Village Vacation

Last weekend Tommy, Mike Z, and I were invited to go to our housekeeper, Sharon’s, village for the day.  Sharon is like our Zambian mother.  She is hired by Grassroot Soccer to clean the house and office and cook Nshima (I could do a whole other post about Nshima because of its importance in Zambian culture, but in short it is a corn-meal dough that is the staple meal in sub-saharan Africa because it is very cheap and filling.  Its usually combined with a vegetable relish and a liquid tomato soup/sauce type thing and meat if you can afford it.  Its delicious.) for lunch in the office every day.  She was born in a village about an hour drive outside of Lusaka and moved into the city for work when she was older.  She and her sister now live near us in Lusaka with their husbands and kids.  We gladly accepted an invitation to see the village and decided to meet Saturday morning at 10 in the parking lot of the gas station to pick them up.  Expecting just Sharon and her kids, we were very surprised to see that Sharon, her sister, their kids, and their cousins all had come to the parking lot of the gas station to visit their grandparents/parents and cousins in the village.  We piled them all in the car and headed off for the hour journey.  I was the driver of the kids car and was entertained by the 10 year old children in the back yelling for me to drive faster because every time I accelerated was the fastest they had ever gone in their lives. 

 

Many of them had never been in a car let alone a plane.  When I realized that many hadn’t been in a car before I asked a question that I had originally though I had known the answer to, “Have any of you ever seen the village or your grandparents?”  Only Maggie, Sharon’s 14 year old daughter had been to the village (but didn’t remember seeing it) and none of the other kids had ever been.  No one in the family has a car so this was the first time most of the kids were ever getting the opportunity to visit their grandparents.  And they lived only one hour away.  Wow, no wonder all the Lusaka family members showed up to ride along.  This was the only opportunity they were going to have to see the village ‘til god knows when.  And this is when I realized that not only was this an incredible experience for me but an even bigger day for the family.

We arrived at the village that consisted of 2 four walled buildings and 2 huts and housed 12 of Sharon’s family members.  The next closest village was a 20-minute walk away but asking the family if they ever go there yields a confused look and a response of “why would we ever go there? We have everything we want here.”  They grow their own corn (which they harvest and keep for themselves for the year), ground nuts (peanuts), mangos, and they make their own charcoal which they use to grill their corn, cook their ground nuts, and occasionally to cook one of their chickens that roam the village.  That’s it, that’s all.  That’s their life.  We brought a Frisbee and a soccer ball with us and although it provided temporary entertainment, they refused when we offered for them to keep the items.

They only wanted what they had and they were completely happy with their minimalist lifestyle.  This also became apparent when I pulled out my camera and started snapping pictures of the village kids who seemed very uninterested.  Then when I started taking pictures of one of the cousins who we had taken from the city, Joshua , he was mesmerized by the camera.  

When I gave it to him he walked around the rest of the day with the camera pressed against his face and kept making the sound of a camera flash with his mouth.  When we finally showed him how to actually use the camera, he played with the settings and took this picture all on his own. 

 He might have a future in photography.

After a day of hiking, sitting around, talking, and eating groundnuts, we were getting ready to leave when I heard a loud whistle.  As quickly as I turned, the dog and two other village children were already sprinting towards the whistling kid.  And off went one of the chickens running for its life as the ringleader of the chicken hunt whistled signals and hand motions to the dog and the other two boys in a very well executed hunt that corralled the chicken into one of their huts with calculated commanding from the leader and acute listening from the dog and two other children.  As the kid emerged from the hut holding the chicken upside down by his legs he walked directly to me and handed me their catch and told me it was a gift for coming to the village.  After trying to refuse because they rarely got to eat chicken, they insisted we take home one of their 5 chickens and have it for ourselves.  Incredible.