Moni, Malawi!

Dr. Kelly has worked on many grants and many of them have provided scholarships for Malawians to come get an education at Virginia Tech. Over the years, many of the Malawians belonged to Blacksburg Presbyterian Church (BPC) while they were students at Virginia Tech. This started BPC sponsoring many projects in Malawi including hospitals, sponsorships and educational trips. Patti Talbot is a member of BPC and is involved in the Malawi committee. Once a year, the church has a big celebration called "Moni, Malawi" which means "Hello, Malawi." All the upcoming and past study abroad students, the international students from Malawi who attend VT and the church supporters are invited to attend this Malawi Celebration on April 19th.

The '08 group was so excited to have another reunion! Another great reason to dress up in our chitenji's! It was a potluck luncheon right after church. Here is the program:

I was excited to catch up with the advisors and students from the trip. The biggest news of the day is Dr. Jones is engaged!! We are all so excited for her! Jenny is in the process of graduating grad school and buying her first house! After spending a month with these people they really became like family. So it was great to see everyone again!

I talked to Dr. Kelly about Madonna's adoption controversy, and she brought up some interesting points. She said it's unreasonable to require people to live in Malawi for 18 months before they can adopt. She also said Madonna made two mistakes. 1. she wants to adopt a girl and girls are not valuable in Malawi, so they have no problem refusing her adoption. 2. Dr. Kelly pointed out that Madonna was inappropriately dressed during her visit to Malawi. She didn't wear clothes that showed she was taking this seriously. Dr. Kelly believes Madonna just has to donate more funds/programs to Malawi and that its only a matter of time before they will allow the adoption.

I also showed Dr. Kelly Macdonald's letter. She said she has never heard of night school in Malawi. Dr. Kelly emailed her credible friends in Malawi to research Macdonald's program and is going to let me know what he finds out.

Dr. Kelly told us about the group going this summer. 6 VT students, 5 Radford students and 4 NC A & T students. 4 students are boys! We just had one boy last summer, so that will be very different. Dr. Jones and Dr. Talbot (Radford advisors) will not be going this summer. A new advisor from Radford will be going to Malawi for the first time. I am so excited and jealous for the group going this summer... I would love to go back!

I met 3 of the students going to Malawi this summer. Two of them are actually adults teaching in Grayson County. They heard about the program and wanted to take advantage of this opportunity because going to Africa has been on their bucket list of things to do in life. I just kept rambling on and on about it and I gave them my contact to ask me any questions! I highly recommended keeping a blog! haha

After visiting with Dr. Kelly, we got lunch and the program began. The room was decorated with beautiful Malawian fabric and displays. I honestly felt like I was in Malawi again. There were about 100 people there and almost everyone had to stand and be introduced if they had a connection to Malawi. It took forever! But it was great to see how many people in Blacksburg care about Malawi.

The church members presented a slideshow of all the programs they started in Malawi. They have done an incredible about of work! They sponsored so many students and trips to Malawi over the years. Read more about BPC Malawi Partnerships.

Next a Malawian attending Virginia Tech, Daniel, took the stage to teach us about the Malawian culture. He explained the proper way to greet people, how laid back the culture is (afternoon could mean 1pm or 5pm) and explained the meaning of the flag. The black represents the people of Malawi, the red represents fighting for their independence, the green represents the land and the rising sun represents the dawn of freedom and hope for Africa.

At the end of the event we took a Malawi 2008 reunion picture!! Daniel is in the middle. We actually saw him in Malawi last summer. He met us one day to exchange paperwork with Dr. Kelly. When we told him we remembered seeing him in Malawi, he got really excited! I never meet anyone with that kind of excitement in the US, so it really made me miss Malawi.

By the end of the day, my heart was aching to go back to Malawi. Jenny brought a video camera to Malawi and put together a DVD for everyone of all her footage. I watched it as soon as I got home. It reminded me I really need to start making a movie with all of my tapes. That will be my summer project.