Chores

My alarm goes off at 5:30am, but I’m usually awake from the sounds of Amai Abusa (Pastor’s wife) rising and taking her morning bath. Sound echoes in my house, bouncing off the tin roof that covers the entire house which has no ceilings for each room. My morning exercises have included yoga, a series of squats, lunges, and jumping jacks, or just dancing furiously around my room to “A Sky Full of Stars” by Coldplay. Three different times I’ve ran around Chawama and its surrounding compounds with my brother Phillip. On our runs, we pass things like men turning and moving giant wheels down the paved road, two people sharing a single bicycle, roadside stands laying our their wares for the day, children bathing in buckets outside their homes, nearly empty mini-buses, and school children dressed in their uniforms running alongside me and laughing hysterically.

After I feel I have sufficiently worked off the nshima/cornmeal paste of the previous day, I try to get some chores in before getting ready for school. I put on my bright yellow, red, and blue chitenge, or African wrap skirt, and I start by sweeping my room. Even as if I do this everyday I manage to pile up a significant amount of sand and dust, brought in on my shoes and book from the parched land outside that hasn’t seen rain in months. Then I sweep the kitchen, picking up pieces of nshima powder and leafy greens that didn’t quite make it into the pot to get turned into a salty relish. Then I sweep the dining room, carefully moving each chair to get all the hard to reach spots, before moving the dust out the front door and temporarily into the schoolyard outside. After sweeping the porch, I go to get a traditional African broom made out of dried straw-like sticks. I then proceed to sweep the garbage, charcoal dust, and stray plant debris into the garbage pit behind the school. I’ll often see an elder from the church, the same lady passing for work each morning, or a smiling child, and they often ask me, “You know how to sweep?” All are very excited to see a white lady in African garb sweeping the dust and garbage at 6 am in the morning. While there are many mornings where I don’t feel like sweeping, (AGAIN, for goodness sake) but I also feel a growing sense of solidarity in the work. I do what they do.

I also help out by cleaning the dishes at least once a day. We don’t have running water, so that means scooping water out of the many buckets under the sink and filling the two basins. I learned to squeeze the dish soap into an old butter plastic container and periodically get soap from their as I do the massive pile of dishes that usually get dirtied by cooking a Zambian meal. I scrub the dish with the soap then dip it in the first basin to get most of the water off and then dip it again in the second basin before putting the plate on the drying rack. The pot that was used to cook nshima can usually only be cleaned after sitting in water for awhile. The boiled cornmeal mush takes a good half an hour to a full hour to cook so the bottom always gets caked with nshima that can’t be removed without a good soak.

Other jobs around the house include simply flushing the toilet. Each time I have to fill up a buck and fill up the tank manually. To bathe, I heat up water with a plug in water heater, usually used for tea. About two pitchers of boiling water mixed with room temperature water usually brings the bathing water to a nice temperature.

These are just the jobs I do everyday. This doesn’t account for the vegetable cleaning, pounding, boiling and more that goes into cooking relish around me. Or plucking and cutting up chickens or salting the little fish, kapenta I’ve eaten, eyes and all. Or the work of drawing water from a nearby borehole, pushing the giant container back to our home and then the filling buckets of water that sit outside the bathing rooms and in the kitchen. Or shining the floor with red polish. The list goes on.

Most of these chores are necessities. If I didn’t sweep every single day, the house would be full of dust. If Phillip didn’t draw water, we couldn’t survive. Chores have been a lovely way to join in a Zambian rhythm, but they are hard work! And they must be done every day, over and over and over again. I am struck by how much work it is to live. Back home, so many things we need to live are done for us or are quickly at our fingertips. From the vacuum cleaner to running water, we can go about our days, worrying about something else other than cleaning or certainly how much energy or water we are using at that current moment.

Living life by necessity is a trade off. It requires sweat and a little elbow grease and I often wonder if it didn’t take so much darn work to survive, all the people around me could put their energy into changing the world around them or following a personal dream. On the other hand, distilling life to what is necessary in essence makes life fulfilling. Each job one does needs to be done. Each chores fills you up, quite literally if so many have to do with food and water. Each act has a purpose that makes your life better. I find myself more thankful for what is around me. Living life by necessity might be necessary for living a full life. That is quite interesting because that means that a full life isn’t full of so much stuff after all.