Happy Easter! While it’s just not the same as spending time with family on Easter, I had an enjoyable day overall. Church was packed for the occasion, and it was really neat to celebrate the resurrection with new friends in Africa. Yours truly played the liturgy and hymns on the piano to lead the congregation in singing. T and I also made our choir debut by singing 8 songs with the choir. Thankfully, several of them were ones I have heard before. But let me tell you, it was not an easy task singing songs in another language and doing a different choreographed dance to each song! T and I usually are the center of attention being the only Mzungus, but we were especially stared at today! The choir always sings as they leave church and go through the reception line afterwards, so T and I joined in to, and of course all our little preschoolers thought this was the funniest thing ever to hear the Mzungus singing in Nyanja while greeting them after church! It was a very joyous occasion and I feel honored to have shared the celebration with my new African students and friends.
Random things that happened after church: I asked a lady to take a picture of T and I by the church, and after showing her the button to push, she held the camera the wrong way. Sometimes I forget the lack of technology here and that she’s probably never held a digital camera before. I also took some of the caramel Cadburry eggs T and I bought with some lollipops we had and hid an Easter basket for T to find. J Lunch happened. Unfortunately, I spent some of my Easter working on things, like figuring out our cost spreadsheet, but the good news is, I found one of the mistakes! Hurray! That only took forever to find…
To fit in the mold of normal Sundays, D&D took me to the pool for a swim. The last time seeing it before the big race! I’ve definitely gotten a lot better at swimming pool lengths, but I’m by no means good. Same with running and biking. So of course I’m doing a triathlon…right? I hope this was a good idea, especially since I have to miss the Dutch Reform, the big market that happens once a month, while T and I already missed the first two.
When I got back from swimming, choir practice had already started, so I followed the singing voices and found the choir practicing outside and joined in. After the confidence from excelling this morning in the choir, I thought this would be a piece of cake. But no. The songs we went through were less call and response with different rhythms and more words to memorize. I can’t pronounce the words, let alone memorize them! In one of the songs the sopranos start really low and end up really really high, and I don’t remember any of the words, but the melody has been stuck in my head all day! I do remember the first line: Mweva mwi sone day coo ti que ni, but I have no idea what it means! N, the choir director, even had a song in English today, and they’ve never sang an English song in the three months we’ve been here, but even that one was tough to learn. But at least I knew I was singing the correct words! After those overwhelming 90 minutes, I went back to home for some down time.
Not too much down time because EW and MW, a missionary family we don’t know too well, invited us over for dinner. Good thing because otherwise we had no plans and we were running out of food! They provided a delicious meal including chicken, scalloped potatoes, salad, beans, squash, and cherry cobbler. A meal that makes me forget I’m in Africa. The W family is very well traveled, and they’ve been in Zambia for over 40 years, so it was really neat listening to all their stories. A very nice evening indeed. Unfortunately, after leaving, I really wasn’t feeling well and was dead tired, so I turned in early and missed two chatting dates with loved ones. L The sleep did me good, though.
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