The heat is finally picking up again and the edge has gone off the early morning chill. Tomorrow, we’re supposed to hit the mid-30s Centigrade, so need to brace myself for the next season. Others call it the hot, dry season; I call it the not-sleep-very-well-inside-modern-house season. Not sure if this is common knowledge, but I live in a room attached to the Concern Worldwide office in Senanga. Yes, I live at the office … but it does have a [cold] shower, a sink, and the Internet, so not bad. However, it has ceilings, which are not good.
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I was never so impressed with traditional grass roofs as when I stopped living under one. You see, a grass roof is permeable to air (and sometimes water, but that’s another story), so the dry heat of the day tends to waft away. Also, the walls of mud brick huts don’t retain heat very well, and hence they cool easily. Not so much a “modern” house with “proper” bricks and ceilings … they absorb heat throughout the day and radiate it back throughout the night. The ceilings, which were intended to reduce the direct heat that bakes through the tin, tile, or asbestos sheeting, manage to minimize air flow throughout the house, so the house heats up on hot days and rarely cools off.
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Speaking of home … I went to Washington, D.C. ten days ago (August 10) for a job interview. Hopped across the ocean on a Monday-Tuesday and came back on a Saturday-Sunday-Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday. To be honest, I didn’t move on Tuesday, as the very notion of 12 hours on the bus back to Senanga chilled my spine, so I spent the day scouting retail prices for Mongu rice and picking up equipment for the production site.
Arriving back, everyone kept asking me the same thing: _How was home? I tried to explain that Washington, though very nice and full of exceedingly well-dressed go-getters, was not home and that home was far away in a wonderful place called Upper Michigan (and yes, Paul Simon: it seems like a dream to me now). The sand is limited to the beaches, the beaches surround cool, clear lakes, the lakes have no crocodiles, etc., etc.
The Zambian equivalent of a blank stare is a blank stare, albeit supplemented by a slight nodding of the head and a sound that is like a drawn-out “ohhhh?” with tonal variation, sort of like the “Really?” or “You don’t say?” expressions that Americans use. You know … a polite way of saying “How dumb do you think I am?” or “You’re so full of it you stink”. When I kept explaining that I hadn’t gone home, I guess people thought that returning to the cultural markers with which I’m supposedly familiar (McDonalds, streetlights, white people, etc.) was close enough to home and that I was trying to confuse them. Or that I had family in D.C.; I don’t, but I did see a number of close friends. Maybe the definitions of home vary. Anyway, I got a lot of blank stares and "ohhh?"'s ... nothing too new.
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A little local business news: We are moving forward on the rice bags finally … just before I boosted for D.C. we got the other infernal engine up and running, so now we are going to try and make a market in Lusaka for small packages of rice originating in Senanga. It means I’ll back on the bus Thursday, running around the industrial area again, wrangling and haggling for a better price; but if we can get this thing going … it just might turn the corner for us.
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