Humor and Due Course.

I have found a jumping castle! It is in Pennsylvania of all places. E-bay is truly one of the more brilliant ideas to come out of our age of technology. I rushed to the internet connection at Copperbelt University this morning to try and coordinate the purchase and shipping of it but I’m not one hundred percent sure it will work out yet. On the twenty-five minute walk there, I passed through and under a field of high tension electricity wires that created this odd chirping noise level with my head. I have never experienced this electrical sensation before so I could not have known that this was secretly a warning. If my life were a novel, I would call this ‘foreshadowing.’

My activities at the orphanage are finally finding a rhythm. When there is power, we dance and I work on the website. I tried to teach them the game ‘I Spy’ but it turned into a far more exciting game they call “I Spell in the World” which involves no spelling whatsoever. It does, however, involve running around the whole house and yard, shouting colors and wrestling each other. The ‘Hokey Pokey’ has remained intact and they love it (I’ve limited them to singing it once a day though). In the morning I try to work on the alphabet with the two little ones who don’t go to school yet. I’m not sure how successful my work will be. Working on their English is a big priority but reading together takes a huge amount of patience.

Now that they know me and we are comfortable around each other, they have started to show me their mischievous sides. This has made me aware of one large disparity between caring for children here and in the US. Safety standards are somewhat different. Sometimes I will scold them for doing something I think is dangerous ( i.e. A four year old handing a large, sawed-off, rusty garden tool above his head to another boy in a tree) but they just laugh at me. Not because they are being disobedient but because they think I’m being silly. I have spent many stern minutes trying to explain that I am scolding them for their own safety. Sometimes I think they understand and sometimes I don’t.

I also figured out that there are no readily available first aid supplies at the house and I was struck with terror. My goal this weekend is to purchase the supplies to make a kit. They are strong kids but I’m wondering where I should draw the line between those hyper-active-super disinfectant-hypochondriatic families in the US and the independent six year-olds fending for themselves and their siblings on the streets of Zambia.

You all have heard me complain about the slowness of business here but today it was just the opposite: everything happened at once. The washing machine, the plumber, the internet men, and my dad with two Indian colleagues showed up at virtually the same moment in time. The same moment, in fact, that the power was out and my mom and I found out about a mounting minor crisis in the form of faulty ATMs (which have magic-ed away a few million in local currency of my dad’s money…). Since I couldn’t do anything about the lost money, I focused my attention on reconnecting with my beloved western culture through the World Wide Web (but mostly facebook). We had paid for internet service for our house a few days ago and they were supposed to have come set it up yesterday but fate had them show up during the weekly load shedding (which is a scheduled power outage). My silent prayers to the electricity gods were answered when the power came back on and they hadn’t left. But I paid for it by tripping over their extension cord (which ended up not working anyway) and spraining my left wrist. But spraining my left wrist saved my Nikon from a devastating fall that would most certainly have killed it. The electricity gods are only fair (and must be in cohorts with some particularly fickle ancient Chinese philosophers and Mr. Bush for their sense of humor and due course.)

In the world news arena, I am afraid to listen to BBC anymore. Things are not looking good, are they?

Peace,
Vidya