A Typical Day
Living in a single room with 3 other people for a month has meant a lot of early mornings, as 2 roommates wake up at 6:00am to work out, and their alarms leave my other fitness-wary roommate and I unable to fall asleep again. I get ready for service learning by changing into comfortable clothes and sneakers, taking my malaria medication, packing my bag with a notebook and a water bottle, and sitting down for breakfast at 7:15. Breakfast is always the same: fried eggs, beans, toast, coffee, tea, and peanut butter buffet style just for our group. Everyone quickly fell into their own breakfast routine, finding their own way to personalize their meal. I always bring a banana purchased from the market to breakfast and eat peanut butter and banana slices on toast with a cup of tea. At 7:30, our bus driver Allen picks us all up, and we pile into his little van, with me in the back seat, as my service site is the last to be dropped off. My commute takes anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half, and I arrive at Appleseed around 8:30-9:00. My partner and I walk in, and each child demands an individual hug from both of us. After greeting the staff, we go over the plan for the day with Appleseed’s director. Sometimes Allie and I will spend the day working with him on our capacity building project, the most important part of our time in Zambia. Other days we will do individual or group tutoring sessions with the kids, and even others we will do a mix of both. We have also helped out with any projects that were being worked on in any given day like building a wall by filling empty water bottles with wet sand and using concrete to keep the structure together. One day, we spent all day cooking for the 60 kids at Appleseed when the cooks were away for the day.
At 11:45 Allen picks us up and drops us off at Kalulu. After service-learning, our day again varies. Sometimes we will have a guest lecturer speak at around 2:00 or 3:00, giving us just enough time to eat lunch and take care of errands before sitting down for class. All the lectures have been discussion-style which has been extremely beneficial to our small group. If no guest lecturer is coming, our professors might hold class to discuss capacity building projects, or we might be scheduled to work with the University of Zambia students planning for the Youth Summit. Very rarely we will have the afternoon off after service learning, and we use the time to go grocery shopping and work on our capacity building projects at the mall where there is wifi. Sometimes for dinner, we will have large group meals prepared in the Kalulu kitchen, other times we will go out to eat traditional Zambian food together, and other times we will all do our own thing for dinner. At night, we will all gather in my room to watch movies on someone’s laptop or get a group together to play cards, but by the end of our long day, we are usually asleep by 9:00pm in order to get enough sleep for our next busy day.
