Mid-Training Update

Monile Nonse! (hello all)
Well we've been in training for the last month but got a quick break in the city, so I'll give a quick update while I can.
We are still in our "homestay" part of training where we live in a village with a family and learn all of the basics of rural Malawian life. We are staying in the village of Kasina. It is a small village with no running water or electricity. Our family gets water from a boar hole about 300 meters from our house, cooks over a fire, lives in mud-walled and thatched-roofed house, and uses outdoor chimbuzi's (pit latrine). We eat a lot of Nsima, usually with boiled greens and either chicken, goat, beans, or soy pieces, but sometimes we have rice instead of sima. The food isn't very exciting for the most part, but we did try cow intestines (gross) and flying termites (not too bad) after the first rain last week. Our host mother cooks for us and takes very good care of us, but it is difficult to live with other people and sometimes feel like we're in the way, so we are very much looking forward to moving out of homestay.
We have been teaching at the local secondary school since the second week of homesty. Zeb's teaching form 1 (9th grade) english with about 70 students and I'm doing form 3 (11th) biology with only about 40 students. We teach in the mornings, and afternoons are taken up with language class. We ended up being put in the Chitumbuka language class. The bad side to this is that I had already been studying Chichewa prior to leaving the US, but the really bad part is that our homestay village speaks Chichewa. So, we go to language class to try to learn one language, then go home and try to communicate (usually unsuccessfully) with our host family in a different language. Plus, Chitumbuka has many different dialects, so different Chitumbuka teachers use different vocab and pronunciations. I like to compare it to going to Italy to learn Spanish from a Spaniard to prepare to live in Mexico. Frustrating. The upside is that it means we will be going to the north part of Malawi (we find out exactly where in 2 weeks) which is wehre there are mountains (ie cooler temps) and the lake. For us that makes it well worth all the stress.
Despite the heat and frustrations with language, I love Malawi. It is a beautiful country and the people are very nice. We hitch-hiked forthe first time last week and met some friendly locals who gave us a ride for free. We are very much looking forward to moving to our site and settling in and start teaching at our school.
I hope this finds everyone well.