Finally, an Update

I've neglected my blog for quite a while now, so I'll attempt to give a brief overview of what's been going on in our lives for the past 5 months.

December:
Just after Shane left, while still in Lilongwe, our camera was stolen. This was bad partly because it was the most valuable possession we have here, but on top of that it had pictures from Shane's trip. Fortunately I had posted some of them already, and also shane had a lot of pics on his camera, but is still sucks. It also explains the lack of recent pics.
Then we went back to Kacheche to resume teaching. As expected, the school calendar change caused students and teachers to miss school as they were planting corn and other crops.
We had a nice Christmas at home with lots of guests (other PC volunteers) stopping by as they traveled by our village. We had a fantastic Christmas dinner with an actual ham, fresh off the pig, and green bean casserole. I even bought food coloring with the intention of making and decorating actual Christmas cookies. However, after two attempt of making cookies and having them disappear before I could make the icing, I gave up.

January
January was busy, starting with our mid-service training, which we were able to bring a Malawian counterpart teacher to. It was helpful, but it was also a week of staying in a room with electricity and hot showers, and with meals (every one including meat!) prepared for us, which was welcomed.
We left training full of ideas and motivation. I finally started working with Girl Guides (which is the international branch of Girl scouts) which has been lots of fun. We also did a mud stove building demonstration at the primary school, which was well received. Mud stoves save a whole lot of firewood when cooking over fires, so the stoves save money for Malawians and trees for Malawi.

February
This was also busy with teaching. With the new school calendar each term has been shortened by 3-4 weeks. On top of that we missed school for training, planting in December, and we planned a trip to America which would cause us to miss another 3 weeks of school. So Jan and Feb were spent doing alot of teaching extra classes.
We also put a lot of work into drafting building plans and a grant proposal for a science lab at the school.

March
March was a crazy month. We wrapped up the term at school. I went down to Nkata Bay (on the lake) to celebrate Margaret's birthday. Then we went down to Lilongwe to get some office work done. And then we went to America for a little vacation!
In America, we first went to Florida to see my grandparents, which was really nice. And it turned out that my good friend RaeAnn was also on vacation in Tampa the same week, so we got to hang out on the beach together.
Then we headed up to Michigan. On the trip north we were assaulted by all of the choices of things to eat at each road stop we made. In Michigan we got to see some family. It worked out perfectly that Ashley (Zeb's sister) was home on spring break and Abby (also Zeb's sister) flew in from Honduras, so we got to all be together.
We also ate some good food, drank real wine (instead of homemade mango wine) and got some school supplies to take back. We also broke down and bought one of those fancy new netbooks, so we can do work and watch movies in the village.

After 3 weeks in the US we headed back. We had a small bit of adventure here. On the trip back our flight out of Washington DC was delayed for fog, causing us to miss our connecting flight from Ethiopia to Malawi. Unfortunately there wasn't another flight scheduled for that day. Ethiopian airlines was really helpful and put us up in a decent hotel with free meals, and we got to see a little bit of Addis Ababa. The next day we boarded our flight, and as the plane is taxiing away and preparing for takeoff, they announce, "welcome to flight 843, with service to Harare, Zimbabwe via Lusaka, Zambia." Of course, we want to go to Lilongwe, Malawi, not either of those places. We frantically wave down a flight attendant and ask if this flight also goes to Lilongwe, and she gets a worried look on her face and asks to see our ticket stubs. Our tickets do in fact say flight 843 to Lilongwe, but she tells us she is not aware of a stop there. She goes to talk to the pilots as they are getting into position on the runway. After a few minutes she returns, still looking a bit uncertain, and says that she thinks that a new flight crew will take over in Harare, and from there we will go on to Lilongwe. So we take off, stop in Lusaka, and still no mention of Lilongwe in the flight announcements. Finally, after the stop in Harare, they announce the flight as going to back to Addis Ababa via Lilongwe. Now we feel better. So we go on, we stop in Lilongwe, get off the plane. At the Lilongwe airport you have to take a bus from the plane to the airport building, so we wait for the bus and see our bags come off the plane (yay! they didn't get lost!). We wait for others to get off the plane, but nobody does. As we arrive at the building the plane begins to move back to the runway without picking anyone up either. We were the only ones to get on or off the plane in Lilongwe. So, it turned out that when we missed our flight, the next one to Lilongwe was several days later. Rather than paying to put us up for a few extra nights in Ethiopia, the airline simply swung by Lilongwe on the way back from Zimbabwe, just for us. We claim this as our ultimate hitchhiking experience.

April
We returned to a whole lot of drama in our village. I'll try to summarize it briefly. Zeb's blog will probably have a more detailed account.
So, basically, our inkhosana (who is the head chief in our area, over about 1000 people) is related to our head teacher, and does not like him because he is financially responsible and therefore has more money. He has been leading an attempt to get our head teacher fired for the last 6 months or more. We did not realize this until now. He made accusations of embezzlement of school funds, poor school management, and other things, which didn't hold up. Then while we were away, a cousin of the head teacher died and our headteacher was accused of murdering him through witchcraft. (the guy also had TB, but that didn't kill him, a curse did.) A witchdoctor was brought in and "proved" this true. After spending a few days in jail, he was transferred to another school and moved away. Fortunately, the education office recognized that he was doing a good job as headteacher and sent him to a nicer school, still as head teacher.

May
Now we're trying to put things back together with a new head teacher. Its hard not to have bad feelings toward the people who were leading the witch hunt, but most of them were just following their chief (because you don't question authority here). Also, we are realizing that you can't change deep rooted beliefs like witchcraft in a few months or even years, and its not really our job to do that anyway. So we're trying to move on and still be productive. We've been putting a lot of time into teaching once again, but that's also been difficult because school pretty much came to a stop during the witchcraft fiasco.
But things are still ok. One of our former students has started teaching at a new nursery school in the area, so we might start helping with that. (By the way, if anyone wants to send stuff to us, we could use toys for young children, ie blocks, shapes that you put in the right hole, childrens books, etc.) I'm also working with Allyssa and Margaret on a camp for girls, which I'm super excited about. Zeb has been working on plans to help out with training of the new education group.

So all in all, things have been busy, interesting, frustrating, disappointing, good, exciting, and many other things. Hopefully all of you are doing well and have had a good 5 months also.