life in HD

Whoa. No updates since September...sorry sorry. It's been quite busy here in lala-land the last few months. I've had meetings and workshops and events and vacations...not to mention a full term of teaching my very own English class. Craziness. For details on any of the aforementioned items, send a letter, email, facebook message, text, etc. There's too much to put here right now.

So. On to my topic for today. After being in Zambia for almost a full year, I have decided on my least favorite season. I can say with full confidence that hot season, especially toward the end, is the worst. This isn't even because of the temperature. I can handle hot. The sun might be super-intense here. But I can still deal. The thing I can't deal with are the scorpion spiders. First of all, they just look scary..a huge spider with an extra set of legs that it holds up like a lady holding her skirts. Second, they have huge, scary, hairy mouthparts. It would HURT to get bit by one. The last (and worst!) thing about them is when they move. Not only do they come straight for you--climbing up and down walls to avoid obstacles if necessary--they are FAST. One night when some other volunteers were visiting me, we screamed at, scrambled away from, and eventually squashed 8 scorpion spiders in less than an hour.

Now that the rains have come, the scorpion spiders have disappeared. They've been replaced, however, by tons of what I like to call "Africa bugs." they come in all shapes and patterns, but most share the quality of being much larger than any bug has a right to be. I stared some laundry the other day... I poured water over clothes in the basin, added laundry powder, and started mixing...when I felt something that wasn't fabric. I pulled my hand out and there was a giant black beetle with some crazy red marks that looked like a kid had drawn them on with crayon. Really cool, but also mildly terrifying.

In addition to Africa bugs, the rains have brought (back) a few other things worth mentioning.

First, I have rediscovered what it means to be a dirty Peace Corps volunteer. You can fake it during dry season. I wasn't very dirty when I was home, since I spend most of my village time at school, where I am expected to look somewhat respectable. (Which really means: I'm not obviously dirty and am wearing nicer clothes than, say, an agriculture volunteer would wear on an average day. But I look significantly less nice than the Zambian teachers, who wear three-piece suits and prom dresses to teach.) I always felt pretty disgusting after a day of travel though, especially if I was riding more than a few kilometers in the back of a truck. The worst is when you start bathing and realize that what you thought was some really good sun (as you can see by the awesome tan lines from your sandals and/or capris) is actually a layer of dust. Gross. But that was dry season; now it's rainy. Which means mud, and lots of it. And mud guards for your bike are great, but, unfortunately, not entirely effective. As a result of walking and biking in copious amounts of mud, two activities which end in gobbets of the stuff being flung onto any exposed flesh or fabric, I have a lot more laundry to do on a regular basis. Now, in addition to the sniff test for garment re-wearability, I have to do the mud splatter test. This is problematic due to the nature of washing clothes in a place without a dryer. You have to be strategic about when to do your wash. Pick correctly an time it right, and you'll get a sunny morning/afternoon when your clothes will have enough time to dry. Pick wrong, however, and your clothes get an extra rinse cycle. Sometimes it takes two or three days for drying clothes. And in the end, no matter how dry and fresh-smelling your clothes are when you bring them in off the line, they will inevitably feel damp and smell musty after just a day of being in your house. I have resigned myself to the fact that everything in my home will feel perpetually damp for the next 3 months. It's not a cheerful resignation; I'm complaining every step of the way. But I have accepted it nonetheless. I can only count down the days until I can empty my hut into the no-longer-filled-with-mud yard to spend a day drying out in the hot African sun.

Despite it's problems for laundry and bugs, rainy season has brought back one of my favorite things: green. I didn't realize how brown and dead everything looked until it started raining and everything is green again. Every time I go to school, the path looks a little different. It's amazing how everything green just exploded into existence after the rain started.

I also didn't realize how much I missed the clouds during dry season. The sky is amazing here. I look up, and it looks unreal. Someone put it well: it's like we're living life in HD. Seriously. Sometimes when I'm biking I just have to stop and appreciate the beauty that is around me. A lot of times it's the sky that amazes me, but I see something that stops me in my tracks about everyday. One day, it might be a beautiful African child smiling, or a particularly bright flower, or a sunset over the train tracks, or a cool twisty tree... it's endless. I can't believe how lucky I am to be in Zambia!

bush baby: it's what's for dinner

As I've said before, I eat with my family rather often. And usually we eat pretty normal things like cabbage, eggs, or some other vegetable. But the other night, we had some sort of mystery meat. Bamayo told me what it was in Bemba, and of course I didn't understand, but asked her son to translate. He told me that we were eating "bush baby." At the time, I just went on and ate it. It was really good. The meat was tender, and took well to the way that Zambians cook the heck out of everything.

Later, though, I decided to do some research. They're really cute!! Bush babies, also called "galagos," look like a crazy cross between a squirrel and a lemur. They're nocturnal primates with ears similar to bats.' Their primary food source is insects, and they are master jumpers. They jump better than frogs, leaping from to tree to tree in the African bush.

After seeing some pictures of them, I realized that I've seen them before. My family has eaten them on nights that I haven't partaken. And then I made some connections. My little brothers, Savior and Licha, often walk around with slingshots around their necks, especially later in the day. And after I lock up my house to go to bed, I always hear kids screaming. So I'm pretty sure that the kids run around the trees hunting bush babies at night. And I ate some cute little primates. Here's the wikipedia link for anyone that's interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galago

it's a skirt...it's a towel...no, it's chitenge!

One of my favorite things about living in Zambia is ichitenge (ee-chee-tang-gay). Basically, chitenge is fabric. It usually comes in 2-meter lengths, but you can find it in 4- or 6-meter lengths as well. The combinations of colors, patterns, and pictures are endlessly fabulous. I've even seen one with Obama's face on it.

Chitenges (the plural in Bemba is ifitenge) are probably the most useful things that I have here in Zambia. And I don't even use them in all the possible ways. I wear mine as a skirt, that doubles as an apron. They make great potholders. I've used them as towels, for bathing and for the beach. I put them on the ground or on dirty seats or in truckbeds to sit on so I don't get my clothes dirty. I've gotten clothes made out of them. Chitenges make fantastic togas. Zambian women also use them to carry their babies on their backs. They wrap up bulky packages that they carry on their heads.

Tailors in Zambia are pretty great. They can make pretty much anything, and whether it's a dress or a suit jacket, they call it a "chitenge suit." I currently only have one, which I wore for swear-in, but I plan on getting more throughout my service. It's also possible to get chitenge scraps from the tailors. I use them for crafting, but Zambians make purses and all sorts of other goodies to sell to the musungus (white people). And they're all awesome.

So basically, I love chitenge. I definitely plan on bringing them all back to the US and wearing/using them. And I will love being able to just throw them in a washing machine when they're dirty!

just call me rachael ray... or maybe barefoot contessa

Something I've realized is that I have never appreciated kitchens. And I should have. Even the one in the basement of the Ross Street house with its limited counter space. But I will never again underappreciate a kitchen. And this is why.

In Zambia, I cook everything over charcoal in a metal brazier with a 10-inch diameter. So first, I have to light the fire. Then I have to wait until the coals get hot enough to even cook anything, which takes at least 20 minutes, but probably 30 or more. This process can be expedited by swinging the braizer back and forth to increase airflow to the coals. Then, once it's hot, I can start cooking things one at a time.

Breakfast is easy. I usually just have to boil water so I can make coffee and oatmeal. (I'm SOOOO glad I brought a French press.) For lunch and dinner, what I do depends on the day, and whether or not I'm going to eat with my host family.

On the days that I don't eat with them, I usually just cook one meal in the afternoon. I'll snack on something, like fruit or peanuts or popcorn, when I get home from school, then start something fancy for my lunch/dinner. I can only cook one thing at a time, so I cook my starch (rice, pasta, or potatoes) first, then whatever else I'm going to eat. My usual method is to just sautee a bunch of stuff and put some sort of sauce over it. But sometimes I get creative. I've made potstickers, stuffed cabbage leaves, orange-glazed soya pieces, refried beans (and tortillas, of course), sweet potato gnocci and garlic cream sauce, the village equivalent of eggplant parmesan, banana curry, and Thai peanut sauce. I also make a lot of soups. It's a one-pot meal, which is ideal for braizer cooking, and lasts for several meals. So I have my big meal around 4 or 5, depending on how long it takes to cook. And honestly, most of the reason I do it this way is so I can do dishes that night. Otherwise I wait until morning because I rely on the sun to dry my dishes.

The days that I do eat with my family are a bit different. I make something smallish for lunch, or just have a peanut butter sandwich or something. Then later I'll make a relish to take to dinner. We usually don't eat until after 7pm, because the family is busy until there's no light to see. So bamayo makes nshima and a relish, and I bring another one. When I go, I sit with bamayo and the kids, next to the fire. We all wash our hands in a dish of warm water. There's a big bowl of nshima in the middle and the smaller bowls of relish around it. Then we dig in, everyone's fingers in the communal bowls. There's lots of talking and laughing (especially at my Bemba mistakes) and it's overall a good time. The kids bicker and pick on each other as everyone tries to keep the dogs away from the food. After we're done eating, and they've fed the dogs their portion of the nshima, I stick around to chat for a bit. My two-year-old sister comes and sits on my lap, and we talk about the day and what we're doing tomorrow.

So, as you can see, cooking isn't really that different here. Except for the fact that I don't have an oven. I really miss baking. So about two weeks ago, I decided to just try it anyway. I decided that my first attempt at brazier baking would be a chocolate cake. I wanted to make bread, but I didn't want to waste yeast in case it was an epic failure. So I used one of my pots as a Dutch oven. I put the cake batter in the pot, then adjusted my coals. I put some soda cans on the brazier to lift the pot off the heat, and put coals on the lid to heat from the top. My cake venture was semi-successful. I ended up not having enough coals; they were spent before the center of the cake had fully cooked. It still tasted good, though. So after learning that I needed more coals, I decided to attempt bread the next day. It was fully cooked and tasted like, well, bread. My only other baking venture was a tomato bread with onions and garlic. (I needed to use up my tomatoes before they went bad.) It was SO GOOD. I haven't really tried to bake anything else, but I'm looking forward to experimenting with brazier baking. :)

I must reiterate, though, that I will never take a kitchen for granted again. Even though I've figured out how to cook all these things from scratch, and even bake over a fire, it takes forever. I could easily spend 3 hours cooking one meal, especially if I want to do something fancy like potstickers. Having a stove, oven, microwave, coffee pot, refrigerator, freezer, a sink with running water... these things are such a luxury, and I never realized it.

frost

Now I've been living in the village for two whole months, and the time has flown by.

The first few weeks were kind of slow, because school hadn't started yet. I would get up in the morning, woken by the sun and the roosters, and start my charcoal brazier for some breakfast. Then I'd do dishes, and have nothing to do til it was time to cook lunch. After lunch, there was nothing to do till dinner. And after that, I went to be not to long after it got dark. Wash, rinse, repeat. So I read A LOT of books. (I've read 15 books I hadn't previously read, plus a few I already had. Thinking about copying Musi Lisa and posting a list with ratings/reviews/recommendations.) I walked around and met some people, or hung out with my host sisters. I would have done work on my house, but there's only so much organizing you can do when all your stuff is in piles or bags on the floor and you have no furniture.

Then school started and things picked up. A very early morning was added to my routine--school starts at 7am. So I would go to observe classes for the morning, and do other things (similar to the earlier routine) in the afternoon. I went to planning meetings, hung out with the teachers in the deputy head's office (our spot since there's no teacher's lounge), and watched classes that I wouldn't be teaching (like math) just to see them. It was really nice to have somewhere to be besides my house.

I ordered furniture from a local carpenter in my first week, and it started rolling in a few weeks into the term. So as I've been getting each piece, I've slowly gotten things out of bags and off the floor. I got huge incentive to especially do the latter when I found a snake curled up under one of my bags. Yikes! I also made chitenge curtains and painted some things on my walls. My mud hut is slowly looking like a home!

One other thing I've done to fill my time is work with the organization Safe Love. It's based in Lusaka, and I don't know if they're in every province (I think I remember them saying it was only in a few).  I've done a few presentations with the organization in my village and at a local college. My talking point was prevention of mother-to-child transmission, and it was really rewarding to know that the people I was talking to wouldn't have been able to get that info otherwise. Unsurprisingly, there aren't a lot of resources available to people in the rural areas on the topic. So it was good to be able to meet that need.

In other news, it gets REALLY cold here. It's gets to the point that you can see your breath in the morning, and that makes for an uncomfortable bike ride. I've been told that as it gets colder in July and August it may even frost in my area. I'm not gonna lie, I wasn't expecting frost in Africa. But we're in the equivalent of winter right now: cold season. It reminds me of late fall in the states actually. It's really cold at night, but still burning hot in the afternoon. Layers are key. :) It'll get colder in July, and then we'll transistion to "hot season," where it's unbearably hot all the time. And that's the other thing. It hasn't rained in the entire two months I've been at my site. I knew it was going to happen, but it's still crazy to try to wrap my mind around the fact that it won't rain again until November.

So I won't have blog-capable internet access for another month... I still have that much left of community entry, and then I'll be able to use the provincial house occasionally and blog more often (hopefully!). So it'll be a while before I update again.

bemba in space

Written on 4/6:

So once again we're all hanging out in the big insaka. This morning, we took our final language tests, the "Language Proficiency Interview." It's a thirty minute recorded interview with one of the testers. It's one of those tests that gets harder as you do better; the tester asks more advanced questions as you successfully answer the previous questions with as much vocab and as many complicated constructions as possible. Terrifying, right? So now we wait until Wednesday to see if we've done well enough to swear in as volunteers.

So to make the waiting easier, and to pass the time, we're watching Star Wars: A New Hope. (I love this group of people!) And there's a funny story to go with this. At the beginning when they've just recruited Han Solo and Jabba's representative finds him to hound him for money, the alien guy says, clear as day, "Muli shani." ("Muli shani" is Bemba for "how are you"). When we heard this we all cracked up, and rewound the movie to watch it again. So funny. Now I need to rewatch Star Wars to listen for more Bemba in the alien speech. :)

I'm moving to Lala-land

Written in my journal during second site visit, on 3/14:

So here I am at the end of my third full day in my new home. It's been a pretty eventful three days, too. I started my adventure here walking to see the school and visit my head teacher's home. After the crazy drive into the wilds to get to my house, it was a bit of a shock to see that he had electricity. The TV was on, two freezers were running, everything was modern, bright, and nice. I ate lunch there, even though I'd eaten just an hour and a half earlier at a rest stop in Kapiri. Ba Milton (the head teacher) called some of the other teachers over to meet me, walk me home, and fix the lock on my door. So they fixed my lock while I set up my borrowed tent and bathed. When they were finished, I fixed myself a grilled cheese and went to bed.
I started off Monday with a funeral. Since I'd never been to a Zambian funeral, I went to my bataata, who is the headman, to ask what I should wear. He told me that what I was wearing was fine, which surprised me since I was wearing a tshirt and a chitenge over my shorts - my wake-up-and-make-breakfast standard. So I finished my oatmeal, did the dishes, and we set off for the funeral. The walk was pretty impressive. It was long, first of all. We were walking along the train tracks for a good portion of it. My bataata was carrying a chicken under his arm and bamaayo had a bowl of mealie-meal on her head and a baby on her back. Other women walked with us, similarly laden. We walked through the market, which was abandoned in mourning for the dead chilolo [chief advisor]. We crossed the Mikunku River, which winds through a huge grassy field. As we were walking, I felt like I was really in Africa. When we got to the funeral, we went  straight into the house to it with the deceased's family. We sat in silence for a good ten minutes, then said our goodbyes and I'm-sorry-for-your-loss's and went outside. At this point, the men and women separated. I sat with the women (obviously) on mealie-meal sacks under some nice shady trees. There wasn't much talking, other than greetings and scolding of children. The kids were funny. One boy was climbing a tree, then all of a sudden dropped his pants and ran down the path. Too funny. My little sister sat on my lap for a bit, then ran off to play in the dirt. While we were sitting there watching the kids have fun, one of the women in front started this wailing song. Of course, I can understand it because it's in very fast Bemba, but I assume it's a song of loss. And it's eerie. Then the women inside the house began their own wailing. It created a dissonent counterpoint that was heartwrenching in the sincerity of feeling it represented.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to stay for the whole funeral. My bamaayo took me home so I could have lunch before I had to go to school. There was a language breakdown and some confusion about a chicken, but after it was all over, I had bamaayo walk me to ba Milton's house so we could chat about community entry. They laughed over y nshima cooking skills, then we did my timeline. When we were done, bamaayo had gone home to cook, so ba Milton had one of his nephews walk me home. We had a nice chat about choir, church, books, and his dream of becoming an English teacher like me. Bamaayo offered me a bowl of mealie-meal when I got home, which I refused. I told her: "Nshaleipikila ubwali. Nalalya umupunga." [I'm not going to cook ubwali for myself. I will eat rice.] I couldn't tell if she was offended or not, but she seemed to understand, at least. So I made some fabulous stir fry with my leftover chicken. As I was finishing my meal, the ENTIRE FAMILY crowded into my insaka to chill with me. It was fun. I started to get to know some of the kids/nephews and talked with an uncle.

I had to be at school at 6:40 on Tuesday, so the morning was a scramble. I woke up at 5 and managed somehow to light my brazier all by myself. My bamaayo was surprised when she came to offer me coals. So I got myself all ready and was shoveling my breakfast of leftover rice with sugar and peanut butter into my mouth, straight from the pan, when ba Susan came by to say hi. Kind of embarrassing. But I told her I had to leave in 5 minutes, guzzled the rest of my coffee, and hopped on my bike. The assembies [where they introduced me to the students] were anticlimactic and the teacher briefing was boring and slightly unnecessary. Well, maybe not. Who's to say? Anyway. The grade 2 teacher here is FANTASTIC. She makes me think of my mom. The grade 9 teacher seemed to be putting on a show for me, though. I went home for lunch, and once again turned down the offer of mealie-meal, in favor of leftover stirfry and an apple with peanut butter. Went back to school for a hot second, then came pack to do some PACA stuff. I got Ronald and Susan's family tree and the seasonal calendar done. They were both a lot more complicated than they needed to be. Made some soya and lentil sloppy joes for dinner, which were actually supposed to be burgers. Failed attempt. Good anyway thought. Just the boys chilled with me last night.

Today was a good day. I started off right with some pancakes. Bamaayo brought me some peanuts, which I honey-roasted to take to school. I got there at 9, only to sit for an hour. Then the deputy head and I got into his truck to go and meet the headmen. I didn't find out until after he'd backed into a tree that he taught himself to drive last October, when he got the truck, and doesn't have a license. Safe, right? Add to that the condition of the village "roads" and you've got a fun ride. It really was good though. And the whole time I was having moments. I just kept lookig out the windows and seeing grasslands and crazy trees/fields/rivers/huts/thatched roofs and thinking to myself, "I can't believe I'm in effing Africa." It was so surreal. Came home to a sandwich on two leftover pancakes and just chilled for two hours. It was glorious. I finished "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish." Then another observation. 5th grade. The teacher taught entirely in Bemba, so I was lost. And becaue I wasn't actively notetaking, I started absentmindedly flipping my pen around my thumb. I look up, and a group of kids is watching me, pens at the ready to try it. Too funny. After class, I taught ba Milton about email and Facebook and the internet. He thought you had to go to the post office to set up email!

Happy Pi Day, me! :)