First of all Jesse, one of the original founders of World Camp came to stay starting Monday night with his friend Josh. They started a company called MokuZoku which is an online game site for kids, where points earned online earn trees for us to give the kids to plant in Malawi. So, they donated every tree we gave the kids this month.

We finished up with Nankhonde school today. Because of the mishap on Monday, we had to condense the curriculum in to two days instead of three. Yesterday started out like normal, but when we got there it all went downhill. While getting in the circle for morning songs, one of the students had a seizure. It frazzled a lot of the World Camp volunteers and made morning songs less enthusiastic than usual. We know that seizures are a big deal, but we were at the school for a specific reason, and once the girl had been moved from the area we needed to continue doing what we were supposed to do (not to make that sound insensitive, I was freaked out, too).

After morning songs we split up in to our groups, where Andrew and I were assigned to teach the teachers. We had been prepared for the other school that we couldn’t get to, so the number of teachers was more than we were prepared for. We get in the room with them and we had forgotten the cups for tea, so we had to run around collecting cups. The rest of the day went all right, but there ended up being about 22 teachers in our room instead of the eight we expected. We had a rough job!

One part of the teacher curriculum is having them write down anonymous questions for us to answer the next day. Questions this time ranged from “Can a person with blood type O get HIV?” to “Do boys or girls enjoy sex more?” to “Where did HIV come from?”. We answered the best we could, but a lot of the questions were questions that no one really knows. Like obviously a person with O blood type can get HIV, but who can say who enjoys sex more? Or where it originally came from?

It was definitely a challenging day. And today wasn’t much better. First of all, the girls and boys had to be split up for the empowerment discussions, so our translator Doreen had to be taken to teach the kids. So Andrew and I did not have a translator. Luckily, most of the teachers knew some English, so we were able to squeak by with that.

We planted a bunch of trees with the teachers and then ran out of things for them to do, so they kind of wandered around for a while.

One thing we’ve definitely noticed is that every kid at every school in Malawi knows “give me…” where we respond “palibe” (pah-lee-bay) which means “we don’t have any”. I’ve also learned “tionanamawa” (tee-oh-nahnah-mow-uh) which means “see you tomorrow”, but that obviously only works when I’ll be seeing them the next day!

Had a great spicy curry dinner made by our house manager, John, with all sorts of veggies and stuff, and now I’m trying to figure out what we’re making for dinner tomorrow!