'Holiday' Week = No School!

First, they call it a holiday, but it is really just a break in the middle of the term – they are not off for anything special except that they are celebrating no school for a week. If you read my last post, you know that the week didn’t start off well; Kayla and I attended our first (and hopefully only) Malawi funeral service. So, Tuesday comes and we enjoy sleeping in, though we only really sleep until 8:00 instead of 6 because the sunlight wakes us up enough so that we can’t go back to sleep. We have to walk to the TNM (that’s our cell phone service provider) office to check on the internet dongle that we had purchased the week before. We had purchased a bundle that should have lasted us 3-4 days, but it lasted 40 minutes (GRR!!). Before we tried to return it, though, we wanted to make sure that there wasn’t something wrong with the dongle and that we had purchased the bundle correctly. When we got there Tuesday, though, they couldn’t get a hold of the technicians who could verify the MBs we had used, so they told us to come back tomorrow. Not really a big deal, but did I mention the weather? It is the hot season – mid- to high 90s every day without a cloud in the sky. Not great weather for walking back & forth, up & down hills multiple times a day (though I don’t want to complain too much because I am VERY grateful that there is not a lot of humidity with the heat).

We return from our unproductive trip to TNM and go talk with Pastor Nihaka about the weekend and when/if we’ll be heading to Lilongwe. He says we’ll leave Friday and so we go to talk with the Deputy Headmaster to find out what we need to do with all the test scores for the students in Standard 6. We have to put the students in order based on their total percentage scores for all the exams, while still including each individual score on the sheet. I have always enjoyed and appreciated using Excel for tables and quick sorting of data; but I didn’t realize just how nice it was until I had to write out all the students’ information by hand. Kayla had at least already put the information into a spreadsheet on her computer, so I just had to copy the information, but it was still tedious & time consuming. Why didn’t we just print out our spreadsheet, you ask? Because we don’t have regular access to a printer and we wanted to turn it in as they asked for it. We didn’t get started on this until Wednesday afternoon because we were waiting on their Chichewa scores (that’s the only test we didn’t mark) which would enable us to put them in order based on every test score. We ended up having to do it without the Chichewa scores because we found out we’d be leaving Thursday instead of Friday and wouldn’t have time to turn it before Monday.

So, along with writing out the test scores, Kayla and I had to walk to TNM again. This time, they were able to get a hold of the technician and he confirmed that we purchased the bundle correctly and that we used the MBs. We asked if we could return the dongle and get our money back which almost went smoothly. What happens is that they’ll take the dongle from us and sell it to someone then they can give us our money back. We left the dongle with them, took the name & number of the representative who helped us as well as the supervisor who’s in charge of authorizing the resale. They told us that it would probably be sold by the end of the week and that they would call us when we could come and receive our money.

Once all that was sorted, we started to pack for our trip. I also forgot to mention an early morning phone call Wednesday from Pastor Nkosi in Lilongwe. He wanted to let us know that he was looking forward to our trip and asked if Kayla and I could prepare some presentations for the youth leaders at church on Saturday. Of course, we agreed to do that because we knew that it would be helpful and beneficial to them for us to share our resources with them. But that just added to our ‘to-do’ list for the trip.