Out of Time

Strange how you go to foreign land and suddenly have so many things to say but every time you're on a computer you have such a laundry list of things to do you have no time to share them.

I'm writing now only to say that I will write more later. Don't abandon me yet.

Next week, I promise. Lots.

Pestilence or Potato Chips?

The seven month Zambian rainy season is beginning this month, and I've been enjoying some fairly strange weather. It goes from 90 and hot during the day to a cool 60 at night. It goes from a cloudless sky to overcast in a matter of an hour. The wind can gust at 30 mph all morning and it will be still as a church by noon. The rains, though, have brought the most interesting phenomena.

We got our first rain on Sep. 28. It was a short shower, and according to the Zambians was a "fluke." We got another rain this week, and I can tell you that there was nothing flukey about it. It downpoured, the dirt roads turned into raging rivers, and the tin roof of my house sounded like it was being pummeled by hail. It was two hours of sheeting rain then nothing. The sky was clear an hour later. But that's not the weird part.

The next day the sky was filled with what I thought were a bunch of moths. These insects were flying everywhere, hitting you in the face, running into walls, and flailing about frantically for no apparent reason. All of the chameleons came out of hiding, the village dogs were going nuts, and the chickens were pecking their heads off. These bugs were prime pickins, and everything in site was eating them up by the dozen. I asked one of our trainers what the deal with all the moths was and she replied casually, "Oh, the termites always migrate after the first big rain."

Did you say termites? I've always thought of termites as detestable creatures that live in rotting wood. The African version is an apparently winged creature that builds 20-foot mounds of clay all over the countryside.

There was another thing that I never realized about termites that I was clued in on. The trainer said equally casually, "If you fry them up they taste like potato chips." I had to call B.S. on that one, but she persisted saying, "Oh yeah! The village kids will be gathering them up all over the place." She wasn't kidding. Some people even get sacks or baskets and put them over termite holes to catch them as the stream out in a black cloud.

I didn't get the chance to try them, but if I had I probably would've passed on it. But I've been hearing stories from volunteers about how they thought caterpillars tasted like bacon and how they have been using their imaginations to try to add some variety to the HORRENDOUSLY MONOTONOUS Zambian diet, so in a couple of years I might just try to tell you that if you mix dirt with a little oil and salt it really doesn't taste that bad. If that day comes please feel free to slap me into my senses.

Monopoly Money

To we Americans who are used to our uniformly green paper currency, most money in the world seems like a joke. I've traded in my trusted Benjamins for....Kwacha? You mean to tell me that this rainbow confetti will actually buy things?

I have not in my time here actually seen a one Kwacha note. It's currently valued at....1/450th of a cent. I don't know if they even print them any longer, to be honest. Money is referred toin 1000 kwacha (ZKw) increments, known as "pin." They call it a pin because inflation hit so hard in the '90s that they didn't have bills any larger than 100 Zkw so they had to pin together ten of them to make 1000 Zkw. Money was being carried around in plastic sacks. $100 weighed too much to carry alone.

Now we're dealing with larger bills. I currently have over a million ZKw in my front pocket, and my MEAGER monthly paycheck is more than enough to allow me to retain my millionaire status. A beer costs about 4000, a used t-shirt is 3000, and I've dropped as much as 30,000 for a good meal (though fast food is only around 7000). When you're dealing with sums that large it can be a slippery slope to the land without relative value. I have an automatic mechanism in my head that tells me that $3 is too much to pay for a hamburger, but that reflex doesn't exist when I do the math and realize I've spend 50,000 ZKw on beer in a night.

What's 50,000 again? $11? I guess I don't have too much to worry about.

The Pit

Prepare to be disgusted.

In almost all of Zambia running water is a luxury few people can afford. That makes washing dishes, cooking, washing clothes, bathing, getting a nice refreshing drink, and many other daily activities much more difficult. There is one very important daily activity that has been more adversely affected than all of the others: defecation. In plain language: pooping.

The bathroom is a cinder block structure out behind the house. It has no door, and the bamboo fence that used to be a privacy screen in front of the doorway is laying broken on the ground. There is no light, and usually no candle either. The floor is concrete and the roof is tin. The toilet hole is a 6"x12" hole in the middle of the floor. That's it, just a hole in a room.

You may think this is no huge problem. I thought the same thing until I tried my hand at pooping without sitting. The first problem is the squatting position. I don't know how the Zambians do it, but I have real difficulty finding a way to get everything where it's supposed to go and not on the floor or my pants. I've had such trouble with it that I've resorted to putting my hand on the filty floor for extra stability.

When they run out of toilet paper (which seems to be pretty often) they either leave none there, which makes me wonder about Zambian hygiene, or they use the KIDS' HOMEWORK. "We're really proud of you, Billy, but we're going to have to take your A- paper off of our nonexistent refridgerator and wipe our asses with it." Education is very highly regarded here.

The smell is what you'd expect. Times ten. I swear I can see the green stink lines coming up in waves from the hole when I kick the rotted piece of wood off of the craphole.

And here's the cherry on top. One night I had to use the pit latrine after dark (though I try to avoid it because there's a real danger of snakes coming out of the hole) so I brought my flashlight with me. When I got in and kicked off the lid the usual swarm of houseflies flew out, then I got the great idea that I should shine the light down into the hole to see what was going on down there. It's only poop, right? Wrong. It's poop, yes, but it's also a gigantic teeming cesspool of maggots feeding off of last month's casserole. So that's where those flies came from! Super!