Christmas traditions

The holiday season in Zambia is quite a bit different then the Holiday season in the States. In fact it pretty much does not exist. If it had not been for the abundant amount of Christmas decorations at our local grocery store,you almost had to duck to go down the aisles so as not to clothes line your self on the garland, I might have missed Christmas all together. Zambians for the most part do not celebrate Christmas. When you are barely getting by as it is spending extra money on a celebration is out of the picture. They don’t celebrate birthdays either, if you ask most Zambians when their birthday is they can not tell you and there is no way of saying Happy Birthday in any of the local languages. When I would ask people what they would do to celebrate Christmas I usually got the answer of “Nothing.” Some people will prepare a special meal, which usually means slaughtering a chicken and if they are really lucky maybe having rice in stead of the usual staple food of Nshima, and many people will go to special church services.

Last year Andy and I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas morning in our village. Very early in the morning we started to get people, mostly children, coming to the house walking up to us and saying ”Christmas” with a big grin on their faces. We would reply “Yes it is Christmas” or “Merry Christmas” they would then stand there with the grin on there face for a few minutes, the grin would start to fade and eventually the would turn and walk away. We did not understand that they were asking us for gifts. The people outside of our village were more straight forward. They would just walk up to us and say “Give me Christmas” when we would say “No” they would just look at us straight faced and say “Why?” to which I would respond “Ummm, because I don’t know you” but this never seemed to be a good enough answer. We would then cautiously turn and walk away. The “Give me Christmas” requests continued until new years and then for a week or so after that we got “Give me New Year” we soon just learned to ignore it.

This year was different. We spent the Christmas with about ten other volunteers at our house. We had all kind of decorations that parents and friends had sent from the states and everyone was trying to carry on at least a bit of their Christmas traditions from home. We watched every movie we could find that had anything to do with Christmas, ate lots of food and after picking up about twenty packages from the post office almost everyone had at least one present to open. It was a good day, but it was still not the same as being at home. It is hard for it to feel like Christmas when it is 90 degrees outside, we kept hearing how everyone at home was freezing and snowed in and I must say that we were a little bit jealous. It was also much harder this year to be away from family and friends. Andy and I were able to carry on one tradition that is important to us, every year for Christmas dinner we cook a traditional meal from the country of our choosing. In the past we have done Japan, India, Italy, to name a few, but this year we went for most traditional American food we could think of - Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. One thing you learn when you are this far from home is that it is the little things like Mac and cheese that make the homesickness better.

New years is another holiday that is mostly forgotten here in Zambia, and Andy and I decided to go along with the Zambian tradition and were in bed by 9:30. After having a house full of volunteers for about two weeks it was nice to have a quiet house so we decided that would best be taken advantage of by sleeping.

Now with all the holidays finished up we are back to work as usual. School has reopened so I am back to working with my preschool and Andy starts his art club again this week. He will be teaching one and two point perspective and will be having the children draw still lifes. I just finished a work shop for parents and teachers that taught the importance of early childhood education and how they can incorporate early childhood education activities into their daily lives. The children here are unsupervised for most of the day and have very little interaction with their parents or any adults (ask my family, it is one of things that they commented on the most while they were here to visit. Andy and I call the Children “free range” because the just run around doing whatever they want all day.) I am trying to help the parents understand that even with limited resources they can effectively teach their children and help to prepare then to attend school. We never thought that we would be focusing on education as our primary work here in Zambia, but the longer we are here the more we recognize how important education is and that if the education system in Zambia does not improve then true development will never happen here.