Itchfest 2007

I seem to have some dermatological disagreement with Africa, which was not helped by my peeling sunburn after this week.  More insights into my two weeks in the bush:
As I mentioned previously, I asked them to include me in what they were doing during the week, a thought which stretched their ideas of hospitality.  However, both cultures bent a little and we met in the middle, with me going to work in the fields for a few hours while they tried to spare me from the hard work, and after two or three hours reached their tolerance limit about what I would be allowed to stand.  Ba Yanjisha works very hard, taking care of three fields with the help of his children, wife, and hired hand.  We hoed weeds out of one field, put down fertilizer, and cut and planted sweet potato shoots in a third.  Like my dad, Mr. Yanjisha has back problems, which I am amazed that more Zambians don't have, considering that all of this work is done bent over half-way, either bending down to hoe, or pull weeds, or put down fertilizer.  I was glad I had brought some extra Ibuprofen to share with him while I was there.
Because he's worked so hard for the last several years, he managed to put a tin roof on his house this past year, which took him five years to save up for (total of around $330 US).  Their place is very well-to-do by village standards, with 4 rooms.  There's a "VIP" toilet out back (as the peace corps workers put it) where the flies rise to greet you like the bats out of Carlsbad cavern.  He's made plans to try to build a separate storeroom for the maize which will hopefully help a little bit with the rat problem in the future.  And the next 5 years or so he'd like to buy a solar panel, so they could have electric lights at night.
After a few hours of work, during which I still managed to get a few blisters and sunburn despite the Yanjisha's careful watch on me, we'd come back to the house, where the rest of the day would consist of me memorizing Kikaonde vocabulary on a language program that I invented through the week, eating a few mangoes, and sitting outside the house in one of the deck chairs that they reserved for special visitors.  Time moves slowly, marked less by the ticking of a clock than by the thud of the mangoes as they fall and hit the red dirt yard, but it is a pace that allows you to greet everyone as they come by, and indeed it would be rude not to.  As an American, it was hard to get used to the idleness; in fact, Tolstoy puts it well:

'Fallen man, too, has retained a love of idleness but the curse still lies heavy on the human race, and not only because we have to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow but because our moral nature is such that we are unable to be idle and at peace.  A secret voice warns that for us idleness is a sin.  If it were possible for man to discover a mode of existence in which he could feel that, though idle, he was of use to the world and fulfilling his duty, he would have attained to one facet of primeval bliss.'

I felt Tolstoy's curse heavily and tried to work to learn some language, but after I shifted my chair twice to follow the slowly moving shade from the mango trees, I would make an excuse of headache and return to reading or watching the baby goats or playing uno with the kids.
Much like my skin seems to be reacting to the alien African humidity or insects or whatever it is, I couldn't help but feel that my presence upset what was a well-functioning social equilibrium while I was there.  My well-intentioned gestures, like bringing rice and flour with me, seemed out of place, as the white rice was less nutritious and took longer to cook than the usual nshima, the maize porridge that we ate for most of our meals.  I left behind a wake of bloody chicken carcasses as they kept buying and sacrificing their and the neighbors extra chickens (I wasn't sad when the rooster went under the knife, however -- 15 minutes of extra sleep for me, and a delicious drumstick on top of it all).  I hoped that that was maybe the usual state of things, until most of the people that stopped by commented on how many chickens we were eating.  Already feeling my fair share of white guilt (after living there, I can't even imagine the violence that the slave trade did to these families) the chicken slaughter didn't help matters much.
However, the generosity and welcome that they gave me kept me from feeling those things too much.  And as much as it strained my cultural values of independence to accept their sacrificial generosity, they strained to meet me in my independence.  At the junction is where friendship forms, I think.