Good Ole Animal Sacrifice

So I wrote this a while ago but just got around to posting it. Sometimes I procrastinate. 

Sometimes in Africa I find myself in some of the strangest situations. Sometimes things that should appall or surprise me don’t anymore.   Ritualistic animal sacrifice, however, is not one of those things.

I just returned yesterday from a trip up north to a village called Kazembe for Luapula’s biggest traditional ceremony called Mutomboko.  In short, the ceremony is basically to commemorate the Lunda crossing from the Congo over the Luapula River into Zambia and the crushing of local enemies after power had been established.  It involves Luapula’s biggest chief, Mwata Kazembe, walking around with an ENORMOUS entourage to sacred spots in the village (one of these spots was a tree which, at the base, was stacked dozens of hippo skulls; he sacrifices food to these bones to appease animal spirits and protect his people.  In the past there used to be lion, elephant and other wild animal bones here as well-kind of awesome) to perform little traditional acts that symbolize important things in the Mwata’s history, such as receiving blessings from the ancestors in the form of living headmen and offering food to the river gods (for more in-depth reading go here).  The whole ceremony culminates with the Mwata being carried 2.5 km from his palace amid thousands-and I mean THOUSANDS- of people to perform his traditional dance that basically broadcasts that he can conquer anyone. Except god. Of course.

In short, the ceremony was fantastic.  I’ve been to small local ceremonies before, but this one definitely was the biggest and most rooted in tradition.  Before each event (the whole ceremony took place over the course of a day and was broken up into mini-events), a group of drummers banged out beat to call the congregation to the royal palace.  Every time the Mwata entered or left an area, guns were fired to announce his movements.  He was accompanied by dozens of advisors dressed in all white.  The throngs of people (over 10,000 were in attendance) were appropriately suffocating and emotive.  I was appropriately drunk off skunked liter-bottles of smuggled Congo beer. 

So, I got there with a bunch of other PCVs on the Friday before the day of the big festival and stayed at the Kazembe Orphanage which is run by a missionary couple named Tom and Amy. 

Side note-Tom and Amy are some of the most fantastic people I’ve ever met. They work with orphans under 2 whose parents have died or are psychologically unable to care for their children.  Read about their story or help their cause.

 The next day we trooped out to watch (or attempt to watch) the festivities.  In all honesty, the crowds were too massive and the chaos too chaotic to actually see anything without the very probable possibility of being killed.  I saw part of the hippo stop, got literally crushed in the masses when the Mwata offered food to appease the river gods and copped out early when the chief retainers (chief’s bodyguards) opened the palace gates for about 10 seconds while a horde of people attempted to squeeze themselves through a 10 foot space.

The one thing though that I had been looking forward to the whole day and was basically one of the reasons why I had decided to attend (in addition to the AMAZING pig roast done by Tom and Amy) was the point in the ceremony when they sacrificed a goat.  I wasn’t quite sure when they would do it but I knew it was going to be one of the times the Mwata left his palace.  One of his royal bearers was supposed to kill the goat and the Mwata was carried over it in his umuselo (royal carriage thing covered in Zebra skin carried by villagers) to signify that the Mwata is powerful enough to destroy anything.  In the olden days, and by the olden days I mean about 100 years ago, this goat used to be a human. 

So, the goat is sacrificed right before the Mwata is paraded to the arena to perform his big traditional dance, the highlight of the ceremony (don’t ask me about this-I didn’t go because I was too dehydrated and weak to attempt to force my way into an arena packed with 10,000+ people that was only meant for 5,000).  Me and a few other PCVs ended up talking to the gate keeper who was nice enough to let us into the royal palace compound so we could see everything.  Lots of gunshots, drumming and ululating later, I’d had a front row seat (I literally stalked that goat so I knew that I would see it die) I’d seen my first animal sacrifice.  It’s funny- maybe it was the fact that I knew that this death was meant for a human or the fact that it was for ceremony, but seeing this goat being hacked at the neck was different from seeing an animal killed for food.   It was actually kind of difficult to watch, but one of those things you certainly couldn’t turn away from (probably along the same lines as car accidents and ugly babies).  Didn’t really help that the goat was crying like a child and the machete was dull. I thought it was going to be a swift slice of the neck; it was more a hacking off of the head. They never did get it all the way off, btw.

All in all, my experience at Mutomboko was pretty damn unique.   Something I’m glad I attended, something I will probably not attend again.  It was amazing to see this slice of culture maintained and to see practices that had kept on from when Africa hadn’t yet been permeated, dictated or influenced by Western ideals and ideas.  I cant help thinking though what it was like in the days when the ceremony was meant to show enemies the power of the Mwata- where rivalry influenced the ambiance and when the sacrifices walked on two legs.

Lions and Cheetahs and Eles, Dear God.

Hi Friends.

So its been a bit of an -interesting- week.  In addition to provs happening (which is just- interesting I suppose would be the word- in its own right), I've gone through a waterfall of emotions mostly concerning my friends back home.  Dont really feel like going into anything specific about that, but suffice to say it's been a bit of a hard week.  So I suppose this post will be semi-dedicated to something I haven't written about before, which are my fears while being in the Peace Corps.

So, regardless of everything else, my biggest fear is anything happening to my family while I am way.  Second? Anything happening to my friends.  I unfortunately had to deal with the latter.  Thankfully, I have an amazing support network here in the province, but, and I'm sure anyone volunteer will attest to this, the ever-constant presence of the possibility of anything happening to loved ones while away is absolutely terrifying. Distance combined with the lack of communication and the inaccessibility to immediate travel makes these fears even more difficult.  There really is nothing I can do about this, and I just wanted to mention it, but you all are what is most important to me and that's how it will remain no matter where I am in the world. And a HUGE thank you to those who were there for me this past week and, well, ever.   My life is just that much better.

So there's that.

On to other, lighter subjects: VACAY! So as I mentioned before I had visitors about a month ago. Both my mother and broski as well as my number one came to visit me in Zam-land! So imma compress this into lists and pictures because you all know how much I love lists (see Best and Worst: insert season here). And pictures.

So...
M's Visit
It was kind of an impromptu vacay and pretty short, but it was more than amazing to see him after a year plus of being apart (I think, up to this point in our relationship, we've been apart physically more than together). We spent a couple of days in Lusaka (ew.) then went on to Livingstone and did a safari in Chobe National Park in Botswana (we saw: elephants, water buff, impala, puku, lions, warthogs, giraffes, monitor lizards, fish eagles, lots of very large storks, vultures and crocs.  There was a jackal that visited our campsite and some unknown creature started scratching at our tent).  I also got attacked by a baboon. For serious.

Africa has some mind blowing sunsets. I guess.

Il mio ragazzo on the river safari. And some elephants.

Male lion. We saw a ridiculous number of lions and heard them all night.

Oh, and we got a flat tire. In the middle of the park. With lions wandering around.  This is now my life :]

We saw gazillions of elephants. I never knew you could get tired of seeing elephants.

Mom and Bro's Visit
So we had a little more wiggle room with this visit as they were here for about 2 weeks.  We did the ville, South Luangwa, and Livingstone.  It was fun and informative. Imma go with pics on what we did.

Fam bam at Vic Falls! Too much mist to see the falls though.

We did an elephant safari and of course got the biggest elephant. Of course.

I fed it! His name was Boniface.

Petted a lion.

Petted some cheetahs too.

I have much, much more pictures but they're on f-book.













So, that's about all that was up with the vacay. It was awesome to share some of my Zam-life with people from the States and we had a fantasmic time.

I suppose that's all I've got to say for right now. I would give a preview for next blog, but to be honest I'm not quite sure when that's getting up. Much love to all of you and until later, holla.

Best and Worst: Rainy Season

10 best/worst for my favorite season!

BEST:

1. Its not hot anymore!

2. Everything becomes an incredibly vibrant and almost unnaturally green overnight. In my opinion, Zambia is at its most beautiful just after a heavy rain.

3. Everything feels clean.  The air takes on this crazy crispness that can only be described as if the entire world was washed of all of its dirt and has woken up brand spanking new.

4. No more going to the well! Just put all your buckets out under your roof and voila, water for a week. Just make sure to boil and/or filter. I don’t want to KNOW what kind of diseases habitate my roof.

5. No more dust since everything is wet all the time.

6. CATERPILLAR SEASON! (mushrooms too)

7. Lightening shows are spectacular with imbasela thunder concerts.

8. The weather is actually varied.  Believe it or not, endless blue sky does get tiring.

9. There’s food in the market again.

10. You can FINALLY sleep since its not so damn hot anymore.

WORST:

1. Obvi: everything is always wet. Your clothes, your house, your bed…everything. Moist. All the time.

2. You don’t really ever do laundry because it’s always rainy.

3. You’re always muddy. This makes showing up looking professional extremely difficult. Just another talent that Zambians seem to somehow innately possess and I can never learn.

4. No one shows up for anything. Even if it just LOOKS like its going to rain, just cancel your meeting. No one will be there anyhow.

5. Critters come out. Most notably snakes. And termites that fly up my nose.

6. The schools I can work with become incredibly limited both because of lack of attendance and accessibility.

7. Everything grows like its on steroids.  What once was a completely navigable bush path has given way back to just bush.

8. Sudden thunderstorms make swarms of children take shelter on my porch and I don’t have the heart to tell them to go away.  

9. Your chimbusu and ulusasa (toilet and shower) roof collapses.

10. Since you have no shower roof and you’re wet most of the time anyway, the amount of baths you take a month severely decreases.

Still Alive! Also, Camp G.L.O.W. Luapula!

So many exclamation points (marks? I forget which country uses which)! So, yet another four month break between blog posts- I know, I’m a terrible updater but I had an excuse.  Lightening struck our internet router around Christmas and it wasn’t until early April that we got it fixed.  I get some props for that, right?

Anywho, since I last wrote and now, things have been pretty damn busy.  What with co-teaching, adult literacy, Camp G.L.O.W. (more to come on this later), the LLIT mosquito net study and hammer mill, I’ve hardly had time even to breathe in the past few months.  I would go into detail about all the projects but to be honest I kind of just want to forget about work right now and enjoy my vacation (Yes, I’m writing on vacay. My life is just that cool). In any case I think I described most of my activities in an early post anyway so go back and read that one if you’re so interested-all except the net study which is basically a partnership with USAID/PMI and the Society for Family Health to study the longevity of mosquito nets and insecticide efficacy. I know, enthralling.  I do, however, want to talk about one project that was just recently completed and incredibly rewarding for me, the rest of the volunteers that helped with planning and implementation as well as all the girls/mentors that were selected for the program.

So, I think I’ve mentioned this before but in Zambian society due to both culture and tradition, women and especially girls are highly overlooked.  In villages it is not uncommon to marry off a girl child as early as the age of 14 years- I’ve seen it done multiple times in my school- for a bridal price as low as 250,000 kwatcha, roughly $50 US, or human labor.  Though this practice is technically illegal, it is still rampant in rural areas despite both police and cultural leader intervention.  In addition to early marriage, the worth of the girl child is substantially lower than that of the male child and many girls are pulled out of school at grade 7 in favor of working in the house or the fields.  Girls in the village are afforded maybe half of the opportunities given to boys and often lack the motivation, assertiveness, self confidence as well as the sense of self worth to try and change that fact simply because they were brought up in a culture that does not value them nearly as much as it should.  To help remedy this, the female volunteers of Luapula have planned and implemented a program called Camp G.L.O.W., which stands for Girls Leading Our World, a camp focused on girls’ empowerment that is implemented by volunteers all over the world.  Each camp is unique to each group that plans it, but ours was run entirely by women, both Zambian and American, with as little male presence as possible to encourage a safe and open atmosphere for all the girls and mentors involved. G.L.O.W. Luapula  took place on 10^th-14^th April at a Youth Center in our provincial capitol and involved 9 volunteers from Mwense, Nchelenge, Mansa and Samfya districts.  Each volunteer (except one) brought two girls grades 7-8 of their choice and one community mentor to the camp which focused on issues such as girls empowerment, leadership skills, assertiveness, career planning, the importance of education, rape and gender based violence awareness, HIV/AIDS education as well as many other subjects that are either not or not substantially addressed in schools and the community.  In addition, the girls participated in fun activities such as sports, arts and crafts and sanitary pad making.  After the HIV/AIDS sessions, we partnered with an organization to provide voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) to everyone present in order to assist them in learning their status. 

I have to say, out of all the activities in my service thus far, this has definitely been the most rewarding.  The change in the girls and women, even after the first day, is so discernible that just being with them and seeing them grow from day to day was reward enough.  I can’t put into words what it meant to me, and I’m sure the rest of the volunteers, to the entire camp come together and know that this may very well be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and hopefully a life changer for these girls and women.  Granted it was a bit rough at times but the professionalism and positive attitudes of all the volunteers planning it, most notable the three in charge, helped solve every problem efficiently as possible.  We were all exhausted at the end of it but honestly, after a week of 9 volunteers, 16 teenage girls, 8 Zambian mentors and countless surprises from the venue, facilitators and partners, who wouldn’t be?

So that’s what I’d been doing in the last few months.  Recently, as in right now, I’ve been on vacay with friends and fam from America-land so updates on that later (preview: I get attacked by a baboon).   

A Year Ago Today...

Well, not actually today. More like around this time last year...I boarded a plane to live for 2 years in a country I'd never been to, met 29 incredible individuals-many of whom in the subsequent months I've come to rely on as family and came to this country as a brand-spanking new Peace Corps Trainee.

Holy Jesus I've been here a year. I can't say that time has flown by- sometimes it feels like I've just stepped off the plane onto hot Zambian tarmac, other times it feels like I've been here for a hundred years. Like most things in this country, it just depends on the day.  But, here I am, another year older, another year (hopefully) wiser, another year of incredible experience under my proverbial belt.  So what have I been doing in my 2 cough3cough month break? Stuff.

Not gonna lie, my first Christmas away from my family was rough. No egg nog, no arguing whether we'd do white or colored lights, no real tree, no cookie baking marathon, no claymation movies or 24 hours of A Christmas Story. For the majority of the Christmas holiday, Mansa didn't even have electricity. But what we did have for the holiday was each other.  Vastly different (packet punch, face paints and a night out to a dirty warehouse bar) but no less special, Christmas this year simply reaffirmed that what you do doesnt really matter, just who you do it with, and I spent my holiday with some of the best people a volunteer could ask for.

Okay enough of the sentimental stuff- onto the funsies: NEW YEARS! After traveling for 2 days from Mansa to get to Lusaka to meet my FAVORITE Zam-ladies and a whirlwind night devoid of sleeping but full of tequila, we found ourselves on a 6 hour bus heading to Livingstone to see Zambia's claim to world wonder fame- Victoria Falls.  We did what we could on Peace Corps budget, which limited us to a booze cruise and a bomb New Years party at a lodge on the Zambezi, but honestly the best part was getting to spend some much needed quality time with the girls. But I'm not gonna wax poetic on how much I love my friends because I'm hoping they already know. Imma talk about the booze cruise (and New Years and Vic Falls).  SO, its billed as a "river cruise" down the Zambezi where you're served dinner and as much booze as you can handle (or until they run out).  We had an awesome time on it and saw a good amount of animals- a couple crocs, some monkeys and an f-ton of hippos.  New Years Eve party was a booze-driven blur, enough to make me miss the actual countdown to the new year.  There were monkeys that we saw jumping from branch to branch in the trees above us earlier in the night though.  I think the best part of our vacation though was just seeing the actual falls. They were un-freaking-believable.  I had a pre-concieved notion of what they would look like, but seeing the actual falls...they blew my mind.  They're spectacular. Words cannot describe. 
The biggest misconception that I had was that the falls fell into a giant pool of water, but they dont.  It's like the earth just split and there's a giant scar running down the face of it that the Zambezi falls into.  Its a giant valley pretty much, all black and jagged wet rock face.  One of the things I found most impressive was the spray.  No one really talks about it but since the water is falling on rocks and not into a pool, it creates a mist you can see from pretty far away that just blankets (and consequently soaks) everything.  I thought it was the coolest thing when we were on the booze cruise and you could see the white spray coming up, or when we were driving to the falls in one of those open-top safari vehicles and we turned a corner and there we were at the top, mist billowing and the falls looking like the end of the earth.  I wonder what Dr. Livingstone thought about that. 
Word of caution though: as incredible as it is, it is also incredibly dangerous. Due to the ever-present mist, everything is wet and consequently slippery.  The hand rails only reach to chest level if there are any at all.  The drops are steep. Very, very steep. And the bottom of the gorge is full of not-so-soft rock.  Not to mention there are unofficial guides that take you for an unofficial tour to walk on the lip of the falls (I'm serious-people do it. If the internet were working in Mansa I have pictures of two girls and an illegal guide standing in the water literally ON the edge of the falls).  People die all the time.
There are also baboons. Not the lovably eccentric Rafiki baboons, but large, brown, intimidating baboons with even larger canines.  Volunteers have horror stories in regards to these baboons and one stole my friend's purse to drink her alcohol packets and eat her doxycycline (malaria profylaxis) when we were there. A year ago a tourist got killed when a baboon tried to take away his camera and he slipped and fell into the falls.  If you know me, there's only one primate I hate more than baboons. And that's gorillas.

So that's pretty much what I did during my vacay.  Right now I'm in Lusaka for the new RED diversity panel (I'm special and unique!).  It was so strange meeting the new RED trainees- even stranger than meeting the new CHIP/RAP intake since these new ones are in the same program.  It was refreshing to see a group fresh out of America-land, enthusiastic and excited and still devoid of the cynicism and jaded menality that seems to take over the longer you stay and work in the field (sorry- just being honest).  After panel I got to shop and hang out with a few of them and there's some seriously awesome people and potential in this group.  They're gonna do some great things once they get in the field. Good luck with PST and power to y'all!

That's about all I've been doing recently.  Term 1 started a few weeks ago (I nearly killed myself planning/writing up lesson plans for the one and a half weeks of lessons I missed) and its going pretty well, more on work and projects at a later date.  Hope all is well in the home land! Love all of you and you know how to get me if you need me.

Best and Worst: Hot Season

Since hot season is officially over, here's the best and worst of my least favorite season yet.


10 Best:
1. My solio and batteries are always charged because the sun is always out.
2. Cold bucket baths=HEAVEN.
3. Pupils attend school on a more regular basis.
4. You don't have to worry about your clothes or dishes being soaked due to unexpected rain storms.
5. You don't have to worry about the weather at all really; its always going to be sunny.
6. Your clothes dry in about an hour.
7. You dont really want to eat anything because its so damn hot so you lose weight and save money because you dont buy much.
8. Cold drinks (when you can find them) are just that much better.
9. The weather is so vastly different from home that I dont miss home as much.
10. The sky is bluer than I've ever seen.

10 Worst:
1. It is hot.
2. I get sweaty very quickly because its so damn hot.
3. After biking to my farther schools, I'm about a billion and one times more irritated because biking in the hot is about a billion and one times harder when its hot.
4. It is impossible to sleep at nights. I'm convinced that my hut actually absorbs heat so when Im trying to go to sleep (read- 7:30 pm) its basically an inferno. Some nights I have to lie on my cement floor because  freaking everything is too hot.
5. The water in the well runs dry.
6. Villagers stop doing anything and sit on their porches at about 9 am because its effin hot.
7. I always forget my water bottle, so 5 km into biking, I realize I'm so screwed.
8. I curse having to move so my productivity decreases immensely.
9. Food goes bad REAL fast.
10. It is HOT, hotter than I've ever experienced before, and there's nothing that you can do about it. No cold drinks, no AC, no Pacific Ocean. You just deal with it any way you can.

Nshima: Its What's For Dinner. And Lunch. Breakfast, too.

Back at the house for PEPFAR training, which is basically a week-long workshop on HIV/AIDS.  Nothing really new has gone on at site. Lots of working, lots of biking, lots of sweating. Its right in the peak of hot season right now, which means infernal heat day and night. REALLY not my favorite season.  Hard rains have been coming and going (one huge storm hit a few days ago and knocked the power out in the middle of cooking steak fajitas. good old Zambia), but generally the weather's been humid as a crazy man.

So I think I'm going to follow the role of my fellow volunteers and write about specific aspects of Zambia and its culture, starting with one of my favorite things no matter where the hell I am in the world: FOOD, or one in particular.  First and foremost, Zambian cuisine can be summed up in, more or less, one word. Nshima. Nshima Nshima Nshima. In Bemba-land, we call it ubwali and in Zambia-land, villagers eat it with every. single. meal.  There's a saying here, that if you haven't eaten nshima, you haven't eaten.  The call to eat meals for the Bena Ngumbo tribe (what the people of my area are called) is "Takuli ubwali," which means "You don't have nshima."  It's kind of comparable to rice in Hawaii, but much more lauded and more central to the meal.  In Zambia, the nshima is generally made out of three different kinds of flour: maize, cassava or millet.  The most popular by far is nshima made of maize meal, which is a constant throughout the country.  The cassava and millet varieties are found in certain provinces (Luapula, Northern and Northwest to be specific) in the more rural areas- they're considered to be less...civilized I suppose, for lack of a better word.  Nshima comes in many many forms, depending on where you are.  For example a restaurant in Lusaka may serve a personal-sized snowy white lump of breakfast meal (mass processed maize meal, utterly bland and tasteless, usually bought and served by wealthier Zambians- I am SO not a fan of breakfast meal nshima).  At a family's house in Lusaka you may be served smaller, pre-made lumps of breakfast meal nshima that you pull out of a large communal bowl. In provinces near Lusaka you may be served a tan colored nshima, made from maize that has been grown and processed by the family.  In my area, we usually get either a mix of home grown maize meal and cassava meal nshima or cassava meal nshima straight up, which is called ubwali bwa tute.  More on this later.  The general idea is, the farther you get from civilization, the more colored, textured, and, in my opinion, tasty your nshima becomes.

Me, cooking a pathetically small pot of nshima with lots of guidance.

So now that you have a general idea of nshima in Zambia, I'm gonna talk about nshima in Luapula, aka cassava capitol.  Like I've said, in my area (bumfuck, middle of nowhere) we ONLY get home-made maize or cassava meal, usually mixed or straight cassava.  Our nshima is not separated into neat little personal lumps that your transfer onto your plate, but rather it comes in a giant (I'm talking GIANT) brown-gray heap that is set in the middle of the table. We eat communally, and with our hands.

Step One: Reach your fingers into this lump that greatly resembles jaba the hut and pull out whatever you can separate. Word of caution: the nshima is ALWAYS the last thing to be cooked and goes straight from the fire to the table. Never have I seen a Zambian's fingers get burned. Me? Third degrees. Every time.
Step Two: Roll steaming hunk of gray matter into smaller bite sized balls.
Step Three: Consume.

Volunteers eat nshima to varying degrees, anywhere from never to every day, depending on how much they eat with their families (to my knowledge, no volunteer prepares nshima for themselves- feel free to prove me wrong).  Me personally? I eat nshima every day except Sundays, one because i like it, two because I have NO time to cook for myself, three because even if i did have time to cook I probably wouldnt do it because im lazy (see future post on the tediousness of doing basically anything chore-related in Zambia).  I dont eat on Sundays because my family goes to church until 15:00 (3 pm) and i get hungry before then and I actually have time to fire up my brazier and cook a decent meal.  Anywho, Monday through Thursday I eat one meal a day, lunch, and believe you me, that is enough.  My family usually brings it to me in my hut (since I'm usually at school when they eat) at around 12:30/13:00.  I have tea for breakfast and dinner, maybe a small snack in the evenings, but usually not.

My host sister in Chongwe cooking nshima for lunch.

Like I've said before, volunteers lay on a huge spectrum regarding nshima with some who absolutely love it to those who hate it. For me it depends on what kind. I hate breakfast meal nshima. Will not eat it.  But I LOVE straight cassava nshima.  Mixed cassava/maize meal and home-grown maize meal is pretty good too.  I know lots of volunteers dont like the cassava variety and I can understand why.  It has a different taste, a different texture and, if you have a weaker digestive system, wreaks havoc on your stomach.  The taste, I can't describe (sorry, guess you just have to visit!) at all- its nothing like I've ever tasted.  The texture is kind of like mochi, but about a hundred times denser. Just as sticky.  Maize meal is more granular, kind of like if you kept cooking cream of wheat until you could mold it into balls. And yeah, for some volunteers, cassava kills your digestive system. It is heavy.  I dont think I could eat more than one meal a day even if it wanted to.  Fortunately though, it just makes me full- no indigestion, diarrhea, stomach cramps, etc.

Zambian meal.

So that is my attempt at trying to convey the importance, the prevalence, the entire platform on which Zambian cuisine stands on. Like nearly everything, everyone has a different opinion it- whether it be negative or positive.  It is, however, an undeniable pillar in Zam-eats.  Honestly, you couldn't come to Zambia and not try nshima.  I mean, you could, but that would be like going to Italy and not trying pasta or pizza; its just a fallacy.