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How many people in high school can say I've been to the other side of the planet, literally.
I've been running the Malawi Immersion Seminar to rural Malawi for 10 years now.
We've been taking college students - we've got our 10th trip with college students this year
and this year was the first year of the high school program for the Malawi Immersion Seminar.
I'm actually from Webster. I go to McQuad Jesuit High School and I'm going to be a senior.
You know when the idea was proposed to extend our college program to high school students it was a no brainer.
Especially a study abroad aspect.
Then we're taking that model and putting them in a whole other country
on top of it and so its about pushing them out of their comfort zone.
And that's going to happen in college, so why not start adjusting a little earlier?
The Malawi Immersion Seminar starts with language training
and the reality is the students aren't going to learn a lot of the language.
The idea behind it is that when they get to their homestay families,
when they live in the community with the Malawian family, to be able to say 'hello'
to be able to introduce themselves and say their names.
The big part for those of us who lead the program is that we want to give them just enough
that when they try to go speak the language they screw up.
Because when they screw up and their homestay family starts laughing at them that's where rapport is built.
By like the second day the children kind of reached out to us.
Next thing you know we were talking more about dinner.
He was telling us he liked Chris Brown and Michael Jackson.
The first day we take them to the market and show them a little bit about how the economics of Malawi works.
How the exchange and bartering and trade and economy is structured.
We have a significant section of cultural history. We go to an old mission that's also a cultural museum.
It's important for them to go see the background of the different types of groups we're living with.
The Chewa, the Ngoni, the Yao.
And then we go to the rural homestay
and they stay in a village that's about 2 hours from the capital and a 2 hour walk down into the Rift Valley.
They live with homestay families. These are folks I've worked with for over a decade.
I started as a Peace Corp volunteer there in 2000.
And lived for 2 years and got to know them quite well and these are folks who invite us back every year.
The unique part about the Malawi Immersion Seminar for high school students
is that it gives them access to a research opportunity. Particularly in anthropology, which is very very rare
for high school students to have access to an anthropology class and to learn anthropology methods.
We had some interesting projects this year - students who looked at theatre in Malawi, the role of myth in theatre.
We had a student this year who actually documented and analyzed
all of the - they're called pounding songs.
The women pound maize in a mortar and pestle
and while they're all in a group pounding maize they're singing songs.
It's partly to keep the beat to the pounding, its partly to entertain each other.
We had a student who documented and analyzed about 40 different songs.
My favorite part of the trip probably was going to the health clinic.
We went a couple days before we left the village
and it was nice to see all the mothers were coming down.
We could see them coming down the pathways in the morning.
They were all coming to the clinic with their children.
And they brought them all inside the clinic and we introduced ourselves
and next thing you know we're putting babies on scales, we're writing down their shots that they have,
we're trying to calm down kids, mothers are talking and they're singing songs for us.
It was just like this crazy, crazy affair that I never thought I'd be able to do.
And a big part of the program for us is not only the education about Malawi
but its discovering something about yourself.
It was an amazing experience. I met amazing people and I loved every minute of it.