Trouble

As some of you may recall from earlier blog entries, Malawian kids can cause some confusion by deciding to change their names from time to time. People don’t have birth certificates over here, and we certainly don’t have anything like student IDs, or a computer regulated attendance system. Students are thus free to choose their own name. Of course, in general, people give and use the name that they were given by their parents, but on occasion people will choose to change their name. For instance my student Stephano Frank, now uses the name Stephan Mandela. The lack of official records, etc. makes things confusing as to who actually changed their name, and who had their name recorded incorrectly by a teacher/administrator. The following is my favorite story of name confusion:

Mr. Kambalame came into the staff room after attendance for the Form 2s.
- “Did you know, Mabvuto’s name is not really Mabvuto?”
- “I was wondering about that, he just wrote Jabulanie on his test the other day.”
- “I just found out that his name is Jabulanie; his younger brother’s name is Mabvuto. But he was getting into so much trouble last term that he decided to change back to Jabulanie.”

At this point you’d be laughing if you spoke Chichewa; Mabvuto means trouble.

Amazingly enough, he has been behaving better this term with the new (or I guess old) name.