Welcome to my office.

I walked into work this morning to discover a broom holding a sign onto the pile of boxes just inside the door:

BEWARE OF THE SNAKE

But some of my coworkers were there, so I greeted them before proceeding to more pressing questions.
“Er, is there a snake?”
“Yes, somewhere in those boxes.”
I eyed the boxes warily and continued my progress into the room (and away from the boxes). “What kind of snake? Do we know?”
“Yes, a very small cobra.”

This is kind of how life goes here. But I’m glad that there’s a well-fitting door between me and the boxes and the snake.

Good Morning, Mapanza

First: the final of the Africa Cup of Nations. That was one of the most exciting sports events I have ever watched, on par with some excellent fencing and that one field hockey final back when I was in high school. It was definitely the most exciting football/soccer match I have ever watched. It’s certainly the only match I’ve ever stayed up to 1am to see the end of. It was also a sloppy game. I don’t mean to comment on the technical skill of the two teams involved, but rather on the state of the field itself: somewhere early in the second half, there was a close-up of the ball bouncing off the field, and I saw the splash as it hit the grass. It had been raining for over an hour before the game started, and rained for most of normal time, too. By the time Zambia won, after 20 nerve-racking penalty kicks, both penalty spots were more mud than grass. In a way, the weather made it more exciting: while there was some marvelous execution (Especially the keepers. As a soccer player, Kennedy Mweene is probably worth his weight in gold, and Zambia would’ve been toast without him. Soggy toast. I must admit that the Cote d’Ivoire keeper is good, too.) there were also a lot of mistakes and fumbles, not to mention the way the players kept slipping and falling. This meant that the ball moved up and down the field a LOT (I remember one point where it bounced 40 or 50 meters back and forth three times in succession because no one could manage to get control of both themselves and the ball).
And, of course, the game went into overtime. It went into penalties. It went into sudden death penalties. And when Zambia made that last shot, 1am or not, we screamed so loudly that we woke the babies, but no one cared, because Zambia had won. Zambia has NEVER won the Africa Cup of Nations before. We didn’t actually see them lift the cup, because the satellite feed cut out, but we saw the game, which to my mind is the important part.
So. If you like watching soccer, I would recommend this game (even with the ending spoilered). It must be online somewhere.

I fell asleep to the cadences of my neighbors excitedly discussing the game outside my window (tonga tonga tonga tonga penalty kick tonga tonga tonga tonga tonga tonga tonga Drogba tonga tonga tonga tonga Africa Cup of Nations tonga tonga Lusaka International Airport tonga tonga tonga tonga tonga tonga tonga tonga tonga Chris Katonga tonga tonga Mayuba tonga tonga tonga Mweene . . .) and woke to rain and voices singing ‘Doncha kubeba’ with a definite lilt that suggested the singers were half-dancing.

I stuck a basin under the largest of the eaves-drips, fortified my sleep-deprived self with a cup of Earl Grey tea and trudged through the mud, only a little bit late for my 8am class. There was no one there besides my (LITA) boss. At 8:20 I declared to my handful of students that we were starting at 8:30, regardless of whether anyone else showed up, and at 8:28 another few trickled in, enough to make me feel that I’d reached some sort of quorum, although not as many as I would’ve liked for the first day of the module where we actually start using the computers. Earl Grey must’ve helped, because class went really well, considering that I was operating on something between five and six hours of sleep.

After I’d finished teaching, but before I hung around for an hour afterwards to answer questions and mark answers to the reflection questions, I decided to make my way over to the office to see if I could acquire a new voucher, mine having run out the day before. To my surprise, I found all of the vaguely boss-people, including the ones I haven’t seen for weeks.
“Miriam! Good morning!”
“Good morning. How are you?”
“I am fine. How are you?”
“I am fine, although a bit tired.
[Obligatory brief chat about football, the Chipolopolo, and the Africa Cup of Nations.]
And also my voucher has expired.”
“Ah. We should do something about that.” Two vouchers are produced, one for now and one for later. “We are going to Mapanza. Have you ever been to Mapanza?”
“I don’t think so.” Mapanza being one of those places that I’d never really figured out where they are. Someone told me once, but I had forgotten what they’d said. “No.”
“You should come with us.”
“Well, I have not yet finished with the class; I should go back and answer questions.”
“When will you be done?”
“Within an hour.”
“It is ten hours — that would be eleven . . . we will leave at eleven hours.” And they went back to talking to the guy I didn’t recognize, who they seemed to be interviewing, or getting a report from, or something of that nature.

So I finished with my class, went home and dumped my textbook and The Penguin Complete Novels of Jane Austen, changed into something more suited for scrambling into and out of cars and around mud, grabbed some fruit just in case, and we set off for Mapanza.

It took us a while to get out of Macha, because we needed to stop at Abraham’s place and do je ne sais quoi and stop at Assenic’s place to drop off a ladder and discuss the importance of primer.

As we rocked off into the badly rutted dirt road, Abraham chided Assenic, “These things are not toys.” He indicated the seatbelt. “We overturned in this very vehicle, and if it were not for that, Mr. M would’ve been 90 KGs right on my face.”
Thanks, Abraham. Thanks. That inspires so much confidence.

We made it to Mapanza without incident, though, and I discovered that Mapanza is ten or fifteen kilometers up the paved road from Miyobe — ten or fifteen kilometers towards Namwala, through scenery I’d never seen before. (It looked much like the scenery I’ve seen before, but the concept of novelty was exciting.)

We bounced along typical, wet-season-poor roads, past a variety of house-like buildings, through the local market (they had LEMONS. The Macha market does not reliably have lemons, and I would have bought some if only I hadn’t gotten Kathy to bring me some when they came to Macha a few days before), past a very interesting church, and pulled to a stop in front of the container.

My coworkers climbing the container.

I don’t believe that I’ve talked about the containers.

There are a great many shipping containers in this part of Africa, because goods of all kinds arrive in them, there are not enough products being exported in shipping containers to even the numbers, and it’s not cost effective to send empty shipping containers back. So shipping containers are put to all sorts of purposes. The Parmalat office in Mazabuka is (at least partly) located in a shipping container. Aside from a hanger that’s still under construction, the only building-infrastructure that the Macha airport has consists of two shipping containers. People use shipping containers for back sheds. I would not be surprised to find people living in shipping containers.

This, you see, is what LinkNet does, aside from computer classes and maintaining the Macha networks: it makes shipping containers into computer labs. The container gets a door and some furniture, perhaps half a dozen computers, and we train a community representative to use and maintain the computers (and, ideally, teach others, but I’m not sure how well that works in practice). Internet usually comes through the cell phone towers, and if the village isn’t on the electric grid, the container will have a solar panel, too. I think this is really cool.

We took inventory of the container, chatted with Macdonald, who was one of my ICDL students last year, and considered the state of internet and power at the container (internet: none yet, power: there, but the wires are rather more entangled with tree branches than any of us are comfortable with). While the others climbed towers to examine the lay of the land from the top of the container (I spent about half a second considering joining them before deciding that the fact that I was wearing a skirt was a perfectly acceptable reason for not pushing my uneasiness with heights), I walked down the road a bit to take pictures of the church.

I really like the way the rust from the roof colored the mortar. The other side was even cooler -- rounded, with buttresses -- but I had to walk back to rejoin the others.

We stopped by the hospital to look at the offices and shared computer so the guys could consider possibilities for joining it to the eventual Mapanza network. After some discussion of why no one in Mapanza seemed to be sick (the ward we were looking at is the maternity ward, and they have the pregnant women come in on Tuesdays for checkups), we, plus Macdonald, piled back into the vehicle and bounced off down more dust roads to St. Mark’s School.

This sort of vehicle made out of plastic drink cartons, some sort of lid, and twig axles is very common here. Yesterday I saw three children pushing tractor trailer trucks with five or six segments. Children riding bicycles that are almost taller than they are is pretty common, too.

At the school, we waited around for a while because the Headmaster was out, the Deputy Headmaster was busy, and the Assistant Secretary didn’t seem to have the authority to let us see the computer lab. Abraham, my LinkNet boss, gave us a discourse on how everyone always had to do everything according to the proper formalities and protocols, and we weren’t the formality and protocol people, we were the doing-things people. He reminded me a bit of my mother, actually, though mom doesn’t give discourses of that sort. After a while it became clear that we were waiting because the department head was elsewhere, and he was the one with the keys. We tromped over to look at the lab anyway, and I managed to feel useful by finding a window that people shorter than 5’9″ could look through. (I must say that it was a very impressive lab. I could only half-see it, but there were probably 40 computers in that room, more than I’ve seen in any room in Zambia to date. I was not, of course, in a position to judge the age of the computers. The monitors would’ve been old for the US, but about par for the course here.)

As we bounced along dust roads again, Abraham complained some more about how people involved in education are as bad as religious people when it comes to protocol. It did not occur to me until after the conversation had moved on to point out to him that I’m religious and teach three classes a week. (A word about Abraham. When I first got here, he and I had some tensions, because it took me very little time to decide that he was a bit argumentative, liked to tell people what to do, and liked to be in charge of things — me included. But no one in my chain of command had so much as mentioned his existence to me before he introduced himself, so I wasn’t at all sure who he was or where he fit into anything. Six months and several command structure changes later, I’ve figured out that Abraham and I reported to the same boss — but that he’s also nominally in charge of people I consider my peers. At this point, I think that my initial assessment of him was fairly accurate, but I’ve now been here long enough to be ‘one of the guys’ and not ‘the random muguwa’ (at least to some extent), we’ve reached an understanding, and furthermore, he’s now officially my office supervisor (as opposed to my LITA supervisor or my MICS supervisor), and while I don’t know that a bystander would observe any difference in our interactions, we now spar out of habit, and to keep things lively, rather than with any real intent.)

The rest of our trip back was nominally uneventful, but after we picked up a hitchhiking nun (and dropped her off again), I had an incredibly awkward conversation with the three guys about “Why would a woman like that waste herself on being a nun?” with Miriam as resident expert on any and all things female-related. I cannot imagine having a conversation like that with coworkers, during the work day, in a work vehicle in the States, but here no one (but me) even thought anything of it. We also stopped by Mr. S’s place, “So Miriam can see the woman behind this wonderful man,” and stopped the car at the side of the road to chat with his children, who were on their way home from school, because this seemed to be the trip to Show Miriam Everything. (They keep saying that they’ll haul me off to see the distant towns where they have containers. This would be interesting, but considering Abraham’s complaints about the place they’ve been for the past six months, I might be just as glad to skip that one.)

We had lunch at the restaurant, which I did not particularly need because I have plenty of food at home, but I wasn’t about to object to lunch out on the company tab, even if it was just sausage. (I like sausage. But the most prevalent sort of sausage here is not one that I would serve as an unadulterated main course. It’s okay.) After lunch we stopped by the office, and I had a chance to pin down Abraham for a conversation I’ve been meaning to have with him for some months.

“They tell me you’re in charge of me now.”
“Oh. Ah, yes.”
“And I really feel that I ought to inform you, as my boss, that when I’m not teaching or at the school, I don’t have any work to do. I haven’t had any in months.”
“Well. As your boss, I suppose I ought to see if I can do something about that.”

That was a week ago, and so far hasn’t produced any results, but I’m still hopeful.

The others completed whatever we were at the office to do, and I was invited to come see the Airtel tower. By this point it had been a longish day on not enough sleep, and I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to stand around being useless a while longer while other people did things, but I’ve been mildly interested in seeing the tower (which is in some way related to how we get our internet) for some months now, and goodness knew when I would next get the chance, so I climbed back into the vehicle for another jouncing trip to the tower, with a possible side-trip to Gideon.

The tower. The guys estimated that it's 50 meters tall, and our internet uses a technology that sort of piggybacks on the satellite connection for the mobile phones, which is both cheaper and faster than having our own satellite connection.

About halfway up, just by that dish on the right, there’s a mesh grating. Just above the mesh grating — between it and the dish, almost — there’s a small white square that you might be able to see if you zoom in a lot (or perhaps not. I had trouble seeing it on the original image, and I know where it is). This square is our transmitter. It beams a radio signal to (I think) the smaller tower on the LITA building. Or possibly somewhere in the hospital complex. But a distance of several kilometers. Wirelessly. I think it is SO COOL. They were playing with a pair of transmitter dishes in ‘my’ office for a while, which was neat, but also annoying, because it emits a loud-ish beep periodically. The airtel tower is enclosed in a gate, and the guard who’s supposed to have the key to that gate wasn’t there, so we left again. On our way, we got a call that the restaurant needed to go to town to get supplies for Valentine’s Day orders, and needed a vehicle, probably the one we were using. We did not go to Gideon, which I was just as glad of by that point, even though the guys wanted to stop to get beef while we were there, and I would have been able to locate the place to purchase the cheapest beef in the Macha area.

——

Speaking of meat, I’m told that I should inform you that Moses has eaten the chicken. When asked, he grinned, gave me a thumbs up, and said that it was good. He also told me that my next task is to kill a goat.

——

This is something that I find alternately enjoyable and frustrating about life in Zambia: when you wake up in the morning, you can never be entirely sure of how your day will be occupied. You might kill a chicken. You might up and go to Mapanza, or to a cultural ceremony. You might spend several hours sitting in front of a pile of chopped onions, waiting for power to come back so that you can cook them. You may find yourself playing host at a moment’s notice, or teaching the neighbor kids to play the card game War. It does keep life interesting.

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, or, The Chipolopolo Boys

I am not much of a sports aficionada. When the Super Bowl rolls around, what enthusiasm I manage to raise generally centers around the prospect of snacks. The rise or fall of the fortunes of Philadelphia teams tend not to inspire me to greater emotion than “Oh, that’s nice,” or “Alas,” depending on the context. However, four seasons of field hockey and one of lacrosse did leave their mark: I can usually manage to enjoy watching sports of the ‘people running up and down a field with a ball’ variety, at least for a while. American football is not included in this category: the ball isn’t round, and gameflow consists more of throw the ball, maybe run a bit, lose the ball under a dogpile, stop gameplay, rinse and repeat. I like more finesse and teamwork/passing.

But this post isn’t about American football; it’s about what the rest of the world calls football. I always considered soccer a decent sort of sport: not as pretty as (women’s) lacrosse or the level of basketball where people still pass to each other, not as sensible as (women’s) field hockey, but enjoyable enough. I wasn’t any good at it even before I spent four years being trained not to kick the ball or ever let it touch my feet, but my brother’s involvement in a local club ensured that I learned at least the rudiments of the rules.

And then I went to Spain. Ivan, Pepi’s younger son, is a diehard fútbol fan who could possibly have played for Barcelona, and we were a Barça household. I cultivated an appreciation for the game, and soon came to prefer televised fútbol to dubbed American movies, even if Ivan’s yells of “GOL” made me jump every single time. Spain did poorly in the World Cup that year, but it was Barça that really mattered, anyway.

Here in Zambia, most people who follow football have an English Premier League team. I’ve never developed a preference, and tend to take my affiliation from whoever I’m watching with. La Liga games are also aired, though, and I sometimes see Barcelona flags and jerseys, though not as often as English teams.

But now we have the Africa Cup of Nations, and of course everyone follows Zambia, myself included. I wasn’t paying much attention, because I don’t generally seek out sports events of any sort, and I only tend to see games if they’re on when I’m at Monica’s, but last week I realized that the Zambian team was doing very well: had in fact made it to the quarter-finals. So of course I watched the game with the other SALTers at our spiritual retreat last weekend. We could hear the sound of horns and vuvuzuelas drifting over the wall from the nearby compounds. (Did you know that distant vuvuzuelas sound disconcertingly like mosquitoes?)

Zambia proceeded to the semi-finals. I made a point of seeking out an opportunity to watch the game, and found myself watching with a number of my neighbor ladies. Let me tell you, football with Zambian ladies is like no other sports audience I have ever participated in. No one screamed GOAL, although there were a few a few shrieks and protestations of ‘I can’t watch!’ at some of the skin-of-the-teeth saves. The real difference, though, made itself apparent when Zambia scored the first goal sixty-some minutes in. We clapped, we whooped, Mercy ululated, Esther did the ‘doncha kubeba’ dance as well as once can while sitting on a couch with a sleeping baby. (When African teams score, it’s not one player showing off and rejoicing; the whole team breaks into a little dance routine. ‘Doncha kubeba’ is one of ours.) Zambian women are very good at showing elation. I hope that one thing I can retain when I return to the States is the ability to just drop all inhibitions and rejoice. We watched with bated breath for the remaining time, and for the extra four minutes (If anyone wants to explain to me WHY there were four minutes added on at the end, feel free), and when the game ended without a Ghanean goal, we just partied all over again.

The final match is Sunday night. Zambia hasn’t had this good a chance at the cup since the famously terrible tragedy in the eighties(?) where most of the team perished in a plane crash, flying to, incidentally, Gabon, where the cup is being held this year. Zambians are loving this. The whole country is excited. And me, I once again understand why people follow sports teams. This is FUN. But I’m very glad that I’m not in Lusaka tonight; I can only imagine that things there must be getting crazy right around now.

Edit at time of posting: This was written on Wednesday.

Water!

It’s been raining a lot, at least once every three days, and frequently a few hours a day for several days in a row, or raining hard several nights in a row. We’ve also had more of the pouring, exuberant rain that we got a few times at the beginning of rainy season, the kind of rain that completely overwhelms the rather inadequate gutter system on the Wooden House, sending water almost sheeting off the roof on all the low points. If I put my biggest basin — the one that’s so large that I almost can’t move it when it’s full, much less lift it — under one of these drip cascades, it fills in a matter of minutes. This also cuts the heat marvelously, and while it’s still hot some days, I haven’t needed my fan in weeks.

——

All last week, there were signs that running water would return.
The pilot’s family had water from all of their taps, including the kitchen sink.
There was water at the upper Zambezi outdoor tap for the first time in weeks.
The Dutch kids in the Zambezi six-plex had running water, and we had water at the taps behind the house.
One night I heard the toilet filling, slowly, slowly, slowly, and a day or two later Clare scolded me for dumping water in the toilet to flush it, because there was water in the tank.

This was very exciting. (Except for the scolding.) It was also rather prolonged, due to the fact that we kept having power outages, and I think I’ve mentioned that the pumps don’t run when there isn’t any power. Thankfully they do seem to have acquired more diesel for the generator, which mitigated the power situation somewhat, but still meant that water was very slow in returning.

And then — and then! Friday at lunch, I happened to glance at the sink, and it seemed wetter than usual, not wet like someone had poured something down it, but wet as if it had been dripping, and the drips had splashed . . .
Cautiously, cautiously, I turned the tap, and water came out! I let out a whoop that startled the poor fellow that had wandered in with Clare, and did a small celebratory dance.

Even with continued power fluctuations, the water situation is as good as it’s been since the first month I was here. I am incredibly pleased. It’s nice to have running water in the house, of course, and also to be able to rinse off in the shower (though mostly I haven’t been, because a lot of the time it’s a bit chilly for cold showers in the morning or at night, and there usually isn’t enough water pressure for a shower in the late afternoons, when it’s hot enough) but the best part is having a toilet that flushes reliably.

——

What’s odd, though, is how quickly I forget. Not when I’m actually using the running water, which makes me happy pretty much every time (although I have noticed that I’m using more water for things like washing dishes. But I do still collect rainwater). And I haven’t forgotten that there is running water; I don’t find myself getting water from the bucket when I could be getting water from the tap. But if I’m not actively using the water, I forget that there being running water is unusual, something to be happy about. On Saturday I had to go the Choma to sign papers for the Ongoing Saga Of My Work Permit, and Eric asked me how things were going in Macha, and it didn’t even occur to me that THERE IS WATER AGAIN was exactly the sort of thing he was asking about. I meant to post this last weekend, but the power kept going out and I didn’t get around to it, and then by this week, I’d almost forgotten that this was news that ought to be shared. How quickly luxuries become normal.

Place of Emptiness

For a town named after one’s rear end, Swakopmund is actually a charming place. It’s huddled between the sea and the Namib desert, colonial architecture squeezed in next to rugged industry. (We did not get a group picture in front of the two-story warehouse proclaiming its manufacture of SALT in enormous capital letters. But we did think about it.) I was surprised at how much I liked it, given that it’s a tourist beach town, and December-January is the big summer holiday and the height of the tourist season. I was also surprised at the feeling of history that I felt there, when the desert erases most older traces (though the museum did suggest that there’s a surprising amount of information in the middens and refuse of trade routes, not to mention some really cool purple glass) and few buildings sport dates older than 1900. But it felt like a European city, steeped in history, an impression furthered by the large population of Europeans residents and tourists, not to mention the German spoken amidst the English and Afrikaans. It certainly didn’t feel like the Africa I’ve gotten to know in Zambia, with its broad, sunny, almost-empty streets paved in tarmac or cement tiles; the cheese in the grocery stores at halfway reasonable prices; the stretch of lawn next to the beach that was watered by a sprinkler system; the posh, modern stores catering to people with money to buy; the lack of open-air markets selling everything from mangoes to clothes to plastic containers (though there was a craft market, which, I discovered in chatting with the vendors, drew people from all the neighboring countries to sell goods); the gelato (OH MY GOODNESS, the gelato!); and around the fringes of it all, just past the edges of the back (mostly rock-and-cacti) gardens, low, rugged, scrubby plants quickly replaced by . . . nothing. Empty landscape. No people, no animals, no plants. Perhaps an occasional tangle of dry, dead branches, or the tracks of some previous wanderer or quad bike (or, more rarely, some other animal), a lone cloud briefly casting its shadow over the dunes, a gull or hawk gliding high over thermals before vanishing into blueness.

Namib literally means "Place of Emptiness." I think it's an incredibly fitting name.

(Most of the pictures are better if you click on them to get a bigger view, although they all suffer a bit because I made them smaller for ease of uploading over local internet.)

I have never in my life been anywhere like the Namib Desert. So empty, so barren, whole stretches of nothing but dirt and rock and sand rising to distant sand dunes or hunks of stone.

On the first day of this new year, a few days into our stay, when the others went to the beach (again), I decided that I was going to find the sand dunes that rose and shimmered at the edge of every vista. Armed with my water bottle, sunscreen, hat, chitenge, camera in a ziplock bag, various useful and useless things that I always carry in my bag, and a consultation with the hostel hostess to be sure that this was not a completely unreasonable idea, I set off to find adventure.

A 90-degree disconnect between my understanding of the lay of the land inside and outside the building resulted in going in the wrong direction, but as there’s desert around every edge of Swakopmund that doesn’t border the Atlantic, this was not actually a problem. I got a scenic route through a residential area that I would not otherwise have seen, discovered the source of the solar system (and thereby answered a question that had been puzzling us since we arrived), and got a first-hand acquaintance with some of the plants that cluster around one of the few sources of water.

Edit: Desert Life.

I also avoided the protected bird-nesting area that I would’ve encountered if I’d followed the “over the bridge and along the road” advice of the hostess, and found myself in something much closer to untrammeled wilderness than the footprint-strewn dunes close to the shore and the road.

I don't think that I'm managing to convey how LARGE these things are. You could fit houses in them. Gymnasiums. Office buildings. These are not merely hummocks, but small mountains of sand, mountain ranges of sand, running and meeting and melding and dropping off abruptly into steep slopes that are closer to vertical than horizontal.

I had a marvelous hike. I stood alone on ridges of sand marked by no footsteps before mine, watched the wind in the sand that blew over a sharp peak, marveled at the colors and patterns of the different weights and compositions of sand, slipped and slithered down slopes, and followed the tracks of unidentified mammals between scruffy lowland plants and along the dry streambed. Eventually I made my way back to the welcome shade of our accommodations. I was thrilled, flushed, hot, and sun-wearied, and my calves and hamstrings absolutely ached — there are very few stairs in Zambia, and my legs have not been called upon to do nearly as much work here as they were accustomed to at home. But there was something almost magical about that solitary ramble through the dunes.

————

Swakopmund is trying very hard to make itself one of the adrenaline capitals of the world. Chris went skydiving, Matt went surfing, and even Alison rented a wetsuit. I contented myself with a brief tumble — I can’t really call it a swim — in the rough and gritty ocean, which was a bit like playing with a very large cat that may or may not really understand how fragile you are. I’m told that the actual swimming beach was rather more subdued and gentle, but I’m not all that much of a beach person, so I confined myself to a few treks down that direction, a marvelous bit of watching dolphins playing in the breakers, and a game of frisbee with a gang of German (?) highschoolers (?) — and the ache in my arms afterwards informed me that I’m out of practice with that, too.

What I did do is go on a boat trip, along with Chris and Alison. The morning trip was full, so we went on the afternoon trip, which was shorter (didn’t go to Bird Island, which was mildly disappointing, but on the whole I felt like I had as much fun on two and a half hours of boat trip as I would’ve on four hours of boat trip), cheaper, and just had complimentary drinks instead of complimentary drinks and lunch, including fresh oysters. And the drinks included the really excellent fruit juice that they have here, which pleased me very much, since I didn’t really feel like paying extra so everyone else could drink as much alcohol as they wanted. (In the States, ‘complimentary drinks’ would mean ‘one per person.’ One of the groups who went on the morning trip told us that when their group ran out of alcohol (twice), they just pulled up next to one of the other boats and resupplied. And you probably wouldn’t take children on your boat trip with complimentary alcoholic drinks.)

The seagulls would take fish right out of his hand, too, but I didn't get my camera out soon enough for that.

It was the wrong season for whales, and we didn’t see leatherback turtles or penguins (though none of us had any clue if it was the right season for those, either. The other group said that they didn’t see turtles, either). But we DID go out to the Creche, the seal “kindergarten,” where thousands (literally thousands. The fellow feeding the fish in the above picture estimated 50,000) of seals congregate on the beach, and the pups learn how to swim and hunt and do other important seal things.

One of the things I love about seals is that they know how to have fun. That's what it looks like to me, anyway.

A number of the male seals have figured out that if they climb up the steps at the back of the boats, they get fed fish. Some of them are chill and comfortable enough with humans to be petted. I’ve now petted and hand-fed a wild seal. The guide also told us that when seals balance things on their noses for tricks, they aren’t actually balancing them: they’re holding them with their whiskers, which are large and thick and cane be raised forward or squished back against the sides of the face.

This is Saki. "How do you tell them apart?" I asked the guide, because Saki looked just the same as the younger, more skittish male we'd had on the on board a few minutes before. "He's the one as shakes hands. A few have scars or markings that you can distinguish, but Saki's the one that shakes hands."

AND we saw dolphins. I know that seeing dolphins isn't unusual, but I love it anyway. I like dolphins even more than seals.

Usually I'm pretty blasé about seagulls, but I had more fondness for them in Namibia than I normally do.

We also went for a hike as a group out to the sanddunes, on the "Along the road and over the bridge" route, which featured this excellent sign.

For scale. And that was a SMALL dune, one of the ones close to the sea. That slope is probably about 70 degrees, too. I "walked" down it by standing still and just alternately lifting my feet one after the other, and letting the sand carry me down. Alison said it looked like I was floating down the hill.

Are you tired of vistas of sand yet?

I'm modeling Use #12 of a Chitenge: Desert Ranger Sand Cape, and Alison is sporting a somewhat dilapidated version of Use #13: Indian-Style Head Scarf, authentically learned in India (but not with a chitenge). Matt is doing Desert Bandit Fusion, and Chris is showing off Even Better Ways to Get Sunburned. If you're curious, use #11 is Beach Towel.

Unlike the rest of Namibia, the west coast gets cool weather from the ocean, and Swakopmund generally has sun between approximately 10 hours and 15 hours, before and after which it's cloudy and may be cold, even in summer (I slept in my sleeping bag every night). However, on our last day, there was enough of a break in the clouds that we had a partial sunset for our beach supper picnic.

There are more stories from this trip. It’s possible that I’ll post them here, but I probably won’t. Suffice it to say that we did get home again, safe and sound, despite a very typical timing misadventure due to our bus home leaving Lusaka a day late (and subsequently leaving Namibia a day late) and adventures with my visa. (N.B. When you’re asking for days, you need to count both endpoint days, not just how many days away the departure date is. And if you’re traveling by bus, the day the bus departs may not be the day you leave the country. And you should just ask for at least an extra half-week, anyway. The exit immigration gave me a bit of a hard time, but it could’ve been worse. It’s very difficult to effectively lecture someone when you won’t talk loudly enough for her to hear you through the glass window.)

Happy Holidays

I believe I mentioned that one of the things I’m learning in Zambia is to deal with nothing ever starting on time. I intended to post this on Christmas, since it seemed seasonally appropriate. Clearly, I didn’t. I could make excuses about 23-hour power outages starting Christmas Eve evening, but that doesn’t account for not posting yesterday. (I was reading, okay?) Instead, I’ll claim that I’m just adapting to the laid-back pace of just about everything in Zambian life.

The only Advent wreath I've seen in Zambia. Yes, that is a canoe. And paddles.

Merry Christmas, or whatever else you celebrate, from warm, rainy (finally! Though not as rainy as I’d like it to be. I think the farmers would like it rainier, too) Zambia!

People have asked me if I miss being home for the holidays. The answer is: not really. In fact, I don’t feel like I’m missing holidays. Holidays? There are no holidays in August. It’s felt like August for a long time. Besides the weather, there are none of the other usual cues. The only time I’ve heard bad Christmas music piped over store loudspeakers was back at the Shoprite in Livingstone in mid-November. I haven’t heard good Christmas/Advent music in Church. We sang carols on MCC retreat, where the above picture was taken, and Sunday at church. (I hiked to Church in POURING rain that made several portions of path into muddy, shallow rivers. A far cry from Christmas services at home.) No one here plays Christmas music, either, except for expatriates. (And one really annoying toy that baby K has that plays “Jingle Bells.” The irony of this song in this location is not sufficient to get me past more than ten or fifteen listens.)

All of which made it very nice to actually sing Christmas carols at church, even if they were in Tonga. Due to the rain, attendance was low, but the kids put on a very nice sketch (skit). It was all in Tonga, of course, but there’s a cadence to the Gospel of Luke, so that even in Tonga, I could tell what book Luundu was narrating from, and more-or-less follow along, even on the less familiar stories. And there were less familiar stories. It was a small epiphany for me, actually. The Christmas readings are so familiar, but I’m only barely acquainted with the birth of John the Baptist: I can’t ever recall hearing Luke 1 used in a Christmas service, and certainly not in a pageant. And I spent the rest of the day at a board games get-together that the pilot’s family was hosting for people who didn’t have family to be with.

Not Christmas like I’m used to. But it was nice. (And who knew that basil, tomato, and mozzarella salad with added avocado is Christmas-colored?)

You won’t hear from me at New Year’s, either: I’ll be in Namibia. German pastry and five-story sand dunes, here I come! Assuming I survive a 24-hour plus bus ride.

Not a post for the squeamish

I killed a chicken this morning.

I was lying awake in bed, looking at the amount of light filtering in through the little window and the big curtain, and wondering if it was time to get up. I had, in fact, decided that it probably was, but had not yet extracted a hand from the mosquito net to check my phone and verify this.
There was a loud squawking from somewhere outside my room, and the sound of Moses having a discussion with some people whose identities I could not quite ascertain.
“Me? I can’t kill a chicken!”

I figured that this was as good a time to get up as any, so I did, but by the time I emerged from my room, there was no sign of a chicken, or, in fact, of anyone but Moses. I figured that whatever show had been going, I’d missed it, so I proceeded to boil a guineafowl egg to supplement the banana scone and peanut butter I was having for breakfast, and lamented the fact that I had not bothered to walk to the market yesterday to acquire more mangoes.

As I was finishing my breakfast, Beauty showed up, and then Luyando joined her as I was washing the dishes, and the subject of the chicken resurfaced.
“I can’t kill a chicken!”
“Why not?” I asked.
“I just can’t!”
“Where is it?” asked Beauty.
“There, in that room.” (the storage room)
“You kill it, and I’ll do the rest.” Motion to indicate pulling out feathers.
“Moses, do you want me to kill your chicken for you?” I participated in chicken butchery at Mboole, but the chicken had been dead and plucked when we got there. I’ve felt for several months that I ought to buy a live chicken and kill, prepare and eat it while I’m here, since it’s the most readily available form of chicken, and while I’m an unrepentant omnivore, I’ve never killed anything larger than a mouse. But I haven’t seen any for sale at a point that I needed a chicken, and it’s a lot of meat for just one person, and the feathers are somewhat intimidating, as is the whole concept of acquiring a live chicken in general.
“You? You want to?”
“I’ve never done it before, but there’s a first time for everything.” I will admit that I take a great deal of pleasure in breaking people’s expectations of what I can and will do.
Luyando broke in, “Where?”
“There, where Beauty is.”
“On the shelf?”
“Down.”
There was a great deal of squawking and struggling as the chicken was found and removed from the storage room, but as the its feet were tied together, it didn’t have much chance. Luyando took it outside, Moses went in his room, and Beauty got the best of the bad lot of knives from the kitchen of the wooden house.

Then she turned and offered it, handle-first, to me, and drew her other hand across her throat. “You will do it?”
“Er, okay.”

I took the knife and went outside, where Luyando had the chicken restrained, one foot on its wings and the other on its feet. I grasped the head and commenced sawing the blade across the chicken’s neck.

It made absolutely no impression, and the chicken lay there calmly, looking at us. I went inside and traded the knife for one of the good knives I got for my birthday. It still didn’t do much.
“Close,” Luyando said, indicating the hollow where the neck met the head.
I readjusted my hold and moved the knife there. It still took a surprising amount of work, although I’m not sure why it should be surprising, given how tough village chicken are to chew, but the knife sliced cleanly. The chicken lay quiet as the blood began to splatter, only cawing and struggling when I had cut a good way through the neck, when the knife was blood-soaked, just before I severed the spine. The head suddenly swung loose, connected only by a bit of tissue, and I let it go to flop next to the body.
“Like that?”
“Yes.”
We watched as the muscles twitched aimlessly, and I bent to wipe the blade of my knife on the thick grass.

I took my knife back inside and added it to the pile of dishes. As I finished rinsing, Luyando took the limp, feathery body inside and deposited it in a bowl under the sink to wait for the water to finish boiling.

Later, I watched Moses flop the body about in the bowl of water, pulling off feathers.
“I’ve never seen this done before,” I commented.
We talked a bit about chicken in the States, how meat comes in the grocery store, frequently unrecognizable. How there are kids who grow up without ever seeing the animals their food comes from.
“I can’t even imagine that.”
“What do people do with the feathers? Just throw them out?”
Moses nodded and turned his attention to yanking out tailfeathers, and the conversation languished for a bit. Then, “I have never done this before. It will make me not want to eat chicken.”
“Then what was the point of me killing it?”
“I can’t make it alive again!”
“Why have you never done it? Is it a woman’s job?”
He nodded. “If a woman were doing this, it would be done already, and it would look nicer.” He indicated the stray feathers he had missed, lone and sopping, like some sort of bizarre goosepimpled combover.

He butchered it as I wrote this. I think it’s in the fridge now; all traces are gone except for the small bit of blood among the plants under the trees, and three black feathers on the rocks next to the house.

It was both easier and harder than I expected. Physically harder, and I can see how the Dutch kids might have had a traumatizing experience while attempting to slaughter their chicken, and needed to resort to breaking its neck. But emotionally, psychologically, easier. My hands were completely steady holding the chicken’s head, and as I washed my knife afterwards, and at no point did I feel shaky the way I did after (badly) bludgeoning the mouse to death with a broom handle.

I think it’s a good thing to know where your food comes from, the meat as well as the plants, and to participate, at least occasionally, in that process.

A Room of One’s Own

And you thought that I didn’t have any roommates.

I was out of town for a week and a half for MCC retreat, and when I got back, I discovered that the geckos and spiders had taken over my room. I figured that this was a relatively small price to pay for the general absence of flies, wasps, mosquitoes, and rats.

I’ve always been fond of spiders, and the Wall Crab Spiders that are most prevalent here are harmless to humans, and presumably eat insects, though I’ve never seen one of them doing so. They’re about as big as a half-dollar and lie almost perfectly flat on the wall when not moving. They don’t spin webs. I’ve had a handful of them in my room since I got here. As I have a low startle factor for spiders, I like these just as long as they don’t die and plummet abruptly off the ceiling, which has happened a few times.

I don’t know that there are more spiders in my room now than when I left two weeks ago. What is true is that a particularly fine specimen has taken to hanging out either on my window or on the curtain.

The fellows that have really moved in are the geckos. When I first got here, I would see them occasionally, darting out of sight through the crack to the common area, or running in and out of the window before I got a screen up. I found them fascinating, but they were small and fast and camera-shy.

Not so anymore. They’re still small and fast, but since I’ve been gone, at least three of them seem to have decided that this is their room and than I am but a visitor. I’m sure they’d scramble if I made an attempt to actually catch one, but I got about fifteen inches away while taking this picture, and the fellow just looked at me.

I like to watch them. They stalk bugs, or each other, or wander around for no reason I can determine, and their feet make little whirring sounds as they cross the drawing S gave me that I have hanging up on my wall. Sometimes they jump from vertical surface to vertical surface, which I think is about the coolest thing ever, or they’ll do little dances around each other. I wonder if those odd circling skitters mean
“Get out of here, you upstart!” or
“Are you a boy gecko or a girl gecko?” or
“Hot, isn’t it?” or
“You are one good-looking piece of lizardflesh! Are you doing anything later?”
or something else that hasn’t even occurred to me.

My only complaint is that they sometimes leave little droppings (“poos,” as the safari guides would say) on whatever happens to be underneath them. But even the best roommate has some annoying behavior.

Roald Dahl named the lizards on his ceiling, or possibly one of his friends did. I think my three deserve something nicer than Hitler and Mussolini, though. There’s a little one and two bigger ones, the grayer of which is pictured above. Let me know if you have any brilliant ideas.

It’s always skinks at the office, but only geckos in my room.

Things I am learning in Zambia

In no particular order:

Tonga, slowly. I expect that I would make better progress if I had more ability to faithfully study my flash cards, but I find it very difficult because no one is checking up on me regularly. I’ve discovered that there are Tonga classes at the MICS school, and hope to sit in on them when school starts again next year. Perhaps sitting with a bunch of (for the most part) native speakers learning grammar, or whatever they’re doing, is not the best plan, but what I’m doing right now isn’t working terribly well, and Craig Davis always says that “social adrenaline is the key to linguistic form,” (that is, people learn language to keep from looking stupid in front of other people), so perhaps the prospect of looking foolish in front of third graders will provide the goad that infrequent visits to Mboole do not.

I’m getting very good at greetings, though. And I can sometimes see other ways that I’m making progress, but it goes slowly.

Zambian English
When I first got here, I frequently had the experience I would be talking to someone, and both of us spoke English, but neither of us could understand the other. It happens much less frequently, and I’m aware that I’m acquiring a Zambian accent, at least while talking to Zambians. (Sometimes in mixed groups of Zambians and expats, the Dutch kids won’t understand something a Zambian says, I repeat it with slightly more explanation, but in my Zambian accent, so they still don’t get it until I say it again in an American accent.)
I don’t really know how much of it is British English and how much is particularly Zambian, although it is clearly a mixture. It’s not just the stuff I was warned about, like pants and napkins, or things that I knew if I thought about it, like zed instead of zee. It’s ‘grade three,’ ‘bath’ instead of ‘bathe,’ and ‘just a minute’ means ‘can you come here for a minute?’ and ‘feel free’ means ‘make yourself at home’ and ‘Sorry! Sorry!’ is not an apology but instead sympathy, a reaction as automatic as ‘bless you’ after a sneeze is at home. (I’ve learned to not say bless you — or gesundheit, which is worse — but I still feel like I ought to.) And even educated people will say he when they mean she, and the other way around. ‘Footing’ instead of ‘walking,’ ‘pick me’ or ‘drop me’ for ‘pick me up’ and ‘drop me off,’ and the answer to ‘How are you?’ is ‘I am fine.’ ‘She said no’ is more frequently ‘she is refusing me,’ although I think that applying this to inanimate objects, for example, ‘It is refusing me!’ when the remote is not working, is particular to Monica’s son Junior.

(He is SO CUTE. The other night he’d gotten ahold of a pair of black rain boots/gum boots/gumbos that fit him like waders and was clomping around in them before supper, but had to take them off to get into the chair to eat with us. After supper,
“Don’t put the gumbos on.”
“They like me!” As he climbs back into them.
Luckily his parents think that he’s as hilarious as I do, so it’s acceptable to laugh out loud at his antics and I’m not in danger of keeling over from an excess of smothered laughter.
It’s also very nice that Monica is a nurse and has enough education that if I comment on the sort of thing that frazzles my nerves around young children (“Are you bouncing around like that with masuku in your mouth?”) she is on him like that. (“Junior, spit it out so you don’t choke!”))

Mind you, what was very peculiar was the Learn Maths At Home! tv show that I caught the tail end of the other day, where the (implied Zambian) sample student had an accent exactly like Hermione Granger’s in the Harry Potter movies. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that the posh accent here is British, but it was weird. Zambians don’t talk like that, at least not the ones I know. And it made it even more difficult for me to believe that she was honestly asking questions from her heart about regression analysis and lines of best fit.

Water Conservation
I don’t know that I’m learning water conservation from Zambians, who don’t practice it, at least not the way all(?) American children are taught when they are small. We don’t pay for the water coming out of our tap (when so many taps are outdoor communal, it would be nearly impossible to set up a system), and I would guess that most of my neighbors grew up with bore holes that needed to be pumped by hand, not taps that keep running until you turn them off, so DON’T LEAVE THE WATER RUNNING is not necessarily the same instinctive reaction that it is for me (especially not with a slow tap and a big bucket, where it can take a very long time to fill up and people may wander off. Usually there’s someone around to see if it’s overflowing), and Zambia is not one of those places you were told about as a child where they bathe in half a cup of water. At the same time, I have yet to meet a Zambian with a washing machine (Zambian women wash impressive amounts of clothing to impressive states of whiteness in incredibly dirty water), have not seen a dishwashing machine in the entire country, and bucket bathing does use less water than showering, pit latrines use less water than flush toilets, and flush toilets don’t use that much water if there’s no water to flush them with.

I guess you could say that it’s the environment that’s teaching me water conservation. The rains have not improved the water situation – there hasn’t been running water in the house in over a month, and for most of that time we haven’t had running water out back, either. Possibly we haven’t gotten enough rain. It only rained one day last week, and not that much, either. There were a few days when none of the taps had running water at all for a couple of hours. But it did rain last night, and this morning there was water at the tap next to Zambezi House, which there hasn’t been in a long time. And when all the water has to be hauled from some distance away, one is naturally more careful with it.

I’ve started measuring dishwashing water by the mug-full: my personal record is one (fairly dirty) plastic container, one (fairly dirty) pan, a plate, utensils, and a cup washed and rinsed in half a mug of water (of course, then I used the other half trying to rinse out the scrubbing pad), although two dirty pans, two plates, a cup and assorted utensils in two and a half mugs of water is also pretty good.

I’ve become an avid graywater collector, because no way am I going to use some of our limited supply of clean water, fetched from some distance away, to make the toilet flush, but it really does get gross. I collect rainwater and now see it as a free gift from the sky. I’ve learned to skim the dead bugs off the top of my bathwater and be glad that it fell off of the roof and I didn’t have to carry it, same for water for washing clothes. Yesterday I got soaked, walking home in the rain, so that I would get home before it stopped raining to collect water to bath with. I can wash hair and self in the small blue basin (six liters? eight liters? I don’t really know).

To Carry Water
The first time I tried to carry a basin of water on my head, it splashed all over my skirt and the ground, and I found it very difficult. I used a smaller basin to water my garden, which I could lift easily, but still sometimes spilled while lifting onto or off of my head. Since we haven’t had water, I’ve been using a 20-liter bucket (which I can’t fill too full or I can’t manage it, but luckily there’s usually someone around at the house to help the foolish muguwa who doesn’t know how much water she can lift get it back off her head again, but I estimate that I can manage 15 or 17 liters without too much trouble) at least twice a week, and I was very pleased to discover, while fetching water in the blue basin, that it was not only manageable, but easy. I could probably handle the red basin I had so much trouble with the first time, too, but I haven’t tried. (I should note that this is not hands-free water carrying; I don’t have a suitable piece of chitenge cloth to make the pad that helps to balance a bucket or basin, and I’m certainly not skilled enough to try even the blue basin without, but the balance and muscles are similar, so by the time I go home, I ought to be able to co-opt my mother’s parlor trick of balancing a cup of water on her head.)

To Eat Nshima
I’ll admit that I never found eating nshima to be particularly difficult. I don’t mind eating with my hands, and I’ve done enough work with clay that ‘roll it into a ball with one hand and then flatten it with a thumb-imprint’ is not a particularly difficult instruction to follow, and the flavor is somewhere between cornmeal mush and cream of wheat, which is to say, entirely unobjectionable. I had been puzzled as to how most Zambians seem to wind up with less nshima-residue on their hands at the end of a meal, but I’ve learned that the trick is to not dry your hands after washing them, and then it sticks much less. Still somewhat, but less, and while the feeling is somewhat unpleasant, it’s not that difficult to wash off.

When I’d been here for perhaps a month, N, who is perhaps four or five, showed up outside my room one day and announced, “White people don’t eat nshima.”
“I eat nshima,” I told her. “And I’m white.”
She was not convinced, and we had variations on this discussion several times in the weeks that followed. I came to the conclusion that the only solution would be to eat nshima in front of her, if that, and more or less gave up.
Last week I went to the Christmas pageant put on by the MICS school (where I guess she’s in daycare, or kindergarten, or something to that effect), and I passed N and some of her classmates in the yard. She pointed me out to her peers, and then to the teacher.
“Teacher, Teacher! You know this one? She eats nshima!“
Booyah.

Cooking nshima
Eating nshima is easy (though I don’t eat it like a Zambian; I can only manage one or perhaps one and a half lumps, whereas a Zambian might eat between four and seven). Cooking nshima, though, that’s hard. By the time I leave, I hope to have attained sufficient skill that I do not inspire every woman in sight with a desire to grab the stick out of my hand and stir it properly. I console myself with the thought that none of them know how to stir batter.

Let me tell you a story

On the way to expat American Thanksgiving in Choma last Friday, my ride picked up two of my sort-of neighbors, Vita and Fanny. (I found this enlightening, because it explained why they’re my sort-of neighbors, and also what they actually do, neither of which I’d managed to figure out on my own. Also, Fanny’s name. They both live in Choma, but stay here in Macha during the week. Fanny is a co-headmistress, or assistant headmistress, or something to that effect, at the MICS school, and Vita is an assistant teacher (explaining why she seems to be a teacher, but doesn’t keep teacher hours). Since Vita stays with Clare while she’s here, she’s a very close sort-of neighbor, and it’s nice to have a better understanding of the situation.

Also, Fanny told us a story.

Why the cow does not get out of the road

There was a cow, a goat, and a dog who were traveling. To get to where they were going, they hiked*. When the cow got to where it was going, it paid in full, which is why it is not afraid of the vehicles that pass. When the goat got to where it was going, it just jumped off and ran away, so it always runs. The dog paid, and there was change due, but the driver did not provide it, which is why the dog always chases after cars.

*That is, hitch-hiked. Walking is ‘footing it,’ or sometimes just walking.

——————-

Expat American Thanksgiving was very nice. Everyone seemed very excited about “meeting fellow Americans,” which prospect did not particularly excite me; I could meet Americans in the US without coming all the way to Zambia, and in general there is a much better selection over there (not that I’m complaining about the expats I’ve met here; they’re all very nice). This is just as well, as it turns out that I was the only person present who had met all of the attendees before that evening. And I always like holidays that involve hanging out and eating good food, especially since we stayed the night and I had the opportunity to take a hot bath.

There was no turkey, but there was pretty much everything else that one thinks of at Thanksgiving — the only staples I might have included were green bean casserole, sweetcorn, and Grandma H’s cranberry relish. AND we had chicken, duck, guineafowl, and bushpig. The guineafowl was very nice: good flavor, moist, more substantive than chicken at home, but not as much as village chicken here. Bushpig is rather generically pork-ish and somewhat dry. I don’t feel any need to have bushpig again. But I would eat more guineafowl.

We played a game that I thought was a nice acknowledgement of the origins of the holiday. Everyone was given an illustrated nametag incorporating their initials to create a “Native American style” name, and we were informed that this was the name out parents had given us when we were small, and that by dessert we should share with the group the story we had been told as children about how we got out name. Mine was Rising Moon, so of course I told the tale of how, when I was born, I was given one of those stupid names that babies get, like Ichabod or something, but that it was quickly changed when my parents realized that my sleep schedule was lunar, rather than solar. We also heard how Matt played with mountain lions when he was two or three years old; how Erma was discovered on a small hill covered in elk; how grownup-Chris’s mother had to slaughter a cow all by herself; how SALT-Chris’s parents drove the car into a ditch so that he was born in a canyon; the story of the nasty Shetland pony that Greg’s family had when he was a kid, which made his first date with his future wife a complete failure; and a few others. I thought it was lots of fun.

And I already mentioned the hot bath. I was really decadent this morning and heated water to add to my bathwater, so I washed my hair in hot water this morning, too, although out of a bucket.

——————-

I’ve been tutoring a woman in computer science material I was never taught, which is interesting. I read the (really poorly designed in all sorts of ways) book and then explain it to her. cmoore calls it “knowledge translation.” In addition to meaning that I spend more evenings away from home than I do at home, I’m getting chances to eat more Zambian food, and also to experience a little bit of the daily household interactions that I miss out on through not living with a host family. I like Monica and her family a lot, and hanging out with them is definitely worth tromping over to the hospital-area several evenings a week. I’m learning things too, which is always fun, and her husband and two youngest kids and I had a hymn sing Saturday night while we waited for supper to be ready, which was absolutely marvelous. I like the music here, and people in general sing really well, but hymns in Tonga aren’t quite the same as hymns in English, and half the music is praise songs in Tonga, which is much harder, because then I haven’t got written words (though it’s really exciting when, on the second or third pass, I can figure out not only what the words are but what they mean, which is happening more and more frequently). So it was very nice to sit down and sing Amazing Grace and gobs of old familiar hymns, and a few new-to-me old hymns. Yesterday Monica and I were talking about binary numbers, and decimal-to-binary conversion, and binary-to-octal conversion, and I could see that she was getting it, which was really marvelous, especially since I knew that she would not have understood it from just reading the book.

I’m also doing some tutoring with the boarding kids at MICS, due to not having enough work to do at work, which is fun, but also challenging, because I never know from day to day which kids I’ll be working with (and I have yet to see any of them twice, although I think that will change if I keep doing tutoring through next year), or whether they’ll have homework or I’m just supposed to come up with something on my own, or even what grade they’ll be in. 24 is my favorite game right now, although it takes a good bit of work to create cards easy enough for their maths skills that are still challenging.