What are you eating??
Above is a picture of nshima (white stuff on the left) and a HUGE meal we had to celebrate the PFs leaving.Simply, we eat nshima (pronounced "in-she-ma") all the time! Nshima is either made out of corn meal, kasava flour (a plant that grows here and the flour is made out of it 's starchy white roots), or millet flour (millet is kind of like birdseeds). The most comparable thing to nshima that we have in America, is polenta. Though, nshima has a thick doughy texture and is really sticky. The way you eat it is: grab a chunk from the big bowl of nshima, mush it in your hand until it' s in a uniform ball, then break off a chunk with your fingers and thumb, roll that smaller chunk into a small ball, push your finger into the ball to make a little cup, and use that small piece shaped like a cup as a spoon to pick up whatever you want to eat. You do all of that with one hand, and at this point the 5-year-old is much better at it than I am. I 'm always dropping the little ball or making really ugly little balls …o well! As our relishes (AKA side dishes) we have a few options: whole little fish, greens, cabbage, rice, soya (soy pieces), meats of various sorts (on very rare occasions), beans, lentils, soupu (a soup of tomatoes and onions), pasta, or one of my favorites - nchekele (a lentil like bean). My favorite snacks are: ground nuts (very similar to peanuts, which Daniel and I roast ourselves), fried sweet potatoes, fritters (which are less sugary donut-hole like bread pieces) and big fresh avocados. There isn' t much protein, fat or calcium in our diet, but we' re enjoying it and feeling healthy.
Is it a lot of English there?
There is a lot of English here. Zambia 's national language is English, so while many different languages are spoken in Zambia (because there are 73 different tribes just in Zambia), they are supposed to learn English in school. But, people who have been educated well enough to know English are pretty few and far between out here in the middle of the bush (meaning, we are in the middle of nowhere rural Zambia). The people in my village speak Bemba, which I' m learning very slowly, because it is incredibly hard to make out any syllables when they speak. However, language inside Mwange Refugee Camp is very different than what you find in Zambia. Within the Camp, the refugees generally speak Swahili and French, because they are from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). I 'm taking Swahili/French lessons from my translator, named Kikassa, and slowly understanding more and becoming more fluent. The Congolese mix French with their Swahili, which makes things much more confusing. I 'm hoping to be able to get around speaking Swahili by myself without Kikassa by December. Having Kikassa around to help us translate in important meetings has made the transition into working here really easy. The picture below is of Kikasssa (right) and his family at his house.
Do you shower? If so, how?
Haha, yes I shower. Well, I wouldn't call it a shower… Here's how it works: We have a mudbrick hut-like structure (without a roof - check it out in the picture below) for the "shower". To shower, you fill a bucket with water that comes from the small river about 1/4 of a mile from the house and you get a cup. Then you stand in the hut with your bucket and use the cup to pour FREEZING cold water all over you as you try as hard as you can to scrub the dirt off yourself. Though no matter how hard I scrub, I always have remnants of dirt on my feet, legs, arms, neck, hands. It's incredibly dusty and windy here, and therefore we are always dirty. I wash up about every 3 days because waiting for more than 3 days is pretty gross…I speak from experience.
There are a lot more questions to answer, but I'll save those for the next blog entry. Someday I'll explain a typical day here, but at this point I don't think I've had one. And honestly, I'm not sure that I will ever have a "typical day" doing this job, which is pretty awesome.
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