2008 – In which Ilana celebrates Tu Bishvat in a very unusual place: On the shores of Lake Malawi.

A stranger Tu Bishvat I haven’t had. (Tu Bishvat is a Jewish holiday: the New Year of the trees, look, it’s complicated, ask me if you need to.) Usually I haul over various unsuspecting friends to my house, where I make them eat various fruits and nuts and drink wine. But there I was in the middle of Malawi, surrounded by a group of children and adults, all singing softly in Tonga. Sitting on cool, white sand on the banks of the enormous Lake, the full moon seemed to laugh as it rose out of the still black water. It blazed down, mirrored like a black and white Salvador Dali painting. The fire crackled and 24 kids and their mentors watched transfixed as “Rabbi” (seriously – real name: Matthews, a guide at Mvuu but volunteers at Children in the Wilderness, calls himself this because he says, he’s not an official teacher but wants to show the children the way – and that is his idea of a rabbi. Not having met one personally himself, mind you – he has to explain to them that that is what a rabbi is, but he doesn’t tell them it’s a Jewish thing cos they don’t know from Jewish…), with a jersey worn upside down on his legs – the sleeves become trouser legs – and a blanket wrapped around him elder-like, gosh this is a long sentence sits at a fire and tells the children the following:

“Don’t be afraid of learning. You have come here to have fun but also to learn and learning is the best thing in life. Don’t be afraid of it.”

A very good lesson I think.

In between each sentence he breaks into song – and the kids pick up the refrain. All their songs are very simple, with one or two words repeated over and over. For example, one song that even I could sing went: “Folwahd, folwahd…” – and then I realised that meant ‘forward’… followed by a Tonga word meaning backward which I didn’t get so well. (Another one is “sehko, sehko, sehko” – circle, as in: get into a circle, see.) The song they sing around the flickering firelight that turns the sand golden is “Hazaa zaa zaa” and is sung between all the acts of the campfire show that the mentors and leaders put on for the children on their first day. There’s a magic show and a skit on poaching and a doctor joke – each one very simple, the magician using not-so-fast sleight of hand but these kids have never seen anything like it and are enthralled. At the end, we all stand in a circle, small, warm hands in each of mine and sing a slow good night song that brings the tempo right down and envelops them in a warm bubble – just right to send them to sleep.

The next morning… ahh… the sublime Lake lies silver-smooth and silent. The view straight out my room is of the water, the clouds reflected in its perfectly still surface at this time of the morning. And the birds are… well actually they’re drowned out by screams and yells as the children, up since 5:00, play an extremely noisy game of catch with their mentors who clearly have an incredible amount of energy at this time of the morning. (Mind you, they are very well organised – they all have turns to be on early morning duty while the rest sleep in.) Bit of a clash of audio and visual here!

Hence my davening was slightly different today – not the elevated silent type, but rather one that is filled with what it means to live life with a sense of meaning – to give of yourself somehow in this world, because let’s face it, in Africa, there’s plenty of places to give. This is emphasised by the mentors who are running around with the children. They are generally between 18 and 20 and have the life that they’re trying to move the kids away from: they haven’t finished school and live in the villages continuing to do what their parents do – fishing or subsistence farming. A beautiful girl named Desire shrugs her shoulders and avoids the question when I ask her what she ‘does’. What she ‘does’, what they all ‘do’ is look after children once a year for six weeks – and then for the rest of the year, they do ‘follow-up’ – in other words, keep in touch with the kids, make sure they’re okay, encourage them to study and continue their schooling and to perhaps look at another future for themselves – an opportunity that they, the mentors, have never had themselves.

There were a couple of volunteers around too, including a Scottish boy who talked about a “wee house” and he didn’t mean the bathroom, a Zimbabwean boy called Pule, pronounced Pulleh (his English name is Andrew but no one calls him that) whose parents are missionaries somewhere in Zimbabwe, and a nurse from the Peace Corps with Hebrew letters tattooed on her toes…

Then there’s the African rhythm that one must gently descend into: where one instruction takes ten minutes to give over, because a whole story, nay, an entire production, is made of it, complete with enormous facial expressions, leaping, shouting and then dramatically dropping the voice to a whisper, with the final denouement or moment of humour – and the whole table erupts into laughter. I do too, delighted by the wonderful heart-filling giggles of a child. (Apparently the instruction was: please turn off your lights when you leave the room.)

There are many more memories of the few days I spent with these people: the words they begin to instil in the children (RTC – stands for Respecti, Teamworki and Challengi; the ‘i’ is at the end of the word in Tonga, not the beginning), or the Nutrition Game (do you know how to act like a vitamin? Or be a carbohydrate? I do!) and other games, all educational. The children who – if not malnourished are not exactly well-fed – stand politely in line to get their food and then all wait before diving in, while one of them says grace. (The first little girl to do so, appropriately named Grace – seriously – went on for about 10 minutes – Sephardic grace I suppose.)

Then there was the ‘swimming test’ where everyone gets a chance to see if they can swim before they go on a ‘boat safari.’ The boys swim better than the girls – that’s because they are the ones being taught to fish and therefore need to know. One little girl, as she tried to swim across the width of the pool, clearly thought the test was how long she could keep her face underwater – luckily Pule pulled her out after a bit….

Many other quirky happenings, but most in the context of “you had to be there” so I’ll leave it for now. With the shlush-shlush of the Lake and chanting “sehko sehko” of the children still ringing in my ears I reluctantly dragged myself away, returning to Lilongwe to grandmother Tammie before setting out to Liwonde. But that’s another story.