ZAMBIA: Part 2

One of the important things to do if living or doing work in an African town/village (whatever) is to meet the chief, greet him, and ask for permission to work in his area.  The men in our group had the opportunity to go and meet the head chief and the women had the opportunity to have the head chief's wife come to bush camp and have an interview with her. 

The woman in the middle, in blue, is the chief's wife. 

Our group asked her several questions and we got very short answers.  However, she was shy and could not speak a lick of English.  The woman on the far left would answer a lot of the questions for her actually.  She was like her spokeswoman. 

During the hour or two that she was there, we asked questions, sang songs for her, had a devotional, and one group even did a drama for her. While we were singing one of the songs though someone noticed a snake was crawling down the wall right behind where these women were sitting.  It was kinda funny though because we all kept singing while Suzie ran and got Bart to come and kill the slithering creature!

I was able to capture a picture of Bart in the act of snake killing! 

African culture is so very different than what you are used to in the states.  We assume things about them and they assume a lot of things about us.  One thing I found so interesting and true is how little the women in this culture know about their husbands.  We asked the chief's wife how her husband was picked as chief and she explained that to us.  However, the next question was what kind of job did her husband have before they were married and she had no clue!  It is also very common in this setting for a husband to be gone from the home for days and the wife have no idea where he is.  I thought it was crazy, but this is the norm for them. 

After going into the small town several times on the back of the flat bed truck, our assignments changed once again.  This time we got to go to surrounding villages in the area! We went to the village and asked some of the questions that we asked in the town and in the big city of Lusaka.  We focused on life cycle questions: birth, maturity, marriage, and death.  On one day we sat down with some women and I thought they were going to tell me their secrets!  When a girl reaches maturity or it is time for her to be married she is taught by the elder women in the village the "secrets" she needs to know.  The women we were talking with shooed all the young girls away from our circle and I thought I would get a little insight into their traditional teachings.  However, they were very vague about what they teach a girl and gave no specifics. Oh, well.

This is a picture of the village Brad and I went to on our daily assignments. 

Pretty cool door I loved in the village! 

I handle smells pretty well....I am talking about stinky ones.  However, in the village we went to they had mounds and mounds of rotting corn.  Before it was ruined they had it ready to sell but an unexpected rain spoiled it all.  It was the yuckiest smell...so thick smelling that it stuck in the back of your throat. ugh. I will never forget it.  How sad that this much food was ruined! 

The last 3 days of our time in bush camp we spent out in the villages with a national in their home/hut.  Every family was put in different homes but some of us were in the same villages! We packed enough stuff to get us through 3 days and off we went!  We stayed with our helper, Iwell, and his family.  He was a pastor and his church was located right beside his house!  He had 4 girls and  2 boys and a lot of different kind of animals that Macy and Mara had a blast playing with.  If I thought my girls got dirty at bush camp, you should have seen them out in the village! 

This is the family's home that we stayed at.  On the far left you can see a small building that was the long drop room. 

This is the house that we slept in for 3 nights.  Our room was one of the 3 rooms that made up the house. 

Village kids looking in at some of the family's animals....chickens, guinea pigs, bunnies, roosters....

When we arrived at the house we put our belongings in the room we were to sleep in.  The room was bare except for 2 things:  a reed mat to place our mattresses on and guess what.....AN OPERATION CHRISTMAS CHILD SHOE BOX!!!!  I thought it was so neat to see one all the way out in the bush in Zambia!  I wanted to open it up and see if anything was inside (hoping that I could find the person who sent it and let them see who got it) but I felt that that would be prying and decided a picture of the box was good enough! 

After we set up our room we set out on a short walk to go to some meeting.  I found out we were headed to a certain tree where women with children under the age of 5 met monthly.  The women gather to weigh their children and a doctor comes and marks their weight on a growth chart that all the women have been given for their child.  It was scary to see the charts.  The family that we stayed with had 2 children under the age of 5 and both of their growth curves were dropping sharply.  

The women standing in line waiting to weigh their babies.

The scale was like a grocery store scale.  The woman to the right of me is holding the growth curve pamphlet in her hand. 

 After our little trip to the weighing tree we walked back to the house I found out I was getting to help Ida kill a chicken and prepare it for lunch.  This is my second experience killing a chicken and I am not so sure if I am good at it yet!

Unfortunately after these pictures, my phone decided to die!  I was disappointed because I did not even get a picture with the whole family that we stayed with!  On the last full day in the village we all went to Iwell's church and all the Mzungu's (white people) gave their testimonies followed by a sermon from Brad that Iwell translated!  It was great! 

The next morning we all got up super early, walked our luggage to the paved road, and said goodbye to our new found friends!  We had a great time in the village but we were all ready to GO AND STAY IN A HOTEL!   

We arrived at a super cute place called Ibis Gardens late that afternoon!  I headed straight to our little house and showered off the girls and took the most heavenly shower I have ever taken in my life!  I like village life, but man I LOVE RUNNING WATER THAT IS HOT! Ibis was wonderful! It had a beautiful pool that the kids loved to swim in even though it was the temperature of the north pole. We also had a buffet to eat from every meal of the day and desserts too! We thoroughly enjoyed our time here and relaxed and fellowshipped more with all of our friends!  

The pool at Ibis Gardens.

Our house at Ibis Gardens. 

My girls!

Lovin on daddy!

After 30 days of fun, it was time to head to the airport and fly back to Kenya for who knows how long! Hopefully we can visit Zambia again one day!

Waiting to board the airplane.

ZAMBIA: Part One

We had a great time in Zambia! To be honest it was almost like a vacation for me and my family. The weather was cool (not the 90s and 100s we had been experiencing in West Africa) and someone made your meals for you 3 times a day! Plus there was dessert at supper every night! We were so happy to see some of our cherished friends that we trained with in the states and made many more friends that we will keep for a life time! We were there for 30 days but it seemed to go by so fast!

 We first stayed in the capital of Zambia, called Lusaka. Our group was very large so we were split up between two different places. We were housed in a seminary with other families of 4 and the singles. (All the other larger families were driven back and forth each day from another guest house.) My family and I stayed in a small room that had 4 twin size beds, 3 of which we pushed together to form a giant bed that we all slept on. The 4th one was a bunk and I don't trust my girls on top of those things yet! It was a bit cramped, but we had what we needed! There were 2 showers and 2 toilets for the girls in the shower room to share and the same for the men. For those of you from my hometown of Cleveland, TN, I kind of felt like I was in a weird version of Camp Cherokee again! HA!

The King family's room at the Seminary in Lusaka. 

Our days there were packed full of daily assignments in order to help us learn more about African culture. While in the capital, Lusaka, we went out daily and rode the "mini buses" (public transportation) to different areas of the town. We were packed in those things like sardines but it was fun! It is very easy to strike up a conversation with someone when you are practically sitting on them so we talked a lot on the buses with the nationals too! We were all paired into groups and each group had their own helper. This picture is of me, Sarah, and our helper Rose.

Rose took us around her neighborhood and we talked to some people she knew but mostly those she did not know. We had fun each day talking and interviewing the nationals and would drink a nice cold Coke (in a glass bottle because it is cheaper) each time we were out!

After approximately 2 weeks in arriving in Zambia it was time to head out to the bush!  Everyone readied themselves by taking the local form of Dramamine since it was to be curvy, hilly ride!  (I opted out of taking dramamine so I could actually be awake for the entirety of the day though! That stuff knocks me out!)  We all rode on a really nice grey-hound type bus to a small town called Petauke.  The landscape and view from the bus was great on the way there!

We finally arrived at our destination...BUSH CAMP!  This was probably my favorite part of our time in Zambia!  We, of course, had no modern conveniences here.  You had to draw your water out of the well each day and carry it a good distance.  (Well to me it was a good distance...the nationals put me to shame with the distances they carry their water!)  If you wanted to have hot water then you put your water in a metal kettle and heated it over the fire before you showered!  The shower was a fun experience too! You had a bucket attached to a pulley system that you would lower down, pour the hot water in, lift the bucket back up, and then pull a small lever whenever you wanted to release some of the water from the bucket out of a small shower head attached to the bottom of the bucket.  Fun times! It did not come without its dangers though. One guy got stung by a scorpion while in the shower and one girl got stitches in her head when the bucket full of water fell on it. Yikes! 

Bush Camp

Macy and Mara enjoyed bucket baths each day for the most part!  They were so dirty each day! I felt they could have been poster children for some humanitarian aid organization they looked so filthy! 

For the bathrooms, we used small buildings with "long drops" in them.  For the most part they were very easy to use, unless, of course you had bees swarming around your legs OR bats making noises below you.  The first time I walked into one, a bat flew out of the bathroom and I ran like a ninny.  I am not sure if anyone saw me and I don't really care! 

Macy and Mara loved sleeping in the tent at night! I have to be truthful...I slept well! It was cold at night but we had plenty of blankets to keep us warm! The hardest part was getting out from underneath the covers in the morning! (Breakfast was each morning at 7 am).

The King family tent

Macy and Mara outside our big tent. 

 In order for us not to have to walk around in the middle of the night to go and use the restroom we were provided with potty buckets (they called them choo buckets).  I really appreciated that since my girls had to go potty several nights when we were there.  The downside though..the potty buckets look like small trash cans with lids on them.  The place we are staying at in Kenya has small trash cans with lids on them....Guess what we found Mara doing? :)  

Of course there were no mini buses to ride since we were out in the bush so we all got to ride on the back of a flat bed truck each time we went into the small town for more daily assignments!  It was not that long of a drive and we all enjoyed it!  The girls got to ride on it twice with us too!

The flat bed truck that we rode in the back of! Wood benches were placed in the back that we all sat on. 

View of Zambia from the back of the flat bed truck! 

The first part of bush camp we went to the small town that was close to us.  Our group had the opportunity to go the office where passports, driver's licenses, and things like that were made.  So...we walk into a small room that had a small number of people lined up outside and about 3 people sitting down inside waiting their turn in line.  When we came in, the man made all the nationals leave and let us take their seats and spoke to us for about 20 minutes.  What would you have done if you were at your local DMV office and some foreigners walked in and they kicked you out?  Not the same reaction here in Zambia that I would imagine would happened in the states! 

Brad and Iwell, our helper, walking down a road in Petauke.