I’m sitting here in an Axa Bus (think Mega Bus but with a radio announcer religiously calling out soccer plays in Chichewa). We’re leaving Blantyre behind for a few days so that we can head to Lilongwe, and these next few hours are a good opportunity for me to fill you in on these last few weeks.
When I think about internships, I usually think about them as opportunities to grow and to learn from new experiences. Each day usually brings a new lesson. That’s how it was in the operating room last summer and at the lab bench the summer before. The exciting part about this internship, part of the reason why I applied, was that the chance to grow doesn’t stop when we leave the design kitchen and the Polytechnic. Each time we explore the city, we meet new people, learn to understand and appreciate a new culture, and pick up a few fragments of Chichewa. A few phrases I’ve learned:
Mwadzuka Bwanji – Good morning
Pang’ono pang’ono – Little by little
Ndili Njala – I’m hungry (my personal favorite)
Learning Chichewa’s only the tip of iceberg. With the lifestyle, the speaking styles, the approach to solving problems – there’s a lot of opportunity to reexamine my own way of thinking, comparing it to what I see around me. What do I do well? What can I do better? As I continue to adjust to life in Malawi, each new perspective, each shift from my personal normal, is a chance for introspection.
Even with all of the new ideas and different ways of thinking, sometimes, it’s the familiar that’s most surprising. A quieter style of speaking demands constant attention – a definite distinction from my own often fast, loud, and decidedly American style of speaking. And yet, this quiet style of speaking is not quite a new to me. In its own way, it reminds me of the operating room, where hushed voices combined with face masks and the din of machinery made just hearing the surgeon challenging. It’s an old experience in a new setting.
I’ve found another unexpected, wonderful piece of home here, a hemisphere away.
“Salaam”
Just being able to say that one word puts me at ease. Even as I pick up a little bit of Chichewa (pang’ono pang’ono), I’ve gotten to speak more Urdu here than I have in a long time. Whether it’s been in grocery stores, electrical shops, or at restaurants, it seems like each stop has offered me the chance to speak as if I were at home. The words roll off my tongue. The conversations shift from my asking where the bread is to our talking about good places to eat to talking about the internship.
The old and the new, the familiar and unfamiliar, are mixed together here in Blantyre. There exists an intersection between what is Malawian, Pakistani, and American. Whether it’s been finding a Malawian who speaks better Urdu than I do or a Pakistani raised to speak Chichewa, I’ve found a little bit of home in a place far, far away. Malawi has a vibrant, beautiful mixture of cultures, and I’m excited to see what these next two months will bring!
Tiwonana (See you later)