I have settled into a role as an assistant teacher during the day and a boarding chaperone and tutor during the afternoons and evenings. I have found a rhythm I am comfortable with now.

I’m going to write 4 or five posts about what a weekday here is like with some extra commentary as required.

Every morning at 5:45 or 6:15 depending on how nice the sheet feels and if the winter temperatures are a nice 17º or a ‘freezing’ 11º, I get out of bed and start the day. The first thing I see after leaving by room is the morning sky.

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Sunrises here have a quality of beauty that I do not see in Canada. I think it might have something to do with being so close to the equator, but the truth is that I can’t put my finger on it. Perhaps there are just fewer clouds during the dry season so the frequency of spectacular skies increases and I become more aware of them in a redthreadic way.

We have an instant shower. The water comes from the well at MICS and is pumped to the water tower. From there it comes through our plumbing system to our building and into a device which acts like an electric kettle, using an element to instantly heat the water to a comfortable temperature. The system is relatively new addition to life as a MICS intern and I can’t imagine life without it.  The only difference between it and a shower back home is the water pressure, which can’t go much higher than 1 liter a minute because the element can’t heat more flow quickly enough. Made in Britain, like all quality water heaters, I think it would make a very nice brew for tea as well.

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The thing to note here is that MICS is an anomaly for water service. The rest of the municipality of Macha either has no running water or it is served from an aging and falling apart system which is intended to serve the hospital. The hospital has it’s water rationed to use between 5 am  and 8 am and again from 6 pm to 9 pm. The leaks in the aging pipes prevent any more use from being very good for the supply at the local dam. It’s been barely a month since I was first at the dam which is Macha’s main water reservoir other than the deep underground pumps. In that time the water has gone from this, to this. That’s at least a 15 cm drop in a pond no larger than those one might find in Canada serving as a retention pond for a small subdivision.  I’m told that by by the end of August it might be completely dry.

A picnic on the 25th of May

Same perspective on the 18th of June. not shown at least 4 additional feet of exposed mud. Those boys are standing on dry land where not a month ago was a foot of water.

I’m extremely grateful to not have to use a cold sponge bath to keep clean. The dust in dry season here makes showering daily a requirement and I’d shudder to think how cold I’d be every morning if I had to use ground temperature water. I have been incredibly fortunate that I’ve only had one morning power outage so far and the experience of fumbling out of suddenly very cold water in the darkness of pre-dawn still covered in soap is not one I’d like to repeat.

Then I make breakfast. Eggs and milk are required to pull this off effectively though I did make pancakes in bulk early on and have been whittling them down gradually. I should mention that maple syrup is a Canadian luxury and I have been substituting a molasses and cane syrup mix  that was a pleasant surprise in it’s adequacy. That might not sound like a glowing review but I’m sure I can explain by saying that I have to compare it to maple syrup so it might as well be used fuel oil. I really miss maple syrup.

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The milk is long life UHT milk that requires no refrigeration until it has been opened just like the eggs which remain unwashed from the chicken coop in order to retain their natural bacterial defenses so as to avoid needing refrigeration as well. I’m still not used to just picking an egg up that has been sitting on the shelf for over a month now and using it as though it’s fresh, but I’m not sick and they taste great fired scrambled and hard-boiled.

By now it is probably time to go to the morning teacher’s meeting which begins at 715. If I planned my morning correctly this usually means I have listened to my audio book chapter on my phone and done the morning dishes with my colleague Sarah using hot water from the kettle that only took us about 4 weeks to realize we could use, rather than washing our dishes in cold tap water.

The teachers meeting is an opportunity to greet the teachers and focus on the day ahead. We take some time to pray as a group and make announcements about the day or the week. If your business doesn’t have a casual daily morning meeting I’d highly recommend beginning one. It is far more valuable to give that face time to build esprit-du-corps than an impersonal and one sided e-mail or bulletin board announcement. I think it also serves as a time to shift from ‘morning’ to ‘work’ mode in your head saving time at the desk.

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Then we go outside to greet the students who are expected to arrive at 730. some of the students have left their homes at 5 am to get here on time so there is a generous grace period for students arriving late but if they aren’t sitting in the chapel by the time it starts at 745 or so, they are marked late and after three violations a note goes home to be signed by the parents and returned.

I think I’ll stop here and continue the story in my next post about the school day. I want to keep these posts a manageable size as part of the reason for the long delay between this post and the previous one is that I am writing another more personal post which has tuned into a bit of a novel. It is still unfinished but coming. (Now I sound like a certain Ice and Fire author.)

I love adding photos and telling stories but internet access here is difficult to manage like the water and power. Zambia, and the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa are in extraordinary need of infrastructure development and as the Chinese are finding now and as the Americans, British and previous European colonizers have found in the last century or more; building and doing business in Africa is one part funding the project and 9 parts funding the lavish lifestyles of the people who sign the permits. The public purse is about as watertight as the water main in Macha. I’ll be writing more on that topic later but for now I hope you enjoyed this detailed look at a weekday morning. Next up is the school day.