We Met the President of Zambia!!

This month in constituencies all over Zambia, people are electing new members of Parliament. The two main competing parties in our area are the Patriotic Front and the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD), which holds the majority of seats in the country, including the Presidency. Both parties have been actively campaigning in our village, and every household has a flyer or textile feauturing their candidate of choice plastered on their hut. The campaigners have been driving through in big trucks with PA systems blasting, holding rallies and recruiting voters. About four days ago, a helicopter circled around the village and headed back in the direction of Kasama. We never see aircraft overhead, so the village was in an uproar with everyone exclaiming about the chidayo and pointing into the sky.  There was word that the president of Zambia would be visiting the village the afternoon of October 12. We didn't believe it because we live in a remote village of no real political importance. The day came, and to our surprise, a plethora of cars and a battalion of soldiers arrived at the schoolyard and began setting up a tent, a covered podium, and a temporary flagpole for the Zambian flag and coat of arms. Opportunistic sellers arrived with vegetables, beans, and scones to sell, and urban-dwellers from Kasama and bigger cities eagerly snatched up the "village food." Women began beating drums, wagging their citenge-clad hips to the beat, and singing about the MMD. Radio Mano arrived from Kasama with their "velvet-voiced" DJ to broadcast the event and blast Zam pop. Then, the helicopters arrived, stirring up thick red dust and landing on the football pitch. Everyone ran to wave at their arrival, choking on the dust while throwing their thumb and forefinger in the air, the sign for the MMD. We were shepherded back by stern soldiers with AK-47s, then his excellency President Rupiah Banda greeted the people, lingering long enough to shake our hands and mention he had just been to New York, and all his children attend university in America. Some of his officers spoke before him, urging support for the MMD's candidate, Burton Mgala. Then Banda (an iciNyanja speaker reared in Eastern Province) took the microphone, speaking eloquently in English, as his words were translated into icibemba. He spoke against the PF's candidate, Mr. Sata (nicknamed "King Cobra") and urged support for the MMD. He spoke against tribalism influencing politics, chanting "One Zambia, One Nation," the mantra to avoid the tribal fighting that has consumed many of Zambia's neighbors. Glancing at us, he said Zambia should follow America's example, and look beyond tribal similarity to elect the best candidate, much as Americans, a white majority, elected Obama. After concluding his speech and introducing his officers, President Banda gamely took a picture with us, then was shuffled off by his security. Everyone circled the helicopter to watch it take off, and President Banda waved to his supporters, then spotting us waving back, waved both arms over his head in an enthusiastic goodbye.




****Disclaimer: As Peace Corps volunteers, we are politically neutral. These are primarily observations of events, and do not indicate a support for the MMD. ****


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I don't think many people can say that their oven is made out of scrap metal from an old car and clay bricks dug from the dambo and fired in a homemade kiln. We didn't make the bricks ourselves, although that may be Chris' next hobby after he gets bored of making charcoal, but we laid the bricks with a mortar of clay, sand and water.

There are men in Kasama who work just outside the entrance to the Roundabout Market, surrounded by scraps of old metal, which they pound into braziers and pots with hammers under the merciless hot season sun. If you need anything made, say a large cooking pot called a shomeka, they can form it in a day and sell it to you for the cost of a magazine in America. We sat and watched an old man as he filled our order, screaming in icibemba over the clanking of metal about how a shomeka can be transformed into an oven. Give a shomeka to a bamaayo in Zambia and she'll cook nshima in it over a wood fire, but give it to us and we'll encase it sideways in bricks and use it to cook pizza.

The chimney is made of powdered milk containers wired together and covered with clay. Unfortunately, we don't drink enough Cowbell, because the chimney is only about three feet long, and doesn't clear the grass roof of our insaka. The first time we used our oven, we marveled on how well the chimney drew smoke out, that it insulated heat well, and that you didn't need to build an actual fire, just throw some kindling in and light it. Ten minutes later, a rapidly growing patch of our roof was in flames. We spent some frantic moments dumping any water we could find on it. Our roof now has a bald spot, but we like to pretend it's a skylight.



On the second day of every month, a traveling market comes to the next village over. It's called umunada, a Swahili word. There's merchants crowded on both sides of the road for a kilometer selling citenge, clothes, gum boots, meter-long bars of soap, 50 kg bags of flour labeled "for human consumption," vegetables, piles of dried fish swarming with flies, and colorful cardboard-backed signs depicting Jesus dying gruesomely on the cross. Congesting the road further are slow-moving flatbed trucks carrying a cargo of people, bamaayos in colorful citenge with babies slung over their backs haggling deafeningly over said wares, and intoxicated men stumbling from the beer huts. I was peeling carrots by candlelight when Patricia, a nine-year old neighbor, came over carrying a brown rooster with its legs bound with a strip of citenge. The chicken protested, Willow bounded at her, and she threw the chicken at me as if it was a detonated bomb. Her uncle was selling the chicken to get money for the market, and a chicken that cost the price of two shriveled chicken nuggets in the U.S. flying into my lap amidst carrot peelings was an "only in Zambia" moment.

On the 9th of October, a 65-year old woman in our village passed away. She had been suffering for quite some time from a malignant tumor on the inside of her cheek, without the benefit of chemotherapy or painkillers. Like all the elderly in the village, she had only snuff to ease the pain.

On the day I attended her funeral, we were also frantically called to the house of a teenage girl
who had swallowed battery acid in a suicide attempt, so needless to say it was an emotional day.

On the day of a person's death, their body is wrapped in a blanket and put inside their family's hut. Mourners quietly sit inside the dark house with the deceased's closest family members upon arrival, then go outside to sit segregated by sex. People arrive throughout the day, and as a sign of respect for the deceased, sleep outside the house at night. All the while, some men work on piecing together a coffin out of roughly hewn timber.

When the coffin is finished the next day, there's a processional to the cemetery. The graveyard is deep in the bush, far from the village, so that the spirits can't bother the living. Children are buried in one graveyard, adults in another, with mounds of dirt marked with rough wooden crosses.

As the gravediggers were working, the old woman's daughters and granddaughters leaned on the coffin and wailed. A choir sitting in the leaves sang. The coffin was lowered, a prayer was said by a Catholic shimapepo, and the family members threw clods of dirt on the coffin.


It's the hungry season now, so relish is becoming scarce. Everything has been harvested and is diminishing quickly, so we've seen more kids than usual out hunting small birds, bush rats, and catapillars. We saw two boys around six-years-old holding pieces of strings, the ends attached to the tails of bush rats that greatly resemble gerbils. Evidently, playing with food is popular. Patricia came by with some friends one morning to offer some catapillars to Chris.