Happy.

Don’t ask me to describe this. These words jumped from my pen as I sat to write this entry.

I hesitated to document my daily life here. Why? Because I am no able anecdote of Africa or even of Zambia. The country that I have known for these past three months is diverse and shifting, a study of contrasts and contradictions - as we all are. So do not ask me to capture this is sentences and thought trains. There is too much and my words will fail. Do not ask me to catalog this in facts and absolutes. I cannot be your reference point for this world so far away.

That said, I made this blog to communicate with you – family, friends, random visitors from the Internet ether. I do know that I miss you all dearly (well, maybe not so much for that last group) and I want you to know how I spend my days here. You shouldn’t have to suffer for my fits of relativist angst. Just bear in mind the above disclaimer and bear with me – your self-conscious, slightly neurotic narrator.

I have now been “at site” for over a month. The world before Mufumbwe is rapidly falling away. Mine is an existence of bucket baths, pit latrines and solar charger battles. I get excited to buy tomatoes and sweet potatoes and bananas. I race the sun – getting where I need to be before the heat of midday, hurrying home again before the fall of dusk.

The same sun wakes me at dawn. Now during cold season, it gets down to about 58 degrees in the mornings. While in D.C. that would have signaled full-on skirt and tank top weather, here it just means freezing. I usually need to don a pair of thick knee-highs, a knit cap, a scarf and my North Face fleece to summon the willpower to get out of bed. Yes this is the same girl who frequently left the house without a coat on in the dead of New York winter. Most mornings I bike the seven kilometers to my head school after breakfast. My role there is to assist with teacher trainings, resource development and really anything education-related in the zone. As of yet, my actual job is still vague so more on that some other time. Regardless, they keep me quite busy that side (a Zambian idiom) and thoroughly enjoy feeding me nshima – the cornmeal staple of the country – whenever the opportunity arises.

Afternoons, I am often left to my own devices, which has been very good for my reading habit. I lay in the hammock and devour books, practice yoga, or visit with the neighborhood ladies for a Zambian version of Stitch and Dish. So far my country craft tally is 1½ knitted scarves, one embroidered LL Bean backpack, 2 aprons and a fair amount of crayon-based wall graffito.

Not to say that I am just twiddling my thumbs over here though. The basics of cleanly survival (succumbing to dirtiness would actually be quite easy) takes up large swaths of daytime. I wash my dishes in buckets and my laundry by hand. I sweep my house – constantly – and so my neighbors don’t judge me, I sweep the dirt in the yard. I draw water from a well and, if I am feeling brave, I carry it home on my head. I bathe outdoors, something that I don’t anticipate getting sick of in 27 months. We don’t have markets here as most people grow what they need for themselves. If someone has extra, say tomatoes to sell, they place of small bowl of them in their walkway and wait for buyers. Kind of like a lemonade stand minus the actual stand part and the oh-so-eager kids. It definitely makes one appreciate the produce section though. On free days, I may bike into town – 20 kilometers away – and enjoy a cold drink and TV news, but only if there’s electricity, a risky bet.

When the sun sets at 6:30, I retreat to my little home. I fill a brazier with charcoal and start my fire for the night. My cooking skills have yet to follow the same learning curve as the rest of me but I still manage to scrape together one hot, mostly edible meal a night. My cat Dorkus – a big orange fluff-ball inherited from a previous volunteer – eats most of my leftovers, as well as copious amounts of little dried fish called kapenta. He seems to have the appetite of most teenaged boys or a Hoover vacuum cleaner. But his antics are sometimes my sole entertainment for the night so I put up with the expense. It’s like Animal Planet for one.

Before coming to Zambia, I read this prediction on another Peace Corps blog: Volunteers who go to Asia become mystics, those who go to Latin America become revolutionaries, those who go to Eastern Europe become drunks, and those who go to Africa come back happy. And yes, there is happiness in the slow fading of days and the simple activities that fill them. In doing chores that modern appliances have made obsolete. In living and working in this community, among these people who have done everything conceivable to welcome this stranger in their midst.

And so, that is that. I have begged not to describe and then droned on and on. But this bit cannot contain everything. Even now, I am bursting with additions and revisions, disclaimers and tangents. I do not have the nuance to offer the whole picture. I have been given four colors when what I need is a 96-count Crayola crayon box. But I am happy. And for now, that is enough.

Where have you been, my darling young one?

This one has been far in the days since I hurtled it, a bit unwillingly, into the stratosphere and away from the comforting stability and warmth of the Earth. There were times when I doubted my ability to reach this time, this end of training.

But now, we are here. And I am ready. An adventure is beginning. In a day or two, I will be at my site, in the first home of my own.

The house – as I am sure all of you are dying to know – is a little white and blue gem surrounded by fruit trees and sunshine. There are mangoes, guavas, papayas and lemons growing in my yard. There is a vegetable garden and a soybean plot. There is a chicken house (should I decide to get some) and two trees that are waiting for a hammock to be strung between them. There is a bathing shelter for bucket baths and a pit latrine. I only miss indoor plumbing when I brush my teeth – strangely.

There are two rooms and a pantry. There are two lazy boy chairs sitting around a brazier. There is a bike and a bookshelf to filled with novels and notebooks. There is me.

Training is over. Three days ago, me and 34 of my new found friends stood on the lawn of the U.S. Ambassador’s residence and said the same oath that President Obama had uttered in my D.C. months earlier, to defend the Constitution and protect the country we still knew as home. We sang the U.S. and Zambian national anthems, with my voice cracking from pride in my home and for these amazing people singing next to me.

“Make me an instrument of your peace…” began the country director in her address. She read through the prayer and my heart beat against the St. Francis medal that dangled below my dress. I felt once again the simple truth that I was meant to be here, the soft force of encouragement from somewhere I couldn’t see.

I have traveled in two months. My self is wider. I won’t say I have grown because that is too cliché and not entirely true to the reality of I feel. But my experience is more capable, my being is more expansive. I have pushed out new boundaries from my skin and understanding and now wait for an existence that will fill them.

I have seen poverty. I have seen standards of living that before I had only known about through development classes and Christian adopt-a-child commercials. I have seen a hundred students crammed into a classroom, lacking books and efficient teaching but filled with a desire to learn. What has this brought me – this understanding of lives so closed to the opportunities that stretch before me like America’s mid-western prairies? These new boundaries are membranous – they let pass through these truths and it becomes a part of me, as this food grown in African soil becomes the cells that comprise the physical me. I do not know what will happen when the cells of my being have this muscle memory of Zambia. I do not know self these nutrients will construct.