Making a Difference

Every teacher has at least a few students who make them feel like they really made a difference. Zach is one of those students for us. We don’t get to see him often since he is working as an office assistant down in the city, but this last weekend we met up while we were down there preparing for English Theater. His life doesn’t seem that fabulous at a casual inspection. Despite leaving his rural village for the city, he still lives in a one room mud house with a dirt floor and no electricity, and walks to and from work, at least 4 miles each way with no respite from the hot sun. He works 6 days a week for less than $80 a month. Still, this is an achievement here. Zach looked skinnier so we took him out to lunch and fed him beef. He casually let us know that he took his girlfriend from the village to live with him in the city and that they are married now. He’s still so eager to learn, and reminded us several times that we should leave him our Chewa-English dictionary when we leave since it will be of little use in America. We made good on a promise to teach him how to use the internet this weekend. We took him to the mission and sat him on the computer for two hours going over e-mail. We opened his own yahoo account and showed him how to write all the different volunteers which have passed through his life. What he really liked was facebook. He told us he had forgotten what the volunteers looked like. He also wanted to see Google Earth and locate his home. He let us know how marvelous the internet is. He also used the bath room at the mission which was his first encounter with a western style toilet. He couldn’t figure out how to make it flush, and then once we showed him how, he was worried about how to make it stop flushing. We let him know it would stop on its own.