"Evening: 1 January 2010
"Today was epic, adn I don't mean that lightly. We waited so long for our ride today. It was supposed to be here at 11:00-ish, but it didn't show until 1:30pm. But today, Gift was our driver, and in the car, too. We talked him into bringing us into an ice cream shop. It was so good! Soft serve, in vanilla, banana, or strawberry, and all in bright pastel colors, for only 2000k a piece!..."
"2 January 2010
"We walked oer to a field where there were soccer nets set up and children were playing all manner of games. As we started to play, more and more children cam to join us - probably around 200 in all by the time we left. When we took pictures we would be swarmed by kids. Two girls, Mildred and Charity, came by with a cotton yarn and were crocheting with pieces of metal [which I later figured out were bike spokes; they were just too far removed from their usual state for me to recognize them]. They showed me how, and Charity let me work on hers. After I gave it back we were still standing there, and Mildred started saying Bemba words and telling me the English. After four, I realized that I needed to write these things down. Wow. I was surrounded by kids telling me words, and then Catherine Jere, a mother with a baby, joined in the fun. She was a beautiful woman, and every kind. After I had filled two pages, it was time for us to go. I walked back hand-in-hand with a girl named Juliet, and Mildred, and some other kids. At the orphanage, we were the last group to go, so when everyone was gone, the four of us from our house were chilling with the kids at the orphanage. One of them braided my hair, and they asked about our hair & what we do with it. They asked us about songs, & Michelle told them we actually knew a song in Bemba, then I started to sing it. Mama Maureen got excited by that. "Who!? Who taught you that!?" she asked. I told her that it was just a song that we sing, and she told me, "I think you should stay here. You belong here. You don't go back to Chicago. You tell your parents, you aren't going back to Chicago, you're staying here." When Gift got back with the car we headed out, and eh let us stop for grilled corn and to buy some mangos.... SUpper was at Mama Sylvia's last night, with tons of different food options. I successfully rolled my nshima and used it to scoop up my beans. I felt pretty proud.... This morning Ileana made us arepas - very filling & delicious...."
I didn't want to give any preempt for this excerpt, because I thought it spoke for itself. It's only been two weeks since I've been back in the States, and already it seems like Zambia happened ages ago. But I can tap into that feeling of belonging I had when I was there: like I was exactly where God wanted me to be, where I belonged. I can't begin to describe the kind of peace that thought would give me while we were there. I'm trying to somehow connect my life here with what I did there, how life was and how I felt, but I suppose the proper term for my findings would be "grasping for straws". It's a strange feeling.
As far as I know, I have not really suffered from culture shock in my past travel/mission trip experiences. I have decided that this is because I travelled and returned during the summer, which meant that when I got back I wasn't busy. Well, culture shock is definitely at work here: I'm so busy, all the time, and there's so much to do, and be done, and I feel like I'm going to go crazy. I've never been so stressed out over the little that I have to do before - and comparatively it is so much less work than last semester - but going from being anything BUT busy for two weeks into full-fledged American busy-centrism is enough to kill a man. Which is not to say that we should be worried about me, just that it's not been an easy adjustment to make.
One more thought before I end this post: while we were in Zambia, Michelle was reading a book called "The Blue Sweater", about doing aid-work in Africa, which eerily correlated with events and activities during our trip. But there was one quote that she read to us while we were sitting in the living room and I was writing up my above-quoted entry, a quote that I'd like to share with you because it struck me, enough so that I copied it down into the upper margin of my journal.
"I always wished my parents would visit East Africa so they could see the work for themselves. I knew that if they went, they'd realize how little there was to fear and how much there was to love." - from "The Blue Sweater", by Jacqueline Novogratz
I wholeheartedly agree.
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