Another Week in Village Life: March Edition

(Gina's Post)

Sorry it's a little late . . . we've been traveling in Malawi and my father is about to visit the village.  Stay tuned for his guest post!

Friday, March 1st: Naming 3 Goats and a Child

I rolled out of bed with the roosters crowing as usual, and had to remember who was on my schedule for the daily morning goat milking assessments (more on our goat milking program to come).  It actually happened that there were two families on the calendar, both in opposite directions from our hut, so Scott generously offered to help with one of the families . . . even though he would lose some precious sleep-in time in the village.  I did a few chores and had a quick breakfast of leftover rice, bananas and granpola before leaving slightly after Scott and hopped on my bike to race 4k down the road to catch the family before all the adults left for the fields.  I was lost deep in thought, mostly about what a pain it would be to buy a car when we move back to America, when I realized I passed the house by about 500 meters.  I turned around to the bewildered look of schoolchildren going to school . . . like I didn't know where I was going after 1 1/2 years of living in the small village . . . and arrived at the family compound only to find Scott almost finished with helping their family milking operation.

Arghh!!! between being tired and lost in my own train of thought I went to the wrong family entirely.  I would be lucky to find the other family still at home, but I rode my bike at a rare cardiovascular pace past our house to find them.  Luckily, the father was only walking about 400 meters away from his compound with a large hoe when his neighbors cried out to me, and I rode to the house, apologizing profusely for being so late.  I met several women and children from the compound and took a look at their log-and-bark constructed milking stand.  It had fresh manure on it, which was a good sign that the family was actually training their goats to go to the stand.  A large billy goat jumped up, and she was so big (by village standards) that at first I thought she was a male with a huge beard and hair completely covering her eyes.  She hadn't been given a goat name yet as Lundas traditionally don't name their livestock, but we are encouraging all farmers in the goat milking program to name them to keep better records.  I instantly blurted out "akalumpi" or "old man" in Lunda, and everyone in the family got a kick out of the new name.  I taught the entire family how to pet and remove dirt from the fur of the goats, and even the children were encouraged to participate so that Alkalumpi got used to their touch.  She was still too skiddish to let us touch her udders, but it was a good start.  There were two other females, which the family named "jealous" and "black" and they were even more skiddish than the large one, but eventually they allowed for some petting.

Back home, I ate some roasted peanuts and a hard-boiled egg even though I wasn't hungry, knowing full well I would have a day full of programs with no lunch break.  I cycled back to the clinic in the same direction I accidentally cycled earlier in the morning.  Upon arrival, the traditional birth attendants quickly directed me to the labor ward to welcome a new baby boy, who had literally been born 20 min. prior to my arrival.  His mother was from a very remote village and had to camp out at our little clinic for two weeks waiting for the birth, so this arrival was particularly good news indeed.  Why I even thought of asking his name I don't know, because by now I know full well that they don't name their babies for a few days after the birth.  Unless a particular chindelli (white person) speaks of a name and then they ask her to hame it.  And so I had to privilege to name yet another child in the village.  I chose John after my father.  I think that brings count up to about 7 named babies, but I've lost track.

The clinic volunteer and lay worker arrived, so together we made an agenda for the clinic meeting scheduled for this coming Tuesday.  I wanted to start writing bush notes in Lunda, informing people from the remote villages of the upcoming meeting, but the three birth attendants started dancing to a scratchy radio and wanted me to take a picture of them with the newborn baby.  Because I happened to have my camera with me, for this afternoon's school programs, I was able to take a few less-than-candid snaps.

At around 11:00 I went to the school to meet Scott for our combined HIV/AIDS education program, but he hadn't yet arrived.  Tens of small children who weren't in their class rotations at the moment swarmed around me, knowing something special was going on.  Scott finally came, and it was quite a circus corralling enough desks to fit 87 students from grades 7,8, and 9 in one small classroom.  The teacher wanted the program outside, but I thought the older kids would be too distracted from the smaller kids running around, so we decided against it.  After the 10 minutes it took into get the undivided attention of 87 adolescents, we broke into four premier league football teams: Chelsea, South Africa, Barcelona, and Arsenal.  Then, the teams went to separate sides of the room to write on a piece of paper all of the facts they knew about HIV and AIDS.   We discussed some “myths” they had written, such as the facts that blood transfusions no longer transmitted HIV, unless it was done by a witch doctor (which is still fairly common).  Also, it is very unlikely for people to spread HIV through open wounds, unless they are rubbing the wounds together.  We then played the “wildfire” game, where each person shook hands with 3 people and then wrote the names of the 3 people they shook hands with.  After they did this, we randomly selected 2 people, who announced the 3 people they shook with, and then these new ones stood up and announced the 3 they shook hands with.  The game was to demonstrate that if this was unprotected sex rather than just a handshake, the virus could indeed spread like “wilfire” if people had multiple partners. 

 

After all the education came the part that the students eagerly waited for: prizes donated by our partner middle school in Yakima, Washington.  The students saw the box full of stickers, gum, pens, pencils and toothbrushes and their eyes lit up like it was Christmas morning.  Only two teams won the HIV games, so they were allowed to stay in the rooms while the rest of the students left and peered in the windows with eager eyes.  Before collecting their prizes, each student had to write a small thank-you note to the American students stating one fact about HIV.  It took a painstaking hour before Scott and I corrected the notes and handed out the prizes, but well worth it, as some of the students came from families that did not have pencils for school or toothbrushes for all of their family members.  The two winning teams proudly posted for pictures in front of the school before proudly walking home with their newly-acquired goods.

 

I cycled home from the school to start preparing dinner while Scott stopped to  chat with a local fish farmer.  I read a short preschool book to the village kids before picking a garden salad: lettuce, bite-sized carrots, and native prickly-pear cucumbers.  I prepped the garden beds for adding much-needed compost by loosening soil around the plants.  Scott and I ate a simple dinner of rice, salad, corn and tea and watched a grand heat lightning storm mobilize over the forest canopy.  It never ceases to amaze me; the lights and colors rivaled a 4^th of July fireworks show back home.  We kept watching the silent distant lightning as the sun set, and then watched as the flickering insects came out as well as a symphony of crickets serenading the evening. 

 

I went inside the house to journal as Scott tutored math to Ryvus and Ryford, and we could now hear the thunder of an approaching storm in the distance.  Scott couldn’t help but laugh as he rolled into bed as he told me his pupils asked if people in America were buried with their shoes on.  Apparently in Lunda culture, they take the shoes off before burial so the ghosts’ footsteps don’t nuisance the living.

 

March 2^nd: Making Porridge

 

I woke at dawn and helped the new chickens get used to their new egg-laying station.  Five small eggs in the past month for our five female chickens just wasn’t cutting it (I think they were laying lots in the surrounding bush), so paid some villagers to build some egg-laying stations out of a hollowed-out log.  My goat-training duty was just across the road, so I walked over and realized that I had never been to my neighbors’ place early enough to enjoy the beautiful sunrise over the forest canopy.  One goat wa s already up on the milking stand eating some dried cassava, so it was a good sign this family had started their training.  I asked the owner Golden and his wife if they had already named that particular goat, and they said they hadn’t, so I pointed to the 2/3 moon opposite the pink sunrise and said, “kakweji,” meaning moon.  They laughed and liked the name.  I taught them how to lock the head in the stand while the goat was eating and give it a gentle massage to get used to human touch.  This goat had lots of dirt balls in its fur which the children helped pull out.  We named the next one on the stand “mwaana,” or sun, just as the sun peeked over the horizon.  It was also fitting since the similar-sounding “mwana” means child, and this was definitely the smallest goat.  Several other goats were still too skiddish to come to the feeding stand, but I helped the family learn how to slowly coax them little by little. 

 

Scott left early for some distant fields to help our neighbors with their bean harvest, and I took advantage of the sunny morning to wash/dry dishes outside as well as fill the solar shower.  I biked to the clinic, which was slow for a Saturday morning, but there were still a fair amount of malaria cases.   I was happy to see they had test kits in so they could actually test for malaria rather than just guess (even the common cold is called “malaria” in the village, so it’s often over-treated, building resistance to the disease).  I finished writing letters in mixed Lunda and English inviting village members to the board meeting, and the clinic volunteers helped me distributing them by asking patients if they lived near the person whose name was on the letter.  The patients would walk back with the notes and effectively distribute them all over our catchment area. 

 

I walked across the road to my counterpart Hildah’s house and realized that I was about 1 ½ hours late for a cooking program that we were supposed to teach in a neighboring village.  She also apologized that she was late because she was out looking for vegetables to feed her family, so then I didn’t feel so bad.  We walked together an hour over the river in the bright sun and chatted in mixed Lunda and English.  Then she gave me the bad news . . . she would be moving to Zambezi next month!   Zambezi was at the opposite end of the province, at least a day’s bus ride away, but Hildah was from there and felt like she was missing her hometown by living in Mwinilunga for the last 15 years, so it was time to re-connect with her family.  I was happy for her, but also sad as Hildah had been a friend, confidant, and wonderful advocate for maternal and child health in the community.  Hopefully she would use that same enthusiasm to teach fellow birth attendants and clinic volunteers in her hometown. 

 

As we approached the compound of Nesi,  another Safe Motherhood member, we could hear distant thunder and see black clouds quickly rolling over the previously clear blue sky.  Hildah and Nesi taught a very small group of mothers and fathers how to make enriched porridge for children: a mixture of pounded roasted soybeans and mashed squash.  They sifted the pounded soybean flour just in time for the heavy rains to come, and we all huddled around the fire in the outdoor kitchen trying to stay dry in the downpour as torrents of water slid down the thatched roof.  The two women also pounded dried fish and explained to the parents how both the fish and the soybeans could be added to the porridge to give the children much-needed protein.  During the rainstorm, about 12 children took turns eating with their hands out of a communal dish (spoons were in the main house and no one wanted to run and get them in the rain).  There was definitely not enough demonstration food for the children to be full, but at least they got something.  The Safe Motherhood members each gave a talk to the parents about child spacing and family planning to ensure that each village child could get proper nutrition before the next one came as often the children are stunted because they are weaned too early. 

 

Some parents had difficulty paying attention, due to a combination of the rain and a vehicle that had pulled into the compound several minutes earlier.  On a road that only receives 2-3 vehicles per day, one pulling in front of someone’s house is a rare event indeed.  Finally there was a break in the rain, and Nesi went to talk to the vehicle, whose driver was speaking with some of the men on the compound.  It was a honey buyer who had come up our road all the way from Lusaka to buy drums of honey that the Northwest province is famous for producing.  Although he didn’t buy as much honey as he would have liked, he offered to give Hildah and myself a ride back to our village!  We gladly accepted the offer, since otherwise we’d have to wait several hours for the rains to subside before walking over an hour on the muddy roads.  Of course the driver started talking with me in English and was shocked to see that a white person was “living like this . . . with so many sacrifices.”  I explained that Scott and I were just fine living without television and running water, but we did occasionally miss friends and family back home.  I told him we greatly enjoyed the people and the slower pace of life.

 

On the drive home, the truck came across a huge fallen tree that took down two other trees and inconveniently blocked the dirt road to our house.  The 4WD vehicle barely made it around the mess, but was able to pull an amazing maneuver in the mud.  We all stopped to assess the damage, and if the tree had fallen the other way in the rain, it would have taken out several mud brick houses. 

 

I arrived home hoping to find Scott, only to realize that he was not there and probably stuck in the rains somewhere in a makeshift shelter at our neighbors’ field.  I started a fire in our brazier using melted candle wax to get the wet charcoal going and turned the shortwave radio on to the BBC.  I started cooking lots of snacks, knowing full well Scott would be hungry when he arrived from the fields: popcorn, roasted pumpkin seeds, and boiled pumpkin/rice for dinner.  The rain lightened just as Scott returned, and a bunch of school-age children started coming by the house to ask if they could read, so we took a break to do some ABC coloring pages. 

 

As evening approached, I heated some bath water (obviously the solar showers didn’t get much warmth today), and took a luxurious bucket bath.  The rain stopped just as darkness came, and Scott prepared for a fish farming while I made tea, journaled, and watched a spider catch a flying termite 10 times its own size on a beautifully crafted web.

 

 

March 3^rd: A Typical Sunday

 

I woke at dawn as usual to help with the goat-milking project and realized I had to walk the kilometer to the house I was helping with since I had left my rain-soaked bicycle at Hildah’s yesterday.  This family’s goats were not used to being touched at all, so I could tell they had lots of training to do.  The husband and wife practiced properly handling the goats (rather than pulling on legs which is so common in the village) and led them one-by-one to the milking stand using a collar made of a tree bark rope.  The children eagerly watched and were happy to pet the goats. 

 

I went back home for breakfast of homemade granola, and did some house chores such as sweeping and filling water containers.  Then I set off on the 4 kilometer walk to retrieve my bicycle from the previous day and had a nice little parade of village children follow me most of the way.  Many villagers we passed were decked out in their Sunday best . . . chitenge dresses and suits to show off at church. 

 

I picked up my bicycle from Hildah’s place, and she told me that a baby boy had been born at the clinic across the road just two hours prior.  I stopped by to see it, as the birth attendants always like me to visit the newborns, and the poor mother was all by herself eating a pack of dry cookies and looking rather pale . . . not a clinic worker in sight.  I ran and got a cup from Hildah’s place and filled it with water from the bore hole so at least she would have fresh drinking water.  I rode my bike the half a kilometer to the nearby Catholic church, wondering if I would be early or late.  The church start time seems to differ every week and basically has to do with when the greatest number of people show up and start singing.  Scott came about the same time from the other direction, and when we entered they were already doing petitions.  Well this week we were late, but you just never know!

 

Scott and I rode home and did a few more chores before having a lunch of corn-tomato-cilantro salad before he prepared for a fish farmer meeting.  I washed and cut pumpkin leaves and some other leafy green vegetables for tonight’s dinner.  I cycled 3km down the road to meet some members of the Safe Motherhood group who were going to teach their villagers about family planning and HIV prevention, but the lesson was cancelled because all the women were out picking caterpillars from the surrounding trees.  I didn’t know the season had officially begun until some children ran up with a whole pot of the squirmy writhing things that would be their dinner-quite a treat for them!  Although I can only stomach one or two in a sitting, I was glad the children would at least have a steady protein source for a few weeks.  Before I left, I helped those two Safe Motherhood members make an action plan so that they could their certificates in May, since they are a bit behind for their education programs.

 

I cycled home and took advantage of the cancelled program to do 30 minutes of yoga in the hut, sometimes a rarity due to finding the time, but it felt absolutely delicious and rejuvenating.  I spread some compost on the garden since some of the soil had eroded due to rains, and took a solar shower.  Scott made pumpkin soup with greens and pumpkin bread for dessert, and together we watched the clear starry skies. 

 

 

March 4^th: Baking a Cake

 

This morning’s goat milking program was a 40-minute bike ride over the river and up the hill a bit, so when I got there around 6:45, I was pleasantly surprised to find the family was already collecting milk from their goats.  The father showed me the four baby goats he had separated from the mothers overnight.  Because they were just running and I didn’t want them to go to their mothers when we let the mothers out of the pen, we spent about 20 minutes chasing the 4 baby goats and tying them to a tree.  Two of the mothers did indeed produce, and the owner was proud.  I gave him some tips to help boost production even further.  I stopped by another milking family on the way back to our hut, but they had already left for the fields for the day. 

 

At home, Scott started shelling fresh beans that he had picked at our neighbors’ fields.  We swapped places in front of the burning charcoal brazier, and he hopped on his bicycle to buy chicken de-wormer and other items in the BOMA.  I thought I’d have to put out the fire due to a grantwriting program I had in a nearby village with a drama group, but he showed me a handwritten bush note delivered by a guy on a bicycle to tell me that the program had been cancelled.  Even though the group had my cell phone number, they probably didn’t have enough charge or credit in the phone to call, so they delivered the message the old-fashioned bush note way and it worked!

 

Again I took advantage of the cancelled program to do chores such as filling water buckets from the rain-catching barrel and even making a cake.  Tomorrow would be the big clinic advisory board meeting, and I wanted to make a cake to show my appreciation to Hildah and all the other clinic volunteers.  I used a mixture of white cake flour and cassava flour in the batter and poured it into our cast-iron dutch oven that had been pre-heated by coals.  I took tongs to place hot coals on the lid to complete the baking process and kept a close eye on the cake.  In the meantime, I prepared some beans and dumplings to go over the fire when the cake was done. 

 

I worked in the garden again harvesting our cover crops of sun hemp and velvet beans so that we could put them in our neighbors’ fish ponds as a high-protein food.  Ryvus and Ryford stopped by around 13:30 from the fields and they each had two big bowls of bean soup with dumplings . . . they were definitely appreciative of the mid-afternoon treat, and if I wasn’t saving some of it for Scott, they could have probably eaten more.  I followed them about 2km to their fish ponds and carried the greens and each of them carried a big bucket of manure to place in the crib of the ponds to help with plankton production.  The fish swarmed at the new cover-crop greens, so I could tell it was a success even as they shunned the tomatoes and rape that were already in the pond. 

 

The storm clouds loomed overhead, and  I had the rare opportunity for more reading and yoga, hoping Scott would make it home on his bike before the downpour.  I was pretty proud of the cake I made earlier (although it cracked right down the middle when I inverted the cast-iron dutch oven), and was hoping to frost it with the clinic workers’ names on it for a special treat.  I had saved some icing sugar from the nearest grocery store (over 300 kilometers away) and some food coloring for something like this.  Unfortunately the dim lighting in our hut due to the late afternoon storm caused me to overestimate the water . . . with no more icing sugar to add!  So it came out more like a runny, lumpy glaze with no hope of forming frosting letters.  I plopped it on the cracked cake and it looked like Martha Stewart gone wrong.  Funny how I would never imagine taking something looking like that to work in America, but I knew the Zambian volunteers at the clinic would devour it in a matter of minutes. 

 

It rained fairly hard for about 20 minutes before Scott came, and just as it was getting dark and I was beginning to worry, he appeared soaked and muddy!  Luckily all the things he bought at the BOMA (almost 2 hours cycle away) were in dry bags, so they got spared.  Scott said he could have left much earlier, but he wanted to finish a card game he started playing with three other volunteers while he was there! 

 

Since I had been cooking all morning, I didn’t want to start the fire in the brazier again, so we both took cold showers and ate dumpling soup and pumpkin soup in the hut by candlelight and reminisced about our day.