Typing Lessons and Dead Hippos

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…