Chichewa

Monday, July 14th, 2008

Today was my first official day of orientation with the WUSC-Malawi team. I met everybody in the office: Jacob, Joyce, Lawrence, Mercy, Grace and Macdonald. They are all Malawians, however, their names are a constant reminder of the influence of British colonial rule. Their last names of course are Malawian and I have no recollection what they are off the top of my head. I’ll work on it.

The Malawian language is very difficult, mostly because the orders of the letters make no sense to me. The difference between English, French and Spanish really isn’t so bad when you start learning traditional African languages. I had my official Chichewan language lesson today, with Austin, my tutor. Man on man, I’m not sure but I am trying. I think I will be able to get the greetings down but there is no way I am going to gain fluency! So for those interested here is the basic greeting:

Muli bwanji?
Ndili bwino, kaya inu?
Ndili bwino, zikomo.
Zikomo.

This basically goes: How are you? I am fine and you? I am well thank you. Thank you.
You end all conversations with zikomo – thank you. That is a given. If you don’t greet someone then you are very rude, so basically I have to have this conversation (or one of the three versions of this – this is the general one, and there are also versions for the morning and the afternoon) with everyone I meet. Otherwise I will not be considered a kind person. It doesn’t seem that hard but try remembering how to pronounce this, listening to it in rapid speech, and not knowing which of the 3 versions to expect in the first half of the day. Their version of Hi is Moni, but it’s not used as much as the above greeting, sigh.

I also learned two other valuable language tidbits today. What we call pants (or slacks) Malawians consider to be underwear. So if I say to someone nice pants, they think I am talking about their underwear or panties! They call their slacks – trousers. I didn’t actually make that mistake today but they told me about that after I made the following mistake: Mercy handed me a menu today to order lunch. I wanted to try the local fish – chambo. I accidentally called it chamba. The difference between the o and a at the end of the word holds a big implication. Chamba means marijuana. So I ordered weed for lunch. lol. Too funny.

Besides the language lesson I met with the agriculture and sustainable livelihood sector specialist, Jacob, who is also Director of the WUSC Lilongwe office, and my bwana – boss. We went over the outline of my work expectations. He wanted my work to follow RBM – oh yes boys and girls RBM framework!! For those of you who did not do IPMP with me at Humber this past year, RBM is results based management and I know this project design method inside and out. My dreams are in RBM format (well not all of them). I was so relieved that the Malawian office wanted to use this format. You never quite know what you’re getting into with international partners in developing countries, so boy was I relieved when they started talking about objectives, activities, outputs, outcomes, impacts, beneficiaries and stakeholder meetings!! Geeky yes, but this is going to make my work so much more organized and easier to tackle – conceptually at least.

OK I am saving the biggest news for last. This is HUGE…I almost exploded when they told me. When talking to Jacob about the work plan and the livelihood recovery projects they were doing he recommended that I should work on their fishpond projects!! Yes fish fucking ponds!! And to think I almost never took this position because it was too terrestrial. Hahaha. Jacob said that after reviewing my cv and my publications he thought that I would be better suited to this area. I had no idea they were even doing aquaculture projects. So I am happy, happy. For my work plan we discussed the idea of me doing a rapid assessment of their fishpond projects and then making recommendations and holding workshops to help build capacity. He gave me a deadline of 2 weeks to come up with my objectives and activities with tasks. All this IPMP lingo and fishpond projects…my knees went weak and I began to swoon. I suppose I am in the honeymoon phase of my cross-culture experience, now I wait for the crash. I expect it will come when I am standing by the side of a pond wondering why I have to greet 10 people over and over whilst wondering why I can’t go somewhere that day for a meeting or an important email, and why its impossible for them to change a small behaviour deeply ingrained in their culture that would improve the whole situation…or maybe not. But I am trying to prepare for the eventuality in some way.

So basically I am looking forward to getting to Dedza on Friday. I assume not much will happen on the weekend but hopefully on Monday I’ll be able to get a look around the sites and see what I have to work with.

I know it has only been a few days that I’ve been here in Malawi but I have to admit that I feel really good about this placement. The WUSC Malawi office appears really supportive and organized. I hope that the other local NGO, CADECOM, will be as well.