It Was Worth It - Written by Johnny

One of the best parts of living in Africa for me is the interesting people you get to meet. Missionaries and aid workers from all over the world live in Malawi, and the blend of unique personalities and experiences is really amazing. I have spent many hours listening to crazy stories from some of these "expats" (expatriates), and the time is definitely well spent. But what I enjoy much more than that is hanging out with the children of these missionaries.

There is a great group of teens here who share a lot in common with us. Not only are they all sincere Christians, but they are also all homeschooled like us. Since so many expatriates homeschool here, this has led to a gathering that we simply call "Homeschooolers." We meet on the first Friday of every month for a meal, games, sports, fellowship, and just chatting. Contrary to what you would expect from the name, however, there is absolutely no school involved, and it is just a day of fun, with the occasional learning experience or field trip thrown in.

We always have a great time, and it's something we look forward to from month to month. For the past two months everyone had been busy though, so Homeschoolers had been canceled. This month it was decided we would do it again, however. Like always, it was a great experience, but as it turned out, it was one that would leave me and Chris limping for the next few days.

This Homeschoolers the plan was to meet at a picnic area on top of the nearby Zomba Plateau (aka Zomba Mountain). There is a road running up the side of the mountain, so that makes it easily accessible by car for most people. We had just one problem: our car wasn't working. As Chris mentioned in the last post, we were having mechanical trouble with it, and couldn't get it running. (It's up and working now, but it wasn't on Friday).

Ok, so it seemed we needed to have a Plan B. Friends offered to give us a lift, but me and Chris opted to bike up the mountain, and a friend of ours named Brody decided to join us. The bike ride up is pretty brutal (about 12 kilometers of constant uphill) but it was something we had done twice before, and we felt fairly confident we could do it again. Biking up Zomba Mountain provides 3 benefits: The first is having a cool and unforgettable experience. The second is the amazing views you get all along the way up, and that alone would be worth it. Last but not least is the bragging rights you get from saying you have done it. It's pretty funny seeing people faces when they hear you have biked (or run) all the up. Alright, I don't actually brag about that, but it's worth biking up all the same.

Friday morning came, and it immediately became apparent that Homeschoolers would not be on the Plateau. A heavy fog set in, and it was also drizzling. Thankfully our friends the Beatons (the same family who had been Chris' proctor) volunteered to have it hosted at their house, and we were thankful to them for having opened their house to everyone at the last minute. So much for biking up the mountain, though.

Brody had arrived here anyway, so we decided we would bike with him to the new Homeschoolers location. It had stopped drizzling, so we wouldn't have to bike in the rain. It's only between 4 and 5 kilometers to the Beaton's house, so compared to biking up a mountain it seemed pretty easy, right?

We wheeled our bikes out of the garage; Chris had a flat tire so he pumped that up really quickly and then we set off. About a kilometer from the house we realized Chris' tire had gone flat again. We hadn't brought the pump with us, so we just decided to take turns running with the bike until we got there. That worked. For a while anyhow. Then the rubber part of the tire started coming off of the rim. Not good. Carrying the bike was the next step, so we proceeded with that method. We weren't very far from our destination at that point though, so thankfully we didn't have to continue like that for long.

It took us about 35 minutes to travel 4 kilometers, a trip which included another flat tire and a lot of running uphill for whichever one of us was taking a turn pushing that bike. Despite that though, we were still the first people to arrive. Ah well, everyone here is on "African Time", after all. We were all very glad of one thing though: we didn't have to bike up an entire mountain!

After a few people had arrived we decided to play a game of football (soccer, for those in North America). Only four teens were able to make it to that Homeschoolers, so we enlisted as many younger kids as we could and then started playing. Football is one of our staple sports at Homeschoolers, and we have played countless hours of it.

Me and Chris were on different teams for the first match, and I think you probably all know what sibling rivalries can be like. At one point in the game the ball rolled to a place directly between us. We both went for it. Crash! I think we were both expecting the other person to stop at the last moment, but we didn't. It was certainly not our brightest moment, and it was a few minutes before either of us could stand up straight without wincing. Our legs got pretty banged up by that little crash.

A while later we were all called to lunch, and I have to say I was pretty glad to sit down after our "bike ride," almost 2 hours of football, and that crash. I hadn't scored a single goal during those two hours, which was a bit of a bummer. My joke was that I had about as many assists as we had scored goals. Just not my day I guess.

After lunch we played football for a while longer, and I finally managed to score a goal! I comforted myself that at least I had gotten one... When we got bored with football we switched to "British Bulldogs" or Sharks and Minnows as it is known in North America.

After close to an hour of that we changed games again to Man Hunt (it is also known as Wolf, and a few other names). It was another running game... We played that for a while, until we got bored. Around that time most of the families left, and since we couldn't bike home we would need to get a lift. The other teens still had time to spare however, so me and Chris decided to run back later.

We played some more football after that, then switched to handball. Finally I was in my element, and I managed to score several really good goals. It was a relief after my long streak of misses in football! I was quite glad I had gotten a chance to slightly redeem my honor. After about an hour of this me and Chris said our goodbyes and that we needed to run back home. Ok, so we might as well have said limping. We ran a few kilometers and then switched to a walk. There was literally no way we could have gotten anything more out of our legs.

When we finally collapsed onto the couch at home it was a huge relief. The next two days I was still hobbling around. Sure, it was brutal, but I had blast, and would do it again in a heartbeat! It was worth it!

Our group of friends at a gathering last year
(Chris is second from left at the top,
I'm second from left at the bottom)

A (Very) African Exam - Written by Chris

Note: In order to understand this blog post, you should know that a dongle is an external USB that you can plug into your PC to get internet on the go. They are very common in Africa, and not-so-common in the Western world.

How do we do school in Africa? That's a long story to tell, involving a lot of adventure, mishaps, and bemusing situations. Right now as I right this blog post offline I am sitting outside a bicycle repair shop on a broken lawn chair in the middle of the city. This may not be the way an average Canadian kid prepares for an exam, but this is how I am spending my day before a final exam which will take place tomorrow. Why? Because I need internet for the exam. You are probably completely confused now, so allow me to back up.
[Note: the rest of the blog post was written about a week after my exam.]

Me and Johnny have been homeschooled for as long as we can remember. Ditto for our younger sister Sarah, and (soon) our four year old sister Elianna. Our family homeschooled while we lived in Canada, and that didn't change when we moved here to Malawi - if anything, getting decent education at a “conventional” school would have been much more difficult (and expensive) here, since we would have had to go to boarding school to receive an education that would meet international standards. So we continued home schooling, even into high school. I am currently finishing grade 11, and Johnny is finishing grade 9. We generally take between 8 to 10 courses per year, some with text books and some through an online government school based out of Lindsay, Ontario (hence this blog post). Anyhow, fast forward to about a week ago, when I was preparing for an online exam for my course Environmental Science (hats off to my teacher, “Mystery”, for an awesome semester). These exams are worth 30% of your final mark, and you have to take them at someone else’s house so that the school knows you didn’t cheat. I asked my friend’s mom, “Aunty” Leslie to be my proctor, and she readily agreed - with one hesitation. Their internet was extremely slow, and she recommend that I bring my own internet source. “No problem, I can bring my external internet dongle,” I replied. I knew that the dongle was out of repair, but I figured it would be a simple matter to have it fixed at the local internet shop. How hard could it be, right? Well… wrong.

About a week before my exam our 1998 Colorado SUV broke down, and a gaggle of visiting mechanics failed to fix it (a week after the exam, it’s still broken). This pushed dad into a flurry of stressed activity as he tried to figure out how to get our new solar system home (thank you so much for donating it, Warkworth Free Methodist Church) from the trade capital (Blantyre), fix the car, and also not put our ministry here on the back burner. “If worst comes to worst I’ll get on my bike and head downtown to get the dongle fixed,” I told dad. The day before my exam, I decided that time was running out, and me and Johnny saddled up and took a scenic 3 or 4 kilometer bike ride into the town centre. We first headed to “Africycle”, an NGO that sells and repairs bikes, to get our back brakes fixed since neither of us had fully functioning back brakes (which, trust me, is not a good thing on our mountainous roads). While the bikes were repaired I walked a block to the internet kiosk, hoping to find a techy who could help me fix the dongle. In my pocket I had about 60,000 Malawian Kwacha (about a 80$ USD), partially to buy bananas (a staple in our family), pay for our bike repairs, and also to guarantee that we had a lot of extra money to buy a new dongle. And in my backpack I had the dongle along with a computer to test it on (since the “techy’s” don’t have their own laptops). Anyhow, I walked down the dusty, busy street - past an open-air welding shop and a mini-bus station - feeling like a very rich man. I got to the internet shop only to discover that they were closed. I’m not sure why since Eid al-Fitr had been the previous week and there was no national holiday, but closed they were and there was no arguing the fact. There were a few internet service guys outside the shop selling 4G SIM-cards to Malawians, and they directed me to a friend who was, apparently, a techy. This man explained to me that the SIM-card in my dongle had probably expired from lack of use (we normally use our router for internet), and directed me to the 4G stand so I could get a new SIM-card. He said that once I had bought the SIM-card I would have to go home and reinstall the driver software, and I complied, slipping the new card into my pocket as I headed back to see how the bike repairs where going. When I arrived I sat on a rickety plastic lawn chair waiting for the bikes to be repaired, chatting with the Malawian guys and writing the beginning part of this blog post on my computer (which, remember, I had in the backpack). In about twenty minutes our bikes were repaired and good-as-new thanks to the Africycle guys, so me and Johnny biked back home, choosing a scenic route from which we could watch the beginnings of a sunset creep over the beautiful Malawian countryside. On our way we passed dad, who was also on a bike and headed to the government buildings in the old quarter of the city so that he could pay the import taxes for our solar system. Needless to say, it was a very bike-filled day. Before arriving home we stopped to buy a hand of bananas at a local roadside stop. Me and Johnny had a chuckle when it took a full five minutes for the shop owner and a Malawian lady to finish their chat before we were serviced.

Back home I plugged the dongle into my computer’s USB port, swapped the SIM cards, and reinstalled the software. Surprise, surprise - it didn’t work. Fairly frustrated and starting to wonder if I would have internet for my exam, I waited for dad to return home and told him the whole saga. Dad shared my frustration, and promised that we would figure it out the next day - the day of my exam, which was going to take place at 3PM. Next morning dad biked up to our colleagues house to borrow their dongles and see if we could get them running. Meanwhile, I did some last minute studying, adding to an online study document that my online classmates back in Canada had created. Dad returned with the dongles from our colleagues, but they didn’t work either. By this time it was about 11AM, and I was starting to stress. We ate lunch and then dad biked into town with the SIM-cards, dongles, and a computer, hoping to get them repaired at the shop while running some other errands. I continued studying, on Johnny's computer since mine was having issues; all the while I was watching nervously as the clock ticked its way towards 3PM. Dad finally arrived at the gate around 2:30, panting hard after a long uphill bike ride (kudos to you, dad). I shoved the dongle and a computer in a backpack just as our colleague Marieke dropped by to pick me and Sarah up - Sarah on her way to horseback riding lessons at a local farm along with Marieke’s girls, and me on my way to the exam at “Aunty” Leslie’s house. I arrived at the proctor’s house around 2:50, with just barely enough time to set-up my computer and internet and log into the exam. I was just thankful that the whole ordeal would soon be over. 3 hours later after a fairly tough exam I was finished, and Leslie’s husband (“Uncle” Robby) drove me home, along with his son Colin who came over to our place for a sleepover. Me, Johnny, and Colin had fun re-watching the Fellowship of the Ring and playing some old Wii games, and the day ended on a happy note.

Thus ends the saga of my exam. The lesson I have learned, for the umpteenth time, is that nothing is easy in Africa. I’m so thankful for my family, as well as our friends/colleagues, all of whom are so gracious when I’m up to my eyeballs in school work and need a helping hand.

Fun note: the bike repairs for my bike cost 1,500 Malawian Kwacha, and for Johnny's 500 Malawian Kwacha. That's a grand total of 3 or 4 Canadian dollars. The SIM card cost 500 Kwacha, which is about 1 dollar. Some things in Malawi are very cheap! On the other hand, you could pay 20$ for a simple block of cheese.

Johnny's Introduction

Hello! Muli Bwanji! Ça va! ¡Hola! Guten Tag! Confused by all these greetings? From left to right the languages are English, Chichewa, French, Spanish, and German. What do all of those languages have in common? Every single one of them I use daily. My use of English should be pretty obvious, since that’s my native language. Chichewa is the language spoken here in Malawi, so knowing the basics is pretty important. French, Spanish, and German are all languages I’m learning, and they all have some importance to me. Sadly, I’m only completely fluent in English, but my hope is that in time my knowledge of the rest will come. To back up a little my name is Jonathan Babcock, I’m 15, and I live in Malawi, Africa. For the past 6 years our family has been here as missionaries to the locals. Its a life full of crazy adventures, and the purpose of this blog is to share those adventures with you! We have a family of six people. Besides my parents, I have two younger sisters and an older brother, Chris, who is co-author of this blog. I was born in a small town in Ontario, Canada and I lived there until we came here to Malawi. A lot of people ask me what conveniences I miss most about living in Canada and the answer to that would probably be access to easily cooked meals and fast food. It can make life a lot simpler, but the good news is that cooking is one of my hobbies, so when I have time I’m often in the kitchen. A few of my other hobbies are traveling, reading, running, music, and spending time in the great outdoors! Travelling is something that I’ve done a lot of, having been to 21 countries on 4 different continents! Its certainly a big relief that I enjoy it. As for reading, I’m a chronic book addict. My favorite genres are Fantasy, Dystopian, and historical fiction. I love running! Partially just because of how healthy it is, partially because I enjoy testing my limits. My running partner is almost always Chris, and together we’ve gone pretty far, even completing a half marathon recently. Music is something I really enjoy as well. Sure, I’m no musician, but I love listening to Christian Contemporary Music, and little by little I am improving my guitar skills. My final big hobby is being outdoors. That can mean anything from sitting by a gentle stream to climbing a mountain, but I’ll still enjoy it. I’m often asked what my plans for the future are, and I really don’t know. Beyond high school my plans are a bit dim, but I do know this: I’ll follow wherever God leads me! I’m currently planning to do a gap year after high school and then proceed to university. Where will I go to university? Well, first I’ll have to pick which continent I want to study on, and that in itself will be a challenge. I’m thinking I’ll likely try to find a university somewhere in Canada, but like I’ve said: I really don’t know what the future holds! I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this post and we look forward to seeing you here again! Goodbye. Tionana. Au revoir. Adios. Auf Wiedersehen.

Johnny Contemplating Life in Dubai

Chris' Introduction

Have you ever been chased down a bumpy dirt road by an angry bull elephant? Well, I have. Nice to meet you, I’m Chris Babcock! While my life certainly isn’t all elephants and adventures, I’ve had my share of both during my 17 years on earth - hence this blog.

Although born deep in the Canadian Shield (that means the cold part, for you Americans), I’ve lived in southern Africa for six years of my life. Traveling - one of my more exhausting interests - has become a part of my life, and I’m grateful that I get to share this crazy life with my family of 6 (including myself and Johnny). When not traveling, I’m usually busy working on home school (sometimes playing catch up because I was traveling!). I really enjoy studying history, politics, geography, and literature, both through my home school courses and through part-time enrollment in the Virtual Learning Centre, an online high school based out of Ontario. If I’m not doing school “work” or traveling, you would probably find me reading, writing, doing something active outdoors (airsoft, anyone?), or hanging with friends. I generally read between 50 and 80 books a year, from modern young adult fiction like the Hunger Games to old classics like Crime and Punishment - all of which fuel my love of words and my inspiration to write. I’ve currently written about 150,000 words of fiction, and am hoping to finish the rough draft of my second novel, I Am Aynebidding, very soon.

Living in Africa can be rough sometimes, but at the end of the day I’d definitely do it all over again. Life is full of blessings, and Jesus is worthy! I honestly have no idea where I will end up in this world as an adult, but I’m sure it’ll be a roller coaster ride that will probably involve more than just a 9-5 work day and a life in suburbia. Currently my plans for the future are hazy, although I plan on attending university in Canada, Germany, or possibly some third country, and studying International Issues or Political Science. I am often driven by the big picture - I enjoy taking a step back and analyzing what the political trends are, how attitudes are shifting, and how God is moving in our world. I could see myself being a journalist, diplomat, or missionary - it all depends on what I am called to do. My hope is that I can use my skills and talents to make our world a better place, and enjoy the ride in the process surrounded by friends and family.

Thanks for reading - more blog posts are on their way! I’m looking forward to meeting you - please feel free to comment or email us :)

Chris in Dubai