Kid's Korner: Surprise Visitor from the USA!

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Kid's Korner to share some of our activities with our visitor, Flat Stanley! After being stuck at the Post Office for a few weeks because there is no home delivery of Mail, Flat Stanley visited us and our village for a few weeks.

Here he is at our house.

 

Admiring the view of Lunjika Mountain behind our house.

Checking on the Maize Crop.

Helping Tara's Grassroots Soccer Team with one of their Practices.

Attending my Grassroots Soccer Team's Graduation.

We had a lot of fun showing Flat Stanly around and even took him to the market to get him his very own Chitenje clothing.

Next time on Kid's Korner:

Back to your regularly schedualed programming:

If you don't have electricity, how do you cook?

21 Hours

21 HOURS
The number of hours Matt and I saw each other in all of February.

It has been much harder than expected to spend quality time together.  One of our biggest expectations for PC was to spend more time with each other than we would know what to do with.

Sometimes like ships in the night Lilongwe calls each of us, individually, for one duty or another.

These times pose challenges that we have never really had to face in the states.  Since September 2010, when Matt moved back to Virginia, we have not been apart more than 2 weeks at a time.

In the states we would call each other, text, or if we really needed to we could make a trip in a car to see each other.  Here, we have Whatsapp, which as been great, but phone time is limited.  At times phone signal is slow or down, there is no voice mail, and phone calls are expensive.  Round trip from Lunjika to Lilongwe is a minimum of 4 days for what should be a 5 hour one way trip.  This makes a quick visit impossible.  Nothing in Malawi is quick.

I would like to say this is the only challenge to spending quality time together.  However, during our New Year Resolution check-in we came to the conclusion that even when we were both at site we were not spending the kind of time together that we wanted or envisioned.  The days home together were filled with chores and living a village life.  We were being sure to share responsibilities, but not what was happening in our day.  Household work was shared evenly but the simple things of what we were doing or how we were feeling hardly came up in conversation.

We realized that we didn't actually know how the other one was feeling about their service.  At least not how we would have known about each other in the States.

I think we took for granted that the amount of time together does not make up for the quality of time together.  

This lesson has not only been our biggest surprise but it has been our best.

Now, every day we are at site together we set aside one hour for each other and one hour for ourselves as an individual.  Saturday is all ours...no projects, no unnecessary house work.  We just talk, be with each other, cook, and we eat!

It's not as easy as we had expected but we are starting to meet our expectation of getting to know each other even more than before!

Malawi Music Project

Donate to 2016's project https://www.youcaring.com/kids-between-7-and-16-517278

Malawi Music Project was an absolute BLAST!  I had such an amazing time reconnecting with my musical roots and was even more thrilled to share that passion with talented youth from Malawi. 

A brief back ground of Malawi Music Project: It was started in 2008 by a few volunteers and each year since it has been taken on and developed by a new group of volunteers.  Unlike GLOW  this camp is unique to Malawi and is a partner with Music Crossroads in Lilongwe.  PC Volunteers work with professional musicians and teachers to lead sessions on: song writing, traditional music, drum circles, hip hop, music fusion and music theory to name a few.  The youth were broken into bands and given a week to use these lessons to write, produce, record, and perform an original song about HIV awareness.  To help with content of their songs and personal awareness we also held HIV sessions that taught about transmission, prevention, healthy living after contracting HIV and provided an opportunity for testing and counseling.

Just Jammin'

Drum Circle

The week ended with a celebration and a battle of the bands where six newly formed bands preformed their original songs for the local community!  It was quite the show!  The energy was electric and the bands shared not only their passion and talents but how HIV effects them on a personal level.  They learned that they can use their talents as a voice to empower others and to educate the community on important topics.

Male Condom Demo! 

We believe in equality! Female Condom Demo! 

All of this was amazing to witness and to be apart of but the thing that will stick with me the most was the creativity that was flowing all week!  In the United States most youth are given the opportunity to practice or learn the arts in school and to be with peers on a regular basis who have the same interest.

These youth came from all over Malawi.  All of them were musicians from vocalist to violinist, however, few of them had any training at all.  Most of them are self taught and are not used to playing with other musicians.  The schedule had a lot of free time built into it and from my past experience with camps I saw this as a potential nightmare.  I imagined youth leaving the premises, drinking alcohol, and general mischief.  The youth proved me absolutely wrong and used EVERY SPARE MOMENT to make music and just jam with each other.  I had never experienced something so organic in my life.  It was like something had awoken a completely new beast within these youth and the energy in the area was so vibrant.  There was not a quiet moment but there was never a need for a quiet moment.  The air was full of joy, music, and recently tapped potential.

I expect wonderful things for these spectacular youth and feel so privileged to be apart of this experience.

 

Soo Many Friends!! 

So proud of my band "Crazy Colors" who won 2nd Place at battle of the band!