Naked Knees and Other Misdeeds 08/10/10

The saga of getting Lisa to Mansa, Zambia continues…
After a nice break at Victoria Falls, our long journey continued north ward, deeper into Zambia. I was eager to get to Mansa and my new home, the guest room attached to the orphan center. As we approached Mansa, Pastor Henry called and warned us, “Do not go into the orphan center. Don’t put anything inside the building. Come straight to my house.” Sounds serious.

Henry had sent people in to clean for my arrival, but they all came out red and scratching. So he hired a pest sprayer. The ladies went in to clean and once again came out red & scratching. Henry was stumped, until he noticed the Sepe tree on the lot next door. It has evil spores that explode in the wind and send itchy little hairs into the air that cause bad reactions on human skin. We couldn’t move in and we waited a few days while the tree was cut down and the place aired out.

Finally, we were cleared to move in. The orphan center and guest rooms are just an empty shell of a building - concrete floors with inches of dirt to be swept out. And lots of creepy crawly things. Tim and I were both shocked to hear Katrien screaming “Kill it, kill it, KILL IT!” She is a vegetarian for humane reasons, killing animals is cruel. Evidently this does not apply to creatures where she has to sleep, namely a large spider with a dozen babies jumping off its back and scurrying towards her like a scene from “The Ring”.

As we moved our stuff in and cleaned, a crowd of children gathered at the windows, peering in and giggling. They just lined up along the sill, watching our every move, like they were watching a TV show. “What’s the white girl doing now?”

They were fascinated, they had never seen white people before. If you tried to talk to them, they ducked down or ran away. Until we unpacked little toy cars and handed them out the window, now we were not so scary. With no curtains on any of the windows, the children moved from window to window to follow all the action. I was living in a fish bowl, the Lisa Poll show.


We spent our first night there, basically camping on the cement. We had flashlights and mattresses on the floor and we rigged up mosquito nets to tuck around the bottoms. There was no furniture and no electricity. I fell asleep early to the sound of children outside singing black gospel songs in Bemba.


The next day I attended three hours of church. This is typical of churches in rural Africa. Church is an all day event. There is singing and dancing and the pastor can talk for hours! It brought back wonderful memories of my first trip to Africa in 2004. That was the first time that I really knew what it meant to be part of the family of God. Here are people on the other side of the world, whose culture is so different, who don’t speak my language, and we are singing and worshipping Jesus together. They call me sister because we are children of the same God. What a beautiful huge family I have!

It was amazing to be sitting in the church that I helped to build. The last time I was here, this building was just a hole in the ground. Back in 2004, all that was on this property was a big ole tree. I laid under that tree because I was sick from eating too much nshima, taking pictures of my team mates make bricks which became this church. That counts right?
I helped more when we got back.
Our team had a concert to raise the money to finish building the church.

Now, to the right of the tree, the church is done and to the left, there is an orphan center. I never dreamed six years ago I’d be returning here to live! Now I sit under that tree and play Go Fish with the neighbor children.

Back to the church service. Pastor Henry introduced me and asked me to say a few words. I recounted the story of laying under the tree six years ago, told them what I was here to do and also explained that “I will be living here for a few months, if I look helpless or am doing something wrong, please come tell me.” This proved to be quite prophetic and more immediate than I had hoped.
Right after church, while the church elders were waiting next door to meet me, I proceeded to lock myself in the bathroom for half an hour.
The handle of the door just broke right off in my hand. I could not climb out the window as there are bars on the windows. I stuck my arms out and waved until someone noticed me. A group of children came to the window to see me, but they didn’t understand English so they didn’t know why this white woman was waving and standing in a bathroom for half an hour. Finally, Tim came to my rescue.

After meeting the church elders, we walked to the market. We went into sensory overload as we weaved through a maze of tables piled high with bright red tomatoes, brown casaba roots, rows of large blackened fish, mountains of tiny dried out fishies, buckets of beans, pyramids of potatoes, racks of vividly colored patterned fabrics, and marble-sized white balls of unknown origin (I have since been told these are balls of clay which are eaten to aid digestion, though I’ve never seen anyone actually do this).

The sellers were mostly women, with babies strapped to their backs by the patterned fabrics. As we passed, the babies screamed and hid their faces in their mother’s shoulders. Never having seen white people before, they thought we were ghosts.

It just kept getting hotter and hotter so I changed into shorts to walk up to the internet place. Everyone openly stared at my white legs. Being that I had just endured my second winter this year, my legs had not seen the sun in many, many months, so they were pretty scary. When I got home, there was a knock at the door and two women came in and quietly introduced themselves as being from the nearby Bible college. They got right to the point. “You cannot run away from our culture. You are in it.” They proceeded to rap a piece of fabric around my waist that went all the way to the floor. “This is how the women in our church show respect. If you want the men to treat you properly, you must not show your knees.”

Ohhhhh, that’s why everyone was gawking at my legs – they were naked! I have ugly surgery-scarred knees, who would have thought they were sexual objects? The women taught me how to wrap the chitenge (what the fabric square is called) and I vowed to wear it each time I went out. When they left, I could hear Tim & Katrien snickering in the next room, “You’ve received your first civic censure.”

The next day, the orphans showed up at church. But I am going to leave that story for another day. I want to give the children the time and space that they deserve in a blog that is all about them. There is so much to say about and for them. They are the reason I am here.