Just because I can’t tell you enough about what I saw here:
Imagine walking down a washed out dirt road. It is uneven and full of potholes caused by erosion. You turn off onto a narrow goat trail that weaves a path through a thick jungle brush speckled with bright pink and yellow blossoms. You pop out in a small clearing where there are a few small brick huts with straw roofs. Home sweet home for the average Dzoole village dweller. Smiling faces (mostly under age 10) flood out of the crops and vegetation to great you. ‘Muzungu’ they cry. This alerts everyone within a 10 mile radius that there is a ‘strange white person’ in the area that needs to be stared at and touched. Before you know it there is at least one child attached to each finger, elbow, knee cap, appendage that you own and they are guiding you through the village pointing at random things and yelling in Chichewa. Welcome to the next month of your life.
The corn fields are high and healthy, there are pumpkin plants, peanuts, potatoes, tomatoes, and more growing in abundance. Goats, chickens, pigs, and cattle roam semi-freely. They do get put up in stick-shack-pins at night or tied to a wooden stake stuck in the ground.
The kitchen is a scary, toxic, enclosed brick room with open wood fires where the women sit and stir massive pots of Nsima, rice, beans, and veggies for half the day. If you are brave enough to enter and try to learn their cooking methods you will be smoked out within 5 minutes. It, then, takes 20 minutes to recover.
The bathroom. Oh, the bathroom! There is another small brick structure with a blue door (sort of) and a tin roof. When you enter you will see a toilet seat built into the ground with a removable lid. I was never brave enough to look into the hole and find out how far down the squatty went, but it sounded deep. Also, hopefully you do not have a fear of cockroaches or fly swarms because both will accompany you in the squatty.
What’s that? You need water to drink, do your laundry, and cook with? No worries, just grab your massive 500 gallon bucket, head down to the ‘river’ (a small stream that is quickly drying up), dig a hole in the river bed so water will filter up through the dirt, fill your bucket, set it on your head, and then simply hike back home for about a mile. Now you are ready to go! Just make sure to boil it. Want a shower? No problem! Pull one of those buckets of boiling water into the brick room, grab your cup, mix in a little cold water, and go to town pouring it over yourself.
Need to run in to town for supplies? It’s easy, just a quick 6 kilometer trek by foot or bike if one is available. However, if you have a few extra kwacha to spend feel free to flag down a van and cram in to a 9 person van that probably already has 16 people in it.
