Orientation

The first summer session volunteers arrived on Wednesday and Thursday- our girl-power team is made up of Christine, Megan, Laura, Channell, Sarah G., Paige, Sarah W., Alex, and Jess, and comes from California to Cleveland to Connecticut. We were greeted by our awesome coordinators, Katy, Ashley, Scott, and Jaren, and after some brief introductions, house-tours, and quick trips to town, were ready to get started.

We’ve gone over our curriculum, from HIV and AIDS basics to how to contract HIV, to prevention, to male and female empowerment, to deforestation and its causes and potential solutions, among other topics. We’ve practiced morning songs and games, and have gone bananas, boom chicka boom-ed, and funky chicken-ed with the best of them. On Friday we also took a trip to Chisomo, a local shelter for children, where the new volunteers helped lead some songs and then watched the coordinators demonstrate a game showing the effects of deforestation, as well as do a condom demonstration with bananas. Saturday was full of more curriculum review, and also included some exciting skits, in which two teams of volunteers competed to show off their acting prowess and which resulted in an epic showdown of a Broadway-worthy musical vs. Spanish channel-style soap opera. Stay tuned for results.

We’ve met some lively and friendly faces in Lilongwe, where we’ve promised multiple vendors that we’ll never, ever forget them (or their shops), we’ve sampled nsima and the other delicious offerings of John’s cooking, and some of us have embarked on a pretty ambitious puzzle. From Paige’s lifelong dream to have a dog named Maggie, Alex’s impressive Chichewa skills, Ashley and Sarah G’s inexplicable (yet, somehow, shared) obsessions with Dolly Parton, and Laura and Megan’s (again, strangely shared) elephant figurine collections, we’ve already started to get to know each other, and are looking forward to more to come in the next few weeks.

Until then,

Jess Hallett