Girl to a Woman

    After spending several days meeting and greeting people in Petauke, we began to walk out into the surrounding villages. The first day Karrisa and I met a woman names Ester. We asked her many questions about what it means to be a woman in Zambia and what the rights of passage are. Ester was very hospitable; she offered us peanuts that she picked from her field. We sat outside her mud house on a reed mat as she described for us the ceremony that takes place when a girl is becoming a woman. When the girl reaches puberty, she is taken inside her house where traditionally she must stay for several weeks or even a few months. Each day, women from the community come to her and teach her what it means to be a women and how to take care of her husband. We later learned that part of this ceremony involves teaching the girls how to “keep” their husbands, i.e. some very sexual content. Most girls are only 11 or 12 years old when this ceremony takes place. We asked our blvr guide what the women at her ch do when their girls become of age. She explained they realized that teaching the girls such explicit things so early in life led to premature sexual activity, so they leave out the sexual content of the ceremony. For the most part, the blvr girls would be taught by older ch members. Just before the girls are to be married they might have a “kitchen” party in which the girls would receive the more adult lessons.