My loving village Zam Fam, and some neighbours. 

My village home! The compound to the left is where most of the cooking, and living actually happens. The structures to the right are for food storage—maize granaries and groundnuts. I was standing in front of the buildings where the family slept when I took the photo though, so they aren’t shown. 

What an attractive cob! Admire it’s size, and the flintiness of its grains! It’ll make really white mealy-meal, perfect for high quality nshima! (These are all things I have learned to appreciate—mealy-meal is a type of maize flour, and nshima is Zambia’s staple food.)

Lunch: boiled eggs, pumpkin leaves stewed in groundnuts, and nshima, of course!

Oh the things you can do with maize. Joe, is hand shelling cobs. Cindy, in the back, is using a manual grinder to process the maize grains into smaller pieces, to make chibwantu (or mukoyo), a traditional village drink made with fermented maize and special roots. Zambians say it’s a drink that chases hunger (tanda nzala)—kind of chewy, and really delicious. Our neighbour (whose name I unfortunately never got the hang of) is pounding maize grains to remove their skins. Once the skins are removed, the grains can be cooked in water so they puff up, kind of like wet popcorn.

A group of women I met harvesting groundnuts. It’s tough work, especially because the market for groundnuts isn’t very good right now. Despite the poor prices they’re getting though, the women continue to plant groundnuts to supplement their income because you can recycle the seed. Mr. Lwiindi, the agent I was staying with, has been trying to convince some of the more entrepreneurial individuals to invest in buying onion or tomato seeds, as these crops have really high returns, especially in their community.

It takes a village to fix a bike. My kind of hilariously named “Glory bike” was consistently inglorious, and failed after a few days of alternately rocky and sandy terrain. 

This picture is definitely not from the village. Some unsafe firework launching in Malawi. The flames to the right are from our ignited makeshift mortar, constructed from flipchart paper. The name on the firework package was “Orchids in Snow.”