The Road to Yuka: Family
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way”- Leo Tolstoy
I’ve always been skeptical of family. In my younger years, bursting with teenage angst and all its misunderstood splendor, pledging unyielding fealty to a group of people I had no choice in choosing — a group of people decided through mere circumstance — felt a bit contrived. This suspicion was furthered by every flare up with my father and falling out with my sister, events that in retrospect seem a seminal part of growing up as an oldest child. While I was exceedingly close with my mother — my closest confidant and truest companion — I did not share the same conviction that many of my peers discussed their nuclear families with. To me, family was a functional unit. Distinct individuals united by circumstance, not a cohesive whole; the result not greater than the sum of its parts.
My functional understanding of family only deepened as I grew older. My mother became ill and died when I was 17; our party of four now a triumvirate. I believed her absence would bring us closer; in fact, it only drove us further apart. We each searched for her in our own way, fragmenting into our own worlds in so doing; my father in his study, my sister in her room, and myself in my home away from home, the ice rink. Different in method, united in isolation. We all moved on —what choice does one have? — each landing in a very different place, each on an island of our own making.
My father landed in a new marriage; another attempt at life grabbed from the clutches of what some surely labeled inevitable defeat. My sister landed in art; painting, origami, piano, the violin. Some of these inherited passions from her late mother, others of her own creation; each a cicatrix formed from absence. And I landed in Boston, beginning my university career, grateful for a new beginning absent from pangs of pains past. So it goes, as it always does.
Four years after beginning in Boston, I began yet again. This time much further away, in a much stranger land, an island unlike any I had experienced before: Zambia. I chose to do the Peace Corps for many reasons, some more trivial than others, but chiefly because I felt in comparison with the big blue world, the United States had little to offer me. I wanted a challenge, an environment far outside my comfort zone, something worth doing. These myriad desires landed me in Zambia, as a primary school teacher in the tiny village of Yuka; a place as good as any to begin again.
Peace Corps service is primarily viewed through the negative; people pay attention to what will be lost: internet connection, electricity, daily comforts of American life. But little attention is paid to what will be gained: a new home, a new job, and most importantly, a new family. It was the last of these three things that most piqued my interest in pondering my soon to be life in Zambia. Who will my host family be? What will that relationship look like? How will my time with them compare to my time with my family back home? I didn’t dare hope for anything other than the mundane — hope is certainly one of life’s most dangerous offerings — but in my heart of hearts, its whispers stirred, realizing the Peace Corps offered me an opportunity like no other: a second chance at family.
Many months after these ponderings, I met my host mother. Following our first meeting, I was convinced she hated me. In the opening days of October, we met in Mongu — the Provincial Capital of Western Province, the province Yuka is located in — for a workshop the Peace Corps dubs ‘Site Visit,’ a weeklong period in which each volunteer meets their host family and visits their village for the first time. My host mother was quiet, reserved, and despite my best attempts in my broken siLozi we didn’t speak much. I departed Mongu excited about Yuka, albeit dejected the familial chemistry I had foolishly hoped to find was absent.
Several weeks later, I returned to Yuka, this time for good. I jumped out of the Peace Corps Land Cruiser, grabbed my backpack, and before I even took stock of my surroundings my host family had formed a flawless assembly line transporting my belongings from the cruiser into my house with an efficiency that would make Frederick Taylor proud. In the midst of the assembly line, my host mother appeared, an all-knowing smile I had not yet seen gracefully resting on her face, to welcome me home. We exchanged pleasantries as dictated by custom, but nothing more. What I did not realize at the time, was that that moment was the beginning of what has turned out to be, a not yet long, but indeed beautiful friendship.
In the seven months that have passed since I was welcomed home, my host mother, much like mylate mother before her, has become my closest friend in my new life. She takes care of me as only a mother can, checking on me every night to make sure I have everything I need to sleep, calling me when I am outside of Yuka to make sure my day went off without a hitch, and constantly scolding me to clean my clothes and sweep my house. She refers to me as her firstborn child — “mwanake” in siLozi — and when faced with visitors or the odd passerby, matter of factly informs them I am the oldest of her five children.
There are certainly differences in my relationships with my mothers. My grasp of siLozi is not nearly at a point where I can communicate as freely with my host mother as I could with my late mother, nor is our life experience anywhere near as shared. But despite this, the bond I feel is strikingly similar. Spending time with my host mother is spending time in the presence of power; someone completely in their element, confident in their abilities, in control of their environment. Around her I know I am safe, looked after, and completely accounted for, as was equally the case in the presence of my late mother.
My host father, while an entirely delightful man, is rarely home. He spends most weeks fishing —oneofmyhost family’s chief sources of income — and is often at the river or in the plains, absent from the Yuka homefront. He always greets me with a massive hug and a hearty pat on the back, but his ultimate priorities lie elsewhere. Parallels exist in this relationship, too.
The chief difference between my two families, however, is that of siblings; I now have more siblings than I can count, a far cry from my duties as an older brother of one. Yuka is full of kids, many of them young enough to be my own, and my role varies between brother, uncle, friend, mentor, pseudo-father figure, friendly neighbor, and circus attraction. Sometimes I’m tasked with providing a piggy back ride to one of the little ones, other times kicking a soccer ball around with the medium guys, sometimes tutoring or playing chess with the bigger guys, and sometimes providing a listening ear to the young adults. My relationship with each child is different, but the feeling of family is present in them all.
My family here has taught me what it means to be a part of a greater whole; a result that exceeds the sum of its parts. I feel that I am part of a living, breathing, family unit in which each and every member plays a unique role in promoting the collective familial good. However hedged myhopes had been, however optimistic I was to potentially become a part of that which I felt I never truly experienced in the United States, however alluring that ideal was, it has been outdone. I could not be more grateful for my Zambian family, my host mother first and foremost, and the education they have given me on what it means to be part of a family. Not only have they provided me with more support than I believed possible, they have proved my teenage self wrong, and showed that when attended to properly, family is indeed something worth believing in.