Website

www.malawichildrensvillage.com

That is all.

Audio/Video

A couple random things from life here at nyumba ya Sibale.

Faith bought the audio cassette of my favorite song here in Malawi, Gobedegobede. We then proceeded to have a dance party. This song is considerably better than the most popular song currently in Malawi, which consists of a baby repeatedly crying into a synthesizer.

The Sibales’ have a television which gets the one station available here, TV Malawi. TVM shows televangelism 90% of the time, and I never watch it. However, the other morning there was a program encouraging people to go visit a couple of random small towns in Indiana and Illinois. This, I had to watch. Who in the world is watching this and deciding that if they ever make it to America, they really need to go visit Lake Michigan. Adding to my personal amusement was the fact that they showed shots of Gurnee, IL, where my friend Sarah Ryndak is from, and Indiana University where some of my friends went to school.

By the way, the reason for me putting up a bagillion entries today, is that I'll be out of touch for the next couple weeks on a trip up to northern Malawi.

Salini Bwino

Mmm, mmm good.

A typical lunch here in Malawi, nsima and ndiwo. The nsima is the white lump of paste made from Maize. Ndiwo is anything that goes with nsima, in this case, Chambo from Lake Malawi, and pumpkin leaves. (I'll be honest, this is not one of the meals which I have learned to love.)

Cultural Diversity

Meet, Mazinda, Sahar, Tania, and Tamana, students at Gracious Private Secondary School. They moved here recently from Afghanistan with their mother and father. Their father Ayuby, works for Solace International (solaceinternational.org), an American NGO that was helping to create girls schools in Afghanistan. They moved here to get away from the obvious dangers they were facing back home. Their father is continuing to work for Solace which helps support various projects at MCV.

Solace Cyber Café

The Solace Cyber Café opened up a couple weeks ago in the MCV library. Thanks to this project, we now have a satellite dish which provides us with much faster and more reliable Internet. The project will provide Internet free of charge to the MCV administration and school, by charging for public usage.

The Café is currently being run by a pleasant Solace employee, from Kenya, named Violet.

Calculators chapter 2

So I know it’s terrible to take pictures when kids are trying to take a test, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to show our kids here using the calculators that kids at Canandaigua Academy collected. (the old blog entry: calculators) We’re definitely grateful to have them, and can always use more if anyone wants to start up another collection.

The students using the calculators in these pictures are all Form 1s. They’re names, starting with the top going down, are Mtisunge, Atupele, and Hannah.

The Invigilator

The last couple of days I’ve been just proctoring tests. This of course is rather boring, but the British English gives it an entertaining title: Invigilating. So now, in addition to being Sports Master, and Math Hero, I am The Invigilator. I think we need to start using this word more in the States. The invigilator sounds so much better than the proctor. (I’d rather be a character in an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie than a character in an Arthur Miller play.)