Service-changers and Village Living

Part I: Service-changers


Whether by our own work ethic and merit, someone’s generosity, a superior’s snap decision, or some combination of factors, the projection or trajectory of our service in Zambia has been substantially altered several times in the past 21 months. This blog will highlight some of the major ‘service-changers’ that have improved our work and standard of living since we arrived in Zambia.

Service-changer 1: Our home’s location

We had no say at all in the first service-changers that we encountered in country, but they set the initial course of our service and are worth mentioning. On our 1st day in Zambia we were assigned a local language group, Bemba, which determined the region of the country where we would be based. Not long after, we were assigned our village. These are service-changers because no two sites are alike. There are cultural ties across all of Zambia, but each village is unique and comparisons from one to the next often fall apart below surface level. Had we been placed anywhere else, our time here would be much different.

Service-changer 2: Computer in the bush

Less than a week after we moved to our present home, a door sized solar panel, a 90lb battery, an inverter, and a laptop were dropped at our door step. This is an obvious service-changer. All of it was purchased and delivered by MSU and the Food Security Research Project to allow me to complete my thesis and to facilitate further research, data collection and analysis while living in the African bush. I did not expect to even have a computer in Zambia, but the system has been incredible. It changed the depth of my research and the type of things I could accomplish here, and it allows us to charge our phone, ipods, cameras, lights, etc. on a regular basis. We even have movie nights!

Service-changer 3: Shower

Showers are a huge upgrade from bucket baths. We put one together from an old 20 liter water jerry, a valve and a cheap shower head. We shower every night, usually with water slightly warmed by the sun. We stay cleaner and just feel better because of it and the benefits are more than skin deep.

Service-changer 4: Second hut

It took about 11 months of organizing and lobbying our community, but after about 4 days of real work, we had a second hut/kitchen/den/guesthouse. As you can tell by all of the “/”s – almost as many as a young Kordell Stewart in his day – it’s a multipurpose room and the extra space has been great. We use it mostly for storage and food preparation/cooking, but it’s a great place to read and a good change of scenery from our main hut (turns out 14 sq. meters shared by two people can get a bit cramped). Unquestionably the best part of the room is the veranda where we can be found most days around 6:00 pm sitting, watching the sunset or the occasional evening storm roll in.

Service-changer 5: Mattress

Zambian foam mattresses are fine. Joy and I slept very comfortably on one for over a year, but despite our diligence in rotating and flipping it every week, it caves badly to the middle, which can be uncomfortable for two people when it’s 92° at night. But thanks to a well-timed phone call and request by Joy to Peace Corps HQ, we now have a spring mattress complete with a box-spring. Now we sleep like champions in all weather – but, 92° is still way too hot to be trying to sleep.

Service-changer 6: (content deleted by editor)

Service-changer 7: Gas stove

Most Peace Corps Volunteers in Zambia spend 1/3 of their day cooking and preparing food. For the things that we’re trying to accomplish over here, that is just too long. So, after about 3 months of cooking all our own meals, Joy and I worked out an arrangement with our neighbors so they bring us two portions of their nshima dinner every night and in return we supply them with cooking oil or salt or whatever they might want contributed. This arrangement cut our food prep time in half, but we were still spending up to 2 hours a day cooking lunch (usually just rice or pasta) over our small charcoal cooker. This past July, we invested in a gas stove with two burners that halved our meal prep time again. We no longer have to make/borrow fire twice a day, nor do we have to wait for charcoal to burn properly. With the twist of nob we have a roaring cooking fire. And we can control the heat, which is another huge advantage over fire cooking. The stove frees up more time for work and more productive pursuits, and it definitely makes everyday living a whole lot easier.
We started in Zambia with nothing but the essentials – a 3.5m by 4m mud hut and a toilet – and over the past 21 months we have afforded ourselves these service-changers: simple luxuries that have improved our quality of living and have made working and living in the Zambian bush a bit easier. Which takes us to…

Part II: Village living

When I was 19, working at summer camp in Northern Michigan, falling in love with Joy, and reading the grandiose development schemes of Jeffrey Sachs, I decided that I was going to be a Peace Corps Volunteer someday. At the time I thought I would be an African villager. Eat what villagers ate, work as villagers worked and live as villagers lived. I would make my home in the village and over 2+ years, I thought, I would serve the community and, in the process, learn a great deal about village life and development work and how I could, in the future, effectively work to improve the lives of those that need it most. That whole last sentence, as it turns out, is entirely true today, but, even before I left America, I knew that my plan to be an African villager and strip down life to the bare necessities (Baloo shout-out) and experience life as they know it was fatally flawed. I don’t flatter myself by calling myself a villager. Even if I lived exactly the same life as anyone around me and held the same standard of living, it still would not even be close. There are too many structural differences: differences in upbringing, in culture, in education, in exposure to the world, and the truly fatal difference that makes sure that no Peace Corps Volunteer ever has been nor ever will be a villager, a way out. At the end of this crazy, wonderful, challenging experience, we leave. It’s an option, a safety net that no villager has. I saw this structural difference before we moved, but I see it and understand it better every day that I’m here.

Despite these differences, I still wanted to live, in some capacities at least, a village life. Living in the village and maintaining a comparable living standard to those around us has been eye-opening and we’ve learned more than I could ever write. We started at the base level and have slowly increased our quality of living, as I mentioned in part I, and we certainly don’t flaunt our stove or our battery. In fact, I don’t think more than our 3 closest friends and neighbors know that we have them – it helps that Zambian homes are very private and usually only a place to sleep. But one interesting thing I’ve learned by living here is that we don’t get any real respect for living in a mud hut and carrying our water from a well. For the most part, villagers just think it’s weird – even the ones that are eager to work with us. From their point of view, why would we choose this lifestyle? Most villagers would not choose this way of life if they had any say in the matter. So it’s strange to our neighbors and friends that we have other options, yet still choose this difficult lifestyle – if only temporarily.

And so, we are very grateful for the small and gradual improvements to our lives that have made us more patient and more energetic towards our work. We view these as improvements to our home. We may not ever be villagers, but our home is in the village, and we continue to work to benefit the lives of those around us in whatever modest ways that we can. We love our home.