A Chicken Isn't Just a Chicken

Saturday was so eventful that I accomplished nothing of what I wanted to do (laundry, school work, email writing) and almost everything of what I didn’t really need to do, but would at least make for a better story. The story begins the night before, Friday night that is, when Jesse and I were walking over to our friend Ayub’s house to buy some eggs. We’ve been visiting him a lot lately since his wife is on a two month trip back to Afghanistan to visit her mother and Ayub is all alone and very lonely in the house. We had just started down his road when along he comes in his car with a fellow teacher Kyle in the front seat. They are on their way to Palm Beach (the resort where the Nighswander’s house is and where Kyle is living) for a relaxing evening on the beach. Change of plans, we are now headed to Palm Beach with Kyle and Ayub. Hopefully the chicken we are thawing for dinner will keep until tomorrow.

At Palm Beach we meet two old British men who are full of crazy tales and passionate about HAM radio. We chatted with them for a while (my side of the conversation consisted of a lot of head nodding) and learned many new things about England, my favorite being the British hand symbol which is equivalent to the American middle finger. The first two fingers are held apart and slightly curved, which originates (according to our new friend) with archers during one of the conflicts between France and England. Two fingers were all that the French soldiers could see of the British archers, thus the birth of a rude gesture. After an hour spent talking and playing pool, I’m really not sure how the British have avoided the loud reputation that Americans have been saddled with.

After a delicious meal several courses larger than our usual fare, we returned home to be met at our door by an MCV night time security guard. “Mr. Austin said that he would pick you up at 10 am tomorrow morning.” What? When did we make arrangements to meet Austin on a Saturday? Austin is the one who met me and Jesse at the airport in Lilongwe when we arrived. After about five minutes I finally remembered that Jesse had talked to Austin on Monday about maybe visiting his home and meeting his wife this weekend. Be careful in Malawi about suggesting plans. They become permanent much more easily than in the US where a cell phone call 10 minutes prior to the scheduled event is necessary to ensure that everyone actually shows up. Thankfully, this was a suggestion that we had been intending to follow up on.

Saturday morning brings school at 8 am. I don’t actually have to be there, but I go and get a little grading done and write some notes for next week’s classes. 10 am comes much sooner than 2 hours and Austin is right on time. He’s come to pick us up on a bicycle. This means that he will ride back to Namyasi and we will catch a matola. Surprisingly, despite our vehicle having a motor, we arrive at the destination at the same time.

A side note about matolas. One, when space get tight, men should stand. Women should not stand, and any sitting woman is liable to be handed a baby (this happened to me on the return trip from Namyasi). Two, do not expect your matola to have enough fuel to take you where you are going. However, if you do run out of gas, your conductor will arrange a bulk transit fair for all of his passengers on the next passing matola (our conductor paid 500 kwatcha for 14 of us on the way into Mangochi). Three, a matola is like a mother’s lap, there’s always room for one more (or 14 more).

Back to Austin. We walked through the village to Austin’s house where he lives with his wife and two boys. We were introduced and led out back to sit under a tree and visit while lunch was being prepared. One of the boys immediately brought out a carved wooden board with 4 rows of eight holes each and a pile of gumball sized seeds. Bao is the name of the game and it is incredibly popular in Malawi. So popular that I usually see a makeshift board scratched in the dirt under any large tree where people a liable to wait for any length time. Stones are usually used for the pieces, but I liked to look of the large grey seeds that Austin’s son brought out with his board. In case you are thinking – yes that game sounds familiar, it’s like Mancala right? Wrong. That’s what Jesse and I thought when our friend and fellow teacher Andrea taught us how to play, but the rules are completely different. For one, pieces are not captured by landing in empty spaces, but by landing in full spaces and game play zigzags back and forth according to a complex set of rules. I’ll try to post the rules to this blog at some point. For the mathematically inclined, the question of how to win the game in the fewest moves is and interesting one, but I think that I have to become a much more skilled player before I can answer it. Suffice to say, at age 8, Austin’s eldest son could already move the pieces faster than I could follow, finishing with a loud slap when he placed the last piece of each turn. Game after game was played for the two hours we sat there, with the neighboring children vying for a place at the board.

It seemed to be a boy’s game, so while they were playing I taught the girls how to make paper airplanes. As soon as they figured out what I was about, they raced off to who knows what rubbish pile and back with zillions of scraps of paper which appeared to be someone’s biology notes. No one really got the hang of folding a plane, but throwing them was easily understood by all and for several minutes the air was full of flying paper and squeals.

So passed the time before lunch. Soon enough we were seated at the table have a meal of rice and rooster (killed special for us) marinated in a delicious sauce. Swimming in the sauce was an organ that looked strangely familiar, but not as something I would normally eat. “What is this part?” I asked Austin before taking a bite. It was the heart. In Malawi, the way that you show a visitor he is welcome is by serving him chicken. If he is very welcome, you kill one of your own chickens, and if he is especially welcome you kill a rooster and serve him the heart to show that the rooster is genuinely his. If the rooster heart wasn’t enough to make us feel welcome, they even brought cold water from a neighbor’s refrigerator for us to mix Sobo (an orange drink).

The meal was delicious, and the only downside was that I was constantly looking at my watch creep toward 1:30. A sports game was scheduled for 2:00pm that day and as a sports patron I was obligated to be there. I knew that no one would be there on time, but still, I expressed my regrets immediately after lunch and headed back out to the road to catch a matola back to MCV.

I finally arrived back to MCV at 2:30. The opposing team was already there, but our students were, as usual, missing. Luckily, that showed up soon after I arrived and we were able to start the netball game only one hour late. My suggestion that we play the football game concurrently so as to save time politely ignored (the football game subsequently finished around 6pm). Our girls played fabulously. We just received a new teammate (she started school just this week, two weeks before finals) and she can make every basket she shoots. She’s definitely an asset to a team that can deftly pass the ball up the court, but can’t seem to make a shot once they get to the end. With the new girl’s help, we trounced the other team 21 to10. Some day here, I’ll try to post some footage of a netball game on this blog.

I left the field once the netball game was over for some much needed recovery time in the shade. I hadn’t had a chance to reapply sunscreen and was feeling thoroughly roasted. Rest was not to be had for long; there’s alawyas dinner to be made. After such a delicious chicken lunch I didn’t feel like cooking yet another chicken for dinner, so Friday’s chicken went back into the fridge. It should keep until Sunday. Night was coming and Jesse, Kyle, Ayub and I had plans to check out a local pub that night due to a rumor of the possibility of live music.

The name of the establishment was the Zithele Pano Pub (ZPP), which the owner (a very friendly woman named Vikki) explained meant “it all stays here”. This is a phrase equivalent to the English, “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”. It’s quite a good name for the bar, especially for a small town where everyone knows your business anyways. Prior to the ZPP and a few chance encountered with Malawians from Blantyre, I was under the impression that Malawian women always wore skirts. Not so, at least not for the younger ones. They all were out on the dance floor shaking their booties in tight jeans and halter tops. I was glad to see that the modern woman has reached Malawi, but felt severely underdressed in my school-marm skirt and baggy tank top. Unfortunately that night the only music to be found was a DJ playing American hip-hop and Malawian pop music, but we heard rumor that maybe next week….

So that was my Saturday. As far as the week before, my biology class is just finished up a unit on genetics and evolution this week. I think that maybe 5 out of 60 students actually understood genetics, so the last week when I was teaching evolution I changed tactics and presented it as a story. I told them the story of Darwin and the finches of the Galapagos Islands as well as the story of how the peacock grew such a large tail. It was certainly more fun to teach that way, but I’m not sure if they got much more out of it. At least they appeared to be more entertained, especially when I got to the part in the Peacock story about the females liking the males with the larger tails.

When I started the evolution unit, I wasn’t quite sure what reactions I would get from some of my very Christian students. I began by asking my class “why are there so many different types of life on Earth?” Mostly I got blank stares in answer, but one boy (a very talented gospel composer) replied “because Jesus made them that way.” Well, I don’t think it was Jesus himself, but I replied that, yes, that is the explanation from religion, but that evolution is biology’s answer to that question. So then he asked, well which one is right? Of course, the only thing I could tell him was that that was for him to decide and then I moved on with my lesson.

For such a religious seeming country, I am surprised to find such an openness and tolerance of religion. Several teachers have asked me which church I go to, and when I explain that I’m Jewish and there isn’t a church for me in Malawi, they are immediately interested to hear about what Jews believe and compare it to their own Christian or Muslim religion. Just yesterday, walking back from the netball game, a student started asking me about my beliefs. “Oh so you read the Old Testament but not the New Testament,” she replied after learning that Jews don’t believe in Jesus as a prophet. Her responses were full of curiosity without any apparent judgment. Based on her and other students’ interest in my religious views, I think a comparative religions class would be quite popular here. I think its unfortunate that the only religion class taught is Bible Knowledge.

So far, it appears that the attitude toward religion is much healthier here in Malawi than in the US, where religion is practically a taboo subject in public places. Yes, I fully support the separation between church and state; it is necessary to allow everyone to feel comfortable with their nation’s governmental institutions. However, sometimes I wonder if our hesitation to talk about beliefs and cultural differences creates more of a problem than if we did flaunt our religions. I also wonder what makes people here are more open about religious differences.

Lately I’ve been trying to increase my Chichewa vocabulary. Since I only know about 30 words, this is not difficult to improve on. Last week I wanted to know the word for one of my favorite foods here. I looked it up in the dictionary; the first entry is the word nkhuku (coo coo), a nice accurate description of a chicken. The third entry under chicken was chitsekulamuvi, the definition: “a chicken given to a divorced wife in order to reunite”. I asked several of my colleagues, “Really? A literal chicken?” Yup. Evidently, in Northern Malawi, it is the women who do the divorcing and if a husband wants to get back together he must present her with a chicken. So there’s your Chichewa word of the day: chitsekulamuvi. What with rooster hearts and make-up chickens, I get the sense that this bird has some importance here. I will have to investigate further.