The McDaniel Migration: Our Home-Stay!

The last setting for learning about African culture at 40/40 was a weekend living with a Zambia family. On Friday morning each missionary family was taken to a family's home from one of the local Baptist Churches. We lived and worked with them all weekend and were picked back up on Monday morning.

I am going to say upfront -- This was one of the most difficult weekends of my life. I am so grateful to this family for opening up their home to us. They were very kind and spent a lot of money feeding us. But, there were many things that made this experience super hard.

Here is Lee....packed and ready!
(Everything he knows comes from you Mark!)

This is me....waiting for our ride.

The van could not get down to where their house is, so we had to walk from the road.

Many people helped us.
It was strange because at the time we had no idea who they were.

Here is the home of the Embayawa family.
It looked so nice from the outside.
But, it was still under construction.

Here is their living room.
Yes, it was very nice.
What you can't see are the MILLIONS
of biting ants crawling all over the floor.

This the the hallway to the rest of the house.
All dirt floors.

Here is the kitchen....complete with chicken and it's poop!
Oh...and more ants.

Here is the little hallway where the chicken sleeps and
where they wash the dishes and rinse the veggies.....with no soap.....

Here is where we slept.
We had little foam mattresses that sat on these reed mats.
The ants came up through hundreds of little holes in the dirt and through the mats and got into our beds.
Lee is looking for them and trying to put out some ant killer.....baby powder....who knew?!?
I am so sad that I did not get a picture of our room when it was fixed.
We had reed mats, mattress, blankets, pillows, and mosquito nets....
and all our stuff in these two little rooms that were connected.
More about our night times later.

This is our bath house and toilet.
The room on the right is the room for a bath. (a.k.a a bucket of warm water and a cup)
The room on the left is the latrine. (a.k.a. a squatty potty)
And you guessed it.....there were MILLIONS of ants in there, too.
So, stomp your feet when you are bathing and don't let anything get near the ground.
Then when nature calls.....stomps then too!

As soon as we got to there house the women when into the kitchen and started to cook lunch.
They thought I should try my hand at stirring the nshema.
This is a staple in Africa. It is corn meal and water, cooked until it is like a play-doh consistency.
You eat it with your hands combining it with the other things on your plate,
usually greens, tomatoes, and possibly chicken.
This day we had nshema, tomatoes, another vegetable (I don't know what it was), and greens.
The children were a bit overwhelmed at this point. When Emma did not eat hers fast enough the wife, Florence,
unexpectedly shoved a big bite into her mouth for her.
Emma handled it with grace.
(I am not sure how.)

After lunch Lee and Billy headed into town to work the rest of the day
at his little bicycle parts store in the market.

Meanwhile Florence and her friend Martha took the girls
and I into a little market like area in the neighborhood.
First stop....playing with the white lady's hair!

Second stop...meeting a family member who is a tailor.
Don't let the smiles fool you....the girls were freaked out at this point!

This is what Lee was doing all afternoon Friday and then again on Saturday
....watching men play games :)

One of the hardest parts of the home stay was the girls. They felt like everyone was examining everything thing about them and they stuck to me like glue. Many of the children really did just want to hang out with them. As the weekend went along the girls warmed up a bit.

Then, Meghan had the great idea to teach them some songs.
That was a huge hit!!

The J-O-Y song

The Hokey Pokey into the night!!!

That was Saturday night. That was an interesting night...again! Because the mosquito net stuck to our faces all night Friday night Lee and I opted to sleep without ours on Saturday. But, about midnight I was stirred by Lee and Emma getting up to use the "Chou bucket". (FYI.....that is a bucket that we were given to use during the night instead of having to walk outside to go to the latrine.) All of a sudden I feel something land on my chest. I quickly flicked it off and asked Lee to shine the flashlight on the bed. There sat a HUGE cockroach!!!! We decided to go back to sleeping with the net on our faces!!!!
Then about 4:30 we wake to the sound of, "Mom, Emma's about to throw-up!" And she did! For the next 6 hours in our little room with dirt floors and no running water we battled vomit and severe diarrhea. That about says it all.....

The women loved to give me jobs to do and either laugh or take pictures of me.
Here I am cutting up cabbage.
(Notice the Mancala board the kids have made in the dirt.)