Blood Drives and Name Games

When I return to the United States after being in Africa for a year, I will not be allowed to donate blood for some jail-sentence worthy length of time. The Blood Bank of America is worried that I may have picked up one of sub-Saharan Africa’s many parasites that travel from bloodstream to bloodstream via mosquitoes, flies, and snails. My blood is possibly contaminated. No need to bother donating (even though all blood is, of course, screened). Today I sat under Gracious Secondary Schools’ central Baobab tree listening to a guest from the Blood Bank of Malawi urge our students to donate blood and save a life. The irony of my situation was not lost on me.

This is the second such blood drive that has happened at Gracious since I began teaching in January. In a country where our major district hospital runs out of antibiotics and has a total of three doctors, I was impressed to learn that there is an organization which collects and provides blood. Usually a patient needing a blood transfusion must wait for a relative to come give them blood; however, the Blood Bank collects blood for emergency patients who cannot afford to wait for a relative. With the AIDS epidemic, it is becoming more difficult to collect safe blood. The Blood Bank has recently begun hitting up secondary schools with the hope of obtaining “cleaner” blood, the rationale being that students are less likely to participate in risky behaviors and therefore less likely to contract the dreaded HIV.

But HIV is only one of a multitude of hitchhikers possibly inhabiting the bloodstreams of those of us who live in Africa. What does the Blood Bank do about Schistosomiasis or Malaria? Two things. First they ask, “Are you sick?” If so, then no blood donation for you today. That takes care of most malaria. Second, they screen the blood for diseases, just like we do in the United States. Is this safe? The representative today seemed to think so. Nevertheless, the US won’t be taking my blood when I return.

Aside from lectures on blood donation, Gracious has also recently had visits from the police, lecturing on road safety. It felt like I was back at an assembly in elementary school with the model of the yellow school bus with flashing red lights. ‘Okay kids- which side of the road do you walk on?’ Though, other than the general swapping of left and right that comes from living in a country where cars drive on the left, there were some differences. Instead of being told to “wear your helmet” students were told “do not ride in open vehicles” (that’s the back of pickup trucks, not convertible cars). And pedestrians definitely do not have the right of way in Malawi.

In addition to attending public safety lectures, I have been spending my free time slowly expanding my Chichewa vocabulary. After ten months, my stack of word cards has grown to fill four rubber bands and in addition to paging through the dictionary for humorous cultural insights and words that I will probably never use, I am now beginning to analyze the names of my Malawian colleagues and students. When searching for the perfect name for their child, American parents search baby name books for pretty-sounding (but still conventional) syllables whose vague definitions, far removed from their root tongue, proclaim general virtues like “strength” or “purity”. Not wanting their dreams for their child to go unnoticed, Malawians give their children unmistakably literal names. Upon first arriving in Malawi, I only noticed this fact amongst those students whose parents had decided to give their child an English name such as, “Wishes, Trouble, Innocent, Danger, Witness (his last name is Mine), Blessings, and … Fraction”. But now that my Chichewa is a little better, I have been having fun dissecting the names of those around me.

Most commonly, there is ‘Thokozani. -thokoza means ‘thank’ and ‘-ni’ is the suffix which makes the verb imperative. In others words, Thokozani means “give thanks”. My favorite so far is Mutisunge, mu- means ‘you’, -ti- means ‘us’, and –sunge means “keep”. So the translation becomes “you keep us” where I assume the subject of this request is God. I recently worked out a translation of our deputy principle’s name, Kambalame, though I am debating between two possible interpretations. Kambalame quite literally means ‘Tsetse fly’; however, the word mbalame means ‘bird’ and the prefix ka- is a diminutive conjugation which makes ‘kambalame’ mean “little bird”. Three of my form four students (2 girls and 1 boy) are named Chikondi, meaning ‘love’.

I often wonder whether Chichewa conversations are often confused by the preponderance of names which have meanings which refers to objects other than the person being talked about. I then imagine what conversations in America would be like if people started giving their children such literal names… “Give Thanks said that Hope told him that Gift saw Love yesterday.”… and I think, wouldn’t that be nice.