Stretching Time

Thursday, January 7, 2010

We received another package from my mom today (don’t get me started on the UTTER incompetence of the customs lady at the post office). Amid the miniature candy bars, granola bars, Crayola Markers, Fruit Loops and Wheat Thins, she had included a book. Rhoda Janzen’s memoir “Mennonite in a Black Dress” is a book I was looking forward to reading, especially since the author was Peter’s professor in college and I know the family. I am sad to miss the book discussion at my home church because it would have been fun to laugh and talk with my friends over this interesting memoir. I had just pulled the Honey Wheat Bread out of the oven (More With Less Cookbook, p. 57) and had stuck in two cookie sheets of peppernuts (I needed to reclaim my freezer space), and tonight’s soup was bubbling on the stove, so it seemed like a good time to delve in. Chapter One was finished in the blink of an eye and I was beginning on Chapter Two when it was time to take the peppernuts out of the oven. I continued reading, a few of the piping hot morsels in one hand, when I read the following:

“Mennonite food has its delicious moments – more on that later – but our true gift lies in the ease with which we cook. Some cooks struggle with timing, with menu planning, with missing ingredients. Not us. Our seven side dishes always come up at exactly the same time, and if have run out of something, which we rarely do, we have improvised a delicious substitution. We’re idiot savants when it comes to food preparation.”

I found this especially comical given the conversation I had with Peter the other night after dinner. “I think I must love to cook,” I said to him. He didn’t find that all too convincing and probed deeper. I struggled to articulate what I was thinking and it kind of relates to my thing about not feeling love. The same holds true in this area. I don’t feel like I love to cook, but others look in on my life and think I must. And I would have to agree with them. I like looking at recipes in magazines, thumbing through cookbooks, serving a hearty meal to friends, choosing dishes that I know people like, trying to prepare meals that are healthy and use local produce. But I guess I thought all women were like that. But in talking to my MCC friends, who said they cook because they have to eat, I began to wonder if maybe I do love to cook. Maybe this is one of those areas that is so culturally ingrained in me that I completely lack any self-awareness. Maybe it is in my Mennonite genes. But when I look at people who really understand the chemistry of cooking and come up with amazing dishes and say they LOVE to cook, I can’t relate. I’m not into aesthetics or exotic dishes or fancy table adornments. I’m into functionality and like what cooking gives me. I like being connected to what I eat. I like choosing meals that are healthy and simple and wholesome. I like sitting down to a meal with friends with minimal fuss that ends with filled tummies and a sense of satisfaction. I like seeing Brendan gobble down two plates of curried lentils. I like hearing Jason’s cries of excitement when I tell him we are having calzones for dinner. I like making the cookies I know Peter loves. And I love eating Honey Wheat Bread that is still warm from the oven with the butter melting into it. And admittedly, more and more, I am enjoying the process as well as the end product. Perhaps that is a function of time, which I have plenty of here. So it isn’t a bother to spend the late afternoon washing and cutting fresh tomatoes instead of simply opening up a can. I can let bread rise during the day, knowing that I will be around to move it on to the next stage so we can enjoy it for dinner along with soup. I’m no savant but putting together meals is easy for me. But does that mean I love it? I think I must. OK, I do. But I just hadn’t realized it before.

Friday, January 8, 2010

After several attempts, my Conflict Resolution curriculum finally came together. This afternoon I presented it to the Lechwe teachers so that they can begin teaching the lessons throughout this term. This time, however, the secondary teachers were also in attendance, some willingly and some not so much. This made the group swell to almost fifty teachers. Most were very engaged and eager to talk about the material that I was presenting. There was energy buzzing in the room as we looked at the different approaches to conflict (Shark, Teddy Bear, Turtle, Owl, and Fox). But you could also tell that it was Friday afternoon at the end of the first week back from the holidays. The young guys were eager to get to the football pitch for their weekly staff match. Some of the older teachers were struggling to keep their eyes open, wishing they could indulge in a much deserved nap. And then there was the cheeky teacher who raised his hand and asked, “So is this for us or for our students?” I gave a brief answer mentioning integrity and if teachers can’t engage in this then what can they expect of their students, then challeneged him back, asking, “It seems there is more behind your question. What are you trying to ask?” There were snickers throughout the room, and he shrugged and said, “Nothing.” I made a little joke later that didn’t seem to register with the teachers but I was tickled. We were talking about the importance of body language and so I asked them all to demonstrate with their bodies what it would like if they weren’t listening to me. Nobody moved or changed positions. So I said, “Isn’t that funny that nobody moved?” You’d think teachers would be aware of their own body language since they get to see how it looks for their students to look bored and disinterested, but I guess not.

But despite these things, I received good feedback from others. One teacher told me at the break that she always looks forward to my workshops because she learns so much. Because she is older and has a lot of life experience, she intuitively knows much of what we cover but she sees it in new ways and has a framework in which to understand what is happening. And Ms. Lubamba, the head teacher, is thrilled with the materials and sees how it is benefiting the school. At the morning assembly for primary students, she and I staged a disagreement as an intro to our topic this term. You could see the younger kids squirming as we pretended to fight with each other until I stopped the disagreement and explained that it wasn’t real. You could see relief flood the faces of the students. One of Jason’s classmates found me in the parking lot after school and said, “Mrs. Smith, you had me fooled this morning. I thought you really were mad at Ms. Lubamba!” With a huge grin on his face, he explained to his mom what had happened. I guess it left an impression!

Monday, January 18, 2010

An MCC colleague came to visit over the weekend. Young Mi is from South Korea, here in Zambia for a year with the YAMEN program. In Korea, she was associated with the Korea Anabaptist Center in Seoul and was working for an NGO called Frontier that does peace education for youth in hotspots around the world. She traveled to East Timor and spent two years in Afghanistan. She has never had any formal English education, having chosen to learn Spanish in secondary school. But she is able to communicate and her warmth and interest in people more than make up for grammar. But English grammar skills would be helpful in her assignment, which is to develop peace curriculum for the Peace Clubs that are running in Lusaka. This means she is stuck in an office when her gifts lie in relating to people, trying to write lessons in a foreign language. Tough. So Friday morning, Peter and I spent a few hours with Young Mi looking at her curriculum and suggesting ways to improve it. Having found a good deal of overlap with the curriculum that I had just developed for Lechwe, I agreed to take her ideas and blend them with the material I already had for one unit. She will continue working on several of the other units and then we will collaborate once again to put it together. When we were not working on curriculum, we talked and played games and hung out. The boys enjoyed having Young Mi around as she loves kids and played with them.

Sunday morning, we decided to attend Maranatha Assembly, the Penetecostal church that our Zambian friends go to. I appreciated how the choir and the musicians all played in the same key. They even had the Bemba words to the songs projected onto the wall so that I could sing along. The prayer time was louder than I have ever heard before with hundreds of Zambians shouting and making their petitions known to God. It was amazing really. The sermon was on discipleship, a theme that is not emphasized in many churches here so I was pleasantly surprised to hear it addressed. Unfortunately, the microphone screeched quite a bit as the pastor became more and more animated, yelling out his sermon and emphasizing his points with a high pitch that assailed our ears through the speakers. Our friends, the M’hangos, found us after the service and invited us to their home. As this was spur of the moment, we weren’t sure what to expect but since an invitation to a home is so rare, we couldn’t pass it up. The M’hangos have been working on building their concrete home for the last seven years or so, little by little, as funds have become available. The moved in once the roof was on, last July. But they have been living without power since then, as Zesco costs and arm and a leg to hook up, even when there is a pole already present on the corner of their property. As Christmas gifts to our family back home, we had given the M’hangos a financial gift that would help them get electricity hooked up. We were unable to give the whole amount but they scraped enough together and on Friday, their dream finally came true. They wanted to have us over and feed us lunch to celebrate and to say thank you. Mrs. M’hango instructed Young Mi and I how to make nshima that is not lumpy and we helped cut up rape for the relish. They had purchased tiger fish which she fried on her electric stove. Because the stove had been sitting there for many months without being used, millions of cockroaches had taken up residence inside the paneling. When she began frying the fish, they all started streaming out which was a bit disconcerting but since they stayed well away from the food we would be eating, I tried not to let it bother me. Several hours later, the meal was prepared and we sat down to eat. Brendan managed to eat a bit of the fish and didn’t complain about the nshima. Jason decided to fast that meal but I don’t know if he spent that time in prayer or just willing himself not to complain. Either way, he did OK. The tiger fish had a multitude of tiny bones shaped like a Y. Every bite had to be picked through with all the thin bones pulled out. This was a tedious job but we did our best. We enjoyed the time with the M’hangos and the friendship that is forming there. Our boys get along really well and I had the extra pleasure of rocking their seven month old baby to sleep in the kitchen while Mrs. M’hango stirred the nshima. We returned home thankful but exhausted with our bellies weighted down by the nshima.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Two words: Star Wars. This is Jason’s current obsession. He has several books on the subject which he has read so many times that he almost has them memorized. And yet there are still questions. Even before six in the morning, I hear his soft pitter patter of feet approach my side of the bed. He crawls in and with his face centimeters away from mine, he asks, “Do you think Count Dooku blah blah blah . . .” No good morning, mommy. Nothing. Straight into the burning Star Wars question of the day. Up until now, we have not allowed him to watch any of the Star Wars movies so Brendan gets drilled on what happens in each episode and what color each person’s light saber is and which bad guy gets killed in which movie. So we capitalized on this obsession to motivate Jason to learn to tie his shoes, a project that has been ongoing since August. You wouldn’t believe how quickly he became proficient at shoelace tying when we told him he could watch the first Star Wars movie if he learned this most important task. He can now tie his own shoes and he has viewed the first Star Wars movie with Peter at his side to answer his gazillion questions. Unlike Brendan, who was slightly disappointed when he finally got to watch Star Wars, Jason was ecstatic and can’t wait to watch the next one.

Me, I have my own obsession, besides this cool new game on the computer that gives new meaning to the word addiction. When I can tear myself away from “just one more game. . .” I am working on a book. Should it ever reach completion, it will be a work of non-fiction, drawing on my experiences living overseas and reflections on God, parenting and whatnot. I have entertained this idea off and on over the last several years but my spurts of interest have been shortlived. And perhaps my writing spree will be fleeting again. But when the ideas come, I try to sit down and write a bit and hopefully the accumulated effort some day will amount to a book. Goodness knows I have enough material from my blogs. This is very helpful since my memory is near useless.

I enjoy reading non-fiction, like Rhoda’s book. In my better moments, I convince myself that I too could write a book. In my bad moments, I think that even if I write a book I may not get it published or guarantee that anyone would read it. I’m not like Rhoda with a PhD in English and doing this for a living. I’m reading “White Masai” at the moment and read that it is a best seller. I find the writing less than clever but the sheer fact that this woman fell in love with a Masai man and in complete ignorance moved to his village in Kenya makes people want to read it, I guess. My husband hasn’t left me for a gay lover and I didn’t move in with a Masai warrior but I think I have a few interesting things to write nonetheless.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Sometimes it is good to stretch yourself a little bit and because living in Zambia obviously wasn’t providing enough stretchy material, I agreed to be part of the Lechwe PTA. I’m not a PTA kind of mom. I’m happy to help in classrooms and do workshops and work behind the scenes but fundraising? Not my cup of tea. But they desperately needed someone to be the secretary and I figured that couldn’t be that hard so I decided to take on the challenge. I like to know what is going on so maybe this will prove helpful. So far, I already got the inside scoop that school fees will increase by 25% next term. Not the kind of info I was looking for but I got it first.

Brendan is working hard on the piano, especially since his music teacher asked him to take part in the Royal School of Music Examinations. I wanted to leave the decision up to Brendan as to whether or not he participated but Brendan can be afraid of challenges as well as performing in front of people and I really wanted him to choose to do this voluntarily. When that didn’t work, I forced him. That didn’t go well. It is hard as a parent to know when you make something mandatory for their own good, so that they can grow and face challenges in a safe context with the hope that they will be better equipped in the future. Brendan obviously didn’t think this was the time for me to exert my parental power and he was able to articulate that quite well. So after that blowout ensued, well, basically, I won. He’s going to do it but that doesn’t mean he is going to be happy about it. Oh no. I will probably be punished for the next few months as we prepare for the exam where he has to play a few scales as well as learn three songs. But I’m willing to take one for the team if that means he will grow a bit in the process. The kicker is that after all this we found out that the fees are $50 on top of paying for all the weekly piano lessons. But we couldn’t go back after all we had been through. So little by little, Brendan is learning his pieces, and although he won’t readily admit it, he likes the songs he is learning and will enjoy them once he gets through the difficult part of learning them. We all have to learn to do things we may not necessarily like, whether it be piano practice or sitting on the PTA, but who knows the possible good that might emerge?

Monday, January 25, 2010

I received a call from Ms. Lubamba yesterday afternoon (right before she fainted becaue of untreated malaria) saying that the copier at the school has been broken all week and so they were unable to make copies of the conflict curriculum for the teachers to use Monday morning. Her idea was that I teach the material myself to several classes at a time in the assembly hall. So this morning I had 35 5^th and 6^th graders for half an hour, followed by 50 children from Grades 2, 3, and 4. I was teaching them the five approaches to conflict characterized by the different animals and they were getting into it. Right before I began teaching, I had the bright idea of an interactive exercise where the children would move around the room to show which animal is their dominant style. The injuries that occurred were unanticipated. After they all moved to their dominant style, I read out a situation and the children had to decide which approach would be best in that situation. The younger kids were so keen on getting to different animals that there was a fair bit of shoving and elbowing, which resulted in two minor injuries. Despite that unforeseen problem, we had fun with the exercise. One of the scenarios was that a friend is telling you to steal a candy bar from the store. The answer that I was looking for was the Shark, the approach where you take charge and choose what is right over the relationship. The Turtle, leaving the situation, would also have been acceptable. I had to tease those who chose the Owl (problem solving) and wondered aloud if they would be saying something like, “We’ve got a problem we have to solve. What is the best way to steal this candy bar? Let’s brainstorm our options . . .” Those in that corner all rushed to another animal. To those in the Fox (compromise) corner, I laughingly told them that they were the ones that said, “Yeah, we can steal the candy bar but then we have to split it 50-50.” Again there were screams as they moved to another option. Hopefully it was memorable, and not just for Emma who got an elbow in the gut. It took awhile for my voice to recover after those lessons. I don’t know how teachers do it every day. It was my own fault for trying something different that was a bit noisy instead of having them all sit quietly the entire time. I think it was worth it.