Today feels a little like I won the lottery: for a fleeting zenith of a moment, I am productive, effective and needed! I also made my house 10% more awesome for absolutely free.
The second of what looks to be many requests for teacher obeservations came to me from Peter Gwesere, a biology and maths teacher who is also our Sciences Head of Department. He wanted me to come and see him in action and even had a form ready for my comments - the form was from Domasi college, where he's finishing his Secondary School Teacher's Training Certificate. Then, I did four periods of 1 on 1 computer trainings with my coworkers - no one flaked out! And I even found my counterpart, Sister Chimpango, teaching the Deputy Headteacher how to use the typing program to learn the proper finger placements - with no encouragement whatsoever from me, beforehand that is! I made sure she knew I was appreciating her ingenuity and his humbleness for allowing her to teach him. At the community library (Pelino Chiwoko Memorial Reading Centre) after school, where I have been teaching computer literacy classes to a split group of 30+, I had 10 more would-be students banging down the door to get in.
It is amazing to feel needed and so capable just as a virtue of my silver spooned youth. My current projects are satisfying me because they use resources that are already here to a fuller extent; because I need no training in using it and am thsi completely comfortable acting as an expert; because the comptuer tarining is almost failproof compared to mango pit charcoal making or soapmaking; no grants or outside money are involved so the resource being utilized really is me and the benefits are obvious and coveted - so the projects keep themselves rolling.
Aside: It was aushc a strong-headed victory when I got the computer at school moved from the lair of the dictator/Head teacher to the populist Deputy head's desk. For at least 3 years had that African Development Fund-provided comptuer sat in the HT's office untouched by everyone, even the Deputy himself, before I came along. The deputy is the one who did all the typing of school exams before the computer revolution kicked in - his typing is fast, though he is still a hunt-and-pecker. Over the next few months, I'm really hoping to give the other teachers a reason to value the computer y teaching them cool things so they will unilaterally reject any power reclamation the HT might try after I'm gone. That goes doubly true if PCMW decides that I don't need to be replaced by another volunteer.
Going down to the community library for the past 3.5 weeks has also been fun ebcause I am interacting more with my former landlord, Mr. Kadzakumanja, who really has a cool hybrid of a family: Malawian in some ways and weirdly American in others. His daughter Joyce works at the United Nations in New York as a secretary and old grandpa himself lived there way past his visa allowance. Here, he has 4 diesel-powered maize mills around the area, a number of boreholes for pumping groundwater up to the surface, and a ton of cows and goats (at about $50/pop). So he has grown from a crotchety defeated political candidate to an amiable guy who is delighted to see a resurgence in attendance an interest at the library he founded as a memorial to his late wife.
That amiability is what spurred him to let me have 2 wood boards for free so I could construct a kitchen counter. As soon as I got home, I brought inside the best looking bricks leftover from a former chicken house to give the counter some height. What a relief to have another shelf and workspace! My knees will be happy to take a break from squatting, that's for sure.
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