So my last post was about all of the differences between "Americaland" and Zambia...since then I have been trying to make myself very aware of the things that make me think..."this feels like home"
1. The "mom look." This is at the top of my list because I am a daughter that had many not so hot ideas in my day....therefore Momma Julie mastered this look from when I was a young age. At least I think that she must have mastered it when I was young otherwise I wouldn't be alive today...I feel like that look stopped me from making many bad decisions in my day.
But back to my point...this mom look transcends cultures...I have seen it in use in in the Village many times. It is the same look that I am sure has kept the Zambian population what it is today because without that look the little iwe minds would have gotten themselves killed. I too in fact have had the look used on me by my host mothers in the Village...I have two: my actual host mother, and my crazy neighbor that tried to rip my arm apart you will remember from a previous post.
What I am saying is I feel like this look comes the day you give birth and never really goes away. God bless the look for having the ability to stop me and many other immature thinkers across the world dead in our tracks!
2. Keeping on the mom theme....The whiny mom voice. My personal favorite way to utilize this voice has always been from my bed on a Saturday morning while my mom loudly throws dishes around to wake Zach and I up. I use it to get her to stop making so much damn noise at 10:00 in the morning...I mean for Christ sake we are trying to sleep!
The iwe in the village use the voice in much the same way though here it is pronounced "Ahhhhhhhmaaaaaaaiiiiiii" It makes me laugh every time because I can hear my own mother responding when their moms yell back "Ciani" (Chiani). Depending on the time of day that I choose to use this voice Momma Julie either responds gently (the 10am voice) "What Maggie?" Or later in the day when I am just saying it to hear myself talk...like when I need her to hand me the remote to the TV and it is just on the other couch within reach and she is in the other room. Come on...we've all done it :)
3. Now onto the men....apparently it does not matter what culture you are from...if something is broken and a bunch of men find themselves standing around said broken thing....things will get better before they get worse. IT HAPPENS EVERY TIME! Granted her in Zambia it gets much much worse before it get to be better...and better isn't really better it is just sort of good enough for now. And of course no woman could possibly know what the fuck she is talking about...especially the while girl, and I don't mean to toot my own horn (yes I do) but I am usually fucking right.
4. The sound of little kids laughing always always makes you feel better. Even if they were the ones that made you pist in the first place. Their giggles are magical and I wish there was a way we could use them to bring peace to the world.
5. No matter where you are in the world there is something very incredible about a beautiful day. I used to love waking up in August and September to the really crisp cool mornings...where the cold doesn't bite at you...instead it is just a gentle nibble before the heat comes. I am slowly kissing those mornings goodbye as the hot season rolls in...until next June beautiful days...I will be waiting. Lucky for me beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it was a quick lesson to learn that there are not really bad days when you are blessed enough to be in Africa!
6. I gave a shout out to mommies...so now for my daddy! A father only wanting the best for his daughter never seems to change either. For my whole life I watched how my dad sat back and let me do what I thought was best for me. He coached my softball team for many years, yelled at me when my grades were shit, snuck me money in handshakes goodbye before I used to leave for college so mom wouldn't know...the list goes on and on.
Here, my Zambian Atate sits for many hours and watches the builders as they build my new house making sure that the walls are straight and life is perfect for his daughter (though his english isn't 100% he sometimes calls me his son). He goes to meetings with me to try and make sure I am being understood, he runs all over the village to make sure my requests are met quickly, and he apologizes incessantly when Zambian Villlage promises and inevitably broken...just like my own Pappa Tom would do.
7. The mother daughter bond! Mothers and daughters sit for hours on end just talking in the comfort of a shade tree. They talk the afternoons away about what...I'll never know. But I understand it. My mom calls when I am here and we just talk and talk and talk. It would be the same when I used to come home on weekends from college, we would just sit in the kitchen and talk about nothing while she cooked a meal.
Another aspect of the mother daughter bond that extends cultures is how you can look at one another and know what you are each thinking...no words needed.
8. Home is where you lay your head. You know when you are on vacation and you have walked a million miles and all you want to do is go to the hotel that you call home and go to bed. Same feeling here....though my hut is not really home home....after being gone for 2 weeks at a training all I want to go is go to my hut and sleep in my tiny 2 meter by 3 meter love nest. I have committed to making that cave my home for the next 2 years.
9. Friends give you warm fuzzy feelings no matter what. It doesn't matter that we can't fully understand one another... hell, at times we can't understand a damn word we are saying...but the comfort is there. Because even when words aren't available...they still get you.
10. Being happy is all that really matters....ever.
My work is based on the assumption that clarity and consistency in our moral thinking is likely, in the long run, to lead us to hold better views on ethical issues. ~Peter Singer
August 23, 2010
August 2, 2010
This Shit Would Never Happen In America
So there isn't really a day that goes by that I don't think to myself either out loud or in my head "that shit would never happen in America..." Then I thought that might be a neat blog about cultural exchange...let me begin.
1. In America if I if my tit is every hanging out in front of my dad/mom/brother/friend/child/random child/stranger I've never met before/ANYONE OTHER THAN MYSELF...I put that shit away ASAP! If I have a shirt that just happens to have a hole in it right where the nipple on my tit might be I would throw that shirt away...never to be seen again! Or I would at the very least wear a bra. Well not in Zambia. I feel like I could write a whole blog on boobs only in Zambia...they exhaust me...and I kind of hate them.
2. In America if I am cooking my dinner and a fucking tarantula the size of the palm of my hand comes to visit me I freak out! (Well that is a lie...1st I do the big sister thing and check to make sure brother Zachary isn't around because that could quite possibly the worst thing he would ever experience.) But here in Zambia when that happens I don't even try to kill it and I don't even scream...I just flick it off of my porch with a flip flop. The damn thing was so heavy and big that I couldn't even flick it off on my first try. Then the poor thing came back 45 minutes later only to be brutally murdered by my neighbor with her BARE FEET!
3. In America when people tell you that you are getting fat...everyone else around you drops their jaw to the floor and jabs their elbows into the side of whatever moron thought that would be a good thing to say. Well folks not in Zambia. I am constantly being told I am getting fat and everyone around just nods their head and smiles very large as if they had just told me that I had the body of Heidi Klum. So while I am trying not to cry they think they just handed me the biggest compliment ever. No mom I don't really think I am getting fat...all of my clothes still fit, and I am still running.
4. In America when your pot is dirty and black you grab some steel wool and soap and give the pot the best elbow grease you can muster and get the stupid thing clean. Well, not in Zambia. They take a little bit of water and pour it onto the dirty/sandy ground and rub the pot into the dirt and use it as their steel wool and get that pot better than new! In their defense they cook over an open fire every night so their pots are black black black at the end of every day. They actually judge me quite harshly when I wash my pots with a scrubber...a few times my neighbor has actually come over and taken my clean shiny pot out of my hands and rubbed it into the dirty ground while saying "In America soap...in Zambia dirty..." In my head "this shit would never happen in America..." on a lot of different levels like if someone stole my pot out of my own hands I would probably deck 'em.
5. In America if your neighbors are gone all day but their under 5 children are still around the house all day with no supervision you call the cops and get the children taken away from them because that shit just isn't okay. But apparently the phrase "It takes a Village to raise a child" came from Zambia or somewhere in Africa. Because when I haven't seen Patrica or Moffat all day I do not worry one bit about what Issac or Joanie are going to eat for lunch or dinner or anything like that. It is really quite a beautiful thing. It isn't like the kids are going hungry they just show up at someone else's house and get their food and then leave and go play. That shit would never happen in America.
6. Along those same lines, if you are a parent and you haven't seen your kids since breakfast and it is now 18 or 19:00 you might start to worry a little bit about where they are...not in Zambia though. No one in really gets to worried because the whole village knows who your kid is and where they are supposed to be and they always come home eventually. Again it really is beautiful and neat.
These are only 6 things but they are the first six that came to my head which means they are probably the most often thought about ones.
There is little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference. The little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative. W. Clement Stone
1. In America if I if my tit is every hanging out in front of my dad/mom/brother/friend/child/random child/stranger I've never met before/ANYONE OTHER THAN MYSELF...I put that shit away ASAP! If I have a shirt that just happens to have a hole in it right where the nipple on my tit might be I would throw that shirt away...never to be seen again! Or I would at the very least wear a bra. Well not in Zambia. I feel like I could write a whole blog on boobs only in Zambia...they exhaust me...and I kind of hate them.
2. In America if I am cooking my dinner and a fucking tarantula the size of the palm of my hand comes to visit me I freak out! (Well that is a lie...1st I do the big sister thing and check to make sure brother Zachary isn't around because that could quite possibly the worst thing he would ever experience.) But here in Zambia when that happens I don't even try to kill it and I don't even scream...I just flick it off of my porch with a flip flop. The damn thing was so heavy and big that I couldn't even flick it off on my first try. Then the poor thing came back 45 minutes later only to be brutally murdered by my neighbor with her BARE FEET!
3. In America when people tell you that you are getting fat...everyone else around you drops their jaw to the floor and jabs their elbows into the side of whatever moron thought that would be a good thing to say. Well folks not in Zambia. I am constantly being told I am getting fat and everyone around just nods their head and smiles very large as if they had just told me that I had the body of Heidi Klum. So while I am trying not to cry they think they just handed me the biggest compliment ever. No mom I don't really think I am getting fat...all of my clothes still fit, and I am still running.
4. In America when your pot is dirty and black you grab some steel wool and soap and give the pot the best elbow grease you can muster and get the stupid thing clean. Well, not in Zambia. They take a little bit of water and pour it onto the dirty/sandy ground and rub the pot into the dirt and use it as their steel wool and get that pot better than new! In their defense they cook over an open fire every night so their pots are black black black at the end of every day. They actually judge me quite harshly when I wash my pots with a scrubber...a few times my neighbor has actually come over and taken my clean shiny pot out of my hands and rubbed it into the dirty ground while saying "In America soap...in Zambia dirty..." In my head "this shit would never happen in America..." on a lot of different levels like if someone stole my pot out of my own hands I would probably deck 'em.
5. In America if your neighbors are gone all day but their under 5 children are still around the house all day with no supervision you call the cops and get the children taken away from them because that shit just isn't okay. But apparently the phrase "It takes a Village to raise a child" came from Zambia or somewhere in Africa. Because when I haven't seen Patrica or Moffat all day I do not worry one bit about what Issac or Joanie are going to eat for lunch or dinner or anything like that. It is really quite a beautiful thing. It isn't like the kids are going hungry they just show up at someone else's house and get their food and then leave and go play. That shit would never happen in America.
6. Along those same lines, if you are a parent and you haven't seen your kids since breakfast and it is now 18 or 19:00 you might start to worry a little bit about where they are...not in Zambia though. No one in really gets to worried because the whole village knows who your kid is and where they are supposed to be and they always come home eventually. Again it really is beautiful and neat.
These are only 6 things but they are the first six that came to my head which means they are probably the most often thought about ones.
There is little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference. The little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative. W. Clement Stone
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