Heads up

After a difficult month of soul searching I’ve finally decided to stay a little longer in Malawi. I’ll be working with primary school teachers on strengthening their English instruction, in hopes that by the time the students reach secondary school (where instruction is theoretically all in English) they will actually be able to function in English. Many of them can’t. My Chichewa is better than many of my Form 1 students’ English, which is pretty scary. I don’t know details yet, but I’ll be moving down the road, closer to town. I’ll still be able to visit my current village fairly easily. I’m planning on coming home for a visit at Christmas, then finishing up my last few months of service in Malawi.

So that’s the big news. On a more entertaining note, I have another bird story to share with you. This time it’s not about chickens. On Saturday morning I was looking for a broom and couldn’t find it anywhere in my house, so I went out to the kitchen (my kitchen and bathroom are separate from the rest of the house) to look for it. All thoughts of sweeping quickly vanished when I looked in the kitchen and found…a severed owl head.

Now this is creepy and disturbing in any circumstances, but in many African cultures owls are considered bad luck, to put it mildly. If you hear an owl hooting near your house, it’s a sign that there will be a funeral in the near future (granted, there’s funerals all the time anyway). Most people in my community are Christians, but there’s still a strong underlying belief in witchcraft, so my initial reaction was, “Oh my gosh, someone’s trying to curse me.” Malawians are generally pretty non-confrontational, so it’s entirely possible that I wouldn’t know someone hated me until animal body parts started showing up at my house.

I didn’t want to scare my neighbors or any unexpected visitors, so I closed the kitchen door and waited for my head teacher to come and advise me. He theorized that my cat had killed the owl and left me the head as a present, which would have been feasible except for the extreme neatness of the head and the surrounding area. He went to find my guard and see what he knew.

I had been gone the previous weekend, and my guard had been house-sitting for me. Someone had killed an owl at the church next door and offered it to my guard, who cooked it and ate it. (My Malawian friends also find this strange and have never heard of people eating owls [see aforementioned superstition].) He decided to keep the head to show people (this part was all in Chichewa, so I didn’t completely understand why he wanted to keep it) and put it in the rafters to dry. It fell down at some point, completely creeping me out.

The head teacher advised my guard to please communicate with me about any unusual circumstances (like a sudden interest in taxidermy) in the future. My guard apologized and came back later to assure me that he doesn’t practice witchcraft and that he and I are both going to heaven. Now that it’s all over, I think it’s pretty funny. At any rate, I’ve got a good story to tell.