"You are a girl or you are a boy?"

The title of this post is an actual question I received today after introducing myself to one of the men working on the village today. Often people are confused about my name, "Danielle," because to them it sounds like I'm saying "Daniel," which is clearly a boy's name. So basically everyone at the village think I have a boys name (some of the children think "Auntie Danielle" is a little funny), and it has be the source of some name confusion with the grownups.
But today we were walking back from the Rafiki Junior Secondary school, where we were covering books, and we passed a group of men. We greeted them, and they were friendly. But then one of them came up to ask us our names. Emily introduced herself, "Emiry," he repeated. And then it was my turn. I told him my name and he did a double-take. (I was wearing a skirt and a pink t-shirt) and then he asked me, "You are a boy or a girl?" Which launched us into the common explanation of the difference in the U.S. between the names "Daniel" and "Danielle". He wasn't at all being rude, just confused; it's pretty funny, and remarkably common.


In other news, the Rafiki Village, Malawi received another mini-missionary today, who arrived from Lilongwe (4 hours south) understandably jet-lagged. We look forward to getting to know her and working with her as she begins to get acclimated.
And, we were without power for most of today, as well as yesterday. Yesterday was a scheduled outage. Just about every other Sunday, they turn off the electricity coming into Mzuzu around 7 am and it stays off for about 12 hours. (there are a couple of generators in the village, so there's not too much to worry about, especially with the scheduled outages). However, today the power went out unexpectedly around 4 in the morning. I think they ran the generators for a little while so the kitchen could prepare lunch, and I'm not sure when the power came back on. However, today it did cause a bit of a problem, since the water tank fed by the well pump did not get to fill up all the way last night, and with the usage of the village, we ran out completely about mid-afternoon--a bit of an inconvenience, but an aspect of life here that requires a little flexibility. It will be replenished again completely by tomorrow, and then we'll be fine.

We are still attempting to learn Tumbuka from the kids. Today, Grace laughed hilariously with the rest of her table at dinner as she tried to teach me the Tumbuka equivalent to, "Be quiet" or "No more noise": "ku mpanga fuwawa yaye" (approximate phonetic spelling). At one point, I had about 8 of the ten kids repeating the phrase to me over and over and laughing as I failed. about 78 repetitions later, we had an approximately correct pronunciation.
Tonight we went to Mama Jane's cottage for evening devotions, which is always fun. The children are almost ready for be by then, and they all sit in the floor, and their mama or an auntie reads a story to them from the Bible. By this point, they are all pretty tired and quiet; not their usual busy selves, so it's a completely different atmosphere.