Nc-wala

  Hello friends and family! Blog entry three.  I think that means I am officially a blogger. I am already imagining my growing cadre of fans.

I had meant to elaborate on my experience in the field in this entry, but amazing events have made me push it back a bit. Last weekend I undertook an epic journey to the Nc–wala festival in Chipata, a town about  7 hours north of Lusaka. I say epic because the entire thing involved little sleep, no showers, and a terrifying bus ride. However, it was one of the most rewarding spontaneous trips in my life.

My roommate Casey getting wild

I was accompanied on this journey by my equally crazy and adventurous roommate Casey and my work mate and friend from Boston, Alla. We each packed a small back pack Friday and departed for a party at our friend’s house, which somehow ended up looking more like a masquerade than a chilled out dinner party. Our bus departed at 4:00 am, so at that point it is really not worth going to bed.  We proceeded to board a seven hour bus to Chipata 3:00 am.  Seeing as we had wet hair from a dip in the pool, were covered in glittery things, and were perhaps a bit too giggly, I would rate that particular moment as a Triple Muzungu Effect moment. 

This was my first bus ride in Africa, I learned a couple rules governing the operation of these vehicles.  If it is dark, that obviously means that you have to drive in the middle of the road. Since you are in a top-heavy bus,  that clearly indicates that you should actually speed up when going around turns.  And, last but not least, if is pouring rain at 4:30 in the morning and you can’t see the road ahead of you, that means accelerate.  God and I re-united in the early hours of that bus ride. I also learned the reason the seats under the vents were empty were because the rest of the bus knew that in the pouring rain, vents leak. A lot.  Thus you have Alla and I (Casey having done the wise thing of putting herself out of her misery by going to sleep) with a rain coat and chitenge over our heads, hiding from the rain on the bus, and praying for our lives. Damn muzungus.  Despite all of our preparations to sleep on the bus (namely, alcohol) there was no sleeping for the first three hours.

I woke up to be dropped in the middle of a field with thousands of people and tents. We drag our poor selves to find a bathroom, and are led to a port-o- potty. Now, I have dealt with port-o-potties before.  In fact, the difference between an African festival port-o-potty and a port-o-potty found at a Phish show is merely the color. Alas, shit is shit. However, this being Africa, the birthplace of the majority of microscopic beasties, we decided to take our chances in the bush.  We confidently wandered into a weird, overgrown cemetery. Of course, it turned out to served the same purpose as the port-o-potties.  It’s amazing how acclimated I have become to the smell of poop.  Family germophobes, I can almost see you cringing.

Anyways, after changing, deodorizing, and waking up a bit in this weird overgrown cemetery/potty in the bush, we walk into the festival.  We are clearly in the drinking section, which inspires me to say a little word about a thing called Shake Shake. Shake Shake is the local, cheap alcohol. It comes in a milk carton. It is made by essentially putting mealie meal and water in a hollowed out gourd and letting it sit for a couple of days.  Apparently mealie meal is considered a staple for more than just its nutritional value. It somehow ferments and turns alcoholic.  It unfortunately also starts to smell like puke. Strongly. And it is thick and white.  I am literally nauseous just thinking about it. So when you see someone totally drunk with white stuff spilled down their front, you really don't know what it is. Everyone was drinking Shake Shake.

I don't think these would make it past customs.

Now a little more context about Nc-wala (pronounced Nich- wala.) Nc-wala is a harvest festival of the Ngoni people in the Eastern Province of Zambia. I essentially went because they sacrifice a cow by stabbing it and the paramount chief drinks its blood.  How could I miss it? And to think I was once a vegetarian…The Ngoni do these tribal dances and dress in traditional tribal dress.  They wear headdresses and skirts made of pelts.  The pelts they use were often of cheetah, zebra, and other animals that were clearly illegal and poached. You can see some in the pictures.  So the attendees at the festival were all wearing these pelt head dresses in celebration of Nc-wala.

Being three Muzungu girls, we were stopped about 2 minutes after entering the festival by a couple of young Zambian men, and being the nice ladies that we are, we started talking with them.  Before you know it the cameras are out and we are taking pictures with absolutely everyone and wearing their headdresses.  We make friends in particular with these two guys that seem at least half sober and not as obnoxiously hitting on us.

Just at this moment it starts to pour.  Of course none of us actually brought our rain jackets to the middle of the African countryside during the rainy season, so we dash for cover. The problem was that so did everyone else. After nearly getting knocked down in the shoving that occurred to get under a roof, our new friends guided us to the police tent and spoke with the police.  Muzungu Effect: We are allowed to stand under the police tent while everyone else gets wet. Did I feel a little bad?  Yes. Was Casey wearing a white silk shirt that really would have looked rather thin when wet? Yes. So we stayed in the police tent with the “prisoners” from the festival and some guy bleeding from the head that walked in. This seemed completely normal.

The rain let up and we try to go over the actual ceremony, which takes place within a walled yard. We go to the first doorway and are denied entrance by members of the Zambian military.  We go to the second entrance, and our new guides get in through the guards to find one of his friends working in the press. He gets us in! Yes! At this point, the cameras are out. We work the camera thing and are soon ushered up front to take pictures.  Alla has a big digital camera, and before you know it she had gone right up to the press only area and was ten feet away from President Rupiah Banda taking pictures! She made friends with a press agent, and suddenly we were ushered front and center. Muzungu Effect. We were treated like press, and we didn’t dissuade anybody. We must have been in front of thousands of people, taking premium pictures. 

Awesome. 

Ngoni in traditional dress

 But it just gets better. On both sides of the stage are hundreds of Ngoni in full tribal dress. They see us taking pictures, and they want theirs’ taken. The ability to see their pictures on the screen is just too much fun.  Soon we are taking pictures among the crowd of people actually taking part in the ceremony.  We were there for about 45 minutes snapping pictures and joking across the language barrier. It was by far the most amazing experience I have had in Zambia to date. You can see from the pictures that the women are topless. Only older women are allowed to expose their breasts. If a woman can still produce milk, it is inappropriate to show them. It is only after one is done having children that this becomes acceptable. 

 

Digital camera = lots of friends

                              

After we get tired of pictures, we get back to our press spots in time to catch the final dance. Again, as close as we can be. I was self-conscious because we are being watched by so many people. I have amazing video footage, but I do not have the patience to upload them.

After all of this, the bull had yet to be killed. We were front and center but couldn’t see much as we had to sit down so that others could see. I saw the first spear go in, but didn’t get to see anyone drink blood. At that point though, it was inconsequential. We had such an amazing time, I would have been happy to leave right then. We left the ceremony and ate some nshima, and then our new friend took us out of the festival and into the actually village that hosted the festival. On the way, we ran into one of the women we had taken pictures of.  Her family camp was making a huge pot of nshima over the fire. There is a very a particular way to stir it with the cooking stick, as you can see from the video, and they let us try it! I may have burnt their nshima. 

I never was good at cooking.

We continued on and had a nice rest in a field, as at this point we were exhausted. We were on our way back when our friend ran into two of the chiefs, who gave us a ride back to town (Muzungu Effect). Essentially, we arrived dirty and hung over on a bus, and got a ride back with not one, but two chiefs. Not bad for one day, in my opinion.

Now, after I have recounted the most amazing day I’ve had here thus far, allow me to of expound some of the darker aspects of Nc-wala and some cultural practices that I learned about during my visit.  Every Ngoni village has a chief.  As many of you know, tribal lines in Africa supercede national lines. Thus, when I say Ngoni, I am referring to Ngoni tribes in Malawi, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, etc. So, ruling all of those chiefs is a paramount chief. He is the one that drinks the cow’s blood, and he is believed to have connections to the spirits. He is treated like a king of sorts, with body guards, multiple houses etc. He has been chief for around 40 years.

Every year at Nc-wala, the chief is allowed to pick one virgin girl from the village. This girl is required to ‘entertain’ the chief that night. Although there is no legal repercussions for refusal, the elder women in the village will ensure that this young girl complies. There is no marriage or any kind of compensation, just this one night. After this night, the girl is ruined. Her prospects for marriage are dashed. You may think that this is because she is no longer a virgin. Not the case. The reason is heart breaking and an example of the struggles that Africa faces. The paramount chief is HIV positive. He has been sick for years, and everyone knows it. However, tradition is tradition, and so the practice continues.  No one will marry the girl for fear of getting sick. I think this is such a telling example of how hard it is to combat the virus in Africa in the face of so many conducive cultural practices.

There are also some other interesting cultural practices that surprised me. I had assumed that girls being virgins at marriage was important here, as it often is in cultures where women are repressed. Not so. In fact, there is a practice I was told about that ensures that women are NOT virgins. Apparently, there is a man in the village called a “hyena” that is responsible or determining when a girl is ready for marriage. He does this by sleeping with her when she is around 12-13 years old. He will then make the decision.  Can anybody think of a better way to spread an STD?  Frankly, I was horrified.  These practices are only in the very rural areas, and also seem to be fading out, but still shocking.

Our trip ended rather uneventfully. We stayed in a self-contained room that we couldn’t leave without the assistance of the attendant because of the guard dog outside (exactly who was he guarding, anyways?) We then got to wait until about 12:30 for 10:00 bus to depart, but that’s the way it goes. All in all, it was an absolutely amazing weekend!

Thus concludes entry 3. Love to all!

She's saying "its a weapon, not a magic wand."

These boys were posing for us.

Believe it or not, they asked us to take a picture with them

Amazing

The Nuts and Bolts

Hello and welcome to post two. So far so good with keeping up with my blog.  Thanks for all of your support and encouragement!  

To begin with, most of you know that I have just returned from three weeks ‘in the field.’ I should qualify that term. I was not staying in a tent with mud floors. I was staying in a lodge with a private room, TV, mini-fridge, cleaning and laundry service, and intermittent hot water. (Actually, intermittent water in general. For the first time, my excuse for being late was ‘The water stopped and I was covered in soap and had to wait for it to come back on.’  I have never used THAT one before.) I just want to debunk any visions of me sleeping on a cot among lions. Nowhere near.  In fact, the first room I stayed in looked like, (and I am sorry for using this description with family and making you feel awkward, but there is NO other way to describe it) a scene from a really bad 1990’s adult movie. The picture is above, complete with mosquito net, but it doesn’t really do it justice.  Let’s just say the entire room was dark red (including plush carpet), and all the fabric was shiny, shiny, shiny. It also had a huge heart pillow studded with sequins among the 20 throw pillows on the bed.  Just saying.

So, to give some context to my field work, I am going to dedicate this blog post to giving a brief description of my project and my work for those of you who I haven’t already tortured with the details. (And Mark, because I know that you will NEVER get around to reading my protocol).  Then next post I can break into all of the fun stuff and you will know what I am talking about.  I apologize, it’s rather boring, but necessary to understand the context of my work.

My study is called the Longitudinal Study on Orphans and Vulnerable Children, or LOS for short. Let me break that down a little.

 Longitudinal means over time.

An orphan, in Africa, refers to any child that has lost EITHER parent. In fact whenever you are reading any orphan related statistic from the WHO, USAID, etc., you should keep in mind that they are using this definition. While this definition may seem to decrease the severity of the word ‘orphan’ in comparison to our definition, you must also understand that the context is different.  Consider the severe shortage of income generating activities available to any given household.  In the States a single parent can often manage to at least get by.  In Africa it could mean starvation. A child can be a paternal, maternal, or double orphan. As you can imagine in a country with a 1 in 5 HIV rate, there are a lot of these children.

 A vulnerable child is one who has HIV, or some other extenuating factor which increases their vulnerability.

Together, these children are referred to as OVC’s (Orphans and Vulnerable Children).

Caregiver and children in Kafue

This study is one of the first longitudinal studies on orphans in Africa. I am not sure that there have been any published results of a similar kind of study.  The main reason, I think, is that tracking the same children over time is very difficult.  We attempted to find the same children that were interviewed in the program evaluation conducted last year (more on this later) and it was very challenging. Just trying to match the names is near to impossible. Names are very fluid here. People have two to three names that they use interchangeably, plus names they use with muzungus (On the last day in the field I learned that one of my dear friends was Chisiah, not Maynard. Go figure).  In addition, spelling is purely phonetic. This means it can change depending who is writing it down and how they hear it. R’s and L’s are mixed up as a rule. So, Lejoi and Rejoi...same person.  So, one thinks, let’s just look at the birthday. Also problematic.  Of the 200 or so children that we did track from the last study, there were about 5 with the same birthdays as they listed a year ago. Most were off by at least a year. My feelings on the effects of not tracking age I will save for another post. (Hint: I like it). So, to get back to the point, it is difficult and time consuming to track these children over time. Therefore most studies that look at the conditions of orphans are cross-sectional, a one-time evaluation that really only yields results of association, not cause.

Moving on. The goal of the study is two-fold. The first is a kind of evaluation. When Bush, in a rare moment of insight (apologies to those in Florida and Texas), gave Africa millions of dollars in aid, he did so under the Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. This is commonly known as PEPFAR. In Zambia, this was distributed through a program called Expanded Church Response. Essentially, money to assist OVCs was funneled through local churches because they already play such a vital role in Zambian communities. Christianity is actually written into the Zambian constitution, and Zambians are very religious as a rule.  

Last year, at the end of the first five year PEPFAR grant, my office conducted an evaluation of the program to see how orphans were faring in comparison to other children. This was a cross sectional study, with rudimentary results. Thus, my study was funded by PEPFAR in order to create a cohort of children that we can follow over time, to truly understand what is going on. This is an extension of the evaluation in some ways, but is also designed to better understand the different levels of vulnerability in orphans compared to regular children. It looks at six domains: Education, Health, Nutrition, Security, Shelter, and Psycho-social development. Socioeconomic Status is kind of an all-encompassing seventh domain.  So far, it seems the differences are substantial.

Half of the team before departing.

The study consists of quantitative and qualitative methods. For quantitative, we trained about 19 quantitative data collectors to conduct interviews on random selected beneficiaries of the funded church’s services. For those of you who are interested, we are using the Teleform software. They then find three comparison children within the community of the same gender and age range. In all, there were around 1300 households interviewed, and each interview takes about an hour. It was quite an undertaking. We split into two teams and went three locations, Kafue, Chingola, and Luanshya (see map.) I went south to Kafue, and then met up with the entire team in Luanshya.  My part in the quantitative research consisted of keeping an up to date electronic database in Excel and tracking all of the follow-ups we had to do, as well as reviewing questionnaires for completion.

Room for Focus Group Discussion.

I am the team leader of the qualitative research. I work with two amazing Zambian women, Helen and Nomsa, to conduct Focus Group Discussions regarding the program and people’s living conditions. I got to train them on my third day in Africa. Note: I have NEVER conducted qualitative research or Focus Groups. Read the appropriate section of the guide the night before each training day. However, we managed. Helen and Nomsa essentially kept me alive and safe, and were my guides throughout my experience. I got to go places I never would have gone alone because of them. We spent A LOT of time together, and I love them both dearly.

This is the 'road' where one of our participants lived.

Each Focus Group consisted of arranging logistics (such as driving around on bumpy roads for three hours in the hottest part of the day in a 4WD with no air conditioning), Helen and Nomsa conducting the FGD (Focus Group Discussion) for an hour and a half, then spending countless hours listening to the recording and translating the discussion in my hotel room.  I have learned that transcription puts me to sleep faster than any sleeping pill. Incredibly tedious. 

That is the brief overview of the study and my job description in the field, and enough for one post! Tristan and Gabrielle, the next post will have some pictures of my house.

Love to all!

The Muzungu Effect

Hello friends and family! Welcome to my new form of communication. Perhaps now that I have an official blog with a fancy name I will be better about writing. Nobody keep their hopes up, but I am feeling inspired. I figure that in two years I’ll get a book deal and leading role opposite Meryl Streep.

The Muzungu Effect:

It is a well-known fact that when you travel you often learn more about where you are coming from than where you are going.  It is kind of like being able to look through someone else’s eyes at yourself, but on a cultural level. That said, let me share with you my latest observations of our wonderful country, as it relates to the title of my soon to be famous blog.  What makes America (and other Western countries) unique from the rest of the developing world is that when you are standing at the back of a crowd and you look forward, everyone’s hair is different.  Seriously, number one difference.  You don’t realize how unusual this is until you are in a crowd where everyone is African (or Indian or Thai or Hispanic....you get the idea). I literally think that the most noticeable difference between the developing and the Western World  are the moments at the back of the crowd, when all the heads in front of you look the same. The whole 'melting pot' thing is not a joke.

This brings me to the title of my blog. You can imagine, given my observation, that in Africa I stand out. Just a bit. Not only am I white, I am whiter than the average white (some have said that I glow).  Thus, as a background to anything that I am doing, you must imagine that everyone is looking at me, or at least aware of my actions. There is never a second that there is not someone watching me. I went to a large and busy market the other day with two friends, and getting split up from each other was not a big concern, because at any time, any person could tell you where the other muzungus were (although the amount of grabby hands was an incentive to get together). They are just aware of your presence and your actions at all times.

Obviously, people often treat you differently, for better or for worse.  The obvious: I am immediately considered rich, which means I am immediately a target for begging, both overt and subtle.  Other effects? I am immediately a bad dancer. I clearly need protection from the hardships of African life, and I can clearly pay about twice as much for those tomatoes than my friend Helen. There is definitely some resentment, and I have definitely been taunted in the field (there is a traditional belief in rural areas that white development workers are Satanists). I was also flipped off by a 10 year old in front of my whole team.  It took all my self-control not to do it back and stick my tongue out. You’ll be happy to know that at the age of 25, I resisted.  However, there are also good things, and amusing things. No one ever forgets my order in a restaurant. When I call a taxi driver from last night, all I have to say is ‘I’m the Muzungu you picked up last night,’ and he immediately knows where to find me. And I am automatically perceived as an expert in just about anything. Oh….and yes, all muzungus look alike. No joke.  

 These things I have collectively termed 'The Muzungu  Effect,'  and it has become vernacular among my Zambian team members (who have been quite amused by the antics we have encountered) and among my fellow muzungu friends. You can also have a Double and Triple Muzungu Effects (DME or TME) depending on what else you are doing that is completely against cultural norms. For example, consider if I were to go running.  First, I am white. Muzungu Effect. Secondly, I am a white woman wearing exercise clothes. Double Muzungu Effect (DME). Third, I am running  in a place where NO ONE runs. Triple Muzungu Effect (TME). Thus we can rate our questionable activities rather well.

The wonderful thing about The Muzungu Effect is that it just keeps growing. Every day I discover something new. And while it is a phrase coined in humor, it also has a very serious roots because every time I discover an aspect of The Muzungu Effect, I am also getting closer to understanding an aspect of Zambian culture as it truly is, and not as a foreigner would see it. In other words, by being aware of the differences in treatment, I am at least being aware that of the ways in which my experience is not the norm. Thus I thought that it would be an appropriate name for my blog, as hopefully I will learn more and more about Zambian culture as it is, and not as a foreign tourist.

Stay tuned. To part, some pictures, because everyone loves pictures:

This was my favorite place to buy vegetables on the road from Luanshya to Lusaka.

One dollar buys a whole bowl of whatever they are selling.

 And closer to home, this is my food cabinet as of right now, the 15th of February. With my off hours schedule it has been hard to make it to the market. Thus the past two days of consisted of coffee, bread and peanut butter, and beans.

This is worse than college....

Love to all!