This weekend, you graduate high school. I know this day has been one that you looked forward since you knew what high school was. From here on out, the world can be structure-less. From here on out, the things that capture our days, the periods into which we can divide them, are optional. The defining element of a post-high school existence is choice – the choice of who to live with, of what to do, of which of your myriad of dreams to follow and which will be first ones to let go.

Of course, acting on these choices sometimes seems irrational. At times, our alternative might be setting up a residence alone in a drafty cardboard box. Truly, our lives are no freer. But still us out-of-high-school ‘adults’ place the idea of choice in the dusty closets of our minds, like one of those post-9/11 survival packs we were all so quick to buy. Using it would mean our world is in chaos, but we take comfort that it is there.

In truth, free will is mostly a lie. We must work at jobs to make livings, we must love the people who love us back, and we must remain in the tracks that habit digs too deep for us to leave. We remedy this deception by obsessing over changing our superficialities – our hair, our clothes, our bodies, our things. We follow invisible rubrics, strive for unmarked grades. Occasionally a mid-life crisis will go further, and we will laugh, embarrassed, at this someone who’s too cool for school.

So what am I getting at here? I am trying to give you some words on this very important day, some wisdom that I have found. It’s not an electric kettle, or a photo album or a gift certificate to Bed, Bath and Beyond. It is, apologetically, a trite bit of graduation advice, in a medium exhausted well past cliché. At 25, it is all I have to offer.

I have few clear insights from my quarter-century of life. Statistically, my presence on earth is an achievement. Global childhood mortality is at six percent. And there are the countless other mishaps and hazards along the way – the sicknesses, the car accidents, the psycho-killers, the freak hair dryer in the tub. I might not believe my 25 years have bestowed me with much wisdom, but I recognize them as a gift. To breathe is to be grateful, for all those breaths that came before.

I know our world is troubling.

There are women, children really, taken from homes to cities, where they must sit on stranger’s laps in exchange for a life. There are men with guns, pointing at other men who also have guns and neither group quite knows the reason and not one of them wants to die. There are many many millions of people who walk with holes in their heels where little bits of themselves fall out and are forgotten. And one day they awake an incomplete puzzle, jagged and pointless and with a picture that does not make sense.

You and I are people who know this. Our holes are not big enough to let this knowledge slip out, and our hearts must beat a little harder because of it. It is difficult to convince the blood to leave the cozy chamber of our right ventricles when there is a world of sex slaves and soldiers and jigsaw pieces around. For this reason, we are often tired.

There are many who will deal with the troubles by getting angry. Who believe that the choices offered are complacency or anger, and nothing more. Comply with the system or fight it. I know that this option appeals to you – you who feel, you who knows the weariness of heels without holes. Hate will set you free.

Once, I knew this anger. I hated corporations, I hated condominiums, I hated Wal-Mart, I hated Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. I was angry at globalization, at war, at oppression both large-scale and small.

I was proud of my resentment. Likewise, I was proud of the deep pools of sadness that the futility of my activism brought on. I choose to change the world, finding my efforts more valid than the consumption-based changes all around me.

The thing is, I was wrong. Hate isn’t the only choice available. And it’s just as superficial as all those choices that make the angry people so red in the face. In our attempts to save the world, we have divided it – with all sides vehemently raging against the other. We have failed.

So here’s my graduation advice for you, so many silly words later. When you live this beautiful, new open life of yours, don’t be fooled. Your options are greater than you could believe. When you feel you are offered compliance with the status quo or the angry surging against it, choose neither. Choose joy.

When the sadness of the world, with all holes, has made you weary, choose joy. Fight it all with joy.

There is no other way I know to handle this life. You are here. You are breathing. You are loved. Be grateful. Have joy.

We cannot stop war by hating war. We cannot stop suffering through anger. The holes in the heels of this world will not be darned if we just keep our heads down and plod on.

To have joy is to spread joy. Like the flu or cat hair, it violates its nature to stick to one living being. So do what makes you happy, and your happiness will contaminate the world.

It will not be easy. It will be easier to hold your anger, hot and predictable in your chest. Or to build an existence surrounded by the shallow markers of pleasure and success that replace the As and Bs in the post-high school progress report. True joy does not stem from these things. And it withers in the presence of rage. It must come from you, from a true desire to change the world with its touch.

I can promise you this. The process will change you. It will make you a better person, and it will make those around you better for having known you. There will be times when the world crushes you. When you hear of a two-year-old who dies from AIDS complications. When you watch CNN. When it is cold and you are warm and you know that others, somewhere, are not.

You will be mad sometimes. You will be so mad that you want to scream at the people who appear so unconcerned. And you will want to destroy, to debase, to hate. It will be difficult, then, to turn away.

But if you make any choice, make this one. Let this be the class you continue. Let it be the curriculum that guides your days. Do what makes you happy. Remember when the world feels tight around you, that you are free, that you have a choice. Act in love. Embrace joy.

So there you are. I hope you can use these words in some way. I hope they can bring you a peace. Next time, I promise, I’ll just send a gift card to Subway.

It’s official – I’m a Lusaka city girl now. The adjustment from my cozy cottage life, where I could spend full days reading and struggled to go through a dollar a week, to my new urban one was interesting to say the least. I now have an 8 to 5 job that I adore, a three-bedroom flat that I share with my best friend, a commute and monthly expenses, a much more frequently accessed wallet and a rapidly expanding closet.

Zambia remains a source of both great joy and frustration for me, and this contradictory nature does nothing to dim my love for it. Four months into my third year and I know I could have made no other decision besides this.

My work at a non-profit committed to behavior change around HIV/AIDS is challenging and my position often sends me on the road to one of our ten field sites throughout the country. I’ve been given responsibilities that I wouldn’t get near within a few years of work at a comparable US organization and am glad to finally be working concretely on the epidemic in this country.

But to truly give you a picture of my new life, I’m recruiting the help of someone who has an intimate view of it. Yes, that’s right, my orange tom cat, Dorcus.

As a last aside before I switch narrators and officially tick off the “crazy cat lady” box on my census form, let me note that Dorcus (in puppet form) has made two previous appearances as a Brittany-life ethnographer. This is his first venture into the blogosphere...

It’s 5:30 in the morning and I sit about a foot from a sleeping Brittany’s face, focusing on making my green eyes wide for when her green ones open. For while, when we first moved here and I was going through my difficult transition phase as she likes to say, I would simply bite her hair until she woke up and fed me. I quickly realized that that method yielded more aerial journeys across the room than feedings though and stopped.

Lusaka is chilly now and Brittany isn’t quite visible under the colorful spread of her duvet. She had hand-stitched the patchwork pieces of chitenge during lazy village afternoons and long school meetings and the hours spent waiting for transport on many a Zambian road. It was a relic of a once unpredictable existence and that too contributed much to keeping her warm.

By 5:45, the force of my glare has woken her up. It’s a gift. I run figure 8’s around her ankles, crying and nipping if the situation seems urgent. Town life has rounded out my already healthy village tummy, and if I want to maintain my new physique, it’s crucial that I am fed promptly. Brittany, of course, doesn’t share in my prioritizing and will dawdle in the bathroom or by heating the kettle for tea.

Within the hour, I’m comfortably full of kibble and have returned to napping on a freshly made-up bed, and she’s out the door to work. From what I gather, she spends her days writing training guides and personal stories of change, meeting with various other peoples and buying us groceries at the mall a few minutes from her office. It seems to require a lot of energy.

Meanwhile, back at the flat, I live the lap of luxury lifestyle I prefer. I test all the beds, couches and patches of sunlight for optimal napping quality. I roll around in the little backyard garden. I add to my repertoire of things guaranteed to annoy Jen, Brittany’s roommate. I occasionally deign to show myself to the little gang of children living next door, who think I am quite handsome and narrated by every movement like EPSN announcers. I take frequent snack breaks. All this is quite exhausting and I wouldn’t my blood sugar to drop.

By 18 hours, Brittany is back. Despite all my feline training to remain nonchalant, I rush to the door, making sure my white booties and chest are especially glowing. After all, this is the person who feeds and houses me, who brought me from the village to my rightful place in the big city, and it pays to show some gratitude. Besides, I need to work it if I am to secure that ticket to America – the land of Petco and Whiskas.

The girls chatter as they cook, making spicy, vegetable-filled meals that hold no interest for me. I still use the opportunity to practice my begging techniques. The roommate is a baker and occasionally I go into a full force charm and aggravate offensive to net some pumpkin bread, ginger cookie or walnut-chocolate biscotti.

When it’s clear that there’ll be no table scraps for me, I sulk off on my nightly patrols. I take my job of protecting these females very seriously. No rats, snakes or other intruders on my watch. Before dawn, I’ll return to the sleepy house, ready to begin again. Ready for another day in the LSK..

Last night, ants invaded my house. When I say invaded, I mean massive ground-level infantry movements. Think Napoleon, think Normandy, think Bombs Over Baghdad. This crawling black carpet woke me from sleep and I flip on a flashlight to see their thousands of singly-driven crumb-seeking eyes.

The impetus for this attack was a slight adjustment to my box of tea. This shift in land mass allowed them access to my previously unreachable hanging basket of dirty dishes.

Somehow the master commander of the six-legged army received news of this development. And the invasion began. A futile effort at deterring and squashing left me with bitten ankles and a few too many unwelcome visitors in my PJ bottoms. Thus conquered, I pulled a Chamberlain, tucked my mosquito net tight, and returned to bed. My appeasement wasn’t total though – I did move the tea box. As I tried to sleep through the marching, the little invaders did give me some interesting thoughts.

How is it that ants know exactly where to swarm to find sustenance? To them, my two-room hut must seem as vast as this great big world seems to me and yet, they did not dally, they do not wander lost in corners, embark on fruitless quests up chair legs and into cupboards. To watch them on their trek across the savanna of my cemented, pock-marked floor is to witness a purposeful migration.

Why is it then that we must move so aimlessly across the earth? Seeking and so seldom finding the nourishment that makes our journey worth the while? To just be plopped down and know instinctively where to go to find that crumb that will save you, now that would be an awesome gift.

Or so I used to think. I wrote these opening lines months ago, the bones of a blog entry never completed, pushed aside by the vacations and novels and chitenge projects that kept me from delving into this little ol’ notebook at site. At the time, the ants seemed enviable, in their purposeful marching towards food. I was torn between committing to another year in Zambia working who-knows-where doing who-knows-what, or moving back to the States, and facing similarly vague employment choices. I had been intensely happy in my two years in the village. My cottage had nourished me, fed me the foods I had not known I was hungry for. My electric-less, plumbing-less existence, the long lazy days had been my teacher and I had learned. As Ntozake Shange wrote, “I have found God in myself and I have loved her, I have loved her fiercely.”

But that life had to end, is now ending. And the world, at that moment, seemed too vast. I was an ant in two-room hut. Facing choices – grad school, job search, more volunteering, or as one friend suggested, a move to some ashram where I could do yoga and write – without any inkling of which way I should go.

I write this now wrapped in the cozy comfort of a decision made. Candles flicker and groundnuts roast on the brazier. Through the open window float moths and the voices of my neighbors over evening meals, the full moon adding tones of festivity to their rapid KiKaonde cadences. I have eight such nights left. By the time I type these words, Kamayembe will be gone to me.

I have a new job here – and a good one. I’ll still be a Peace Corps Volunteer but I’ll be working 9-to-5 as an extension agent at an Zambian health NGO. I’ll be helping HIV-positive people to tell their stories, documenting their lives in articles and pictures, and assisting with community radio awareness programs. Though I’ll live in Lusaka – with a real apartment and nearby grocery stores (!) – my job will send me on the road, into the field, one to two weeks a month. Which is what I want. With my new life will come constant internet access and conveniences, so hopefully I will seem more connected to all of you across the ocean.

It was not an easy decision to remain in Africa another year and I did not make it lightly. I miss all you loved ones immensely. I crave my friends’ laughter over good coffee and confessions over good red wine; the warmth of family gatherings and the anonymity of walking an American street, not always being reduced to a race and a gender.

But I also know that this is right. I love Zambia. I love Peace Corps. And I am not yet ready to give them up. They still have much to teach to me. As part of my new contract, I have one month’s paid leave to New York. Right now, I’m thinking October unless anyone has any strong pulls for a different time.

I no longer envy ants.

I still don’t know, instinctively, where in this fascinating world I should scurry at any moment. But I no longer would want to. I have come to value the wandering, as clichéd and trite as that may be. I know that the nourishment we seek stays in no one place, that each day lived with a commitment to love, each breath drawn in happiness, feeds us.

And what crumb could be sweeter than that?

Someday, when this journey is over, we will sit together. Perhaps we will be cupping steaming mugs, perhaps we will be stabbing salads, perhaps we will driving to and fro. Because that is what one does when one is young and lives on an island.

And we will be talking. Of boyfriends, of other friends, of awful bosses, of the more awful lack thereof. Because that is what one talks about when one is young and lives on an island.

And then you will ask me of Africa.

And I will tell you certain things when you ask me of Africa.

You will ask me of the weather.

I will tell you that there are three seasons. That it rains from November to April. That May through August have cold morning and nights. That the heat descends as viscous beast in September until it is deadened by fall’s first storm.

I will not tell you how when it rains, it silences all sound of humanity until you cannot remember what it was to think and just sync your breath and your heartbeat to the steady staccato drum. I will not tell you how when it is hot, you sit doing nothing but track the sweat as it beads in your elbows, the back of your thighs, some little nook of your soul as the temperature sweats from it any desire besides lethargy. I will not tell you how when it is cold, the thatched roofs steam with the warmth of breakfast fires and sleeping hearts, and how you enumerate every drop of water in you as the dryness closes in, a desertification of chapped lips, of cracked heels, of absent tears.

You will ask me of the village.

I will tell you that the people live in mud-and-grass homes, clustered by families and clan. That they get water from wells and cook on fires in open-air gazebos called kinzangas. That they grow cassava and maize and groundnuts and pumpkins. That they buy incidentals like soap, salt and cooking oil from little stands called tuck shops.

I will not tell you how the women sit for hours plaiting each other’s hair and how their laughter reaches to a place in your femininity that you did not remember existed. I will not tell you how when you return home, the grandmother who sits sentry in your path raises her hands in greetings and how the skin hangs like war medals from her bones and how if there are gates to some heaven surely they should be manned by a woman such as this. I will not tell you how on full moons, families morph to creatures of singing and dancing and how you lay in patches of moonlight and let the bonds of others cocoon you into sleep.

You will ask me of the children.

I will tell you that there are many. That they can make balls out of anything. That they run from their houses just to see you bike by as though your daily commute is a Haley’s Comet and not some fixed constellation in their skies.

I will not tell how they wear the rags of clothing that were once designer – Oshkosh jumpers, babyGap tees – and you wonder if the happiness of previous owners lingers on and if mutual proximity to growing bones and scrapped knees will bring a connection yet unknown. I will not tell you how they are in the schools, with shorts that ride up thighs and shirts that no longer button and with feet and minds that make the long walk to classes every day knowing there is no future beyond what this simple village can provide. I will not tell you how sometimes when you look at them, your very body aches for it, with its white skin and residual cells fed from supermarkets and hope, houses a spirit equal to theirs and the claustrophobia that injustice provokes leaves your spirit banging to get out.

I will not tell you all this because I have lost the words. Between here and there, adrift in the ocean or at unclaimed baggage perhaps, are my descriptions, my adjectives, my nouns.

I will tell you the that’s but not the how’s. I will try to make us understand. Because that us what one does when one is young and lives on island and once, once lived in Africa.

Hello again, dear friends, family and assorted others. It’s been a while. Since writing last I have celebrated a one year anniversary as a Zambian resident, spent three days tranversing the continent on a train, read 10 books, cemented and painted the walls of my little hut, now affectionately known as Kamizhi’s Cottage, and spent countless rainy afternoons and candlelit evenings sewing and my newest craft-based obsession, collage-ing. (side note: the current trend is anything that cannot feasibly be modified with a chitenge scrap – i.e. tabletops, door, magazine files) should be covered with photo clippings and leftover wrappers. So far my cat has escaped the chitengifization of 2010 but he did earn himself a bowtie.) Confession: while much of my craft-happy binge can be blamed on the rains, another major factor was my decision to smarten up my reading lists. While I love reading the classics and policy books that fill out Solwezi library’s shelves, a few weeks of straight James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are enough to drive even this most bookish of girls to the needle and glue stick as it were.

There is no real unifying theme to this entry besides its randomness. So I’ll skip the strained transitions and label each new thought line as it appears. Enjoy the glimpse into the disjointed musings that have been bouncing around my head these days.

School and Such.

Work goes well. January started a new school year in Zambia – a much more logical system. At seven years, two of my favorites children on the family compound are now old enough to walk the two kilometers to school and back. Twin brothers, they love to show me their workbooks on the days they actually go. They point out their clumsily drawn alphabets with pride-filled gap-toothed grins. Workbook gained and teeth lost – concrete evidence of the passing months.

At my zonal school, we’re trying to start a small library out of our resource centre. If anyone has any free(ish) ideas for encouraging literacy in kids, please pass them on! On another kinda note, I’m spending this week training the incoming volunteers at my old training stomping grounds of Chongwe. Don’t really feel like I know enough about anything Zambian to be an effective trainer but perhaps I’ll fool them (and myself).

Stuff

Peace Corps Zambia’s population operates the way the world’s population should. In order for new volunteers to come in, the old ones have to go out. Meaning that in about a month, a good quantity of my friends here will be returning to America-land. While I get this on principle, in practice it is much harder to accept. Besides causing emotional strain, this upcoming departure also has me thinking a lot about stuff, literally.

Packing has never been a pleasant experience for me. I hate deciding what to leave and what to take. I like my things. I want them with me. I believe it hurts their feelings to be left behind, a theory I trace back to early childhood movies where toys came to life behind their owners’ backs and lamented their slow fading into disuse. But maybe that’s just me trying to put a veneer of psychological romance to my materialism.

Already I am dreading the task that my friends are now confronting – packing up their Peace Corps life into as small a space as possible, jettisoning most of it as giveaways to other volunteers or the village, and strapping the remainder on their backs as they set off for final vacations before the real world begins. Seeing this process made me realize two things: I have a lot of stuff; I am very attached to it.

Who would have thought that this experience would make me embrace my materialism? Perhaps it is just that this little cottage is the first place that is truly all my own. And the longest I lived anywhere for one stretch since leaving for college. Ideally I would like to just pick this whole little hut up and plop it down somewhere in America, preferably a rather incongruous urban setting. With maybe the addition of electricity and plumbing.

The upshot of my stuff dilemma is that I still have a year to cultivate a Buddha-like non-attachment. But I’m not holding my breath.

My ramblings on how to save the world/Stop reading if you are not a development major with some time to kill

Two of the more intellectual reading materials that have passed over my desk these days are Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” and New York Times’ special women’s rights issue (timed to complement columnists Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book “Half of the Sky”) Klein’s book links a suspension of democracy, neoliberal market changes and torture, starting in Pinochet’s Chile and continuing throughout transitional countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa. This trifecta is responsible for the explosion of inequality and dearth of social safety nets in the developing world and for the “shocked” populations’ refusal to demand their basic economic rights. The Times focused more on the traditional outrage-inducing rights violations – Indian women whose husbands drank away their microloan earnings, Afghan girls attacked by acid throwers on their way to school, African mothers with botched or fatal childbirths and no access to contraceptives, American wage earners with bank accounts three-fourths as full as their male counterparts. Reading the stories of these anecdotal women, there is a clear connection between the hit-you-over-the-head blatant abuse and my rising sense of injustice.

For Klein’s book, the lines of repression are murky, no drunken spouses or rapist soldier to villain-ize but a complex web of global corporations, think tanks, international organizations and suited speculators. A fog of evil or just plain selfishness that has none of the solid edges of a traditional enemy. It’s hard to get riled up about private banks and export treaties. Together the book and the magazine revived the dichotomy of my AU life – “The Shock Doctrine” mirroring the dry economic readings and second generation rights lectures; The Times that of noisy student meetings and impassioned coffeehouse debates. (side note: I have been missing my days as a linked-in member of activist circles for a while now. A small sacrifice to make for my Peace Corps experience, which requires a hiatus of activism while a government employee. Still, a part of me aches for the communities of loving fighters. We who built up imaginary utopias, who dirtied our hands with policies and actions, who knew that when the world’s hurt pushes you to your edge the only solution is to scream into the void and pray that your echo brings you back some hope.)

It is cliché to say that the modern bleeding heart will care a lot more about the easy, personalize, gross individual rights violations highlighted in The Times than the vague, systematic violations perpetuated against entire populations by the market. For one thing, the neoliberal rights violation is less an abuse of a person than a restriction of the realm of the possible. If throwing dissidents in prison or mutilating genitalias could be compared to beating a dog, then imposing neoliberal markets sans social safety nets could be putting that dog on a very short leash. Who’s to say it would leave if it got the chance anyway. And if the leash leaves the dog defenseless against the elements and would-be attackers, well is that really the leasher’s fault?

Most people recognize a good economy that provides jobs and opportunities and a state that provides healthcare, education and security as prerequisites to any good quality of life. Still, most people who care about other people in this world are by nature fixers. It’s a lot easier to “fix” hunger by donating a cow than it is to throw off a global yoke of an economic system. One solution can be finished with the click of the mouse in between email checking and dinner plans. The other takes a little longer.

Call it the “drive-thru” mentality. We like issues that can be easily packaged, ones we can throw our money at and move on, full on cheap empty calories and conveniently ignoring the lack of nutritional sustainability.

Being here has made me painfully aware of this drive-thru ethos of helping. Zambians are conditioned to see Westerns as donors – of school rooms, of medical supplies, of water wells. These money-based quick fixes may satisfy a village’s immediate hunger, but they do absolutely nothing to permanently nourish a country that is starving for better systems of education, healthcare and sanitation. Worse, they perpetuate a dependency on aid, make skills transfer work like the Peace Corps’, unspeakably difficult, and allow for a governmental sloth on basic rights issues. It’s the equivalent of a Big Mac’s artery clogging, spare-tire inducing effect and it is only getting super-sized.

It seems that countries like Zambia need more than aid to develop. They need the changes hinted at in Klein’s book. They need a rollback of the neoliberal revolution of the 90s. They need a greater state hand in the market. They need the Third Way that was briefly thought possible after the fall of communism but eclipsed by dominance of unfettered capitalism.

Sadly, these changes will not be as easy coming as the aid dollars. And perhaps my conclusions are too short-sighted. I’m too near the problem to see the solution. Perhaps the next book I read will send me another pseudo-intellectual diatribe. Maybe I just miss college term papers more than I’d like to admit. Regardless thanks for putting up me. As always.

Per Stevie’s suggestion, I am writing my New Year’s letter to the Universe. What is it that I want out of this great big beautiful world this decade? What is it that I am grateful to already possess? Being here has alerted me to the incredible miracle of my existence. I am blessed beyond my understanding, but for the grace of colliding genomes or conspiring deities go I. It’s easy to assume that these blessings are noticed now only in the stark contrast of poverty and disadvantage that I live in, as if privilege casts a glow discernable only in the darkness of need. That’s not quite true. Yes being here has helped me appreciate the material circumstances of my life – my education, my financial security, my American passport. But it has also helped me to discover the other more valuable blessings that litter my world. These things are not so easily linked to economic status or geographic location.

Like a true Oscar winner, let me first recognize my family and friends, guides and mentors. Both in America-land and here in Zambia, I have continually been surrounded by those who love me. Everyone always says they’re grateful for friends and family. It’s kind of one of those automatic likes necessary for membership in the human race, together with puppies and hot-from-the-oven cookies. But you don’t always realize that gratitude until you’re alone in a hut with your thoughts and your memories and the knowledge that there’s a whole web of people out there who only wish you well. It’s a wonderful, wrapped-up, cozy feeling, contemplating that web. In the world of instant, intrusive communication, such a network can be taken for granted or resented as entangling. From here I can see only the benefits, this primordial support system as old as mankind. I talk to my network (side note: Verizon has totally ruined that word for me. All I can see is the ‘Can you hear me now?’ guy) less here but I cherish its members more.

There are other blessings that I can now name, inherent things I have unearthed since arriving and new things that have grown into my person in this African soil. I am braver than I thought. I believe that most of us have a greater capacity for daring and adventure than our closed-in existence allows us to express. I am blessed with the opportunity to test the boundaries of ability again and again. I am blessed with health and more importantly, when my blessing of health fails me, with a young body that can recover stronger than before. I am blessed with a wandering mind and the time to let it explore whichever nook or alleyway it desires. I am blessed with a hard-won and ever-morphing spirituality that endures exposure to all that is both banal and evil in the world and still finds ways to fill moments with giggle-inducing joy. These gifts have been intensified by my socio-economic position but not produced by them. These are the gifts that the Universe has sent with me on this journey and I strive everyday to be worthy of their company. You shouldn’t cast pearls before swine. Neither should you be swine behind your pearls.

Now that tangent is over. Back to the original goal: to ask the universe what I want out of this shiny 2010. For the sake of space, let’s eliminate the unrealistic ones – the ability to fly, doing a handstand in yoga, a singing voice. Then the beauty pageant answers – world peace, a cure for AIDS, a zero calorie sweeter that doesn’t give you cancer.

Where does that leave us? I want my loved ones at home to be happy, healthy and fulfilled. One of the hardest parts of Peace Corps service is the separation from all of you. Take care of yourselves and seek out every opportunity for joy you can. It’s cliché to say that life’s too short not to, but I’m thinking that with a letter to the Universe I’m already to far enough into the cliché hole to say the hell with it.

I ask that the Universe to keep giving me new experiences; new chances to see existence from fresh eyes. I ask for more laughter on transport, more skipping down dirt paths, more rainy mornings with tea and crosswords, more hijinxs with the children who alternately drive me crazy and keep me sane. I ask the Universe for more moments with Zambia. I ask for a renewed urge to write, and the elusive ability to have these words move closer to the reality I desire them to express. I ask for the humility to accept that as impossible. I ask to continue learning with a sense of wonder and I ask not to fall into the fate of jaded misanthropes like so many starry-eyed seekers before me. I ask to leave off my flowery verbal ramblings occasionally – if only for the sake of my practicality-loving friends who are surely rolling their eyes right now.

Oh and Universe, if in the process, some cute new clothes, a mint green Vespa, beach-front vacations, and other what-nots a 23-year-old girl desires should happen to fall my way I wouldn’t be opposed. Just saying.

As usual, I have mentioned little specific to Zambia. I’ll try to put another day-in-the-life post up soon. This blog has always been more of a way to bring you along on my personal journey than to take on the monumental and egocentric task of reducing Zambian culture to a sporadic, one-page blog entry. Sorry for boring all of you loved ones who read out of obligation. For others, hope you’re enjoying the ravings of my mefloquine-addled, craft-addicted brain. Thanks for reading this. Fingers crossed, the Universe did too.

hi folks - just a quick update while I'm still in Lusaka and basking in my free internet.

First for those of you who get letters, if you could save them for me that would me awesome. I want to photocopy them as a rememberance of my service someday. If it makes you feel like a 1940s war wife, all the better.

Also, a CD player is next on my list of things waiting at home to be sent so I need music! Send me anything new, theme cd's, funny songs, or npr episodes (especially This American Life).

And if you scroll down there's a new book list of things I've read. Let me know if you want recommendations.

New photos are on Facebook.

Okay. Off to Malawi for the Lake of Stars music festival. Be jealous.

I am sitting on my reed mat at a recent stitch 'n dish, or so my neighbor and I call our somewhat bi-weekly combos of lunch and chitenge quilting. Depending on how aggravating village life is the "dish" might change to the less tame "b" word but as this is a family-friendly blog and as both of us are pretty laid-back persons we'll stick with the "dish." (Besides then you get the benefits of the double meaning - food and conversation - and I do love a corny pun.)

And the conversation is the fodder for this post (though the food wasn't so bad either.) So getting back to my reed mat... On this day, we were discussing the role of the Peace Corps Volunteer and more specifically, our fear of not leaving any lasting work after our two-year stay. (Side note: most stitch 'n dish topics are not nearly so existential, this was a bit of an oddity.) I have mentioned previously that I did not come to Africa to effect a development revolution and have no illusionment about the ability of two years of work to surmount long standing systems of inequity. In fact, I still consider my decision to be a selfish one, shelfing a decent education and skill set that could have best served the greater good in some inner city school or cash-strapped NGO. Granted, that's just my opinion - I'm sure most PCVs would disagree. Even so, for all of my talk of being wise to the development crawl, I would still like to thinkof my work here as being somewhat beneficial. I think the "Is my time on Earth making it a slightly better place?" is a fairly universal dilemma whether in a mud hut in Africa or a skyscraper in NYC, unless of course you're amoralistic or certain former politicans.

So what do I do with that time here anyway? Basically everyone I talk to stateside has asked me what the heck my job is and I have so far pretty adeptly dodged the question. Reason being my job description is murky. Peace Corps PR solgan reads the Toughest Job You'll Ever Love. Internally we PCVs sub Toughest for Vaguest. On paper, I'm supposed to be improving the quality of education in my rural zone (equivalent of a US district) and increasing the number of children who can access said education. It all fits into the Ministry of Education's overall plan and more broadly the Millenium Development Goals, complete with statistical indicators and target dates. On the ground level, of course, things aren't so cut and dry. I have 6 government schools and 5 community ones, though I do most of my work at my zonal center school that is 7 km away. I observe classes and give feedback on how to provide child-centered learning. I run workshops or trainings on teaching methods. I work with school officials to write proposals and teach computer classes. I talk abou HIV prevention at the clinic during antenatal sessions. All this sounds lovely on paper. But when faced with the larger issues to rural education I often feel I am pedaling away on a stationary bike (no pun intended). Indeed my least trivial work is often that that doesn't fit neatly into numbers and reports.

In an environment where girls marry young and leave school younger, my status as a college-educated, single 23-year-old is slightly mind-blowing. I cherish my position as a strong feminine role model. Beyond that, I often serve as an ad-hoc cultural ambassador, answering questions ranging from American courtship rituals to the presence of poverty in the States. But one of my most trivial (and most valued) pursuits is just being me.

I once asked a Peace Corps trainer why she liked working with PCVs. She said, "All Americans are different. All Zambians are the same." While that is far from a general rule, culturally Zambia values community over individual efforts. This results in some beautiful traditions but it often boils down to conformity. I have never embraced my American individualism (and my own innate quirkness) more. Ayn Rand would be tickled pink with my acceptance of the ego. Don't worry my leftist comrades, in other areas of my life I remain decidedly non-Randian.

A consequence (and perhaps a contributing factor) to my promotion of the individual, is that I spend a lot time thinking about, well, myself. Apart from some recluses and hermits, I think I am pretty high up there on the time spent alone scale. The opportunity to delve within yourself is hard to find in the fast-paced stateside world but I would recommend you try. The findings might surprise you. Walt Whitman's famous line "I celebrate myself and sing myself" is written large across the wall of my bedroom. Perhaps it ties back to my being selfish but I know the work of believing those words in my heart will be a lasting legacy of my time here.

And somewhere in that heart I know that I am doing something in Zambia. I am encouraging teachers to try new things, I am showing girls a different path, I am befuddling everyone with my strange Kamizhi ways. Hardly a blip on the statistical radar - those percentages and pie charts that find their way into reports that find their way to Washington that find their way into the Congressional budget hearings that keep me fed every quarter. No one ever said that Peace Corp's impact was capturable. But whether I am sewing on a reed mat, or biking to town at dawn, or just rejoicing in this crazy bundle of atoms that is me, I am certain of one thing. It is hardly trivial.

Not to be deter by the lack of true TV, my new favorite village activity is creating my own primetime line-up of programs. Which actually rivals some of the legit 'reality' series passing for entertainment these days. Here are some of my most watched favorites.

What Not to Wear: I'm sure many of you have lost sleep wondering what what happened to all of those neon tracksuits of the late 1980s. Despite their continued popularity among high school gym teachers, there simply isn't a market in America for all that indestructible nylon. But there are willing buyers aplenty in Zambia. Most of the Western clothes in country come via DAPPs, essentially thrift stores stocked with all the donated treasures that second hand shops couldn't sell. Yep, these are the duds that the Salvation Army rejected. Stacy and Clinton would have a field day. Besides the ubiquitous track suit, there's always plenty of t-shirts to amuse. Boy bands and pro wrestlers are staples for teenagers. Seems boys in the States aren't keen on having more desirable boys emblazoned across their chests. Others announce the wearer's relationship requirements - "No Money, No Honey" - or personal accomplishments - "I'm an honors students at Hooters" (seen on a girl of about 5). Another popular look is the hood of a ski jacket. Just the hood, snapped and tied. And no true fashionista would be complete without a holographic belt buckle. Bigger is better bu the image matters too. Obama, Tupac, Tom Cruise - all winking and flexing from the pelvises of Zambia like so many magical Harry Potter pictures.

The Truman Show: In the made-for-TV Zambia version of this Jim Carrey classic, I'm the one on view 24/7. Only no artistic director in a black beret is commanding a legion of staffers to accommodate my every need. If you never brought the concept that people could be mesmerized by one person's daily routine, you should meet my village. I get water every day, wash the dishes, sweep the yard but you wouldn't know it for the audience. Now if I could only find that door in the sky...

Kids Say the Darnest Things: Zambia could have kept this show on the air for decades. The communication barriers between me and the 20-or-so little rascals who hang around my house every day are substantial (basically I have the vocabulary of a slightly slow 2-year-old). Still they never fail to amuse me when I do manage to decipher the mile a minute babble emerging from their mouths. Often it is to tell me that I am committing some drastic error in my daily chores. "Kamizhi those socks are not clean" "Kamizhi you didn't wash the bottom of your pot" "Kamizhi you are sweeping your yard in the wrong direction." My response of "It's clean enough" elicits stares as though arms just sprouted from my head and a resigned "Oh Kamizhi." Nothing beats being schooled by a first grader in hygiene. Just like in America imagination games provide hours of fun. My kids have mastered the "Beep beep beep" back-up sound made by the Belga trucks working on the road. They've also constructed an elaborate network of sand highways in my (poorly swept) front yard. When my yard was filled with materials for building a kinzanga (a traditional gazebo for cooking and entertaining), the kids promptly erected the tallest pole and christening it "MTN" - the cell phone tower that was recently constructed on the road.

So You Think You Can Dance?: Answer in Zambia, yes. Everyone, male or female, young or old, has the ability to dance the pants off of just about 3/4 of the populace of the States. And they dance. Dancing is part of weddings, church (where they often dance their tithe up to the basket), school activities and just everyday life. It almost makes you wonder if they are dancing so much just to make this chronically uncoordinated American feel woefully inadequate. But no, talks with other PCVs confirm, Zambians just love to dance. I've gotten a few offers to be taught and may give it a try but I'm not predicting any competitions in my future.

So there you have it, my substitute boob tube entertainment. So far everything been signed on for the fall but time will tell if any pilots challenge the ratings for next seaon.

Don’t ask me to describe this. These words jumped from my pen as I sat to write this entry.

I hesitated to document my daily life here. Why? Because I am no able anecdote of Africa or even of Zambia. The country that I have known for these past three months is diverse and shifting, a study of contrasts and contradictions - as we all are. So do not ask me to capture this is sentences and thought trains. There is too much and my words will fail. Do not ask me to catalog this in facts and absolutes. I cannot be your reference point for this world so far away.

That said, I made this blog to communicate with you – family, friends, random visitors from the Internet ether. I do know that I miss you all dearly (well, maybe not so much for that last group) and I want you to know how I spend my days here. You shouldn’t have to suffer for my fits of relativist angst. Just bear in mind the above disclaimer and bear with me – your self-conscious, slightly neurotic narrator.

I have now been “at site” for over a month. The world before Mufumbwe is rapidly falling away. Mine is an existence of bucket baths, pit latrines and solar charger battles. I get excited to buy tomatoes and sweet potatoes and bananas. I race the sun – getting where I need to be before the heat of midday, hurrying home again before the fall of dusk.

The same sun wakes me at dawn. Now during cold season, it gets down to about 58 degrees in the mornings. While in D.C. that would have signaled full-on skirt and tank top weather, here it just means freezing. I usually need to don a pair of thick knee-highs, a knit cap, a scarf and my North Face fleece to summon the willpower to get out of bed. Yes this is the same girl who frequently left the house without a coat on in the dead of New York winter. Most mornings I bike the seven kilometers to my head school after breakfast. My role there is to assist with teacher trainings, resource development and really anything education-related in the zone. As of yet, my actual job is still vague so more on that some other time. Regardless, they keep me quite busy that side (a Zambian idiom) and thoroughly enjoy feeding me nshima – the cornmeal staple of the country – whenever the opportunity arises.

Afternoons, I am often left to my own devices, which has been very good for my reading habit. I lay in the hammock and devour books, practice yoga, or visit with the neighborhood ladies for a Zambian version of Stitch and Dish. So far my country craft tally is 1½ knitted scarves, one embroidered LL Bean backpack, 2 aprons and a fair amount of crayon-based wall graffito.

Not to say that I am just twiddling my thumbs over here though. The basics of cleanly survival (succumbing to dirtiness would actually be quite easy) takes up large swaths of daytime. I wash my dishes in buckets and my laundry by hand. I sweep my house – constantly – and so my neighbors don’t judge me, I sweep the dirt in the yard. I draw water from a well and, if I am feeling brave, I carry it home on my head. I bathe outdoors, something that I don’t anticipate getting sick of in 27 months. We don’t have markets here as most people grow what they need for themselves. If someone has extra, say tomatoes to sell, they place of small bowl of them in their walkway and wait for buyers. Kind of like a lemonade stand minus the actual stand part and the oh-so-eager kids. It definitely makes one appreciate the produce section though. On free days, I may bike into town – 20 kilometers away – and enjoy a cold drink and TV news, but only if there’s electricity, a risky bet.

When the sun sets at 6:30, I retreat to my little home. I fill a brazier with charcoal and start my fire for the night. My cooking skills have yet to follow the same learning curve as the rest of me but I still manage to scrape together one hot, mostly edible meal a night. My cat Dorkus – a big orange fluff-ball inherited from a previous volunteer – eats most of my leftovers, as well as copious amounts of little dried fish called kapenta. He seems to have the appetite of most teenaged boys or a Hoover vacuum cleaner. But his antics are sometimes my sole entertainment for the night so I put up with the expense. It’s like Animal Planet for one.

Before coming to Zambia, I read this prediction on another Peace Corps blog: Volunteers who go to Asia become mystics, those who go to Latin America become revolutionaries, those who go to Eastern Europe become drunks, and those who go to Africa come back happy. And yes, there is happiness in the slow fading of days and the simple activities that fill them. In doing chores that modern appliances have made obsolete. In living and working in this community, among these people who have done everything conceivable to welcome this stranger in their midst.

And so, that is that. I have begged not to describe and then droned on and on. But this bit cannot contain everything. Even now, I am bursting with additions and revisions, disclaimers and tangents. I do not have the nuance to offer the whole picture. I have been given four colors when what I need is a 96-count Crayola crayon box. But I am happy. And for now, that is enough.

This one has been far in the days since I hurtled it, a bit unwillingly, into the stratosphere and away from the comforting stability and warmth of the Earth. There were times when I doubted my ability to reach this time, this end of training.

But now, we are here. And I am ready. An adventure is beginning. In a day or two, I will be at my site, in the first home of my own.

The house – as I am sure all of you are dying to know – is a little white and blue gem surrounded by fruit trees and sunshine. There are mangoes, guavas, papayas and lemons growing in my yard. There is a vegetable garden and a soybean plot. There is a chicken house (should I decide to get some) and two trees that are waiting for a hammock to be strung between them. There is a bathing shelter for bucket baths and a pit latrine. I only miss indoor plumbing when I brush my teeth – strangely.

There are two rooms and a pantry. There are two lazy boy chairs sitting around a brazier. There is a bike and a bookshelf to filled with novels and notebooks. There is me.

Training is over. Three days ago, me and 34 of my new found friends stood on the lawn of the U.S. Ambassador’s residence and said the same oath that President Obama had uttered in my D.C. months earlier, to defend the Constitution and protect the country we still knew as home. We sang the U.S. and Zambian national anthems, with my voice cracking from pride in my home and for these amazing people singing next to me.

“Make me an instrument of your peace…” began the country director in her address. She read through the prayer and my heart beat against the St. Francis medal that dangled below my dress. I felt once again the simple truth that I was meant to be here, the soft force of encouragement from somewhere I couldn’t see.

I have traveled in two months. My self is wider. I won’t say I have grown because that is too cliché and not entirely true to the reality of I feel. But my experience is more capable, my being is more expansive. I have pushed out new boundaries from my skin and understanding and now wait for an existence that will fill them.

I have seen poverty. I have seen standards of living that before I had only known about through development classes and Christian adopt-a-child commercials. I have seen a hundred students crammed into a classroom, lacking books and efficient teaching but filled with a desire to learn. What has this brought me – this understanding of lives so closed to the opportunities that stretch before me like America’s mid-western prairies? These new boundaries are membranous – they let pass through these truths and it becomes a part of me, as this food grown in African soil becomes the cells that comprise the physical me. I do not know what will happen when the cells of my being have this muscle memory of Zambia. I do not know self these nutrients will construct.

We all have our "one thing" - the thing that it will be hard to live with or without. The pit latrines, the lack of fruit, the staring, the this, the that.

But they aren't just one thing. They are many. Added to casual conversation. Whispered in the back of the mind. We are making sacrifices. we must remind others and ourselves that this life is but a 27-month adventure. It is not a natural state.

This collection of "one thing" troubles me. we - I - must give up to live here. I must make do. And those that we are among do they know this too? Are their lives a constant state of deprivation or do they exist in an universe of ignorant bliss? I do subscribe to the "what they don't know can't hurt them" theory of development. But to conclude the other - that they are well aware, that they too have a small pile of "one things" that float around their heads like rainclouds, to conclude that is letting in a downswell of suffering and injustice that I do not have the courage yet to withstand.

I have voluntarily abdicated my "one thing." I have fled the land of HDTV and indoor plumbing for mud huts in the bush. Some speak highly of the Zambian lifestyle - living close to the earth. I too find myself exalting it.

Yet does this concept mesh with the Zambian goals of development? The head principal at a school I visited wanted a posting with a cell phone reception, wanted a computer, wanted a house that was more "humane" than her home with a tin roof and glass windows. The bus boy at the hostel wanted a ticket to America, wanted to meet Beyonce and 50 Cent. Those who have the money want to eat breakfast nshima - a highly processed, more expensive form of grain that lacks any of the nutritutional value found in the simpler village meal.

Do I approach them with the same objective? And if I do want to teach them to improve their quality of life, is it fair to impose this mindset on them? You can develop but only so long as you stay the same. I want your babies to live, your children to learn, your women to stay free, but only so long as your village remains the same, trapped in time. Isn't it wrong to deny the excesses whom which I fled? Or at least the dream of them?

America's pile of stuff, its Lady Liberty statue of electronics and make-up and salad spinners and Mavi jeans, Target aisles and Costcos, it did not make me happy. But I had the choice. Maybe for others, it calls out, its LCD latern burns brighter, it beckons to these huddled masses. Our life in America, chock full of stuff, speaks to others. Its voice is different but the words are the same. It reads the lines well-worn by religious freedom, by opportunity, by upward mobility. "Come here where you will be free. Be happy here."

I believe that this time Lady Liberty is lying. They believe she is telling the truth. How can we work together? More importantly, who is right?

I am not a princess, spider or otherwises. Physically, I am no different than the me of 24 hours ago. These same cells and ligaments that now suspend thousands of feet over the Atlantic Ocean bear no different marks than those that waited tables in Bay Shore, that stocked shelves in Northampton, that dreamed away Washington nights. Still?

A goldfish will only grow as large as his tank allows. When those fins sense that the walls of plexiglass are closing in, the body just stops - a hibernation of development. Drop the same little guy in a backyard pond and he would grow forever.

I am no different. Still, deep in my tissues, in places dark and dangerous, a message has been relayed. The plexiglass is shifting. I am transplanting. Growth, once considered impossible, is a possibility again.

I do not know what shape this new body will grow into. Perhaps I will be a spider princess. Perhaps not. But things will be different.

(written in the plane en route to Johannesberg)

Leaving Northampton, leaving dark coffee-shops and hipster haunts, leaving this little room with its French windows and fake daffodils and cozy white bed. Wrapping up writer’s group, perhaps one of the most satisfying things in my life since Street Sense ended. Packing life into old green Volvo wagon and hightailing out of town, Jackson Browne blaring through speakers, running, once again it seems, on empty.

In October, this same rearview mirror shrunk down home – waiting tables, barista-ing, life on the Atlantic Ocean, sun-drunk familiarities. A frenetic June in northeast D.C. – heat strokes and thunderstorms, Sunday markets and pizza joints. Graduation, a sprint to San Francisco, before that, the little apartment in Northwest – homeless newspapers, radical musings, regalia, anticipation.

My life moves in circles of 3-and-a-half months, trained for an academic calendar that has since unpinned me. Yet like the girl with the red shoes, I cannot stop dancing. Jobs started and quit, internships engrossing and then dull, homes decorated and then deserted. Friends made and abandoned. My resume is but a testament to my inability to commit.

Things, people, inertia - they just don’t seem to get their claws in me. But Africa is waiting. It too wants its turn.

Much of my pre-Peace Corps days – when not reading up on Zambia or writers’ groups – are spent in an organic discount odds-and-ends shop known as Deals and Steals. A cult favorite among Northamponites, Deals and Steals provides the liberal masses with their wheat germ, Terra Chips, and coconut milk without breaking too much into the college-student/NGO-slave laborer piggy bank.

Our clientele ranges from the super-green young professionals; the lunch-snack-hording mommies; the mac-and-cheese consuming hippie/hipster artists; and the plain 99-cent-max-purchase town destitute. So how is this wonderful store able to provide such deep discounts on bulk granola, Fair Trade chocolate and organic olive oil, you ask? Some products make it to our shop on Pearl Street from the wreckages of small businesses now folded. Others are overstock or damages from the big box health stores – Trader Joes, Whole Foods. Still more are items that have been discontinued. Stock up on your shitake mushroom pad thai now because you’ll never be seeing that again. Most, though, of our items are simply out-of-code, especially the .99 cent collection of chips, cereals, cookies, crackers and bars that line the Bargain Wall. Still taste good, perhaps a bit on the hard side approaching June or July. Just old. Expired. Past their prime.

So I spend most of my days looking at dates. Yes, I am paid a meager sum per hour to do what my Grandmother has turned into an obsessive-compulsive neurosis – check expiration codes. Old items get one price based on how far past the good date they are, and in-date items get another. Really old items get placed in donation bins that get picked through weekly by Food Not Bombs or eaten by hungry health-food-lovin’ employees. (No names here.)

You learn two things working in Deals and Steals. One – that time is a continuously moving evil force of nature. Two – that the act of filling America’s pantries and tables has spawned a vicious culture of all its own.

First, time. As I said before, I spend most of my days battling dates. In-date things on the shelf go out of date. Prices need to be changed. Out-of-date things go too far out of date. Products need to be pulled and thrown into donation bins. Incoming products need to be pulled out of (excess) packaging and evaluated. How long ago was August? June? March? Wasn’t summer just around the corner? Is July really five months dead? Is it December 4 today? Surely you’re wrong? I just put those cookies up a week ago. They can’t be bad yet.

Dates have become my constant reminder of Africa. So long has passed since graduation, since summer, since fall. I calculate these months on my fingers and the memories seem like yesterday. But the food is already bad. Those lucky in-date few transport me to where I will be when they make their migration to the Bargain Wall. Mar 13 09 – what then? A recent email from the Peace Corps, bumping my departure date up to February 17, hasn’t helped the expiration contemplation.

Time is relentless. Constantly the food is going stale. Quicker than we can eat it. We are selling it for ninety-nine cents, buy one get one free and still it will go bad. It will wind up in the donation bins in the back and when it goes quite old, it will be taken by a local farmer to feed his pigs. We are a small store, barely bigger than my bedroom thrice-over, and still we have need of a pig. To eat the food we cannot stomach ourselves.

This segues me to Deals and Steals insight number two. The American way of procuring food is twisted, over-indulgent, and wasteful. Okay, this is not a blog to rave about one pseudo-liberal’s aversion to modern society. That would be slightly hypocritical as I now sit in a warm coffee shop on an iBook with a tummy-full of expensive caffeine and undoubtedly imported trail-mix.

Still, my close encounter with the grocery system has been harrowing. There is a whole food-marketing-industrial complex dedicated to providing us with as many foodstuffs as we can desire. All wrapped and delivered in elaborate packages, further packaged in excessive cardboard, then shrink-wrapped into pallets, placed on trucks and shipped across the country. Before that, they probably began on a ship, before that a factory, before that a field (or worse a laboratory) in a land far far away.

I see only the food that is rejected by other, more legitimate stores. How much do they discard of? And what of the stores with no Deals and Steals nearby, no willing purchaser for their broken boxes or expiring crates? Consumers pay for perfect. Waste is but fundamental counterpoint to the chock-full Stop-and-Shop’s we have all come to love.

Such revelations are particularly hard when viewed next to Zambia. As one of the more stable countries in the region, there is a tendency to think that the problems that wrack, say, Zimbabwe don't apply there. Still, recent articles in the Times of Zambia and AllAfrica.com mention food shortages, rising mealie meal (a dietary staple) prices and slight political unrest. The government has taken action but they are predicting food shortages to hit a low this winter. “The country will run out of maize at the end of February 2009 and that there will be need to import the shortfall to last until May 2009 when we would rely on our own produce," said Agriculture and Commodities Minister Brian Chituwo.

According to the Times, people are cutting back on unexpected visits because everyone knows food is scarce. Importation is unusual and there are worries that the prices will increase beyond what the lower class is capable of paying. The government has sought to quell fears and denies the shortage is a national disaster.

Think of it. The need to import food being considered a potential national disaster. The United States is quite the agricultural powerhouse but I cannot imagine running out of food, or needing to calculate the exact time when the current supplies will run out in relation to the next harvest. Like food doesn’t always appear in elaborate packages, from cardboard boxes, from shrink-wrapped pallets, from 18-wheelers, from cargo ships, from lands far far away.

Working in Deals and Steals, it is hard to picture the culture that I am moving rapidly towards, faster than the crackers going stale on the shelves. It is strange in my little role in the food-industrial complex to imagine an existence so tied to the land. It is difficult to think of the New England pig growing fat on the perfect-good food that Americans just couldn’t eat in its two-odd-year shelf life. It is unfathomable to contemplate starvation. Perhaps I am being ethnocentric, but the words food shortage and Africa still conjures up images of starvation and famine. Zambia will never take on the crisis situation of Malawi or Ethiopia. I know this. I also know I am not ready to see someone starve. I hope to never be ready for that.

Not while our Massachusetts swine are still getting fat.

There is something inherently condescending about volunteering abroad, isn’t there? What do I, a slightly educated American baby, have to offer that the entire continent of Africa is unable to produce on its own? And at some level, is there a lack of gratitude implied by leaving one’s home, family and privilege for 27 months on a whim?

These questions were raised to me by very compassionate friends – the very anti-modernization theory, the pro-American, and the just plain skeptical. Once quick to dismiss these doubts, they nonetheless invaded my subconscious and took up permanent residence in head.

These internal hecklers started at it in earnest Sunday night a few weeks ago, one of my last shifts at the restaurant where I work. Our kitchen assistant, a mid-aged woman from Guatemala, sliced peppers while I lamented the dismal lack of customers in the dining room and zealously munched oyster crackers. “How long you go for,” she asked, between knife falls. “Two years, 27 months,” I say.

“Oh. Long time,” she said. “What your mother say?” I smiled, and explained yet again, how my family was sorry to see me leave but knew that this is something I really wanted to do and so on and so were overall happy about the Zambia thing.

She looked up from her work to grab the Saran wrap. She hadn’t been home to Guatemala in seven years, she said. In that course of time, her sister had died of cancer, and not having a green card, she was unable to attend the funeral. She still expected her sister to answer the phone when she called. She still waited for someone to pass her sister the line in the rotation of family members who crowded the receiver to speak to her.

Going back to Guatemala would require a lifetime commitment and a sacrifice of a hard-earned American life –friends, job, a private apartment in town. My decision to take off to Africa for a life of voluntary deprivation seemed baffling in comparison.

(Unfortunately for me,) a recent Campus Progress article echoed similar fears. Noting that the main benefit of the Peace Corps service now is cross-cultural exchange and not concrete development work, Adam Welti says, “Changing the structure of Peace Corps to allow for more short-term, highly-skilled positions for those men and women with more years of experience could help change the monolithic nature of white, fairly privileged and under-experienced volunteers that tend to enroll now.”

These Peace Corps criticisms have likely been floating around since Kennedy’s proposed the idea in ’61. And people like my restaurant kitchen assistant, those who own experiences make my choices seem more like indulgence than heroism, will always be there to give my own doubts substance. Still, I take faith from the blogs of current Volunteers in Zambia, and their professions of doing good work (no matter how biased!)

So for now, this white, fairly-privileged and under-experienced volunteer, will have to continue to write, read and educate herself as best as possible. I am now a card-carrying Massachusetts Public Library member and have been devouring books on Zambia. I have learned that eldest generation of elephants in Zambia have been killed by poachers and the remaining adolescents group together in packs of rule-deprived bandits and teen-aged mothers. That song and dance is the best way to teach sexuality to villages (there a really interesting group dance that mimics the birth cycle if anyone's interested). That tsetse flies may be one of the seven deadly plagues. That Zambia is complex, beautiful and contradictory, just as everyone one of us is.

Persistent wireless stealing - thanks Netgear - has kept me up to date on my blog and newspaper reading, which is now at an all-time hopeless level of addiction. On the good days, that's just enough to keep those internal hecklers at bay.

As you may or may not have heard through the grapevine, I’ll be joining the Peace Corps and shipping off to Zambia this February. For those who didn’t know: Surprise! To those who did: Thank you for helping me through those crazy, exciting, and chaotic 10 days between invitation and acceptance. Your support – and ability to sit through long one-sided conversations – was invaluable.

According to my fancy, schmancy invitation packet, I have been invited to the “Real Africa.” In PC-language that means I will be living in a hut (my own hut), without running water and electricity. Yes, I realize this description implies that other more modern African cities and countries are less realistic/authentic to the African identity. No, I do not agree that modernization is inherently Western or that a people loses its ethnic or cultural roots by improving quality of life and offering basic creature comforts. Let’s let that slide for now. I feel the African modernization vs. African identity will occupy many of my ipod-, tv-, computer-free nights in the near future.

Also, I will be granted my own mountain bike. Navigating Zambia will require about 5 to 20 miles of biking on a daily basis, from what I gleaned from blogs. Maybe more depending on where I am stationed. The thought makes my butt hurt. And as some of you know, I have a tendency to crash bikes into various immovable objects.

I will be working on a highly successful radio education project called “Learning at Taonga Market.” The AIDS crisis has decimated Zambia’s supply of teachers and general poverty makes it difficult to have traditional classes in rural areas. A large percentage of children are orphans, and these kids often sacrifice schooling to support themselves. The radio program offers a “fun, engaging” form of learning that is accessible to everyone. And tests show that children who attend radio classes do just as well or better than children in formal classrooms. As a volunteer, I will be working at a district level to build capacity in this program (in existence since 2001), recruiting new participants, working with the Ministry of Education and incorporating life skills and HIV/AIDS education. I’m glad the program is indigenous to the community and not a Westernized imposition. It seems my life energy is continually moving to the intersection of media and advocacy. Using communication to feed, house, love, and help makes me feel more alive than I can explain. This may be my acorn (for those of you who get that).

More about Zambia: It’s a land-locked country slightly larger than Texas. It is neighbored by Congo, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Tanzania. The official language is English and the main religion Christianity. It has a tropical or temperate climate depending and it rains from October to April. Google Image Search informs me that it is beautiful. It is famous for Victoria Falls, adventure safaris and “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” It was once Rhodesia. Lonely Planet has a country guide with a section on extreme outdoor sports. Friends, start saving your pennies now.

Not-so-hot things about Zambia: 1 in 6 people have HIV/AIDS (2003 est.). Life expectancy is 38 years. It’s one of the poorest countries in the world.

There are many things I am afraid of. Spiders not being the biggest of them right now. There are many things I am impatient for. Namely my very own mud hut. There are many other feelings I am not sure about dancing around like Northern Lights in my peripheral vision.

I drive my Volvo on Main Street and drum out Simon and Garfunkel melodies and think of Africa. I am nervous that I will fail that mission, but I remind myself that it is not a mission but an adventure and adventures cannot be failed unless they are avoided. I worry that the sorrow will engulf me. Then I think of the countless other alleged “sufferers” I have embraced. These homeless and impoverished individuals left me with a richer understanding of joy. And I think of the people I have met of privilege, who have taught me that unnamable sorrow of small deaths, and managed mediocrity, of unvoiced desires and furtive escape plans.

At some point, sorrow finds us all, whether on suburban cul-de-sacs or under African skies. There is no blood on the door that will ward off the human condition. This plague comes to everyone. Getting this may be part of growing up.

Now, I know I am not going to save the whole big world. Or even just a little country. Limitations are everywhere and my manual fully prepares me to be frustrated by the Zambian bureaucracy. I harbor no rosy expectations of international development.

So why go? Why abandon a country with many legitimate problems of its own, especially when doing so means sacrificing friends, family and a reliable toilet source.

Why not? Maybe I watched too much “Into the Wild.” Or read too many adventure stories. Or loved my Indian fort in the backyard a little too strong. The accurate variation of the Thoreau quote in this blog’s title used to hang above my bed. I loved it since hearing it uttered with whispered reverence by Robin Williams in “The Dead Poets Society.” Perhaps Nineteenth Century recluses are better at expressing me than me. The Peruvian revolutionary Javier Heraud puts it similarly, this universal need to temporarily check out of society,

“But it is better than other ways,” (he writes)

“I recommend it –

get away for a time

from the bustle

learn what it’s all about

in those mountains.”

So dear ones, don’t take it personally. I am not abandoning you. Everything you have given me has brought me to this decision. And I will send you blog posts and letters and e-mail and send cosmic vibes. In return, I would like countless care packages of goodies and similar shows of positive energy. And a few blog comments now and then.

If all goes as planned, I’ll leave for staging February 28 and train in the capital until I begin my actual service in May. From then, it’s straight on ‘til morning, i.e. May 2011.

So if anyone wants to see me in the next 2½ years, please alert me soon! Between now and February, I would also like to a) Acquire a list of fabulous reading, recipes and music; b) Learn some musical instrument; c) Practice running from poisonous things and other crazed bikers; d) Watch lots and lots of movies; and e) Pack.

This is the thing I will not do: I will no longer start thoughts with the phrase “Brittany in Africa…”

Examples:

Brittany in Africa lives in a mud hut and carries water on her head.

Brittany in Africa reads nightly under the constellations and produces deep insights into our existence on Earth.

Brittany in Africa is beloved by small children who follow her like little woodland creatures around a Disney princess.

Brittany in Africa bikes mountains and has calves of titanium and steel.

Brittany in Africa sustains herself on food she grew, picked and cooked.

Brittany in Africa spends her days weaving, sewing, potting and other crafty –ing’s associated with fair trade products, hipsters and women’s collectives.

Brittany in Africa is better, stronger, prettier, primitiver and holier than Brittany in America. (and yes, primitiver is not an actual word but it works.)

This is surprisingly hard for a degenerate daydreamer. I will also refrain from posting long rambling discourses on the state of my soul.

Thank you all. I love you and am more grateful than you can know.