Rubina teaches while Benson translates

By the second class, I knew to keep quiet. The signs Rubina and I had made breaking the health lesson down to the basics proved useless; the children did not get a good grounding in English from Kande Beach's primary schools. As much as I hated leaving Rubina with all the teaching duties, there wasn't much additional benefit in a second person babbling in a foreign language at them.

To my delight, however, our young helpers David and Benson stepped up as fluid translators. Absolute ease with the various body parts, coming up with their own examples of healthy local foods to eat, and total maturity discussing sex and HIV transmission in the face of the smaller children's nervous giggles. We knew all the boys were aware they'd lost their parents due to AIDS complications, but hadn't realized the depth of their understanding.

Alice and friend washing the dishes

Supermodels

We'd been up since sunrise, walking on the beach to witness small girls washing dishes, women gathering jugs of water, while boys...were boys, playing around in the lake. Despite Malawi's status as a gentle entry to African travel, its tourism numbers are fairly low due to lack of star attractions: no serious game park, particularly high mountains, or untouched tribes. Isolated spots like Kande Beach see even fewer tourists than the rest of the country, evident in the delighted grins of children ditching their early-morning chores to follow us around.

Camp officially began at 9AM. The attendees were participants in We Are One's daily lunch program, a small-scale feeding project with food prepared by Mercy and her assistants from the village. Earlier on the beach, a girl with a curiously mannish voice begged me to send extra pens with her sister Alice that day; she was too old for the camp herself but Alice, busily washing dishes with her swollen cheeks and squirrel smile, was a regular lunch attendee.

Waiting for Camp Malawi to start

Decorating bags

The girls loved kickball!

Sixty children opened the morning with joyful songs of praise, clapping and dancing along with a couple talented soloists, easily melting the hearts of our cynical group of New York atheists, Muslims and long-lapsed Christians. The group was then divided, half the children playing a rousing game of kickball and half further splitting into rotations of small art classes.

Kickball and whiffleball were chosen in part for their absolute Americanness, but also because soccer carried cultural weight as a males-only pastime. In a single day we had no hopes of turning this stereotype on its head, and did not wish to discomfort the girls. A new game allowed everyone to participate; one of the most adorable sights of the day was the lineup of girls in long dresses ferociously kicking the ball. As the oldest, the We Are One boys served ably as pitchers and line controllers.

Meanwhile, Rubina and I led the only boring class indoors. The rest of the room was split into various arts & crafts groups using wonderful blank paper goods and Crayola products donated by Kaleidoscope in Kansas City, Missouri, thanks to the efforts of Meegan. Projects included decorating fun paper star-shaped glasses, playing with stickers, and personalizing a bag to carry all the goodies.

For lunch we partook in our first heaping plates of nsima. The lunch was perhaps as typical as it gets: oily meat stew in miniscule portions and a decent amount of soggy greens ladled on top of a liver-size mound of white nsima. Totally bland, soft and mushy, the nsima tasted of nothing and relied on the main courses to carry the daily required intake of sodium. We sat at the table with our boys, while the campers sat on the porch floor outside of WAO's back door... apparently their normal spot.

The first few minutes of The Lion King

We attempted to screen The Lion King after lunch, but that new generator we were so proud of blew out. The gasps and laughter of the children as the cartoon animals made their way across the orphanage wall had been wonderfully gratifying; and with absolutely no experience with TV and movies, the group sat in silence long after the power failed, unaware the movie wasn't supposed to end after 15 minutes.

We spent the rest of the afternoon playing Red Rover instead, another game new to these kids and a huge hit. Before saying goodbye, we thanked the children for the fun we'd had and distributed Kansas University t-shits donated by James Pottorff. Waving cheerfully, the campers walked home eagerly examining their works of art, solemnly wearing their starglasses.

To find out more, please visit the We Are One Malawi website.

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