Happy St. Valentines

Our cultural experience this past week was attending a 5 hour church service in Chichewa. It was an induction service for a new minister. The first 2 or 3 hours were not too bad, with lots of music and dancing. I figured out the scripture passage from Ezekiel, so I know what the sermon was about. The last two hours rather dragged on for us. Everyone else was enthusiastic, however, about welcoming the newly induced minister. Various groups got up and danced forward with money and gifts for him, which got a little repetitive by group number 20. They even made the three Canadians dance and shower him with money (group 18, I think). So, we’ll stick with English speaking services for the foreseeable. The local accented English is hard enough to understand, but we are getting better (especially Nora). Is it worth mentioning that Malawians probably have trouble with our accent?

Our teaching continues. Nora and I rarely teach all six classes in any day, but so far we have always been able to teach one class each as a minimum. We were asked to come good and early (7:40) to school this week, but on Friday, they didn’t have classes until after 8 am. In the coming week, we will go in at 8:30, per new instructions, so we don’t wait around so much. I’ve read a book on contract bridge and now I’m in a novel by Ngaio Marsh.

The two chemistry classes (Form 3, or grade 11 and Form 1, or grade 9) reached some milestones this week. The Form 1 class is now fully conversant on the mysteries of atoms, from unit 4 of their text. They’ve now seen many examples of weighted averages so I expect half to be able to work an example on the test on Monday.

Form 3 on the other hand had their Nitrogen test this week, from the first part of unit 2. I only have one student, although up to four more could show up to class. He asks intelligent questions, but didn’t do very well in the test. As I took up the test, he told me that he wasn’t taught the previous unit, so floundered on questions related to earlier work. He also doesn’t seem to be aware of the material we know so well over in Form 1. This week I will back up and we’ll talk about unit 1 before moving on with Sulphur and Phosphorous.

I’ll mention the Form 1 math class (algebra). We are a few pages away from the end of a unit (a week of classes). I have given them a couple of quizzes and they have had some trouble. It took time for them to understand variables and constants. I think it helped when I looked up the Chichewa words: kosintha and zonse. We seem to be having a good time, with a running joke about my poor Chichewa. Although this was never a strong point in school, here I can show off with my mental arithmetic while they fumble with the calculator. After enough worked examples, they seem to absorb some of the material. Patience is a virtue, and so is being able to multiply 2 and 3. There is a sign over the headmaster’s door, “Chichiri Reformatory School” to remind me that circumstances have held these young men back from achievement.

We are getting closer to buying our own car. Well, the church is buying a truck for us. I got a permit on Tuesday that allows me to own a vehicle and we found a truck for sale. Our reliable mechanic (like Mr JLB Matekoni from the Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency) found it and decided it was in good enough shape to buy. It shouldn’t take too much time for the money to be transferred to us and after a few repairs and a reel of red tape, we should be ready to go (vroom). I’m hoping in a week and then we’ll be able to go to school and elsewhere without begging rides. The traffic isn’t really that bad compared to Eglinton Ave in Toronto, although in Blantyre they have a tendency to go clockwise around round-a-bouts. Nora says it’s something to do with the Coriolis force.

This week I had quite the time getting our personal money transferred to our shiny new bank account in Malawi. I tried doing foreign transfers on line, but this can be expensive, impossible, or both. Some of the bank transfer features don’t even recognise Malawi. And they do like to lock one out of one’s account. Not to be outdone, the TD decided the safest way to keep money in our account was to shred the power of attorney we set up. Cyrille was able to send us money anyway, and we were able to e transfer money back to him. I’ll have to move our business to a more reliable bank when we get home! The good news is that we are now millionaires in Malawi kwacha (540 to the dollar).