Don't Hold Your Breath

For years I’ve had a recurring dream while sleeping. I’ll find myself swimming around in an ocean, maybe along a coral reef or something similar. While swimming, I suddenly consciously realize that I am easily breathing underwater. And I say to myself, “Wow, it is possible. I’m human, and I can actually breathe underwater. I’ve discovered quite a secret.”

Now, I know for a fact that I cannot breathe underwater in real life. Human lungs just don’t work like that. This dream has never meant anything to me at all; I’m not one to interpret dreams or seek meaning in them. It’s always just been a decently amusing dream to laugh about. Only as I’m writing this blog post have I remembered this dream, and, honestly, it doesn’t bear much significance.

Shortly after arriving in Nkhata Bay, I decided that I wanted to get my scuba diving certification while here. Over the last week I’ve been taking the course when weather cooperates with my free time.

I’ve never been one for extreme thrill adventures or anything of the sort. I don’t really like rides at amusement parks and I have very little interest in bungee jumping or skydiving. Before beginning my scuba course, I figured it would just be similar to a higher level of snorkeling. Something chill – not too hard, not too extreme – and a good skill to have for the rest of my life.

View from the dive center.

Well, as I’ve been diving and learning more, I’ve come to realize that it’s much more extreme than I’d planned. For one, you are breathing underwater. Humans aren’t supposed to be able to do that. We are not fish. Next, the deeper you dive, the more atmospheric pressure you find yourself under. Just ten meters underwater, a diver experiences double the atmospheric pressure we feel at the surface, meaning basically the weight of two entire atmospheres.  At twenty meters, we experience a third atmosphere of pressure, and so on.

And finally, there are so many things that can go wrong. If you hold your breath instead of breathing regularly, your lungs can explode. If you don’t equalize the pressure in your ears, your eardrum can explode. If you head up to the surface too fast, your blood can explode. Well, your blood won’t explode, but it will boil. And if you don’t properly check your equipment, you can run out of air while deep underwater.

To make matters worse, every time I tried to take off and replace my mask underwater yesterday, I for some reason decided to inhale through my nose, allowing all of Lake Malawi to flood inside me, gasping, panicking, and swimming for the surface. None of which is in any way correct.

It’s all fairly scary. It’s neither a simple activity, nor the chill skill I’d imagined I’d acquire. And it’s totally distinct from anything I’ve ever experienced.

Diving is like being a fish. It’s an entirely different world. You are swimming and breathing, simultaneously, much farther underneath the surface of the water than imaginable. Lake Malawi is home to hundreds of species of African cichlids, some of the most varied and colorful freshwater fish in the world, and found only in a few African lakes. 

So here I am, existing underwater, swimming around with these fish for 45 minutes at a time. I’m relaxed and breathing well, but sort of terrified to rinse and clear my mask, meaning that it just gets foggier and foggier – oh well.  Eventually I do indeed get up the nerve to clear it. Kristen, the American dive master, says I’m doing really well, impressively well for yesterday being my first real dive, and that I seem completely calm and relaxed underwater. Which surprises me, because often when I try something totally new, I’m not very good at it. It tends to take me time to learn things. 

The fish swim all around, schools of tiny fish, schools of larger fish, all sorts of different colors. Some swimming upside down while feeding on rocks. Most pay no attention to Kristen and I as we glide by, me concentrating on copying Kristen exactly, whether matching her pace or her depth or her positioning. Anxious as ever to do my best and to be correct, I think I might still be trying to overachieve, even while in Malawi. As with many things in my life, I just want to be able to do this right. I guess some things don’t change. Right now it’s still a bit too terrifying to ease fully into enjoying the learning process.

I’m so glad I’m trying something so new to me. So far, diving hasn’t much resembled my recurring dream of breathing underwater. But honestly, it really is incredible to find a full world beneath the surface of the water. Tomorrow I’ll head out for another dive. Hopefully I’ll be able to get past the whole mask removal without deciding to inhale the lake through my nose.

*Note: This post was written and supposed to be published on Sunday. However, when Erin and I showed up at the one place in town with Wi-Fi, we learned that their router had broken that morning. The new one that was connected was not working. This is not the first time we’ve walked the fifteen minutes to find that the Wi-Fi isn’t working, but this time they asked if we knew how to fix it. We spent the next hour and a half trying to repair their Internet connection, to no success. Fifteen minutes later, arriving at the only other place that occasionally has mediocre Wi-Fi, we learned that theirs had been shut off after it wasn’t paid on time. We left thoroughly disappointed, as we both had loads to do online, including calls to our families. Instead of being productive, we went back to Butterfly to eat away our feelings in mandazzi (the plain fried donuts sold on the street) covered in chocolate spread, oreos, and another lukewarm attempt at iced coffee.

Oh, and my second real dive yesterday went much better – I made it past the mask clears.

Butterfly

So. An update on what I’m actually doing here in Malawi.

I’m living at a place called Butterfly Space. It’s a backpacker’s lodge focused on volunteer work with the local community of Nkhata Bay. Butterfly has about fifteen different projects going on at any given time, ranging from women’s soap-making to beginner computer classes to permaculture gardening to school teaching. Volunteers must commit to staying for at least a month, and can then either help with existing projects or can initiate their own projects within the community.

I’ve been here now for a week and a half, and I’ll stay for a month, total.

So far I’ve helped out with various initiatives. I’ve worked at the nursery school, and with a group of HIV positive adults, and with an after-school youth club. Last Monday, I worked with the disabled group, a group of mentally and physically disabled individuals from around the area that meets weekly at Butterfly. *Apologies in advance if something I say here is not politically correct – I have no experience working with the people involved in our group, and, therefore, am unsure about the best terms to describe the project.* The group spends time eating a meal, caring for one another, doing life skills activities, and creating craft projects with students from the small primary school run on-site by Butterfly. I’ve learned that it is extremely difficult to have a disability in Malawi, especially a mental disability; in Tonga, the local language, there is no word for “disability,” rather the participants in our group are simply referred to as “crazy” or “unnatural.” These individuals are often treated very poorly, as there is very little cultural awareness or acceptance of disabilities. This weekly group at Butterfly is an opportunity to interact with other people and to be treated as humans. I don’t want to go into specific details and events, but it was both eye opening and difficult working with this group.

Starting up the truck.

On Wednesday, seven of us climbed into the back of a pick-up truck and drove off to pick up 150 baby trees. For the next hour, all seven of us rode amongst the 150 trees on our way to a public primary school. There we worked alongside students to plant the trees, which will prevent soil erosion while providing healthy snacks for the students. Then we climbed back into the truck and stopped at two more schools to plant trees. However, neither of those schools was ready for planting, so we simply dropped off the trees. It was an enjoyable day. The views were stunning; we passed rubber plantations, drove through rolling hills, and bounced down the uneven and colorful roads of Malawi. Despite layers of sunscreen, I turned very solidly pink. Oh, and the truck we were riding in was 28 years old, so it didn’t start on it’s own. After every stop, we all lined up along the back of the truck and began to run, pushing the truck until the engine caught.

The area, and Lake Malawi, is gorgeous. It’s the rainy season, so everything is crazy hot and humid, but so very green. There are geckos everywhere. And dogs everywhere, and y’all know how much I like pets. I’m not going to say that things look like the Caribbean, because they don’t, but still. Stunning sunsets every night. All of the local fishermen on the lake go out each day in wooden dugout canoes. The women in town wear bright, beautiful, African prints. It’s all quite picturesque.

My dorm.

Butterfly is nice, but it’s also definitely for a certain type of traveler. We don’t have internet right now (which means that the on-site public computer center isn’t currently operating.) Meals at our restaurant can take up to two hours to arrive, once ordered. I stay in a six-person dorm room, which, thankfully, has only been completely full one night that I’ve been here. The loos (I’ve been hanging out with so many Brits) are compost toilets and are open-air, as are the showers. There are ants absolutely everywhere. And mosquitoes – I’m trying to remember to take my malaria pills.

The other volunteers here are great. They’re mostly European, something I’ve found especially since coming to Africa. It’s cool not being around Americans. Like really refreshing.

We tried to make iced coffee this past week, by ordering a pot of coffee from the kitchen, asking them to put it into the freezer, and then mixing it with milk. Unfortunately, Butterfly does not have any ice. Or a refrigerator – just a freezer. This meant that our first cup of iced coffee was lukewarm coffee. The second cup was colder coffee. And by the next morning, the third cup was frozen solid. So it didn’t really work. And despite over an hour of intense brainstorming, we did not come up with a plausible way to make ourselves iced coffee.

A view of the town of Nkhata Bay.

Saturday, my English friend, Erin, and I went into Mzuzu, the city an hour from Nkhata Bay. In our shared taxi to Mzuzu, Erin and I were collectively proposed to by the man sitting next to us, very soon after he got into the taxi and realized he was sitting next to two white girls. We assured him that we were not yet ready to marry, would no longer be in Malawi to marry him later on, and also did not have any rich friends to set him up with. Once in Mzuzu, we headed straight to the western-style supermarket, where, I’m embarrassed to say, we spent almost two hours wandering up and down each and every aisle. We were so excited. Fifteen minutes were spent looking at the fruit juices.

Unfortunately, the rest of the day included lugging all of our supermarket purchases around Mzuzu.

After lunch, we headed off to find the “Swahili Market,” where we wanted to buy fabric. We asked several people on the street, all of which seemed to not really know what we were talking about, but gave us vague directions anyway. Finally we asked a young woman who immediately replied that she definitely knew where the Swahili Market was, and proceeded to lead us towards it, saying it wasn’t far away. As she led us through the middle of a slum and I noticed every Malawian around us staring at our pale skin, Erin and I looked at each other and began to wonder where we were actually heading. I whispered to her, “Are we about to get mugged . . . ?” On high-alert (in case we were about to get mugged, I wanted to be prepared and not be caught by surprise. Although I’m not sure quite what it would have meant to be prepared in that situation,) I decided that if we didn’t see the market in the next couple minutes, we’d thank the girl and quickly distance ourselves.

Well. Less than a minute later I glimpsed fabric in the distance. We spent the next few hours walking around the market, looking at thousands and thousands of fabrics. At one point I left our shopping bag of fruit juice (four different flavors!) at a stall without realizing it, but fortunately the vendor flagged us down half an hour later. That juice would have been a huge loss. Our eyes swimming with bright African prints, we settled on some fabrics as the market began to shut down. Upon leaving, a young man selling cassava said “Mzungu, mzungu, buy some cassava. Buy some cassava, not for you, it’s for me.” My favorite line of the day.

I’m having fun here. It’s much more like a vacation than the other volunteering I’ve done this year, which is an interesting change of pace. The stars over the lake at night are gorgeous, always complete with the Milky Way. I paddleboard and swim on the lake, and have just begun a scuba diving certification course. I’m getting both pinker and tanner. I’ll keep y’all posted on my volunteer work with the various projects in the next few weeks.

It's a Big Lake

Shortly before coming to Malawi, I heard a story. I think it went something like this. A family took a boat out on Lake Malawi one evening for drinks, along with some friends in other boats. The elderly parents were visiting and had come along for the boat ride. After the sun went down, everyone started their engines and turned back towards shore. This particular family was the last to get going. When they started their engine, they found they’d run out of gas. They had no oars. And no one was left in sight. They spent seven days floating on the lake. They ate raw fish and everyone lost loads of weight. Seven days. It’s a big lake.

When I heard this story, I laughed it off a bit, and then realized how serious it would be to be stranded on the lake for seven days.

Last weekend, the local water-sports shop in Nkhata Bay had a fishing trip planned. Their new American dive master is trying to get the place more organized with lots of regular outings. A couple other volunteers and I found out about the trip a few hours before it was supposed to take place, and the American talked us into joining. At the appointed time of departure, we showed at the dive shop. However, the boat captain was nowhere to be found. He had been sent out for bait and fishing gear and had since disappeared. The dive shop staff went all over looking for him, and still could not find him. We decided to go for a little cruise and cliff-jumping instead.

The boat driver assured us that we definitely had enough gas to get to the cliff and back, although the tank was low. So we set off.

Shortly before we arrived at the cliff, the boat stopped abruptly. All ten of us sort of looked around at each other. The boat driver quickly switched gas canisters and announced that we had enough petrol remaining to get us to the rock where we’d be jumping. We didn't discuss what would happen beyond that point.

We arrived, jumped off the boat and into the water, and began swimming and cliff jumping. It was nice. The driver also jumped off the boat and swam to shore, borrowing a dugout canoe and paddling off to a village in search of gas.

After about 45 minutes in the water, we were tired and ready to go. We all climbed back onto the boat. We sat around. Waiting. The sun was setting and it was getting dark. No one had towels or clothes or mosquito repellent. The only items on the boat were a crate of beer and a first aid kit. There was no sign of the return of our driver. We waited. We laughed off the situation. We started making plans for our course of action if the driver simply did not return.

I thought about those seven days.

After a few hours, our boat driver appeared in the distance. Precariously balanced on top of the canoe was a new canister of petrol.

That was my first boat outing on Lake Malawi.

The Supposed Easy Bus Ride

1. The bus I was supposed to be on doesn't actually exist.

2. Five and a half hours after arriving at the bus station, the bus showed up.

3. My backpack was locked under the bus, the key to those storage compartments left behind in Lilongwe. 

4. There was a large stack of cash in my backpack. 

I was carrying $530 in cash, alone, on a five-hour bus ride, to a city still an hour from my final destination. And that $530 was all in two dollar bills, the largest bills of the currency. So, literally, quite a bit of cash. Hundreds of bills stacked together in a pretty huge wad. 

That was Malawi for me yesterday. I headed north from Lilongwe, the capital city, to Nkhata Bay, a beautiful town on Lake Malawi. I was forewarned that the ATMs in Nkhata Bay work even less well than those in Cofradía, so carrying all my cash was recommended. The ATMs here only allow withdrawals of 40,000 Kwacha at a time, or about $90. This means that over the course of 24 hours, I visited five ATMs, two of which worked, and inserted various credit, debit, and ATM cards into these machines countless times. Hurray, let's hope it ends up worth it. 

Yesterday morning I arrived at the bus office. My intention was to book a ticket on the AXA Executive bus, wait an hour, board the bus, and five hours later be in Mzuzu, just a minibus ride from Nkhata Bay. This route had been highly recommended by many people as the best way to travel to Nkhata Bay. I figured it would be way manageable. 

When I asked to purchase my ticket, I was told that the Executive bus no longer runs from Lilongwe to Mzuzu. Instead I'd have to ride the Deluxe Coach, which was completely fine by me. I was, however, thrown off by the fact that the bus everyone had explicitly told me to take seemed to not exist. 

Anyway, noon arrived, the time my alternative to the Executive was supposed to depart. The bus, however, had not arrived. I wasn't too worried. By 1:15pm a guy near me told me that he had inquired about the bus. Apparently, it had broken down en route to Lilongwe. A new bus was being sent to us, and it would arrive at 2:30pm. The bus showed at 3:45pm, and I have to admit, I was beyond thrilled to see it. 

After carefully placing my enormous backpack in the luggage compartment under the bus, I climbed aboard and found a seat. I was the only white person on the bus. I said to myself, "Okay, I can work with this. I'll just get to Mzuzu a bit later than planned and then take a taxi to Nkhata Bay."

45 minutes into our ride, our bus stopped on the side of the road. Everyone started shouting as the bus turned around. Unfortunately, I could not understand a thing anyone was saying, and I'm inclined to believe that they were not speaking English. Well, as explained to me by my new bus friends, the driver had realized that the keys to unlock the luggage compartments under the bus had been left behind in Lilongwe. I couldn't help but burst out laughing.

After some deliberation, the bus decided to proceed to Mzuzu. I have a feeling not many people had luggage under the bus. 

So. There I was. On a bus in Malawi. I have to say, Malawi is stunningly gorgeous and green. I am so thrilled at this beauty I could cry. But the thing is, I had no idea when I'd get to Mzuzu. I'd found out that I wouldn't be able to get my backpack until morning, after another bus arrived in Mzuzu with the luggage keys. Which meant spending the night in Mzuzu, the town, it turns out, in which a high school math teacher of mine was born. Go figure. So, using my new friend's phone, I made arrangements for the night.

When we finally arrived in Mzuzu at 9:45pm, the driver asked me on which side of the bus my pack was locked. I told him the left side, and he announced that that side was unlocked. Once again, I started laughing. I got off the bus, found the taxi driver I had called to take me to a hostel in Mzuzu, and grabbed my pack. Pack in tow, we set off for Nkhata Bay.

I arrived in Nkhata Bay in the pouring rain, with the power out. 

Seeds, Space, Algebra

On Tuesday, I told the school that Friday would be my last day volunteering with them. I really do enjoy working with these kids, but I know that I want to be doing something different than teaching right now. Also, the whole lack of role or purpose at school has been a bit disheartening.

When I told the kids I’d be leaving at the end of the week, they looked devastated and tears were shed. This is now the second goodbye in three months that I’ve had to say to students. In Honduras I had to grit my teeth against my shaking voice, hold back flooding tears, and try with all my might to avoid bawling as I told my kids of my impending departure. Here, three weeks of teaching, versus four months, was not the same, but emotional nonetheless. Unlike in Honduras, the thing about me leaving here is that I know the kids likely won’t ever have another foreign or white teacher in their lives. I’m completely leaving them alone – there’s no one to step into my place. 

I’ve spent the week teaching Class Six algebra, a topic I’m positive I have no idea how to teach. The hardest part is that I don’t have a sense of what math the kids already have to back up the new knowledge. A few days ago I was surprised to learn that the kids never learned how to use negative numbers. Though I am very glad I had a genuinely-certified teacher at their age, I think I’ve actually succeeded okay in teaching them basic algebra this past week.

During science class on Thursday, Class Six announced to me that they were supposed to begin a new unit – the solar system. After checking a textbook, I set beans and maize to soak for an experiment the next day about seed parts, to wrap up our plant unit, and commenced to teaching about the solar system. I quickly realized that the class had little knowledge of the solar system. They had not heard of gravity, and, hence, did not understand planetary orbits or the Earth’s rotation. As soon as I realized the limits of their knowledge, I set the textbook down and began to teach them pretty much everything I know about gravity, planets, and our solar system. Let me just say, it has been years and years since I learned anything about outer space in any sort of school science class. So I pulled it all together as best I could. I answered every single one of their questions, explained things over and over again, and hoped against hope that what I was telling them was correct information. I clarified that Pluto is no longer a planet in our solar system (though, back in the day when I was taught, Pluto still was.) I answered questions about why we can’t feel the Earth spinning, can gravity be found located at the exact middle of the earth, and whether aliens have ever visited the United States. It went much better than I’d have thought.

On Friday, I took Class Six to the science lab to experiment with our soaked seeds. We were supposed to observe and inspect them, and then break them open to identify the parts inside the seed. This was something I had definitely never studied in science class, even as a child. With common sense, I’d managed okay teaching about flower pollination and fertilization. But seed parts was a topic pretty far outside my domain of science, and here I was trying to teach the kids. Now, Class Six has the most questions of any group of students that I have ever encountered, which is truly fantastic. The class period consisted of me studying a textbook in the lab, kids all around me breaking open beans and maize and examining the components, asking question after question, which I could not really answer. I tried my best and eventually let the class dissolve into flicking half maize kernels around the room.

After that science period, I planned to just quickly review in the classroom the process of seed germination. But I had forgotten the number of questions they kids would inevitably have. For literally 25 minutes, the kids asked me every possible question about flowers and seeds and plants. I answered every one, hoping I was giving at least reasonably accurate answers. Unfortunately for me, the actual science teacher came into the room at that point to take pictures of me with the kids (after watching him teach and seeing him defer questions to me, I think he was relieved the kids were asking everything of me, and not of him – he would not have been able to provide more accurate answers.) For some reason, he decided to film this impromptu Q & A session. So, if a video of Eliza trying her best to be an adequate science teacher ever surfaces on YouTube, this is the back-story. The pretend teacher in the video is me, attempting to answer questions about plants that I’m not real qualified to answer. We’ll keep this video away from future employers.

I do spend a lot of time teaching Class Six, the class to which I have become closest, but the week was full of lessons with kids of all ages. Lots of science, lots of PE, some math, and even some creative arts. Creative arts proved a bit difficult with absolutely no materials available for any form of visual art.

It’s been an interesting time at the school. I’ve seen things here that, to say the least, I didn’t see coming. These included a student in the front row of Class Seven clipping his nails throughout my lesson, a sports lunch consisting of half a loaf of white bread and a bottled soda for each kid, students wearing socks so threadbare that no bottom fabric remains, an 8-year-old standing on a two-inch-wide window ledge while washing windows six feet above the ground, students drinking yogurt out of cupped hands.

Tomorrow I’ll head back to the school to say final goodbyes to everyone. Though it was brief, this entire deep-end experience was everything from surreal to wildly entertaining to heart-melting to enormously difficult.