One Month of Being at our New Home

The open well where we used to draw water looks like a wishing well. It's a small clear pool engulfed by sandy soil and rocks, and is fed by a mini waterfall that cascades between the knarled roots of a tree. After all the men in the village got together and dug a new well, this has become the place for washing dishes, which isn't as romantic as its previous use, because now there are fragments of nshima leftover from meals littering the silt. Because we don't have the convenience of running water, we go once a day to draw water in a 20 liter jerry can (a container for cooking oil -saladi- in its previous life), then carry it the half a kilometer back to our house.

Two of the kids, both about four years old, were pretending to ride sticks in our yard, and Chris and I debated about what the sticks represented- bicycles, motorbikes, horses, oxcarts? I asked the boy, Mpollo, "Cinshi mulecofa?" -what are you riding? He answered "ncinga" with his trademark big grin. Chris' eyes got really big and he turned to me and said, "That is so profoundly sad. Children in the U.S. don't have to play riding bikes, they actually ride bikes!" The kids also improvise toy cars by poking sticks through the sip holes of old beer cans. The old Castle Lager cans the volunteer before us left behind are the treasured toys of Muso and Mpollo. Plastic bags are also wadded up and tied with tree bark to make soccer balls. So Mom, thank you so much for sending us toys to distribute. I'm sure they will be cherished.

Most of the clothing that makes it to the villages comes from European or American thrift shops or are donations. The clothing is then sold in little stalls and worn until its permanently dingy anf literally in tatters. Party dresses from the 1980s, with broken zippers in the back, seem to be the favorites of Zambian little girls. Garments that were manufactured as nightgowns for girls in developed countries have metamorphisized into everyday clothing as well. Most amusing though, is the boys who wear fitted tee shirts with sparkly letters or sayings like 'girls rule.' One of our immediate neighbors, a boy of about five or six, wears a now beige, but once white shirt with rhinestones and 'angel' printed in rainbow letters. On Sundays though, the whole village transforms, very Twilight Zone-ish, with everyone well-scrubbed, clothing spotless, and shoes are actually worn. Zambia, as we are told over and over, is "a Christian nation," which means, I guess, that everyone has to look their best for God.

Most of the children in our village have the big, distended bellies and thin limbs characteristic of malnutrition. The staple food is nshima, cornmeal and water cooked into lumps that is then broken into small balls and dipped in beans or greens. Nshima is eaten for lunch and dinner; people will say they haven't eaten if they have ingested anything other than nshima. The typical villagers diet is also lacking in protein; meat is expensive and people are without refrigeration, so it is a very rare treat. While mealie meal (cornmeal) is cheap, it doesn't provide the energy and vitamins children need, so although their bellies might be full, they're undernourished. There's also a hunger season once a year, several months after harvest, that is approaching soon. Most everyone are subsistence farmers, so they'll often sell too much food to get money, and not leave enough for their family.

To get some much needed protein in our own diets, we are keeping chickens for egg-laying. We paid a neighbor 20,000 kwacha (about $4) to make us a log henhouse. It's about 3 feet by 3 feet with a grass roof and elevated so that my head is even with the top of the roof. Best of all, it was constructed without the use of nails; it's sturdy but free standing. Finding chickens, however, has proved difficult. Everyone keeps chickens, but no one wants to sell them because they represent food security. Finally, Chris' community mentor rode his bicycle into our yard, with his young son on the back clutching a brown hen under one arm. I sat on our front porch with the hen in my arms, stroking her soft cocoa feathers, for about twenty minutes, while Ba Alan and Bashiamos, our host father, laughed that I was holding her like a baby. In my defense, I've never held a chicken before! We named her Kalipa (ukukalipa means to anger or hurt in Bemba) because she clucked angrily at us a lot that day. She is free range like all the chickens around, so for the first few nights we had to chase her around or ask a boy to grab her from a tree and then shut her into the henhouse for the night. Now however, she'll go on her own to her house every night at around 5:45pm. She has become very friendly with a gorgeous brown rooster from next door, but she is yet to lay any eggs.

The young boys here are very adept at catching animals. Near the school one day, we heard a pack of boys shouting excitedly from inside a grove of banana trees. Ten minutes later they emerged triumphantly, the oldest one dragging what looked from far way to be a young crocodile from the tail. We went closer to investigate, and it turned out to be a 3-foot long monitor lizard, vaguely resembling an iguana, but brown and with a heavier body. Monitor lizards aren't venomous, but they're a creature to be reckoned with. They can be very dangerous if harassed because they have strong jaws and a serrated tail.

Another time, a boy by the road was holding a genet he'd killed. Genets have sleek, long bodies and tails, big ears and pointed noses, and spots. They almost look like a cross between a house cat and a weasle. Birds, too, are killed by the boys with slingshots with surprising accuracy. In the early evening we were sitting on our porch with some boys, when we heard some birds begin chirping from a nearby tree. The boys picked up some pebbles and nailed two little birds, smaller than the palms of their hands. They are very tasty, we were assured. Every animal caught is cooked and eaten with nshima.

Our house is two rooms, plus a small storage room, with a grass roof and a cement porch. The walls are made of mud brick coated with plaster, and are now varying shades of purple and sky blue, after we used a large chunk of our settling-in allowance to splurge on paint. Also calling our house home are termites who like to tunnel on our freshly painted walls, mice who have shown little interest in our food and instead eat the platstic lining of our roof, ants who apparently really enjoy Chinese cabbage, and strangely, wall crickets. "Why," I asked Chris exasperated, shortly after we arrived, "can't we have a plague of something pleasant, like butterflies?" Prophetically, the next day as I walked into our bathing shelter, a swarm of beautiful blue butterflies rose into the air. Bathing here, in that sense, makes me feel like the heroine in a Disney movie.

Our double bed, shrouded with a mosquito net, takes up most of our bedroom, so we didn't bother to paint that room. From our flight over here, we liberated two thin red blankets that serve nicely as rugs on our cement floors. Opposite our bed are two shelves that hold most of our belongings. The sitting room is furnished with a table, two wood sling chairs, and a camp chair. A piece of purple fabric, or citenge, with Obama's picture and a map of Africa, is a nice wall hanging.

Our pit latrine is a separate plaster and grass building with a small square hole about five feet deep. We throw ash from our fires down the hole every so often, which makes the smell not bad at all. If you shine the flashlight down the hole at dusk, you can see bats flying around, which is both disturbing and kind of neat.

From when we wake up in the morning until dusk, there's a flow of children that trinkle through our yard. They have four favorite activities. The first is to say "mpeeleniko" (please give me) books, pens, plastic bags, candy, et cetera. When that fails, they request "lisheni cilimba," or play guitar. Or, increasingly, they'll say "Tulefwaya ukusambilia icisungu." This means they want an English lesson. One of my favorite kids, a girl of about eight years old named Patricia, is particularly fond of this. She'll listen attentively while Chris and I converse in English, not comprehending a word, but then will carefully repeat sentences. Once Chris and I were checking phone messages by the road, at the only tree in our village with cell phone service. Chris opened an e-mail and suddenly exclaimed, "Oh wow, this girl I worked with at Bassett, she popped!" Immediately, Patricia triumphantly echoed, "She POPPED!" So Sheena, if you're reading this, Congratulations!

Patricia asked me about my mother one day, so I showed her my pictures I brought. She studied them very carefully, and after I'd named off everyone in my family a few times, she'd point to them in subsequent pictures and name them. She was especially pleased when we went through my pictures from graduation, and I pointed to American Patricia, my roommate Trish from college.

In the absence of television or toys with which to amuse themselves, the next best thing to children here is the musungu man playing American songs on his guitar. Chris gets this request at least twice a day. When he starts to play, the kids will flock, tie citenge (brightly colored fabric) in a band around their hips, and dance. The crowd pleasers are always "Twist and Shout" and "What I Got" by Sublime. The children don't understand what the words mean, but they have developed int0 fine little backup singers. Mwenya, the youngest boy from our host family who is about 11, will often walk by our house on his way to the well singing "Looovin' is what I got."

Chris and I have decided to partake on a "door-to-door campaign" of the vilage, as my counterpart, the head teacher, amply calls it. On Saturdays and Sundays we visit people at their houses, with Ba Mulenga to translate, to introduce ourselves, ask what they think the biggest problems in the village are, and urge people to talk to us anytime. Some of the problems we've heard again and again are the scarcity of clean water sources, the need for adult literacy, gender inequality, and a lack of medical facilities. The women are overburdened with work and childcare, and want family planning (the average number of children in a family here is probably around 7 or 8), pre-natal care, and to learn about nutrition.

While our visits have given us a good idea of how we can help as Peace Corps volunteers, they're very depressing. We stopped at one house, inhabited by a skeletal-looking old woman with an apple-sized tumor on her inner cheek, that had only sniffing tobacco to make her constant pain go away. At another house, a shy, pregnant teen-ager cut cabbage as Ba Mulenga explained she had dropped out of grade six to get married and have a baby, which is sadly very common. We've also recently had a death in the village; a baby that was less than two-years old.

Our latest pictures can be found at:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=97895&id=713467480&l=dc0311ffd9
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Todd- I'm glad to hear your students would be excited to write to the upper grade students at the village school here. It would be letters, in case you misunderstood, there are definately no computers. Comprehension of English is minimal (Zambia is actually slipping backward as far as English language goes; adults are more likely to be able to communicate in it than their children), although in schools they are taught in a combination of both English and Bemba. I'm sure if the teachers and I help translate though, your kids will be able to understand correspondence. It would also help kids here learn English.

Heather and Mom- Doreen is 17 years old, she was born two weeks after Heather, actually. See above for explanation of language. She likes dancing and playing netball (kind of like basketball). Write her a letter when you get a chance Heather, and I'll pass it on to her.

Sheena- Thank you for the card and picture. Your baby girl actually has the same hairstyle as Chris now; he let me cut him a mohawk one lazy afternoon.