"Afternoon - 4 January 2010
".... After the market, we went to the Hope House to spend more time with the kids. I had a terrible sunburn on my back from the dress I was wearing, so I asked Mama Maureen if I could get a wet rag to put on it. She wet down her own face cloth & practically gave my burned back a sponge bath, then found some dry skin ointment in her bag and rubbed it in for me. She is the best person in the world. I talked with her and Mama Angela for a good bit - about home, about Zambia, and about the possibility of me coming to stay with them the next time that I'm here. I very much want to come back, and I very much don't want to go. My life in Chicago seems so fake compared to life here. I just don't even know what to make of it anymore...."
"6 January 2010
"It's disgusting to look at the date and to realize how soon it is that we leave here...."
"Evening - 6 January 2010
"One thing that I forgot to mention that happened last night: we were on our way home on the bus and Khongono was ahving me sing "Bonse Aba" for him. Then he looked at me and, in as serious a voice as he ever gets, told me that I was not an American, I was a Zambian....
".... I'm pretty tired. Kind of sad, this was our last time eating supper with our host family, which is why I don't want to go to sleep.... I know that I need my sleep as well. We shall see, we shall see."
"7 January 2010
"It's our last time home before we leave to start our journey back to America. I can't believe it's come to this. I wish I could just live here - forget about the travesty of American culture.... After everything was all packed up we went over to Hope House for supper.... Jeff and Jane prayed for us, and that we have a safe trip home, and that our families be blessed. It was really powerful. They definitely both have the gift of prayer. Now we're home. I just ate a big bowl of ice cream - real, delicious, Zambian ice cream; Roy caught a huge bug and scared the crap out of me; we're all just chilling in the living room.... I don't want to leave Zed, and it's making me anxious. I'm going to stop writing, now, though, so that I can be with my family here one last time before we go."
"8 January 2010
"I don't want to leave."
"9 January 2010
"I'm sitting alone in the back corner seat of a huge Kenya Airways plane, and I just watched Zambia pull away from me and get sucked up by a sea of white clouds. These last two weeks seem like a blur. It's as though they stretched out over a lifetime, but simultaneously went by too fast to count. I'm so uncertain about things right now, except that I know I am leaving and I know that I don't want to go..... This place has become my home."
I've decided that it's time to draw this blog to a close. Zambia was amazing, but I can't just keep reflecting on what has happened; right now I need to focus on letting it shape my present, and being present in my present. If there's one thing I learned from my time in Zambia, it was love. I chose the excerpts today to show the simplicity of love, and how much it draws you in. I didn't want to leave Zed because the love I felt there was overwhelming, and I was so much happier than I had been in ages. It's not to say that I never felt love before, because I certainly did, it's just that in Ndola the love was everywhere and permeated into everything. People were the sources of attention, not computers, not televisions, but your neighbor, your friend, your family. When someone I barely know can address me as "sister", and ask me what's wrong with such deep concern in their eyes; when a mother who is not my mother can take me under her wing and give me the best care possible, above and beyond my request; when a friend can look at me, and ignorant of skin color, clothing and birthplace, tell me that I am one of them; these are the times when you realize what love is. Really is. And that it really is. It is a lesson that I never want to forget.
Tomorrow morning I'll be taking my last malaria pill, and the crazy dreams and restless sleep that it brings Sunday night will be the last I'll have to endure, for now. But I'll walk myself down to Jesus House and celebrate with African voices the grace of Jesus and feel love; I'll eat food with my friends here - my Chicago family - and feel love. And in the days and weeks, months and years to come, I will write letters and receive them, make phone calls and answer them, give hugs and get them, love and be loved. God has been blessing me so much since I returned, and my eyes are more open to the good things he gives me each day than they ever were before. I have never felt such optimism in the face of difficulties. Perseverance, yes, I have rooted deep within the fiber of my being; but this is something new: something so uplifting that I can look over my struggles and trials with a smile and not just with tenacious strength. It's something that I was taught, because it's something that I had lost. It's something I learned to recognize, because it's something whose image I had forgotten. And there's really only one word that I can use to describe what I've gained, and hope never to lose.
ZamLove.
I love you all, and I thank you for reading, for praying, for supporting, for teaching, for telling, for sharing, for everything.
May the ZamLove of God be present and permeate through everything that you do, may the grace of Jesus be lived out in you through a strong sense of ubuntu - a focus on the people in your life instead of the things, and may you share these values with others so that we can see more clearly in this world how beautiful will be the next.
~Jaclynn
30 January 2010
24 January 2010
Some more thoughts on ZamLife...
"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.
"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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