"ndaswera bwino"

the picture is Idah Savala on the road between her house and her old school (taken April 16th 2009 at 10:21).

"ndaswera bwino" is chichewa for "i've spent the day well", an accurate, if understated, description of my current mood. I got back from Misomale, Idah's village, where I've spent most of the day, a few hours ago and have been trying to digest and describe all the stuff that I saw today. One of the problems with trying to keep a daily journal is that you're forcing yourself to write about stuff you don't yet really understand. Therefore I'm going to do this is the simplest way possible, I'll start in the morning and work my way to the evening.

Ben and I arrived around 9:30 or 10, which is basically mid-morning and found Idah and her family sitting around and removing corn from the cob. This is something they'll do all day every day until the harvest is over. You'll see the entire family (and you'll really see them once I have the pictures ready) sitting around and talking with pieces or corn in their laps as they remove the kernels from the cob, one by one, and lay them on mats to dry in the sun. It's extremely monotonous, however, once you know how to do it, your hands can do the work on their own and you can put your mind to something else.

Once we got there Idah came to meet us and asked what I'd like see first. I'm sure she was happy that we were there, and I'm sure she's as excited about this as I am, but I'm also certain she was really happy to have an excuse to walk around and chat instead of doing farm work...

The first thing we did was go visit her old primary school. It's about an hour's walk from her house and that gave us a good amount of time alone with her outside of her family. Idah is as shy as she seems and this was a really good opportunity for me to get to know her and, more importantly, for her to get to know me and get used to my presence and the big black camera I keep pointing in her face (however the next time I go on a 2 hour walk at 11 o'clock in the morning under a Malawian sun, I'm wearing sunscreen). Along the way Idah talked about a lot of things: from school, which she likes; to her family situation, which is good; to her friends in village, which she doesn't have many of; to her friends at school, which she does have many of; to the differences between life in the village and life at the school, the vast majority of the students at the school are from cities around Malawi so they, for example, tend to use more than one plate per person...

When we arrived at the school it was almost completely empty. There were a few people carrying same chairs around, but basically nobody. After we'd been there for a short while, and immediately after I set up a light to get a picture of Idah in a classroom, children appeared. I do not know where they came from, though "the woodwork" is as good a guess as any, but I do know two things: 1) there were at least 30 of them and 2) they loved to scream. I'd forgotten how much I dislike large groups of children (if 'Imagine That!' means anything to you you know what I'm talking about).

We meet the school's head master, who was helping to prepare some students for their exams, and spoke to him briefly before letting Idah give us the tour of the class rooms. After this short walk around we went over to the secondary school Idah would have gone to if she hadn't gone to Providence. It's like the CDSS I saw the other day, lots of students, not a lot of teachers, little to no chance of actually getting an education...

(On the way back we bought some cooking oil which, and this is fairly common in Malawi, was given to us in a plastic bag)

I still don't quite understand what they did/do for her but Idah will often talk about her two mentors, she seems to be particularly attached to one, a teacher at the primary school Idah went to. We stopped by the primary teacher's house but she was away for some sort of teacher's retreat, however on our way to her house we did run into a group of women who wanted to have their pictures taken. They seemed really keen on me taking their picture, on reviewing the picture in the camera and making me take it again if they didn't like it, however they weren't too interested in figuring out how I could give them a copy of the portrait. I don't really understand why there was so much interest in being photographed if you didn't then want a copy of the picture.

Idah's other mentor is a businesswomen who lives a few hundred meters up the road from Idah's house and, fortunately, we were able to met and talk with her. This women and Ben spoke at length while I walked around and took pictures. My chichewa is still pretty bad so i didn't understand a word of what they said but I got the executive summary from Ben: everyone seems to think Idah is really smart and hard working and has done everything right so far and her future's so bright she has to wear shades; but this also means that a number of people, and even a few organizations, want Idah to be a symbol for the village's and the organizations' success and a role-model for other young women. I'll be curious to see what happens to this support and admiration when Idah hits her first big failure (thought it'd be awesome if Idah never failed at anything), I just hope that when she does finally not live up to someones expectations she's strong enough to shrug it off and move on.

We eventually made our way back to Idah's house at around 12:30 and, fortunately, found her mother preparing lunch. The rest of the day was spent sitting around with her family, eating nsima with vegetables and taking a few more pictures. (ndr: this paragraph would be longer if i wasn't so damn tired).

I asked Idah if I could come see her sing at church on Sunday and she agreed, so I asked her what time mass is so I'd know when to show up. Nobody in the village has a watch, so the question wasn't as simple as I'd thought it to be. Idah tried to figure it out and put it in terms I could understand, but was having trouble. Her mom finally extended an arm towards a point in the sky and reminded her that she leaves for church when the sun is that high in the sky. Idah stared at her mom's arm for a brief moment and told me to show up at 10.

this picture was published on thursday, april 16 2009. there is a full size version available. this picture was taken with a 24-70mm f/2.8 on a nikon d700. the settings when this was taken were: focal length: 70.0 mm; shutter speed: 1/250; iso: 200. this image has the following tags: malawi.