I Want to be Made: Peace Corps Volunteer: How I Spent My Christmas Vacation

My supervisor, the unofficial mayor of Kayanga, has been working on her shebeen (local bar and shop) for over a year now. When she announced that the grand opening would be Christmas Eve, people immediately starting saving their coins and fattening up their goats. Almost the whole village, plus lots of outsiders, attended the party.

Three other Peace Corps friends, from all over the country, came to join the celebration. Christmas Eve started with the slaughtering of multiple animals, all to sell at the shebeen that night. Then there was the unexpected python that came through the courtyard, that one brave soul bashed on the head. Pythons are actually not venomous but they are dangerous constrictors, I had the guy save me some skin to make bracelets. That night seemed to go by in a flash, all of a sudden it was 2 am and we had danced our way through Christmas! The highlight of the night for me was when my host father, Febian, got his hand on the microphone. This is the man that I lived with for 4 months, see every week and still he barely speaks to me. But put a few beers in him and he becomes the life of the party. He gets on the mic and starts rapping in a low voice, “Jackie, Kayanga. Jackie, Kayanga” over and over for about 3 minutes! I felt like a celebrity, and I danced along with everyone else to my own theme song.

Christmas day was spent with apples, sandwiches and not enough sunscreen at the Kavango River, with Angola a stone's throw away. The plan was to spice up our holiday and head over to Angola in a traditional canoe. However with the recent croc sightings plus the gun shot we heard, we decided to stay on the Nam side. For dinner, we collected some fire wood, fetched our water from the borehole, opened wine brought from town and started preparing our weird Christmas dinner. The meal consisted of beans and rice and for desert, Velveta Macaroni and Cheese (that Christina received from America!). We cooked over an open fire, ate from one communal pot, drank our wine from tin cans turned into cups, sat on carved out tree stumps, all under the sky full of stars that night. We agreed it was probably one of the weirder Christmases we will ever have.