Yesterday I went to Zimbabwe for a bit. Really it was just long enough to show that I had left Zambia so that I could reenter and thus get my visa extended. Luckily Chirundu and Zimbabwe are just a river apart so it was more of a beautiful morning walk back and forth across the bridge than a frustrating bureaucratic experience. Unfortunately the Zimbabwean side is a game park so we couldn’t walk around and explore while we were over there. Then again, we hear the hyenas howling from across the Zambezi every night so I wouldn’t want to go very far into the bush on foot anyway.
We’ve had quite the week. It started with the departure of over half the people staying at the parish house: the Italian family, Lisa, and Levy. To commemorate their leaving I made pumpkin pie for our last big “family” dinner. We didn’t have any nutmeg, we ground the cinnamon from a few cinnamon sticks, and pie crust made from margarine is certainly not the same, but all things considered it wasn’t that bad. There are about 20 pumpkins in the kitchen that don’t seem like they are being used for anything so I anticipate the pie will be repeated a couple more times before the summer is over. We were down to just Stefania, Justin, Fr. Michele and myself for a few days before the arrival of Fr. Paolo, a Zambian priest with a great sense of humor who will serve the Chiawa parish and its outposts. Though not as boisterous, out mealtime conversations are still lively.
We hit a bit of a snag with the waterwheel. We were thinking we could get it in the river this week and then learned the seals on the rotating joint we recently attached are leaking and therefore unusable. We organized a trip to Lusaka to buy another set of seals and look at other bearing options, but the morning we planned to leave the man who does the driving for the parish and who was going to take us, James, ended up in the hospital being treated for ingesting some sort of extremely dangerous poison. James said he was in a bar and someone slipped something in his drink when he went to the bathroom, however Fr. Michele has heard from other sources that there was some fight with his wife that may have led to a suicide attempt. Apparently suicide is alarmingly common in Chirundu and it’s usually done with some sort of animal or insect repelling poison. Regardless of the specific details, thankfully James is going to be fine. Hopefully any remaining issues (which may include a police investigation) will also be worked out.
The day after we learned about James also had sort of an eerie feel. We woke up to a couple gunshots and saw that someone had killed a hippo on the riverbank just below the parish house. For much of the morning we could hear people hacking away at it with machetes because it was so large that it had to be taken away (presumably to people’s kitchens) in pieces. There is still an enormous bloodstain that marks where the hippo was butchered.
On the brighter side, I am teaching Christine, the parish’s cook, how to type. We haven’t moved much beyond the home position for each hand, but she is really enthusiastic about it so we’ve had a lot of fun. It really makes me appreciate learning to type when I was young because I can see how hard it is for Christine to make her fingers stay on the right keys after a lifetime of never moving them in this way. She has a really good attitude though, and when she accidentally skips over one of her fingers she laughs and says, “This one is resting! No resting!” Christine has a phenomenal laugh and she occasionally throws herself onto my shoulder when she is particularly amused. It’s a challenge to find time for these lessons because we are both busy during the day and Christine goes to school in the evenings, but hopefully in the next two months we will have worked through enough together that all she can really do is keep practicing. I don’t know where she’ll find a keyboard to practice on, but she seems pretty committed so I like to think she’ll work something out.
When Fr. Michele found out that I was teaching her a bit, he threw out the idea that I could teach computer classes at the school. They haven’t had any since one of the long-term Italian volunteers left a month ago. I don’t see myself as much of a computer wiz so I’m pretty wary of volunteering to teach full classes. However, given my understanding of the direction the world seems to be going, knowing how to type and use a computer seem like skills that in some ways are just as important as reading so I guess my instruction would be better than none at all. We’ll see…
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Hannah Montana in Chirundu
Mwachoma buangi! Good evening from Chirundu, Zambia! Sorry that it has taken me so long to get the blog going. I’ll try to be better about it in the future. I also apologize that there are no photos. My internet is unfortunately not allowing me to upload anything.
I have been in Zambia for about three weeks now. Most of my time has been spent in Chirundu, where we are working on the waterwheel. That work is going fairly well. We attached a new rotating joint at the outlet pipe last week and tested it in the banana pool. The pontoons are watertight and it is ready for the river. The only issue that remains is getting the river ready for the waterwheel. A few months ago the Zambian government decided to open two more gates in the Siavonga dam, so the Zambezi was a few meters higher in Chirundu than it was when they built the first waterwheel last year. This means the pipe from the shore to the water tanks was well under water and caused some trouble with the anchor and chain as well. They closed these gates again just a couple days ago and the water level immediately went down, so we should be able to use the previous pipe and just have to make a new anchor. We are currently searching out a few parts, but hopefully we will be able to get it in the water in the next week or so. We have heard rumors that they might open even more gates sometime in the future which would throw a serious wrench in the works, but I guess we’ll just hope for the best. It would be nice to design a system that would not be disrupted by significant changes in the water level, but I think Father Michele (the Italian priest serving at the Chirundu parish where I am living) wants to get something working again as quickly as possible. Certainly for good reason, because though I haven’t seen any crocodiles too near Chirundu, Fr. Michele said they killed several people last year.
Aside from working on the waterwheel I have been getting to know Chirundu a bit, which mostly means meeting tons of kids. The parish is connected to a hospital, girls orphanage, and a relatively large school so there are always tons of kids around. Someone told me in my first week that “Zambians are a joyful people” and I believe him. Everyone is very friendly and we spend the majority of any conversation laughing. My popularity is greatly supplemented by my relatively long blond hair, which is often an irresistible plaything. The smaller girls who don’t speak as much English don’t even ask, they just grab my hair and start trying to braid it like their own. Hopefully I won’t be bald by the end of the summer.
The girls at Mudzi Wa Moyo, the orphanage, are particularly keen to make friends. They have some sort of system where individual girls (sometimes two) each choose a foreigner to be some sort of special friend. Then they write very sweet and absurd love letters of a sort. As I was walking to the market on my first day in Chirundu we ran into a girl from Mudzi Wa Moyo who some members of our group met last year. Our greeting lasted less than 30 seconds, but she was particularly careful to get my name. Less than 24 hours later I received a letter in which she told me she loved me and offered a bit of spiritual guidance. As the orphanage is run by the sisters and multiple masses per week are compulsory, all of the girls are at least somewhat religiously inclined. My friend, Esnart, however, is particularly religious (what are the odds…) and in her latest letter she invited me to join her in the Jehovah Witness community as well. We’ll see how this goes.
While the letters are a bit uncomfortable, I really do enjoy hanging out with the Mudzi girls. They have taught me how to play netball, a sport kind of like basketball but the court is divided into thirds and there is no dribbling or backboards. Actually, there aren’t any nets either, but that just may be their court. Basically you pass a ball back and forth down the court and try to shoot it through a metal hoop. It was a bit of a trick to learn as the girls are much more comfortable speaking in Nyanga than in English so their explanation of the rules had some significant gaps. Mostly I learned by making lots of mistakes as I played, which was good for a laugh all around. Netball is also a reminder of why I have avoided contact sports since middle school. There are apparently no rules in terms of fouling and so their defense tactics have left me with a few bruises. At one point one of the girls grabbed both of my arms and held them behind my back so I couldn’t get the ball.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I have not escaped the Hannah Montana thing in Zambia. I have been asked a couple times if I know her. I suppose I really should try to befriend Miley as I hate to keep disappointing people… One girl even put a Hannah Montana sticker on a letter she wrote to me. Classic.
I have been to mass six times since I have been here. Once in English, twice outside, and last Sunday in a church with a thatched roof and mud brick walls. Fr. Michele serves numerous parishes in the region; the farthest away from Chirundu involves driving several kilometers through the bush on something that barely constitutes a road and then crossing the Kafue River in a large dugout canoe. Vehicles are few and far between in some of these areas, meaning there are usually a large number of people looking to hitch a ride to the main road in the back of the parish’s pick up. On the way back from mass last Sunday there were 30 people (including a couple babies), who knows how many kilos of grain, and several chickens in the back of the truck. I have now idea how it all fit in the first place and how no one fell out as we bumped along through the bush. As the above description probably conveys, going to mass in all of these villages is a good way to see the area and meet lots of people, though two masses each Sunday can be rather taxing.
It is philosophically challenging to live and work at a Catholic mission. In addition to my discomfort with evangelism in general, women are so clearly marginalized in Zambian society that it is even more difficult to go to mass here than in the US and see that there is essentially no place for women in leadership roles within the service. That is, unless a woman is the only person in the village who can read. I had a conversation about this observation with Levy, a seminarian living at the parish house, and he attributed it largely to the lack of education for women. (Well, that, and the whole inherent-patriarchy-within-the-Catholic-church can of worms that I won’t open any more than I already have.) Even though women are generally more supportive of the church by going to mass, it is currently uncommon to find a woman who can read in most of the villages, so even though groups within the church may consist primarily of women they will likely chose a man for leadership positions. Levy also told me he made an effort to allow girls to serve at the altar as well as boys, but he met resistance from both parishioners and other church leaders. Though frustrating, I suppose not allowing alter girls should be the least of anyone’s worries in a country in which marrying a woman 40 years younger than him was not political suicide for the president and where most village headmen must have at least 3 wives to be respected. While all of this is certainly disheartening, Levy said things are changing “slowly, slowly.” At the very least, I am grateful for Levy’s candor in discussing these issues with me.
Despite my misgivings about being so connected to the mission, the hospitality I have experienced at the parish is incredible. Fr. Michele welcomes lots of visitors and volunteers, mostly Italians (he is from the Milan diocese), which means my cultural experience has been almost as much Italian as it has been Zambian. There is currently a whole Italian family staying here. One girl, age 7, and two boys, ages 10 and 12. The whole family is very sweet and hilarious. The boys speak the best English of the five of them, though between my Spanish, their English and plenty of charades we communicate fairly well. (And I’m picking up a few Italian phrases. Not what I expected from this summer…) It’s pretty funny to watch them interact with Justin who doesn’t have my Spanish advantage, and the language barrier has been enough to make me laugh until I’ve cried a couple times. There is another Italian woman, Stefania, living here who will be volunteering in the lab of the mission hospital for six months. We share a room and she speaks very good English. I thoroughly enjoy her company and am glad she will be around for the last month or so that I’m here after Justin leaves. While Father Michele and Levy are beyond great, living with just two priests could be a bit much. A German woman, Lisa, also just arrived and will stay for a week or two.
One aspect of the Italian influence that I have enjoyed most is mealtimes. In true Italian style, we sit around the table laughing, talking and eating for an hour and a half at minimum, though usually longer. There were 15 of us around the table at one point, though over the past week many English speakers have left so most conversation is in Italian, but Father Michele and Stefania are good about filling in the rest of us. These mealtimes also feature a surprising amount of Italian food. I swear the family brought more food than clothing, so we have been enjoying various types of sliced meat, cheese, olive oil, and a bit of wine. The parish employs a cook, Christine, who is both wonderfully friendly and cooks delicious Zambian food, but on the nights that she is off the Italians have cooked a couple delicious pasta dishes and risotto. Most importantly, I have not yet begun to crave good chocolate (which is a good thing because I don’t think anyone is selling it in Chirundu) as the family has been very generous with the numerous bars they brought with them.
Eleven of us, including Fr. Michele, took a trip to Livingstone last week to see Victoria Falls. It was quite the journey. We rented a minibus that has clearly seen a lot of use and was quite the adventure as many of the roads are as much potholes as they are pavement. After 8 hours my butt was sufficiently numb but I was exceedingly grateful that the trip was not made in the back of the pickup, which is how we get everywhere else we need to go.
The falls were incredible. They are enormous. There is a lot of water at this time of year, so despite our use of raincoats and ponchos we were almost completely drenched by the spray. We stayed to watch the sunset before stopping back for dry cloths at the Holy Cross convent where we spent the night and then went to—you guessed it—an Italian restaurant for dinner. The next morning we drove through a wildlife reserve before embarking on the long journey home. We had very good luck and saw giraffes, warthogs, water buffalo, pythons, countless baboons (though I also see those on my morning jogs in Chirundu), impala, and a rhino. I am still in awe of the giraffes. They are one of the neatest and strangest animals I have ever seen. I feel like I’m off to a pretty good start on the wildlife viewing as I also saw numerous hippos, elephants and even a couple crocodiles when Justin and I went 50 km down the Zambezi to check out another couple sites that would like waterwheels. And there are monkeys in the trees around the parish house on an almost daily basis.
Anyway, I think that’s about it for now. Congrats, or thank you I suppose, for making it this far. I realize this post became somewhat of a novella. I’ll try to update more frequently and make them shorter. Take care, all!
I have been in Zambia for about three weeks now. Most of my time has been spent in Chirundu, where we are working on the waterwheel. That work is going fairly well. We attached a new rotating joint at the outlet pipe last week and tested it in the banana pool. The pontoons are watertight and it is ready for the river. The only issue that remains is getting the river ready for the waterwheel. A few months ago the Zambian government decided to open two more gates in the Siavonga dam, so the Zambezi was a few meters higher in Chirundu than it was when they built the first waterwheel last year. This means the pipe from the shore to the water tanks was well under water and caused some trouble with the anchor and chain as well. They closed these gates again just a couple days ago and the water level immediately went down, so we should be able to use the previous pipe and just have to make a new anchor. We are currently searching out a few parts, but hopefully we will be able to get it in the water in the next week or so. We have heard rumors that they might open even more gates sometime in the future which would throw a serious wrench in the works, but I guess we’ll just hope for the best. It would be nice to design a system that would not be disrupted by significant changes in the water level, but I think Father Michele (the Italian priest serving at the Chirundu parish where I am living) wants to get something working again as quickly as possible. Certainly for good reason, because though I haven’t seen any crocodiles too near Chirundu, Fr. Michele said they killed several people last year.
Aside from working on the waterwheel I have been getting to know Chirundu a bit, which mostly means meeting tons of kids. The parish is connected to a hospital, girls orphanage, and a relatively large school so there are always tons of kids around. Someone told me in my first week that “Zambians are a joyful people” and I believe him. Everyone is very friendly and we spend the majority of any conversation laughing. My popularity is greatly supplemented by my relatively long blond hair, which is often an irresistible plaything. The smaller girls who don’t speak as much English don’t even ask, they just grab my hair and start trying to braid it like their own. Hopefully I won’t be bald by the end of the summer.
The girls at Mudzi Wa Moyo, the orphanage, are particularly keen to make friends. They have some sort of system where individual girls (sometimes two) each choose a foreigner to be some sort of special friend. Then they write very sweet and absurd love letters of a sort. As I was walking to the market on my first day in Chirundu we ran into a girl from Mudzi Wa Moyo who some members of our group met last year. Our greeting lasted less than 30 seconds, but she was particularly careful to get my name. Less than 24 hours later I received a letter in which she told me she loved me and offered a bit of spiritual guidance. As the orphanage is run by the sisters and multiple masses per week are compulsory, all of the girls are at least somewhat religiously inclined. My friend, Esnart, however, is particularly religious (what are the odds…) and in her latest letter she invited me to join her in the Jehovah Witness community as well. We’ll see how this goes.
While the letters are a bit uncomfortable, I really do enjoy hanging out with the Mudzi girls. They have taught me how to play netball, a sport kind of like basketball but the court is divided into thirds and there is no dribbling or backboards. Actually, there aren’t any nets either, but that just may be their court. Basically you pass a ball back and forth down the court and try to shoot it through a metal hoop. It was a bit of a trick to learn as the girls are much more comfortable speaking in Nyanga than in English so their explanation of the rules had some significant gaps. Mostly I learned by making lots of mistakes as I played, which was good for a laugh all around. Netball is also a reminder of why I have avoided contact sports since middle school. There are apparently no rules in terms of fouling and so their defense tactics have left me with a few bruises. At one point one of the girls grabbed both of my arms and held them behind my back so I couldn’t get the ball.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I have not escaped the Hannah Montana thing in Zambia. I have been asked a couple times if I know her. I suppose I really should try to befriend Miley as I hate to keep disappointing people… One girl even put a Hannah Montana sticker on a letter she wrote to me. Classic.
I have been to mass six times since I have been here. Once in English, twice outside, and last Sunday in a church with a thatched roof and mud brick walls. Fr. Michele serves numerous parishes in the region; the farthest away from Chirundu involves driving several kilometers through the bush on something that barely constitutes a road and then crossing the Kafue River in a large dugout canoe. Vehicles are few and far between in some of these areas, meaning there are usually a large number of people looking to hitch a ride to the main road in the back of the parish’s pick up. On the way back from mass last Sunday there were 30 people (including a couple babies), who knows how many kilos of grain, and several chickens in the back of the truck. I have now idea how it all fit in the first place and how no one fell out as we bumped along through the bush. As the above description probably conveys, going to mass in all of these villages is a good way to see the area and meet lots of people, though two masses each Sunday can be rather taxing.
It is philosophically challenging to live and work at a Catholic mission. In addition to my discomfort with evangelism in general, women are so clearly marginalized in Zambian society that it is even more difficult to go to mass here than in the US and see that there is essentially no place for women in leadership roles within the service. That is, unless a woman is the only person in the village who can read. I had a conversation about this observation with Levy, a seminarian living at the parish house, and he attributed it largely to the lack of education for women. (Well, that, and the whole inherent-patriarchy-within-the-Catholic-church can of worms that I won’t open any more than I already have.) Even though women are generally more supportive of the church by going to mass, it is currently uncommon to find a woman who can read in most of the villages, so even though groups within the church may consist primarily of women they will likely chose a man for leadership positions. Levy also told me he made an effort to allow girls to serve at the altar as well as boys, but he met resistance from both parishioners and other church leaders. Though frustrating, I suppose not allowing alter girls should be the least of anyone’s worries in a country in which marrying a woman 40 years younger than him was not political suicide for the president and where most village headmen must have at least 3 wives to be respected. While all of this is certainly disheartening, Levy said things are changing “slowly, slowly.” At the very least, I am grateful for Levy’s candor in discussing these issues with me.
Despite my misgivings about being so connected to the mission, the hospitality I have experienced at the parish is incredible. Fr. Michele welcomes lots of visitors and volunteers, mostly Italians (he is from the Milan diocese), which means my cultural experience has been almost as much Italian as it has been Zambian. There is currently a whole Italian family staying here. One girl, age 7, and two boys, ages 10 and 12. The whole family is very sweet and hilarious. The boys speak the best English of the five of them, though between my Spanish, their English and plenty of charades we communicate fairly well. (And I’m picking up a few Italian phrases. Not what I expected from this summer…) It’s pretty funny to watch them interact with Justin who doesn’t have my Spanish advantage, and the language barrier has been enough to make me laugh until I’ve cried a couple times. There is another Italian woman, Stefania, living here who will be volunteering in the lab of the mission hospital for six months. We share a room and she speaks very good English. I thoroughly enjoy her company and am glad she will be around for the last month or so that I’m here after Justin leaves. While Father Michele and Levy are beyond great, living with just two priests could be a bit much. A German woman, Lisa, also just arrived and will stay for a week or two.
One aspect of the Italian influence that I have enjoyed most is mealtimes. In true Italian style, we sit around the table laughing, talking and eating for an hour and a half at minimum, though usually longer. There were 15 of us around the table at one point, though over the past week many English speakers have left so most conversation is in Italian, but Father Michele and Stefania are good about filling in the rest of us. These mealtimes also feature a surprising amount of Italian food. I swear the family brought more food than clothing, so we have been enjoying various types of sliced meat, cheese, olive oil, and a bit of wine. The parish employs a cook, Christine, who is both wonderfully friendly and cooks delicious Zambian food, but on the nights that she is off the Italians have cooked a couple delicious pasta dishes and risotto. Most importantly, I have not yet begun to crave good chocolate (which is a good thing because I don’t think anyone is selling it in Chirundu) as the family has been very generous with the numerous bars they brought with them.
Eleven of us, including Fr. Michele, took a trip to Livingstone last week to see Victoria Falls. It was quite the journey. We rented a minibus that has clearly seen a lot of use and was quite the adventure as many of the roads are as much potholes as they are pavement. After 8 hours my butt was sufficiently numb but I was exceedingly grateful that the trip was not made in the back of the pickup, which is how we get everywhere else we need to go.
The falls were incredible. They are enormous. There is a lot of water at this time of year, so despite our use of raincoats and ponchos we were almost completely drenched by the spray. We stayed to watch the sunset before stopping back for dry cloths at the Holy Cross convent where we spent the night and then went to—you guessed it—an Italian restaurant for dinner. The next morning we drove through a wildlife reserve before embarking on the long journey home. We had very good luck and saw giraffes, warthogs, water buffalo, pythons, countless baboons (though I also see those on my morning jogs in Chirundu), impala, and a rhino. I am still in awe of the giraffes. They are one of the neatest and strangest animals I have ever seen. I feel like I’m off to a pretty good start on the wildlife viewing as I also saw numerous hippos, elephants and even a couple crocodiles when Justin and I went 50 km down the Zambezi to check out another couple sites that would like waterwheels. And there are monkeys in the trees around the parish house on an almost daily basis.
Anyway, I think that’s about it for now. Congrats, or thank you I suppose, for making it this far. I realize this post became somewhat of a novella. I’ll try to update more frequently and make them shorter. Take care, all!
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