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.

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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.

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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.

Smoke that Thunders

While in Livingstone, of course we went to see the falls. Again, photocopied receipts of work permit applications were accepted as if they were the work permits themselves, so we got in for the resident price of 7,000 kw (which is the price of seven chicken eggs, ten guineafowl eggs, or a meat pie in the grocery store, and less than $1.50 US), considerably less than the non-resident price.

Once inside the fence, we wandered along the path until we came to an outlook point.

November is absolutely the worst time to visit the falls in terms of water volume, but I still found my first view of them somewhat breathtaking.

We followed the pleasant wooded path down some stairs and over to the other side of the promontory, which looked out across another lovely canyon.

What can I say, I like bridges. And the light was pretty incredible. This bridge was part of the brainchild of a Frenchman around the turn of the last century who wanted to make a road from Capetown to . . . Cairo? Marrakesh? Somewhere in the north of the continent.

After some discussion about where the water at the bottom of this gorge was coming from (and, for Chris and I, some eavesdropping on someone else’s tour guide), we followed the path back to the falls side.

Mind you, while I can only imagine how impressive it is in full torrent, personally, I tend to prefer elegant, trickling waterfalls that dribble over cascades of rocks, and I'm sure that I will not be able to watch individual streams of water in March or May.

Note that rocky cliff; you’ll see it again.

I feel that I should include other people in a few pictures, just for verisimilitude. The landmass in the left background is Zimbabwe, which has a better view of the falls, but we didn't go over there.

I was constantly surprised by the lack of guard rails and attention paid to the tourists. Mostly there were guard rails, but aside from the lookout points, they were usually only about knee-high, and in several places, the chains had rotted away entirely, leaving a meter or two of rocks and grassy scrub between the path and the lip of the gorge. In one notable place, the fence was composed of wooden sticks not even as thick around as my wrist and branches covered in inch-long thorns. (Actually they were technically prickles, since they weren’t modified twigs. But they were still an inch long. It sometimes seems like almost everything here has thorns (prickles), as if to remind the unwary expatriate that yes you are in Africa. I believe it’s actually a physical defense (as opposed to a chemical defense, like those bitter plants in Chobe) because water is so scarce in dry season that anything that doesn’t fight back gets eaten to the ground, and sometimes below that. I find this lots of fun combined with the fact that I wear skirts all the time here. I’ve mentioned that Zambia is very hard on clothing, yes?)

After going as far as we could while still in Zambia (actually, I'm told that we missed a path somewhere that would have let us hike down the gorge to the Boiling Pot, but I'm just as glad we didn't, really), we turned around and went back around the end of the gorge.

It was somewhere around here that we met the baboons. We’ve been warned several times to be wary of the baboons at the falls; they’re very used to people and will take anything that looks like it might be food, including water bottles and Shoprite bags. Alison has promised to give me a copy of the photograph of the baboon waltzing along the path next to us in pursuit of another baboon’s muffin.

Remember that cliff? The advantage of visiting the Falls in dry season is that you can climb around on top of the falls.

If you weren't near the edge, bits of it were oddly otherworldly, completely separate from the rest of the area. I could have believed that we were not 20 meters from the top of a hundred-meter plunge into roiling water and sharp rocks.

Don't worry; they're not AS close to the edge as it looks.

I spent a while being surprised that so much of the footing was stable, but after a good distance it occurred to me that anything that would wobble when I stepped on it was unlikely to remain in place under the full force of the water in rainy season. This did not stop my from testing things before I stepped on them, especially when going from rock to rock across the streams that fed what waterfalls there were.

And take a look at those rocks! Though I'll admit that it was also at times disconcerting to walk along narrow stone ledges between partially water-filled deep circular gouges in the stone, rather along the lines of what a giant might use to make elephants into soup.

I'm not as close to the edge as it looks, either. Although it was still rather closer than I was entirely comfortable with. One hundred meters is a long way.

Chris and Matt, who, if you recall, went rafting, told us that those cute little wavelets are the height of a man when you're down there among them. That deep green circular swoosh on the left is the boiling pot, by the way. At least, that's what we decided, because of course none of this was labeled.

This side didn't have any fencing or guard rails at all. I suppose it would have been rather impractical to build any, since this area is under water for some large portion of the year, and would have spoiled the view of the falls, but I cannot imagine this big of a tourist attraction in the United States being so utterly without guards and protective everything.

I, a slow scrambler, was somewhat perennially behind, which gave me ample time to reconfirm what I had decided at Lockinvar: my water-sandals, while pretty good, are not Tevas, and definitely not hiking boots. (Not that I would've kept up if I had been wearing hiking boots, especially since I kept deciding to hike some distance away from the cliff, where the land might be a bit flatter. Even so, my legs were sore the next day from the rock-scrambling and (really very moderate) slopes. I don't do stairs here. Macha is almost entirely flat, and there are very few two-story buildings, none of which I go in on any kind of regular basis, so I go up at most two or three steps at a time. Which just goes to show that choosing to live on the third floor in college did indeed help keep me in shape.)

After a while, we did come to one sign, a discreet notice asking us to please not go any further in order to help protect the environment. Not that there was anything to stop you from going ahead; in fact, several people did. Personally, I had to wonder what the daily traffic of tourists with enough gumption to hike out that far could do to a landscape that managed just fine with the full force of the Zambezi river rushing over it much of the time.

I had a lot of difficulty taking pictures of the falls because the viewscreen of my camera just wasn't big enough. I felt like I needed a panoramic lens that could capture an entire sweep of landscape.

By the time we finished the trek back to the path, we were all very ready for food, so we caught a taxi back into town and ate at a very nice Italian place that served excellent pizza and sandwiches and also gelato. It wasn’t as good as gelato at home, but it was pretty good ice cream. We spent the afternoon just lounging about, and that evening went to an Indian place. There’s a story there. The menu of this particular restaurant was posted at the hostel, where I noticed it because it was a) very cheap, b) Indian, and c) the second-cheapest item on the menu was goat curry. We tried to go the first night, but when I asked the woman at the desk, she started drawing a crazy squiggle across the little free map, then told me it was complicated, and did we just want Indian food? I wanted goat curry, but I said yes, and she directed us to a different place way off in the other direction. I asked if it was cheap and she said it was reasonable.

And — I suppose that it was on the expensive side of reasonable. (Aside from the fact that you had to order rice separately if you wanted it, which I thought was odd, and Alison, who’s lived in India, found very weird.) It was nice restaurant. Probably only moderate-nice by US standards, but I would’ve put it in the running for Nicest Restaurant in Livingstone. Admittedly, the food was REALLY good. They didn’t have goat curry (and I got a lentil thing, anyway, because Alison agrees with me on the Restaurants Are Best When You Share theory, and she’s vegetarian, and meat was more expensive).

So we tried again for the cheap Indian place on the last night in town. It turns out that it was all of two blocks away and on the main drag, so I can only conclude that the first woman either didn’t know where it was or for some other reason didn’t want us to go there. It was a step and a half above hole in the wall, and there was outdoor seating — but when we looked at the menu, it was NOT what had been posted at the hostel. It was nearly as expensive as the really nice place. And there was no goat curry in evidence. We looked at the prices and concluded that we would go back and eat what they were serving at the hostel that night.

“I’m sorry,” I told the waiter, handing him the menu, “but this is more money than we want to spend.”
“Wait, wait!” he called, as the others were already walking away. “We have another menu! Like this!” He indicated the specials on the chalkboard, which were indeed much cheaper. “I will get that one.”

We looked at each other and shrugged, figuring that we could still walk away. And he returned with a much more durable menu, the first two pages of the one that had been posted at the hostel. The goat curry had been on the third page.

“Do you think it’s kosher to ask him for the third page?” I asked wistfully. A moment later he came out with it. We could only conclude that the first menu he’d given us was the muguwa menu.

They were out of goat meat. But I got to try puri, which is an Indian flatbread, except it’s not flat because it puffs up into a ball. And the replacement curry was good.

“Do not become dry in the hands of the potter”

I have a problem with sermons: if I cannot agree with the overarching metaphor or interpretation, I have a great deal of difficulty getting anything of value out of the sermon at all.

This occasionally happens in the States. It happens much more frequently here in Zambia, probably due to fundamental differences in worldview, experience, and relation to the biblical text. It’s probably also related to a fundamental difference in length of sermons and church services: services here typically range from two and a half to three hours. (And I have it good. Alison’s Pentecostal host family typically spend between four and seven hours at church on a Sunday, and the expression of faith tends towards screaming. She says that she gets though it by cultivating an look of interest when she is, in reality, paying no attention, and by being amused by the way Zambian accents can make ‘Jesus’ sound like ‘Cheez-Its,’ especially if you’re yelling.) I try to tell myself that at least 45 minutes of that time is probably due to repeating everything in Tonga and English, but my body generally informs me that three hours sitting on a hard (and possibly wobbly) wooden bench is still three hours. However, it is true that the service in Mboole where they only translated the sermon was significantly shorter — but I understood very little of Church – {Sermon}.

I also have difficulty taking anything of value from the sermon when the preacher proclaims things from the pulpit that are diametrically opposed to what I believe about the nature of God, God’s family, etc. I am getting better at this one, but it’s not within the scope of this blog post.

This morning’s sermon was “Do Not Become Dry in the Hands of the Potter,” taken from Jeremiah 18*, where God says, “Jeremiah, go to the potter’s house,” and Jeremiah does, and the pot becomes spoiled and the potter smashes it and re-forms it, which is a lesson about Israel. The general idea of the sermon was that when Christians stray from God’s ways, they are no longer useful instruments to God. Okay.

“When the clay becomes dry in the potter’s hands, it is useless to him, hard to work. We must not become dry.”

The instant I realized what this sermon was about, I thought, For everything, there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.

I am a terrible potter, at least when it comes to making vessels on a wheel. However, I have spent enough time and energy trying to throw pots that I can very easily assign tactile-visual memories to metaphors involving clay.

And the truth of it is that the drying of clay is integral to the process of creating finished ceramics. (Also, I have never had the problem that the clay was too dry; mine was always too wet and collapsed, but possibly that’s a problem specific to beginners trying to throw things beyond their skill.)

If I close my eyes, I can easily see Andrea centering a leatherhard (which is to say, half-dry) pot on the wheel and affixing it with lumps of clay, then setting the wheel to a slow spin as she carved off excess weight at the base to create an elegant ‘foot.’ Andrea abhors people who don’t trim the feet of their pots; if the bottom is still clunky, the pot isn’t finished.

The gorgeous ceramics endemic to the Southwest US are created by taking pots at the same stage of dryness, glazing them, and carving off bits of the glazed clay to reveal the natural color beneath.

Even if you aren’t adding fancy trimmings to your pots, you can’t fire wet clay; the water will expand and the piece will explode, quite possibly taking nearby pieces with it.

Aside from that, I don’t like the metaphor of clay in general. It works excellently for the idea of destruction and reformation, but when applied to individual spirituality, it entirely breaks down. Clay is clay. (Yes, there are different grades and colors, but within any one type of clay, all the clay is more-or-less the same.) If the potter is having difficulty working the clay, the fault is in the potter’s preparation of the clay (or the potter’s skill), not the clay itself. If it has air bubbles, that’s because the potter didn’t work it sufficiently before beginning to throw. If it’s too dry, the potter should have added more water, and if it’s too wet, the clay should have been left to dry out a bit. If the clay if off-center on the wheel, the potter centered it badly. Before it is glazed or fired, any piece of clay has the potential to be re-formed into something else, although it may take varying amounts of work to fit it to do so. As Romans 9:21 says, “Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honored use and another for dishonorable use?”

Needless to say, I spent the next while figuring out all the reasons that I didn’t like the metaphor, rather than getting anything useful out of the sermon. When I next brought myself to pay attention, the pastor had moved on to using First Samuel 15:22 (“And Samuel said, ‘Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams.’”) to tell me that if I’m not in a proper church-y mood, I should just not come to church.

Now I’m sorry, but most of the time I do not wake up on a Sunday morning filled with joy at the prospect of going to church in Zambia. I know that it will be a 45 minute walk under the already-hot sun to church, that the service will probably be an hour longer than I really have attention span for, that the preacher and I will probably disagree on a number of points, that if I’m unlucky my feet will get bitten by mosquitoes, that it will be hot and that the windows will not provide sufficient ventilation to compensate for cramming 400-700 people into that church, that it’s somewhat big and impersonal and I know very few people and that enough people wander in and out that the church is not good at welcoming visitors beyond the first day, and that I will quite probably have to walk back home again 45 minutes under the very definitely hot sun. These things have the cumulative effect that I frequently don’t feel like I’ve managed to do very much worshiping at church, and going to church does feel sometimes like a bit of a chore. (I should point out that despite my complaints, it’s MUCH better than Spain, where Spanish Catholicism made me feel like the new kid in class to such an extreme degree that I only ever went to mass twice. In fact, when I’m not grumpy at the preacher, I do feel more at home in Macha BICC than I have in some churches in the States. And I really do like the music, and am even starting to understand it sometimes.)

I’m not arguing that you should go to church if you hate the idea so much that you’ll just sit in the pew sulking and being miserable and angry. The preacher does have a point, at least that far. But I still go to church every Sunday that I’m here, and not just because the SALT program expects me to behave like a reasonable Christian who goes to church on a fairly regular basis. It’s good for me to go to church. I meet people, and interact with the community, and have an opportunity to practice Tonga. Most weeks there is something that speaks to me, at least a little bit. And even the things that make me feel uncomfortable and out-of-place challenge my faith in ways that solidify it and force me to figure out what I do believe. None of this would happen if I stayed home and hung out in my room.

But I’ll admit that I do spend a good bit of time most weeks just trying to figure out new words in Tonga, or exploring the concordance in my Bible.

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*Whenever I’m not working from memory I’m using the English Standard Version. One of these days I will graduate to the Whatever Whatever Tonga Version, at least on a part-time basis.

More pictures than you ever really wanted

Last weekend we went to Livingstone, home of Mosi-oa-tunya, better known as Victoria Falls. (It’s also spelled Mosi-o-tunya.) Mosi-oa-tunya means ‘The Smoke that Thunders,’ which in my mind is an excellent name for a waterfall, and certainly much better than just naming it after the queen.

Chris, Matt and I met up in Choma, where we did some grocery shopping and paid a visit to Immigration. (It turns out, whoops, that we didn’t have a three-month visa, we had a thirty-day visa that could be extended twice. We weren’t trying to be illegal immigrants! Luckily Matt had gone in the day before, figured this out, and gotten the talking-to, so all Chris and I had to do was show up, pay 1,500 kwacha each for photocopies, and fill out a little bit of paperwork. And the guy was nice enough to give us a 60-day extension, rather than the usual 30. Mind you, our work permits have been approved for months, so this shouldn’t be a problem, but they’ve run out of booklets in Lusaka, so we have work permits but don’t have them, we just have photocopies of the receipts with a note that they’ve been approved.)

We met up with Alison on the bus, and after two hours and some crazy in-bus movie, we found ourselves in Livingstone. None of us had any clear idea where we were going, between forgetting to look stuff up on a map and not being able to do so due to lack of power and/or internet. The cab drivers told us which direction our hostel was in, and also that it was an ‘unwalkable distance.’ We were dubious about what constituted ‘unwalkable distance,’ but figured that we had three hours, snacks, and water. After roughly two blocks, we found a sign (or rather, a mural painted on a wall, which is how people do roughly 80% of advertising here) informing us that the place we wanted was 300m in the direction we had come from. Since none of us have a terribly accurate idea of how far 300m is, we wound up at Livingstone Backpackers, rather than Jollyboys Backpackers, but we eventually made our way to Jollyboys, which turned out to be a whole block and a half from the bus station, not in the indicated direction.

While there, we discovered that top bunks in a 16-bed dormitory get really, really warm at the end of the hot season, even if it rains, but mostly we were so exhausted that we didn’t care. The showers were amazing (by which I mean comparable to so-so school showers, but amazing nonetheless), as were the spigots with water coming out of them at the turn of a tap. There was a pool, too. It was almost entirely filled with white people, which we found weird. (And such a variety of people, too!)

Friday night we spent gobs of money (okay, $10, but it felt like a lot) at a really nice Indian restaurant. Saturday the guys went raftinginflatable kayaking, and Alison and I went to Chobe National Park in Botswana. Alison had been thinking of doing both, but decided to just do the river cruise/game drive in Chobe because doing both would cost too much. Me, I had no intention of going down Class 5 rapids in something I couldn’t steer, and hearing the guys talk about it afterwards, I am very confident that I made the correct decision.

Chobe was amazing, though. The trip was door-to-door service from the hostel. I saw a giraffe from the van — my first real, wild giraffe, and I spotted it! I learned that truck drivers may wait three weeks or a month to cross the border; no wonder AIDS is such a problem along truck routes. The line of trucks seemed to stretch on forever, unmoving, most of them apparently unattended.

I stood in Zambia and surveyed Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Namibia. The crossing into Botswana was probably the easiest I have ever had; I didn’t need a visa, and the woman could barely stop reading the newspaper long enough to stamp my passport. She didn’t even look at the picture page. After that we were supposed to walk across a carpet with foot-and-mouth-disease-deterrent goo, but we had a hard time figuring out where it was because there was absolutely no one paying any attention to it. I could have tapdanced across, utterly ignoring the carpet, and I don’t think anyone would have noticed.

From the border we were taken to the lodge, where we paid, got refreshments, and used the restrooms, and then we embarked on the river cruise.

I've forgotten what sort of bird this is.

It was amazing. I don’t know if I have the words to describe how incredible it was.

These are Bee Eaters. And there's a different bird of the same gorgeous, iridescent blue that hangs out around Macha.

Mostly I don’t even try to take pictures of birds with my camera. (And mostly, they were terrible, like usual, but these are the good ones.)

Hippo out of the water.

Alison said at some point on Friday that Lockinvar was pretty lame. I protested, on the grounds that we’d had a great time. She hurried to agree that it was lots of fun, but pointed out that as far as National Parks go, it was terrible, both in terms of animals and maintenance. Which I had to admit was true. All I can say is that it’s a good thing we did it first.

A convocation of elephants! Does anyone know what the proper word for a group of elephants is? 'Herd' is terribly boring.

This was a bachelor herd. The next elephants will be from the breeding herd, which is to say females and children (calves?).

Hippoes are one of the most dangerous of all African animals, responsible for the most deaths per year, I think. It's very unusual to see so many out of the water during the day; the guide said it was because competition for food is so intense.

We, of course, hoped that some of the hippos we saw in the water would do the classic mouth-opening pose, which is actually very rare, despite it’s prevalence in pictures (probably because hippos in the water with their mouths shut make uninteresting pictures). One of them actually did open its mouth, but that was on the boat ride back into Zambia, the light was awkward, it was some distance away, and none of us had cameras out anymore.

Apparently hippos sunburn very easily.

We did have some interesting discussion about the “o’clock” terminology: our guide initially thought that you refer to an animal as “such and such o’clock” to indicate how far away it is. I figured out that something was up when he referred to birds on the starboard side as “twelve o’clock,” but didn’t figure out what was wrong until we got to “twenty-four o’clock.” He was using our new system like a pro by the time we finished, though.

These two climbed into the water while we watched. Unfortunately I was taking pictures from the wrong side of the boat, so most of mine are out of focus.

Have I mentioned how CLOSE all of these animals were? I don't think I cropped this photo at all.

Cape buffalo. Another very dangerous animal.

Monitor lizard. Also, Namibia.

I think that the river cruise was in some ways more impressive than the game drive, because there were animals ALL THE TIME (not pictured: crocodiles, impala, sable antelope, lots of birds), but the game drive was better for pictures, because we were higher, and the animals we did see were very close to the road and not really afraid of people or vehicles.

Impala napping under a tree. It was REALLY HOT that day. The rains in Botswana won't start for perhaps another month.

Why did the elephant cross the road?

Have I mentioned that the lunch they fed us was DELICIOUS? There was ice cream and watermelon for dessert. GOOD ice cream, not watery like most of the stuff here. I hadn’t had ice cream in over two months.

Family of baboons and impala.

I don't generally think of baboons as adorable, especially not the TERRIFYING ones at the falls, which will take food, Shoprite bags, water bottles . . . they told us that a guy got in a flight with a baboon at the falls a few months ago and wound up going over the edge. I do sometimes make exceptions, though. Note that the little one is nursing, and the medium one grooming mama.

Kudu. I think that they are absolutely gorgeous animals, and the top of my list for underappreciated African animals. Giraffes, too, but I could at least picture a giraffe before I came here.

The guide said that the little guy was less than a month old. Baby elephants don't learn to use their trunks until about six months old.

Our guide called impala "the MacDonald's of the bush" because of the golden arch on their rear end.

Those are all elephants. I think they said that Chobe has a population of something like 800,000 elephants.

I love giraffes.

Warthogs! I think Alison described this look as 'eighties punk warthogs.'

No lions, unfortunately, but still an incredible trip.

Remember all those elephants? The whole drive in looked like this due to overgrazing. The only plants left was one that was so bitter that no one would eat much of it, and baobab and acacia trees -- and even those were at risk. Did you know that an elephant can strip the bark from a baobab tree?

After the drive, they took us back through the border, my photocopied receipt worked excellently as proof-of-residency (meaning that I did not have to pay $50 US to get back into the country), we met up with the rather sunburned guys, and had supper at a Mexican restaurant that may have been the slowest restaurant in the world. I was so exhausted that I was seriously concerned that I would fall asleep before the food came, even after we were joined by a bunch of young people that the guys had met rafting.

Pictures of the falls later. And it’s raining AGAIN!

Rain!

My post about the rains coming was premature. That storm, while impressive, delivered very little water, the one two days later was barely enough to wet the dust, and after that it stopped even trying. It continued hot, and we continued with unreliable water, only available some distance away, if that. (The eventual analysis is that it was so long since it had rained that the water table was very low and the pumps could not consistently reach the water. Cue concern that we will either wear out the pumps by running them dry, or deplete the water table so badly that we won’t have water at all. The school (150 people during the day, and 30 boarding students and staff) hadn’t had water for about three weeks, and eventually purchased a tank that they’d haul around on a truck to refill elsewhere.

By the middle of last week I was beginning to wonder when, in good conscience, I would next be able to wash my hair.

Internet and power have been somewhat sporadic, too, but it’s been the water thing that’s really getting to me. These problems may be related, since internet requires electricity, and some large portion of the power here comes from hydroelectric plants, which I assume can’t produce as much when the water level is very low.

I now know that I can carry 17 liters of water on my head for upwards of .2km. The only problem is that after this distance, it’s difficult to get the bucket back down to the ground, and upwards of 2/3rds of the water acquired in this exercise goes immediately to refilling my water filter.

Needless to say, I was greatly looking forward to last weekend’s excursion to Livingstone (description and pictures from that next post, if the internet holds out). The hostel promised 24/7 hot and cold running showers, and I concluded that if I brought only dirty clothing with me and washed it there to wear it and washed it again to bring it home clean, I would be able to go another week without doing laundry in Macha (which, indeed, was the case).

And then. AND THEN! It rained two nights ago. I awoke (unless it started before I went to sleep) to majestic rolling thunder and impressive flashes of lightning, and the marvelous sound of rain pouring down on the roof. The power promptly went out (I can tell because my fan turns off, as does the porch light, which shines in my window), but it was RAINING. It rained and rained and rained and rained and rained in the gorgeous pitch-black night, illuminated by frequent lightning. At about 4am I got up and put my biggest basin outside under one of the parts of the roof that dumps water onto the porch. Unfortunately, by that point, the rain had slackened, but half of my bath (and hairwashing!) water the next morning did not need to be hauled from some distant tap.

The next morning, the ground was WET. There were puddles. There was occasionally mud. As I left for work, I encountered Lidewÿ coming back home with an impressive streak of mud up one side of her leg.

It rained again yesterday evening, not as hard, but fairly thoroughly. This morning dawned fair and clear, but during my lunchtime nap, the sky got lovely and threatening again, and as I write, there is distant thunder, and cool, damp breezes blowing in the windows. We had water at the back tap yesterday morning, and again in the afternoon.

I think I have never in my life been so pleased with any weather phenomenon as I am with this rain.