Eight Pages, One Ending

They were expectant, a little rebellious, and definitely interested in what the white woman at the front of the room had to tell them today.

My first week in Malawi, the country went through a painstaking election. The boarding school that the Form (High School) girls at Mtendere Children’s Village attend had the week off, so it was Emily and my job to run a morning and afternoon session in math and English with the girls who were home.

I learned a little about myself during these sessions. I’ve always wanted to teach English in a cross-cultural context, but have had little to no experience teaching ESL in the “real world.” The children of the village speak a language called Chichewa – the dominant language of Malawi. So, as I taught English for two sessions every day, I learned to talk slowly. I learned to repeat myself. I learned that some of their grammar rules are not the same as the rules that the American education system has drilled into me.

But the most important thing, the most important thing by far, was that I learned a little more about the power of stories.

Now, having to spend your week off of boarding school in a classroom with a few white girls teaching by the renowned method of trial and error is never fun, but nothing could prepare these Form girls for their end-of-the-week assignment.

Even us teachers were wary of giving such a daunting assignment to these young Malawian girls, but our orders came from the headmaster himself…we had no choice.

We were to give the students a composition. They were to write on the prompt “The Most Unforgettable Day of My Life.” That much is easy, but here’s the clincher: the composition was to be eight full pages.

Eight notebook pages. Four pages, front and back. We explained it every way we could, but our shocked students didn’t want to believe it. They were outraged. “This is more than any of us have ever had to write before!” “They would never make us do this at boarding school!” The outcry was almost comical.

But after a quick interlude from the headmaster and the insistence that it is not entirely impossible to write eight pages on notebook paper, we settled down to oversee the writing of these near-novels.

They wrote begrudgingly. Some of them didn’t even make the page requirements. Others put so much space between two words that you had to follow along with your finger to avoid getting lost in the void.

But after the first few compositions we read, we stopped correcting them. We ceased the red marks and missing-word carrots and dots inside circles and decided to put our red pens to better use. Instead, we wrote letters of thanks to each one of the girls. With good reason.

The Most Unforgettable Day of My Life...

It seems simple, straightforward, and easy to draw out long enough to fill the pages. In my mind, I pictured birthdays, holidays, trips. The unforgettable moments of my own life played out in my head.

But I could never prepare myself for what those girls wrote.

So what were the most unforgettable days in the lives of the Form girls at Mtendere village? In my ignorance and self-centeredness, I had overlooked the most important thing: these girls were orphans.

That day, we received over 20 begrudgingly written compositions on the death of fathers, mothers, sisters, and brothers. There were girls who were found in abandoned houses, caring for their younger, neglected, and hopeless siblings. Each story was astounding.

On the day a girl’s father died, her mother took another lover – who instantly decided he didn’t want her in the house and kicked her out into the street.

Girls spoke of the cruelty of their peers in boarding school, and the carelessness and occasional drunkenness of their teachers for whom their students were just a job.

Every death was a testimony. Every outcry of longing was a witness. And every essay for some reason ended with one thing:

Hope.

It’s a small word that means everything in the lives of these girls. They are girls who dream of running away to find the remains of their family, but who can’t reconcile that option to staying in the village and getting 3 meals a day. They stay for nsima and beans. They stay for nightly devotionals and impromptu netball games.

But mostly, they stay for Jesus.

He was the overwhelmingly constant theme that ran through each of these miraculous compositions. I was floored. These young women have seen their family members kidnapped, their fathers murdered, their mothers beaten. But somehow, some way, they ended up at a village gate that says “Follow Me, and I will make you Fishers of Men” in bright colors.

They were aware of their blessing. I wasn’t even consciously grateful of being able to teach abroad for the first time. But they were acutely aware of the sustenance that is in Jesus Christ.

Their school wasn’t preparing them to take their exams. Their relatives were ignoring them and proclaiming them someone else’s problem. Their families had been cursed. But somehow, some way, these girls had all stumbled upon the entity of hope.

Whether it came in the form of an invitation to Mtendere, a kind relative who took them in, or simply a steaming meal of nsima and relish, they were grateful. They were eager. And they were excited for their future.

The provision of Jesus Christ has given each one of these girls a future. Instead of lamenting on the fact that their Most Unforgettable Day involved their only parent being dragged off to prison and their relatives rejecting them, they asked for prayer. Instead of asking why they were the one who had their sisters’ survival in their hands, they were asking us to praise Jesus with them, and planning for a future brighter and more unforgettable than anything they could write about in eight pages.

And so, though these girls blessed us with eight pages, we only wrote them short letters in response. But we wanted to thank them.

Their stories are a big deal. They are important to Jesus, important to their futures, and important to Malawi.

They wrote of how their boarding school teachers didn’t care about their education, let alone them as people, but I think those teachers, with or without knowing it, have given them an extraordinary gift: the gift of communication.

These girls shared their stories. 

Their Most Unforgettable Day transversed the space of history and memory and became incarnate into the world of story – a world where an unsuspecting American girl can sit down to read it and be humbled and inspired.

A world where the struggles of Africans are not just statistics, not just trendy organizations, and not just well-timed National Geographic photos, but the pulse of a real human being whose story is alive even now.

There is another word for these type of stories…testimonies.

The Bible says that Christians can overcome persecution by the word of their testimony. There is no end to the wonders of what these Form girls have overcome by the testimony of knowing Jesus Christ – and what they will overcome in the future.

Granted, an eight-page paper in your second language on a vacation week is a harsh demand. I’m sure the multiple hours spent writing it were not fun either.

But the end result was a powerful gift.

Writing is important. Grammar is important. Paragraph organization is important. Spelling is important. But not empirically.

All these things, and the teaching thereof, are important for one reason:

We all have a voice.

We all have a story to communicate about Jesus, whether we have known Him our whole lives, or just had one encounter with Him 15 years ago. They are both the oldest and newest stories circulating in the universe, and their irreplaceable words will never hit the floor.

 And today, among their ranks are The Most Unforgettable Day in the lives of the Form girls of Mtendere Village in Malawi. 

I am so grateful for the weeks I got to spend in Malawi - so grateful for the family there that has made Jesus Christ its center, and welcomed me in to experience it. It's not easy to leave my new friends, and my best college friend, but here's the thing...

Uganda is calling me.