Well, I was offered an extension position in Lusaka, so it looks like I’ll be in Zambia another two years!!!! April Fools. Don’t worry, I’m coming home.

It’s the time of the season for changing:

• Guava Season. Guavas have replaced the mangos in my oats. I’m not feasting on them, however, as I did with the mangos, as I don’t have any trees of my own and have to resort to buying them. At about forty for 25 cents, I can’t go overboard. (Joke.) Guavas are a strange fruit. Unripe (how Zambians eat them), they’re no good. Ripe, the inside tastes a little fermented and the outside tastes green. They’re full of small seeds that will break your teeth, and they’re not even very flavorful. I bet most Americans wouldn’t even bother with them. I like em, though.
  
  The bush-rat-squirrels like them too. I have to pack up my guavas and tomatoes into a bucket every evening or else my little friends will take a single nibble out of each and every one.
  
  
• Flying Termite Season. Kids like to collect them and pop them straight into their mouths. After being here two years, I didn’t think I would see anything new, but this was something.
  
  
• Groundnut Harvesting Season. Men do the hoeing and women do the picking. The picking is the fun part, so I don’t really complain about gender roles when I help out!
  
  
• Planting Season. People keep coming by to show me the wounds they’ve procured from whacking their feet with their hoes. I don’t remember this happening the past two planting seasons.
  
  
• End of Rainy Season. Each time it rains, someone tells me, “Ah, but that is the rain saying goodbye!” But then the next day, it rains again and I am told the same thing again.

My tomato plant has 75 tomatoes and counting!!!

First my radio’s knob broke off, so I had to adjust the station by maneuvering a little string inside. Then the wires detached from the speaker, so every morning I have to rewire the thing. I feel like a mechanical genius!!

I didn’t spell “genius” right in the above paragraph and spell-check corrected me.

I’m not sure how my house exists anymore, because I feel like I’ve swept out the mass of my house several times over.

Apparently Ngosa is in the juju (witchcraft) business. I found her in the bush one day with a basket of small roots and asked her what they were. She said she sells them to a man from Lusaka who uses them for juju. I couldn’t get out of her what the exact use was, but she let me nibble on one. It was kind of sweet.

Whenever someone is sick or dies, it’s always because of juju. If you want to know who put the juju on your late loved one, a group of people can hold the coffin in the air and it will lead them to the culprit.

It was interesting doing a little blacksmithing with Peter, but I wanted to see it down with a traditional bellows, so I found a guy in my village who agreed to let me observe him work. After he didn’t show up (at his own house), we rescheduled several times and again he didn’t show up. So frustrating.

I was finally successful in recruiting a charcoal teacher, however - a teenager named Kunda. (Actually, after lamenting to Mr. Chisenga about people not helping me, he forced a student to show me.) We spent all day in the bush. I was really surprised what a long hard process it is. Luckily, I was just on fire that day when it came to comic relief. First, I jotted down notes about the charcoal making process. That was very funny. Then I singed off some of my hair. That was very funny. Then I had trouble carrying a huge log. That was very funny. Then I had trouble carrying another huge log. That was still very funny. Then I got lost and started walking the wrong direction. That was very funny too.

On our way out of the bush, suddenly Kunda stopped and squatted to the ground. He pointed to a track in the mud and looking up at me with eyes wide, solemnly said, “Elephant!” This track was about the size of my big thumbnail. I burst out laughing and noted to myself that this was the funniest joke I’ve ever heard a Zambian make. Until I looked back into his deadpan face and realized he was serious. I tried to reason with him that that track couldn’t possibly be from an elephant. Finally I had him describe the beast to me. He said it was “like a small goat.” It was probably a duiker - a miniature antelope. I still giggle every time I recall the image of his face saying “Elephant!”, but really, it’s quite sad that an African doesn’t even know what an elephant is.

Joshua asked me what I’m doing with my bookbag when I leave, as he wanted it for school. I had to tell him I was taking it with me, but in its place, I sewed a little school-bag for each of the school-goers: Joshua, Ngosa, and Makumba. They said thank you and are using them, but their disappointment was obvious. Turns out it wasn’t about having a school-bag after all, but about having an expensive muzungu bag. It’s interesting how in an industrialized country like the United States, people have already gone through that “sterile-manufactured-plastic-uniform stuff is better” stage a long time ago and now some people even appreciate whole grain bread over white bread, real food over processed food, hand-made items over mass-produced items, and so on. But in Zambia, this process is just beginning. Refined white mealie meal is prestigious. Tin roofs are prestigious. Manufactured snacks are prestigious. Plastics are prestigious. Any little piece of junk that’s been made by a factory (e.g. food packaging, broken electronic parts, etc) is prestigious and is horded, even if it has no use. City Zambians are especially adamant about pointing out how they are more advanced than the village folk, but even the villagers would rather a mass-produced product than a hand-made one if they had the choice. To someone who feels like industrialized countries made a huge mistake by ever going down this road, it’s frustrating to see “developing” countries want to do the same. I want to just tell them to skip that step; they’re already where they need to be! But I guess that’d be like an adult telling a teenager what to do, which has absolutely no effect at all. It seems like they just have to experience it themselves before they can decide to refuse it. I hope by then it’s not too late.

Living in kind of a time warp like this, I’ve recently been noticing a lot of idioms that I’ve never really thought about before, but now have literal meanings for me. For instance, as I was cracking nuts one day, I was having trouble with one and said, “Boy, that was hard nut to crack!” Then I paused: Did I really just say that?? Some other examples: “Hoe down,” “Steal my fire,” “An uphill struggle,” “You reap what you sow,” “Fruits of my labor,” “Beggars can’t be choosers” (although if it’s the Mumbas, they damn well will be choosers too), “Empty nest,” “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” “Pecking order,” “Cocky,” and what’s been happening all too much lately, “Pouring salt in my wounds.”

When I first came to Zambia, I often would feel shocked or insulted when people would say racially blunt statements. But after awhile, I came to realize that because race isn’t an issue here, it’s ok to make blunt statements about being “black” or “white.” It just doesn’t have the same historically-guilty connotation, so Zambians don’t walk around pretending that different skin colors don’t exist.

I decided to donate my hive (and bees!) to the school and started up a beekeeping club. All the kids in the club had been traditional honey-gatherers, which means destroying the hive to get the honey. (This is like cutting down a mango tree to get the mangos!) So I taught them all about sustainable beekeeping and we set up the apiary, complete with newly planted flowers.

I’m still very busy doing Life Skills, computer classes, library meetings, and monitoring. This isn’t to say that it hasn’t been extremely frustrating. Looking back at my records, I noticed that people have not come to computer lessons more times than they have come. And we only managed to monitor three schools this term, because usually the ZIC just couldn’t get it together the day of the planned monitoring. Of those three, we didn’t find any teaching going on at two of them because the teachers were busy in the fields.

I’ve noticed that my life in Zambia is never just mildly-constantly-stressful-and-mundane as I remember life in the US. Instead, it’s one extreme or the other. Most of the time, I am very content - extremely calm and peaceful. Then there’s drastic spikes of tumultuous emotional stress. For example, my day is perfectly nice and I’m feeling very content and then I have to sit around for two hours waiting for someone to come to a meeting we planned, just getting angrier and angrier each minute until I’m about to explode. Then I go home and enjoy my life again until the next incident the next day.

I never know whether to start my blogs with the negatives to start it out on a bad note, or end them with the negatives, to leave it on a bad note. If you don’t want to end with the negatives, you can go back after you’re done and read the beginning, I suppose!

Otherwise, onto the next bad thing. Along The Great North Road (main paved road), there’s a section with a big pothole trench all the way across the road. Rumor has it that the villagers there hacked it away on purpose so that mealie-meal trucks and beer trucks would flip and they could steal the goods. It’s worked several times already.

And finally, my family here just keeps getting smaller and smaller:

• Eggy disappeared. Stolen, probably.
  
  
• After a week and a half, New Chicken’s neck wound just didn’t seem to be healing and she was losing weight. Upon closer inspection, I found that most of the food she was eating was oozing out of the wound instead of going to her stomach. I had trouble eating for days after seeing this. (And after conjuring up the image again to type this, I probably will have trouble for a few days again.) I didn’t really see how it could heal up, staying moist like that, and I didn’t know if she was in pain or not, so I told the Mumbas to eat her. It was a hard decision, but when I leave, I’m going to have to give her away anyhow and she’ll probably promptly be eaten, so I figured if there’s even a chance that she’s suffering now, I may as well just get it over with. So now it’s just Pocho and me.
  
  
• I sold Potato and Spud to the Mumbas awhile ago in preparation for my departure, but while I was in Serenje last time, Potato apparently died. I have my doubts, however, because only Victor reported the death to me and no one else even mentioned it. I mean, when their dog died, each one of the Mumbas felt it necessary to individually come over and inform me, but when it’s my own goat, they kept silent. My guess is they ate or sold her, because Iron Mumba was away at the time too, so it seems like they waited for us both to leave to make some money behind our backs. Or, she just could have died and Zambia has made me way too untrusting.

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April 29th, 2009

I didn’t tell anyone when I was coming back to the United States (except for Laura who bought my plane ticket and Doug who just was too persistent in questioning) because I wanted to surprise everyone! Sneaky, eh??? I even wrote this blog in present tense instead of past tense! Ha! I had thought about traveling after I was done, possible to India, but I just couldn’t really decide on anything, so I figured I’d just go straight back to the US. Let me now back up and recap my departure from Mpelembe and Zambia.

My last week at site was strange. I was busy packing, giving things away, selling things, and informing everyone I could think of that I would soon be going. I sent goodbye letters to all of my schools and even had a farewell party with teachers, neighbors, and friends. (Not everyone showed up who was supposed to and a lot of people who I didn’t even know filtered in, but it was nice just the same.) It was extremely Zambian, with official protocol, speeches, guest of honor, chairman, etc. There was food, dancing, and music. I wore my citenge dress from swear-in and gave a farewell speech in Bemba. Everyone understood it perfectly and that made me very happy. There was a ton of food (most I donated, the rest the teachers pitched in for) and for several days afterwards, the Mumba kids kept telling me how full they had been – the utmost compliment.

On the morning that I was to leave, the Mumba’s and Mwelelwa’s and some others stuck around my house to see me off. Impashi (swarms of flesh eating ants) attacked, so that provided some good laughs. Trying to remove the bed from my house was also a ridiculous adventure that took an hour or so. Then I spent the rest of the morning in a marathon tournament of nsolo with Joshua.

That morning, someone stole my toilet paper and my hat, which was a fitting ending to it all.

When the land cruiser finally pulled in, I was both glad to have an end to the strange restless feeling and very sad. As I said goodbye to everyone, I started to cry, which I wasn’t expecting. I just kept reshaking everyone’s hand cause I just didn’t know what else to do. Then I got in the cruiser and we pulled out of Mpelembe for the last time.

Even though I knew I had left Mpelembe, it still didn’t seem real to me that I was going back to the United States. Just impossible to even fathom. And once I got to Serenje, I felt fine, because it just seemed like any other time hanging out at the Peace Corps House. I had to close my bank account, say goodbye to the district Ministry of Education people, and finish up typing my Close of Service documents. Then I had to sit around for several more days (I had to come in before the holiday and weekend so I could go to the bank) with no other Peace Corps Volunteers there, which was boring.

Then I headed to Lusaka for a week of medical and administrative appointments. The end of my service was kind of like reverting to the beginning again. I had to ride out to Chongwe in the old bus we used to take. I visited my homestay family and had my last nshima. I saw my old language teacher and all the training staff. I even got to go visit immigration one last time cause I realized my visa was expired and I had been living in Zambia illegally for over a month. Oops.

Exchanging money wasn’t too exciting. When I came to Zambia, the exchange rate was 3,700 and now it’s 5,700. Which means I only get about half of my money! Argh.

After all my meetings and such, I had some time to kill, so I visited this zoo type place. The gardens were beautiful, but the animals were just kinda sad and there wasn’t really much to see.

The Peace Corps Lusaka staff only has three non-Zambians, but even the Zambian employees are city-folk, so it’s not anything like the village. When I dragged my suitcases over to the medical room to weigh and rearrange them, however, the custodian lady stopped me and made me repack because I hadn’t folded my citenges properly. This took 45 minutes or so. It was so very Zambian and made me smile.

These two weeks of limbo in Serenje and Lusaka were kind of a let down. I would have rather just stepped out of the village and onto the plane for the full excitement and emotional impact. It also was difficult because hanging around the office all week reminded me of things about the way of life in the States that I don’t like – pushing papers, stressful social situations, wasting time on the internet, and mostly, living indoors rather than in nature.

On April 16th, I officially “rang out” with my fellow five remaining RED Peace Corps Volunteers. This high-tech ceremony involves hitting a tire hub with a stick. Whenever I’ve witnessed others ringing out over the past two years, I always get a little teary-eyed, so during my own ceremony, I just tried to ignore everything that was going on so I wouldn’t start crying. Here’s a transcript of my speech: “It’s been wonderful and it’s been terrible and I’d do it all again.”

And on April 21st, I went to the airport to board my 40 hour flight back to Americaland!!




Handy Hut How To: How to Make Charcoal

Cut down some trees and cut the trunks into pieces about ax-length. Build a little platform out of the smaller pieces so that it’s not resting directly on the ground. Then pile up your logs, adding support stakes if necessary. Hack up chunks of sod and pack them around the pile until it’s enclosed, except for an opening on one side. Start a fire between the logs through this hole and keep it stoked for several hours. Then cover up the opening with sod as well and leave the pile to cook for several days, checking on it periodically to make sure it hasn’t collapsed. Then remove the dirt with a hoe and dig out the charcoal pieces. Break up any big pieces and spread them out to cool, covering with some light dirt so that they don’t ignite. Only about half of the pieces will have turned into charcoal, so pile the remain unburned logs into a pile again and let it cook again. Once the charcoal is cool, pile it in your mealie meal sack, lace up the end with bark fiber, and sell it for a price that’s not worth all that work!




John, Martha, and bo-bo - I had a dream that I took a footpath in my village that I had never taken before and it led to a huge mining establishment where John and Martha were working. There were all sorts of fancy buildings and cars and I couldn’t believe that I never knew this place existed in Mpelembe! I explored around some more and came upon a huge monastery made out of burgundy marble. They told me Brady had been working on there, but had just left. I felt bad that he had come to Mpelembe and never let me know!

Doug - Jameson Kunda greets you and your family. The Mumba's and Mwelelwa's greet you. Mulenga and Mr. Chisenga asked about you. Kapiria says he never got a remembrance from you. And Kennedy misses you “a lot.”

My Entire Family - Jameson Kunda greets you. You don’t know him, but he greets you.

Stacy - I still haven’t gotten the packet of letters for my students. Now the term is over (they work in trimesters), so I’m not sure that I’ll ever get to use them in my Life Skills class! I told my head teacher about it, though, so he’ll know to distribute them even if I’m not able.

Anyone - I’ve had several villagers request pen-pals. Does anyone want Jameson Kunda as a pen-pal?? And does anyone want to marry a truck-driver?