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. 

My host family

I am staying with ba Doris and ba Kefas, and their 10 year old niece Dorinda and their 3 year old granddaughter Yuni.  They have a daughter named Joyce who lives in Lusaka, but since she doesn't live here I pretty much just consider Do and Yuni my sisters. Ba Kefas is a bricklayer and he's not home a whole lot, at least while I'm here and awake.  Ba Doris speaks Bemba, Nyanja, Tonga, Soli and English.  She's very good about helping me practice Bemba.  The girls mostly just hang around with a group of kids who live nearby.  Do goes to primary school and we usually eat breakfast together.

My room is a separate structure from the house,  and from what I've heard it's pretty large compared to where the other trainees in my group are staying.  I also have a bed and not just a mattress on the floor like most people have, so I feel pretty lucky.  I also have had only a couple spiders and ants and the occasional small lizard in my chimbuzi, which is pretty nice compared to the giant black widow Rachel has in hers.  Some people have also had a rat problem in their houses, which I am mostly thankful not to have to deal with, but Jodi had rats in her house and Peace Corps brought her a kitten to fix the issue so I feel like at least if I did have rats there would be a small silver lining.

Usually I have bread and peanut butter and hot tea for breakfast, and sometimes there is also a hard boiled egg or a banana.  My bamayo gives me a snack to take to school, which is usually an orange or some popcorn or groundnuts.  For lunch and dinner we typically have nshima, which is the staple food in Zambia.  In this part of the country it's made from corn, but in other places it's made with cassava.   It's basically just finely ground corn added to hot water until it's solid, kind of like grits but harder.  We eat it with relish, which are side dishes that are usually cooked vegetables (cabbage, tomatoes, rape, or pumpkin leaves) or protein (eggs, soya, chicken, or beans).  A couple of times my bamayo has let me help make the nshima, which is pretty easy until you get to the end and then it requires a lot of effort to stir it.  I need to work on my nshima-stirring muscles.  On the weekends I usually go with to get water from the borehole, which is about a 10 minute walk away.  It makes me feel like a weakling when my 10 year old host sister carries 20L of water on her head like it's nothing and I struggle along with my two 5L containers (not on my head) but I guess I'll get better eventually. 

We've talked a lot about school and snow and how you can't see as many stars at night in America as you can in Zambia.  My host sisters and neighbors asked me a lot of questions about how people cook, what we eat, how we wash our clothes, etc. They also were really confused by ny kindle and thought a book with a battery was a hilarious concept, and I kind of agree with them.  Overall my homestay experience has been really good.  My family is really nice and we've had some good conversations about how life is different in America and in Zambia.

Fifteen things I learned at first site visit

1.  Never go on a long car ride without an ipod and a camera.

2.  Nshima is way better when your host mom makes it than when you eat it at the Barn Motel.

3.  Whenever someone greets you in Nyanja and you don't understand what they said, just say bwino and then repeat what they said.

4.  Babies generally do not like being weighed, but they can be tricked into getting deworming pills and vitamin A drops if their mom tells them it is a sweetie.

5.  Cooking on a brazier, doing laundry by hand, getting water from a borehole, and taking bucket baths are more time consuming than doing things the way I am used to,  but overall not bad.   (Although I'm sure I'll get tired of it soon.)

6.  A stick lying on the ground in the chimbuzi looks an awful lot like a snake when you go in there half asleep at night.

7.  If you are very lucky, your host dad will take you to see his garden and you will get to taste sugarcane and bring back some oranges and lemons.

8.  When you go visit the chief you are supposed to bring a white chicken as a gift,  but if you don't have a white chicken cookies from Shoprite are acceptable.

9.  People in the U.S. who have dogs train them to come when called, and in Zambia you spend most of your time telling dogs to go away.   You also constantly have to tell pigs, goats, and chickens to go away or they will eat your food or sometimes try to come into your house.

10.  Eggs don't have to be refrigerated in Zambia.  Apparently they only have to be refrigerated in the U.S. because they are pressure washed and it removes some membrane. Here they last up to a month at room temperature.

11.  There are at least 101 ways to use a chitenge.

12.  When you play the "I'm going to the chimbuzi and I'm bringing..." ABC game with health volunteers,  people bring iodine, sunscreen, and diabetes screening.

13.  You can put "Zam" in front of any word and it instantly becomes better.  Zamfriends,  Zambeef,  Zamtired,  Zamfries,  etc.

14. Peace Corps friends are unlike any other friends.  I'm having deep conversations about life and love and bodily functions and everything else with people I only met a week ago, and it's really great.

15.  Zambia is absolutely the most beautiful place in the world.

Finally in Zambia!

I'm finally in Zambia!   I left for staging in Philadelphia on the 10th.  Staging was part introduction to Peace Corps,  part travel logistics and part meet everyone and discuss our expectations and concerns.  It was quick,  but I really liked it because it was nice to be in a room full of people who all are feeling the same excitement,  anticipation,  and nervousness.  There are 63 people in the group, 33 health and 30 education.  We got on buses at 2:30am to drive to New York, waited in a pile on the floor at JFK for a couple hours until we could check in, then went through security and waited some more.  The flight to South Africa was 15 hours long and we were all exhausted so it wasn't a ton of fun.  Then we just had a quick two hour flight to Lusaka.

Peace Corps picked us up from the airport and took us to the Barn Motel,  which is pretty much where we've been since then.  We've been doing a lot of paperwork,  got a rabies vaccine, picked our malaria prevention, and heard a presentation about safety and security and a couple about how to stay healthy.  We also had a session with Ba Beene, the health program manager.   She's really great and very funny, and it made us all really excited for what's to come.  The Barn Motel is really nice;  the electricity works most of the time and there are toilets that usually work.  There is hot water for showers most of the time too, and occasionally a lack of cold water so that anyone who tries to take a shower gets scalded.  That's kind of the opposite of what we expected to happen since we were told to expect cold showers.

Yesterday we went to Lusaka to go grocery shopping for first site visit and get sim cards and phones.  I am going to Eastern province for site visit with Ginny, Meghan, Jodi and Katherine.  We're staying with a volunteer named Sue for four days to see what it's like to live in the village and be a health volunteer and such.  I'm super excited to finally get out of the sort of closed-in environment of the Barn Motel and experience something more similar to where we'll all eventually be placed for two years. We on our way to site visit now, and it's a six hour drive so we'll get to see lots of scenery on the way. 

Packing

It's kind of hard to figure out what to bring when you're packing for over two years.  Of course even if I forget something super important, I can get it in Zambia or ask someone to ship it to me and I'll have it eventually, but there's still a lot to consider.  Peace Corps gave us a packing list, pretty much every Peace Corps blog ever has packing suggestions, and current PCVs and RPCVs have advice.  It's all very helpful, but also really overwhelming.  I think the hardest part for me is thinking about this in an I'm-moving-to-Zambia kind of way, not just packing for a trip.  The most helpful thing for me has been the advice about what people brought that turned out to be utterly useless, the things they're really glad they brought, and the things they left at home that they wish they had brought.  A lot of people have conflicting opinions on what is necessary and what isn't, but it seems like duct tape, ziploc bags, water bottles, a good knife, and a raincoat are the essentials.  Everything else is whatever.

Everything I'm bringing in one picture

Packing party!  Clearly Claire and Max are being very helpful.

All packed up.

Busy busy busy

I thought that after I graduated I would have all sorts of free time to sleep in and do fun things, but it turns out that's not real life. I sort of forgot that all of my friends and family have jobs, which means they're not available to entertain me all day. Darn. I still have tons and tons of stuff to do when I'm not spending time with family and friends, and for the most part it's way more fun than my previous thesis-busyness. Here are some things currently on my never ending to do list. 

1.  Unpack all of the stuff I brought home. 

2.  Buy the stuff I don't already own that I need to take to Zambia. 

3.  Watch a lot of Food Network and HGTV shows. 

4.  Organize all of the files on my computer and external hard drive. 

5.  Eat my favorite home-foods and visit my favorite Schaumburg restaurants. 

6.  Cuddle with my adorable cats. 

7.  Work on getting my thesis published. 

8.  Pack and organize everything I own. 

9.  Go on bike rides. 

10.  Mentally prepare myself to leave for Zambia in two weeks... eek.