In the Office

So, you are sitting in the office on a Friday or Monday morning, having ploughed through the first onslaught of “crises” and “issues”. Now that they are averted or solved, you turn to the distracting de Luna blog update… only to be taken back to the office- well, our office.

To give you some idea of what we do in the village, we figured we’d upload so recent photos from villages in the southern province of Zambia.



During the day, I meet with various old men and women to document their languages (languages that are already disappearing). I focus on various cultural activities- subsistence farming and herding, hunting, fishing, pottery-making, divination, witchcraft, and local medicines.

Meanwhile, Sean is often invited to help out with such activities. In Chitongo, along the road from Choma to Namwala (for those of you with a really good map), Sean helped to make a traditional butale (grain-bin) by stripping bark by hand from fiber trees (also used in making rope, nets, and traps). The small trees were then placed upright in a circle, tied together with the bark fibers and then plastered to form the walls of the butale.



When he is not busy with local chores, Sean is biking around the local villages doing an ethnography of cycling in Africa (more in this in an upcoming entry in Sean’s Journal).

Another part of my research is to document local medicines and how they are used. So, in each village we do a “bush walk” where we walk around identifying, photographing and describing wild fruits and medicines. So although we are exposing ourselves to many potential deadly snake bites, we’re also accumulating a lot of knowledge about how to treat them. In fact, after a few short months I am already out-girl-scouting most of my research assistants and am teaching local doctors in villages new uses for familiar plants. Pretty cool.

When we work in the village, we live like they do. So, we eat shima- a local food of the African savanna areas that goes by many names: ugali in East Africa, papa in Botswana, etc. With shima, one eats something called “relish” but this only makes sense if you know what shima is. Shima is made of ground up maize (fairly tasteless, hard, dry corn), which is then cooked with water in much the same way as Cream of Wheat. And then they cook it some more- so much more, in fact, that it becomes a kind of stiff, tasteless lump that is broken up and shared. So, the relish is for taste- which is completely lacking in shima. Relish can be dried fish but usually people are too poor to buy fish and don’t have that much extra time to fish in the local streams unless they have extra children to spare from the fields. So, instead, they eat veggies. Veggies here are greens and only greens- not tomatoes, not squash (although they do eat some squash and pumpkin boiled but not at relish). So, for greens, there are the leaves of the plants in the garden (pumpkin leaves and bean leaves being the most common) and weeds in the bush and the garden. That is to say, in the village, we eat hard gruel and weeds…. without any seasoning or variety…. morning, noon, and night. We have wised up a little, and secretly eat cereal and long-life milk or sometimes buy rice and beans.

We also shower like the villagers- this involves a small bucket of water (2 gallons?) that you splash on yourself. Then you use soap and then you rinse. Hair washing is rare (Africans don’t really need to) so we have documented it with photographs for your viewing pleasure.

Then, after a few weeks, we return to town and do archival work (JESUIT ARCHIVE PIC BLW) and relax… unless the backpacker place we are currently inhabiting is also the home-away-from-home of the Swedish Bikini Team. Sorry boys, no photos of this one!


Pictures Sean documents while we are at the Jesuit Archives