My Garden of Weedin' (get it?) and A Daily Schedule (if you ever wondered what I do all day -- I certainly do)

Hallo! I am now in Karonga -- the site of Malawi's intermittent earthquakes, sweating like a pig, and typing under a monkey calendar in the Karonga Museum (home of the Malawisaurus!).

I've been faithfully watering weeds for two months now. My garden is mostly useful -- some herbs, some vegetables, but then there are three four-foot green parasites.
It's kind of funny how I got my garden together. The soil in Chitimba is not very good -- it's overfarmed, and it started out sandy and thin anyway. So I thought that I would go looking for some healthy black soil, full of nutrients, to mix in with the sand in my courtyard. I took my blue plastic basin and my long-handled hoe (long-handled versus short-handled is an important distinction in Malawi; if you're Northern and you use a short-handled hoe, well, you might as well wear shorts all day long for the amount of respect you'll get) and I went to my borehole, where I thought I remembered seeing some promising-looking stuff.
There were two women getting water and gossiping (both popular borehole activities).
"Hello!" I shouted, in Chitumbuka. "How did you wake?"
They responded with the usual reply: "I woke. Thank you. And you?"
"I also woke!" I said. "Now I am looking for some bodies to put in my garden! Can you tell me where I can get some bodies for my garden?"

I should explain here that the Chitumbuka word for soil - "mathipa" - sounds a lot like the word for bodies - "mathupi." Anyway, after some confusion, during which they probably thought this crazy white person was going to drag them by the hair to my house and inter them in the courtyard, they figured out what I was looking for and led me to a well-dug place in one of tiny remnants of jungle around the borehole. So I got a bunch of dirt (both in my basin and all over my clothes, naturally) and lugged it back to the house. I did, however, draw the line at carrying the grimy thing on my head. Standards must be met somewhere.

Then I had a brilliant idea. I am always stepping in cow or goat poo on my way to school, or in fact anytime I set foot outside my back door. Why not make my garden EVEN AWESOMER with this abundant resource? Thus I set out once again with my basin and my hoe to collect some gen-u-wine manure.

Strangely, the cows must have all been taking Immodium or something because there was no poop to be found. I scrounged around for a while in the area just north of my neighbors' house without success. (They probably thought I was scoping out their house for a robbery, because I kept darting from tree to tree, thinking I saw something promising on the ground, only to discover the inevitable anthill -- on the other hand, they're pretty used to me doing weird American things, so maybe they weren't fazed.) Then I heard the clarion call of a Malawian bovine from across the tarmac -- of course! The cows had simply moved to greener pastures.

When I got to the swampy field beside my landlord's carpentry shop I found a whole cow family -- a papa cow, a mama cow, and a baby cow. I kept my distance for a little while, but I couldn't find anything, so I inched closer. It seems wrong, as a Texas child, to admit this, but I really have no experience with cows, and they always seem kind of mean. So I crept up with my hoe, cooing,
"Who's a nice cow? You're a nice, nice cow. Now, give me your poop."
Of course, what the cow saw was a deranged muttering person with some kind of skin disease that rendered her pale creeping around her calf with some kind of sharp metal implement. And so it should not have surprised me that the mama cow bleated frantically and came charging at me, figurative guns blazing. I was two seconds away from a hoof print on my face.

I ran. I dropped the hoe and kept running until I got to the edge of the field, and when I turned back I saw two things: one, that the cow had stopped some distance away - she had come to the end of a literal as well as an emotional tether - and two, there were six men, including my landlord and my headmaster, watching me. They were greatly amused -- not only was I collecting feces for no apparent reason, but I had just run twenty yards to get away from a cow on a five-foot rope. It was not a good day for my dignity.

Nevertheless, I did eventually get enough manure to stick in my garden, and needless to say, that basin will never be used to wash dishes again. As for the weeds --

I started all my seeds in a wide plastic pot. Having a definitively pink thumb, or whatever the color-wheel opposite of green is, when I looked at the tiny plants a few weeks later, I had no idea what they were. I had not marked the portions of the pot at all, and even if I had, I would never have been able to tell an eggplant seedling from a dandelion. I tramped around my house, looking for plants similar to the ones in my pot, but I couldn't make any positive diagnosis. Therefore, when the time came to replant these little stems into the actual dirt, I played it safe. I planted all of them. And I watered them, picked bugs off them, and mulched them.

They're not ugly. In fact, one of them is providing a lovely trellis for my bean plant, which had just laughed merrily at the very idea of growing on the seatless chair I had given it. At the very least, they will be food for the worms in my compost heap. And I haven't entirely given up hope; they don't look like tomatoes, tomatillos, broccoli, eggplant, basil, or jalapenos, but they'd probably have to actually strangle me before I'd pull them up. They were a lot of work.

That's my garden. Up next: flowers!

Also, my mom suggested that I write up some idea of my daily schedule. Ergo:

5.30ish -- Wake up. Lie in bed for a while thinking about what kind of day it will be. I don't know why I bother because it's always the same kind of day: hot. When I've taken care of that, I get up, make coffee in my French press with water heated last night and kept slightly warmer than room temperature by my Thermos, and get breakfast (either instant oatmeal, or a piece of bread with peanut butter). Read in bed until school.

6.45 -- shout, "Blazes! I'm late!" This happens literally every day. Put on Pilgrim-type clothes, fill my Nalgene, take my anti-malarials, wash my face, etc etc. Walk to school (it might be more accurate to say "hike." I go down a muddy slope, through some tall grasses, across a creek full of tadpoles, and finally, along a dirt path.)

7.00 -- first class of the day. On Mondays and Wednesdays I don't teach first period, so I just bum around in the staff room pretending to do lesson plans for a while. Sometimes I actually do them. They always get done at some point during the school day - I usually have a period between classes, or I do them after all my classes. This is also when I rearrange the encyclopedias that the other librarian has passive-aggressively reordered, and when I do things like make posters titled "Pronoun Mania!".

1.00 -- School is officially over. Sometimes I leave early, sometimes late. Go home and have a snack, usually leftovers from the night before, or, if it's been a bad morning, one of my jealously hoarded Clif Bars.

2.30 -- Tuesdays and Thursdays at this time I go to school for afternoon stuff (either library or Girl Guides). Otherwise I generally sit around, either at home or at my headmaster's house. I have gone to my school's sports practices before (boys play football, girls play netball) but it's pretty boring so I don't usually do that. Also could go to the roadblock to buy some comestibles: tomatoes, eggs, soya pieces, and bread are the options. Also, at some point during the afternoon I have to do dishes from the night before and this morning (I just leave them to sit in water overnight, because it's always dark by the time I finish eating). Also have to get water from the borehole, collect firewood from under the mango tree or my neighbor's yard, sweep the house if the floors are too gross to stand, and sit in my chair for a while to justify its presence in Africa.

4.30 -- Sit on my front porch in my chair, reading and greeting the 1,000 people who pass by on their way to the borehole. It's become a bit of a ritual. I always see the same women going to get water for their and their husbands' baths, the same children sent for cooking water, the same old men going up not to the borehole but to another kind of watering hole, my neighbor's house, where they play bao and drink moonshine.

5.30 -- Start lighting a fire.

6.30 -- Achieve flame. Start cooking dinner. I have about three meals in my very cosmopolitan repertoire: curried lentils with rice, pasta with tomato sauce, and tortillas with beans (if I remembered to start soaking the beans in the morning) or soya pieces (if I didn't). Sometimes there are variations if, for example, I was too lazy to go buy tomatoes, and also if weevils count as a variation.

7.00 -- Eat romantic candlelit dinner by myself.

7.15 -- Take a bath, or if it's raining and therefore I didn't go to get water, resign myself to being smelly. Read or watch TV on my iPod, a glorious invention if there ever was one, sliced bread notwithstanding.

8.00ish -- Slime myself with insect repellent and go to sleep.

This time on the internet is probably costing a mint, so I'm signing off now. Send me emails!

There is, apparently, a reason you're not supposed to wear contacts here.

I am now in Lilongwe for a couple of days, on medical hold on account of conjunctivitis. Yay! But this gives me a LOT of time to do the stupid internet things that I do in the States, and to post on this blog.

Since my last post, a couple of us have traveled far into Malawi's southern region, to the mysterious lands of Mwanza and Blantyre. We saw a MOVIE. In a THEATER. We also saw huge vats of Carlsberg at their brewery, delicious Indian food on our plates, Jordan's site and his new house, the termite tunnels at Jordan's site in Jordan's new house, and my glasses at the bottom of his pit latrine. Yes. I dropped them down the chim. Actually, they fell off of my face, bounced off the side, and into a 12-foot hole full of poop.

Malawi is full of miracles, however, and Jordan has actually recovered them! I don't really understand how this happened (I hope it didn't involve spelunking of any kind) but soon they will be back with me, never to enter a chim again. For now, though, I am blind, since I can't put my contacts in (conjuntivitis) and my glasses are in Mwanza.... it's definitely a challenge leaping over the Azungu Traps (read: gutters full of trash) around Lilongwe. At least if I fall in, I can blame it on my vision, and not on sheer stupidity. Unless dropping my glasses in the chim in the first place counts.

So! Being in Lilongwe means I missed the northern GAD (Gender and Development) meeting last night in Mzuzu, which was a bummer. I'm excited though, that we've decided to produce a Malawian Rosie the Riveter shirt to sell at 4th of July with the aim of raising funds for various projects. Right now I think the goal will be on a weekend camp(s) for both boys and girls which will focus on gender roles in the village. I personally am brainstorming on a Take Our Daughters to Work Day situation -- assigning village girls mentors in the city and getting them lodging/food etc. for a couple of days so they can see a professional woman in her environment. Still, obviously, in the idea stage, but I think it would be a lot of fun. What we really want now is to get GAD going, so our projects will be more sustainable -- if every year, PCVs have a bank account and an email and bylaws and all that stuff - the infrastructure - then they won't have to be reinventing the wheel every time they want to do a region-wide project. Hopefully! We'll see.

My eyes hurt from looking at the computer... more later!