Vakay

"The nice thing about arriving somewhere new at night," Colleen--an agricultural PC volunteer--said, "is that when you see it in the morning, it looks different, so you get to arrive twice.  The next morning, as I stepped out of our shared beach banda, I knew she was right.  I'd reached Njaya Lodge, exhauted from three days of travel, including fifteen hours of buses and taxis and crammed minibuses that day, at dark and had been welcomed to a candlelit group dinner at a long table on the beach in front of our little banda.  But in the morning, I could see what had been obscured in the darkness--the crystal blue water of Lake Malawi, the curve of the beach, the tree-covered cliffs off to the left.  "This is unreal," I thought, before spending the next six days swimming, snorkeling, and sunburning in the great freshwater lake that forms the eastern border of most of Malawi.

Peace Corps, while a volunteer organization, carries a few elements of American job culture, including vacation leave.  I earn two vacation days per month (training months excluded), and paid ones at that: $12/day--not exactly enough to fund a trip to the Swiss Alps or Cancun.  Eight months into my service I hadn't yet used any of my vacation days, so I was excited to have a trip over the holidays, to see more of Zambia and cross the border to neighboring Malawi.

Christmas was spent with a few girls from my intake at a hot springs in my province; we rolled out of our tents Christmas morning to one of our crew sprinkling fake snow over us, to make the morning more "authentic," and spent the day sitting in the springs and indulging in a Dickensian Christmas feast at the white Zambian (of British descent)-owned lodge.  Three days later I had made it to Nkhata Bay to join a different group of PC friends in this popular vacation destination.  A few of us were planning to get our scuba certification (it's the most inexpensive place in the world to do it, I've been told) but the class was cancelled by the instructors for logistical reasons.  So instead we hiked, we swam, we paddled traditional dugout canoes, we played a lot of Bananagrams, we read, painted, napped, ate, drank, and as Zambians would say, we enjoyed.  Thoroughly.  It was heavenly.

And while it made quite a dent in my PC bank account, it was, on a global scale, probably the best vacation bargain I'll ever find.  Six days in what was to me a tropical paradise, for around $300, food and lodging inclusive.  The accomodations were simple but cozy; one PCV joked, when the power went out at one lodge where we stayed, that they were lucky to have PCVs as guests because we hardly even noticed, being accustomed to no electricity.  And the lakeside (or oceanside, since Lake Malawi is so big that I said it's essentially an ocean and called it as such jokingly throughout the trip) location was delightful, even if it is quite possible that schistosomiasis permeated the water in which we swam.  (I'm working on picking up a post-exposure prophylactic, just in case.  Schisto is no joke.)

The vacation was amazing, too, because of the company.  In the presence of other Americans--especially those who live the way we do at the present time--we can show parts of ourselves that are cloaked in our communities, whether physically, like being able to wear a bathing suit or a knee-revealing skirt or pair of shorts, and emotionally as well.  Our voices pour out jokes and conversation in our own accent and at a comfortable breakneck pace; sending and interpreting cultural cues come naturally and uninhibited.  On vacation, I can be myself in a different way than I can at home in my village.

There's a chasm, however, that I must straddle between these two places and personalities.  This is a reminder of how my life is different from many of my community members.  I'm in a neighboring country, eating in a lodge restaurant and lounging.  At one of the schools in my zone, over half of the 7th grade pupils have never been to the district boma (roughly equivalent to a county seat) of Mbala, 40 kilometers away from their school, a straight shot north on a tarmac road.  As modest and inexpensive a vacation as this is, it's still a vacation, an undeniable mark of privilege.