Sorry it’s taken me over a month to post on here. I’ve been either busy, lazy (as always), or just haven’t thought anything notable has happened. Some people have asked me what an average day here looks like. So this is an average weekday from the past month, as exact as possible:
6:40 – Alarm goes off. Sleepy Katie reaches out from under her mosquito net to find her cell phone to turn her alarm off. Knocks over her lamp and her bedside table. Presses the snooze button. This is repeated five times over the next twenty-five minutes.
7:05 – Katie gets up. Finds clothes to wear for the day and grabs her shower stuff. Walks to the shower and is greeted numerous times with “Mwauka bwanji?” (“How is the morning?”). Grumpily replies, “Bwino,” (“Fine”).
7:35 – Leaves bathroom, more people ask her how the morning is. By this point, Katie is less cranky and is not quite as sarcastic when replying. Katie then checks Facebook and email and eats breakfast, which is either porridge made from mealie-meal with large amounts of sugar dumped into it, or a bowl of corn flakes and the Frosties (the South African version of Frosted Flakes) mixed together.
8:15ish – Nothing starts on time. Certainly not the staff devotional. This is Africa. But at some point after 8:15, the staff devotional starts. There is singing, praying, Bible reading, and announcements. This is for the CACZ office staff.
9:15ish – Katie starts her fifteen minute bike ride to House of Martha. This is especially fun when she forgets her raincoat and an apparently clear sky decides to turn evil and dump rain on her. But bike rides are wonderful here, rainy ones included in that wonderfulness. When she gets to House of Martha, Katie goes to the office and start sorting, checking, alphabetizing, fixing, or marking books.
10:30 – Tea time. What a wonderful thing. The British know what’s up.
11:00 – Back to work.
13:00 – Lunch. Nshima, a cooked vegetable, and some form of protein.
14:00 – Back to work.
15:30ish – Leave for House of Moses. The next few hours Katie reads, sleeps, wastes time on the computer, eats anything that isn’t nshima, watches episodes from seasons 2 and 3 of The Office, talks to people, or plays with babies.
20:00 – Dinner. Same as lunch. Then more of what Katie did before dinner.
22:30ish – Sleep.
Next week I’ll be done organizing the library (it has taken obnoxiously long to finish), and will then start reading with the kids. I’m so incredibly excited for this. The kids at House of Martha, because of their situation, don’t receive the personal attention a child in a traditional family receives, and because of this, many of them don’t do quite as well academically as they potentially could. They rarely get someone working one-on-one with them with their specific needs. They are such great kids and I’m so excited to give them what they need, even if it’s just for a short time.
While I’ve been here I’ve been becoming more and more obsessed with aid and its problems. So many times people with good intentions donate their money and stuff to charities, but don’t do proper research on what they are donating to and what kind of effect it will have, and so they only relieve symptoms of a larger issue. It’s kind of like if you haven’t eaten all day and because of that, have a headache. Now, would you take Advil to make the headache go away temporarily, or would you take the time to realize you have to eat, and then give your body food (what it actually needs) rather than a temporary pain killer? Block the annoyance temporarily, or take the time to take care of the real problem? That was kind of a stupid analogy and I guess it’s not that simple all the time. But sometimes it is. Since I’ve been spending a lot of time with the books at House of Martha, I get to see this problem first hand. Now, Zambia happens to have been colonized by the British. Because of this, Zambians use British spellings, rather than American spellings (colour v. color). The thing is, most of the books donated to the school (though with good intentions) are American books. So the books have American spellings. Because of this, the kids, when reading the books in the library, learn how to spell like Americans. Not like Zambians. Yup. I don’t mean to sound self-righteous or annoying or anything, but when you see avoidable issues like this daily, it starts to wear on you. My new favorite website is http://goodintents.org/, which “provides readers with the knowledge, tools, and resources they need to ensure that their donations match their good intentions.” So good.
I promise I won’t take a month to update this again. Thank you for any emails, comments, or letters. They’ve meant so much to me.
I'm sorry that I only just found your blog. I feel like I am working on the other side of your problem, in a way (I work at the Foundation Center in Atlanta). We have a lot of people who come in wanting to start organizations that help people, and occasionally that's in the form of aid to Africa. When I listen to people talk about what they want to do, I try my best to think of you and think of where that intended aid will be theoretically going and what it will look like, and try my best to make sure the people who are talking about starting organizations understand what they're doing and that just bringing random clothes and food over to "Africa" (as if a continent the size of so many countries combined can be summarized in a single name) isn't necessarily going to be helpful in the long run.
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