I’ve decided that the worst part about being in a rural African village, 150 kilometers away from the nearest town, is going outside at night and seeing the AMAZING display of stars, so clear and crisp with stars I didn’t even know were there, and NOT being able to lay out under them for fear or malaria-carrying mosquitoes, stinging ants, impashi, and rats. Standing for a few minutes looking up just doesn’t do it for me.

On nights when there’s a full moon, it’s also amazing how bright everything is at night. It’s like sunlight, only it’s moonlight. Very beautiful, yet eerie.

I want to make a correction. I think that I was mistaken in my last blog when I complained about Zambians not having any regard for nature (e.g. cutting down a tree just to get the caterpillars out; breaking a bird’s legs long before you eat it, letting it suffer, etc.) The more I thought about it, the more I realized that most people in the United States have no regard for nature either. But since they’re not LIVING with nature, they’re a step removed. While they may cringe or criticize the Zambian examples I just gave and not have the heart/stomach to personally perform such deeds, they still cause such things to happen. Trees are chopped down to build their malls all the time, and the chicken they bought at the grocery store suffered in a small cage with its beak cut off. They’re not holding the chicken down and cutting its beak off, but its happening for their benefit anyhow. Is it any different?

Some kids came by the other week with a bucket full of honeycomb they had chopped out of a tree. We bought the whole thing for a ridiculously cheap price. (I guess we’re just as guilty – benefiting from a robbed hive without doing it ourselves… oh well.) After picking out dead bees, we squeezed and strained the honey into one mayonnaise jar and two jelly jars. I thought we’d have a life supply after that, but we’ve polished almost it all off in just two weeks! Hopefully once we get our beebox repaired, we can get our own hive of bees and be able to humanely harvest enough honey to satiate our honey needs.

The night that we got the honey, I even dreamed about it! I “woke up” telling Doug to get the honey stick. He wouldn’t cooperate and I fell back asleep. Now we’ll never know what a “honey stick” is and how it works.

On another honey note, Doug’s grandmother has been sending us articles about this colony collapse disorder that’s been happening in hives recently. On the one hand, it’s interesting that bees are in the news now and hopefully someone can find a cure for whatever the problem is, but it also makes me worry that beekeeping is going to become a fad now and we’ll have too much competition when we get back to the States!

Now I’ll talk about the chickens. New Chicken is really funny. She’s like a dog, coming in the house all the time and begging for food – or stealing it right off of our plates! Doug also taught her a good trick. He holds a peanut up several feet in the air and she’ll jump up to pluck it out of his hand! Fireball will do it now too, but not Pochohantas.

Fireball is still broody, and now we have THREE broody hens, which means no new eggs for over a month. They’re broody differently though. Fireball is just plain crazy, picking up pieces of debris and throwing them behind her as if she’s building a nest, no matter where she is. New Chicken makes a wonderful little meowing-gurgling noise if you approach her when sitting on the nest and puffs up like a turkey when off the nest. Pocahontas doesn’t have any distinguishable traits and doesn’t really compete for the nest like the other two. One day, Fireball and New Chicken were both piled on top of each other on the nest. Pretty cute.

Since all three are just sitting around now, we decided to let them hatch the last two eggs they produced and cross our fingers that they’re not headless. We candled the eggs and you can kinda see some veins and something moving around in one of them, but the other one isn’t doing much. Maybe it’s not fertilized. I’m excited to see if they’ll hatch!

I believe that I have found my favorite bush fruit! Mufundo was my favorite, until we discovered that a certain bug likes to lay its eggs in the fruits. Now, it’s the Monkey Orange, this ball with a rock hard shell and gray innards that look like liver/brains. It’s looks terrible and is all slimy, but tastes really good and is fun to pull apart to eat.

We’ve been rushing around trying to get some gardening done before the rains come more steadily. (Now, it rains lightly on and off all day every other day or so.) We built a tree nursery out of the fruit tree seeds we’ve been saving – Tamarind, Baobab, Custard Apple, Mufundo, Suku, and some flowering trees. That’s all I can remember. It was pretty fun. We’re doing experiments to see which grows best – planting the seed as is, cold water treatment, hot water treatment, or scarification. Even though I will never get the benefit of any of these fruit trees, I think it’s a good thing to do. No one plants trees (anywhere, not just Zambia), even though it’s so easy – and free – to do. I figure if I can’t make any difference in my actual work by the time I leave, at least I will leave Mpelembe with lots of fruit to eat for years to come. If they don’t chop and burn the trees, that is.

We also made our own small field behind the house! Hoed one day, composted the second day, and planted the third. Pumpkins, Melons, Beans, Peanuts, and Corn! Now we’ll just sit back and wait for the rain to do the work.

It’s funny that we try so hard to garden and farm, yet the garden is still a disaster being destroyed by insects and disease. Doug and I even were invited to do a training in Chalilo about “food security.” So we spent two full days on the living room floor planning out how to teach about planning ahead, diversification, saving seed, solar drying, storing food, fruit trees, livestock, etc, as well as composting, natural ways to prevent pests, and how to make income from agricultural projects. (It’s pretty funny because as we were preparing the topics, I was also reading “Ishmael,” this philosophical environmental book that’s kind of anti-farming, anti-storing-food, anti-aid-to-developing-countries, etc, book.) So on the day of the training, we traveled the 30 kilometers to Chalilo and set out to search for “Rayd Kabango,” the one who invited us. He was supposed to meet us at the market and the meeting was supposed to start at 10:00. (He was to announce to the others that the starting time was 9:00, because according to Zamtime, they would arrive at 10:00.) We had bad transport, so didn’t get there until 10:00. After not having much luck finding him, my old neighbor Kapiria who is now a shopkeeper there, led us to the bar where Rayd was drinking. After some confussion about what was going on, he said that 32 people arrived for the training at 7:00 – 8:00, and when we didn’t arrive, they left at 10:00. At first I felt really bad and guilty that we had missed them, but the more I started thinking about it, the more I thought maybe it was “fiction,” as Kapiria put it. Maybe I’m just too cynical or am trying to find an excuse to not feel bad that it’s my fault, but I’ve heard of this exact same situation happening to other volunteers. Stuff just didn’t add up. If he told people 9:00, why in the world would they show up at 7:00? I’ve never heard of a Zambian showing up early to anything, let alone two hours early. And if Rayd was supposed to meet us at the market, why didn’t anyone know anything about it when we arrived? The “Village Action Group” head guy, who runs the place where it was supposed to be held, was saying that he knew nothing about the training and apologized for people being drunk. And Rayd answered “32” – a very exact number – very quickly when we asked how many people were there. Did he really count them all? I don’t know what really happened and I guess I never will, but he’s gonna send us a bushnote if he wants to reschedule.

On the way back, we were crammed in the back of a pickup with several other Zambians and a chicken (a transport regular) when it started raining. I was enjoying the rain, but quick as a whistle, they pulled out a piece of black plastic to hold over all of us. It smelled like fish and flapped around in the wind so violently on my head that it sounded like we were in a warzone or in a firework or something. It was such a ridiculous thing, all I could do was laugh.

When we got back to Mpelembe, we told Peg that we saw Kapiria in Chalilo (because we think maybe they have a thing for each other). She acted kind of confussed, and later the headman tried to ask us what we were talking about, because apparently “icililo” means “dead body” and she thought we were saying that. Oops.

Another terrible Bemba mistake, is that Doug said “Mwacibukeni” (Good Morning) to someone too late in the day and was scolded by Rayd, who said that could be taken as an insult because you’re implying they just woke up. This just cracked Doug and I up and now if we want to brutally insult each other, we know how.

For several nights, I heard koswe (rats) squealing up a storm in the kitchen, but was too tired to go investigate. Finally one night Doug got up to see what the ruckus was and found a koswe in the bag of chili peppers Peter gave us. So apparently, night after night, this stupid koswe was munching on the hot peppers, then squealing in agony, but kept on eating more and squealing in agony more. So stupid.

Another evening, as I was coming toward the house, my heart stopped when I saw a swarm of impashi going up the bike ramp into the house! I jumped around for awhile, not knowing what to do, until neighborlady and her daughter caught my Carrie-crafted broom on fire to sweep the impashi away. It was quite exciting. Fallingdownpantsboy got bit, but he thought it was funny. Later, I found an impashi clinging onto my skirt, but it never got me. They’re soooo tricky. They’ll crawl all the way up your skirt or your pant leg and you’ll never feel it until they get high enough that you can’t get them. THEN they start to attack.

I showed fallingdownpantsboy how to make paper airplaines and origami frogs, but he wasn’t very impressed. As I was trying to play with him, he just kept asking me to give him things. Neighborlady and Iron Mumba send him or one of their other slavechildren over all the time to beg from us. “Ba Mumba balefwaya shuka/imbalala/lapu/umusalu/etc/etc/etc” (Mr./Mrs. Mumba wants sugar/peanuts/rape/vegetables/etc/etc/etc.” It’s gotten to the point where one of them asks us for something every single day, often several times a day. Of late, sugar has been their main request and I’m pretty sure they want it to brew beer.

Fallingdownpantsboy has a “new” pair of pants – that have a big hole in the back! So we still see his little buttcheeks even if the pants are not falling down. Doug claims he’s seen these ones fall down too.

I’ve given up on my girls club for the term and am going to try to start fresh next term. Life Skills class is going ok. I did a session on HIV last week and it went pretty well actually, so that’s good.

So I’ve been comparing Jamaica, the USA, and Zambia, and trying to figure out some trend. Jamaica is the most violent, but also has the most lively people. Zambia is the most peaceful, but also the most boring. (Remember my description of Zambian holiday celebrations?) United States is in the middle of both. I don’t know if these two qualities correlate or not, but maybe. How could a very bad quality correspond with a very good quality though? I’m not even sure what I mean. Like, Zambians will sit on the minibus and let the driver totally lie to them and rip them off, and not say anything. They just put up with it and won’t step out of line. Whereas if that happened in Jamaica, someone would probably throw the minibus driver out the window. Zambians just won’t step out of line in any way – the clothes they wear, how their houses look, what they farm, anything. Trying to buy K8,000 of peanuts instead of K10,000 of peanuts was like pulling teeth. One CAN’T possibly have K8,000 of peanuts. You just can’t. It must be K10,000. Along the road, all the people sell the exact same item for miles. It’s just not good to be different, creative, or to prosper. Guess it’s the whole collective thing. I’m still not sure what I mean. Does anyone else know?

Another strange Zambian thing is that they’re pretty concerned with “looking smart” and having things clean. I’ve been scolded by neighborlady many times for not washing the outside of my pots. “Doowty,” she says and then scrubs it with sand until it’s clean. I’ve also got scolded several times about my “village shirt” – this terrible white man’s shirt (white colored shirt) I wear all the time to keep the sun off me. It’s completely filthy and is full of holes because I caught it on fire once. A Ministry of Education guy told me I looked like a charcoal burner and a shopkeeper told me I could NOT go on transport looking like that. Zambians also get concerned when I sit on the ground instead of a mat, chitenge, chair, ledge, etc. I’ve been asked many times by confused Zambians, in the village and in the boma, just WHY I was sitting on the floor/ground. It really doesn’t matter at all to me. I actually find it more comfortable to sit on the ground most of the time. But to them it’s just savage and doowty.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do for Thanksgiving. Doug and I might try to make a “feast” at the hut as best we can, or we might come to the Peace Corps house to celebrate with other volunteers. Some people are going to Kasanka (the national park by my house) too, which I still have to do soon to see this supposed fruit bat migration.

I think it’d be fun to travel somewhere for Christmas, but I just don’t think I can. Most volunteers visit one of the neighboring African countries (Zanzibar, Mozambique, Malawi, Namibia – I’m sure none of those are spelled right) and claim it’s cheap, but as they describe it to me, spending $500 - $1,000 or more, I just can’t imagine. I barely have that in my home bank account. I might wait til Easter to do it so I can save up money from my stipend here. Right now I have nothing from all the trips to Lusaka and such.

So since I can’t take or post photos, I guess I’ll just give in and describe my house. It’s made of fired mud bricks held together with mud. The roof is thatched grass. It’s set up off the ground with a “wrap around porch” as I call it – basically a mud brick ledge just wide enough to sit on. I built a bike ramp and step going up into it. The door fits loosely in its frame and is secured with a chain and a lock. When you go through the door, it’s a hallway that goes to the back and then to the right. What used to be on the right was a solid brick wall, but I took part of it down, so you can get into the living room from there. The main hallway is used for storing our bikes, so it’s pretty hard to even get through. The old back hallway is now the closet/garage with my new shelf for clothes/books and tools/seeds hanging on the wall. There’s some windows of missing bricks back there. If you back up to the beginning of the main hallway, the kitchen is on the left, where I have a table for making food, a shelf with storage bins for food, lots of hanging baskets for food, water filter, water bucket, water jerry cans, a bag of charcoal in the corner, and pots and pans hanging on the wall. It has a real window with a shutter. A bent nail keeps the shutter closed, so if you want it open, you have to twist the nail. On the back left is the bedroom, which is literally a bed surrounded by wall. There’s a mosquito net and a “dirt flap” hanging over the bed. More of the little hole windows. The living room is on the right as you walk in, with two real windows. It has a reed mat on the floor, a little loveseat bench, a camp chair, a wood chair, a basket for books, and a little side table. Some hanging baskets, a “bulletin board” of string and clothespins, and a wall of photos. There ya go.

So right now I’m in Serenje for a Ministry of Education meeting and also to help Michelle and Mary Lu (the new director of the RED program) visit schools to decide where to place a new education volunteer. We visited two possible zonal schools. The one seems good because it has a female head teacher, which is rare, so I think it’d be good to support that school, but the other one I really prefer. It’s older and probably needs more help. The headteacher was this funny little man with huge thick glasses. They seemed more friendly and eager to have Peace Corps than the other. Then Mary Lu is coming out to my site because she wants to see where all the volunteers live and meet with their counterparts. So since there’s a motoka going directly from the Peace Corps house to my house, I’m busy stocking up on toilet paper, candles, milk powder, oats, etc. Exciting!

Note: If anyone’s thinking of ever visiting, just to let you know, the best time would be April – July, April being the most lush, but maybe slightly rainy or buggy, June being the coldest (too cold at night, actually), and July being the most barren and ugly, but with a slight chance of seeing a citimene.


Handy Hut How To – How to Make Drinking Water

Get your bike out of the house and strap your jerrycan to the back. Bike a kilometer to the school where there’s a water pump. Wait for all the kids to get done filling up buckets to water the flowers at the school (which happens more than they’re in class), then line up the hole in the jerrycan under the spigot. Pump about 80 times, then put a piece of plastic over the hole and screw on the lid. (It’ll leak all over you as you bike otherwise.) Lift up the 900 pound jug and try to balance it on your kickstand-less bike as you tie it on. Walk the bike out of the schoolyard (no bike riding allowed!), then hop on. Maybe stop and see if Triza is selling any amabunsies. Bike back to the hut, try to balance your kickstand-less bike as you unload, and lug jerrycan into the house. Pour water into the tea kettle. (Most of it will go on the floor.) Build a fire and boil the water. Pour the boiled water into the red bucket. Once the water is cool, assess the fullness of the waterfilter (too much water and it’ll leak!) and pour the cooled boiled water into the top. Wait for the water to filter. Turn the tap and drink! Repeat all day every day.


Bonnibelle – Thanks for the candy!