I arrived in Nsokoshi village in the Mukonchi area last week at night to live with Grace Kasali, a fieldworker for the Child Aid project. I wasn’t sure of the layout of my new home for the next three months since my head was turned towards the sky. I could not take my eyes away from the seemingly endless number of stars above me (probably making the sight of a “muzungo” in the village—the local word for white person—even more strange).
I proceeded to a small, three room house with a tin roof where my host family brothers, Brino and Trivo sleep. We ate nshima (white corn flour cooked with water until it’s a sticky paste) with beans as the relish for supper—which is so far my favorite relish to eat with nshima—as the family chatted in Bemba.
I answered a barrage of questions about Canada, how it compares to Zambia and how long it takes to get to Canada by ship—and I had no idea about the answer to the last one! At the end of dinner, I pointed towards a water-colour painting on the wall with a picture of an African village reading “The village life is to hard to maintain” and asked my host family mom, Miss. Lubemba if she believes what it says. Miss. Lubemba laughed at the painting then said to me "Ah, but it's true!"
Shortly after supper, we started getting ready for bed. In the village, with no electricity people adjust their schedules based on the sun so it’s perfectly normal to go to sleep directly after eating. Grace led me to her hut, about 15 meters from the main house with a thatched roof and I wondered if she still slept there in the rainy season.
In the morning, I could finally see where I was and admire the traditional architecture of the Bantu tribes and their artwork in the style of clay paint on the outside of Grace's hut.
As Grace and I went to fetch water, we passed her older sister home and I discovered that Grace lives within an area of about 100 hectres with extended family all around totaling around 120 people. This kind of living arrangement is common. Children shyly watched me from a distance. For many children it was the first time seeing a white person.
The community is fortunate to have a clean water source with a tube well located about 100 meters from the house. After fetching water the family and I listened to the news on the radio and ate breakfast on a straw mat outside the house.
Chewing on a delicious yellow sweet potato I wondered, is what I’m seeing poverty? How vulnerable is Grace's family? Are they unhappy? I stared up at the sky and contemplated the difficulty defining who is poor and what is development.
2 comments:
I doubt I'd want to go to sleep with a beautiful starry sky to stare at all night! And that's funny, about the ship journey; I'm guessing it would take a few weeks, maybe?
What I really wanted to comment on are your questions at the end. In my cultural anthropology course, I've been introduced to the same kinds of ideas, and I think it comes down to our idea of wealth, which is shaped by, among other things, our means of subsistence. We think that people who live in foraging, horticultural, and pastoral societies must have a hard time making ends meet and they must be miserable, what with not having all the comforts, money, and the relatively enormous amount of material possessions that we have. But from reading the works of cultural anthropologists who've done fieldwork with societies like that of the Ju/wasi hunter-gatherers know of the Kalahari desert, I've learned that our ideas about their lives being devoid of leisure and them being perpetually engrossed in an arduous struggle for survival, are wrong. And they don't see themselves as poor, because unlike Westerners, they don't count their wealth in material possessions, but in their relationships with each other. They measure wealth in people, not things. And they are happier and more content in general, because their needs -finite and basic subsistence needs, are fulfilled, unlike our infinite needs for everything and anything we can afford (and even what we can't afford; advent credit card). I think Western society should try and learn some tribal wisdom from the people it labels "underdeveloped" or "third-world", instead of being arrogant and assuming that the rest of the world needs to be "saved".
Anyway, so ends my rambling. I liked reading your weblogs (the correct term :P) because they're a lot like little ethnographic articles, which I find interesting, so I hope you'll continue, even as your work load increases.
I was going to ask you to take a picture of the sky, but I'm not sure commercial cameras are sensitive enough for sky photograph.
It sounds amazing! You're questions at the end very very thought provoking and probably the answers will only become more complicated as you go through your placement. I have a couple of questions that aren't quite as complicated.
Is Nsokoshi fairly isolated that (as a white person) you would be an unusual sight? Or is it more that a white person is an unusual sight pretty much anywhere in Zambia?
How does the rest of the village view the project? It's wonderful how the participants welcome it, but is the knowledge and attitudes passed on to other members of the community, or is it viewed as "I'm not part of it so it doesn't matter to me"?
Finally, what have you noticed about the role of women in the community and in family life? I have read a bit about women's issues in the developing world and I really wanted to get you're take on it.
Thanks! I'm glad to hear things are going well so far. :)
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