Day in the Life

Day 6

By Charis Tshihamba

7/26/12

Today we all visited the homes of the families we met on Monday. On the way to the homes, we made a nickname for our driver, Peter. We were talking about how adorable and fluffy, so we decided to call him Fluffy. My dad and I visited the house of Pastor Joseph Banda and his wife, Catherine. He has five children, two of whom we did not meet. We met his son, Joseph, who is sixteen years old. We saw his daughter, Miriam, for the second time. We also met his baby named Enelos. About fifteen minutes after we got to their house, we went to the market to get food to make nsheema. There were billions of flies at the market. As most people know, I am deathly afraid of every bug, so the market was very scary. On the way home from the market, I heard Beyonce playing from two different homes. When we got back to their home, I watched the baby while Catherine killed the live chicken for our meal. Joseph Jr. came home after a day of school. The two dads were talking and somehow, piano playing was the subject of conversation. My dad told Pastor Joseph that I play piano, so Joseph Jr. pulled out a keyboard. Joseph Jr. played a cool catchy tune, then requested that I play something. I hadn’t played much piano in the past month but I still had a song up my sleeve. Unfortunately, about half of the keys did not produce any sound. I sounded like a young child banging on the keys. It was a bit embarrassing, considering I have been playing piano for over ten years. Miriam came home after the keyboard was put away. She took me outside and taught me how to play a few Zambian games. The ball we played with fell in the garbage hole a few times and got wet. That was when I started creeping into the house. I was ready to stop playing with the ball and start eating. After a day in the life of a Zambian, we went back to our hotel. All of the girls played a card game called Nertz. Allison and I were a team. Neither of us was good at the game, but together, we were decent. After playing cards for a while, the power went out. We played outside until the sun went down. After the card game, we all went to our rooms. On the way to dinner, we spotted an enormous spider, so we ran to the eating area. When we were in the eating area, the moms spotted another spider. This was the same kind of spider. Kathy killed it with her shoe. We looked at the spider and it had cheetah print. It is now called the cheetah spider. Dinner concluded the night. We all went to sleep and I was very paranoid, thinking about the cheetah spider.