A Day in the Life

Wake up around 6:15 . If the electricity is on, I boil a pot of water to cook nsima for breakfast and maybe fry an egg. Don’t forget the powdered milk and sugar for the nsima, otherwise it tastes just like the nsima I will have for lunch. If the water is on then it is an especially lucky day; I will even wash my face before I go to school.

I get to school just after 7:00am and when I arrive I must greet all of the teachers. This involves walking around the room to each teacher there and saying “Good morning, how are you?”. I like to arrive early- then the teachers get to greet me. This is easily accomplished since I live about 30 seconds away from the school.

Classes start at 7:30 am and there are nine 40 minute periods in a day. (Why did I complain about 6 periods in high school?) After the first three periods we have a 30 minute tea break and after the second three periods we have an hour lunch break.

Lunch time at 12:00. The nsima arrives at least 20 minutes into the lunch hour. Sometimes the administration arrives instead to tell us that there is no food today because (fill in excuse here). Nsima is accompanied by kidney beans and a pinch of cooked greens. If a teacher is feeling generous he or she will cook a couple eggs to supplement our meal. If a teacher is feeling especially generous they will buy (and share) some fish from the fisherman who stops by the teacher’s office everyday to advertise his catch.

Back to class at 1:00pm. I have no classes on Thursday and Friday afternoons, at least that is according to the current schedule. The schedule changes on average every two weeks as new teachers arrive. Classes are officially over at 3:00; I usually teach two to six periods a day and have the rest of the time to make lesson plans and grade homework and tests. This always takes much longer than expected since time must be allowed for aimless staring across the room. It is usually too hot to think for more than 20 minutes at a time. The temperature dictates whether I will be found planning lessons in the teachers office during the periods that I don’t teach or back at my house in the cool dark shade.

The day is not finished after nine periods of classes. Every day from 3:00-4:00 the students have an activity. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the activity is “Prep” during which they are supposed to study or receive an extra lesson. However, I often observe them “studying” while fast asleep. My prep time is spent tutoring new students who showed up in the middle of the term, having no clue about the topics we have covered so far in class. It is the end of week 8 of a term with 13 weeks and just last Thursday a new student came during the middle of my class. I guess school begins here whenever a person has the money to pay for it.

On Tuesdays the students go to various clubs and societies. I am in charge of the Math Club, which astonishingly enough is the largest club at the school. The first day we met, I asked the students why they signed up for Math Club. They told me, “because madam, we have trouble with math and want to be better”. Wow. Can you an entire American school full of students with that attitude? I had to reassess my vision of a Math Club in which we do lots of fun new problems to include some practice with their normal math classes.

Thursdays are reserved for sports. The two sports are football (soccer) and netball (a cross between basketball and ultimate frisbee). Both are played outside under the glaring sun on a crudely shorn field of grass. As the girl’s sports patron, get to stand outside and watch the girls run back and forth yelling at each other in Chichewa. I’m not sure what exactly my job is. I tried to make the girls put on shoes when they run across the grass, since who knows what is living on the ground, but they informed me that they didn’t have sports shoes and were unable to play in their school shoes.

Most days school fills my day until 4:00 when I finally return home. Then I get to decide whether I want to lay in my hammock with a Fanta or get started making dinner. One would think that getting home at 4 would leave plenty of time for other activities in the evening, but it gets dark at 6:30pm. The availability of electricity usually determines what I do in the evenings. Sometimes it’s a rush to make dinner before the power goes off.

Dinner is sometime after 4:30 but before 7:00. We have a rotation of meals: beans and rice, chicken and fried potatoes, chicken soup with rice, or beans and fried potatoes. Supplement this with occasional leafy vegetables or fresh baked bread.

After dinner and before bed is a time for sitting in the dark and deciding if I am tired enough to go to sleep. Some nights we watch saved episodes of television shows on the computer or play ‘Tanks’ or ‘Zuma’ (two especially addicting computer games). Some nights we play cards. Most nights I read. At least twice week I end up asleep in bed before 8 o’clock.

So that is a day.

Three items of note this week:

1) Jesse found a projector and screen and on Friday night showed Jurassic Park to a packed house of students who stay nearby. Most touching to me were the kids who asked, “so did those dinosaurs ever exist?” and my form four biology students who wanted to ask me about dinosaurs the next day.
2) I saw a monkey in the giant Baobab tree in the courtyard at school. He seemed completely unperturbed by the being surrounded by a couple hundred students in classrooms.
3) Jesse went to Mangochi to find candles, superglue, and money from the bank. He came back with a haircut. He likes the fact that he no longer has any hair to dry when he gets out of the shower, but I think he looks like a Qtip. I have now threatened to go get a “haircut”.