February 12 "Water, Water, Everywhere...."

First weekend in Zambia. Saturday was a nice day to take off from all the planning/scheduling/prepping from the week. Tammy and I ventured into doing our laundry; simple enough task, but in Zambia, nothing is quite that simple when it comes to technology. Silly us, turning the machine on wouldn’t start the wash, but turning on the outlet and the water sure did! With the length of time it took to fill up the washer with water to begin the cycle, I had read two chapters in my book! Then we ran into the difficulty of cooking our grilled cheese for lunch because we couldn’t have the stove on with the dryer, otherwise bad things would happen. Numerous occurrences of turning outlets on and off later, and we had successfully made lunch and started the second load. But boy oh boy, did our two loads turn into a daylong event practically! Besides laundry, we walked down to the market nearby, in the midst of several stares from the locals. We made it to the store for our supplies, but, of course, it started raining as we left the store. However, I was prepared! The two of us tried to keep our newly purchased school supplies and bread under the umbrella for the ten minute walk home. Good thing we got back when we did because we soon found out why it’s called the wet season! A 20 minute downpour ensued as we checked our laundry again. The rest of the afternoon was filled with more visits of the families. Pastor P was going to take us at 14 hours, but we didn’t end up leaving until 17:30! As one of the sem students explained to us, Africans are event oriented, not time oriented. If we were supposed to meet at 14:00, then people start getting ready at 14:00.  I felt like I had read that line right out of a textbook; it was funny hearing it from him. That, and Pastor P was stuck 150 km away made it impossible to begin earlier, but all families were visited in time. J Again, they were so thankful that we were there and it makes me excited to begin teaching on Monday! We were taught some more Chewa and I think it goes something like this: Mwacomo bwanje, which means good afternoon. African languages are nice in the fact that they sound just like they are spelled, so as soon as I see things in print, I’m usually ok with pronunciation. We had a lovely meal at “Arabian Nights” with the missionaries. They were all getting together as a late Christmas gift, but invited us along as well. It was good company with D&L, D&D, S&P, and M&E, along with the children N and S. I had Afghani steak and it was delicious! I also think it’s humorous that I’ve never been to an Arabian restaurant before this trip and I’ve already been to two of them! A little R&R for T and I meant a lovely evening with a movie.