Let's Talk

I love birthdays. I love baking cakes for my loved ones, I love hunting for the perfect gift for the birthday-girl or -boy, I love silly cards that make me laugh (or sappy ones from my mom that say the sweetest things), I love the excuse to get a whole bunch of great people together in one place. So naturally, I love my own birthday.  As this most recent birthday was my big 2-5 (meaning I’ve officially been alive for a quarter of a century!), my instinct was to go into it with high hopes. These high expectations manifested themselves in my desire to “dance with a bunch of African women” (you know, tribal-style with drums and firelight) on my birthday. Previous experience, however, has taught me that spending a birthday in a new place can be a crapshoot. When you’re in a new place on your birthday, and the people you’re with don’t know you very well, things can be slightly awkward at best, and terribly disappointing at worst. And upon arriving in Malawi and doing fieldwork in several villages, I discovered that bunches of African women don’t usually break out into spontaneous dancing to celebrate the birthdays of foreign muzungu (white people) who’re just passing through the area. In fact, a good number of rural Malawians have trouble remembering the year in which they were born, much less the month or the day. And even urban Malawians, many of whom do know their actual birthdays, don’t make a big fuss about the occasion. Thus, I tempered my birthday expectations.

As it turns out, I had a lovely birthday in Malawi! We conducted surveys during the day, Alex (my research partner here) and I did some survey evaluations in the evening, and then all of us (Alex, myself, and 5 of our Malawian survey enumerators/research assistants) went out to a nice dinner in Dedza, a town in central Malawi. Top this off with a Malawian-style cheesecake (Alex’s much appreciated contribution to the birthday meal) split 7 ways, and I had myself a durn good start to my 25^th year! The real reason that this day was special was not because of what we did, but because we were together, 7 people from very different places with very different perspectives, and we used this informal dinner to talk to one another about things other than work. You see, at the time of my birthday, we’d been in the field for about a week of long days and hard work. Almost from the moment I landed in Malawi, Alex, myself, and our research had been running: we edited the survey, pre-tested it, printed 350 copies of it, and immediately headed off to the villages. Our daily conversations were generally about how to accurately measure a farmer’s maize yield or how to gauge a farmer’s level of participation in a development project, so for a group of people who had spent a bit of time working together very closely, we really knew nothing about each other.

Thus it was that at my birthday dinner, we talked. We talked about social norms, about each other’s families and loved ones, about our college days, and about witchcraft in Malawi and politics in America, among other things. We told jokes and laughed together as if that night wasn’t our first informal gathering as friends. We figured out that we all had a lot in common, despite our obvious cultural differences. And I realized that in a relatively short amount of time, I had really bonded with these people. During my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kazakhstan, it took me months and months to bond with my community in Saumalkol, mostly because of the language barrier. But here, thanks in part to Malawi’s English immersion secondary school curriculum, it was easy to bond with each other once we sat down together and dedicated some time to just talking.

Our research team L-R: Emmanuel, Meriam, Elian, Kondwani, Dziwani, Isaac; 

(me and Alex are the ones in front)

Since my birthday night, our group dynamic has shifted. We use our spare time to ask questions about each other’s culture and personal lives, we show each other photos, we laugh together and tease each other, and we help each other. My birthday was great because it was the turning point for our research team; it was the icebreaker that has helped me feel like I have a family here in Malawi. Since my arrival here, I’ve been constantly astounded at just how different this place is from anywhere I’ve ever been (more on that in a future blog), but one thing is the same: people are people all over the world, and we all long for connections with each other. For a birthday without gifts, candles, cards, or familiar faces, this one has topped the charts. 

Some more pictures of the enumerators teaching Alex and I the ways of Malawi: 

Dziwani, Elian, and Emmanuel teaching me the art of eating raw sugarcane (you have to strip off all of the husk with your teeth and then chew up-but don't swallow-the sweet fibers inside)...I really hope my dentist doesn't see this photo. 

Dziwani teaching Alex how to break open a baobab tree fruit with a big rock to get at the very strange inner parts--it's impossible to explain the texture of these fruits in your mouth, but they taste a little sour and leave an odd, almost numbing coating all over the inside of your mouth. Probably one of the strangest things I've ever eaten!

The edible innards of the baobab tree fruit (the white parts are what you suck on and what leaves the chalky residue in your mouth).