my first two months in Malawi and plan on writing as much as possible as that will be my only form of communication stateside. Please write me as often as you can. My addie for the first 2-3months will be as follows:

Spencer Martin, PCT
Peace Corps
P.O. Box 208
Lilongwe, Malawi

Every blog I read mentions how much Volunteers enjoy receiving letters from home and how it makes the transition much easier. I will love u forever and ever if u write me!!!! Please label letters "air mail" and "par avion" Also feel free to send me protein (like beef jerky, nuts, bars etc), dried fruit, tasty healthy snacks, tasty unhealthy snacks, and things that i could use in a developing nation and to teach.

I would like to say thank you to all my friends and family for their love and support. If anyone has any questions let me know. You can find me on Facebook and Myspace or just leave one here.

By way of conclusion, let me end with some of the most important phrases in Chichewa: Chimbudzi chili kuti? (where is the toilet) and Ndili gwa ngati mwala (I am strong like a rock)

Much love,

Spencer

Preparations

So I have about a month until i head to Philly for staging and then 3 days after that I head straight to the Sub-Sahara. For those of you who don't know, the Sub-Sahara is that which is below the Sahara...in Africa...the continent. I am going as a Peace Corps Trainee and will after about 10 weeks be sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer for the next two years after that.

I applied for the PC last November and have been excited about it ever since. I am going as an educator and will be teaching physical science to a rural high school in the country of Malawi, Africa. Malawi has no idea what is about to hit it. hehehehe I have been reading and talking to people and so excited about the time that I will spend there. I had a random Malawian guy who sent me a message on Facebook asking if I expected the Hollywood version of Africa and that I should not because of the poverty and the mosquitoes and such. I wanted to respond and say, "now when u say Hollywood version, do you mean Blood Diamond or Hotel Rwanda?" but i didn't because i have such great control over my mouth and what comes out of it.

There are many things i am looking forward to including scuba diving, safari, and the world cup in South Africa in 2010. I am not really nervous about anything except the teaching with little or no materials. Malawi seems like a great place with great people and I am very excited to experience and be changed by the experience. I told a friend today that although i am not sure that i like it about myself, I feel more excited about the adventure then the idealism or opportunity for philanthropy. I do want to help out in the world, but i have a feeling that i will be changed much more than i will instigate anything or anyone else to change. The end...for now....