September 2019 – Reilly in Zambia

Hot Season Made Me Do It

Hi everybody! I know it’s been a long time since I’ve posted, but hey, it’s my blog and I’ll post when I want!

Most of you now are enjoying the autumn (my favorite season), and that means cute sweaters, yummy pastries, and pretty leaves. Over here, however, we’ve been slogging through hot season. Hot season means preemptively starting your day with oral rehydration salts, too-warm early morning bike rides to the training center, getting irritated by the smallest things, sleeping on top of my bed instead of in it, and taking cool baths instead of warm ones, while being outside one hundred. Percent. Of. The. Time.

I don’t mean to complain, but man, it’s HOT. So hot, in fact, that I was a little impulsive last weekend. I was suffering through the heat, and I convinced (begged) my friends to cut my hair. Niether of them had ever cut hair before, so after convincing them that they could do it, we chopped off about 5 inches of hair in the hopes of helping me stay cooler in this heat. We all learned as we went, and defintely learned what (not) to do next time a PCV wants their hair cut! It turned out pretty well, and most importantly, it can still go into a pony tail! (I’ll attatch a picture at the bottom of this post)

In addition to giving in to hot season impulses (like cutting my hair, running to the market across the street at lunch for an ice cold Coca Cola, and laying on top of my bed in clothes that would be immodest here instead of being social with my host family) I’ve also been working on my Tonga skills, getting (marginally) better on my bike, and starting to think about what kinds of programs I might be able to do at my permanent site. Last week, we had round-robin interviews where we met with our Director of Programming and Training, our Program Manager, and our Program Trainer to discuss how training is going, any challenges, our host families, and any preferences or concerns regarding site placement we may have. Next week, we all find out exactly where we’ll be placed. For someone like me, who’s learning a langauge that’s largely only spoken in one province, it’s not nearly as nerve-wracking as it is for someone who’s language is spoken throughout the country and doesn’t know which province they’re headed to yet.

Nevertheless, it’s exciting and nerve-wracking and every emotion in between.
It brings up so many question marks for me…Will they like me? Will they even want me? How close will I be to my friends? Will I get along with my host family? How will I set effective and appropriate boundaries? When can I get started? Can I go already?!

Also next week, we depart for two-week site visits, wherein we’ll stay with a current PCV already living in our province, do a workshop with a member of our host family, and then go to our actual site to check it out!! (I’ll provide a more detailed description when I come home and share my experience with you!) Our lovely site host has shared the menu with us, and let me just say, I’m so excited for some amazing American food after almost 6 weeks of mostly nsima and chicken (amongst a few other things)

Last week, we gave our first health talks in training! I got to give a health talk on why it’s important to take your child to the clinic early if they’re sick, as well as gave a nutritious cooking demo, to 17 moms at a local Under-5 Growth Monitoring Clinic. I also got to give one at a local secondary girl’s school about peer pressure and how to avoid it. These young women really opened up to us, got VERY into their skits, and showed us so much wisdom. Giving these talks has made me SO excited to get to site and start doing some health education!
I don’t have to much else to share with you at the moment, but here’s a few pictures to enjoy:

My new haircut! (Ignore the toothpaste on my collar)

Us and some of the girls we did our peer pressure talk with

Me and my friends Valerie and Kiran, sitting under the mango trees and out of the heat at our friend Monica’s house. Photo taken by her host brother! My feet are, unfortunately, almost always this dirty.

House Tour

Hi friends! It just occurred to me that I’ve barely shared any pictures of my host home, so I figured I’d give you all a mini-tour today! Please your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times, and please no flash photography.

First up: My house

This is the small, two-roomed house I share with a fellow trainee. My room is on the left! My room has a concrete-clay floor, a tin roof, two teeny (screened) windows, and is built from plastered-over mud bricks. It gets VERY hot inside during the day, but the walls hold in the heat nicely for our colder evenings and nights.

Moving right along to my room now:

Obviously, my bed is covered by a mosquito net to prevent malaria, as well as creepy-crawlers that inevitably end up in my room. Being inside my mosquito net almost feels like a sanctuary; nothing bad can happen as long as I’m tucked inside! I keep my bike indoors while at home, as it can make our compound a target for thieves if kept outside (even locked). Of course, keeping it inside tracks in lots of dust. I have a small table and stool (that I am sitting at right now as I type this), where I keep my water filter, notebooks, toiletries, and odds-and-ends. Beneath my table is my rucksack, which holds only occasionally-used gear (my two suitcases are kept in storage at our training center, because as you can see, there’s not exactly room for them here!) Next to my table is my bucket of water to be filtered, my “dresser” with some clothes inside, and my wash basin. This wash basin is used when I bathe (twice per day, as is usual in Zambia) and also for laundry. Tucked into the corner is my little broom, which gets used 2-3 times per day to sweep out the ever-accumulating dust.

The view from my doorway shows both of our cooking structures:

The fact that I somehow managed to take this picture without the menagerie of chickens (nkuku), goats (npongo), and kids (bana) running about is a miracle (My host mom is a grandmother, and as everybody knows, Grandma’s house is always the place to be). The chickens love the structure on the left, and is where many of them lay their eggs. Most of the cooking happens inside and just outside of the structure on the right, which holds the cooking supplies and all of our water.

I did manage to snap a picture of some of the chickens sniffing around by my stoop! (Note the makeshift threshold, which does an ok-job of preventing dust from swirling in to my room). I often sit out on this stoop to study or journal.

The yard:

The first picture shows the yard to the right of the right cook structure. Underneath those mango trees is where we for our laundry, as well as where we lay out the museme (reed mat) when its too hot to sit in the sun. In the back, you can see my Bamaama’s home. The second picture is taken behind my home, which from left to right shows: bricks for a soon-to-be-built house, the goat house, my brother Ba Patmore’s house, my bathing structure (cisambilo) (my roommate has her own, too), the laundry, our toilet (cimbuzi) (you can just see it’s thatched roof here), and my sister Ba Benita’s house nestled into a small grove of mango trees.

Well, I hope you enjoyed the tour! Please remember to tip your tour guide 😉

I’m doing my best to take pictures, but I’m spending most of my time in the present. I’ll leave you with this picture of one of the many beautiful sunsets from this week.

(Very Early) Realizations After Two Weeks in Zambia

Can you all believe that it’s already been two weeks since I arrived? For me, it’s been a non-stop flurry of new experiences, new food, new people, new languages, and a new landscape. Being here has given me a lot of time to think on a lot of things, so here are 10 of my (very early) realizations:

1. As Americans, we are shockingly disconnected from the systems which serve us. Transportation, sanitation, food supply, waste management, water…You name it, we’re disconnected from it. I’ll share an example regarding food supply: My bamaama (host mom) raises chickens on our compound, and it’s lovely to regularly eat their free-range eggs. Last week, we were sitting together planning my day off from PST, and she said that I’ll be killing a chicken for our lunch. Hold up—what?!! I did my best to respond as graciously as possible, but clearly conveyed that that was way out of my comfort zone. It gave me a chance to think on how many steps removed with are from the food we’d normally buy at the grocery store, and it just spiraled from there. I’ve become very conscious of just how much trash I produce, because I throw it into a pit behind my hut—even though that’s pretty similar to how it is back home (though on a much larger scale), it prompts me to think about what kind of impact it would have if everybody’s trash just stayed in their backyard.

2. Biking is terrible. It just is. I don’t understand why people willingly roll themselves down rocky, narrow paths as fast as possible. This is an issue, seeing as how biking is my main mode of transportation these days!

3. You haven’t seen the sky properly until you’ve come to Zambia. Most mornings, I manage to time brushing my teeth with looking out over the horizon at the bright red sun rising over the mountains. I bike home as the amber sun lazily begins to drop further and further. At night, I can see the MILKY WAY. The stars are so bright and so densely packed into the night sky; it’s truly one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in my life. I haven’t seen the full moon out yet, but I have a feeling I may just cry. After just a week or so at my homestay, I’m beginning to feel very connected to the sky and it’s rhythms.

4. Zambians are huge on greetings. There’s greetings for different times of the day, different activities, all kinds of things. You simply don’t walk past someone without greeting them. At first this felt overwhelming, but then I realized how beautiful it was that their culture ritualizes being excited to see one another. It always makes me smile. We barely even make eye contact or smile at people we walk past, let alone have a full-on exchange. Next time you walk past a stranger, I challenge you to smile and say hi to them—you’ll probably both love it.

5. I thought I was really going to miss showers, but being able to bathe outdoors at sunset every day is pretty nice.

6. I love the slower pace of life here in the village compared to home. Even though PST is busy and cram-packed, the rest of life…just isn’t. I can feel my body’s tempos slowing down to a really nice equilibrium. Slower pace=time for mindfulness and thoughtfulness in almost all tasks.

7. Going to bed early (generally before 21:00/9:00) and getting up early is AWESOME.

8. We discount water as a resource in the US in a gross way. If we wanted to, we could run the tap or the shower all day. Here in the village, we don’t have plumbing. Which means that my bacizyi (sisters) walk to the borehole to fetch water almost every day (Yes, they carry buckets of water on their heads, and YES, it is the most incredible thing to behold…the power of a woman.) Except right now, the borehole that my family pays to use is broken. And the next closest borehole’s water isn’t very clean. So they have to walk even further and spend even more time to bring home this resource. We have to use it very mindfully. Here in rural Zambia, there’s just not water to waste. I’m going to be placed in the Southern province for my service, which is currently experiencing extreme drought…which means that farmers can’t irrigate their fields to buy food for their family, boreholes and wells are drying up, and the landscape is dying. I’m never taking the embarrassingly long showers that I used to take again. Here, water is worth it’s weight in gold.

9. Zambia has some of the best-flavored potato chips I’ve ever had: Sweet Thai chili, Caribbean onion and balsamic vinegar, and spring onion and cheese. Dangerously good.

10. I’m falling in love with this country. Am I homesick? Obviously. Am I finding a new home in the friends that I’m making, my host family, and the common experiences we all share? Yes