4 March - But you are...fat!

4 March

Chitimba

0 Miles

Steph:

Last night I recruited the camp guards to show me how to play BAO. David, Samson and John were super fun. Their english was limited but good enough. David is the self proclaimed "Master" and is really good. They seemed really excited about teaching me, so while everyone else was talking and drinking at the bar with all the pretty lights and music, I hung out with these guys by the guard shack. The way they play is really impressive. It looks simple at first but the game is very strategic and requires a lot of forethought. It took me forever to count everything out for just one move but they play lightening fast and always have their next 4 moves figured out. It's crazy cool to watch. I'm not very good but I think I'm getting the hang of it. When I went to bed everyone else was already asleep.

This morning was nice. We made breakfast and the 4 of us just sat around talking about all sorts of things. Mostly about the state of africa and possible solutions to the multiple problems. That kind of stuff. It's fun to hear about Ishi and Dave's prespectives.

Eddie, the owner of the camp invited Ishi and I to go visit a project that he's been working on in the village. We drove to a school that he helped build. I think he's on to something in the way he's helping. It acutally related a lot to what we had been talking about earlier. So many organizations, charity groups and NGO's come in here and hand things out. Whether they come in a give out food, or build schools or bring in temporary volunteers, it's all handouts. This has been going on for decades (especially in Malawi) and the result is a unfinished projects and not much of a work ethic. We've seen it as we ride by. This is why all the kids yell, "give me, give me, give me!" when they see white people and why there are so many incomplete buildings and projects along the road. As soon as the foreigners finish the initial project or set up a school or give away 10 pens, they leave and it all stops. The locals don't take the initiative because more help will come. Except now that the world is in a bit of a financial crisis, less help is coming and people don't really know what to do. What Eddie is doing is small, but it's worked. Basically, when he arrived here from the Netherlands, about 8 years ago, he asked the community what they needed. The village talked it over and said that a school was very necessary. So instead of bringing in the supplies and volunteers to build this school he told them that he would find the funds but they had to do the work. He basically forced them to go out and find some designs, find the supplies, the construction material, the whole thing and then he funded it. But they did the work. They, as a community, built their own school and got it running and now they have 3 buildings with 8 classrooms teaching grades 1-8. They work very hard to keep it going because they are the ones who made it happen. The only thing Eddie does is check the receipts and go visit every once in a while to take pictures for the donators in the Netherlands and say hi to the kids (who adore him). It's brilliant. I think it's all about empowering the people and their communities, not about doing it for them.

So we went to see the school and a few teachers showed us around. It's simple. Open aired and plain. The higher grades have posters and maps on the wall. They do really need books and pens, so Ishi is going to work on getting a few donated from their passangers each trip.

We had a group of kids following us around the whole entire time. The three of us had cameras and the kids went nuts over posing and then looking at the photos. It was incredibly fun and slightly chaotic.

There's another storm coming tonight and the lake looks really cool with the black clouds rolling towards us. I'm going to play BAO with my buds again tonight. Woo!

FUN NOTE:

As we were looking at the classrooms, one of the teachers asked what I was doing in Africa. I told him that I was cycling and had come up all the way from Cape Town. He paused, looked at me, looked me up and down and said, "But you are...fat!".

No joke.

To make it even better, he put up his hands and made "grabby" gestures as he said it.

Yup.

I didn't even know what to say so I laughed and said, "yes, I am fat, but my fat legs are very strong". He looked me up and down again, shrugged and just nodded.

Ouch.

It might take a while for my self esteem to recover from that one.

Bastard.