My Peace Corps Family

I’ve spent the last two weeks out of site and I’m completely ready to go back to site now and try some more. I’ve really enjoyed the time I’ve spent away and it has given me the opportunity to realize at least one thing; Peace Corps Malawi really has become like a family to me. I climbed Mt. Mulanje with some friends from my Environment group and it really showed me how I truly relate to them like family.
The way they would tease me and I knew it was out of love; the way I would snore causing them to lose sleep and they would still let me join the cuddle party; And how they would do things that I found annoying but I let it pass cause I know that they have other great qualities. Maybe due to my increase patience I treat them better than I treated my own brother and sister who’ve annoyed me in the past.
One great example is a certain little “joke” that some of my fellow environment volunteers are “playing” on me. When I was at camp Sky I spent the night in the room of another volunteer and from that came a short quip that I am gay. Now it is one thing to just to say. “ Sam is gay, ha ha ha!” But it is another when you go all out and perpetuate this rumor to the point of where people are asking me after several degrees of separation if I am gay! Even more so when I know these guys are doing it on a continual basis. But I suppose that I don’t get pissed because I just shake my head, call the creator of this rumor a Stupid Asshole and know that he isn’t truly being malicious and just wants laughs. It is like one of those obnoxious family jokes that you are the butt of and everybody likes except you, but you kind of smirk every once in a while and you don’t fight too much cause your family loves you anyway.
They are like my family in another way, I don’t get to pick them, I am stuck with them, and I don’t have to like them but I do have to love them. Oh Peace Corps, what a funny institution you are.
I'll blog about Mt. Mulanje later. Love you guys!

Utopia;A good place that is no place

Dear Friends and Family,I have just been afflicted by one of the regular, yet temporary, electrical power failures in Malawi. Of course, I had to feel secure in my place in the universe and I neglected to save my thoughtful blog post. The following will be some semblance of what I had written before. I am at the Kasungu Teacher’s Training College to attend a Peace Corps sponsored event called Camp Sky. Camp Sky allows Peace Corps Volunteers to select a student or two from their local secondary school to participate in a variety of educational and extracurricular courses to be a part of a unique intellectual environment. They take classes in a diverse array of subjects such as, solar engineering, theater, dichotomous plants, health, and mud stove construction (my group) amongst others. Most these youths have never done much travelling but now they have earned the opportunity to go to another part of the country for two weeks and even a field trip to the capital. They are going to see the parliament building and the World Bank offices, but I assume like last year their favorite stop will be the airport to eat lunch. Along with the privilege of travel, they are getting to socialize with their peers from around the country. Different tribes, different locals, and (much to their pubescent enjoyment) a mixed gender crowd has all come together for them to learn from. The level of intellectual activity I’ve seen amongst these Malawians is refreshing and inspiring. I live in an area where I am one of the few literate people; I can write and read A-Z. This is an accomplishment that I never thought much of until I moved to a community where few people have that skill. This atmosphere fools me into believing that I am the only person who has ever been to school. These kids shocked me back to reality with their articulate answers to our questions about the environmental benefits of mud stoves. They used a foreign language to eloquently explain to four disorganized Peace Corps Volunteers all about the ills of deforestation. I felt so thankful to know that there are people, Malawians, who are thinking, learning, and want to make changes to their own country. The youth truly are the future and I’m more determined than ever to go back to my village and work with them. This enthusiasm my quickly fade when I return to the reality of my own village where the kids are illiterate, rambunctious, primary student, but I’ll try to roll with it right now. On a different subject, I went to see Lake Malawi for my first time. It was a nice relaxing break from life at site. I went to the house of these Filipino VSO volunteers who treated me very nicely and got to walk their dog. I was feeling very fed up with things and very frustrated, wondering if I could really carry on with life out there in the village and then I visited a slice of the comfortable, decadent, secure world that America epitomizes. There is a luxurious hotel chain in Malawi called Sun Bird. I went to their Livingstonia Beach branch at Senga Bay to get a beer. As I sat at the bar and thought, “Ah, this seems nice and civilized,” I glanced over at the television –void of all sanity in the known universe- and questioned myself. There was a “news” program on called “The Political Man”. The title leads me to believe that there is some form of hominid more evolved than Homo Sapiens like myself, Homo Politicus? But the program was the very antithesis of humanity as I know it. Humanity is rational, tries to be objective, praises cognitive effort, but what I viewed lacked all of these characteristics. Sensational sheep herding is more what I observed. Blinding graphics combined with a man that would have been perfect calling out every choreographed move of a professional wrestling match attempting to sound serious about the “big” events of world. The horror of remembering what America and much of the world is being spoon fed on a daily basis . . . I was hit by a sudden sense of shock, like cold water being tossed in your face when dozing bringing you to a terrified state of wide eyed alertness and panic. I turned to my fellow comrade in arms and said that I’ll never go back. There are so many strange sicknesses of the mind that are indulged in the USA and they make my skin crawl. But there are also many sicknesses of both the intellect and body that plague people here. I suppose nowhere is perfect.