I did my last rounds with Mr. Stima and Mshanga at the hospital, took some pictures of the hospital, had lunch, and then headed out with Father Kamela to Lilongwe.
After being dropped off in Lilongwe I was picked up by Stacia and Kristoff. They are two former Peace Corps Volunteers who had met when they both were serving in Peace Corps in Jamaica, decided to get married and do one more stint with Peace Corps in Malawi. They arrived in 1996, loved their time in Malawi so much that they decided to settle down and raise a family in Malawi. I got to know them during my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer here in Malawi when Kristoff was involved with some of the training that I had to go through. They were kind enough to allow me to stay with them for a few nights.
They now have one daughter together named Kaliwe, which in Chichewa means culture or being surrounded by people depending on how you interpret it. She is now 10 years old currently goes to the local primary school speaks completely fluent Chichewa. Kristoff supplements her education with home schooling so that she is not missing out on other aspects of her education. Kaliwe is getting a better education than most Americans could ever dream off……
Stacia and Kristoff both are experts in permaculture, which is the use of local plants and very low input farming methods. After Peace Corps, Stacia worked for the WHO cataloging all of the local available and edible plants around Malawi. What she found was surprising; many of the plants that Malawians think of as weeds and remove them to grow Maize are in fact edible and nutritious. When Malawians are told about this, many of them laugh and rely on Maize for their main source of food even though the rains can be unreliable. Malawians have such a narrow margin of failure, that even with a failed Maize harvest, they still have some food. As result, they are resistant to any changes they may leave them with less food than a bad maize harvest. Stacia and Kristoff had decided that they wanted to lead by example and now have a house surrounded by edible plants that provides them with foods for throughout the entire year. It is really cool.
Now back to being picked up by Stacia and Kristoff. After they picked me up, they were on their way to meet with the architects of Madonna’s new school for girls at the planned land site. Madonna is pulling out all of the bells and whistles for this school – it is going to be completely “green” right down the building materials they use for it, much like Oprah did for her girls school in South Africa. Everything is supposed to be bought and built locally. The architects are from New York and will be using water recycling, water harvesting (capturing and storing rain), and solar panels. Since Stacia and Kristoff were local plant and nutrition experts they were being brought in to the team to see what they could contribute to the designing of the project. Their main hope is to incorporate nutritious local plants into the landscape design. This is just the start of the project as they hadn’t even built roads into the land yet.
Not that my opinion counts, but at first I wasn’t sure what to think about Madonna dropping millions of dollars for this school. To me it almost seemed as if it was a “me too” type of project because Oprah did one in South Africa. But after hearing from the architects the project seems really open to new ideas and attempting to keep everything as local as possible.
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