Ups and Downs

Back to blogging! I've been meaning to write all week, but have been going to sleep instead.

After a two week break from the village and the idea in my head that I only have 7.5 ish months left here, I've been rearing to go with work. 

I need to do a little rewinding I realize, since I haven't written anything about the past week. Last weekend, we had our SKILLZ girl graduation which was super fun! The girls performed some skits and a song about HIV, we made reusable sanitary pads, and certificates were passed out to those who earned them. My favorite part was making the pads as it's something that I've long anticipated doing and also, the girls enjoyed it too! Thanks to all of you who donated to the GoFundMe campaign that my family created. Know that your contributions are being used for a variety of projects around the village-including for the materials to make those pads! I'll try to keep yall updated on what you helped to support. 

After the high of graduation and its success, the following days were a bit of a downer as, on back-to-back days, people did not show up for meetings. I worried that my SOLID team was falling apart because the members have been coming inconsistently, and we haven't been able to get anything underway recently. Then when I tried to focus my attention elsewhere, on another group in the village, no one showed up to their weekly meeting. I was in a funk after those few days, spending all of my energy trying to focus on the positive and just take a bunch of pictures around the village to keep me entertained, but then everything completely turned around. 

Action plan

At our SOLID training on Thursday, my primary counterpart and I taught a lesson on project design. I forgot how much fun it is to teach! We had a blast and worked very well off of each other. While we taught, the 2 remaining motivated members from our first training worked together to create an action plan of projects and programs that they want to implement in the next 5 months. I don't know if they just made them up based on what I'd mentioned previously, but their ideas were perfect and exactly what I'd hoped for. They planned out two major projects for each month which is more than enough to keep us busy! I don't know if they realize how big of a commitment a few of them are! ;)

So now things are back on track. I love being busy and feeling useful here. There's nothing worse for a PCV than being bored and having nothing happening in the village. When that happens, you start to get down on yourself, miss your family and life in America, think about possibly early terminating or how else you could be spending your time, etc...it's no good! Being in PC just makes you feel a whole lot of emotions ALL THE TIME I've realized.

The recent heat has been stiflingly hot, and it's not even peak hot season yet. Just three weeks ago, I remember feeling chilled as I woke up in the morning to a bite in the air. Now I wake up feeling sticky and smelly as I don't have enough water to bathe as much as I want to (considering I spend all day sweating). In the daytime, the dust picked up by the wind forms brown tornados and blows all over causing people to hide their faces in their arms and zitenje. When it's this dry and hot, snot becomes hard and brown in your nose. Your skin peels from lack of moisture. Thirst awakes you at night, searching desperately for sustenance. The body is drained of energy as the temperature rises and rises, mirroring the sun as it boils down on the dry, dusty land. Even critters take refuge inside the house where it's at least a few degrees cooler than outside. All day, people can be seen coming from the shallow well with buckets of water balanced atop their heads. Everything is covered with a thick layer of brown dust- trees, roofs, clothes, even chickens.

Last night at 1 AM, a few small raindrops on the roof was enough to wake me from my sleep and keep me awake as I waited in anticipation for the relief of fresh rainfall. Rain; when will it come? Clearly not last night as the silence of nighttime again fell over the village, erasing any hope of mvula (rain) until another day.

Tonight looks promising for rain (clouds and lots of wind), but I'm trying not to get my hopes up. The day today was another hot one. I washed clothes in the river and broke a sweat just walking back to my house with my bucket of freshly washed clothes on my head. My neighbors came over for some one-on-one study time since I have a lot of study materials now and school begins on Monday. This afternoon, my female counterpart and I visited the head teacher at the secondary school (high school) today to discuss doing some different interventions this month like Pad Project and also a Grassroots Soccer intervention for girls AND boys. I'm also hoping to start an art club next month about which I'm nervous as well as extremely excited! 

Prepping by candlelight

This evening, my two neighbor girls watched intently as I crafted a practice keyboard for my SOLID members on which to learn and practice their typing skills in anticipation for a computer class next month, and then they helped me cut out pad templates for countless upcoming pad-making interventions. Next week, we're making sanitary pads with women who were a part of the nutrition program we did earlier this year. We are also holding two SOLID lessons since the trainees have asked to speed up the training in anticipation of lots of work with the coming rainy season. Tomorrow I'm doing a make-up meeting with the CBO (community based organization) in hopes of assisting them with a business training. They seem to have all kinds of bright ideas for community interventions, but no funding.  I would love to try to change that by empowering them to begin a small-scale business to find that money. Anyway, so many ideas and so little time. This post might have been a bit all over the place, but maybe now you can understand how my brain works all the time with juggling all of these different ideas and community projects! 

Oh, and to wrap up / reward those of you who have reached the end of this ridiculously long post, I have 2 embarrassing (yet I guess they will be funny in a few days to me too) stories. 

Story #1

I spilled water all down my shirt

So as you may know, I get my water from an open spring about 1/4 to 1/2 mile away from my house. I've recently, by necessity with the lack of rain, begun to incorporate a daily trip to this spring to get 20 liters of water. I carry this back on my head with the help of a donut-shaped, wrapped-up chitenje called an nkhata cushioning the hard plastic against my skull. The process of 1. situating the nkhata in the right place on your head, 2. lifting the bucket up to balance it on a raised knee (one leg balance needed here) without the nkhata sliding off, 3. readjusting your grip on the bucket and lifting it above your head, and 4. ducking your head under the bucket and finding the sweet balancing spot without sloshing a crap-ton of water down your front is just as complicated as it sounds. Sometimes people help you lift the bucket up (4 arms are better than two) which makes everything a lot easier as long as you are mindful of the angle and don't dump water all over the person as you go through step 4 of leaning forward to duck under the bucket. ANYWAY. So two days ago, after a bad day, I went to fetch water. There were a lootttttt of women there, so I prepared to wait. A nice surprise was that they all let me go ahead of them and on top of that, my neighbor Amayi filled my bucket for me. However, the nkhata I had made was crap, so when I settled my bucket on my head, it got off balance and I ended up with a waterfall pouring down my front. All the amayis gasped, and I could barely contain my horror. We all sort of laughed it off, but the whole walk back, I avoided eye contact with everyone we saw just so I didn't have to see them eyeing my soaked clothes. 

Story #2: 

This evening as I was getting water with my 9-year-old neighbor (who can carry the same size bucket as me), I filled the two buckets myself. I put the first bucket on Judy's head, haphazardly rolled up an nkhata, and grabbed mine to lift it. I felt a little unsteady, so instead of doing the whole lift myself, I stumbled over to a large flattish rock sitting nearby to set it on there and regain my balance. As I stepped onto the rock, my shoe slipped and I crashed down (onto my knees I think although I can't even recall it all happened so quickly). Water sloshed everywhere out of my bucket, although I managed to set it down without the whole thing dumping over. I was HORRIFIED but thankfully there was only one Amayi there and she just said "ah, pepani" (sorry). Judy, hearing the commotion, turned around to see if I was okay and another Amayi came bounding around the corner. I sloughed off the embarrassment, laughing and again lifting the bucket after reassuring the Amayi getting water that I DID NOT need to refill what had spilled out. (At that point, all I wanted was to disappear, not to stick around for longer). As I tried to get the bucket on my head for the second time, my nkhata slipped off and I struggled momentarily, crying out 'I can't do this alone,' before one of the amayis rushed over and helped me to adjust everything the best she could. At least the bucket was lighter and easier to carry home. When we got back, I gave Judy 5 kwacha and begged her to please not tell her mom what had happened.

Appreciate your running water friends!