I never really knew how food was ordered in my mind, but apparently it was organized and its place subconsciously understood.
During training food sort of became the basis for all interaction with my Zambian family. Its why 8 women, 3 Zambian generations and a musungu gathered in a 6’ x 6’ mud hut wall papered with newspaper that had strange headlines about JuJu, Russian women and Chinese contractors.
It’s why after dinner if I was too full to move I would lie in the twin bed with my 3 sisters. If you weren’t laughing, you could hear the scratching legs of coackroaches on the newspapered walls, but we were always laughing. I would stare at my white arms like a swirl of milk in a cup of coffee limbs and imagine that this was a really, really, strange version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. We are so poor and so happy.
If I wasn’t too full and they weren’t too tired, that eating turned into dancing. They always put this one song on repeat because it was my favorite and I guess as long as it was on I had to dance. My bare feet shuffled on the dinner crumbs stuck to the plastic floor.
My first 3 months in Zambia were anchored by dinner on that floor. I don’t know if it kept me stable or stuck, but either way it extinguished whatever order food had in my mind.
To say there wasn’t enough food would be an incomplete truth. “Ubwale” is the staple food of Zambia. Its maize flour boiled and scooped into lumps. Ubwale combined with the brute persuasion of BaMaayos is why if you are a woman and you come to Zambia, you will get fat.
You eat ubwale with relish. Relish is anything you eat with ubwale. The are some indicators of wealth here: tin roofs, a bicycle and more than one relish for dinner are big ones.
It was my understanding that the Peace Corps does some sensitivity training, encouraging the family to provide us with 2 relishes hopefully one with protein, and providing a stipend to do so.
So on the many nights 8 hungry Zambians shoveled down ubwale and greens and refused to touch the single serving of eggs or soya pieces until I had served myself, “food” got more and more disorderly. Instead of seeing it as something to eat, I saw that food as something I couldn’t eat especially when it would go to growing children instead.
Except then I started to get hungry. Really hungry. To this day I travel with peanut butter. I see myself as a 93 year old still packing peanut butter in the purse. There was one night before dinner I was in my hut eating pb and nutella in the dark straight with my pinky. It all felt very secretive. The shame of not wanting to share, the shame if BaMaayo thought she wasn’t feeding me enough, the shame of antisocially sucking on your pinky, all kept me on edge as I was worried my little sister would bust in any moment. When she called me for dinner I hurried out.
We ate like usual. I took my seat in the back corner up against the bed and everyone told me to stretch my legs even though there wasn’t ever any room to do so. And like every other night the youngest girls fumbled with the cheap Chinese batteries in the cheap Chinese made led lantern that was perpetually broken. The only setting the worked was the flashing red blue and green one.
Those flashing lights never seemed to phase the family in the same epileptic way as me. Breakfast and dinner were also times for inspection. Every pimple and every scratch was examined by BaMaayo for signs of illness. She could spot a cut from across the yard, rush over, grab my leg, and scold me.
Sometime that night, despite the mini rave atmosphere, my littlest sister, who was 12 saw a brown smudge between my pinky and ring fingers. She pointed and yelled “what. Is. That.” All of us turned our heads at the same time and arrived at the same terrifying thought. “Oh My God, she has shit on her hand!” I could see the collective horror and confusion in my family’s eyes. The same eyes pleaded for another explanation. Me looking equally surprised and muttering “hm that’s strange,” was not going to suffice.
“Umshile.” “Its Umushile.”
I had just learned that Bemba word for soil and had been planting trees that day, so in that second it seemed it was a good idea to say soil. It was not a good idea.
My sister grabbed my hand and smelled my claim, crying “No its chocolate.”
