I’m in Serenje now for our biannual provincial meeting for Peace Corps. It’s weird to think that this is my last one! We’re also celebrating Thanksgiving, which is a big thing to cook for twenty people! I’m making pies.

I’ve been worrying about what I was going to do with all of my animals when my service ends, but it seems that Zambians and nature are doing a pretty good job of taking care of that for me.

• While I was in Serenje last time, someone stole Fireball and WeeWeeWee. The neighbors were away visiting family, but said that they would return after one week. The day I left was the day they were supposed to return, so I assumed it was ok. But of course, they didn’t return and that left my house even more unprotected than usual. So I blame it on them in part. (Why can’t they just tell me the truth for once?! It’s been a month and half and they’re still not back.) Out of all of the chickens, the three core chickens are Fireball, Pocahontas, and New Chicken (don’t tell the others), so for Fireball to be stolen was awful. She was my first chicken. I took my remaining four chickens to stay at the headman’s house this time so they’d be safe.
  
  
• I went to Kasanka to visit Changa, my bushbaby. She was cute as ever and a little more chubby. I have gotten word, however, that several days later, she suddenly died. Apparently, the guy who usually looks after her was away and the one in charge didn’t give her water.
  
  
• It’s mushroom season now so I bought a huge mushroom and cooked it up. I was then ridiculously sick the whole night. I always give the cats some of my food, so Ngwi was sick too. The next day, I looked at the half of the mushroom I hadn’t used and saw it was covered in white fuzzy mold. I hadn’t noticed the night before because it was dark when I was cooking. I recovered, but Ngwi continued to throw up and then became constipated. I don’t know if the constipation was because of the mushroom or not. More likely, she probably swallowed string or some object that was blocking her intestine. After a week and a half, she still wasn’t pooping. I asked my head teacher to take my phone with him when he was going to the boma to call the vet, but he said he would “only as a last resort.” I have a book about caring for cats and dogs which I read through every day in search of an explanation. I gave her vegetable oil and milk, hoping it would work as a laxative. I gave her garlic, which is supposed to be good for gastrointestinal disorders. But nothing helped. On Monday night, I finally decided I’d go to the clinic in the morning to see if they had some syringe or something that I could use for an enema. (I was desperate, as you can see.) The next morning she was a little droopy eyed, but still purred when I would pet her. A half hour later, I found her dead on the porch. It was completely devastating and I can’t get the image out of my mind. Living alone, my animals are my best friends and my family here. Kapiria was borrowing my hoe, so I found him in the peanut field to get the hoe back to bury Ngwi. I started crying as soon as I asked him. I think he was kind of confused and uncomfortable because Zambians don’t have “pets” like we do. He knows I love my animals though, so he went with me (in the rain) to bury her. She now has a proper Zambian burial mound. I put the seed of one of my favorite Zamtrees in the mound so she can be reincarnated as a tree.

Now that I’ve depressed everyone.

Doug sent catnip for the cats, but they didn’t give a diddlysquat about it! The chickens pecked at it a little. It just doesn’t do anything for Zambian cats, I suppose. Ngwi liked pipecleaners a little bit, so at least we know that is universal.

So rainy season has officially started. And all of a sudden, everything is different. Everything looks more saturated and the lighting is beautiful. Grass and weeds are sprouting. Kids are selling mushrooms. There’s huge claps of thunder with lighting and wind. There’s a whole slew of new bugs, including these weird spider/scorpions and even tarantulas. There’s also these neat bugs that flutter in swarms in the evening and look just like fairies. The cats like to jump and twist into the air trying to get them. It’s a very whimsical scene. The patio fence is collapsing from the weight of the rain. Funny fat frogs have emerged that are so fat they walk instead of hopping. The village paths have turned into small streams, which makes biking interesting. I’m covered in bug bites and rashes and have had a botfly already. My hut stinks from mildewey clothes that after washing, I haven’t been able to dry for four days because it’s rained every day. Yep, it’s rainy season.

I was pretty sure I understood that it was rainy season, but Zambia really wanted to make sure I knew. As soon as I left Kasanka on my trip to visit Changa, it started pouring and it didn’t stop for the whole several hour bike ride back to Mpelembe. I was soaked, but it was rather exhilarating, actually.

On the way, a car pulled over and an aid worker from Chicago stopped to chat with me. It was nice. He gave me several bags of delicious food because he had just been to a big grocery store! I felt very bad for him, though. He had just escaped a hunt after him because the villagers he was working with found out he was gay and Jewish and thought he was the devil.

When I got back home the same day, I found that someone had stole the bag of fish I had hung under the back roof eave. I recommended to Peace Corps to replace my site, but I’m not so sure about the house. It would be irresponsible to put another volunteer in that same exact area, given the continuous problems I’ve had with theft. The woman who lived in the house before me wants it back anyways.

I planted some cucumbers, pumpkins and loofahs in ShakeShake containers and strung them up on the poles of the patio roof so they can climb over it. (ShakeShake is this awful lumpy “beer” that comes in a box.) They’re not climbing yet, but they look ridiculously cute and picturesque.

Zambians are funny how they’re so particular about things. I always get in trouble if my shirt is dirty or ripped. And when I was at the Post Office, my tropical (flip-flop) broke. It was impossible to continue wearing it, so I just kicked it off and stood in line one-shoed. Oh the looks I got!

I think one afternoon basically summed up my Zambian experience. First, one of the neighbors stopped by and told me to give her the grass from my roof. When I told her that no, I wasn’t going to do that, she instead asked for the chain on my door. Next, I was sitting in my hammock reading when “Cowboy” came over and proceeded to stand behind me and look over my shoulder for a half hour. Later, I was inside and heard someone calling me from the path outside. I called back, but he insisted he wanted to see me. Thinking he wanted to ask me something, I went outside. But no, he literally just wanted to see me. After he was satisfied, he continued biking along.

The next week continued to be very Zambian. Justin scolded me for using a reed mat as my fence door instead of as a mat. Boy did I get in trouble! Then Peg asked me to accompany her to the roadside while she bought biscuits and Super Mahao (lumpy sweetened drink made out of mealie meal.) She said she needed to buy these things to eat, because if she ate nshima on that particular day, she would become sick. I asked her to explain, and she demonstrated that she’d start screaming hysterically like she has in the past when she has her fits.

As I was biking one day, a man asked me if I knew Chip, who was a volunteer in the area a long time ago. He said they were best friends. Yet he had no idea that Chip hadn’t been in the country for ten years. Zambians treat the word “friend” so lightly, that it makes me wonder if relationships here are as deep as they are in the US. When you read the advice column in The Post, the letters from 25 year olds sound like they were written by a 13 year old with a crush. “I love him so much and want to have his baby, but he doesn’t know my name and is sleeping with my friend,” etc. Marriages are highly valued, but particular spouses are not. When the headman was afraid his wife might die, he wasn’t upset because he would miss her, but because he’d be burdened with raising the family. When my head teacher was afraid his wife might die, again he wasn’t upset because he’d miss her, but because he’d have to go through the trouble of remarrying. Here’s my theories on the matter.

• Relationships actually are deep, but I can’t see it because of cultural or language barriers.
  
  
• Relationships actually are deep, but Zambians don’t display this emotionally.
  
  
• As for pronouncing a friendship with a muzungu (white person), it’s just to brag.
  
  
• Because everyone is so kind and polite to each other, there’s no need for specific people to overplay those parts in one’s life. Everyone is a not-so-close friend.
  
  
• As far as male-female relationships, gender equality and respect is so messed up here, how could they get along?
  
  
• Because it is more collective than individualistic, individual people aren’t valued for their own personalities, but just as they fit into a role (e.g. “wife.”)

Whenever I think or write about this stuff, I feel so guilty for being so ethnocentric. So here’s my explanation for that. Back in college, learning about “cross-cultural communication,” it seemed so simple. Collective versus individualistic. High context versus low context. Direct versus indirect. Concepts of time. The whole iceburg thing. Easy. Even living in Jamaica didn’t challenge me that much in the cross-cultural sense. It is only now that I realize how difficult it is to understand cultural differences. How difficult it is not to be ethnocentric. Some things are easy to accept. Differences in clothes, food, gestures. Even aspects of etiquette, gender, property, and privacy, though I may not agree with them, I can at least understand that it’s just different. What I’m finding extremely difficult to accept, however, are aspects of value, morality, and logic. Things that I thought were one-hundred percent intrinsic to humanity are in fact, not. How do I accept things that don’t fit into my idea of what it is to be human? Some examples.

• Value - It is not in fact intrinsic that a flower is pretty, that a baby animal is cute, that a rooster with all of its feathers looks better than a rooster that doesn’t have all of its feathers, etc. It is hard to understand someone who values a puppy as much as a rock.
  
  
• Morality - Zambians are a peaceful people. I credit this in part to how they maintain harmony on a daily basis through their communication methods. If the truth is not something that will maintain equilibrium, they don’t use it. This means telling you what they think you want to hear. For example, saying that they’re interested in coming to your meeting, promising to follow through with a task, claiming that the reason they need to borrow your bicycle is direly important, etc. These things sound good in the moment, though they may not bear any connection to reality the next day. To me, it is hard to accept that this is not just dirty rotten lying. The same principal holds true with following through with an action, like holding a meeting. Holding a meeting is a break to the equilibrium of not having a meeting, so they’d rather not.
  
  
• Logic - This one is perhaps the most difficult, because when it comes to questions of reasoning, we are dealing with cognition and it’s not politically correct to point out differences in cognition between cultures or races. Zambians and Americans, however, do in fact think differently.
  
  One way is in deciding the best way something should be done. Americans opt for efficiency. For example, starting a meeting on time so that it ends on time, tying a bike strap so that it’s easy to untie later, taking the most direct route to a destination, etc. Zambians on the other hand, opt for something else that I have not discovered yet, but the best advice I can offer a visitor is Don’t let a Zambian tie your bicycle strap!!!
  
  Then there’s just basic aspects of logic that I can’t understand. For example, when someone stole my chicken, they made a hole in the grass roof of the chicken house to extract the chicken. They then put a brick over the hole to cover it up, so I wouldn’t know. To me, a brick on top of the chicken house is more obvious than a hole in the grass.
  
  Another example is a joke I heard while riding with some Zambians. It goes like this, “A man hailed a cab and when the cab pulled over, he saw that the driver had the legs of an animal. He screamed and ran away, hailing a different cab. When this one pulled over, he said, ‘Sir, the other cab driver! He had these legs like…’ and the driver said, ‘What, like these?’ They were also the legs of an animal.” All the Zambians in the car howled for five minutes. I was still waiting for the punchline. Maybe it would make for a child’s campfire tale, told with a flashlight under the chin, but if this is “funny,” I don’t know how. While I may not think all American jokes are of high quality, at least I can “groan” and understand why it is funny. It’s a pun. It’s a funny stereotype. It’s a play on words. Et cetera.
  
  Finally, when meeting with one of my community school teachers, he told me that his PTA was like “a dog without teeth” or “a white elephant” and went on to sketch a circle and some lines in the dirt to really drive home his point. I can barely even be troubled by the puzzling metaphors when trying to figure out how a circle and a line relate to either a dog, an elephant, or a PTA.
  
  “They say” that the best way to understand a cultural is to look at its expressions and proverbs. In good old cross-cultural communication class, they give the old “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” versus “The nail that stands up gets pounded down” example. Clear and simple. The only thing I can extract from Zambian proverbs, however, is what I’ve already been saying – that Zambian logic is not logical to me.
  
  
  • You cannot stop a child from crying by merely showing him a disused garden.
    
  • He who beats his mother-in-law beats her thoroughly.
    
  • Do as you always do. People’s eyes do not eat.
    
  • For a jackal to bark, there must be something on which it has placed its buttocks.
    
  • A cock breaks its wings when it is growing.

So that’s my explanation of that. Anyways.

We’ve had another computer lesson for the library committee. This time actually using the computer. It went really well. We did simple things like opening and closing windows and folders, but it was still pretty overwhelming for them. A storm blew out the solar panels, so I’m not sure when (if ever) computer lessons will resume again.

We also had a library training for the committee. This is a huge step!!! I planned and facilitated the whole thing myself and it went really well! (“Well,” considering it was a Zambian meeting. That means not everyone showing up, starting over an hour late, and dragging the participants out of their homes to attend.)

I’ve been bothering the “Agricultural Extension Agent” about having meetings to teach things like agroforestry, beekeeping, fuel efficient stoves, planting trees, etc. And when I say “bothering,” that’s really what I mean. He’s not interested and won’t follow through with anything he says he will. It wouldn’t really be acceptable for me to go over his head and have the trainings on my own, so I guess nothing will be done. I might just try to build a stove myself and show the neighbors how. Who knows.

Camp GLOW is ready to go next week. We were unable to raise the money we needed and were about to cancel the whole thing. Then I called Changes2, an NGO I’ve worked with before, with the hope that maybe they could cover the rest of the cost. They had to discuss it and then called me back saying, “Yes we can!” (It was the day Obama was elected.) I guess that whole “networking” thing is true after all. We quickly called a meeting and decided which Volunteers would be sending girls. So in a matter of thirty minutes, it went from canceling the camp to having it fully funded and making the final preparations! I feel good that I was able to make that contribution, because I haven’t really done much else to help plan for the camp. I don’t have cell phone reception anywhere near me, so it really was impossible for me to do much.

In defense of Zambian proverbs, here’s one I do like: A child is like an axe. If it cuts you, you still must pick it up and put it over your shoulder.S

So as you know, Obama was elected. All the Peace Corps Volunteers went to a hotel in Mkushi to watch the election. Luckily the power didn’t go out that night. (It goes out most nights.) I tried to nap during the day and got up at 1:00 AM. Results didn’t really start coming in until 2:00 or so, and the final result was around 6:00 in the morning. It was kind of exciting staying up to watch it. We all cheered when he gave a shout out to all those out there in the far corners of the earth “crowded around a radio” to hear the election results. (Though we were crowded around a TV, actually.) I wish I would have been in the United States for this, because I imagine riots in the street like when the Steelers won the Superbowl. Maybe there wasn’t, I don’t know. Everyone in Africa is elated, of course. They love Obama. There’s even an alcohol named after him – “Obama: The Winning Spirit.” I’m glad that Obama won instead of McCain, but I certainly wasn’t as excited as the other Volunteers. I think it’s significant symbolically that Americans elected a black(ish) person as president and it might influence other racists around the world. (For example, Jamaica and some African countries are more racist against blacks than the US is. The lighter ones hate the darker ones, etc.) But I’m worried that it will become an excuse to stop the push for further equality. “Look, a black man is president. All is equal now, so stop complaining.” It’s still going to be a long time until things are actually equal for everyday blacks, so while it’s symbolic, I don’t think it’s going to change the world. The US is going to go on pretty much the same way it has been. Whether things change or not, I think it can only be a positive thing. Perhaps he will make some significant changes (e.g. legalizing gay marriage) and citizens will continue to push their leaders in the future. And if he isn’t the messiah that people think he is, then the disappointment and disillusion that will ensue might result in the actual change of things. Maybe.

So according to the radio, it’s worse than the Great Depression out there. Is this true? I know that food and gas prices are up and that banks and big businesses’ stocks are down, but is it really that bad? Maybe I should stay here. It makes me sick that I could live here for FREE because land is free. Or I could pay $250 for lakefront property on Samfya Lake. One month rent in the US or lakefront land for a lifetime? Makes me sick.

And now for the Carrie Book Club segment. I read a book called “Salt” which was about, well, salt. The best part was a story about the Caribbean island Turks and Caicos, which was used by England as a salt source. Since it was under colonial rule, England required that they have a proper coat of arms. Turks and Caicos sent a drawing of salt workers near huge piles of salt. The English artists didn’t know where the island was and thought the white mounds were igloos, so the official coat of arms of this tropical island featured igloos until fairly recently when they were replaced by flamingos. I just crack up every time I think about it.




All – Sometimes packages arrive here in two weeks, but I’ve also gotten ones that were sent over four months ago. Taking that into consideration, you should probably stop sending packages, as much as it pains me to say so. (Unless you’re ok with the possibility of other Peace Corps Volunteers ripping it open and splitting the booty, which is protocol when a package arrives for a Volunteer who is no longer in the country.) Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who has sent me packages! I think it was my fate to be a Peace Corps Volunteer, if only for the mail. As a kid, I was always SO excited to check the mailbox, even though I never got anything. Even through highschool, mom and dad would leave the unimportant mail in the box so there’d be something for me to check when I got off the school bus. I’ve never gotten so many packages and letters and probably never will again. Keep the letters coming though (which are really better than the packages anyways.) You can keep sending those up until a few weeks before I’m done.

All – Happy Thanksgiving!!

All who donated to Camp GLOW – Thank you!!

Mom – Thank you for the umbrellas (lifesaving) and watch.

Michelle – Thanks for the bracelet. Doug didn’t really explain the significance of it to me though. Thank you for the condolences as well.

Heather – I can’t imagine that the “Green and Yeller” song is the same one….

Bonnibelle – The Crawford County fact sheet was cool. I was proud to see that eight of the claims to fame had to do with Conneaut Lake Park! (I thought the Blue Streak was number one or two for oldest coaster though, not number six! Hmmm..) I think that probably a bed of puppies would be better than a bed of baby goats, cause they have little baby hooves.

Bonnibelle and Cathy – Silly saying. I was listening to the radio and they were talking about solar plants in the Sahara making enough energy to power all of Africa, and I was thinking WOW, picturing these big cactuses with wide flat leaves that somehow absorbed sunlight and could be tapped for energy. It was awhile before I realized they meant plant as in factory, not plant as in plant.