Cultural Day

One of the final events during PST is cultural day, which is a chance for us to show what we've learned about Zambian culture and share some American culture with our Zambian trainers and homestay families. It went really well and it was a ton of fun.  Unfortunately most of my pictures were taken on my real camera and not my phone, so I can't post them until I have wifi, but I'll try to describe everything as best I can.

One of the most exciting parts of cultural day is that the trainees make American food for lunch.  Theresa, Beth and I volunteered to help organize the meal preparations, which it turns out is rather challenging when you're planning to feed 120 people.  We shopped for food on Monday afternoon and spent Monday evening chopping and preparing with several people, then all morning on Tuesday everyone helped prepare the food and decorate the insaka for the festivities. We made burgers, hot dogs, fried chicken, pasta salad, potato salad, napa cabbage salad, rice, vegetarian chili, grilled cheese, rice krispy treats, and apple cinnamon topping for vanilla ice cream.  The cooking part was fun and generally went far better than it could have, especially considering we had only one working burner on the stove, no ovens, and not nearly enough knives and bowls.

We started the ceremony by singing the Zambian national anthem, then ate lunch.  There were a couple speeches by the Peace Corps Zambia country director and the health program director, then speeches from one person in each language group.  I only understood the Bemba speech, and even that one not all the way, but they were all great.  I had to give a speech in Soli thanking the chieftainess, which also went well despite the fact that my Soli ability is limited to reading what was on the paper they gave me.  Then each language group did either a song or a dance in their language. They were all really fun to watch. The Bembas sang a song written by one of our language teachers, which if you translated it into English probably sounds a lot like a song you might expect preschoolers to sing.  I guess that isn't too surprising since we all speak Bemba at approximately three year old level.  After all the local language songs we did an unrehearsed version of the macarena dance because none of us realized we were going to be expected to perform an American song and dance as well.  It was a good last minute choice because all of us know it, but I thought it was a little funny that that's the one piece of American culture we presented during cultural day.

The last thing on the agenda was saying goodbye to our host families. We all exchanged gifts with our bamayos and hugged and took lots of pictures, and then they all left and we all went back to the kitchen to finish what was left of the ice cream from lunch. It was a really good day and a great way to spend my last day in Chongwe before we headed off to Lusaka for swearing in.