A little summary of all things Africa.
- Dust and dirt. Everywhere. My clothes will never be the same, my feet have dirt permanently etched into my heels, and some of my socks did not make it to Asia. It is the hot season here, so there is not a lot of green, and it does not rain very frequently. The roads in the village areas are all dirt, so we are all dirt as well. It’s always fun to look down at your hands and arms after a bunch of little sweaty kids have been holding on to you – it’s like they smeared you with mud.
- Still hot. Malawi would get quite cool in the evenings, but October in Zambia is the hottest month of the year for them, so we were mostly sweating. Two showers a day became a very real thing.
- Children. Everywhere. All the time. In both countries, almost half of their population is under the age of 15. High birth rates and the AIDS crisis have attributed to some of this. Everywhere we go we are surrounded by children who all want to hold our hands and give us high fives. You will soon find out that more than one child can hold one hand at a time. Three per hand is more accurate and there may be fighting over who gets to hold it.
- Illness/injury. Pretty much inevitable when your ministry and living environment includes hundreds of kids who don’t wash their hands and don’t know what a Kleenex is, and your route to anywhere involves a dirt road full of rocks and hunks of concrete and crevices. Team Ezer has suffered from two twisted ankles, two sinus infections, multiple head colds/upper respiratory infections, many bouts of the TD, and we have gone through at least 4 rounds of cipro and 1 round of amoxicillin. There was at least one ministry day where only 4 people made it out of the 7 of us. Thankfully, most of that was in Malawi, so Zambia was an improvement.
- Itchiness. Apparently this struck me worse than anyone else on my team, but the combination of mosquitoes, mysterious bug bites, super dry skin in Malawi, and all the sweating in Zambia has about driven me crazy with being itchy. I have nearly finished my second tube of cortisone for the Race. My skin does not like Africa.
- Power outages. Occurred at any time in Malawi, and was an almost daily occurrence. In Zambia they were scheduled, so we were at least able to plan ahead to have food prepared and such. No power also means no internet, so we had to figure out all of the schedules in Zambia to be sure we didn’t come into town for internet when the power was off. The water also went out in Malawi all the time. Power and water is such an issue in Malawi that everyone keeps huge barrels of extra water in their homes, and they only use charcoal pots to cook their food.
- Creatures. Rats, mice, cockroaches, big spiders, and the most ridiculous amount of ants and flies. We also had a kitten living in our laundry room.
- Hand-washing clothes. This has almost become second nature. What is a dryer? Still haven’t seen one of those on the Race.
- Hearing “azungu” or “mazungu” whenever you go anywhere. We are most certainly the minority here, and you just can’t hide when all the children/adults/grandmas announce your presence wherever you go as if you are a rare animal being spotted in the wild and they don’t want anyone to miss it.
- Africa is loud. Kids are loud, drunk college students are loud, singing is loud, music is loud.
- The saddest thing:
These are mangoes. You will notice that they are green. You will also notice how big the mango tree is and that there are so many mangoes on it, right in front of the building where we are staying. I see all of these mangoes every day, but I cannot have them. We are about 1 month too early for mango season, so unfortunately, I will be leaving Africa without tasting one mango. Sad day. But it’s ok, I’m asking God for mangoes in Asia.
