Day 2 - Tuesday, June 10

Today was our first day of working, and by golly we worked! My day started off with a nice bowl of raisin muesli (the ROS here really spoil us by stocking our pantry with nice things). At 7:30 we met at the home of Bonnie and Ralph Marron for prayer, followed by a short Bible study at 7:45 with about a dozen of the local staff (Malawians). One elderly Malawi lady closed the study with a beautiful prayer in her native tongue. This was the same lady (I can’t remember her name—so many to remember!) who yesterday called me over and told me that I was her grandson. After learning my age, however, she revised her statement and said I was her son.

[Side note: So many of the people I meet here are like this woman—unabashedly gracious and joyful. For some reason, I don’t trust them fully, maybe because I don’t think they should trust me fully. Here I am, some rich American that is swooping in for two weeks to spend time here doing whatever, but am I really helping them? All the others here from TCBC seem to be entering in to the give-and-take of relationships much easier than I am. I hope that will change.]

Since it was a rainy morning (an oddity during the dry season, obviously), I decided to start my work indoors. One of the tasks given to me for this week was to put adhesive felt pads on all the chair legs in dining hall. The floor there is concrete, and the wooden chairs make a horrible noise when pushed in or pulled out from the tables. This makes clean-up time after dinner a terribly noisy experience, and so the felt pads are designed to save the sanity of kitchen workers, Mamas, Aunties, etc. This seemed like as good a time as any to do work on this, so over the course of about 3 ½ hours I scraped, wiped, and padded 500+ chair legs.

The others in the group were also hard at work. Nick worked outside with some of the landscapers despite the conditions. They were slashing some of the tall grass that grows all over the village—a task that I’ll be experiencing soon enough, as David (one of the ROS) wants all of us men to give it a go. Rebecca worked at making beanbags and also teaching a bit in the Standard 1 class (1^st grade). Sandy Lu worked with the classes as well as spending time mending clothes for the Mamas and their children. Fred taught two classes of English for the Junior Secondary School (JSS) girls, who come from the surrounding areas just for the day.

After lunch, Eileen (one of the ROS) invited the five of us mini-missionaries over to her home for some tea. She’s the nurse here in the village, and so I was able to ask her a little bit about the medical situation. Things seem pretty much under control here in the village. Kids, of course, have various illnesses such as pink-eye, ear infections, etc. But malaria is real too. (It kills about 3,000 children per day in Africa!) Just last week one of the children here was diagnosed with malaria. Fortunately, they have good medication here for treating it. Outside the village, things are a little bleaker. There’s a free hospital in the town next door (Mzuzu), but you need to get there first. This is not always easy to do, of course. Every 3-4 months, the Rafiki village here holds a weeklong open clinic with the help of some American physicians and nurses (although there hasn’t been one here since early this year due to lack of staffing). Eileen said that at that time, they get HUNDREDS of people per day lining up to be seen. Despite how overwhelming this sounds, I hope that I can participate in one such clinic later in my medical school career.

In the afternoon I went to the girls school to help tutor during their study halls. They were working on some 6^th and 7^th grade math, and I tried to help them figure out some of the problems that were more challenging for them. Most of them had difficulty with the same questions, which leads me to believe that either those questions were not worded in an understandable manner or that the textbook didn’t explain how to solve them very well. The rest of the questions presented no problem for them.

At 3:30, Nick and Rebecca held a mini concert in the gazebo by the children’s cottages, playing their trumpet and clarinet. All the little kids were both enthralled and perplexed. What is this new thing, and how do we respond? After a few numbers, we sang some silly songs with the kids and just had some fun in general.

At around 4:30, we joined the ROS in their weekly Bible study, followed by dinner with them at around 6:30. It was a great time of fellowship and encouragement for all of us. They repeatedly thanked us for our hard work today, but I kept feeling that they are the ones with the difficult jobs. We’re the mercenaries (as my father-in-law puts it) that come in for only brief periods, while they do this for years without much of a break. God, give them strength and joy in their work!

In case I forget to mention it elsewhere, these are the ROS here right now: David (the guy I’m staying with) is the facilities manager and pretty much keeps all the infrastructure running; his wife, Darlene, is back in the States at the moment, but is in charge of childcare for the village; Eileen—from Norway—is a nurse, part-time teacher at the JSS and general gopher girl; her husband, Paul, is one of the main teachers at the JSS, covering math and science; Deb is the other main teacher at the JSS and covers grammar and Bible (I think); Ralph is in charge of the books, which is no small job since the village employs tons of locals to be mamas, aunties, landscapers, gardeners, housekeepers, guards, etc.; his wife, Bonnie, is in charge of the education of the children of the village and teaches the Standard 1 class (the oldest children in the village at the moment); Susan is the semi-permanent mini-missionary and teaches the kindergarten class.