“People think Zambia is exotic, but when people in Zambia hear I grew up in Alaska, they think that’s the crazy part. Alaska never felt remote to me as a child. It felt very normal. We constantly had people in and out of our house, and I was teaching in Hebrew school when I was seven years old. I felt very much like I was part of the deal—it wasn’t only something my parents were doing, I was in it too. My older siblings left home at a young age to go to school elsewhere. Online school had just launched by the time I got to first grade, so I stayed home until eighth. You don’t realize what it cost your parents as a child—you only understand once you’re doing it yourself.
I’m not what you’d call adventurous. I didn’t travel anywhere before and I don’t travel much now either. I haven’t even been to Victoria Falls, and it’s only a seven-hour drive. When my husband and I were dating, he asked me whether I’d be willing to go to Africa, and I said, sure, why not. It wasn’t a serious conversation, but it eventually became reality.
Soon after we got to Zambia, there was a drought—the first in a hundred years. A generator doesn’t mean everything works. You have to decide whether you’re going to run the air conditioner or the oven or the dryer. The water pump has to be constantly turned back on. You can be standing there with your kids in the bath and suddenly it’s dark and there’s no water coming.
I’m very aware of how much my children depend on me. When you send your kids to school, you trust the school to build an environment for them. Here I have to build it myself—everything they know, everything they experience.
So we take them to New York for a few weeks every summer—more than 24 hours of travel—and I watch their whole year culminate into those weeks. I must have been this way myself once coming from Alaska, though I don’t remember it. They arrive and they’re in shock that their cousins know the same things they know. Just to be around people who understand them. They run down the street like they’ve lived there their whole lives. They don’t feel like guests. They feel like they’re home.”
– Rivky Hertzel Lusaka, Zambia
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