The wrath of the sun is inescapable. Throngs of red rays drip en masse from the rainless sky. Perennially poised for rain, but hardly happening, you can at times taste the moisture in the air. It does rain in Africa; you can see it in the distance. It’s just a matter of whether it’ll get to you or not.

The rain is suffocating. It’s not often that it does rain, however, each mango-sized drop that leaks from that endless horizon drenches every corner in sight. And for good measure, just when you think the red clay has soaked enough water, just when you’ve had a chance to come up for air, just when you’ve finished praying for the return of sunlight, it rains again.

It didn’t even take me to end of my first week to realize this: you can’t hide from the weather.

It only took me one day to realize that my time with African Impact was going to be a challenge. It’s not the weather that slows time here. Which, I soon found is a real thing. Africa Time is a real thing. Time crawls; the days are long. Everyone is on the cusp of doing something. The best way to describe the infrastructure of Zambia is, “nearly done.” When projects start, they rarely finish on time. This is almost always due to funding.

Culture shock is never something that I thought would affect me. I set out to take in Zambia with open arms. Each experience would be met with child-like curiosity. But there are just some things you can’t prepare for. There are aspects about life that can’t be scheduled. Sometimes culture shock is out of your hands. Because culture shock happens to both sides of the coin. I’m experiencing people for the first time, and people are experience me for the first time.

My first afternoon project was an after school program at Linda Primary. The words “work” and “play” are synonymous. I could say I worked at this project, even if it was me playing with a bunch of kids – although anyone who has spent an extended period of time with large groups of kids knows it is, in fact, work. My introduction to Linda was a small girls fingers tugging at my hair. (Why have kids lately been putting me in these inexplicable situations?) The kids aren’t used to seeing white people. Muzungu.

Another day while working with adults on their reading comprehension, I realized a humorous aspect about their language. While speaking English, Zambians have troubles with L’s and R’s. They get them mixed up. So, Mr. Rickerson isn’t really an option. Nick is the right choice. Unfortunately, the story we were working on was titled Larry the Lion. The humor came from one passage:

Watch Larry fly.

No matter how many times we went over it, the passage was read

Watch Larry fry.

Even though the book contained adequate pictures, I could not get the image of this poor lion, Larry, nice and toasty in the African sun. Watch Larry fry. Despite the mistake in pronunciation we pressed on, they learned, and did better.