Birth of a Nation

Women here are hard as nails (I even saw a woman chewing a nail the other day but she was pregnant, so, she was probably just getting on top of an iron deficiency). To lend an example to this statement, I recently witnessed a woman give birth (I've actually witnessed several at this point but this one was special because it was my first). Because all clinics here are barely staffed by trained professionals, the midwives I travel with end up attending deliveries while we are at the clinic. I was unfortunately in the ward when a woman was in labor and was ushered into the delivery room with the midwives when they realized her time had come.

"You will see this, come we will show you."

I had no means of escape, so, I stood in the corner as this woman attempted to bring life into the world. 2 things to note about giving birth in Zambia 1) they give birth completely naked 2) they make no noise. Not a grunt. Not a whimper. Most women hear live under the belief that showing pain/making noise will cause their babies to die or show to others that you are not a strong mother. This being a true Zambian woman, only slow, silent tears dripped down this her face as she pushed a decent sized baby out into the cramped and dusty delivery room. Her nakedness and my complete lack of skill and legitimate reason for being there made me distinctly uncomfortable but the silence left me completely unnerved. In short, it was surreal to say the least and disturbingly beautiful to say the most. I just stood there in wide-eyed silence as they attempted to make the baby breathe. Had the midwives not been there the baby may have died. There was no resuscitation equipment in the labor ward so the midwives had to manually clear the airways. After a few firm slaps, the baby finally let out a screaming breath and the tension of the moment broke.

The look on my face was, I'm sure, not encouraging for mother and child. I think the midwives picked up on my green and contorted expression and tried to encourage me saying, "it looks good!"

I looked around in panic and mumbled, "Sure." Another one of my profound encapsulations of the moment. I felt like a caveman pawing at the ground for the right things to say or the right things to feel.

I did such a great job of doing absolutely nothing that they entrusted me with the task of telling the family. So, I talked to the family in a bit of broken Tonga which they were thrilled about- so much, so, in fact, that they named the baby after me. I didn't realize they were doing that at first they just kept repeating my name over and over again (keep in mind they don't have r's here so they struggled for quite some time pronouncing it). Outside with the family, absent of the metallic smells of blood in the delivery room, I was struck with a strange and fantastic feeling. While still mildly horrified, I was at the same time oddly amped on life- after all, I now had a namesake. I really shouldn't be overly flattered, however, seeing as how they name children after their favorite dairy products here, but, nonetheless, I felt an odd sense of responsibility for this new baby Carrie. I'll probably never see her again, though. I'll just have to hope she makes it past 5 years old, then she'll have a chance of making it to adulthood.

15 minutes after delivery, the woman was dressed, sitting straight up, breast feeding. Her family was gathering her things in preparation for 15 kilometer walk back home. Ready to show the new Carrie off to their men (who were dense enough to be absence from this epic part of life).

I thought to all the concepts I had of birth. Sterile environment, screams of pain, heavy breathing, drama. I found none of it. We forget in our lives of privilege and health care, what we are all truly capable of. I don’t in anyway mean to diminish anyone’s delivery. Were I to give birth right at this moment, I would want the Lamas breathing techniques, standard infection prevention, drugs, I want to look Scott right in his petrified face and tell him never to touch me again. But it illustrates how we take the most basic tenants of humanity and dramatize it. This way is not the best way (far from it really) it was just…different and it's had me thinking about the actual process of life.

We Moved!!!

So, just a quick update from the last post...

WE MOVED!

We are now spending our days in the provincial capital of Choma. My NGO suddenly moved to Choma in a mass exodus with all other southern province NGOs to be in the capital (Scott's NGO was already partly based here) and in order to avoid a troublesome and expensive commute, we moved too.

The mailing address is still the same for now although we might get our own box at the post office now that we are so close but for now we'll continue sharing the box at the provincial house.

So far the move has been for the better. We have running water now!

To give you an idea of what this means to us I will regail you with our previous water situation in Kalomo:

We lived in a house with plumbing but no water. The water came on at a random point every other day but almost invariably around 3 in the morning. Luckily it made a demon coming up from hell sound so we never had to wonder whether it was on or not. Once the guttural Tibetan throat singing began, we would spend the next 2 hours until dawn outside at the tap (because the pressure was so low it couldn't make it to the inside of the house) filling as many buckets as possible from a thread sized trickle. During the height of dry season we went a couple of weeks without water entirely. Remember when I said we had plumbing- that means we have flush toilets so imagine not flushing your toilets for two weeks... yep. During the final week we were there the rains started coming- thank god so we started catching rain water.

But now all that's behind us :) Honestly, I can live without running water if there is a well nearby or a latrine instead of a flush toilet. That was how we lived during training and it worked out just fine. But the factors that went into this water situation were fairly untenable. Not to mention that I smelled like cheese most of the time because we rarely had enough water for a bucket bath- sorry coworkers. Another plus for our new place is I live by two co workers who like to garden so we now have space to make a garden happen. Also our landlord is a Bemba woman about my age who just lost her husband in road accident, while that is terrible, she's been looking for friends. So she hung out with me while I unpacked (Scott was away for work) so now I've got a Zambian friend who's not a co worker- SUCCESS!

Anywho, more updates to come!

An Attempt-to-Be-Brief Overview of the last 5 months

Our apologies for the absence of updates so far! The first 3 months of training was devoid of internet but luckily the tides have turned and my trepidation about putting words to the experiences we’ve had so far is slowly abating. I’ll start off by saying I’m a bit unsure of how to write for a blog. Is it like a website? A diary? Facebook? Or is it some strange amalgamation of them all? I am going to choose the latter. Posts won’t be all long prose but at least for the next 15 minutes of your life it will be. If you’ve gotten an email from me in the past month some phrases may seem eerily familiar because my paucity of description and humor as well as shear lack of energy has forced me to abuse the copy-paste function. Don’t fret, though, that will probably wane over time… probably…

We got here after a very long but pleasant flight (only after almost being stranded in South Africa when my purse got left on the plane with my passport. That is a story to tell over a very large and very strong beer. Let’s just say if it were not for a drink cart attendant, we would both be wandering separately around South African immigration). Training is now over. It was… a struggle. Not difficult per se but after coming out of a fairly comprehensive Masters of Public Health program boredom and redundancy abounded. It also turns out that none of it really even applies to what we are doing because, due to our master’s background, we are going to be the first volunteers in the history of Peace Corps Zambia to be living in a “city” and working with NGOs. But, I digress. To sum it up, after training we have countless new friends, a limited grasp of Tonga (the language of Southern Province), a new Zambian family, and the experience of hut life.

Scott and I are now in our new home in the small city of Kalomo in Southern Province. We are very close to Livingston and the great Victoria Falls (about an hour and a half away). And, we are, in fact, in a duplex with electricity- much to every other volunteer’s chagrin. We don't have running water so we can claim an element of "roughing" it (more on daily living later). However, it is light years beyond what the other volunteers go through living in thatched mud huts in the far reaches of the bush. It isn't exactly what we signed up for. We had prepared and planned for life in the village and in the city we are missing out on a lot of the things we had hoped for like a close community, space for a garden, or other use of our appropriate technology training. I'm speaking with more animosity than necessary, though, because the work we will be doing has the potential to be even more fulfilling than what we even expected so we are getting used to putting away expectations and accepted our role as guinea pigs for the new phase of Peace Corps, Zambia.

We are doing well, so far- lots of milling around and meeting new people and explaining to them in Tonga that “no we can’t give you any money. We are volunteers, we have no money.” I'm working with an NGO called Saving Mother's Giving Life which is attempting to lower Zambia's maternal mortality rate by 50% (a lofty goal indeed). It has its perks/horrors. For instance, I watched a baby be born a few weeks ago (I’ll do a special segment on having a baby in Zambia). For the most part, we go out to mentor the staff of maternity wards in Kalomo district and train Safe Motherhood Action Groups (groups of community members that promote clinic delivery, family planning and antenatal care). There are 36 clinics over a 1,000+ kilometer area all of which have to be monitored by our group at least once a month. The only way to reach them is through the bush, so, we spend hours in cruisers blazing trails through the African bush on the daily. This sounds romantic until the 3 hour mark when your head is splitting from the constant hammering of your brain against the inside of your skull and your stomach is equally twisted from its contents' jostling. I go with a team of midwives who serve as mentors for the clinic staff- they basically come in and yell at people for the horrific conditions of their clinic and the abysmal state of their record keeping. I generally take notes and stand to the side. I talk with locals and with clinic workers a bit as well but I’m still in the “what possible programs can I start?” phase of things.

I’ll leave the majority of information on Scott’s job for him to explain because he has a much better grasp of it than I do. Scott is working with a group called AKROS on Clean Water and Sanitation issues. He is currently training community members all over Southern Province ( not to mention other parts of the country) on how to use a new tracking system for monitoring sanitation and diarrheal diseases. The past few weeks we have barely seen each other but hopefully once he whittles down the 14 additional trainings he has to do, that will change. He's been out to such isolated places, he's the first white person some of the villagers have ever seen. He's scared countless children who scream "ghost" as they flee. One 16 year old even punched his own mother in an effort to get away for the white witch. He claims to be exasperated by it but I think inside he enjoys instilling fear in the hearts of children.

Scott and I will trade off blog posts in the future. And they won’t all be this long and will be much more interesting, I promise! Just wanted to get the life recap out of the way before we talk about the important stuff.

Much love from Zambia!