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!
