I am a little concerned how fast time is flying by. I still pinch myself every time I think about how I have already been here for a half of a year!!! It does seem like I just got here a little while ago, but time is actually flying by!
The last three months of my life have been full of fun, fear, frustrations, cuts and bruises, and beauty. I might have to write several posts to cover it all, but I can talk about some of the everyday stuff, and leave specific stories for later.
So community entry is just 3 months where new volunteers must "remain" in their village and get to know the people, the layout of the land, and get accustomed to live in the village. I visited my school, clinic, and farmers a lot. I also went to the river often to do laundry and to bathe, but it is now rainy season, so the river is running too hard for me to swim and wash until the dry season. I also spent most all of every day reading, gardening, and building stuff. So let me break this down into a few sections and then I can add more later
I ) KIDS:
I typically don't mind children. I don't like Zambian children very much. First of all they are the ones who carry all the diseases that can put me on medical leave back in the states for months like TB. They are typically very dirty, and if you give them anything at all, they will keep asking you for more and more. I do have a little friend names Manuel. He is my "hired" help, and he gets water for me when my rain catch does not provide enough water for my American demand for water. He also slashes grass, and helps me build stuff. I send him into the bush (and very often go with or on my own too) to cut down trees, or make bush rope. When I go on vacations, it will be his job to feed my cat, feed the chickens, collect chicken manure, change the liter box, collect eggs, etc.... He is an honest kid and it helps to have a little helper to get things done. Another thing that really frustrates me is my trash pit being robbed. Kids love to go through my trash for little hidden treasures, but instead of taking the trash they want away, they always take out the trash and litter my yard with it all. So now I save up trash and have trash fires. The look on their face is one of serious misery, anguish, and sadness. But I do put out all of my plastics and tins out front of my fence and it is always swept up quickly by my host family. Education is very localized in Zambia. People that grow up in Copperbelt where there is a lot of money, have much better education. Also in town. My school and my clinic have no power... So kids build these little toy cars out of trash they find. It is funny to see the differences between village and city cars, because the kids in the village will build them and they will not have moving wheels, and they are usually just a few pieces of plastic with sticks pushed into them so that the kids can "drive" their cars around town. In the city, the toy cars become much more elaborate with wire, and moving wheels, some even have wheels in the front that turn when they use their long stick with a steering wheel at the end of it.
II ) So a real quick one is the lack of critical thinking, and education in the general populace. A quick story, I was in Lumwana West trying to catch a hitch out of town towards Chisasa and eventually my site. While I was waiting Ryan and I wanted to buy some drinks from a local shop. we pull out 4 drinks, 2 waters, and 2 orange drinks. The next 15 mins of my life were the most frustrating in Zambia thus far. with the aid of a calculator and with 4 drinks sitting in front of her, and two college educated Americans both yelling the total sum of the drinks, she still kept adding up the cost of 6 drinks... I literally sat in front of her counting 1,2,3,4... and adding up the total for her time and time again, even using the calculator for her, and she was COMPLETELY lost!!! Drove me crazy!
III ) Rainy/Dry Season:
So When I first arrived at site (you can see in the pictures) all the grass was brown, the earth was just arid dirt, and you could see distances when walking through the bush. NOW, rainy season literally changed my site into a jungle. Grass is now taller than I am, all the trees are full and fruiting, weeds are taking over everywhere, and the bugs have come out! Literally you can not dream up bugs that are here in your wildest imagination. I see moths that have 8-10" wing spans, beetles the size of my fist, spiders as large as CDs and small as a tic-tac w/ really scary bodies, all sorts of different colors, and body sizes. When walking in the bush you never see them, and all of the sudden your face is stuck in a huge web 5ft wide and thick. The spiders are so scary, they even make a "heavy duty" silk that is yellow and really strong. I get stung by little wasps once a month, but those are just annoying, nothing serious. I have seen 3 more snakes since the incident at the river. I have also been attacked by army ants and the red ones too. Army ants are everywhere and I battle them frequently. It is fun because they make a collective hissing noise that is really weird, and they are very sophisticated with their organization. The red ones are really interesting. they are a colony of maybe 5 million ants, and every 5th or 6th on is a slightly larger ant with massive and very painful pincers. They come up out of the ground and will just dominate an area 15x15m or larger. If they move into your house, you literally just have to leave and stay somewhere else until they decide to leave.
IV ) Making my home homely was a very large part of my community entry. I started a garden, and almost everything I planted came up. I have peas, carrots, beans, lettuce, beats, tomatoes, corn, squash, cucumber, watermelon, pumpkin, garlic, spinach, broccoli, and onions. I usually spend the early hours of my morning (if I wake up early, I typically sleep into about 8) weeding my garden while the sun is down and it is not so hot. I will have to make a smaller garden that I can water easily during the dry season later, but for now with all the rain, my garden can be huge.
I also build a lot of things. I have built a really nice cat bed for Honkers and her kittens, a 3 shelf bureau for my bedroom, so I can finally put my clothes away and organize my life. I have built a shelf for my bath so I don't have to squat down over the bucket any longer, now I can take my bucket baths standing up. I have carved out a giant upside down V in my chota (cooking shelter) and put a awning coming out from it so I no longer have to bend over 30 times a day to get in and out of the chota. I put my flag pole up, and fly Ole Glory every day. I constructed a really nice rain catch, that when it rains, I can fill both jerry cans, and my 70L, bucket so that I have a total of 150L of water on hand. I have to treat the water with chlorine, but that is because all sorts of bugs and weird water worms grow in the bucket if it sits for a while. The process of filling just entails putting a rag over the jerry can hole, and pour through that to filter out the bugs and water worms, then treat it with the chlorine. I built a 6 ft long bench out of just bush wood and some string, it reminds me of the camp furniture we would make as kids. Lastly, I also built a really nice chicken coop, and two 5-room hen houses to go along both sides of the coop. I built them all my self using trees, mealie meal sacks, bush rope, a few nails, and grass to thatch the roof. It came out really well, it is a beautiful home that I named the "Hen House Hotel."
In all seriousness though it is more of a rehab center than a hotel. The chickens I am buying are hybrid birds that are bred to lay eggs (layers) and grow fat full of meat (broilers). But they have no instincts to look for food like the village chickens, raise chicks like village chickens do, and in the case of the broilers, they don't know how to walk! So I spend plenty of time during the day trying to feed them and get them to wander around outside my fence, and getting the broilers to walk around more and use their legs. I bought 5 chickens thinking that all broilers are cocks, but 4 of them died on the way to site, because I put them in a zam bag (plastic 2x1.5x1.5ft bag with a zipper on top). Then with the one remaining chicken I realized was a female too, so completely worthless for me (or so I thought). So I ate chicken for 3 days straight after that and realized I need to be more careful. The remaining chicken I took with me to Mwinilunga one day, and it is very funny, because here in Zambia you can go into any restaurant and hand them a live chicken over the counter. They take it, butcher it, and cook it for you. Imagine walking into a KFC or nicer restaurant in America and handing them live animals for them to prepare for you... That is one of the really neat cultural differences here.
Well, a week later I came into Solwezi to update my visa, and I bought 2 layers and 3 more broilers, but this time I put them in nice plastic carry baskets and gave them water often so that they didn't die. Again, it is alike a rehab center spending time getting these chickens used to the village life. The goal of mine is to fatten all the birds up and get them wandering around like other birds, so that my host father's cock will mate with them and fertilize their eggs. Because they don't have the instincts to rear their chicks, I will get a few village hens who are laying, and when they decide to sit, I will eat the eggs from the village hen, and put the hybrid birds' eggs under the village chicken who WILL raise the chicks up. So I am hoping eventually I can inject some of the good and strong hybrid genes into village stock.
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| My Chickens! |
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| bench |
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| Cat Bed |
My garden, chickens, fish ponds are good for me, but also tools I am using to get my village interested in better gardening and animal husbandry practices. After all I am here to improve food security, so that has become my main goal.
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