(Gina's Post)
So lack of internet access has left me a little late catching up on blog posts, but I'm hoping to do "A Week in the Life" every few months or so just to give people an idea of what our day to day life in the village looks like. I chose to blog about Christmas week because although it was a fairly typical week in the village, it was different than any other Christmas we spent together.
Monday December, 19th
Yesterday I went to the BOMA (Mwinilunga) which is about 20 kilometers from our house. I left mid-morning and got my bicycle filthy because of heavy rains in the early morning, which left the dirt road to the BOMA full of mud puddles. It was still lightly raining when I got to Mwinilunga. I got to Mwinilunga on good time, so decided that instead of doing the typical errands to get bread, eggs, and check on the mail, I would start at a youth HIV conference that a local NGO was conducting. Ten 8th and 9th grade youth from my community were invited to attend, so I wanted to see what they were being taught. The workshop was interesting, and although it was mostly in Lunda, I was able to get the basic of the conversation. The youth were trying to brainstorm which traditional cultural practices affected the transmission of HIV. While we were all waiting for lunch, the youth enjoyed themselves by watching and dancing to cheesy Zambian style gospel music videos. It was a treat for many from our village who have no power or access to television. I stayed for a lunch of nshima, veggies, and chicken, and I could tell the village youth were also relishing in the catered food, as chicken hard to come by and only eaten on special occasions in our village. I rode home and missed afternoon rainstorms, which was nice. That night, Scott and I sat around the lit brazier for quite a while after dinner and spoke with our neighbors about what was discussed at the workshop. They helped me translate some Lunda words, including "mukanda" which is a female initiation ceremony. They helped explain that these events typically occur in their culture when a woman is 13-14 years old. They are taken into the bush and taught various things by elder village women, including how to be a good wife. They helped explain that although these events do give some good education to the girls, they also result in early pregnancies and HIV transmission rates for younger women because the women are expected to practice just after the event. We talked about male initiation ceremonies as well, which usually occur at even a younger age (5-6 years) and include male circumcision.
Tuesday December 20th
I woke up to a light rain and emptied the buckets we use for rainwater collection off the roof. We filled 3 buckets, 4 jerry cans and a laundry basin, which is good news since it means not too many trips to the bore hole, which is slowly losing water pressure and badly needing repair. We ate a delicious breakfast of granola with powdered milk, peanut butter, bananas and mangoes. We did a large load of laundry by hand and wrung out the clothes very carefully since it is rainy season. We have to have one person around all day to bring in the clothes in case it rains. Scott washed yesterday's dishes while I prepared beans to soak, poured ash from last night's fire into our pit latrine, and fed the cat a special treat of chicken bones (from yesterday's workshop) and avacado peels. I went to the clinic to deliver under 5 cards I picked up at the BOMA hospital yesterday and assist with the pre-natal clinic. I performed 6 new ante-natal regestrations on my own, and stressed the importance of VCT testing, clinic births, and the father attending ante-natal clinic with his wife. I also wrote 7 letters at the clinic to various district officials to invite them to a meeting at the clinic. It took me probably 7 times as long as it would in the states as they were all the same except for the names, but unfortunately no word processor or copy machine in the bush! Scott stayed home to finish the laundry in the morning, which he had to move in and out of the house several times with the alternating sun and rain. He also made a homemade shelf of string, sticks, and a dor handle he found laying around the village. We switched places in the afternoon, and Scott went to stake a fish pond while I did some house chores. While I was borrowing some hot coals to start our fire from the next-door neighbors, they invited me to play a game of "kukwata ni kuya" or "touch and go". It's kind of like a mixture of checkers and chess, and most resourceful villagers are able to make their own boards from some cardboard and bottle caps of different colors. I had a quick lunch of tomato, avacado and sprouts (I grew them myself in a jar in the bathing shelter) while waiting for the fire to get hot. I cleaned my bike which was filthy from yesterday's ride, and like always, this drew a crowd of young children and teens who were fascinated by the gears. Scott came home earlier than expected; his pond staking fell through since the fish farmer neglected to mention that the stream dries up during the dry season, so it would not be a good place to dig a pond. We alternated pots on our brazier by cooking beans, heating our bath water, and making homemade granola using fresh local honey. Friends came over later to help Scott make a map of the neighborhood. They tried some granola and loved it, and took some of our containers so they can take them to the forest and get freshly harvested honey at a local price rather than having us buy it at a more expensive price in the BOMA. We lent Hops to a different neighbor's house for the night--they love having her occasionally to take care of their rat problem, and we don't mind having a break from her as well.
Wednesday December 21st
I woke up at 5am to a misty early morning light of one of the longest days of the year. The air was filled with birds chirping and people getting ready to go to the fields. I packed for staying one night at the same youth conference I went to earlier in the week. Essentials for any overnight include: bug spray (no mosquito nets there), toilet paper, and plenty of drinking water! It took 1 1/2 hours to bike to the BOMA with just a few stops to greet people we knew along the way. I went to the district health office to drop off the 7 identical handwritten letters and had the wonderful luck of seeing one of my Peace Corps trainers who just happens to work in Mwinilunga. It really helps to know the right people, as he said he could help collaborate the meeting between my clinic and the district office, and even provide a vehicle for the district officials to go up to the clinic, which would save my villagers a 40 kilometer journey by foot. Scott had some business at the district fisheries office, and we both went to the water and sanitation office to again discuss the bore hole pump in our community, which we are worries will be completely dried up by dry season. We went to the welder's place to get Scott's bike rack welded yet again--we've had to get welding done to our bike racks at least three times since October so we know the welder well. We got a nice little package from our friends that included a Yakima magazine, so we sat down for a lunch of fresh fish and nshima at a little local food stand and read about new $16 aluminum water bottles you could buy and re-modeling a 6-bedroom house in the Yakima hills with all new stainless steel appliances. We couldn't help but see the irony after a morning of catching rain water in plastic jerry cans and going over a list of house projects, most of which involve some type of mud bricks or sticks. We got most of the items on our shopping list, including kerosine for our outdoor lantern, dried beans, potatoes, and powdered milk, batteries that last about 20 minutes, and tea. I rode about 5 kilometers up a big hill (at least it was paved!) to the youth conference and observed some sessions about gender-based violence and substance abuse. I knew on Monday they wanted me to lead a session, so I led a session where the youth wrote a letter to their future spouse integrating HIV prevention strategies learned earlier in the week. Some wrote in English, some in Lunda, but mostly, they were proud of the letters and some even volunteered to read them to the group of 60+ youth. I had more nshima and chicken for dinner and a snack of fried termites that one of the facilitators cooked up and the youth gobbled up like popcorn. After dinner, the youth broke up into different groups from their communities and started skits which they will present in their villages once the week-long training is over. I assisted with what I could, but was so sleepy since I was used to going to bed around village time, which is no later than 9pm.
Thursday December 22nd
Breakfast was served at the youth center, which for the villagers is sometimes a foreign concept in and of itself. It was egg sandwiches on large rolls. It was funny to look around the dining hall and see not one single village youth eating them like sandwiches. Instead, they took their right hand and pulled at the bread and rolled it into a little ball almost like nshima. In the morning, the groups performed the skits they practiced the night before. Topics included prevention of transactional sex, gender-based violence, HIV transmission and stigma. The idea is that they will bring these skits back to their various communities to educate people in the villages about sensitive topics. I could tell by watchint that this is definitely a dramatic culture, an storytelling seems to flow naturally. One thing almost all the skits had in common was the boys wearing pants with suspenders looking like Steve Erkle to play the comic fool. After the skits, a lady gave a lecture in a crowded room to about 60 youth about self esteem, and the kids took in about 25% of the information as is was not nearly as entertaining as the skits and they were ready to be done. They were busy passing notes and exchanging contact information of the other children in nearby villages. I ate a lunch of nshima at the training center, and instead of riding my bicycle a hilly 30k back to my clinic for a meeting, one of the facilitators of the youth conference offered me a ride in his land cruiser. We passed by my house, and I gave him some homemade granola for his generosity, and I couldn't tell if he liked it or not. I arrived at the clinic at 1pm and there were still a few pregnant women from this morning's pre-natal clinic. The clinic volunteers were so happy to see me and they wanted me to give the women an impromptu health talk then and there, so I pulled something together about the importance of getting HIV tested during pregnancy since HIV was on my mind during the youth conference. As happens frequently during rainy season, no one showed up to the meeting at the clinic that I left the conference early to get to. Huge dark clouds were rolling in, and I could hear thunder and heavy rains in the distance. I told the clinic staff that I wanted to beat the rain and get back home before it started, so I jumped on my bike only to find that it had been damaged while being shoved in the back of the land cruiser. Something was wrong with the gears which caused the bicycle to lock so I couldn't even pedal it. The clinic in-charge offered his assistance, but he was completely unfamiliar with bicycles that had derailers and gears. Since the land cruiser was long gone and there probably wouldn't be another vehicle down our road for 3-4 hours, I decided the only logical thing to do was to walk the bicycle 4k from the clinic back to my house. About halfway there the skies opened and the rain poured so hard I couldn't see 4 feet in front of me. I kept walking, thinking of the possibility of not having a working bicycle in the village and all the projects I would not be able to do and then the tears came rolling down my face. It was the the first good cry I think since we arrived in our village, and good thing all the villagers were so busy trying to dry off in their little outdoor shelters with smoky fires that I don't think they noticed my tears, which for villagers only happen when someone dies. Every compound I passed invited me in to dodge the rain, but there was no way I was going to show up to someone's house crying, and I just wanted to get home so I could have a better look at the bike. My feet and legs were covered in mud from the backsplash on the dirt road by the time I got home and since I was already soaking wet, the barely warm water in the solar shower didn't bother me one bit. I was too tired to even look at the bike, so I read a New York Times from October that someone had sent us in a care package. It was nice to see Scott, who had busied himself with house projects including re-doing our cardboard toilet hole cover with plastic since the termites had devoured it overnight. He also hung a clothesline in our outdoor cooking shelter so clothes could get somewhat dry in the rainy season whenever we lit our charcoal brazier. Scott fried up some fermented cassava that one of our neighbors gave us and we ate it like french fries with ketchup along with boiled sweet potato and moringa, which tastes somewhat like spinach. The rain finally stopped and I cleaned up from dinner while some friends came over to help Scott translate a fish pond management presentation into Lunda.
Friday December 23rd
We woke up to an overcast day and Scott helped me fix my bike! We realized that as it was crammed into the land cruiser through a small door yesterday, the chain got stuck in a small screw on the bike rack. I was quite relieved that it had nothing to do with the gears, and my sense of freedom of moving about for various village projects was restored. It was probably the best Christmas present I could ask for. We ate a delicious breakfast of millet porridge and fresh pineapples from the villagers. Scott spent all morning carving out four 8-inch diameter holes through the mud brick wall in our living room to make a village version of a solar tube. He filled the circular holes with large clear plastic juice bottles that I brought back from the youth workshop and covered the outside with foil. The difference in daylight entering our hut was amazing. I did typical morning chores; putting yesterday’s cooking ash down our pit latrine and scooping goat poop from various paths around our house. I rode my bike to the clinic and we had a HUGE turnout for the Under 5 preventative clinic. Moms bring their children to this clinic every Friday to get weighed, and I help the community health workers correctly plot the weights on a graph so they know if a child is underweight or not. Of the 79, we found that 17 were either losing weight or significantly unerweight, which is a problem. I did a brief health talk about how women could pound dried fish to add as a nutritional supplement to the children’s poffidge. They laughed at first, but then started to show some interest, although it was really hard to talk with a room full of crying babies. Note to self: next cooking demo will have to be in a smaller village. After the clinic, I stopped by one of the traditional birth attendant’s house to invite her to Lusaka for a Peace Corps workshop. Whe was so excited as she had never been to Lusaka in her life. In typical Lunda fashion, she gave me a large grocery bag full of little orange mushrooms her family collected that probably rival chanterelles in the States. I got back while Scott was assessing the fish ponds of the head man of a neighboring village. Some neighbors came over to help work on our grass and stick fence. It started raining slightly so I invited them to our outdoor kitchen for some peanut butter sandwiches. We bought a 50 lb. bag of charcoal assist with our upcoming Christmas cooking day. I “borrowed fire” from another neighbor by basically taking some hot goals from the ashes of the logs that burn almost all day long and started toasting some peanuts for our baking extravaganza. Scott came home and had been given an entire BUNCH (over 70) small bananas from the headman. He knew we couldn’t eat them all, so he gave many away on our way home. We’ll have to add some bananas to our Christmas goodies. I heated a big pot of water over the brazier for our bucket baths, and started cooking a delicious white sauce including mushrooms, onions, flour, powdered milk, spices, and powdered cheese sauce. We dipped roasted cassava into the cheese sauce and it was almost like a fondue! We sat and watched a huge thunder and lightning production accompanied by little rain, and I made 5 batches of plain popcorn to get ready for the popcorn balls tomorrow. We finally cleaned the dishes and started looking at the book of Peace Corps Africa stories sent from Dad.
Saturday December 24th
We woke around 7:30 am, which is one of the latest we ever slept in at the village. I ate breakfast of banana pancakes and rode my bike to what I hoped would be a quick work meeting at the clinic. Some neighbors came by with some honey their friends gathered, and we paid them 10,000 kwatcha (about USD $2) for 3 large containers, although it was not separated from the comb and we still had to strain it. The meeting at the clinic lasted about 1 hour (yes, it is even open Christmas Eve), and I helped the in-charge work on a meeting agenda for an upcoming meeting with district health officials next week. They taught me how to say “Merry Christmas” in Lunda: “chamishimishi mwani.” As I passed by the main part of the village, I could see villagers making temporary shelters out of sticks to sell meat for Christmas day. I rode home and prepared for a day of sweet baking: popcorn balls, no bake cookies, banana bread and sugar cookies to share some American Christmas joy with our neighbors. Scott managed to make perfect sugar cookies using just the right combinations of a cookie sheet and cast iron lid pot on top of the brazier. The banana millet pancakes didn’t turn out so well, so I used the rest of the batter to make banana bread. It was a nice sunny day with little rain from yesterday, so I actually had to fetch water from the bore hole as our rainwater collection had dwindled. I spent most of the day making the no bakes and popcorn balls, and we wrapped 24 sets of the assortment of sweets into newspaper cones to pass out to our Zambian neighbors tomorrow. Scott tilled the garden by hand to prep it for planting since the fence was almost done. For dinner we had avacado, rice, and even more mushrooms brought by neighbors. This time they were dried, rehydrated and coated with a pumpkin seed paste. Delicious with an earthy texture and meaty flavor. From 8-10 pm, we went to a 2 hour church service at the church down the way where most of our neighbors go. We usually don’t go to that one, but they had a special service where singing and drumming were integrated into the service.
Sunday December 25th
This was a typical morning where we woke up to some sun, did the morning chores, and exchanged greetings with our neighbors. It was interesting to see the lack of hooplah surrounding Christmas morning; no wrapped presents and definitely no mention of Santa Claus. Even without all the commercial frills, people were even livlier than usual and greeted us with “chamichimichi mwani.” We ate a breakfast of leftover rice, hardboiled eggs, and tomatoes and did 3 different bike runs in different directions to pass out all the cookies we had made yesterday. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough for every single household, but tried to be discreet to avoid neighbor jealousy. Since word travels fast in the village, you could tell some people were disappointed. A few people hinted at us giving them gifts by saying they had nothing to eat, and a few downrigt asked for food or money, but we just replied “Merry Christmas” back. I think we would have had to have baked for 1 week straight to give everyone in the village their fair share. We went to the Christmas service at the Catholic church, and it lasted 2 ½ hours! It started with the rosary, and then people broke out a homemade electric guitar, so you could tell it was a special day. To bad the solar battery for the amp didn’t work, so we couldn’t really hear it. A group of eight 10-16 year-old girls dressed in white tops and matching chitenges came dancing down the aisle and performed to drumming and singing for about 20 minutes before the service began. There was quite a bit of hip shaking going on for a Sunday Christmas service. Scott and I got caught in a rainstorm on the way back and soaked again! At least we had some free time and had the luxury of a 2 hour nap! We rode our bikes toward the river to deliver more gifts, call our families in America, and see what was going on in our tiny town center. The phone call was fairly disappointing as even at the highest spot, the network would only support a 3-minute jumbled conversation. But at least our families know we were thinking about them on Christmas. My parents would have to suffice with a “merry christmas” text. In town, we saw everyone dancing, drinking, and general merriment. The big event was selling bits of roasted pig for about 20 cents each. A fight started breaking out, so we decided to leave those Christmas festivities in exchange for some closer to our house. The one near our house had just as many people, but the solar batteries had stopped, so it was not as loud as the one in town. I danced with the locals a little but got laughed at for not shaking my hips enough. We saw homemade cassava liquor being distilled in a giant vat and bought little bits of roasted pig and goat. On the way back home, we walked back with some neighbors and taught them American Christmas carols. They said they had heard some and started busting out “joy to the world” in Lunda. Christmas dinner consisted of a packet of soup with spicy peppers as we were very tired of baking. Since most people were still dancing the night away, we took the opportunity to burn some of our trash while no one was around to ask us what all the wrappers were. We played board games, read, and ate some sugar cookies just the two of us. We stayed up past 11pm, which is probably the latest I stayed up in the village as well. Definitely a Christmas to remember!
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