Site Announcements!

We got our site announcements today! It's been a long week with waiting to find out, especially for the Bembas because we could be placed in three different provinces. They made a big outline of Zambia on the floor with tape and marked each of the available sites on it, and then one by one they called us and told us where we'd be going. 

I am going to Musa in Northern Province.  It's about 20km from the provincial capital of Kasama. My site is 2.5km from the tarmac, and the nearest volunteer is a RAP volunteer named Mike, and he is 20km away.  I'm a second generation volunteer, which means there has been one volunteer there previously and one will be there after me.  The PCV who was visiting us this week at PST told me that the volunteer who is at my site now and is finishing up his service was also an MI from Rollins, so that's fun.  That's pretty much all I know about it at the moment, but next week I'll get to meet my counterpart from the community for a host workshop and the week after that I get to head up there for second site visit.

Even though I know barely anything about my site, I'm absolutely thrilled with my placement and I can't wait to meet my counterpart and find out more.

Bemblish

I am learning to speak Bemba, which is spoken in Central, Northern, and Luapula provinces in Zambia.  My language class is me, Dana, Meghan, Rachel, and Melody. Our LCF (language and cultural facilitator) is ba Mwelwa.  He's very patient with all of our slowness and questions, and he laughs a lot.  Sometimes at us, but not meanly so it's okay.  Our class of five is bigger than most, since most have only three but there are a lot of people learning Bemba so the classes are larger. The Bembas are split into three classes,  and there are three people/one class each for Nyanja, Tonga, Tumbuka, Lunda, and Kaonde.

Peace Corps told us language classes are a "fun club" and I didn't quite believe them, but it turns out they weren't totally wrong.  It is kind of fun most of the time, but the rest of the time it's incredibly frustrating.  I haven't taken a language class in almost six years so my brain is struggling to be in language-learning mode, plus it's four hours of language a day, five days a week.  It's a ton of vocabulary and material, plus Bemba isn't really anything like the other languages any of us know so that makes it a bit harder.  But it's only been two weeks, and already I can introduce myself and talk about my family, talk about what I am learning at training,  say some super basic health things, list some food items, list some household items, name some body parts, and describe a person.  So we must not be doing as badly as it feels like we are when we're in class struggling to conjugate verbs.

In Bemba you put "ba" in front of names and some words to show respect.  In class one day we were learning words for various professions and people and I put ba in front of the word for baby because it followed the pattern of the other words and it seemed reasonable.   Ba Mwelwa laughed and said, "Do we respect babies?" We all were kind of confused, thinking yes, I mean, I think we do, don't we...? Apparently the answer is no, we do not respect babies.

At the beginning of each lesson there are some cultural notes, and after explaining then to us ba Mwelwa usually asks us how it is in America.   For the lesson that included describing people, one of the cultural notes was that in Zambia telling someone they are fat is a compliment. It was entertaining to try and explain why the opposite is true at home.  I think on the same day we ended up explaining breast implants and plastic surgery to ba Mwelwa as well, which was even funnier.

The words for patient and husband are very similar (abalwele and abalume) so I frequently end up saying things like, "How many malaria husbands do you have?" and, "My patient's name is Lucas." I also tend to get the words for eyes and eggs mixed up even though they are not all that similar (ameenso and amani) so that during the language test we had yesterday I almost asked the instructor to pass me the eyes instead of the eggs.

So my Bemba is coming along, amusing mishaps and all. It's a long process and I'm sure I'll never be as fluent as I'd like to be, but hopefully I'll know enough to get by. And in the meantime I am getting pretty good at sentences in half English/half Bemba, aka Bemblish.

Insoka in the insaka: some stories from PST

I'll start with the story this post is titled after: insoka in the insaka. Insoka is snake in Bemba, and an insaka is a semi-open round structure with a roof and low walls but no doors.   Most of the training sessions we have at the training center take place in a big insaka,  and on one of the first days we were all sitting there having a session on something when suddenly there was a commotion at the back of the room.  People started screaming and running away and it turned out a brownish gray maybe 4 foot long snake had wandered in.  Chairs were overturned and bags were scattered as we all ran to the other side of the insaka,  and some of the Zambian trainers went outside and grabbed some big rocks and threw them at the snake and killed it.  It was all over very quickly,  and once the dead snake had been disposed of we all picked up our stuff and went back to the session.   Of course given my feelings about snakes I was not too pleased,  but I did learn two important things.   One is that snakes generally are not aggressive (although apparently mambas are an exception). This one seemed sort of confused by all the commotion,  like it just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.   The second is that if you see a snake,  Zambians are very quick to take care of it for you.  I had heard that this was the case from other volunteers and I am relieved to learn that it is quite true.

Most days I bike to language class in the morning,  bike home for lunch, bike to the training center for afternoon tech sessions, and then bike home in the evening.  I am not a super confident biker, but I'm lucky enough to live pretty close to the training center.   My ride is only about 10 minutes, and most of it is on the tarmac.   The tarmac was only paved a month ago, so my short ride is even easier than it was for previous training groups. The thing I don't like so much about the bike ride is all the kids I have to pass on my way. The young ones were cute at first because whenever you pass you get a chorus of "How are you! How are you!"s.  I usually greet everyone in Bemba, which the kids think is funny.  But as they got more used to seeing us every day the kids got bolder and decided they wanted to grab onto our bikes as we pass. I'm not a fan of that because I'm afraid they'll break their fingers by sticking them in the gears, or they'll knock me over into traffic.  We were taught how to tell them to go away in our language classes, so one afternoon when they came over to grab my bike I said in my meanest voice, "Iwe! Fuma apa!"  They retreated and now they usually just giggle at me from afar.  Our newest bike annoyance is the maybe 13 year old boys who shout "Hey sweetie!" when we bike past.   Sigh.

Another important thing I have learned recently is the importance of staying hydrated.  The water from my filter at home is clean and safe to drink, but it tastes terrible.  Kind of like charcoal.  It's gross.  I usually fill multiple water bottles with the nice water at the training center whenever we're there and it works fine, except for when we're not there from Friday afternoon through Tuesday afternoon.  Rather than being a responsible adult and tolerating the gross water, I just didn't drink very much over the weekend and on Monday.  I was already slightly dehydrated because I was sick on Saturday,  so not drinking enough water for a few days made it way worse.  I was super tired and not feeling well at all, plus I was in a terrible mood.  I was complaining to Aubrey on Tuesday and she said, "How's your poop?" When I told her it was fine she commented that at least I wasn't losing water that way.  I realized I had forgotten to be thankful that I didn't have diarrhea, so I drank a ton of water that afternoon and I felt 1000% better.  Apparently all I needed was some water and an attitude adjustment. 

Training is going well so far, but it's very busy and tiring.  I have pretty decent internet access on my phone,  as long as I can keep it charged. Keep an eye out for future blog posts on my host family and learning Bemba.