Who could have predicted that the vivacious Plainsboro girl with a passion for designer clothes would wind up living in a mud hut in Africa as a volunteer for the Peace Corps with a wardrobe of rubber boots, cargo pants, jeans, and sweats?
It’s a far cry from the Brittany town home where Marsha Grodnicki grew up to her tiny house in Zambia, former Northern Rhodesia, where only thick netting keeps the roaches and rodents from her sleeping face at night and her host family might be dining on barbecued impala and caterpillars. Although the duffle bag she packed back home in Plainsboro contained lots of bush appropriate clothing purchased at Old Navy, J. Crew, and Target, she has acquired several chetenge (wraps for the lower half of our body). “In Zambia,” Marsha writes, “it is the thigh which is most inappropriate to flaunt, even though Beyonce and Mariah Carey are constantly on TV.”
The job Marsha has in this poverty-stricken country where HIV AIDS is rampant, is establishing and maintaining an aqua community for small business farmers to raise tilapia that will provide ongoing life support.
The recent harvest of Tilapia Rendalli from the pond at her training center is “most delicious,” she says. It was while wading in this pond that she was attacked by leeches which, she wrote in the blog she updates whenever she can — usually at 3 a.m. — were not easy to remove. “But my feet still work,” she wrote (janeofthejungle.blogspot.com).
Marsha described her welcome to the village where she now lives and works. “I was immediately surrounded by small village children who have never seen anyone quite like me before. It’s odd to be a main attraction — my front yard looked (and still does a bit) like what Great Adventure looks like on opening day. My villagers were shocked that I’d sleep outside in a tent until renovations I wanted in my little house were finished.” (Marsha had walls knocked down to create one large open space.) “The family nearby tried to scare me into moving the tent into my house by threatening that hyenas would come and eat me.”
She explains that “there are few, if any, animals left in the wild grasslands of Zambia. They have all, by now, been contained in national parks.”
Marsha said she’s had many visitors, in addition to curious Zambians. “My yard is constantly full of chickens, goats, and dogs, while my house was filled with mice and cockroaches,” she said. But the nearby Congolese have a magical system to eliminate roaches and Marsha said it works. “You simply draw a chalk line along the walls and around the windows and doors and the cockroaches leave. As for the mice,” she said, “I have two cute kittens now — they are Smith and Hawkin. They have been trained by the best mouse-catchers in my district. Hopefully, they have learned well.”
As for her work, Marsha has 75 farmers divided into three different fish farming organizations. She said she is “very excited to get them all started with fish ponds and to teach them methods of sustainable agriculture.”
“Marsha was always offbeat,” said her mother, Phyllis Grodnicki, a real estate broker with Prudential Fox and Roach in Princeton. “Her passions were horses, clothes, and boys.”
But Marsha was raised in a family with a tradition of service. Phyllis Grodnicki is active in several organizations including Cancer Care and the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. She donates blood regularly and volunteers weekly at Greenwood House Nursing Home. Marsha’s dad, Ray Grodnicki, had a career in the insurance industry and has also been very active in Shriners and Freemasons. Her maternal grandmother, Evelyn Cohen was president of ORT. Marsha has one sibling, Lauren, 29, married in March to Larry Kirby. Both are PhD candidates in astrophysics at the University of Chicago.
After graduating from Hofstra University with a degree in international business, Marsha worked for a year in New York in a financial services job for a mutual fund company.
The idea of expanding her horizons while offering service where it is needed was simmering for a while when Marsha made that call to the Peace Corps last winter and started the ball in motion for her initiation in Philadelphia in the spring. She actually arrived in Africa in June and after a brief training period, including language immersion, was officially sworn in in August.
Now in a few short months, Marsha feels that her life will be forever changed. “In life, you go through so many changes, so many chapters,” she wrote in her blog. She’s become “emotionally and physically close to a group of 20 fellow trainees who have been posted to different areas of the country” and is coming to love the people in her province “like a family because that is what we now are to each other.”
“I am sure that this experience will change me in more ways that I can know at this early change,” she said. “It may sound cliche, but it’s true. When you meet people who want nothing other than to have the ability to grow enough food in the next rainy season to feed their family all year long, it makes you rethink some of the priorities you hold in your life.”
“The people in the village are great,” she wrote, “and they are very excited to have me there for the next two years. The Kilaka family has become my adoptive family. Mrs. Kilaka is a wonderful cook and I eat with the family at least once a day. Mr. Kilaka is very involved in the community and has been a great help in my meeting the folks I will be working with.
“Life in the bush is led at quite a different pace than we are used to in the states. People always have the time to stop and talk and everyone is very close within the community. The slow pace sometimes “gets” to Marsha who said that “the comfort of good people and, at times, a good book, cures what ails you in a jiffy. The people are very interested in teaching me as much about their culture as they can in two years and I am excited about this.”
Then there are praying mantises. “It seems as though when one is stomped on, a parasite about six inches long — it might seem like a tight fit, but six inches none the less — pops out of the belly of the praying mantis like something from alien and coils itself around the praying mantis until they both die. It is such an unusual and awesome sight that you can’t possibly tear your eyes away and then your dinner gets a little cold but it is well worth it. Then, during the insanely windy night, as you go to bed fearing that the brush fire which has been burning all day and slowly approaching your site visit host’s village and house will blow close enough to catch your tent on fire you experience horrific nightmares about a parasite popping out of you. Quite memorable.”
“I love adventure and am super excited about this one,” Marsha wrote.
