(This is not part 2. I’ll get to that. This is a break for the holiday.)

It’s Thanksgiving and I’m hurtling down the road in a minibus to Lusaka, sweating and squished and generally depressed. The closest thing I’ll see to a turkey today, I realize, is the cardboard box on the lap of a woman two seats over that squawks every time we hit a bump on the road. The director of CHD called me in the morning asking me to ride two hours to the capital to pick up checks so I can get a sustainable agriculture project underway—-the Home Based Care volunteers need to start planting maize now that the rains have begun. Necessary and good work, but there will be no holiday for me.

Still generally depressed about the lack of Thanksgiving, I start writing in my journal about the guy sitting directly behind me, Sunglassed-Charles, one of my most regular stalkers (always stops me on the road asking if he can have my number this time. No. Still No. Always No, Charles.) He just so happens to be staring at my neck. As he gets off the minibus, I get an idea.

A list of things I’m thankful for. That’s what I need to coax myself to do, even though I’m too hot to really get into it.

So I begin writing. Things I’m thankful for:
1) Sunglassed-Charles has disembarked and is no longer staring at my neck.
Okay, no more complaints in disguise. Real things you’re really thankful for, Amy.
2) The ability to read and lots of good books around.
3) A family that loves me so much—my parents and grandparents are calling tonight!
4) The knowledge that, however difficult it’s been getting used to this place, I’m without a doubt exactly where I need to be.
5) Nature and green and good running paths always available.
6) A generally healthy body.
7) Mutinta, Cholobesa, the host fam, Peggy, Mrs. Phiri, Wunde, Lois and Siggi, Karen, Jocelyn, Mark, Tyler, Charlene and John, Cheryl and Peter, Katrina, Lucas, Senda, Mrs. Banda, Mrs. Chisumpa, and all the other beautiful, flawed people who have reached out to me in the last three months and I now realize I’ve been taking for granted.
8) Knowing God is here with me in Zambia.
9) A job that’s frustrating and fulfilling and giving me great experience.
10) Not knowing where I’ll be in a year. Scary, but exhilarating.
11) All the people in the States I love and will keep around even if I’m not physically with them.
12) My education.
13) An extremely unboring life.

Hmm . . . unlucky 13 . . . but that’s all I got. A good exercise for me though. I feel more like it’s Thanksgiving already.

So I get the work done in Lusaka and am riding back on a slightly larger bus, much cooler as night closes in on us. I eat an apple, orange, and a pack of Baby Biscuits (like Teddy Grahams only sans vitamin fortification) because that’s all the food in my backpack. So much for Thanksgiving dinner.

BUT there’s an unopened care package on my lap from a friend in the States that I picked up while in Lusaka. I have to wait until I get home to open it.

My friend Stacey calls me while I’m on the bus to wish me a Happy Thanksgiving and later in the evening my parents and grandparents call. We talk about our problems. We also laugh.

And then, alone in my room, I open the care package. All the usual: CDs, books, magazines, wonderful wonderful candy. But at the bottom there’s an envelope marked “Letters.” It’s filled with encouraging notes collected from a group of my friends in Massachusetts. I read them and realize I’m crying.

So I add one more number to my list:
14) The fact that I don’t need a turkey to be thankful this Thanksgiving.

And there it is. 14 real things I’m really thankful for. The number of completion x 2.

And then I open my door and give a precious piece of candy to my host sister Eunice. It’s a big stretch for me, but what would Thanksgiving be if I kept it all to myself and my phone lines?

The children sneak glances back at me to see if I’ll smile. Bald circles cut into the hair on some of their scalps like oversized bulletholes. It smells like little kid sweat. A lizard just leapt from the grass roof to the dirt floor to be received by neither giggles nor screams—he obviously isn’t the first kamikaze reptile to drop in on this classroom. The rectangular hut is dark except for the crumbing wall on one side that graciously allows in streams of light—it will also welcome in streams of water once the rainy season comes in full force. The children sit on their flattened plastic bag-backpacks so their pants don’t get dirty from the crumbling clay pew seats. Their laps double as desks and they translate 1 + 2 = 3 from the neat chalkboard numbers into crooked scrawls in their exercise books. The other white person in the hut is a blonde Barbie who smiles at me from the back of a t-shirt, but she has a hole in her cheek that makes a big dark mole so I can’t decide if she’s an American or really an African underneath. Or maybe she’s somewhere in the middle—an expat like me silently surveying this school.

This is Kine Community School, one of the three small school huts into which I bring my small, well-intentioned work. As you can imagine, my job of trying to “improve the capacity” of these schools is no simple task. These are not well-regulated, well-funded government schools. They are, instead, almost entirely supported by the villages of huts surrounding them (hence the term “community school”). If a toilet needs to be built at the school, the community is expected to show up to build it. If a teacher wants to get paid this month, all the adults of the village need to chip in.

The problem arises when they don’t chip in. I’ve concluded that the amount of learning that occurs at a given community school is directly proportional to the amount of support it receives from the village surrounding it. Lambanyai School is doing well: the community rallies behind the school so the teachers show up to teach most every day and a building project will start there soon. The school described above, Kine, is somewhere in the middle. But Hope Community School seems hopeless: the roof desperately needs to be patched and books are sparse. I sometimes feel like I’m one of the only people who cares that the students learn—the community is undedicated, the school’s only teacher is so discouraged she skips teaching class for up to a week at a time, and even the village headwoman is antagonistic to its development.

A man at the Ministry of Education explained it to me: the concept of community schools is new, and it’s “one big experiment.” Ideally, if the experiment is successful, the schools should allow students who otherwise wouldn’t attend school—children too poor to pay for uniforms and children in remote locations of the bush—to get an education. And theoretically, the model is sustainable: not much outside support is needed if the community gets onboard.

But variables abound: how can you convince farming parents to allow their children to attend school rather than work in the fields? How can you hire and motivate well-trained teachers when they barely get any pay? How can you still have class in the rainy season when the community doesn’t show up to patch the roof? The list obviously goes on.

And since there are over 70 community schools in Mumbwa District alone, if this “big experiment” fails, if it turns out the schools are not sustainable, a lot of children who want to learn will start showing up to empty school huts. Like they already are at Hope.

But my work with the schools is not entirely composed of seemingly insurmountable problems . . . in fact, some of my work with the kids is stress relieving rather than causing. But more on this in part 2. (Haha. I’m making you wait for the thrilling (and optimistic) conclusion.)

My life has been beautifully busy as of late. I returned on Tuesday from a week-long trip to Southern Zambia on the “official business” of visiting my friends. MCC requires that I observe my fellow volunteers’ family/working situations, so I stayed for two days with Mark-the-English-and-Computer-Teacher in Batoka and about two days with Tyler-the-Physics-Biology-and-Chemistry-Teacher in the leetle town of Sikalongo. It was a refreshing time of comparing notes with the other SALTers on life goals and toilet facilities (they both use squatty potties while I now rest my gluteus maximus upon a throne . . . hehe) and our thoughts on a certain Wonder of the World.

That’s right, over the weekend we met up with Jocelyn (a SALTer who extended her stay) and Louis (a Zambian friend) on the very unofficial business of basking in the beauty of Victoria Falls. The Falls are known as Mosi-o-tunya, or “The Smoke That Thunders,” but since it’s at the end of the dry season, thundering was at a minimum. However, the low water volume made it possible for us to hike down to the Zambezi River to splash away the heat and photograph the great cliffs surrounding us and the occasional bungee jumper hurdling off the Zimbabwe-Zambia bridge. David Livngstone, when first laying eyes on Vic Falls, described them thus:

“The falls are bounded on three sides by ridges 300 or 400 feet in height, which are covered in forest, with red soil appearing amongst the trees . . . It had never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight.” (From the autobiographical Journeys in Southern Africa)

Yes, my colonizing compadre, I second your observations. But no, I am not going to try to imitate an angel in flight (via bungee cord), even if Mark already has and Tyler is thinking he might.

Other trip highlights would include our great and inexpensive hostel, complete with a swimming pool, THE Museum (I don’t think there are many in this country), and a pizza place called the Funky Munky. Americans reading this: count pizza among your blessings and eat a slice on my behalf. Living here makes it no longer possible to take delicious American cuisine for granted.

On Wednesday I returned to my job at Community for Human Development, which I’ve decided I love and am going to describe to you more clearly now that I actually know what I’m doing. It’s a non-profitey/social workey job. My two overarching goals are to improve the education system for orphans/vulnerable children and to improve healthcare primarily to HIV/AIDS and TB patients. To do this, I work with five community school teachers and about 25 volunteer Home Based Care (HBC) providers—who each have one to three patients they care for in the patients’ homes.

I do lots of field work which means I ride my bike to the one-room-school-huts to monitor teachers, bring them extra curriculum, and hold meetings with the school committees. My field work with the HBC providers includes distributing materials like avocado trees and monitoring goat and agriculture sustainable development projects. I’ll also start visiting patients in their homes to compile info on the care they’re receiving.

When I’m not in the field, I’m in the office writing reports to my director in Lusaka or bringing the teachers to the office to have them train each other on how to write lesson plans. If that’s not enough to keep me busy, I’ll start trying to network with other area non-profits (World Vision, Women for Change, etc.) in the near future.

There are plenty of downsides to the job—lots of sweat and miscommunication and sloooow progress. In fact, I oftentimes think a Zambian would probably do my job better. But I love the job anyway because, in interacting with the “poor” and “vulnerable,” I already think about them differently. After two months, it’s much harder for me to define these people this way—by what they don’t have, by the monies they lack. This is because I, the rich, self-sufficient albino outsider, need these “poor” people. And they know that. So when I biked to the village yesterday to take inventory of some books, the HBC volunteer Henry knew that I would be hungry and gave me lunch at his hut without thinking twice. He didn’t congratulate himself for his hospitality; that’s just the way society works here—people depend on each other.

Perhaps this African sense of community comes out of genuine concern, or perhaps it springs from necessity or perhaps it’s just a cultural habit, but whatever the reason, I love living in a place where lunch is always provided and complete strangers will ride their bike next to you for miles to show you the way when you ask for directions.

It makes it hard for a self-sufficient American to see herself as better or wealthier than the people she’s working with. As Raymond Downing put it, “Poor people everywhere, because of their poverty, can see more clearly than we who are not poor what is fundamentally human.”

I’ve decided I have a lot to learn here about being human.

But for now, all this talk of lunch is making me hungry. I’ll have to do this last topic more justice in another blog, one I’m not writing at noon.

As always, thanks for your prayers. Like good pizza, I don’t take them for granted.