At the end of September, 13 months after saying goodbye to each other in the US, my parents and I reunited in Kasama, Zambia. It took them 4 days of travel to reach me. I couldn’t sleep any of those nights. I was so excited to hug them again, to show them my new home, and to explore more of this region together. This was the first time I had planned an entire trip for my parents, so I was also a bit nervous that everything would go smoothly. At long last, my two homes were colliding.
Our trip was marked by my current existence as someone living in something like a third space in this country. I am no longer a complete outsider in Zambia. I speak enough Bemba to hold conversation, and now when I find myself getting ‘homesick’, it is more often a feeling of longing for my house in my village than for anywhere else. At the same time, I am not a local, and still get frustrated at cultural differences that don’t seem to make sense to my American brain. Throughout my parents’ visit, I found myself encountering a strange sort of culture shock as the people who I will always call home entered the place that I currently do.
We started the trip with a night in Kasama. My parents met the other PCVs in Northern Province, and we went grocery/chitenge shopping for my village. Chitenge is the name for the fabric that village women use for clothing, towels, baby swaddles, aprons, and so much more. It is a vital kind of fabric that is both cultural as well as practical. So, it was important for them to have some to wear while greeting my village.
The next day, we taxied to my village where we spent three nights. I was delighted to have my parents in my home. It was also slightly strange seeing my new life through their eyes. I became more conscious of the things that have become so normal to me, but are adjustments to anyone coming from the US – like what it means to rely on 4 buckets and a creek for water. They finally got to meet Remi and Lila, they tasted nshima for the first time with my host family, we washed clothes in the stream, and played with the kids. I also showed them my favorite running trail, we cooked some Indian food on my gas stove, and I introduced them to my village friends, the other teachers, and to my students. We also started sewing projects with the chitenge we had just bought, and spent a whole evening with the village tailor trying to use his sewing machine. I also took them on a morning trip to Chishimba falls, and we had one typical slow village afternoon relaxing in my hammock. I felt like they truly saw every aspect of my life in the village. It was a little overwhelming being the linguistic and cultural bridge between my community and my parents, though. People in my village could not understand why my parents did not speak Bemba, and they had no concept of the vast cultural divide between them. I was reminded of how much I struggled to adjust when I first moved into my site – and also how much I have become a part of the community since then. So after a few days of being a translator in multiple ways, I was very much ready to leave my village and continue to the rest of the trip.
After leaving my village, we drove north to Mbala, which is a town that sits on the border with Tanzania. We spent an afternoon exploring the Moto Moto museum, learning more about the history of this region. From there, we headed to a port town where we boarded a boat taxi to cross Lake Tanganyika, dropping at the base of a steep 3 mile hike. We were on the way to Kalambo falls, the second tallest waterfall on the continent and home to some of the oldest evidence of hominid activity – structures found there predate the earliest known appearance of homo sapiens by more than 100,000 years. We spent a few nights hanging around at the top of the waterfalls before driving back to Kasama for the last two nights in Northern Province.
I loved exploring a part of my province that I had not seen before. It felt like I was discovering more parts of my home country that I could show off. Which is in some ways a bit absurd – I am still, objectively, a foreigner. But once again this reality of existing in this country as neither a tourist nor a local came to light. I felt so much pride for this country that is hosting me, and also frustrations about things that only someone who lives here could feel.
The last of our time in Northern was spent celebrating Cailyn’s birthday, buying more chitenge, and swimming in the river at an RPCV’s house in Kasama. By the end, we had definitely seen the entire province and were excited to embark on the next part of our trip: the safaris!
Our first safari was in South Luangwa National Park in Eastern Province, and we were joined by my mom’s Peace Corps PST roommate, Patti, and her husband Loel. It was incredible! I had never been to a game park before, and I was blown away by the wildlife. On our first evening, we came across some lions who had just taken down a buffalo. They had dragged the buffalo into the brush, engorging themselves until they were practically too full to move. Sprawled out in the middle of the road, almost blocking our way, they were so close we could’ve reached out and touched them. Throughout our time in the park, we also saw leopards, giraffes, hippos, crocodiles, elephants, hyenas, zebras, monkeys, and so much more. It was unbelievable to think about the vast ecosystem of this seemingly barren landscape.
Following our safari in South Luangwa, we parted ways with Patti and Loel and made our way to Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. Hwange is an enormous park, and we ended up staying in a remote corner with no one else around. We happened to be the only party staying at our lodge the entire time we were there, so we enjoyed de facto private drives where we did not see a single other car or person.
During our first night in Hwange, we encountered a pride of lions sitting in the darkness. Despite being farther away from these lions than we had been in South Luangwa, this time I found myself getting scared. There was nothing but the barriers of the car between us and the wildlife, and no one else around for miles. I shivered to think about what it must have been like for ancient humans to stumble across these animals thousands of years ago.
Immediately following our lion sighting, we found a leopard sitting quietly in the night. It’s spots the same color as the landscape behind it, we almost missed it completely. I was in awe of its stealth and beauty, and we left it behind to stalk its prey in peace.
The final leg of our journey was in Victoria Falls. Here, we were pure tourists, buying art to bring back to the US and enjoying spectacular views. We sipped cocktails over the mighty Zambezi river, laughed about inside jokes created during their visit, and prepared ourselves for a tearful goodbye.
On the morning of Friday, October 10th, I dropped my parents off at the Lusaka airport to start their long journey back to the US. I loved having my parents come to visit. I am so grateful that they have experienced living abroad and could relate to me in this way. Having done the Peace Corps themselves, they also understood that this experience is changing me, and that their visit, while welcome and amazing, was also a collision of my two realities. Our goodbye was hard, but I know that this will all be over before I know it and I will get to see them again soon enough. My mom also left Zambia with about 40 pounds of chitenge fabric, which, honestly, is the perfect send off. She will be sewing it all for the entire next year I am sure.
So much of my life here has become normal to me, and the things that used to feel hard haven’t felt so difficult anymore. With my parents here, I was seeing Zambia through their eyes and it made me realize how many differences I have adapted to. From the black market bread trade outside Shoprite to the endless stares, what once was strange has now become expected.
Besides becoming adapted to a new environment, it has also become clear that I have changed in other ways. The most noticeable difference that I have been reflecting on is how I view my immediate future after Peace Corps. Before coming to Zambia, I was filled with fear that I had bitten off more than I could chew. I was nervous that this new chapter would prove very difficult, and that I would be miserable just trying to make it through. I was excited, yes, but the thought of not having running water or electricity, of living alone in a rural village, was almost overwhelmingly daunting. I remember my last week in my hometown vividly. I ran around town buying last minute essentials, savoring every second I got to enjoy the mountains and river around me. I shed more tears than I had expected. I cried thinking about leaving my pets, my parents, and because I knew how much I would miss the luxury of driving and feeling at home in a place.
What’s funny about that last week is that I felt like I knew too well how difficult life would be, and therefore I felt more confident in my fears. I had lived abroad in Chile for a semester just one year prior, and I had taken a gap year between high school and college where I lived in Indonesia, Bolivia, and Peru. I loved and cherished each of these experiences, but I remembered too how homesick I had become. I thought that if these experiences had only been a few months at a time and had been so difficult, two whole years would be unimaginably challenging. So I took this leap of faith, unsure of its outcome.
But now, I have come to understand that the reason it had felt so challenging in those other places was not because I was incapable of adapting to a new home outside of the US. It was because I did not live there long enough, did not have a space to make truly my own, for those places to become home. A semester living somewhere is long enough to become familiar with a place, but just too short to become truly comfortable there. I now know that things do get easier with time, and that I am more capable than I realized.
The result of becoming adapted to a drastically new environment, language, and culture unlike anywhere I have ever been is that I have started to believe that if I can thrive here, I can thrive anywhere. And so now, I have started thinking about potentially continuing to live and work outside of the US after Peace Corps with this new found ability to make a home wherever I go. At the very least, I am less nervous about finding somewhere to live and work after this. I am so much more confident in myself. I know this sounds cliche, yet somehow a year ago, I would have never expected it. I have always been the type of person eager for an adventure and unafraid to go somewhere new entirely alone, yet settling somewhere long-term outside of the US was never something I seriously considered until now. My mind is open to different possibilities than I had in mind a year ago, and that is an exciting place to be. I am eager to cast a wide net and allow whatever is meant to happen next fall into place. That is how I ended up here, after all.
