Just wanted to give you one more glimpse of village life from last month . . . it's kind of long, but a good picture of what we do during swing season. We just got back from helping to facilitate a boys soccer camp for village youth focusing on HIV education and gender equality, and then we visited another health/fish farming couple in our district. So . . . it's back to the village for me and a few days of office work in Solwezi for Scott.
Here it is . . .
Tuesday, March 20th- Going Bananas
I woke up at 6:45 to no rain, which was a bummer since we had a dry spell for a few days, I would probably have to go fetch water if it didn’t rain in the afternoon. Breakfast was a nice mix of leftover boiled corn and fried cassava from dinner last night as well as a banana and peanuts. I sliced some of our excess bananas lengthwise and put them our solar dehydrator that Scott designed from bush wood.
At about 7:30 Scott had a slew of visitors . . . some of his fish farmers stopped by on the way to their fields. They were there to sign a handwritten proposal to a local NGO to ask for a seed press, which could ideally provide oil to sell to the villagers and the wastes could be fed to the fish. Some of the farmers were curious about our garden, so I gave them a tour. They were most curious about the squash (they grow a completely different type), turnips, and broccoli greens. Our host father showed the others our compost heap, explaining to the others in Lunda that we do conservation farming, so I was proud of that. I showed them the bananas drying in our solar dehydrator and gave them each a sample of the already dried ones. They were ecstatic about the flavor and said it tasted like a sweetie. We’ll have to do a workshop one of these days.
I took a short bike trip down the road, hoping to see some women who invited me to help them soak cassava in the river yesterday. This is an integral part of their lives, and I always wanted to see how it was done. But, like so many things in the village, the 8 o’clock time wasn’t exact and I figured they had either left without me or changed their plans. Oh well . . . another day!
So instead, I followed Scott to a fish pond digging that one of the local church groups is doing. He is really excited since it is the first pond in the community being dug according to the design he learned at Peace Corps training. He put a thin rope to mark the height of the mud walls around sticks that were placed previously to measure the perimeter. Then he got to helping the men do the backbreaking, messy job of digging the pond, one shovel or hoe-full at a time.
I rode over the bridge and up the hill to our network spot to check my phone messages, and got one from a local NGO saying that today’s planned visit to our community would be cancelled and they were not coming. I went to school right away to let the schoolmaster know, since it had to do with parent education, and then to let Scott know since he was planning on attending.
After tons of running around and cancelled programs, I finally made it to the clinic for today. Tuesdays are antenatal registrations, where pregnant women come to register for clinic services. We actually only had one woman today, which I think is a record low, but understandable since almost ALL the women are in the bush right now collecting mushrooms or caterpillars or in their fields harvesting maize or beans. The good news is that her husband came! We’ve been working since January to get more men to come to antenatal clinics, so even though it was just one couple, it was a success. The health talk topic for today was the risk of malaria for pregnant women, and the husband was very concerned about borrowing a mosquito net to protect his pregnant wife from malaria caused by dangerous nighttime mosquitos. Success in small numbers, since she may have been afraid to mention it to him if she had come to the clinic alone. My second success was an OT moment I had: the health worker in charge was writing a referral for a woman and her baby to go to a distant mission hospital. Reason: the 1 month-old girl had a small birth defect of her left hand causing several of the finger joints to be missing as well as overall tightness. I knew she was too young to splint (and we have very limited supplies at that clinic anyway), but did recommend encouraging weight bearing through the affected side when she started crawling as well as grasping with her affected hand. Hopefully, the mother will be back in a few weeks.
I went back to the fish pond digging extravaganza and they put a big dent in it, literally. I put on my rubber boots and tried my hand at the hoe. After about 3 swipes at the wet, sloppy mud, the men started laughing at me and I could see right away that me “helping” dig was a useless cause. So instead I went over to Scott and helped him stomp down the mud dike walls with my boots. Nothing like playing in the mud . . . except when you have to move tons of it by hand!
I went home and watered the garden with some dirty dishwater since it still hadn’t rained in 3 days, as well as sprayed the plants with our “all natural” pesticide. Neighbors came by with their treasures for the day: over 2 kg of colorful black, green, blue and yellow caterpillars climbing all over each other in a bucket. They describe”d the different names of each caterpillar: “mayungu “is the general term and “masesi are the big fat ones, while “mapopa” are the smaller ones. They did a photo shoot holding all the different types.
Scott back all muddy and we ate a good lunch, while I went of to a nearby village to look for more bananas to put in the solar dehydrator (they were such a hit this morning!). I pedaled fast because storm clouds were gathering and I heard thunder in the distance. The villagers cut down the ENTIRE flower-tipped bunch of 80+ green bananas hanging off a branch and sold it to me for 5,000 kwacha, the equivalent of a dollar. After they helped me strap the darn thing to the back of the bike, the skies broke loose and the villagers herded me and my bike to a little tin-roofed mud hut with a young woman and her child to wait out the rain. We conversed in awkward Lunda and I could tell by the fear in her and her son’s eyes that she had never spoken to a white person before. Luckily who comes in but our clinic birth attendant volunteer came in as she happened to live at that very same family compound! I didn’t know she was one of the 5 wives of the man who owns the large banana tree-lined compound. I asked how many children lived on the compound, and she said 18. I asked in Lunda how many were hers personally, and she said “all of them!” as if the wives took everyone’s children as their own. Just goes to show community culture around here.
When I got home, Scott had started cooking a stir-fry of mushrooms, delicious local squash, pumpkin leaves, and YES, a few fried caterpillars for protein, given to us so generously by our next door neighbors.
Total biking kilometers: 24
Wednesday March 21st- BOMA and Yard Work
The 3-day dry spell was broken easily by continuous rain through the night, so we slept in past 7am, which is a treat in the village. Breakfast was leftover squash stir fry and rice pudding. I addressed some letters I had written and packed my bike for a 22k trip to Mwinilunga, our District capital, otherwise known as the BOMA. Scott stayed home since he had some appointments to assess fish ponds.
I knew I was pushing it to do the whole round-trip in daylight since I didn’t leave until 10am due to the rain. But, I had to speak with some of the officers there, so I took my chances. The road was a muddy mess ¾ of the way but amazingly dried up nicely just as I reached the BOMA around 11:30. I did multiple and spent 3 days worth of Peace Corps pay on town essentials at various mom & pop shops including: postage, cell phone talk time, peanut butter, guava jam, sour milk, avacadoes, and crackers. I delivered request letters for the seed press to two different NGO’s in town, so we’ll see if they follow-up. I stopped by a used clothing shop and visited a friend who was a shopkeeper. She let me try on a few shirts and gave me one for free! The ride home consisted of over 100 greetings and most people know both of us by name.
I got home at dusk and some of the local neighborhood kids were helping Scott slash the grass that was growing too tall around our house. They have little sharp slashers and it looks like they’re swinging a golf club really fast. While Scott supervised the slashing to make sure they didn’t pull up the entire topsoil with the grass, I helped the little ones collect the fallen grass and put it in our compost pit. More and more came to help, and it ended up being about 15 kids altogether. They each got a gummy bear vitamin for a reward and loved it! We sang “head, shoulders, knees and toes” in Lunda and English, and some of them are finally getting the English words.
For dinner some neighbors brought us fresh corn and boiled legumes that tasted like a combination of chickpeas and peanuts. We supplemented with avacadoes and guava jam from the BOMA. I unpacked the rest of the BOMA stuff while Scott assisted two young adults with math problems. They are in their early 20’s and never went past 11th grade, but if they study hard and pass the GCE, they can earn 12th grade credit and have much expanded job opportunities.
Total biking kilometers: 45
Thursday, March 22nd- Technology is Amazing!
I woke up at 6am and did a 30 min. yoga practice, which is a rare treat in the village since most mornings are spent doing household chores or getting ready to bike to some program. It took Scott about 50 minutes to get the brazier started because it was a cool morning, so while he kept playing with the charcoal, I made pancake batter and mixed dry ingrediens for granola. Once the brazier FINALLY got started we had a hot breakfast: pancakes with guava puree and toasted pecans (thanks to a lovely care package) and tea. Scott stayed home to make some bread and cook the plethora of vegetables including sweet local squash, Chinese cabbage, and tomato sauce.
I went to the clinic and 10 women attended ante-natals, which is still a small number since most are out in the bush collecting caterpillars. I helped the traditional birth attendants give a health talk about the importance of having a birth plan as well as assisted taking blood pressures as the birth attendants handed out antimalarial and deworming pills to the women. Three expectant fathers attended the clinic, which is a recors, so the word must be getting out that we are encouraging men to attend with their wives so they can help formulate the birth plan. The 3 men were rewarded for their attendance as we gave them leftover cardboard boxes that the medications came in. These are hard to get in the village and very valuable since the villagers can use them to collect mushrooms (“wuwa”) in the forest. One of our volunteer clinic workers had just returned from a 10-day course and is now certified to perform HIV tests. He said we could probably start next week (which probably means next month) once we get the appropriate testing solutions.
I came home to fresh baked bread for lunch and our neighbor brought over yet MORE fried masesi. I ate about 10 of them and Scott put the remaining 50 on a caterpillar sandwich. Mmmmm! “They just taste so meaty!” he exclaimed. He went next door to return the caterpillar dish and saw our neighbor woman sticking her hands in a big bucket of green goo. It turns out she was taking the insides out of each and every caterpillar before frying them!
I made a new batch of organic pesticide as grasshoppers were destroying the pumpkin and broccoli leaves. I soaked tobacco leaves, onions, garlic and very hot peppers in water and let them ferment in a sealed container, where I will strain the juice off and put it into a spray bottle in about three days. I took a solar shower and had some extra daylight, so I decided to take a stab at making a mentholated spirit stove out of a soda can out of instructions we got in a Peace Corps manual from a training in January. I cut two soda cans in half, made a slit in the top of one, and then poked holes all around the top with a thumb tack. Even though Scott had been cooking ALL morning, and we really didn’t have to cook anymore, I was so excited to try out the stove. It lit in 30 seconds (a little upgrade from Scott’s fire starting adventure this morning) and lasted 20 minutes—enough time to re-heat our food for dinner and even pop popcorn! Our neighbors heard the pops, so we gave them some popcorn and they gave us even MORE caterpillars. We had a dessert of homemade ricotta cheese made from strained sour milk, granola and guava jam. It tasted almost like cheesecake.
As if I wasn’t already excited enough for the technological breakthrough of the soda can stove, we had the most pleasant surprise of the day happen just after dinner. I turned on my phone to write a text message in prep for riding my bike up the hill to send it the next day, and to my delight it showed two bars of service! We heard rumors that they would turn on a nearby cell tower soon, and sure enough, I had enough network coverage to even make a CALL from the hut. Between the soda can stove and the phone, I figured we’d save 1-2 hours of work per day.
Total biking kilometers: 7
Friday, March 23rd—Biking Through the Forest
I woke up around 6:30, took tomatoes to the solar dryer, and filled the solar dryer with rainwater. We made a quick breakfast of rice, squash, avocado, and peanuts and mobilized to go to a clinic outreach site.
I rode my bike to the clinic and helped the clinic volunteer pack a big cardboard box full of medications and educational materials, but he was late as his wife had just had a baby daughter 2 days ago. We finally left the clinic around 9:30 for a tiny village located about 11k away on a really rough dirt road. Since we were already late, we decided to take the bush path shortcut to the village, Although it was much shorter distance-wise, the bush path included dodging fallen trees, hiking up muddy hills, and saying hello and shaking hands with each and every villager we saw along the way. Most villagers had big baskets of fermented cassava and maize on their heads since this is harvest time.
As we rode/walked our bikes on the bush trail, sparse trees gave way to thicker trees, some over 100 feet tall. I learned the Lunda word “evundu,” which means thick forest, or jungle. After the thick forest, we came upon a floodplain with a beautiful stream winding through and trees in a distance. We hiked our bikes for the last 3 kilometers due to steep, muddy trails and forded one last stream with our bikes to come upon the tiny village where we would set up the mobile clinic. The community had a small mud brick church with a thatched roof, and one of the members helped us remove the wood planks that served as a door. They brought us child-sized desks to put our paperwork and medications, and we hung the baby scale, which looked like a meat scale, from the thatched roof. We started just on time, since just as mothers and their small children came in, we heard the rains come and felt drips through the thatch roof. Kenneth gave the moms a brief health talk about HIV in Lunda, although between the rain and crying babies in the packed church, I don’t know how much they comprehended. Of the 40 children we weighed, we identified three as being either underweight or losing weight (not including the 10 from last month). We took the names of the children and parents as they will participate in a nutrition program starting in June.
The ground outside the church was muddy and soaked from the rain, so we thought we should ride home fast, except that we were invited for lunch by a local villager, and you can’t turn down an invitation for lunch. We had a play-dough like substance made out of cassava meal called nshima as well as “wuwa,” or smaller orange mushrooms that reminded me of chanterelles. The wife even sent me home with a basketful of onions from their garden! We took the main road home rather than the bush path, which was still plenty muddy, but at least we were able to ride most of the way home. Besides an ox cart carrying some wood, there was no other traffic on the 1 ½ hour journey back home.
When I got home, Scott had just arrived from the BOMA (Mwinilunga) with 2 chickens on the back of his bike! A male and a female we bought from some of our friends who are also volunteers about 30 kilometers from us. We locked them in the wooden chicken house made of tree branches by some of our neighbors to get them used to sleeping there. Even before I got home, Scott said the rooster had already gotten in a fight with a neighboring rooster, so that was bad news.
The day ended with a HOT bucket bath from water boiled on the brazier as well as cabbage soup and bread. The surprise of the night came in the form of a bush note, a message sent from the chief from our area who said he would like us to come to his palace on Tuesday, so we were excited about that.
Total biking kilometers: 24
Saturday, March 24th—The Brother
Originally we planned to bike 30K to an old mission further up our road and then visit the chief, but since the chief wanted us to visit on Tuesday, we decided just to do a day trip to the mission to see the infamous American Brother that all of our villagers had been raving to us about. Apparently he was the only other white person in our area, and the villagers gloated that he had been here so long that he was a true Lunda. Besides, Scott wanted to see a seed press he had heard about that was at the mission. We kept the chickens in their cage for fear that they would get lost (or worse, start fights) among the other village chickens without knowing their true home. We started off on the dirt road and came upon many end-of-rainy-season wildflowers as well as tall grass that was shooting up to replace the thick underbrush.
We did find The Brother at the mission, and he was happy to learn of new Peace Corps volunteers on his same road after his 6-month stay in America. He is a Franciscan brother in his mid-70’s who has been in Zambia since 1958, before it was even Zambia. Apparently his higher-ups were thinking of keeping him in America for health reasons, but he insisted on continuing his mission in Zambia, because “there’s always something to do here.” He showed us his latest project of getting the hydroelectric dam up and running after 1 ½ years of no power in the area due to a lightning strike, as well as many gadgets that were very useful when there was electricity but are now just sitting in a garage. He showed us a map of Northwest Province and where all the good game hunting was back in the day that it was allowed and wasn’t all poached. As we sat down to lunch around a table (a rarity for sure around these parts), he told us stories of several schools he started and ran, and even how some of his Zambian students from the bush went on to university. The Brother was even around when the locals were still wearing traditional clothes made of bark. I’m sure if we stayed longer we could have heard more stories.
We took a long bike ride home in the drizzle and on the way, the one vehicle that passed us was from a Zambian priest who lived at the same mission we just visited. He was very sad that we were not staying the night and told us to come again. With the good food and conversation, we probably will. When we got home, the rain buckets from the roof were halfway full. We were too tired to start the brazier, so we just took cold showers since we were wet anyway, and ate dinner of leftover bread, oysters, tomatoes, and garden basil.
Some of the neighbor boys came over for math help from Scott, and one announced that he was going to get married to a girl from the neighboring village. He is 23, and she is 15 with only a 6th grade education. We asked her why he proposed, and he said it is because her mother is in bad health, and she needs someone to take care of her. He is saving money now, because as a dowry, he will have to pay the mother 250,000k ($50) and two goats. In exchange for the math help, the neighbors helped Scott translate sentences from English to Lunda about why his Tuesday fish visit is cancelled; we got an invitation from the chief.
Total biking kilometers: 60.
Sunday March 25th—American Visitors
We woke up and did laundry by hand like we do almost every Sunday because we had nowhere to be until church at 10:30. Breakfast was an amazing time-saving breakthrough using the soda-can stove I made a few days ago. No blowing and lighting kindling to start the brazier; just lit a match and the stove started flaming in about 30 seconds. We toasted some bread and made tea, and had to add more spirits to the stove about halfway through cooking as we are still playing with the amount needed to reheat a small meal. We let the chickens out for the first time in 2 days and they enjoyed roaming around the yard pecking for bugs and soon found their way to the neighbor’s yards, which is common in this fenceless village. Scott named the rooster Cuatro for the four feathers on its tail and the hen Cleo because its neck looked like Cleopatra’s jewlry.
Church consisted of two hours of singing, dancing, and lots of Lunda that I did not understand. The members spent the last 20 minutes or so deciding how they were going to build a new pit latrine toilet before Palm Sunday and Easter, so the announcements turned into a large community meeting. I got back home, and the laundry was almost dry in the hot morning sun. I picked turnips, carrots, and pumpkin leaves for tonight’s stew, and Scott sliced open a 10-pound lumpy squash planted in November from South African seeds bought at the supermarket. The neighbors were fascinated as they had never seen a squash so big. We started the soup by boiling sweet potatoes and the squash in a huge pot.
Our Peace Corps friends John and Kelly arrived around 3pm and were amazed by the amount of hills we had to go up from the BOMA. Since they had been in Zambia for over a year, our host family was very impressed with the amount of Lunda they spoke. We gave them a brief tour of our 2-room hut and garden and everyone had solar showers in this nice sunny day. Dinner consisted of squash soup with pumpkin leaves on the side. The clouds broke open and we had a nice cool downpour as we baked brownies on the brazier of our outdoor cooking shelter. For a minute, we all forgot we were in Zambia and thought we were camping somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, where we have all lived. Except the fresh air, outdoor cooking and beautiful stars were just out our front door!
Total biking kilometers: 8
Monday, March 26th—Village Inspections
We slept in and had breakfast with our guests of French toast with local honey and bananas. Scott pounded coffee beans with a huge wooden mortar and pestle called an iyanda—a little coarse, but it worked. We said goodbye to our friends around 9:30, and I put another batch of about 20 bananas in the solar dryer.
On my way to yet another little village to help a community health worker, I stopped by the clinic. The traditional birth attendant was very proud to have two more village births, and they let me hold a swaddling, wrinkled baby boy. I went over the bridge and up a hill to an outreach village where I found my community health worker carrying water on her head. The two of us sat down on little wooden stools in her compound where she showed me a nice organized plastic file full of paperwork for village health inspections. This is a new program to help village volunteers report health statistics to district officials, because they hadn’t been doing so for the last 5 years. She learned very quickly, and we started with her own family compound, asking questions like births, deaths, illnesses, and who has been to the clinic. We also inspected each family’s pit latrines, rubbish pits, and asked who had mosquito nets. To my surprise, almost everyone did have a mosquito net, but they were lacking in other things like rubbish pits.
Through the course of the long morning, we visited 5 family compounds, and walked 3-4 kilometers as many families were out in their fields harvesting beans/maize or collecting caterpillars. The villagers we interviewed were relatively healthy in March, and reported only a few diseases such as diarrhea, cough, and fever. The average family was 10 people living on a compound. I was also surprised at how much Lunda I understand, and the villagers loved speaking with me.
As I rode home, many of the villagers said they saw Scott ride in the same direction to look at some fish ponds, but I never saw him. I got home, had a HOT solar shower, and prepared a dinner of leftover stew with fresh tomatoes and cooked it over the spirit stove. It started raining around 6pm and didn’t stop raining until 8am the next morning, so all of our water collection buckets were overflowing so much we couldn’t even fill all of our containers.
Total biking distance: 16 kilometers.
Total estimated biking for the week: 184k
Bush trails: 30k
Dirt road: 151k
Tarmac: 3k
Health talks: 3
Caterpillars eaten: 25 (Scott ate well over 100).
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