For those of you that are interested, and don't really get what I did in two years here other than go on holiday a lot and beg for money for the pre-school, I present my site report. It's a detailed summary I had to write for Peace Corps on the demographics, physical and cultural environment, education-related work and secondary activities of my site. It has a lot of detail that I probably never mentioned on here, and gives a more in depth view of what it's really like to be a Peace Corps volunteer in a rural Zambian village.

(Some names and identifying features have been changed for privacy.)

SITE REPORT OF NICOLE M. BARREN

MUMANA LUPANDO VILLAGE

KASAMA DISTRICT, NORTHERN PROVINCE

REPUBLIC OF ZAMBIA

APRIL 2009 – APRIL 2011

Executive Summary

Nicole Barren arrived in Zambia in February 2009. After two months of intensive technical, cross-cultural, medical, and language training, she was posted to Mumana Lupando village in the Kasama district of Northern Province as a second-generation Peace Corps volunteer. She replaced John Eli (RED ’07).

Ms. Barren worked in Lupando zone under the Rural Education Development (RED) project. She worked extensively with teachers at the Mumana Lupando Pre-school, taught adult literacy classes, and facilitated HIV/AIDS education with pupils as part of her primary work. She also engaged in a plethora of secondary activities including water and sanitation work, soya bean promotion and cooking demonstrations, HIV prevention activities with adults, and implementation of a redistribution programme for condoms and the oral contraceptive pill.

Demographics

Lupando zone is roughly 80 kilometres by 80 kilometres, with an adult population nearing 15,000. Due to its size; the difficulty of traveling to some of the most remote schools; and conflicts between Munkonge Basic School, the zonal centre school, and Mumana Lupando Basic School, the true spatial centre of the zone; there has been discussion about breaking it into two separate zones.

Ms. Barren lived in Mumana Lupando village, 84 kilometres west of Kasama in the Munkonge chiefdom. Mumana Lupando has an adult population of less than 2,000 people. The village proper stretches for one kilometre east and west down Luwingu Road, then extends for up to five kilometers north and south, deeper in the bush. Main landmarks in the village include the basic school, five churches of different denominations, and a handful of small shops stocking very basic supplies.

Ms. Barren lived with her husband, Christopher Audette, a LIFE volunteer, beside the Mwene family. The family consisted of a father (Moses), a mother (Linda), and eight children: Mary (daughter, age 19), Kabwe (son, age 17), Chileshe (daughter, age 15), Mwenya (adopted son, age 12), Patience (daughter, age 10), Musa (daughter, age 7), Juliette (daughter, age 4), and Kandy (daughter, age 7 mos).

Mumana Lupando consists of people from the Bemba and Lungu tribes. Most families have been there for several generations, although some are first or second generation to the village.

Ms. Barren lived in a house that was roughly one kilometre from Luwingu Road, which connects to Kasama. She was able to wait on the roadside and hitchhike to Kasama on canter trucks or private vehicles. Sometimes she had to only wait a few minutes before getting a ride, other times she waited as long as five hours. When Ms. Barren arrived, only 20 kilometres of the road closest to Kasama was paved. The rest of the road was in very poor condition, and traveling time from the village to Kasama took around 3 hours. In February, the road was finally paved and it now takes only an hour to reach the boma.

Ms. Barren’s side of the village did not have cell phone service or radio signal. However, there were a few spots on the road where one could stand to get service, depending on the day. The service was reliable for SMS text messaging, but less reliable for calls.

Physical Environment

Ms. Barren’s house was part of a larger section of Mumana Lupando village housing the Mwene family. It used to house Moses Mwene’s family, but was being used for storage for several years until PCV John Eli arrived in 2007. Moses Mwene was able to save up enough money to buy a pickup truck and build a large house with iron sheet roofing, and lived 30 meters away from Ms. Barren. The rest of the houses, about 50 meters away from each other, belonged to brothers of Moses Mwene, their children, and other relatives.

The closest water source for the majority of Ms. Barren’s service was a small, open spring which served as the headwaters of a small stream about 200 meters from her house. Two boreholes are located in other parts of the village, but were broken for most of Ms. Barren’s service. Concerned both by Mr. Eli’s struggles with water related health problems and the community’s uninspired attitude towards water hygiene, Ms. Barren and her husband boiled their drinking water, cooled it, and then filtered it. After an intensive community sensitization program about the importance of clean water and initiating a project to construct a protected spring box, water quality improved such that straight filtration was sufficient. Ms. Barren and her husband fetched their own water.

Mumana Lupando village is characterized mostly by trees, grasses, and shrubbery; the vegetation typical of miombo forest subjected to years of chitemene agriculture. Luwingu Road, which connects Kasama to Luwingu, cuts right through the middle of the village. The village slopes slightly down on either side of the road. On each side about 1 kilometer from the road are two large streams wich most people utilize for irrigation of gardens. From Luwingu Road, there are many small paths circulating throughout the village. There is a small, seldom used government road leading south from Luwingu Road to another village, Mfuba, which then continues to Kapanda.

The nearest clinic, affiliated with the Catholic church, is 15 kilometers away in Lubushi village. Construction began on a new clinic in Mumana Lupando in December of 2010, but due to the slow pace of the work, it is likely to be a few years before the building is completed and it begins serving the community. Mumana Lupando Basic school is located 1 kilometre from Ms. Barren’s home. There are several churches, the most prominent being the Catholic Church, 2 kilometers away from Ms. Barren’s house. Most meetings and village business take place either at the school or the Catholic Church. The headman’s home is located directly across Luwingu road from the school. Some meetings and dispute hearings take place there.

There are six basic schools and eight community schools within Lupando zone. Mumana Lupando is considered the spatial centre school, as far as meetings are concerned. The farthest school, Chasasha, is located 60 km away. The terrain to some of these schools is quite steep and paths are fairly rocky. Within the zone, only Mumana Lupando and Munkonge offer grades 8 and 9, which results in students from other villages either commuting long distances or boarding.

Cultural Environment

Ms. Barren resided in the Munkonge Chiefdom. The chief’s palace is located 20 kilometres away in Munkonge village. When Ms. Barren arrived, the chief was a young man. A year and a half into her service, he was transferred for disciplinary reasons, and an older chief took his place. This new chief is stern and a big change from the previous one.

CiBemba is the local traditional language spoken in the area. Only a handful of people communicated to Ms. Barren and her husband in English, so they learned ciBemba well out of necessity. It is likely that more people were conversant in English and were just afraid to use the language. The majority, however, spoke only ciBemba and many adults, mostly women, were not even literate in their mother tongue.

The traditional leaders are headmen. Each village in the chiefdom has their own headman, which are appointed by the chief and usually run along family lines. In Mumana Lupando, the headman was a hard of hearing man in his eighties named Michael Mubuka. He had only been schooled up to grade three, but was very friendly with Ms. Barren and her husband and supported them in their development work.

The most common religion in Mumana is Roman Catholicism, while two congregations of Pentecostal Assemblies, Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses are also found. Most people are practicing Christians. In addition, belief in traditional witchcraft is rampant. Witchcraft is attributed to most unexplained illnesses and deaths. There are also a few traditional healers offering medicines made from herbs, plants, and wildlife.

Gender issues are the biggest cultural factor impacting educational practices. The people in Lupando zone, as well as nationwide, have a patriarchal culture which puts girls at a marked disadvantage. From grades 1-7, the number of female students is proportional to males. For grades 8 and 9 however, the number significantly decreases. Some of the female students become pregnant or marry, often through parental pressure, and drop out. Others cannot afford school fees and have to drop out so that their brothers can receive higher education in their place. There is also the problem of male teachers sleeping with their pupils.

Increased Quality of and Access to Education

SCHOOL TYPE DISTANCE HAVE WORKED WITH? TYPE OF WORK

Mumana Lupando Basic 1 km Yes HIV/AIDS education, SHN implementation, co-teaching, academic award ceremonies

Chisamba Community 5 km Yes PTO support, learning materials

Mfuba Community 6 km Yes Teacher training, PTO support

Nsange Community 10 km No

Mubanga Lupiya Community 10 km No

Kapanda Basic 18 km No

Munkonge Basic 18 km Yes Anti-AIDS Club

Johnny Chikula Community 23 km No

Kondamu Community 24 km No

Chanda Katebo Community 25 km No

Malonda Basic 28 km No

Mutale Munkonge Basic 35 km No

Kashinka Basic 43 km No

Chasasha Community 60 km No

During Ms. Barren’s service, enrollment has increased throughout the zone. In 2009, the Kasama DEBS Office mandated that only Mumana Lupando and Munkonge could offer grades 8 and 9, leading to an increase in enrollment at those schools. In December 2010, Chisamba community school was established, increasing the opportunities for forty pupils to receive access to education.

Capacity Building of Zone

Ms. Barren worked extensively to develop the capacity of the village’s pre-school for orphans and vulnerable children, the only such grade one preparatory school in the Munkonge chiefdom. She attended pre-school classes regularly to help the teachers out, observe instruction to see if they were utilizing concepts they were taught, and to build relationships with the children. She also coached the Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) in budgeting and proposal writing. As a result, the Pre-school received $200 through the Small Projects Assistance grant to hold a five-day long training workshop for the volunteer teachers. Two facilitators from the Kasama Pre-school Teacher Training College taught the teachers about important concepts and practices in early childhood education. This workshop inspired the Pre-school Teacher Training College to reach out to other village pre-schools, and the Mumana Lupando teachers increased class frequency and were able to teach more effectively.

She also developed over thirty learning aids using locally available materials and instructed teachers in their usage and replication.

The pre-school PTO, through Ms. Barren’s assistance, also wrote a proposal to receive books and educational materials through the Kasama Rotary club. This resulted in the donation of over 200 new or barely used books.

Ms. Barren taught English literacy classes to six men weekly for about a year. All students showed improvement in both competency and confidence. She did try to initiate CiBemba literacy classes for women in collaboration with a local man, but had problems with her counterpart making false promises and not listening.

Ms. Barren briefly began to co-teach grade 8 and 9 English classes at Mumana Lupando Basic school with help from the School Inset Coordinator, Mr. Malasha. However, she found that the majority of students were lacking even a basic competency in English language, which made it very difficult for her to teach. Ms. Barren did not have the confidence or language ability to lecture proficiently in ciBemba, and felt that translation defeated the purpose, so she stopped.

Ms. Barren also trained six teachers and two community leaders for School Health and

Nutrition (SHN) implementation at Mumana Lupando Basic school. Unfortunately, the teacher in charge of the programme, Mr. Phiri, received a transfer, so it was never implemented to its full potential. However, through this school-community partnership in improving health, a protected spring box was constructed.

Ms. Barren facilitated bi-yearly HIV educational sessions for 82 grade 7-9 pupils and life skills to grade 9 pupils, empowering pupils with the knowledge to prevent HIV and pregnancy and make positive decisions. She also tried to discourage the practice of teaching abstinence as the sole prevention method, as evidence shows this is ineffective and impractical in rural Zambia, where sex is seen as a bartering tool.

Ms. Barren taught the head teacher at Ilibwe community school learner-centred teaching methods, including games. He was very enthusiastic about what he learned. Shortly afterward, in September 2010, the Ilibwe community school shut down because parents weren’t paying school fees. Ms. Barren tried unsuccessfully to negotiate between the teachers and parents so that the children could learn. John Eli, Ms. Barren’s predecessor, reported similar problems with school fees at Ilibwe in 2008. This is likely to be an ongoing problem unless the village realizes what an asset the school is.

Ms. Barren had difficulties with the head teacher at Lusasa school, so she did not spend much time there. She did, however, work with the anti-AIDS club there. She helped them develop a skit which was performed for over 250 people.

Shortly after Ms. Barren was posted, the head teacher at Mumana, Mr. Kanya, received the transfer he had requested as the result of an explosive disagreement with parents in June 2008. Mr. Kanya was replaced by Mr. Muli, who lacked Mr. Kanya’s ambition for the community, although he was an agreeable counterpart when Ms. Barren took the initiative.

The zone is divided by a hot issue over which school is the true zonal centre school. This did create problems as Ms. Barren was viewed as Mumana Lupando’s volunteer. Mumana Lupando is spatially the true centre of the zone and the venue for many zonal meetings, but Munkonge is the zonal centre school recognized by the DEBS.

Community Investment in Education

Ms. Barren worked closely with the PTO at Mumana Lupando Pre-school to write a proposal, budget, and raise money for a $4000 Peace Corps Partnership Programme grant. This grant covered the cost of construction materials for a classroom building. Previously, students were learning in an ill-suited abandoned tuck shop, and were frequently moved around depending on the shop’s availability during harvest time. She also introduced the concept of and helped plan an Open House to sensitize parents and the community on the importance of early learning and preparation for grade one, and increasing parent support.

Ms. Barren also worked with the PTOs at Mfuba and Chisamba community schools to offer support and encouragement, especially in resolving conflict for the good of the students. The PTO was formed at Chisamba even before the insaka classroom was built, and still had a lot of enthusiasm and hope and obviously dedication, for they established a community school where previously young children had to walk 5 km to Mumana Lupando, the closest school. The organization has not had any training, but they comprehend their roles and were planning Income Generating Activities to support the teacher.

The PTO at Nswaswa Basic school has lost much of its enthusiasm, and often has difficulties in persuading its members to attend meetings. There has also been no trainings, and members understand in theory that they should support the teachers, but have a difficult time putting this into practice. One reason for this is that they are frustrated with the quality of education their children receive; teachers are frequently absent and spend more time in the boma than in the village. Many parents view education as a lost cause; they don’t see the benefits and it costs too much money.

Capacity Building with the DEBS

As a bush volunteer with a half-day’s journey to Kasama boma, Ms. Barren did not do much work with the District Education Board Secretary Office (DEBS), other than to brief them with quarterly reports and ask for occasional support. The DEBS did not do regular monitoring of schools during Ms. Barren’s service; they only visited Mumana Lupando Basic school once in two years, and never got as far as the community schools.

In the cold dry season of 2010, the Kasama DEBS, Mrs. K, unexpectedly died and was succeeded by Mary Kakasu. Mrs. Kakasu, like her predecessor, is very busy but relates well with PCVs.

HIV/AIDS Activities

Ms. Barren worked closely with the Mumana Youth Care and Supporting Group, a community group supporting orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs) in education and home-based care for HIV+ people and their families. The two primary home-based caregivers in the group, Allan Mwango and Catherine Chisha, attended President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) training with Ms. Barren and her husband. Both got a lot out of the training and would suggest educational programmes or facilitate enthusiastically or add information while Ms. Barren facilitated.

In addition to facilitating sessions on HIV/AIDS with teenagers at the school, Ms. Barren also sought to reach adults in the community. With help from Mrs. Chisha and Mr. Mwango, she did multiple programmes with the Mumana Farming Co-op and Mfuba community members. For World AIDS Day 2010, she worked together with the Mumana Youth Care and Supporting Group to organize activities for over 200 people, including voluntary counseling and testing, a candlelight vigil, and games. During the FIFA World Cup in July 2010, she organized a football match (USA vs. Zambia) to raise awareness for HIV, with dramas and informational sessions during half time and between matches.

In Mumana Lupando, most people who know they are HIV+ are widows. Most children born HIV+ die before they reach school age, but several dozen more without the virus have lost parents to the opportunistic infections accompanying full-blown AIDS. There are two transient high-risk populations which have the potential to infect young women in the village, thereby increasing HIV prevalence in Mumana: bean traders that come during harvest season and road workers. These men typically have more disposable income than the typical man in the village, and have wives far away in their home towns, so they seek village women, who often don’t protest as they’re showered with gifts or money.

In response to this phenomenon and the prevalence of school girls hooking up with sugar daddies, Ms. Barren went to the worker's camp to educate 25 workers on the basics of HIV and prevention. She also supplied many condoms to the workers through her family planning redistribution programme.

Secondary Activities

When Ms. Barren arrived in Mumana Lupando, the closest clinic, 15 km away, was under the jurisdiction of the seminary and the Catholic Church. As a result, clinic officers were prohibited from handing out contraceptives, unless the individual was HIV+. Women in Mumana complained to Ms. Barren that they were “like animals, having baby after baby” and were unable to adequately space births for their and their babies healths, were contributing to household poverty, and were unable to control their own bodies’ reproductive capacity. In response, Ms. Barren stocked SafePlan, the Society for Family Health’s oral contraceptive pill, and resold it along with two counterparts for 200 kwacha for a month’s supply (4 cents). She also stocked free male and female condoms from Northern Health Education Programme. With the condoms, she found they were less likely to be used inappropriately (for bangles or balloons) if people came to her house to get them, rather than handing them out at events. At the first meeting in Mumana to introduce the correct usage of these methods, over one hundred and two dozen men came. Ms. Barren subsequently taught another two hundred women from three other villages about family planning.

Ms. Barren’s counterparts are enthusiastic about the difference they are making in the community and will continue to redistribute family planning for the same price after her departure. They have already made a plan to buy a large box of SafePlan and pick up condoms when they come to Kasama boma, about once every four months. After the completion of Mumana’s clinic, hopefully within a few years, the clinic can take over the programme.

Ms. Barren also taught budgeting skills to 35 individuals in order to prevent economic hardship, seasonal hunger, and to encourage saving for school fees as an additional secondary activity. She conducted these sessions with her host father, the Mumana Farming Co-op, and the Chisamba PTO.

Ms. Barren collaborated with her husband on one project; soya bean seed distribution and cooking demonstrations. Most children are malnourished and don’t receive enough protein. Ironically, some farmers were already growing soya beans, but rather than improving their families’ nutrition, they were feeding it to their animals. This was because no one knew how to cook soya beans or fully understand their importance for food security and nutrition. Ms. Barren encouraged her women’s group to grow soya beans, then held a cooking demonstration for the community in which she prepared several soya bean products using locally available food items. She also printed recipes in ciBemba. As a result, 60 households are implementing these techniques.

Ms. Barren also spoke about nutrition in conjunction with her husband’s permaculture gardening demos.

Upon her arrival at site, 20 households and the basic school were using an open spring contaminated by free range pigs, human feces, and rain water from uphill. The village had two boreholes, but these were not functioning and no one in the village knew how to fix them. Ms. Barren facilitated sensitization on water and sanitation repeatedly to her section of the village, initiated a door to door campaign to reach the whole village, and reached mothers during a monthly United Care International baby weighing. She also redistributed Clorin (water purification chlorine) from the Society for Family Health. This project culminated in a $500 grant from Appropriate Projects to construct a protected spring box so that the community can have a sustainable, safe water source.

When not demonstrating gender roles as she went about her daily life, Ms. Barren also met with a women’s group once a month and taught them about HIV/AIDS, heat retention cooking, IGAs, crafts, and nutrition. She was also a member of a planning committee for a district-wide Girls Leading Our World (GLOW) camp. She organized logistics and facilitated sessions on gender equality, sexuality, and goal setting for a five-day sleep-away camp attended by 21 teenage schoolgirls and 10 teachers.

Recommendations

Since the beginning of 2011, transportation on Luwingu Road is no longer the problem it once was, so there is great potential for future sites for PCVs.

There will be a LIFE replacement volunteer in neighboring Kaseke village, and if that volunteer has the interest, a GLOW specific or just a girl’s club could be formed in Mumana Lupando. One community member, Joanna Chanda, attended Camp GLOW as an adult leader, but unfortunately all three girls that attended transferred shortly afterward. Young women in the village could greatly benefit from increased sensitization on life skills.

There is also always the potential for more soya bean promotion in farther flung villages. Lubushi village especially is sensitized to PCVs and has a highly motivated farming co-op.

In Mumana Lupando village, Ms. Barren was hard-pressed to find a more motivated, eager counterpart than Allan Mwango, who often ended up motivating her instead of the other way around. As a jack of all trades, a volunteer can work with him on projects involving the pre-school, HIV prevention, health, or farming. Catherine Chisha was also a great help and a good friend. BanaMaria Kulu attended a Permaculture Gardening workshop as Ms. Barren’s counterpart, and although she doesn’t speak English, she speaks ciBemba in a way easy to understand.

Ms. Barren had one safety and security issue around 6 months after she arrived at site. Her house was broken into while she was away. The youth who did it was apprehended and taken to the Kasama Police, but was later released and proceeded to break into two tuck shops. Since this incident, a guard always slept in her house while she was away, and there were no further problems.

CAMP GLOW (KASAMA)

Summary from ‘News from Zambia’, a compilation of press coverage. Original Article ran in ‘The Post.’

Official urges more ties in life skills empowerment

- Senior Education Standard Officer Dennis Chisulo said there is need for collaboration to empower youths in the country with life skills.

- During the graduation of 21 youths who participated in the ‘Girls Leading Our World’ sleep-over-camp at Kasama Girls High School organized by Peace Corps volunteers in collaboration with Planned Parenthood Association of Zambia, Chisulo said government appreciated the support of stakeholders in gender youth development.

- Peace Corps Project Coordinator Sally-Rose Mwachilenga said this was the fourth camp, others having been held in Chipata, Chongwe and Serenje. Mwachilenga said the other camp was expected to be held in Mpika. Camp Glow is an initiative of Peace Corps volunteers aimed at encouraging girls to become active citizens of society. (The Post)

Camp Girls Leading Our World (GLOW) was created by Peace Corps volunteers in Poland but has since moved all over the world. Camp GLOW Kasama was held from 6 – 10 December and organized by 10 Peace Corps volunteers, each of whom brought two female grade 7 or 8 pupils and one teacher or community leader from their respective villages. Activities included sessions on HIV/AIDS, rape and sexual assault, sugar daddies, confidence and self-esteem, journaling, sewing menstrual pads, and games. The girls were groomed to be peer educators and expected to create GLOW clubs at their schools. In Zambia, girls are less likely to be educated in higher grades than boys owing to familial pressures for the girls to get married, teenage pregnancy, and cultural expectations about the role of women. In poor, rural villages, especially in ours since the Sable road workers have moved in, sex is about economics. Girls expect to be given gifts or money if they hook up with older (often married) men with stable incomes, so this compromises their ability to negotiate condom use or refuse sex. A very high number of girls are sexually assaulted, with the guilty very rarely prosecuted. Girls are very vulnerable, and the purpose of GLOW was to empower them to practice abstinence, stay away from sugar daddies, respect themselves and their bodies, and plan for their futures rather than short-term goals.

SOUTH LUANGWA NATIONAL PARK

MFUWE, EASTERN PROVINCE OF ZAMBIA

South Luangwa is one of the premier national parks in the region. We stayed at Flatdogs lodge for three nights, camping on a treetop platform amid curious vervet monkeys. Hippos came to graze on the field at night from the nearby river and elephants also wandered through, so we were relieved that our tent was several metres of the ground. We went on a day drive and a night drive, so we saw many different animals. The best sight came when our guide heard a group of baboons making an alarm call. He sped the land cruiser off in their direction, and we found around fifty baboons hovering under a large canopied tree and screaming up at the branches. After a few moments, a leopard leapt to the ground, skulking away. The largest baboons trailed him, chasing him away with their persistent vocalizations and sheer number. The leopard hadn’t made a kill, and was probably only dozing in the tree, but the baboons showed him there is strength in numbers.

We also saw four lionesses sleeping in the shade. That’s the first time we’ve seen more than one solitary lion.

NKHATA BAY

MALAWI

From Eastern Province, we crossed the border into Malawi. Our destination was the northern part of Lake Malawi, around 700 kilometres from the capital city of Lilongwe. We stayed in a bamboo hut right on the beach at Njaya Lodge. The people in Nkhata Bay were very friendly, and there were even three kids that came right up to me and attached themselves around my legs in a hug, and a group of young girls that were swimming and wanted to play, using the few English words they knew. Kids in our village that know me well will crawl all over me, but the ones who I don’t see often are terrified of me and the younger ones will burst into tears at the sight of me. So I was surprised how fearless the Nkhata Bay kids were around white people.

We took a boat trip to the cliff where the fish eagles live. The fish eagle, which closely resembles the majestic American bald eagle, is the national bird of both Malawi and Zambia. These wild eagles have been trained so that when they hear a whistle and see a fish being thrown into the water, they’ll fly down by the boat to retrieve the fish, presenting tourists with a unique photo opportunity. Chris, of course, took full advantage.

We also got to snorkel off the shore around schools of bright, tropical fish. Then we tried paddling the local canoes, made from dugout logs, and jumped off a cliff into the clear water. There was a village nearby, so there was a bunch of young boys also jumping from as high as 5 metres. They were fearless, even scrambling into a nearby mango tree to get even higher from the water, and screaming as they plunged down. I jumped from 3 metres up, but got really nervous jumping from higher because I was blind without my glasses.

The official language is iciChewa, which is closely related to iciNyanja, which we can understand a bit because it’s close to iciBemba. So it probably would have been easy to pick it up if we stayed for a longer period of time, but we mostly stuck to the words we knew because they were the same in iciBemba.

From Nkhata Bay, we took an excursion to Nyika National Park, possibly one of the most beautiful places in Africa. It’s called the Scotland of Africa for its rolling green hills and incredible views to as far away as Zambia. It was even more dramatic with dark blue storm clouds hovering above. We camped there for two nights, and had to pay a significant sum to hire a vehicle as the park is so remote it’s impossible to get there by hitch hiking, but it was well worth it. There are no dangerous animals in the park, so it’s safe to walk, and by walking you can get very close to zebra and roan antelope. Nyika is one of the few places where you can see roan antelope, which have a clumsy almost moose-like brown body and a white mask. Chris got some awesome pictures of the zebra because we were able to get so close to them.

After a wonderful Christmas in Malawi, we crossed back over to spend the New Year in Zambia. Unfortunately, we had a hang up at the border. We had crossed from Zambia on 17 December and were granted a no-fee visa for ten days. We returned to the Mchinji border post on 27 December. The 17th to 27th December is actually eleven days, according to immigration officers. So, we were asked into the office to speak with the in-charge, who turned out to be a corrupt, misogynist. After being in Africa for two years, you know when something is a big deal and when something is insignificant, but played up by officials so they can get a bribe. This guy, who refused to give us his name, said we had to either return to Lilongwe to request an extension (half a day’s journey away and we had very little money) or pay him 5,000 Malawian kwacha each (around USD $66). He had our passports and refused to let us leave the office. Then he said if we refused to pay, he’d cancel our passports so that we’d never be allowed back to Malawi, and hinted that this would effect us at immigration at the entry point in Zambia. I flipped out, which I think was justified and raised my voice. I can’t remember exactly what I said (it was mainly the mefloquine talking, my malaria prophylaxis which makes me somewhat bipolar and anxious), but it was enough so that the guy refused to address me from that point on. He even told Chris that I was acting like an animal and that he would throw me in the cells if I didn’t calm down. Chris took on the good cop role and tried to be respectful, which I couldn’t stomach because he was trying to show us that we were white, and therefore inferior in his office. I left the room in a huff before I said something I’d regret too much, then I marched back in and proclaimed that we were calling the US Embassy and our “boss.” Only Chris’ phone had a Malawian sim card to make outgoing calls, so he phoned Peace Corps’ Safety and Security officer, Allan. I muttered about how our “boss” would solve everything. The guy quietly stamped our entry on our passports and slid them across the desk at us as Chris was on the phone. When he hung up, the guy said we could leave. Then he launched into another obloquy about how Chris had to control me because I was an animal, so I ran out with my passport. Chris relayed what Allan had told him on the phone: The most the immigration officials could do was give us a warning, so the guy was only blowing hot air. He could have canceled our passports from entering Malawi, but it couldn’t be enforced, as we were using temporary no-fee government passports, not our civilian ones, and record-keeping isn’t that great.

Outside immigration, I cried to the sympathetic money-changers, then Chris and I discussed rates with them and quickly changed the small amount of money we had left to Zambian kwacha. Their rates are only slightly higher than a bank’s, but they’re more convenient, especially for small sums. We walked across to the Zambian entry point, and a white woman stopped us in the parking lot. “Did you just exchange money over there?” She asked. We said yes. “Isn’t that illegal?” She wanted to know. I studied the gravel parking lot intently. Chris shifted uneasily. We were both silent for a long time, thinking she was a plainclothes border post cop, then Chris mumbled “I don’t know.” The truth is we hadn’t really thought about it. They’re a conspicuous sight at African border crossings, and they often change currencies just out of view of the police. “I think they are,” the woman finally responded. “Did they give you a good rate? I was also thinking about exchanging some money.”

LAKE KARIBA

SOUTHERN PROVINCE, ZAMBIA

Lake Kariba is the favorite vacation spot for expatriates. It makes up part of Zambia’s border with Zimbabwe, and was created in the 60s after Kariba dam was created for hydroelectric power. Bradt’s guide book warns not to walk in the bush at Lake Kariba, because there are still unexploded land mines from Zim’s independence struggle.

We stayed at the Bush Club. Luckily, there wasn’t much bush. The owners had a herd of zebra, some cows, and a pet goat that roamed the facilities, but they’d also stocked the nearby islands with game and owned a crocodile farm. We wanted to go on a game walk on the island with a guide, but the owner said the scouts had reported that the elephants had swum over that day and the island wasn’t safe to walk on. The scouts had been charged that day. The elephants had emigrated from Zimbabwe, and were quite ferocious around people because Zim’s political problems meant animals weren’t well protected from poachers.

The owner felt bad so he took us on a tour of the crocodile farm for free. We wouldn’t have paid because we’d already been to a croc farm in Livingstone, but this turned out to be much better. They had many more crocs, and were the second largest crocodile farm in the world. Each year, they hatched around 16,000 crocodiles. They also captured and used “problem crocs” from around Lake Kariba; the ones that had killed people. They harvested the crocs at three years of age. Their skin was exported, and 2% of the meat was exported to Holland. The other 98% was fed back to the crocs, as they do practice cannibalism in the wild. Others were kept for breeding. We drove a land cruiser into the breeding area, which was several acres of a scenic pond fenced off with electrical wire, rather than an artificial cement pool that I’ve seen at other places. The crocodiles were so thick that the driver was beating a stick on the road to get the crocs to slide out of the land cruiser’s path. It’s the closest I’ve ever been to crocodiles, being literally just a bit above them sitting in a land cruiser. They threw out chicken innards to the crocs and we saw them feast.

We also ate crocodile curry at the Bush Club. We both love crocodile meat. I don’t know why it’s not more popular in Zambia or even the US. It’s delicious. In Zambia, you can usually only find it at game park lodges or at croc farms.

On New Year’s Eve, we took a sunset boat cruise on Lake Kariba around the islands that were stocked with game. It was the first time Chris had seen wildebeest. Back at the Bush Club, the other guests were mostly families with kids or older people, so most people were in bed by 21 hours. Chris and I sat at the bar drinking overpriced Mosi’s and watching music videos on VH1. Then another couple joined us; Vic and Helen from Lusaka, who’d put their 6-year old to bed. I think all of us were glad there was some companionship. Vic was born in Kasama, then moved to Ireland at age 12 with his

Irish mother when his parents split up. He was educated in Ireland and met his wife there, but they’d decided to move to Zambia ten years prior. At quarter of midnight, the winds began getting strong, and Vic ran back to the chalet to get some champagne. Electricity and thus the music videos went out, and the storm descended with a vengeance. At one point, Helen said “My watch says it’s midnight.” “I have 23:57” Chris responded. Mine and the bartender’s also displayed different times. We drank more Mosi’s and gazed at the storm ushering in 2011. Vic didn’t return. Fifteen minutes later the rain let up a bit so we went to their chalet to drink champagne. Their chalet was absolutely flooded as the windows had only screens. Our tent had a sizeable puddle at the foot. Still, it was 2011 at a lakeside bar in Africa.

Vic and Helen ended up adopting us and not only gave us a ride back to Lusaka (it took 6 hours returning; we spent almost 11 hours getting there on buses and hitch hiking on canter trucks) but let us stay at their house for two nights. We only had to put up with endless replayings of Toy Story 3 (surprisingly not horrible) and their son Aaron, an only child that would talk your ear off. Chris bonded with him, because he said he was the same way growing up as an only kid.

We then traveled to the Peace Corps office on the other side of town for our Close of Service conference. We were rewarded for our two years of service by lodging at the Taj Pamodzi, one of Lusaka’s fanciest hotels, on the US taxpayer’s dime. It was probably a bad idea putting twenty young PCVs accustomed to the bush and harsh conditions in a five star hotel. Or at least a hilarious one, as each of us had five plates a piece at the buffet every meal. They served three kinds of meat at every meal! We eat meat once a month, and that’s because we can buy it at the ShopRite in Kasama when we come in monthly. The Taj also restocked bottles of water and pens at the conference room after every break we had, so we stockpiled everything. I don’t even drink bottled water in Lusaka; I drink tap water.

PCVs usually stay at Chaminuka, a fancy safari lodge 50 km out of Lusaka for COS conference, but we got bumped out because the Vice President of Zambia wanted to hold an emergency meeting there. We ended up getting a free day there on Sunday because Chaminuka felt bad they couldn’t accommodate us. We went on a game drive (they also have stocked game on their property), but got rained out. We did see a giraffe right by the side of the road on the way out though. They had an amazing lunch buffet though and a jacuzzi.

PRE-SCHOOL CONSTRUCTION

We travel back to Kasama tomorrow (13 January) and I’m meeting Ba Allan and Ba Catherine there to buy building materials for the pre-school. I’ve been out of the village on our mega vacation for a month and a half, but I spoke with Ba Allan tonight and the community has been mobilized and is ready to start construction. Hassim, the owner of Sable construction, has agreed to donate and transport the tons of crushed stone we need. The Mumana Youth Care and Supporting Group molded and burned the necessary 12,000 bricks months ago. The parents are very supportive. Stay tuned...

THANKS AGAIN TO EVERYONE WHO HAS HELPED TO MAKE THE PRE-SCHOOL CLASSROOM A REALITY.

I promise I'll post about our mega vacation and our adventures in South Luangwa National Park, Lake Malawi, Nyika Plateau, and Lake Kariba when I get a chance.

In the meantime, thanks again to Appropriate Projects for making the protected spring box a reality. It's of course hard to measure, but I think safe drinking water can prevent some of the needless deaths of children in our village, and also improve the health of people with HIV or other chronic illnesses.

Here's the completion page:

http://appropriateprojects.com/node/474

Pictures Depicting Everything Mentioned Below (plus village moonshine)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nswaswa/

Caterpillars

Right after the first rains begin, women trek into the bush to collect caterpillars. Armed with a pail and often a child to climb the trees, they collect many different varieties: fat neon green ones, spiky ones, black and white ones. They usually track caterpillars by looking carefully at the ground. If you see droppings, there are caterpillars munching on the fresh new growth on that tree.

Women spend all morning collecting caterpillars and return when the sun is at its peak to cook ubwali for lunch. At home they squeeze the caterpillars starting from the head and moving toward the end, like one squeezes a tube of toothpaste, to rid them of the insides. Then the caterpillars are fried with cooking oil.

Chris enjoys eating them. I see the merit in caterpillars being a protein source where meat and eggs are scarce, but I prefer my texturized vegetable protein pieces.

Not all caterpillars here are benevolent. Chishishi, huge grey caterpillars with bristly hair, are also plentiful at this time. As with snakes, the policy with chishishi is to kill every one you find. If they contact human skin, the bristles will cause you to itch and have a rash, similar to poison ivy.

This Is Our World

A young woman reclines on the clay floor of her parents' cooking shelter. Her breasts hang down nearly to her navel beneath an old red t-shirt, and her arms are thin; the width of an ubwali cooking stick. In a hoarse voice voice she recites her symptoms in monotone Bemba, a change from the tonal inflections that usually accompany the language: a cough, vomiting, body pains, jaundice that turns the whites of her eyes into a sick mustard color. The clinic's diagnosis is yellow fever, an illness similar to malaria in cause and symptom. There's no cure but elapsed time, and already these maladies have persisted for over a week. Where Western medicine has failed her, she turns to the traditional umuti of her ancestors. A thin strip of bark fiber from a mutondo tree is tied around her neck to prevent vomiting and her family dabs water infused with pepa root in her eyes, nose, and fingertips.

The illness has caused her to stop producing breastmilk, so she can't feed her two-month old daughter. In America, the crisis could be averted with store bought formula. But formula here is only available in urban centres and costs $USD 5 for a 1 kg tin, unaffordable for subsistence farmers who survive on $2 a day. Besides, formula mixed with unclean water would ravage the baby's body with diarrhea. A wet nurse, a compassionate neighbor with her own baby, could help. But no nursing mother here will touch this cursed, sickly little girl. People gossip and whisper "AIDS" behind the backs of their hands. The family feeds the baby porridge instead - corn, millet, or cassava flour cooked in boiled water. It is pure carbohydrate with no nutritional value at all. The baby is very thin and cries all the time.

The aspersions that the women whisper to each other, heavy and ominous like the sagging dark clouds that hang in the sky this time of year, may be true. It's got to be either AIDS or witchcraft; no single family can fall so far from God's mercy on their own.

This woman's husband had a first wife in a distant village that died after a long illness. The husband himself is sickly. People warned the woman's parents not to approve of the marriage years ago, but the parents only scoffed, thinking it was jealousy. The couple has since brought five children into the world, two of whom they've already buried. Soon to be three. Young children face enough adversity threatening their fragile lives without being pulled away from their mother's dried up breasts at only two months old and fed only starch.

In the U.S. ("The Promised Land," as we've taken to calling it) this incurable virus ravaging Africa can seem impersonal. Children dying from preventable illnesses is sad, but detached from your reality; your own children have chubby cheeks from baby fat and grow like weeds. This life is our reality.

Kasama Town Cast of Characters

These are the quirky, omnipresent, mentally disturbed people that inhabit Kasama Town. Kasama does in fact have a mental hospital, but its only a place for people to sleep at night. During the day, they're on their own.

Judgment Man: Has long tangled hair, wears a tunic closely resembling a potato sack, a huge cross necklace, and carries a staff. He'll quietly walk into a place of business or to an individual, draw himself up, and begin a tirade in Bemba. I usually don't even try to understand what he's saying, but he repeats "judgment" a lot and asks for 100 kwacha (~2 cents). He's found on Luwingu Rd, and solicits the internet cafe several times a day because the staff there will quickly hand over money so he'll leave.

Inconspicuous Dude: Is found near Shoprite, often sleeping in a shady patch of dirt beside the road. He has unkempt mats of hair and wears ripped clothing the exact shade of the soil. He doesn't harass anyone and often blends into Kasama itself.

Several months ago, an angry, displaced swarm of bees terrorized the centre of town, disrupting business. African bees are fierce even when unprovoked, so the street quickly emptied, except a few tenacious people who ran by. Inconspicuous Dude, however, strolled down the street, completely oblivious to the swarming mass that seethed around his head.

Bernard: A short, stout man with grey hair, untamed nose hairs, and kind eyes. He used to stand in front of Shoprite everyday just hanging out, but the regulars that hawk newspapers and prepaid talk time forced him out. His new haunt is PJT Market, the local supermarket chain on the next street over. He's supposedly a beggar, but in the two years I've known him, he's never asked me for money. He always greets me by name and is completely lucid except for one thing - he thinks I'm his wife. In fact, he thinks every light-skinned woman he meets in Kasama is his wife. He gets upset if you protest, so I play along. Our usual conversation usually goes something like this:

Bernard: Ah, Nicole! How are you?

Me: I'm fine. And you?

B: I'm okay. Last week I did not have much money for food, but it is better now. How are our children?

M: They're doing well. Little Mary is doing very well on her exams and little Bupe had malaria, but he's recovered now and is back to playing football with his friends.

B: You must bring them to see me soon.

M: Sure.

Bernard is fluent in English and well-spoken and spoke once of being educated at Cambridge in the UK, which I believe. Rumor has it that he was once a successful businessman and was married to a white woman. At some point mental illness crept in.

Hot Season and Hot Tempers

BashiAmose told us his schoolteacher from years ago once noted that there are a lot more disagreements and fights during the hot, dry season (September- November) than other times of the year. I'd be willing to concur. I personally was miserable during this period; it's too hot to do anything but lay in your house from 10 am until 15 hours.

About a month ago, some men came to BashiAmose's house while he and BanaAmose were away and pressured their fifteen-year old daughter to sell them home-brewed beer. Soon there was a group of men sitting in the shade and drinking. Tempers started flaring and two men began fighting. One was hitting another with a stick, there was blood flying, and the disagreement went on for a good half an hour, to the great interest of the children, whom no one thought to shoo away. Apparently on this same day, just 400m up the hill, a boy from the village and a Sable worker were also drinking and one was threatening the other with a knife.

Remember Chanda, the teenage boy who broke into our house last Halloween? After he stole from several other houses, tuckshops, and finally us, the village agreed to send him to the police. Because he was a minor, he was sent to live in a orphanage and attend school in Kasama for two years. But a few months ago he ran away and returned to the village. We spoke to his legal guardian at the Department of Social Welfare, but the man kept insisting that Chanda would return after a home leave of a few days and if we didn't like it, we could accompany him back to Kasama ourselves. Four months later, still in the village, Chanda broke into a tuck shop again. He was taken to the headman's house to be punished and people ended up forcing the soles of his feet into the coals of a cooking fire so he couldn't run away. We saw him the next day, supported by two other boys as he was barefoot and limping badly, standing at the tuck shop he broke into while the items he stole were recovered. Kids ran over to jeer at him. Later, he was sent back to live in Kasama.

Recently a man stole 11 million kwacha ($USD 2,000) from a business in Kasama. With uncharacteristic tenacity and accuracy, the Kasama police tracked him to his parents' house in our village. When the police arrived, the man had only enough time to hide in the bathing shelter. As they were questioning his parents, the man tried slipping away. The officers tried to pursue him and one fired his gun, but the man escaped into the bush. They recovered half of the money from his wife, and then took her into custody because they thought she knew more than she was telling them. The next day, the police came again in an unmarked vehicle and found the man on the road, trying to find transport out. Again he escaped into the bush and hasn't been seen since.

They're saying that this man was able to evade capture twice because he has powerful spells and is a known wizard. Apparently if he puts money into the pages of a special book, then closes the cover, he's able to duplicate that money. It hasn't been explained why he had to steal ZMK 11,000,000 when he could have just used his book and avoided involvement with the police.

Traditional Leaders

Most villages are named after the headman. (Ours happens to be named after a nonexistant river, a grandiose nomenclature for an area with only two sinuous streams.) Headmen are hereditary, traditional leaders on the most minute scale; chiefs have jurisdiction over several dozen villages; above them are senior chiefs; and finally one paramount chief for an entire dispersed tribe. The Bemba paramount chief is named Chitemukulu and resides in a palace in Northern Province, the ancestral home of the Bembas.

The headman and his panel of good old boy advisors are the equivalent of an American town mayor, council, and court. Most headmen are fair and don't abuse their power. Our own headman has no schooling past grade 4, but he understands the value of development despite a conservative populace. He's consistently been an advocate for us.

Puppies!

Willow gave birth to 6 puppies fathered by Chankulila in mid-October. They're now 5 weeks old and starting to wean. They were a big strain on her body and she was looking pretty skeletal even though we fed her better than most people and even we, eat. We were covertly feeding her boiled eggs, dried fish, and ubwali fortified with soya bean flour and milk powder so our neighbors wouldn't click their tongues at us and demand that we give them some. All the puppies are fat and healthy except for some unavoidable fleas and chiggers. We're looking into getting Willow spayed and dewormed once she's back up to her normal body weight. Wish us luck; the procedures here are done without respirators or monitors in not sterile environments, but our PC Medical nurse (who's active in Lusaka spay & neuter campaigns) said the benefits still outweigh the risks.

The Protected Spring Box

The protected spring box was completed on 2 November after 2.5 days of labor, supervised by an engineer with Rural Water from Kasama. The total cost was $500 (donated by U.S. based Appropriate Projects) plus the community contribution of 1,000 burnt bricks, 1 ton of crushed stones, and K 2500 (~50 cents) from every household to buy wooden planks.

Synopsis: It’s the season of bush fires. Bashi Mutale sired – in the village another Nikki has been acquired.

In late August and September, fierce morning winds batter grass roofs, snatching handfuls of dried thatch and strewing it on the sand. Dead leaves snarl and circle angrily in the gusts. Ash from neighbors’ cooking fires is thrown on our freshly washed dishes. The afternoon brings the peak of a glaring sun and stifling heat. Panting dogs laze under shelter of skeletal guava trees, ribcages jutting from under a dull coat with each shallow inhalation. Women sigh and sink under the overhang of their grass roof before placing a baby to their breasts. Only evenings, with a blood red sun sagging wearily and bleeding into the surrounding sky, bring relief. On the heels of this heat the rains will creep in, replenishing the parched yellow land. But before this happens, the stretches of overgrown dried grasses are scorched. Campfires are mesmerizing in the way flames flitter about, changing the composition of wood and trapping your eyes in its primordial beauty. Fire can be devastating and dangerous, and part of its appeal is being able to control a force of nature. Bush fires hold the same appeal, but on a much larger scale. Entire fields of dried grasses, shrubbery, and small trees are burnt, the flames spreading ravenously. In theory, it is controlled by creating fire breaks, burning a small strip of land first so that the fire doesn’t have fuel to spread beyond the confines of where you want it to. But wind is a variable, and I’ve seen a defiant fire set at the school devour a teacher’s grass bathing shelter and fence. If fire breaks fail, teenage boys grab leafy branches and begin furiously beating the flames. Bush fires start with a crackling as loud as a thunderclap, which can be heard for as far as a kilometer away. The black smoke billows out into the sky, drawing birds of prey that circle overhead, dining on the emerging exodus of grasshoppers and song birds. I don’t know why the bush is burnt. Bush fires are often spoken about in relation to kapanga, the rats that burrow in the bush that people eat. But you can find bush rats without burning an area first. Chief Munkonge decreed that the bush should be burnt early to avoid damaging the rainy season sprouts that caterpillars, another bush food, eat, thus diminishing the caterpillar population. In the end, burning the bush might be as pointless as chitimene, or the slash and burn agriculture that’s also practiced. It might be done because the ancestors practiced it, with no regard for its effect on the environment.

I’m kind of a big deal among the under-five crowd. Malama, Juliet, Charity, and Purity, particularly, the toddlers that live closest to us, openly adore me. If we’re returning home after a short absence from the village, they shout “Ba Nikki! Muli shani?” (How are you?) then enthusiastically cheer “Ba bwela!” (She’s returned) for the next five minutes. If they acknowledge Chris at all, they also call him Ba Nikki.

So in late August when Bana Mutale gave birth at home to a tiny and perfect little girl, older sister Charity immediately declared her name to be Nikki. Her amused parents asked for my approval. So now ka (small) Nikki joins ka Chris and Shaq as a legacy of Peace Corps in our village (The previous volunteer, a basketball enthusiast, was asked to name a newborn boy).

Pre-School Updates From September 13 -18, three volunteer teachers from the village were trained in early childhood education. The workshop was funded locally by the Kasama Pre-School Teacher Training College and also by a USAID grant. Topics included the history of pre-school education, its importance on a child’s development, making teaching aids using locally available materials, first aid, creating lesson plans, sample syllabus, songs and dances, and child developmental stages and development. The teachers seem like they learned a lot and are excited to implement this new knowledge. Ba Allan Mwango, Ba Catherine Chisha, Ba John Bwalya Kandeke, and I after their graduation.

$921 has been donated towards the pre-school construction in just a few weeks. We still need $2872. Pleas e, please spread the word of this project. If you’ve already done so, please continue to do it. It’s pretty difficult raising publicity for what I’m doing when I’m in the village without access to any form of modern communication, so I need help. (Special thanks to Sue and Tim, Rick, Kate, and Sarah). Again the link is https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=611-061

The Peace Corps finally put my project up on their website, so we can start accepting donations.

Please, please, please give the blog or that link to everyone you know. I've lived amongst, loved, and laughed with these kids for the past year and a half; they've taught me the Bemba language and accepted me as their friend. I came to Zambia with the intention of helping people, but the biggest change has happened inside of me. Ba Allan introduced us recently to a visiting relative as "These ones aren't Americans anymore. They're real Bembas." That inclusion into our adopted tribe has been repeated by other people too, and as a Peace Corps volunteer whose goal is assimilation, it gives me a great sense of accomplishment. But all the credit goes to the people we live with, who've taught me how to be strong and happy no matter how hard life may be, who've taught me Bemba songs, dances, cooking, and work. I've learned a lot from their children, too, my peers as far as language goes. In the beginning, they'd come to our house to stare because, well, not many white Americans jabbering in a foreign language make it to the village. Now they come to ask me to informally teach them, to play soccer and monkey-in-the-middle, or just because they're bored and want to talk. I wish I could take all of them to America with me when I leave. I like that village life is simpler, safe for children to wander by themselves, and close-knit. But I can escape it, I don't have to deal with most of the hardships. I want to save them from their futures; alcoholism, HIV/AIDS, early pregnancy and baby after baby, a 45-year life expectancy. But I can't. What I can do is build them a pre-school, which is sorely needed, to thank them for allowing us to enter their lives for two years. The most critical years of a child's development are ages 1-6. Pre-school gives them a good foundation and prepares them for grade one, gets them used to attending school regularly, fosters in them a love for learning. Pre-school education puts them at an advantage years later; children who attend pre-school are more likely to pursue adult education and adhere to development programmes. They have a head start at basic school, and a better chance at becoming literate. Short-term, they're going to be able to learn more effectively in a better-suited classroom and take even greater pride in it. This can make their lives a little bit better, put them a little bit closer to escaping the lives of their grandparents and parents.

I wish you all could come to the pre-school and see the looks of pride on these kids' faces when they write a number correctly, their smiles when they sing, and their eagerness when their hands shoot into the air to be called on. I hope the pictures can convince you to take an interest in these kids and help me help them. Even if you can only give $10, that's fine. If 39 other people give $10, then we've reached our goal. $10 may not seem like a lot to you, but it's a very sizeable sum in the village; it can buy 100 heads of cabbage, piles of tomatoes, or bundles of greens, enough to combat malnutrition in an entire family for a very long time. It can almost buy a 50 kg bag of cement. Please help us out. And continue to check the blog; I'll update on the project's progress regularly.

The website is https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=611-061.

Alternatively, you can go to peacecorps.gov, click on 'Donate to Volunteer Projects' and search by my last name, Barren.

I also made flyers that I can e-mail by request (nicolebarrdette@gmail.com). For further information and pictures, look at earlier posts. Chris posted a whole facebook album of pictures of the pre-school at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=211887&id=713467480&l=94dff03873.

The Mumana Lupando

Pre-school for Orphaned

and Vulnerable Children

The Condensed Version:Our counterparts, Ba Allan and Ba Catherine, are volunteer teachers at this free pre-school. The students range in age from 2 1/2 to 6 years old, and are mostly orphans or from families with HIV or other chronic illnesses. I go often to help teach, have made some learning materials, and suggest new teaching methodologies. I've also arranged for the teachers to attend a workshop on early childhood education. It's important to note, however, that this pre-school functioned before I arrived and will continue after I leave.

The children have regular attendance, which is pretty rare in Zambian villages, are eager to learn, and come wearing their best church clothes. This is the only educational opportunity they have before age 7, when they can enter grade 1 at basic school. Most children seem to start school years later than that though. A lot of the first-graders look to be about ten or eleven years old. This is a shame because the early years are a formative part of a child's development, and studies have shown that children who attend pre-school and kidnergarden are better prepared and learn more effectively when they enter school, and even puts them at an advantage years later in life.

Since 2007, the pre-school has been using a cramped, abandoned general store as a classroom. The problems with this arrangement are many. The shack is located in the center of the village, where the men drink home-brewed beer, there’s always a radio powered by a car battery blaring, and older children duck in and out to satisfy their own curiosity. Adding to the distractions, there are no chairs or desks, and children crouch together on pieces of broken brick. The floor is dirt, and in the absence of a blackboard, functions as a slate upon which to practice writing letters and numbers. There’s no locking door, so the learning aids utilized by the teachers are restricted to what they can carry in and out each day. During harvest time, traders squat in the building, forcing the school to meet outside. Finally, the students are orphaned or from families dealing with HIV or other chronic illnesses, so they especially are prone to fall through the cracks. The pre-school functions to instill in them an early love for learning and prepare them for basic school, but it’s difficult to impress upon them the importance of education and their own self-worth when they’re learning in a dilapidated, ill-suited classroom.

Additionally, expansion of the programme is impossible without a larger facility. With a new building, the teachers could separate the students into classes by age, increase enrollment so that a fraction of the village's 300 other children could receive the same opportunity, and utilize new teaching methods and materials.

The community has agreed to donate local building materials, labor, and equipment to construct a new school building. However, as subsistence farmers, each family survives on only about $40 a year, so they can only contribute gifts-in-kind. The remaining money will come from US donors, through the Peace Corps Partnership Programme. We will need $4000.

This is my plea to you to help my village educate its children. Soon Peace Corps Washington will set up a website so that I can accept donations. Please help me by telling your friends, colleagues, church groups, clubs, and schools. I know times are difficult now in the US with the economy, but these children have it so much harder. Every little bit helps- especially because every little bit stretches a lot farther in Africa.

The Long Version: Copied from my proposal

Background Information

The village of Mumana Lupando is located eighty-five kilometers west of Kasama, in the Munkonge chiefdom. Approximately 3,200 people reside in the village proper, an area of about 5 km². With the exception of four GRZ (public school) teachers, all adults in the village are subsistence farmers, with an average yearly income of ZMK 200,000 (USD$40).

Around 65% of all children aged seven and above attend grades one through seven at Mumana Lupando Basic School. 241 boys and 201 girls are currently enrolled. Attendance is often sporadic, dipping during planting and harvest time when children are needed to work in the fields. Teachers as well frequently take unauthorized leaves during the term, so illiteracy rates in even the upper grades are high.

In the villages surrounding Mumana Lupando, there is no existing formal education for children prior to grade one. Children often don’t begin school until around age seven to age ten, leaving a gap in preliminary education attained during their formative years, which puts them at a disadvantage. Since September 2007, the Mumana Youth Care and Supporting Group has partially filled the void for pre-school education in the village. Around 80 orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs) aged two through six attend the weekly three-hour long class, taught by the group’s chairwoman and secretary. In Mumana Lupando, families in which parents are deceased or chronically ill, struggle with poverty to a greater extent than the rest of the village. OVCs are less likely to attend school due to a lack of funds, support and encouragement. The pre-school was established to rally around the village’s most disadvantaged children and foster in them an early love for learning, so they would be more likely to enter and excel at Mumana Lupando Basic School.

The Mumana Youth Care and Supporting Group (MYCSG) was established in 2000 with help from the Northern Health Education Programme, a local NGO located in Kasama. MYCSG’s goals are:

· To sensitize the youth and general public on HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention.

· To correct misconceptions about the transmission of HIV, including the overemphasis on superficial blood contact.

· To discourage the stigmatization of individuals living with HIV and AIDS.

· To support OVCs in education and enable them to develop an interest in learning before they reach grade one.

· To promote good nutrition for OVCs and HIV+ individuals.

MYCSG is registered with Kasama local council and is comprised of twelve members and an executive board of a chairwoman, secretary, and treasurer. The group meets weekly and has established itself as the most active philanthropic group in the community. It accomplishes its goals through organizing educational events for the observation of World AIDS and Voluntary Counseling and Testing Days, conducts mobile VCT, and has worked hand-in-hand with two generations of Peace Corps volunteers for HIV/AIDS sensitization. It provides home-based care for nineteen HIV+ individuals and their families and conducts monthly growth monitoring for over one hundred children under age five. It dabbles in environmental conservation, and especially conservation farming techniques like permaculture gardening which can improve nutrition for at-risk families. It also has established a piggery to provide vulnerable families with protein. Taking into account MYCSG’s previous activities, excellent organization, and commitment to the community, MYCSG is perfectly capable of managing the activities outlined in this proposal.

The Project

The aim of this project is to construct a 16 x 6 m classroom block so that the children can have a larger, stable, comfortable, and quiet learning environment. It will be furnished with a blackboard and stools, located in a quiet section of the village away from the main road, and will have a locking door so that learning materials can be stored safely. The community has pledged to donate everything they can short of money, which they don’t have to give. Instead, they are donating building equipment such as shovels, wheelbarrows, and trowels; local building materials like crushed stone, sand, bricks, and clay; and labor to prepare the local materials and construct the school. It also speaks about the motivation of the community that they began molding bricks for this project in early June, four months before the project is set to begin.

The $4,000 needed to buy building materials will hopefully be donated by friends and family in the US, through a Peace Corps Partnership Programme.

Community Need

This project is important because education is vital to development. A strong, early foundation obtained during the formative years of a child’s life will put him at an advantage later in life. A child who attends pre-school will be more likely to continue to basic school and excel. He may continue to upper basic school and university, or he may remain in the village and use his knowledge to improve his family’s health, nutrition, and quality of life. The community needs skilled, educated people to break the cycle of poverty and this foundation and early emphasis on education is the first step.

The more rural a community, the less likely it is they will have a pre-school. Mumana Lupando will be the first community in the region to properly address the issue of pre-school education. In this way, the village can serve as an inspiration to surrounding communities and ignite positive change. The community has proven its support of the pre-school since its inception in 2007. The current classroom, an unused tuck shop, was donated by a local businessman. The children’s attendance is regular and punctual and encouraged by their parents and caretakers. The teachers at the GRZ school have offered encouragement and suggestions, and the school’s founders strive to improve the quality of the school. The community definitely recognizes the value of pre-school education. If the project is not implemented, the pre-school program will continue to function at minimal effectiveness. Enrollment will not increase to the desired 120 students, and only OVCs will benefit from the program. The children will continue to learn in a cramped, unstable environment with many distractions, so that they won’t absorb all of the material they are taught. The teachers will be unable to utilize new learning aids and teaching methodologies, because the classroom is too small and they can’t store materials in the current classroom due to the risk of weather damage or theft.

Project Sustainability

Through this project’s implementation, MYCSG members will gain budgeting and money management skills, and managerial and planning skills. These new skills can help them plan their own household budgets or other group projects, including IGAs. The whole community will receive sensitization on the importance of pre-school education. Few people understand exactly why it is that early childhood education is so important, and I would like to use this project as a platform to promote learning at home, not just when children are in the classroom. Also, this project presents the opportunity for young adults to learn about construction under the supervision of older, skilled members of the community.

This project will increase the aptitude of the three teachers to teach. A more spacious and distraction-free classroom will leave students more attentive and receptive, while a locking door means they can use learning aids. This project will be carried out after a SPA-funded five-day training of the volunteer teachers by the Pre-school Teacher Training College, which will give them the knowledge to make the most of their new classroom.

Beauty Kabwe is five-years old, with a lingering grin and almond-shaped eyes. She's polite, a natural leader and a clown, doing impressions and hamming it up to make the other kids laugh. She's a gifted dancer, and is always the first to tie a citenge around her hips when there's drumming and singing.

She's the last-born child of her family, being raised alone by her mother after her father's death. She helps her mother by drawing water, sweeping and harvesting in the fields.

(L to R: Muso, Beauty, and Mapalo)Most kids are unable or unmotivated to continue school past grade 7, and end up as subsistence farmers like their parents. However, Beauty's older sister works in Kasama and an older brother attends grade 10 outside the village. Beauty, too, is smart. She started pre-school six months ago, after talking excitedly for several months about going to school. She's learned to count quickly and her mother proudly told me that she writes her numbers and letters very well. It's true. She even helps other children when they have trouble.

I persuaded Muso and Mapalo, or banabwinga and bashibwinga (husband and wife; I swear those kids are going to get married one day), to start attending the school a month ago. Muso and Mapalo are the two equally mischevious children that always find their ways into my blogs. Mapalo picks up really fast with writing too. Often children who are just learning have trouble reversing their letters or getting the shapes right, but I've watched Mapalo get them right on his first try.

Musonda, also five-years old, is Ba Allan's niece and another pre-school student. She also is not an OVC, but her aunt and uncle passed away from AIDS, a contributing factor to Ba Allan's HIV activism. Musonda is a little shy but a natural model. This photo shoot was actually a riot. Chris got out his camera and Musonda immediately started posing with her hands on her chin. She changed her position and facial expression slightly with each shot. Chris in turn starts shooting her from all different angles. I'm afraid her brothers and cousins, behind her, got neglected.

HIPPOS The most exotic wildlife we've seen in our village is five-year-old Muso running down the path naked, so we were excited when we arrived at Kafue National Park and found hippo tracks the size of dinner plates on the bank of the river, only 25 ft from our campsite. However, what was novel in the daylight became frightening after sunset when the Kafue River became shrouded in darkness penetrated only by a glaring full moon. Hippos bellowed as we cooked dinner, the sound echoing over the dark water so that we could only nervously guess at their location. Around 23 hrs, we awoke to the sound of splashing and scraping along the bank, followed by lumbering footsteps and snorting. It was too nearby for comfort.

"Chris," I whispered as he peered through the mosquito screen, "What if it tramples our tent?"

He hesitated. "It won't.""Hippos graze on land at night," I reminded him. "It's coming closer." Beyond our flimsy, nylon two-person tent lay a field of lush grass, kept green during the dry season by a sprinkler system.

We sat in the darkness, straining to track its movements by sound. Minutes passed slowly, but the hippo never strayed far. My heart leapt when it unexpectedly fell silent. I was sure it had heard us rustling and was creeping up, dangerously curious. But then it returned to foraging. We deliberated with growing dread. Should we wait for it to move away and then quietly slip out, and walk three minutes upstream to the lodge to wait out daybreak? Or where we safer remaining and being quiet? Chris dimmed his headlamp with his hands as I opened our Bradt guidebook. "Hippos are widely credited with killing more people than any other African mammal," I read softly. "Strongly territorial, herds of ten or more animals are presided over by a dominant male who will readily defend his patriarchy to the death." Close to hyperventilating now, we decided to wait for it to meander a safe distance away before we escaped to the lodge. We listened and waited as it slowly foraged its way downstream, our hope growing. Then it turned around. It was circling, not leaving. With resignation, we realized we were helpless, at the whim of an unpredictable 1,500 kg animal. After an hour, I began to calm down as I realized it hadn't strayed from the water's edge. My earlier adrenaline melted into exhaustion. "We can sleep in shifts," I offered drowsily to Chris. Two hours later it finally moved away.

BASIL

The following morning, we found out that was our first introduction to Basil, Mukambi Safari Lodge's resident hippo. A young male, he was violently chased away by another group but found a sort of refuge from harassment at Mukambi. He grazes on the grass in front of reception regularly and even enters the lodge. Once, a larger male hippo chased him right through the dining room in the midst of a meal, so the staff always watches him closely. When we were there, they hurried to block off the dining room and reception area with a wicker sofa when he came around. So Basil lay down and slept right there on the second floor of the stone patio overlooking the river like an overgrown house cat. For over two hours he was sprawled out as guests tip-toed behind the relative safety of the sofa and the glass-fronted doors of the lodge taking photographs.

LIONS

Kafue was the sixth National park I've been to in Southern Africa, the second in Zambia. I've been on many game drives and have seen it all. Except lions, which tend to be elusive. In Kafue, we were lucky enough to see two lionesses a total of three times. On a morning drive, we found a lioness in a dry riverbed, chasing away a pack of vultures. She pawed the sand where the carrion-eaters had been and plopped down to rest. Suddenly she rose, keeping her tawny square head at the same level of the long, sunburnt grasses, looking intently into the distance at a herd of puku. Lithely she stepped through the grasses, never losing concentration, not unlike a house cat stalking a mouse. 150 yards away, she stopped. The leader of the puku herd had spotted her and was staring at intently at her as she was at him as his unconcerned charges nibbled grass. Neither predator nor prey moved for several minutes, trapped in a staring contest. Our land cruiser moved on. More than likely, the lioness had lost her advantageous element of surprise and abandoned the hunt, preferring to pick up again in the cooler temperatures at dusk.

We saw her again at the same place in the late afternoon. She was on the opposite bank of the dry riverbed but crossed right in front of our land cruiser, undisturbed by the breathless humans eagerly snapping pictures of her.

Our second night camping, we heard a lion calling multiple times from the northwest. By the third time, it had undeniably gotten closer, but as their roars can carry a distance of over 8 km, he still could have been some distance from us. It was really amazing to sit around a campfire and hear lions and jackals though.

WARTHOGS

At the lodge's ground level, there's a storage area cut into the stone foundation containing bags of charcoal. And a resident family of three warthogs. To my extreme delight, they snort just like domestic pigs.

ET CETERA

In addition to watching vervet monkeys, puku, some amazing birds, and warthogs right in our campsite, we also went on two day game drives and one at night. Animals spotted: lions, bush baby, civet "cats", elephants, jackals, warthogs, vultures, puku, water bucks.

It was an amazing experience seeing this side of Africa that we don't get the chance to see in our daily lives.

Top to bottom and left to right: A male kudu. Definitely the ugliest antelope.Puku in flight and puku mother and fawn.Baboons.A bush baby. One of the few nocturnal primates.Elephants sniffing the air to smell our scent.A tree hyrax that fell out of its tree and landed with a thud.A pretty bird that looks like a lilac-breasted roller, except its green.

I’ve become accustomed to the distended bellies caused by malnutrition, the fungal infections that cause the children to lose patches of their hair, and small dusty, bare feet running on chigger-infested soil. It’s become scenery just as much as the tall, thirsty grasses burnt by the relentless sun during dry season. But the death of a child is not something I can get used to. Despite the special cemetery just for children, with unmarked mounds strangled with weeds stretching far into the distance.

Mpundu Kandeke was five-years-old, with chubby cheeks and a bright smile like her father’s, a farmer Chris worked closely with. Sometime on Friday, she went with her twin brother and some other children into the woods to dig for bush rats, so their families could have some meat with dinner that night. She was young and a girl, so the boys told her to sit and wait for them. She didn’t see the spotted puff adder that blended in with the dead leaves and dried grass she sat on. It bit her on the thigh. On Saturday, her family managed to take her to the clinic, although their house is 3 miles from the road, and another 10 miles from there to the clinic, by the only transportation they had, a rusty Chinese-made bicycle. The clinic could do little for her. No clinic in Zambia could; there isn’t the infrastructure to store anti-venom.

She passed away on Sunday morning, nearly forty painful hours after she was bit. That same day, we and her father were supposed to play in a soccer match organized to celebrate the World Cup, which she probably would have watched. Instead, her male relatives were hammering her small coffin together.

In Bemba culture, twins are revered. You don’t wail for one twin if the other is still living. In this instance, though, her twin brother was the first to cry upon hearing of her death, making it acceptable for the rest of the family to mourn.

The morning of her funeral, the Pentecostal Church choir was singing in her grandmother’s yard for the mourners. Inside the small, empty traditional stick and mud hut, her mother, grandmother, and others sat around her body. It’s custom for mourners to sit for a few minutes with the body after they arrive. She was swaddled in a wool blanket, with only her face in view. The hut was dark and quiet and she was surrounded by her relatives on both sides. It was very peaceful, even after her mother began to softly wail, accentuating the melodious voices outside. She could have easily been only sleeping. Later though, as they prepared to move to the cemetery and drove the nails into her small, rough hewn coffin, that illusion was ruined. We were really going to leave this small girl in the ground, alone, away from all the houses in the village. She would become just another unmarked mound among many mounds, just another child lost. A too-familiar tragedy played out in the savage but beautiful landscape of Africa.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

On 30 June, two proposals I’ve spent the last three months working on will be evaluated. The first is for almost $200 funding from USAID to train three volunteer pre-school teachers in curriculum, lesson planning, and learning aids. The Kasama Pre-school Teacher Training College has agreed to facilitate this five-day workshop for free, although such a training usually costs around $400. The money requested is just to cover stationary supplies, transport, and food.

The second proposal is through the Peace Corps Partnership Program to construct a pre-school building. Since 2007, the pre-school has been using a cramped, abandoned general store as a classroom. The problems with this arrangement are many. The shack is located in the center of the village, where the men drink home-brewed beer, there’s always a radio powered by a car battery blaring, and older children duck in and out to satisfy their own curiosity. Adding to the distractions, there are no chairs or desks, and children crouch together on pieces of broken brick. The floor is dirt, and in the absence of a blackboard, functions as a slate upon which to practice writing letters and numbers. There’s no locking door, so the learning aids utilized by the teachers are restricted to what they can carry in and out each day. Finally, the students are orphaned or from families dealing with HIV or other chronic illnesses, so they especially are prone to fall through the cracks. The pre-school functions to instill in them an early love for learning and prepare them for basic school, but it’s difficult to impress upon them the importance of education and their own self-worth when they’re learning in a dilapidated, ill-suited classroom.

The money for this PCPP comes from you, my family and friends in the great United States of America. The community has agreed to donate local building materials, labor, and equipment, but they cannot contribute the necessary $4,000 in cash. As subsistence farmers, each family survives on a mere $40 a year.

If Peace Corps approves this proposal, I can begin accepting donations in 1 – 2 months. There will be a Peace Corps-affiliated website where you can donate. Of course I’ll post further information, as well as pictures. Please, please pass it on to any individual or organization that you think can help. The kids love attending their pre-school and it really has great potential to prepare children for basic school, improve literacy rates, and keep more children in school for longer.

Stay tuned…

So, recently, here at TBPLTB, we've been doing some thinking. Have we gotten ourselves into a rut? Is it time to move away from the same old text and pretty picture posts we've been doing for the better part of our services? These questions were met with a resounding YES.

Please enjoy our lives through the quirkily honest lens that is Rotten Guavas...

A mature baobab, hosting buffalo weaverbirds, and a nesting stork

In the beginning of May, we had to come to Lusaka for our Midterm Conference and medical physical and tests. We both got a clean bill of health, including no tuberculosis. We were a bit worried because everyone in the village seems to have a persistant cough and chickens wander in and out of huts regularly. A lot of the young girls have deep, hacking coughs similar to those produced by an 80-year-old lifelong smoker. Of course, they also spend a lot of time sitting in smoke-filled insakas, leaning over cooking fires, so that could be a contributing factor as well.

This also marks the halfway point of our service. 13 months down, 12 months to go. At this point, Peace Corps Zambia tells us, it's common to have a nosedive in morale. You start feeling like the difference you're making in the village is marginal, like your family and friends in the U.S. have forgotten about you and moved on with their lives, like you've changed too much to fit back into your old life in the states. Chris and I both feel this, along with most of our intake. (speaking of which, our original group has diminished by 9 people since February 2009. Most people were medically separated, others chose to go home). So we had a touching rededication ceremony, received some helpful project-specific books, shared ideas about what has and hasn't worked for us at our individual sites.

For some reason, Peace Corps thinks married couples should stay in a quiet guesthouse 2 kilometers away from all the other volunteers when down in Lusaka on official business. So Chris and I, and Daphne and Tyson (a LIFE couple from Kansas living in Central Province) were corralled into Cheshire Homes Guesthouse while our twenty-odd other friends stayed elsewhere. This turned out to be not so bad because Cheshire Homes is actually very nice, and we met an older American staying there named Craig, a returned PCV from Samoa in the '70s. He's a professor of epidemiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and is director of some global health programmes, and travels to Zambia frequently for work. He bought the four of us dinner at a nice Indian restaraunt, and a book about Zambia that he found out we'd never read. It was really nice that we had this instant connection to someone we might not normally know, just through similar experiences.

One night, we went out bar-hopping with our intake. We hired a mini bus to take us around for the night. We started at the new casino at Arcades Shopping Mall. Lusaka surprisingly has two classy casinos now. The first bar we went to, the band that was supposed to be practicing didn't show. So Chris picked up an electric guitar on the stage and started jamming with two Zambians that were milling around. They were really into it, and invited him to come back a few nights later. Unfortunately, we couldn't. We moved onto another bar, then ended at the infamous Alpha Bar. Infamous because if you aren't careful, your phone or money will be stolen, and it's where the prostitutes loiter; women squeezed into too-short skirts and plunging necklines hanging onto men in business suits. However, it also happens to have the best atmosphere. Inside, they blare Zambian pop music over a strobed dance floor, and outside, there's a quieter porch with picnic tables. I don't think anyone ended up getting more than 4 hours of sleep that night, before we had to be up at 8am for a session.

After MTC, Chris and I decided to take a four-day vacation in Livingstone. Livingstone, home of Victoria Falls, one of the seven wonders of the world, is the most touristy part of Zambia. It's 6 hours south of Lusaka, and the Falls are flanked by Zimbabwe across the Zambezi River. It's also very close to Mosi-o-Tunya National Park. Victoria Falls themselves make Niagra Falls look like a small brook trickling over a pebble. It's the end of the rainy season now, so we saw them in their full grandeur. They're about 2 kilometers in width, and plunge into a deep, carved gorge sprinkled with rainforest foliage. It's really breathtaking. You can walk all along them, and onto a bridge cutting across. The spray is so strong that your clothes unavoidably become soaked through, even at a distance of 1 kilometer away. They even have a rent-a-raincoat stand set up at the entrance to the Falls. At the bridge linking Zambia to Zimbabwe, you can bungee jump off the side into the gorge. There's also light aircraft and helicopters that will give you an aerial view of the Falls. Unfortunately, it's a little beyond our volunteer budget.

The Boiling Pot and the bridge where people bungee jump

If you really squint, you can see someone at the end of her/his jump. The person on the left is coming to "rescue" the jumper before all of the blood rushes to her/his brain.

Our first hike, before we got soaked, was to the Boiling Pot, the massive, turbulent pool under the Falls. It was a beautiful walk through vivid rainforest foliage, with birds calling over our heads and monitor lizards sunning themselves on rocks. A view from the "Boiling Pot" trail.

On the way back up, we encountered a troop of baboons foraging on the steep hill. There were about twenty in all, from small babies clinging to their mothers to a few large males strutting around. At first I was a bit nervous, because baboons are about German Shepherd-sized and have very sharp canines, but they seemed rather habituated to people wandering around, and ignored us. Until Chris dropped his open bag by our feet (we were with an American living in Tanzania named JJ), and walked up to take a picture of a baboon that was sitting on a garbage can, banging it like a drum. I was transfixed by a very adorable baby clinging to its mothers' back as a male groomed her. Another female walked over and the male grabbed the baby, walked a few meters away, and sat down to play with it. This wasn't necessarily the father; baboons have an interesting social network in which they make friendships that are sometimes lifelong, but don't always mate with that individual. I didn't even notice the male that had ambled up to us until he grabbed Chris' bag, spilling his new internet phone and other belongings on the hillside. I watched in horror for some long seconds as he picked through the bag, dragging it downhill, and considered whether I should throw a rock at him. Then JJ growled at him and raised his arms, and the baboon skulked away, realizing a bag without food wasn't worth the trouble. This occasion marked the second time in less than 4 months that a primate has rifled through our bags and stole things. (The first was when a vervet monkey named Jocko opened my bag and stole some hairclips. Luckily, like a dog, he was easily fooled when I picked up a leaf and pretended it was extremely interesting, quickly discarding the clips in favor of the new thing).This is a good baboon. She didn't steal anything from us.

Here we are after a good soaking from walking around the falls.

JJ. Our hero.

We went to Gwembe Crocodile Farm the second day to catch a feeding. They have about 20 adult crocodiles that were wild-caught from the Zambezi River, mostly because they were causing trouble. For example, there was one female that was stealing campers' backpacks. Once she even took off someone's foot that got to close to the water, at which point she was relocated. Now all of the crocodiles are used for breeding. Their eggs are incubated at another farm, and the young are used for meat or crocodile skin products. We tried some crocodile meat, and it's pretty good. It tastes like a cross between fish and chicken. A 1 1/2 year old crocodile we like to call "Dinner"

Our guide actually nonchalantly jumped down into this croc's enclosure and hit him on the snout with a stick to show us his teeth.*No animals or people were harmed in the making of this picture.

One thing that surprised me was how massive adult male crocodiles can get. They're easily the size of a four seat couch, as long from head to tail as a full size pickup truck. They're not horribly exciting to watch, you can easily mistake one sunning itself on the bank for a statue. They're fed chunks of raw cow meat weekly. They become animated when the meat is dropped into their enclosure, huge jaws with pocket-knife teeth knashing in the air, stubby prehistoric bodies sliding over the ground.

We also went on a sunset booze cruise on the Zambezi River. We heard it was likely we'd see hippos or crocs as we were sailing through National Park waters, but the water level was too high. We did get a nice view of the sunset though, and as much alcohol as we could drink. We ended up spending a lot of time with a Bemba man named Kelly. The predominant tribe in Southern Province is Tonga, and many people speak Nyanja (which is very similar to Bemba. We can understand some of it, but aren't able to speak it). Kelly, though, was originally from Northern Province, very drunk, and excited to be speaking Bemba, a language not commonly used in Livingstone. He was a tour operator and kept pointing out all the other boats on the river to me. Apparently, the large double-decker boats were all Zambian, while the smaller ones came from the Zimbabwean side. Of course, Zambians are proudly nationalistic (There are private companies named ZamBike, ZamBeef, ZamChick, ZamTel, and many more), so this could have been complete heresay. Obviously not a Zimbabwean boat.

The following day, we went on a "lion encounter." There's an organization named ALERT in Zambia and Zimbabwe that works specifially on lion conservation. They relocate at-risk lion populations and orphaned cubs. Starting at 6 weeks old, cubs are taken on walks in the bush in order to become familiar with it and develop hunting instincts. Once they are able to become self-sufficient, they are put in a fenced, managed area with no competition like hyenas, and allowed to form prides on their own. Finally, they are released into the larger park to have wildborne cubs and become completely independent from humans. So Chris and I went on one of these walks with three 11-month old cubs named Rwanda, Rema, and Rafiji. There were guides with us, and two scouts walking ahead to make sure we wouldn't run into any game. The cubs were playful with eachother, rolling and tackling until they turned into one large blur of golden fur. Chris took some great pictures. At one point, the male Rwanda found a pile of elephant dung and began rolling around in it. Whenever lions find dung they will cover themselves in it to disguise their own scent, so that their prey becomes confused.

Elephant dung: catnip for lions.

Our final activity was a walking safari in Mosi-o-Tunya National Park (only 66 km2). I've only been on game drives before and was afraid that being on foot, we wouldn't cover as much distance, and would be less likely to see any animals, but the opposite was true. On foot, we were able to get deeper into the bush past the roads, and weren't competing with other Land Rovers. We went on the walk with a German couple, the company owner, and a game scout, walking at the front with an AK 47. The AK, he told us, was to fire into the air to scare away an animals in case of an incident. That, and for killing poachers. The first animals we happened across were a herd of zebra grazing on the savanna. We were able to slowly get closer, until we were about 40 feet away. The stallion made sure to stay between us and his herd, keeping one eye on us while he lipped sunburnt grass. The rest of the herd meandered away to keep some distance, then indifferently returned to grazing, flicking their ears against flies. A small brown oxpecker with a red beak perched on one of the zebra's withers, eating its parasites. Slowly, the herd moved away, and the scout pointed into a thicket of small trees, where a buffalo was staring at us. Unfortunately, we were in an open savanna while the buffalo had the advantage of cover, so it was unsafe for us to approach him any closer. Undoubtedly he had friends hidden from us nearby, so we didn't want to stumble into a herd of buffalo, and gave him a wide berth. We edged away, but he continued to watch us uneasily. Then, a solitary giraffe with eyes half-closed crossed our path, not noticing us until he was just 25 feet away. He looked at us curiously once from under a fringe of thick eyelashes, then turned to a scraggly low tree. He too ambled away, and we continued, all the while with the buffalo still glaring at us. The scout went ahead because he spotted a rhino in the trees ahead and wanted to make sure it was safe for us to approach. For the grand finale, we were 25 feet away from a white rhino, dozing in the shade. White or square-lipped rhinos are among the rarest of Africa's endangered species. There are only five in the whole 66 km squared Mosi-o-Tunya park. Female rhinos have a gestation period of 18 months, then raise their young for five years. This means female rhinos only have two young during their lifetimes; three if they are extremely lucky. The large male dozing in front of us was one of a dying species. Unconcerned with us, he laboriously shifted onto his side, then stood up, all 3 tons of him. He had intense marble-sized eyes under long, horse-like ears and a snout with two horns underlined by his large, square lips. Except for a hump on his back, his wrinkled body almost looked like an elephant's. After admiring him for fifteen minutes, we trekked back to the Land Rover, and took the long way out of the park, and managed to see some baboons and vervet monkeys, a family of running warthogs, countless impala, and some hornbills, beautiful graceful cranes and a vulture, both carrion eaters. This was Chris' first game park adventure (and almost, I feel, a rite of passage for travelers in Africa), and he was ecstatic, looking at me every so often with a big grin. I've been on several game drives in South Africa, including a night one at Kruger National Park, but never have I had an experience like this one. A walking safari is definately the way to go to get up close to these animals.

After one year of worrying about a lack of clean water in our village, and having insufficient funds as Peace Corps Volunteers to do anything about it, Appropriate Projects has solved our problem in a matter of days:

Link to Mumana Lupando Well Project:

http://appropriateprojects.com/node/169

Appropriate Projects has approved our proposal and within a month, approximately 250 people in our village (including us) will have clean water.

A great charity to donate to. Twatotela sana (Thank you very much), Appropriate Projects!

Every month, our counterparts' group in conjunction with Safe Motherhood weighs all the children in the village under age 5. Zambian children don't regularly visit doctors for check-ups like American kids, so this is a way to monitor a child's growth and take early action if they are not growing as they should. Most every child in the village is mildly malnourished due to a lack of fresh vegetables and protein, but growth monitoring looks for severe malnutrition that could be life-threatening. Ba Allan tells us that during the hungry season, most childrens' weights dip.

The women in green is one of the twins' wife (dedicated young men in my English class). The woman in yellow is Ba Maureeni, my counterpart's (Ba Catherine's) younger sister.

Beauty pretending to be shy at the baby weighing. Don't let her fool you, she's the most charismatic five-year-old I know. Her mother, BanaPeggy, is the woman featured in the very last picture.

My first soya bean cooking demonstration. Chris and I pedaled soya beans a few months back, because we wanted farmers to grow them. They are very nutritious and contain more protein than other legumes. As promised, I had a cooking demo to teach how to prepare them. Joan (our former PCV neighbor in the blue apron, who sadly finishes her service in a matter of days) was on hand to help, as was Ba Chongo the community development officer and his wife. We prepared fritters made with soya flour, soya bean sausages, soya milk, and soya coffee. It was all surprisingly very tasty. Once Chris' harvest is ready, I want us to make our own soya milk.

Yangu! A Zambian man cooking?! BashiMpalo (father of the frequently mentioned rambunctious Mpalo) making fritters. When I specifically asked for a man to volunteer to help, most of the men snickered, but BashiMpalo wins brownie points for volunteering.

A view of the whole soya demo, with our house in the background.

Our visitors, Peace Corps trainees who will hopefully swear in as volunteers in a week. They visited us for four days to learn what it's really like to be a volunteer. Chris insisted on putting them to work in Ba Allan's garden. They are (from left to right) Amanda (AKA Musonda), Brian (AKA Chishimba) and Courtney (AKA Chileshe). The Zambians are their Bemba language trainer Ba Golden, and Ba Allan (who, according to Joan, has a "smile like sunshine"). Joan and I sat in the shade and roasted maize. One of the highlights of their visit is definately the feast Ba Allan fed us all; corn/millet nshima with chicken, chikanda ifisashi (African bologna in a creamy peanut sauce), cabbage, and beans. On the trainees' first night, we organized a dance party under the full moon. The plan was for some of the village girls to sing, drum, and dance. We invited just our counterparts and neighbors whom we're friendly with, and planned to have it at our house. An hour before, our neighbor Mutale came with the message that we should move the party to the football pitch by our house, because more people would come than we expected. When we arrived, we found half of the village there waiting for us. There were probably over 150 party-crashers! I was amused that so many people would show up when we didn't invite them, but when I try to organize community educational events and send out many reminders, only a couple dozen people show up at best. The dancing was a lot of fun; everyone really enjoyed when the trainees tied citenges around their hips and entered the dancing circle. Chris has Zambian dancing perfected and always hams it up, getting the bamaayos hooting. The next night, the girls pleaded for us to do it again, so we played a mixture of American dance music and Zampop on our iPod. The following night, they pleaded again. I said we were too tired and wanted to relax. We later found out we'd been spotted at Ba Allan's house on the second day, so people came to his house at night to wait for us because they thought we were coming to dance with the other half of the village.

Ba Astone and his family. Ba Astone is in my English class and works on farming with Chris. He invited us to his house to see his permaculture garden (a method of farming Chris taught):

BanaPeggy and her permaculture garden.

There have been some unfortunate events both in our village and to Peace Corps staff in Kasama, so I am going to get to the bad stuff immediately, so I can expel it, then forget it and move onto happier things.

The worst news: We had just got into Kasama after a 3 1/2 hour ride on a bumpy, empty Sable fuel truck when we happened to meet our PCVL, Ted, in the Shoprite parking lot. It turns out that our Northern Province driver, Ba Lameck, narrowly avoided being beaten to death and is in jail, awaiting a court date. Before I say anything else about the incident, a note on Ba Lameck's character; he is very professional, caring, and supportive. All the volunteers like him, and he's been on Peace Corps staff for years.

Ba Lameck was driving the Peace Corps land cruiser east on Luwingu Road (our road) about 25 kilometers outside Kasama. Ba Jonathon (the provincial coordinator), a volunteer that is our closest neighbor, and the Health project director were with him. A vehicle passing in the other direction went by two children on bicycles. The children thought the road was clear and were riding in the left lane, as the shoulder was too sandy. Ba Lameck beeped and one of the kids jerked his bike to the side, but the other kid, a boy, froze, struck by fear at the approaching cruiser. Ba Lameck hit the brakes, but it was a situation in which only a split-second reflex could have saved the boy. The cruiser killed him instantly, his bike becoming tangled between the vehicle's front tires. Immediately, women from the village started to wail loudly, and a crowd surrounded the cruiser, making big scratches in it. A group of men began to beat Ba Lameck ceaselessly, not stopping even when he was lying still and bloody on the tarmac. Ba Jonathon tried to help, but they began to beat him as well. The health project director pleaded with the men to stop before they killed Ba Lameck. The man who threw the first punch finally took pity and carried Ba Lameck into his house, sparing his life.

The police were called and Ba Lameck was arrested. Peace Corps paid all funeral expenses for the family and a very generous sum of compensation, equivalent to about ten years of farming high yields of cash crops. Driving recklessly, the charge, is only a civil offense, so after a steep fine, Ba Lameck will most likely be released. I'm sure, however, that the accident will haunt him for the rest of his life.

The rest of my bad news is mild compared to this tragedy. I've written before about our lack of a clean water source. Our well is open, not covered, fed by a spring, and at a lower elevation than the rest of the village. Sometime around November, a baby straddled to a woman's back peed while she was drawing water, contaminating the water. It was cleaned, and I held a meeting to elect a well committee and stress the importance of clean water to health.

Since people have returned from imitanda, in the last month, they have disregarded all previous rules. Kids were throwing mango pits, musuku seeds, chewed up cassava into the well or carelessly discarding it nearby, so that it washed into the pit. Most people were not washing their jerry cans before they drew water. These jerry cans most likely came in contact with animal or human feces at some point. Every house has a flock of chickens, sometimes goats and a dog, that inevitably poop in their yard or insaka. Most people also don't have a latrine, and children especially pee wherever. Parasites are prolific, and it's probably safe to assume that jerry cans that are set in the sand are becoming contaminated. Also, jerry cans can also get dusty or gritty. Women were also washing their dishes and clothes in the furrow upstream. There are banks to divert water, but these become erroded from people walking on them, and one heavy rain (and it rains every day) could wash the soap or nshima residue into the well. The last straw though, came when a child pooped about 15 feet upstream of the well. It was on a rock, right on the path. Hello hepatitis, cholera, dysentery, diarrhea, giarrdia, intestinal worms, e. coli...

Chris and I were livid. That is our only source of drinking water. The next closest well is about a mile away. Too far to draw water from twice a day and carry back to our house. A 20-liter jerry can is very heavy, about forty lbs. and we don't have a wheel barrow or a pack mule or anything. And we go through about 20 liters of water a day, much more if we have to wash clothes or bathe.

So we immediately started a door-to-door campaign of the village on the importance of clean water for life. Most families don't treat their water, and diarrhea can kill people with already low immune systems, especially small children. There's also a fair amount of people that are HIV+ or have other chronic illnesses like TB. We tried to get across the point that not following the rules of the well could be killing your neighbor. In two days, three groups visited over 60 households, and spoke to over 150 men, women, and children about clean water. And people began to listen. Chris went to draw water with the 20-liter jerry can and gave two 2.5 liter jerry cans to Muso and Mpollo (both about 5 years old) to carry so they could help. Mpollo told Chris that his dad said little kids aren't allowed to go to the well anymore (without supervision, one of our rules). Chris told him it was OK, because he was there to teach them. When they arrived at the well, Mpollo suggested on his own that Chris do the actual drawing of the water.

(By the way, Mpollo is the boy in the black shirt in the top most photo on the left sidebar, and in a pink Dollywood shirt in the bottom one. Muso is in a jean dress in the top photo)

Our teenage neighbor came to our house to tell us there was poop (amafi in Bemba) in the well we use to clean jerry cans. We went down there and it turned out to just be a rotten guava on closer inspection, but one of the women immediately drained that well and shoveled out the sludge to clean it anyways. People seemed to be following the rules. Then, nature turned against us. Three days ago, our last full day in the village before we came here, our neighbor came to us distraught with an empty jerry can. Torrential rains earlier that day, coupled with the fact that the Sable workers fixing the road had diverted the water to go down a path that led to our well, had turned the path into a rushing stream, breaking the barrier, and ending up in the well. All the chicken turds, garbage, fruit pits, etc. that were within 1 kilometer uphill were washed down straight into our drinking supply.

Chris and I boil cooking water and both boil and filter water we just use for drinking. I think these methods kill pretty much everything, even if there is human waste literally in the water, but we plan to call the Peace Corps medical officer tommorrow just to make sure. Please, don't take your clean water that flows from taps right into your house for granted.

As I mentioned, the Sable road workers have come to our village. The plan is to pave the entire 160 km stretch from Luwingu to Kasama by next year. So far, only about 25 kilometers just outside the two cities are paved. They set up camp about 4 kilometers outside our village, and proceeded to bulldoze 25 feet on each side of the road. Our village used to be sort of pretty, but countless trees were taken down, and it sort of looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland now. Straight out of Cormac McCarthy. There's now a 70 foot long stretch of sand littered with crumpled tree corpses that bisects the village. Apparently closing off one lane at a time to fix the road is not an option; they need one side to park their equipment and the other to build a new diversion for traffic. Or some nonsense. Trees are dispensible; deforestation is irrelevant; a tarmac road will bring development!

Enough with the ranting. There's been some good, too. Our host mother gave birth to a girl, her seventh child. She had some pain in her abdomen after the birth and was taken to the clinic, but they're both fine now. When we asked our host father whether it was a boy or girl, he mumbled "a netball player." They had 5 girls already, so I think he might have been hoping for another son.

Ba Allan's son, little Chris, is getting very fat and likes shouting incomprehensible baby words. His wife and sons went to farm beans near Luwingu for the past couple of months, so it's been a while since we've seen them.

On nights with full moons, people like to sing and dance and drum, so one night after eating nshima, we followed the music to our neighbor's house. The girls really liked that we were dancing with them, and begged us to come with Chris' guitar the next night. They've been teaching us Bemba songs.

My favorite: Ba (insert some name here) batuwina, mulelya kalembula. Oh, cashinka fye, cashinka fye (at this point in the song everyone bends into the middle and claps their hands).

Then there's some others I haven't yet memorized but we have written down. There's one with a pretty tune that starts off Indeke yapita apa, yapita speedi nomwela... The airplane is passing there, it's passing with speed through the air, then the next line is about the plane writing "(football) players" in the sky, and below that "prostitutes." Apparently, it's used to taunt the other team during a game. There's another song they taught us about prostitutes too, it seems to be a common theme?

In exchange, I've been teaching the girls the song Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes. It's really fun to hear them sing in English.

Other than the door-to-door clean water campaign, I've been working with Ba Allan and Ba Catherine on writing a proposal and a budget to get a grant for a training for early education teachers, and to build them an actual pre-school structure. Right now, they teach around 50 kids (all orphans or children affected or infected with HIV)crammed into a deserted tuck shop. The kids sit on broken bricks and write their letters and numbers in the dirt with their fingers.

And now, I present you with some of our favorite quotes:

--- "He is my cousin. He is from Mparapata. He is mad." - our friend, to Chris--- Nakonde amaguy: "Where is your sister?" (meaning Chris)Me: "He is coming."--- "There is one; she is too fat." -Zanzibari hotel desk clerk, describing a woman in a group. We were trying to find our friends.---Chris: "How many hoes do you have?"Ba Allan: "Me, I have two. But in fact, every member of the family should have one. They should have their own and not use anyone else's."Chris: "Like toothbrushes?" --- A story our host father related to us about a conversation he had with Mpollo:Mpollo: "Why don't you drive your car?"BashiAmos: "It's broken."Mpollo: "Why don't you fix it?"BashiAmos: "I don't have the money."Mpollo: "I will give you money. I just planted two gallons of beans in my garden. I will have a lot of money."

Well, here we are...my solo debut on TBPLTB. I thought that since Nikki has the text niche rather expertly occupied, perhaps I would describe our recent trip to Zanzibar (a small island off the coast of Tanzania) in the format I most enjoy: photos. For those of you, who do Facebook, I'll post a link to additional photos posted there. So, without further adieu, for your enjoyment, I give you...Zanzibar!

Jerry and Ricardo keeping vigil

Nikki, immigration forms, and hills.

Our journey began with catching a train from Kasama, Zambia to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Aside from sitting in the train station from 0100 to 0400 and spending the better part of two days careening through the bush in a rickety metal box, it was actually quite enjoyable. The

views were beautiful, and we even got to see some animals!

After arriving in Dar, and subsequently hauling ourselves back onto our feet after being hit by the oppressive heat (it is much cooler in Zambia), we took an (thankfully) air conditioned (!!!) ferry to Stone Town, Zanzibar, where we were greeted by a beautiful sunset. Following are some typical scenes from around Stone Town (alleys, markets, etc)

The most amazing thing about Stone Town was how the city was arranged around this dendritic, meandering system of alleys and streets, and the way people tore through them at break-neck speeds on tiny scooters. This combined with the intricacy of the architecture and the dynamic, friendly people gave Stone Town the depth and color surpassing that of the spices sold in it's markets.

By day, we explored Stone Town and went to bea ches, but by night, we spent time at the music festival, watching various acts from all over Africa. Some were very good, some...well, you understand. One of the highlights was a white artist who performed in Kiswahili and dubbed himself "Mzungu", meaning white person, or foreigner (Musungu in Bemba). One of the low points was a Tanzanian rapper who growled his lyrics, and simply appeared to be trying too hard. Unfortunately, I don't remember the actual names of any of the artists. Here are a few pictures...

Besides music, markets, and beaches, we also had opportunities to go snorkeling on coral reefs, see dolphins, walk through a 50+ year old red mahogany plantation that was bristling with red colobus monkeys, and visit a spice farm where we got to drink from coconuts. Later, we traveled to the north coast to enjoy other beaches, and wonderful fresh seafood. For more photos of all these things, please check out my facebook album here:

All in all, we didn't want to leave Zanzibar. This feeling was intensified during our hellish journey back to Zambia, but I'd rather not dwell on the negative. Zanzibar was a very pleasant change of scenery, and a lot of fun. I think I'll leave you with a sign we saw at a petrol station on the way down Tanzania from Dar. It, I think illustrates beautifully the difference between countries with a strong Muslim influence, and ones that do not:

Well, thanks for reading, I had a great time taking these photos, and I hope you like them!

-Chris

Sorry for the discombobulation of these two posts; Chris is working on the pictures and I am working on the words on adjacent computers simultaneously. So, we took a Tazara train from Kasama (roughly in the middle of the blurb of Zambia that's showing on the map), to Dar es Salaam. We shared a closet-sized first class cabin with another volunteer from our province, Ricardo, and his friend visiting from the U.S. We were on the train for roughly 36 hours, but it wasn't horrible because there were cots to sleep on. We even passed through Mikumi National Park and saw giraffe, elephants, warthogs, zebras, baboons, and impala through the train windows. We took a ferry from Dar to Stonetown, the capital of Zanzibar, where we stayed for four nights. Stonetown is drastically different from mainland Tanzania. The people are predominantly Muslim, and most wear traditional long, loose white shirts and hats for the men, and dark veils for the women. One of the things that immediately struck me was how friendly and welcoming the people were. We didn't get hassled once, a common occurence for us in Zambia, and everyone was SOBER. People would even come up and introduce themselves and ask where we were from ("Zambia! But you aren't black!" or "Zambia! Tell me, do the people there still drink too much?") The heat was almost unbearable; it was much more humid and stifling than Zambia even in hot season, but Chris and I took ice cold showers morning and night at the guesthouse. Stonetown is full of narrow, cobbled, winding alleys bustling with motorbikes and flanked by tall, regal buildings reminiscent of Morocco. Zanzibar has been influenced by Arabs, Persians, Indians, British, and Swahili people, so it's an interesting melting pot of different cultures. And the food is amazing-fried plantains and other mainland African foods like nshima; fresh seafood like octopus, tuna and prawns; Indian-inspired chipatis, curries and lentils; all seasoned with the homegrown cinnamon, cardamon, cloves, peri-peri peppers and tandoori spices that Zanzibar is known for. One of my favorite days was when we arranged for Chris and I and four other volunteers to travel north for the day and take a dhow to go snorkeling among the coral reefs and dolphin-watching. The dolphins seemed quite unperturbed that our dhow kept following them, and regularly surfaced to give us glimpses of their dark snouts and smooth, silvery dorsal fins and backs. Watching them glide through these pristine, sky blue seas off white sand beaches, free and untroubled by our presence, was truly amazing. Later, we stopped at Jozani National Park and walked with a guide through the forest. There aren't any large, dangerous animals on the island, but we did see a lot of monkeys. There were both red colobus and blue Sikes monkeys high in coconut trees, swinging through the forest, chattering to eachother. Red colobus monkeys have small, black wrinkled faces set with wide brown eyes and a mane of white Einstein hair fading into a chestnut-colored back, gangly arms and legs, and a long tail. The monkeys are so habituated to people that we stood close enough to touch them, and they thoroughly ignored us, foraging for fruit with small, articulate hands. I've really gotten into primate classes I took for my anthropology major, so seeing the monkeys up close combined with our recent trip to see the chimps has been my favorite experience of the past year. We spent two nights up north on beautiful beaches, and again got a chance to snorkel off a dhow in the open ocean. There were schools of hundreds of these tropical fish surrounding me in a cloud, as I floated lazily on my stomach letting the waves gently toss me around. The world was completely silent, and it was only me and the fish, and I felt like one of them. The coral formed ravines and small mountains on the ocean floor, prickly black sea urchins and bright blue starfish the mountains' inhabitants, as fish floated past like clouds. Chris and I, being somewhat proficient in Bemba, can often understand Nyanja (spoken in the Eastern province of Zambia and Malawi), and bits of Kaonde (Northwestern province) and Mambwe (far North of Northern province in Zambia), so we expected to be able to decode parts of Swahili, the Bantu language spoken in Tanzania. Other than numbers being nearly identical, the word sana (meaning very much), and Bemba words that were adopted from Swahili (Odi and Kalibu, musungu, ubwali) we were disappointed. I heard someone say "Kabiyeni" ('please go away' in Bemba) and excitably told Chris it was the same in Swahili; when I asked a friendly waiter at a restaraunt to test my theory, he looked mildly distressed, and said "That is a bad, bad word. It means tough guys with guns." When in doubt, I reverted to the basic greetings we learned and names from The Lion King (some of the characters' names have meanings; Simba (the lion cub) means lion in Swahili, Rafiki (the spiritual baboon leader) means friend). Also, Swahili-speakers do love to say "Hakuna matata." Zanzibar was beautiful, amazing, incredible, but mainland Tanzania, apart from the beautiful mountains and scenery from the train, didn't impress me. This was probably compounded by the fact that transport out of Tanzania was arduous and quite frankly, hellish. The people at Tazara on the Tanzanian end didn't record our train reservations and the train left an hour earlier than scheduled (unheard of in Africa), so we missed the train. We pleaded with the woman at the ticket desk for a good twenty minutes until she agreed to let us board the train in the crowded third class and wait until compartments opened in first class. By the time we rushed upstairs to get our bags and board the train, the employees had actually conspired against us and were barring the doors shut so we couldn't enter and yelling at us. They wouldn't even let us into the holding area, where one member of our group was sitting terrified and watching all of our bags, until the train left the station. They were pretty unprofessional, and it was unspoken but obvious that they were lording their positions of authority over us because we're white. So, we ended up stranded in Dar, because the next train wouldn't leave for another five days. We considered renting a car, but it turned out to be too expensive. We finally got tickets for a bus that left the next morning, but the ticket seller lied and we reached the border at 10pm, after it had closed, rather than 6pm as promised. The bus ride was 16 hours long, made worse by the fact that the driver and conductor pretended not to know English or any of the three local Zambian languages we collectively knew, and wouldn't answer our questions. So it was the longest bus ride of my life, but luckily we didn't have to sleep on the bus, and found a decent guesthouse. The following day was an 8-hour journey on an agonizingly slow petrol truck from the border town Nakonde to Mpika. We arrived at dark in Mpika, paid way too much for a crappy room in a guesthouse (ZMK 60,000 or around $11; ridiculous) and started off the next day for the 3-hour ride to Kasama in the cab of a cement truck. I didn't even mention the music festival, the main reason we went to Zanzibar, but I think Chris will fill you in with pictures. I've been at this computer way too long and am craving a hot shwarma from Superlye!

After our Peace Corps-mandated last minute trip to Lusaka for H1N1 shots, we only had five whole days in the village before we left again for another holiday. In about twelve hours we're boarding a train bound for Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania. There's a big music festival in Stonetown.

Our five days were pretty uneventful, as most of the village's inhabitants are still farming beans in the bush and only come into the village for Sunday church services. On Sunday, though, we spent the afternoon visiting. Our last stop was my counterpart's house, where she had brewed local beer to generate some funds. There were four older men sitting under a tree, sharing a cup and a 5 liter jerry can of thick, foul-tasting ubwalwa. They were very drunk, so we quickly greeted them and went to sit with Ba Catherine. Then BashiK, a notorious character in our village (often drunk, corrupt, pompous, has two wives, though polygyny isn't common in Bemba culture) stumbled over and wrote "SHAQ" in the sand. "Chris! Whas thees mean?" The previous PC volunteer, a sports enthusiast, had been asked to name BashiK's newborn grandson, and had endowed him with "Shaq." Chris explained, substituting basketball for netball, and BashiK stumbled back.

The next thing we knew, the men had risen from their seats and were yelling at eachother furiously. "...ICISUNGU! Blah blah really angry Bemba icisungu!" BashiK threw a jerry can and one man was inexplicably shirtless. Ba Catherine yelled, and the men suddenly turned sheepish. They apologized and retreated. Ba Catherine explained what the bewildering fight had been about. The English language. The men had been speaking Bemba the entire time, except for when BashiK addressed us in English. He only speaks English when he's drunk. The other men had ridiculed him, saying he didn't know how to write or speak English. Being able to speak English is a mark of education, although many people are shy about it because they don't want to be laughed at for their mistakes. Most pointless fight ever, especially because BashiK is conversant in English and quite literate. But funny all the same.

On a somewhat different topic, last week a taxi driver in Kasama, after we'd had a short conversation in Bemba, told us we should forget English and only speak icibemba fye. We explained that probably wouldn't go over well when we returned to America, since no one knows Bemba there.

And now, a segway...

ZAMLISH TO ENGLISH COLLOQUIALISMS

amaguys - That guy. A taxi driver, street vendor, professional loiterer that favors tight, women's bootcut jeans and knock-off designer sunglasses, is often drunk and in your face.

"Hey boy! Let me have one!" -An amaguy's request to Chris, when walking with a group of female PCVs.

be caref - Cautionary statement.

big man - Term of respect for an elder.

boss/boy - Equivalent to "hey, you."

bwana - A word that meant boss during colonialism, but now refers to someone with money. Possibly from Swahili.

he/she - Sex is irrelevant in language. In Bemba, ba indicates a male or female third person with respect. Only age is important in Bemba when talking about people; it determines whether that person is shown respect or not. Most (fluent) Zambian English-speakers mix up their pronouns, which is both endearing and confusing.

isn't it? - Used for emphasis. "He's farming a lot of maize, isn't it?"

kasmall - A redundant adjective. Ka is a prefix in Bemba used for diminutive nouns. "Borrow me your kasmall hoe."

mami - A term of endearment for a respected female.

obviously - Same general meaning, but exorbitantly overused, with no trace of sarcasm. Often used as an answer for questions.

"R" and "L" as interchangeable - There is no letter R in the Bemba alphabet, which causes some confusion in English. For the longest time, we thought Ba Alan's son's name was actually Jello; it's really Jero, a nickname for Jeremy. "For your preasure and leisure." -A sign at a guesthouse in Mpulungu

sorry sorry - Response to an embarrassing or potentially injurious situation. Often accompanied by tongue clicking.

spare wheel/side plate - A derogatory term for a mistress. Extramarital affairs for men are quietly accepted; men are seen as being insatiable and virile, so it's not usual for them to have many sexual partners.

sweetie - Candy. "You can't enjoy a sweetie with a wrapper on it." -A common, infuriating response when I try to teach condom use as a means for preventing HIV.

this one/that one - Used to describe a third person who is in proximity to the speaker or listener.

you can't manage - An observation made when a task is seen as formidable. Often used when a white person is carrying some bags or declares that they are going to walk a distance greater than 1 kilometer (0.6 mile).

Dedicated to my great-grandmother, Lola Flipse, 1909-2010.

Part II - Mutinondo

***Please read Part I, the post below this one, first.***

We stayed for three nights at Chimfunshi, then from Chingola we took a bus to Kapiri Mposhi, because it has the best rest area food in Zambia. Mmm, shwarmas. From Kapiri Mposhi, we were trying to find a ride north to Serenje, about 4 hours away. Hitching is the norm in rural Zambia as not everyone can afford a car, and most drivers will happily pick up hitch hikers to help pay for petrol. One memorable moment sticks out when we asked the only white guy there, in his 40's and driving a nice SUV, where he was going. He said "The other way" without knowing our destination, then blunty told Chris, "I don't pick up people like you." As if we were obnoxious homeless beggars. We ended up getting a fast, comfortable ride with an American-educated Zimbabwean working for the Swedish embassy in Lusaka. Best of all, he wouldn't take our money. "This is my good deed," he said. "Some time, I may be the one on the side of the road needing a ride, and then you can repay me." Chris replied that the best we'd be able to offer him was a ride on the back of our bicycles.

After spending the night at the Peace Corps house in Central province, we traveled to Mutinondo Wilderness Area. The first night, we shared a fire and traded travel tips with an older couple (she was South African, he was from Switzerland) who were living out of their SUV and traveling through Southern Africa.

Mutinondo is several thousands of gorgeous, protected acres, cut by the Mutinondo River and several waterfalls and many small rocky, mountains. The older British couple who run it say they've seen evidence of lions, and they see leopards quite often. In this over-poached, deforested country that is Zambia, that's really amazing. There's a camping area with running water, real hot showers, and clean, longdrop toilets - really, it was hardly camping because we have lesser accomodations and call it 'home.' There's also kilometers of different trails to explore. We mostly stuck to the trails that followed the river, because it was hot, and we'd jump in and swim anytime we found a suitable area. Below the third waterfall, 4 kilometers from our camp, there was a calm pool to swim in. To get there, we had to slip in through the trees and swim hard with the current to avoid being slammed into a large rock. I took off my glasses, reducing the world to a blur, because I've already almost ruined them once when they fell off during a rainstorm on our road, which turns into a fast-moving, deep stream with heavy rainfall. Luckily, Chris found them only minutes before a large truck came barreling by.

Chris and I got out into the calm part of the water and were standing on a rock, when I looked into the reeds around the edge of the river. There was a greenish tan curve slightly above water level, and a pair of glinting eyes on either side staring straight back at me, identical to Willow's eyes shining in the dark. It began to move slowly in our direction. I screamed "CROCODILE" to Chris, then realized I couldn't swim against the current to get back to shore, hysterical at this point and almost in tears. Chris spun around to look, and felt a moment of panic when he couldn't see it, thinking it had submerged itself underwater. He calmly asked me if I could still see it. "Yes, it's there," I screamed, pointing. He then realized that the crocodile I was seeing was actually a thick piece of sideways grass, moving slightly in the current, glinting symmetrically. He tried calming me down, but I still insisted on getting out of the water. I know what they look like, I saw one at a national park in South Africa. And without my glasses to define the blur I was seeing, it still looked very real to me.

They have about ten horses at Mutinondo, so Chris and I were able to go on a morning trail ride. I rode a couple times a week in the U.S. and Chris was learning, but this was our first time being on a horse, or even seeing a horse, in a whole year, since we've been in Zambia.

We just found out the medical staff wants us to go to Lusaka to get a H1N1 vaccination, so we won't be going back to the village as expected. We're going to Zanzibar (island off the coast of Tanzania) in early February, so unfortunately it looks like we'll travel to Lusaka, be in the village for less than a week, then leave for a week and a half in Zanzibar.

PART I - Chimfunshi

A quick highlight of recent events in the village:

A spitting cobra blinded one of our hens, to eat the eggs she was sitting on. We thought the venom actually ate away at her eyes, and we weren't sure if she was going to recover. Some of our neighbors put milk in her eyes, the indigenous cure. A blind chicken probably wouldn't survive free-range grazing, so we slaughtered her and ate the meat with our host family.

97% of the village are away farming beans (the main cash crop) in the bush, living in temporary stick houses until late March. Most people come back into the village on Sunday for church. Shortly before we left, three houses by the road were broken into and all their belongings were stolen.

We just returned from an amazing vacation. First, we went to Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage http://www.chimfunshi.org.za/ in the Copperbelt, near Chingola. It was a 12-hour overnight bus ride from Kasama. The orphanage started in 1983 when a British couple with a cattle farm were given a sick, orphaned chimp to nurse back to health. Chimps aren't indigenous to Zambia, but they are to the Democratic Republic of Congo (the border is only kilometers from Chingola) and Tanzania. Due to the fighting in the Congo, chimps, their cousins bonobos, and gorillas are all at high risk. People kill them for bush meat, to use as fetishes in witchcraft, or for pets.

The orphanage now cares for over 120 chimpanzees of all ages. Most chimps live in family groups in four very spacious enclosures. Twice a day, they enter cages in an attached building to be fed, and so that the handlers can check on their well-being. The younger chimps and "the bachelors" are housed right by the founder's, Sheila Siddle's, house.

One of my favorite chimps was an older female named Milla. She was rescued from a bar in West Africa, where she'd imitate the patrons and drink beer and smoke cigarettes. Because she was a pet, she learned many mannerisms from people. She was in a cage, because the other chimps picked on her, and she learned how to escape from the electric-fenced enclosure. When we approached her cage, she'd lay her right hand over her heart, the traditional way of greeting. She'd also point hopefully out her cage at the house where her meals were prepared, and at the guava tree. She also carried around a square of blanket that she'd carefully arrange into a bed wherever she moved. Her caretaker said that a few times, when she escaped, she'd draw water from the borehole and use keys to open the locked food storage room.

Jack fruit, or manna. A really tasty fruit that's the size of my torso.

Before a girl gets married, there's a ceremony in which her female relatives and the banacimbusa teach her some lessons. These were painted on the wall of the bride's house. Every picture represents a lesson. The two red lines on the bottom are a road, so a woman is instructed to look behind her and remember her family and where she came from. She needs torespect her in-laws and husband. They need to submit to their husbands. Some of the pictures are sexual lessons. The lion represents a man (red, in the middle) and the hyena a woman. The women should let the man catch her when he needs "to feed" (read between the lines). Likewise, the fruit tree (not pictured) can drop its fruit whenever, just like a man's sex drive. On the top left, there is a pregnant prostitute. Women should not be like her.

The BanaBwinga about to get married. I wasn't there, but Chris describes the girl on the right as her "mini bride."

Willow (10 mos. old now) and Tiger. Tiger's adopted us and now wherever we go, we have two dogs following us.

Ba Allan and BanaChrisi, his wife, making nshima. She's a great cook.

Little Chrisi, Ba Allan's son. 5 mos. old.

Little Chrisi is also an aspiring acrobat.

It's a hassle to upload pictures on Blogger with a slow internet connection, so check Chris' facebook page for everything.

Catapillar season has come and gone. Women would go out into the bush for a morning and come back with baskets full of various kinds of ifishimu, or catapillars to fry. There was also an abundance of cishishi, giant furry catapillars. Those ones you can't eat, and you need to watch out for them, because their fur can give you a very bad, itchy rash. The children were terrified of them. Chris put one on a stick once and chased the children with it. They loved that game, and even pointed out more catapillars for him to chase after them with.

Mushroom season is now in full swing. There are many kinds of edible, wild mushrooms that people collect. There's one kind that's about 14 inches in width. Small, yellow eggplants are also being harvested from fields now. Surprisingly, I eat both foods now, but I still don't think this will translate to me actually eating mushrooms willingly in the U.S. Here, I can't be picky when we eat with Zambians, or I'll go hungry. We recently sampled some winged termites, and they are surprisingly very good. People go to a termite mound and just pick them as they come out, then rub the wings so they can't fly away. They cook them with some salt, and they almost taste fried, but I guess the oil comes from the termites bodies.

Chris has been teaching compost-making and permaculture gardening, so I have been teaching about nutrition in conjunction as they go well together. According to a 2007 survey, 50% of children in Northern Province are stunted in growth due to chronic malnutrition. 1 out of 9 children dies before the age of 5. Malnourished children are more likely to be sick and die from illnesses and diseases. Malnutrition would be preventable if people grew a greater variety of vegetables, rather than focusing on carbohydrates like corn, millet, and cassava. Chris and I have also been working together to introduce soya beans for human consumption (most people use them to feed their animals due to ignorance; they don't know how to prepare them). Soya

has more protein than beans and groundnuts, and can be cooked as a relish or ground into a flour to enrich foods. People have actually been very receptive to soya beans, so I have been promising people I will give cooking demonstrations and teach them how to cook them if they will grow them in their fields.

Family planning is also one of my ongoing projects that has intensified since World AIDS Day. Women in Northern Province have an average of eight children, according to the 2007 survey. Spacing births more than three years apart means both mother and baby are healthier, but 2 years is the norm. Shortly after they stop breastfeeding exclusively, they're pregnant again. Women are malnourished and weak during their pregnancy. I see all this everyday. Infant mortality is high, and increases as the duration between births decreases. Babies die often in our village, and no one but us realizes that it doesn't have to be this way. If I can convince people to actually listen, to grow more vegetables, to use contraceptives to plan births, less children will die. We can not only better lives, but save them through knowledge. I strongly believe we can have this impact, as Chris is teaching the techniques to grow food and giving seeds for multiplication; I am teaching what foods to grow; how to use family planning; and supplying family planning; people just need to apply the knowledge we give them from theory to practice.

Last post, I wrote about the stories the twin brothers in my English class wrote for their homework. I'd like to share them exactly as they were written.

Note: I have struggled with being treated differently not only because I am a white foreigner, but also a woman, since we've arrived. Men will often completely disregard me and direct their conversation at Chris. Men are regarded as smarter, more aggressive, and dominant over women. Education for girls is not as much of a priority for parents, so the cycle is repeated. There are many women in our village who can't even write their own names. Women are supposed to submit to their husbands, the head of the household, even though they do the majority of the work. Before a woman gets married, she is taught by her older female relatives, through song and dance, that she must be submissive to her husband. So it is not just men, but women that believe and are teaching the next generation that they don't have as much worth as a male. There is a clear division of labor, with women cooking, drawing water, collecting firewood, watching the children, sweeping, washing, and cleaning. Both men and women work in their farms. We have been trying to actively challenge these beliefs since we've arrived. Most people blame gender inequality on Bemba culture. I have been trying to get people to understand that culture is always changing. Christianity has become a huge part of the culture, even bumping out most traditional beliefs, since colonization, so why couldn't gender equality do the same thing? Apparently, people are listening:

By Godwin

When I was at home I did the cooking. My Grand Father found me. "Why did you do a cook while your wife is needleing?" said the Grand Father. "It's genda [gender]," I asked. My Grand Father replied, "In our traditional we did not allow men to do a cook, is not for men it's for women." I asked, "I told you that it is a genda issue." "Genda...!" He shouted in a loud voice. "Is it a dog [not quite sure what he meant by this] or a joke?" He threw down the stool and waving his hands around his face like a hundred buffalo. I said in a humble voice, "sorry. Sat down, my dear Grand Father, it is not a dog or a joke, it is a way of living that we have learned from American people Chris and his wife Nicole, the Peace Corps trainers, that husband and wife shall work together without separation. "Can you expect that white men can live in huts?" "No, I can't expect," said my Grand Father. I replied, "It is modern Zambia."

By Edwin

...Rinee said, "At 1500 hours I will start English lessons, so that I must go before the hour 15. I have my English teacher the peace corps from America, her name is Mrs. Nic she is very kind and friendly and I and my classmates we loves her so much." Then Wayne said, "I am also go to learn a permaculture garden and compost manure in order to make soil fertile. Our teacher is Mr. Chris the husband of your class teacher, He is also kind and active in the activities and also friendly as his wife." The two friends went and Wayne said to his friend, "Let us go..." Rinee said "Yes, let's go, after 2 years before they depart we will learn more, let's go."...

The day after we returned from Kasama after dealing with the police regarding the robbery, a large boomslang slithered into our yard. The toddler and the five-year old girl from our host family were on the porch, along with our puppy and the dog that has adopted us, Tiger. Abandoning American sensibilities (we've been in Zambia too long), Chris grabbed a large stick and proceeded to have an epic showdown with the venomous snake, finally killing it. Tiger, being a Zambian dog, has some emotional baggage, and when Chris began to swing the stick, he thought he would be beat, and bit Chris hard on the leg. According to Peace Corps standards, Chris had to travel to Lusaka for a week to receive two rabies shots. Both dog and guy are still alive and free of rabies, although the snake did not fare as well.

Our next encounter with a venomous snake happened a few days ago. We were bicycling to a nearby village, an hour away, for umunada on a narrow bush path. I was in front and didn't see the large cobra just to the side of the path until I was almost next to it. Adrenaline pumping, I screamed, and pedaled faster, and Chris lifted his legs up so that if the snake struck, it would only hit his bike. We both were unscathed, although I was shaking for a good fifteen minutes afterwards and refused to stop bicycling until we were a kilometer past the snake. On the ride back, we got caught in a downpour, and I lost my glasses on the road, which had turned into an actual stream. Chris eventually found them intact, but it was a very eventful bicycle trip.

While Chris was still in Lusaka, our puppy went mad. Suddenly one morning she began to yelp and run around crazily. Her eyes were almost glassy, and her tail was between her legs, and she lost bowel and bladder control. It wasn't pretty and was very frightening. I had to tie her up for four days because I was afraid she would hurt herself or others because she wasn't in a normal state of mind. By the second day, she had attacks of madness about once every half an hour, but was completely normal in between. By the fifth day, she was back to her old self. People told me that she had eaten a poisonous grasshopper, and it's a common enough occurence in playful young dogs. They gave her local medicine; sweet potato leaves and a lizard. I've since heard that it can even kill if the puppy is too small. People also said she would learn and wouldn't eat a grasshopper again, although she continues to chase everything that moves.I have been doing a lot of HIV/AIDS work since 1 December was World AIDS Day. As I have some experience doing HIV voluntary counseling and testing in West Africa, I went around with Ba Allan as he conducted his once monthly home counseling visits of people living with HIV in the village. The prevelance of HIV infection in the Northern Province is 7% of the population. If you applied that to our village, that would mean there are actually around 140 people that are HIV-positive, although there are only about 20 people that know they are HIV-positive. I've recently learned that two people who are my good friends in the village have been living with HIV for several years, which upsets me because they are both wonderful, friendly people. There are also several HIV+ children, many of whom are orphaned and attend Ba Allan's pre-school.An NGO in Kasama donated 50 HIV tests (Ba Allan is trained to do VCT) and 700 condoms for our World AIDS Day activities. I wrote a report on the two days that I thought I'd post.Report of World AIDS Day Activities in [name of village]

Nicole Barren, U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer

On the first day of programmed activities, 30 November 2009, PCV Nicole Barren and community member Allan Mwango spoke to 105 schoolchildren in grades 1-9 about HIV/AIDS, modes of transmission, and prevention. Pupils in grades 7-9 were instructed on the correct usage of both male and female condoms. Pupils asked good questions, and afterwards, sixteen boys and girls under the age of twenty went to VCT, and many teenage boys requested condoms.

On the first day of VCT, 17 people were tested, and the demand was so great that we decided to also hold VCT the following day.

The candlelight vigil in the evening was attended by 92 people, mostly children. There were prayers and drumming and dancing, and it was a fun, heartfelt ceremony.

On 1 December, an additional 13 people were tested for HIV, bringing the total number tested to 31 people. In the under 16 age group, three males and one female were tested. Seventeen males and one female aged 16-25 were tested. In the 26-35 age bracket, two males and one female were tested. Four males and two females over the age of 36 were tested. Of the 31 tests administered, 9 were non-reactive or negative, and 22 were inconclusive. There is obvious need for further testing to confirm the statuses of the remaining 22 people after the three-month window period.

For this day many activities were planned; a drama, games, an educational speech on HIV/AIDS, and a speech by an HIV-positive woman in the village. However, the Kasama General Constituency had also chosen this day to come and generate National Registration Cards for voters, drawing away many people from the planned activities. Due to poor attendance, the program was canceled, but will be rescheduled later this month, at a more convenient time.

Despite the failed educational programming, the condom distribution was successful. We received 200 female condoms and 600 male condoms from Northern Health Education Programme, and we distributed 735 condoms to 173 people over a span of six days. 52 male youths, 1 female youth, 88 male adults, and 32 female adults received condoms. All had instruction on how to use them. To avoid misuse of the condoms (using them for bangles, balloons, etc.), we didn’t freely hand them out- people had to come to where we were sitting or to our house and request them. We also refused to give them to young girls that we personally knew would not use them for the purpose of HIV prevention. Until five months ago, condoms were not accessible in [village name], so the free distribution was a great method of sensitization on the importance of their use. It is our hope that once people become comfortable using them and their supply diminishes, they will buy them from us (K 200 for a pack of three).

Despite scheduling conflicts, we felt that overall the programme was successful. We were able to reach many villagers with the importance of knowing their status and practicing safe sex. We will continue sensitizing the community on HIV/AIDS and contraceptives, and look forward to working with NOHEP again for VCT Day and World AIDS Day next year.

Among my favorite people in the village are two twin brothers who are in their early thirties. They are part of my devoted weekly English class of four men. They're really funny and always reliable. The previous class, I had given a homework assignment to write a one-page story in which there is dialogue, because they needed practice on punctuation and where to place quotation marks. One of the brothers had written a story in which he is talking to a friend about the Peace Corps volunteers in their village. He wrote how much he enjoys my English class and that I am very friendly and nice. Then he spoke about his guitar lessons with Chris and how much he enjoys their friendship. It was so candid and sweet, and was one of the few moments where I realized what impact my working and living here is having on people. We often worry that we aren't really accomplishing development because we have no means other than to impart knowledge, which is less regarded in Zambia then big, material projects. But large-scale, funded projects don't have the same emotional effect as our work does. Another moment like this happened just a few days ago, when my counterpart returned to the village after a month of visiting her brother. She had left because of problems with her husband, because he's often drunk, but ultimately returned rather than leave the village for good because of me. There's ups and downs, emotional highs and depressing moments or events when I just want to go back to America where everything is safe and predictable. The newest drama is jealousy on the part of our host mother. She prefers to think that we are just there for her and her family, to give them things. She has been mean on some occasions to people that come to visit us, so that they no longer feel comfortable coming to our house. Apparently when the volunteer before us left, he gave many of his belongings to one of his good friends, and that friend is not allowed to come to our house in that chance that will happen with us. When I last met with my women's group at my house, she caused a scene, so we can no longer convene there. All in all, it's jealousy, controlling behavior, and an incorrect picture of what Peace Corps is. It isn't directed at us, but it's very important for us and for our job that people feel comfortable coming to talk to us.

When we first arrived at our village, and asked the Peace Corps volunteer there from 2007-2009 if he had ever had any problems with theft, he said no. Then he laughed a little, and said, "O.K., this one time I left the window open when I went away, and a candy bar was stolen." People kept telling us how safe it was here. Our headman had some goats stolen once, but the thief, who lived in Kasama, was found and arrested. The school had some solar panels stolen. But other than some firewood and indigenous fruits we left outside, we have never had anything of any monetary value taken.

So we were shocked when we returned home at around four in the afternoon on Halloween and found someone had tampered with our lock with a flat object, possibly a screwdriver. The lock was closed, so at first we thought the break-in attempt had failed. Then we looked inside. Things were just as messy as we had left them, but things were missing from the shelves in our bedroom, the mosquito net was untucked from the bed, and cartons of my thyroid medicine had been removed from a bag under the bed and tossed beside a pile of dirty clothes. Our solar charger, several packages of batteries, and a flashlight were missing. The bag containing our MP3 player was disturbed, but the MP3 player was untouched. We had money hidden, but the thief didn't find it. He had taken some batteries, but left a package of identical batteries untouched on my shelf.

I felt like I had swallowed a mango pit that was pressing painfully against my stomach. My heart was running the Boston Marathon. Worst of all, at that moment, what I wanted most was to go home to America. The repeated infections, bad sunburn I'd got on a boat at Lake Tang, diarrhea that came and went, the homesickness, alone was bearable. But now theft, invasion of the one place in our village in which we had real privacy... why try to help people that stole from you?

Since the lock was broken, Chris stayed at our house and talked with our host father, who summoned the Community Crime Prevention Unit (CCPU). I went to the road with my cell phone to call the Peace Corps Safety and Security Officer in Lusaka, who helped immensely and called Peace Corps staff in Kasama, then spoke with my and Chris' Associate Peace Corp directors. Then I went to inform the school headmaster and a senior teacher, who went with me to the village headman to help translate.

By the time I returned, night had fallen, and Chris and I sat pathetically on our porch beside a candle, knawing on half a loaf of banana bread, the only food we'd had since breakfast. Our host father came to invite us to eat nshima. He told us people were saying it was an "inside job" because only a few items had been stolen; most likely the thief was from our village and broke into our house to steal specific items, not clear us out completely. Some people were even blaming the family that lived around us for not preventing the theft, or worse, saying they stole from us. This, we didn't believe, but our host father was very distressed and later told us he'd questioned his three teenaged children.

Before going to bed, I set an axe between the headboard of the bed and the wall. Then I fell into a restless sleep, punctuated by moments I'd awake suddenly after hearing noises outside, and listen intently, my heart beating with Lariam-fueled paranoia. Chris, on the other hand, slept fine.

The following morning, at around 9 am, the CCPU came marching into our yard bearing some of our batteries that had been stolen. Our neighbor, a man that takes guitar lessons from Chris and English lessons from me, said he had become suspicious of his nephew, and upon entering his house, found the batteries. The twenty-year old boy confessed and the CCPU found the rest of our belongings, hidden in a hole under a rock which had been urinated on. Our flashlight, which doesn't take batteries, and you shake to charge it, had been smashed. Apparently the guy couldn't figure out how to use it. Our solar charger had been damaged and knocked around a bit, and the connecting cable was cut. About half of our batteries had been recovered. We also got back a bottle of shampoo, an inhaler, and my old cell phone from the states, which he didn't realize had been stolen. We've speculated quite a bit on why he took the inhaler. Chris' guess is that the package resembles a pack of cigarettes.

An impromptu community trial was arranged at the school to determine punishment. The robber sat under a tree, his head bowed, skinny legs poking out from baggy faded brown shorts, and one wrist shackled in a pair of ancient handcuffs. The headman, CCPU, and Chris and I stood around him, surrounded by a gaggle of children pushing frantically to get a view, and somber adults. The boy (he was so thin, helpless, and baby-faced that calling him a man or guy doesn't seem right) was mentally ill, we were told. He'd stolen before. A couple of days before breaking into our house, he'd stolen a mattress from a teacher's house. The headman, the boy's grandmother, and another older man scolded him in rapid-fire icibemba. Chris bent down, and in Bemba, said "We are here to help the village. Why did you steal from us?" The boy just mumbled that he didn't know. The community decided that he should go to jail. Jails in Zambia are horrible pits of dispair, where they don't think twice about beating prisoners. Our friend's host father had spent two nights there, and had to pay the biggest prisoner there ZMK 5,000 a day or the man would kick his butt. But there are no real facilities for the mentally ill, and the consensus was that if he remained in the village, he'd continue to steal.

The Peace Corps staff in Kasama had heard about our ordeal, and Ted and Scorpion came to the rescue, bringing us a new lock and a flashlight. The police in Kasama have limited funds and there is a fuel shortage, so you can only buy 5g of black market gas for over $10, so we would have to bring the thief to them. At that time, he was being held by the CCPU near his uncle's house. With nothing else to do on a Sunday morning after church let out, a large crowd of children sneered at him. Chris and I got into the land cruiser, then three men escorted the placid boy in behind us, and BashiKatongo, a senior member of the CCPU, came along to hold the boy and present the story of his capture to the police. As we rolled away from the village, the children stood on the red sand, waving enthusiastically. BashiKatongo grabbed the boy's hand and made him wave back. After a sleepless night and the comforting bounce of the cruiser speeding over the mud, I dozed. Chris awkwardly held the boy's handcuffs when BashiKatongo had to pee. And the boy looked in wonder at the bush speeding by out the window. This was his first time ever traveling to Kasama.

At the police station, we handed over the "evidence," a plastic Shoprite bag full of the recovered objects that had been stolen. We made a statement and the police locked the boy in a cell, a large concrete room with one side that was an open window with bars that faced the courtyard. The trial was supposed to be yesterday, and then today, now it's tommorrow. He's expected to plead guilty, so we won't have to testify.

October has been a busy month for us. Since I've last wrote, we attended a Permaculture/Bio-intensive home garden workshop in Kasama, were confined to the Peace Corps provincial house after one person died and one was injured at a political rally in a busy market in Kasama the day before elections, camped out in the village 8km from our home for two nights for meetings, returned to Kasama because I had an infected cut on the edge of my toe that made it painful to walk and kept spreading further down my foot, then took a day trip to Chishimba Waterfalls and a three-day trip to Lake Tanganyika with other volunteers.

Our own village can be a bit apathetic to our projects, so we really enjoy working with the small village 8km south, because the people are very excited to work with us and make sure we are well-fed. We decided to camp out so we could conduct two and a half days of meetings, without biking there and back every day. The first day, Chris taught making and using compost, followed by a meeting on HIV/AIDS that I facilitated. The second day, Chris met with the PTA community school garden committee, I met with the two teachers, and I taught a nutrition class that didn't go so well, then helped a newly-formed women's group to realize their purpose and make plans. The last day we had a question and answer session about farming that turned into questions about family planning.

Bamaayos (Zambian women) adore Chris. They smile warmly at him when he goes to the well to draw water or wash dishes. This is considered "women's work." I always ask people why it is women's work, and they answer intambi, or culture. We've both tried convincing people that culture is not static and men can do women's jobs and vice versa (which I proved to our host father by helping him move 200 kg bags of maize, which greatly impressed him, as he was convinced women couldn't lift heavy things). I don't think we've made too much headway, as I raised the point that men too can help draw water at the well meeting, and all the men in attendance began smirking. Because Chris does women's work and treats the women just the same as the men, the bamaayos bat their eyelashes at him and greet him enthusiastically. Left in single gender groups, women are boisterous, talk very fast, and laugh hard, but in the presence of men they immediately clam up. This is not the case when with Chris; they're very comfortable with him.

Chishimba Waterfalls is 60 km from our village, in the direction of Kasama. It's actually a series of three waterfalls, the tallest and most impressive one plunging deep into a green valley. To the side of where this waterfall drops off, there is a pool where the current is not very strong, where you can swim. Usually the park is empty, but we went the day after the Zambian Independence Day, so there was a group of Zambians dressed in their nicest clothes stripping down to swim. From Kasama, Mpulungu is a four-hour bus ride north. Only a small portion of Lake Tanganyika is inside Zambia's borders, the majority is in Tanzania. Lake Tanganyika is the largest lake in Africa, the second deepest in the world, and one of a series of geologically old lakes in the Rift Valley. From Mpulungu, the port town, it was a hour by boat to Isanga Bay Lodge, where we camped. It was a private white sand beach with palm trees, next to a quiet village with fisherman and children playing in the water. It has an entirely different feel than the rest of land-locked Zambia. The lodge owner was an older, spunky British lady that cooked us amazing food. The first night it was rich beef stew, creamy potatoes, and moist chocolate cake. The second night we had rice and beef and chicken curry, with mango chutney, spiced mango pieces, coconut, and tomatoes, with apple cake for dessert. For 12 Peace Corps volunteers that survive primarily on nshima and other bland staples, it was heaven. In addition to swimming, we snorkeled along the jetty. Bright blue fish, schools of tiny black ones, striped ones, and fat ones darted among the dark rocks. Chris went on a four-hour hike to Kalambo Falls, which is the second highest waterfall in Africa, taller than Victoria Falls. I wasn't able to go as I was still limping from my runaway toe infection. Right above Kalambo Falls, I read afterwards in a guide book, is an important archaeological site with the earliest evidence of humans using fire. The Rift Valley has yielded many monumental archaeological finds that have revealed the history of humans. We really enjoyed Lake Tanganyika and decided it's time for our first proper vacation, so over Christmas we are planning to go to Tanzania and possibly Zanzibar. On the Tanzanian side of Lake Tanganyika is Gombe Stream National Park, the site of Jane Goodall's chimpanzee research. You can take walking safaris to see the chimps, who are pretty acclimated to humans after decades of research there. As an anthropology major in college, I took a number of classes on primates and greatly admire Jane Goodall and her colleagues and their contributions to the field, so going to Gombe will be an amazing experience. ---------------------------------------New Pictures of Chishimba Falls and Lake Tanganyika:http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=131178&id=713467480&l=49132a13c2

This month in constituencies all over Zambia, people are electing new members of Parliament. The two main competing parties in our area are the Patriotic Front and the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (which holds the majority of seats in the country, including the Presidency). They've been actively campaigning in our village, and every household has their candidate of choice plastered on their hut. The campaigners have been driving through in big trucks with PA systems blasting, holding rallies, and recrutiting voters. About four days ago, a helicopter circled around the village and headed back in the direction of Kasama. Everyone was pointing at the sky and exclaiming about the chidayo. Chris, cycling back from a meeting in the village of Johnny Chikulu, nearly fell off his bike. Then there was word that the president of Zambia would be visiting the village the afternoon of 12 October. We didn't believe it, because we live in a little village in the middle of nowhere. The day came, and a plethora of cars and a battalion of soldiers arrived at the schoolyard and began setting up a tent, a covered podium, and a temporary flagpole for the Zambian flag and coat of arms. Opportunistic bamaayos arrived with vegetables, beans, and scones to sell, and people from Kasama and bigger cities eagerly snatched up the "village food." Women began beating drums, wagging their citenge-clad hips to the beat, and singing about the MMD. Radio Mano arrived from Kasama with their "velvet-voiced" DJ to broadcast the event and blast Zam pop. Then, the helicopters arrived, stirring up thick red dust and landing on the football pitch. Everyone ran to wave at their arrival, choking on the dust while throwing their thumb and forefinger in the air, the sign for the MMD. We were shepherded back by stern soldiers with AK-47s, then his excellency President Rupiah Banda greeted the people, lingering long enough to shake our hands and mention he had just been to New York, and all his children attend university in America. Some of his officers spoke before him, urging support for the MMD's candidate, Burton Mgala. Then Banda (an iciNyanja speaker reared in Eastern Province) took the microphone, speaking eloquently in English, as his words were translated into icibemba. He spoke against the PF's candidate, Mr. Sata (nicknamed "King Cobra") and urged support for the MMD. He spoke against tribalism influencing politics, chanting "One Zambia, One Nation," the mantra to avoid the tribal fighting that has consumed many of Zambia's neighbors. Glancing at us, he said Zambia should follow America's example, and look beyond tribal similarity to elect the best candidate, much as Americans, a white majority, elected Obama. After concluding his speech and introducing his officers, President Banda gamely took a picture with us, then was shuffled off by his security. Everyone circled the helicopter to watch it take off, and President Banda waved to his supporters, then spotting us waving back, waved both arms over his head in an enthusiastic goodbye.

****Disclaimer: As Peace Corps volunteers, we are politically neutral. These are primarily observations of events, and do not indicate a support for the MMD. ****

Shortly after we arrived back from Lusaka, we found there was yet another new communal well to draw water from. This one was a very shallow hole in the ground, only about a foot and a half deep, and perpetually murky. Since this is also the water we drink from, all the sediment was a bit disconcerting. For a week, we drew from this well and tried to ignore all the pieces of root and clods of dirt floating in it, while we continued to wash dishes in the spring nearby, which had become a breeding ground for frogs, with little tadpoles flitting around our dishes as we scrubbed them with sand and soap. A week ago, some boys bearing hoes and shovels came to our house to collect Chris to clean the old old well (which had become the place to wash dishes). It was dug out deeper, the sand littered with nshima scraps was tossed aside, and a wall of river stones was built as a bridge. Best of all, it's refreshingly clear.

I dove right into work when we returned to the village, but unfortunately the teachers with whom I had projects planned failed to return from Kasama. They were supposed to be gone for two days, but they've been away for over two weeks, while their students have not been attending school during this time. I had planned to teach English to interested kids twice a week, help implement the new School Health and Nutrition Programme, and begin adult literacy classes. Only the adult literacy has panned out, and poorly at that. My counterpart was to teach literacy in the local language to a large group of enthusiastic women, but he's proved to be unreliable, despite repeated warnings. I have only held one class so far in upper-level English, but my section seems to be going well. The first class I had two men, whose end goal is to achieve their grade 9 certificates, which could offer them more career-wise than just being subsistence farmers. I've since had another four people sign up. One of the men in my class is also taking guitar lessons from Chris. I've usually stayed out of these lessons, so I didn't know him well, but he's very nice. He stayed an hour after to tell me his life story, which I always take as a sign that someone likes and trusts you.

One of the things I need to work on with my students is the distinction between he versus she. I am often called Mr. Nikki. In icibemba, there's no such distinction between male and female, only between ages. If, for example, you say baleisa, it can mean either he is coming, she is coming, or they are coming. Ba is the person, le is present tense, and isa is from the verb ukwisa. If you wish to talk about a younger person, whom you don't have to show extra respect to, you say aleisa.

In Lusaka, I purchased a bag of tennis balls and a soccer ball to bring back to the village. Often, when the blistering hot day is melting into night, we've been playing catch with the children. It started out as monkey in the middle but morphed into two teams, each keeping the ball away from the other team. One game turned into boys against girls as more children joined, with about two dozen laughing, barefoot children running in the sand in front of our house. When the oldest children, in their early teens began to play, the youngest ones were a little left behind. Muso and Beauty are only about five-years old, so they'd hang onto my arms and make me promise to pass them the ball. I did, and they'd take it and run determinedly and hand it to another older girl.

Our puppy continues to grow, but after meeting other dogs in the village, we've found something interesting; she is the only dog in our village that isn't named Tiger or Danger. When I mentioned to my counterpart, Ba Catherine, that all the dogs seem to share one of these names, she laughed and said, "Yes, 75% of the dogs here are named Tiger and 25% are Danger."

Another interesting fact about the Bemba people and their naming habits: Twins are called mpundu. I think due to the higher birth rate, there are a lot more twins around here. The children usually aren't referred to by their given names, they're just called mpundu. The child born after twins is usually named Icoola, meaning bag. This is because the younger child always must follow his twin siblings to carry their baggage.

And a special birth announcement: Chris' namesake, Christopher Mutale Mwango, was born 14 July, 2009.

And for my dad, our house in it's entirety:

We've just completed In-Service Training, and have been enjoying Lusaka for a week and a half now. It's really nice to be able to go to one of the big supermarkets and buy anything you want, even "American" brands like Oreos and Lays potato chips. Unfortunately, fruits and vegetables are outlandishly expensive because they're imported from South Africa- a very small package of grapes for the equivalent of $7, etc. We spend more money in a day in Lusaka than we do in several weeks in our village. Most goods are comparable in price to things in America, so it's a bit of a culture shock in itself to come from life in the village, where we pay the equivalent of $1 to have our laundry washed and 20 cents for a head of cabbage, to the hustle and steady flow of cash in Lusaka. We have managed to watch three movies since we've arrived; The Hangover, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, and Knowing. It was very funny to watch all of those movies with a Zambian audience. To express disapproval, Zambians click their tongue against the roof of their mouths and shake their heads. This clicking sound accentuated every crude part in The Hangover, which just made Chris and I laugh harder.

Earlier today, Chris and I returned to Chongwe to visit our host family during training, Bamaayo and Batata. It was really wonderful to see them again, and our brother and sisters. Bamaayo kept trying to feed us and invited us to spend the night. I think we all felt that our visit was too short. They are the closest we have to family here in Zambia, and we really do love them. We also got to meet the newest group of Peace Corps trainees, who will swear in as volunteers in a few weeks.

Tommorrow, we're off to Kabwata market to get my hair done, then to Cairo Road to buy Indian spices. That's another thing that I've begun to love about Lusaka, the Indian food. Especially naan and samosas. There's a decent population of Indians in Zambia, who I've just learned where brought by the British during colonialism to be the merchant class. There's also a lot of other white people; ex-patriates, British, Afrikaaners, and the occasional tourist. It's nice not to be the only white people around for once, especially when your mere presence evokes so much curiosity in the village. Even in Lusaka, though, there are places where white people aren't very prevalent, which are always the places we seem to find ourselves in, conversing in icibemba. These include mini-buses, cramped and cheap public transportation, which is always an adventure.

We will return to Kasama in four days, amid mixed emotions. It'll be nice to be back home after a three-week long absence, but we're sure going to miss hot showers, easy transportation, cheese, electricity, Indian restaraunts and pizza, and movies.

African Animals!

Our host family's dog, Tiger, and our puppy, Willow. It seems to be an unwritten rule in Zambia that animals get English names. Tiger, we think, has got to be mostly Rhodesian Ridgeback, a dog breed that was developed here to hunt lions.

Our hen, Kalipa, and her week-old chicks. She's down to seven now, as one was killed by either a dog or a hawk. Water

Our well, one of only two in the whole village. We usually draw water once a day.

The washing hole. We wash our dishes here, and our feet and dog downstream. The people think it's hilarious that we wash our dog, and we've gotten demands that we do it so people can watch.

BashiMutale's (our neighbor's) fishpond, just behind the well. He drained it to harvest fish and everyone came to watch, because there's not much happening in the village. In the foreground, in the red shirt, is his second oldest son, Everisto. Everisto washes our clothes for us, and I give him and his older brother Mutale English lessons. On the far left is another brother, Nicholas. The second youngest boy, Lazaro, is on the far right in the blue shirt. They're one of my favorite families.

Our House

Our sitting room and bedroom. Fun with Iwes The girls like playing with their Ba Chrisi's hair. Odder still, he allows them to. Celia is on the left, and her cousin and our host sister Maureeni is on the right.

Chris always comes home with a lot of sugar cane after he visits farmers. We don't eat it often, so we give it as rewards to the kids.

They like using our guava tree as a seesaw.

Just a quick update until we arrive in Lusaka and are able to upload PICTURES...

My first official workshop as a Peace Corps volunteer was held 5th August and attended by around 120 men and women. It was on the topic of family planning, as so many women expressed interest in being able to attain it in the village. I bought a huge box of male condoms and Safeplan, the contraceptive pill, to sell after I explained about the pros and cons and how to use both. Unfortunately, I was not able to get as many women on Safeplan as I had hoped, because most of those in attendance were nursing babies, and Safeplan decreases the quality and quantity of breast milk.

I spoke to the women, through Ba Catherine, who translated, while Chris and Ba Allan spoke to the men. Men, quite unfairly, hold most of the power when it comes to making decisions regarding sex, so it was very important to convince them that contraceptives are beneficial to their family's health. Women in the village have an average of around eight children, usually starting when they are in their late teens, and give birth in their homes. There aren't even any traditional birth attendants, let alone trained midwives. So introducing contraceptives not only saves lives but also empowers families to be able to have the number of children they want, when they want them.

The next day, I held an end of the term academic awards ceremony at the school. My mom had sent me a box filled with all sorts of wonderful toys, so I decided to use them to promote education in the village, something that is seriously undervalued here. The two children who received the best overall grades on their exams in each grade level, were recognized and given a toy. It was the first time in the teachers' memories that such a ceremony had been held. Usually, academic accomplishment is not acknowledged; exams only serve to admit the student to the next grade. Needless to say, the children seemed very excited to get toys and puzzles and balls. I wrapped each prize in plain paper, so there were delighted rushes of children who mobbed the students unwrapping their prizes. Chris took some pictures, but we'll have to upload them in Lusaka next week.

This week, we are in Kasama for a PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) workshop. Each volunteer was allowed to bring one village counterpart to learn and help implement HIV/AIDS prevention, education, and support for the individuals that are HIV-positive in our village. Chris and I brought Ba Allan and Ba Catherine, respectively, who each are already involved in doing community health work. In sub-Saharan Africa, the vast majority of people with HIV are infected through unprotected sex. Young women are especially vulnerable due to many factors. Young girls are often enticed into sex for material gain, and in Zambia especially, it's not uncommon for men to have a "spare wheel." This is the disgusting term for a man having girlfriends, in addition to a wife. Sadly, spare wheels are all too common and excepted here. Often, men will have unprotected sex with their girlfriends, become infected with HIV, and give it to their passive, ever-faithful wives, then their children will be born with HIV. It's a sad phenomenon I observed in Ghana, West Africa, while working there as a VCT counselor, and also something I spent several months investigating for my senior thesis in college. The opressive chauvinism of males here is unbelievable sometimes, and we are working on gender relations in the village, but sometimes the problem is just so overwhelming and frustrating.

Tommorrow, we will start off for the capital city, Lusaka, a 12-hour ride by car. We'll spend ten days there for In-Service Training. This is additional training after our community entry period, after which we can begin to actually implement projects. Afterwards, we are going to take some cultural days to visit our former host family (who are now hosting a new couple), go Christmas shopping (a bit early, but Northern Province is not a tourist area), and visit the National Museum. Then we are going to return to Kasama via hitching rides, do some errands, and accompany our new Rural Aquaculture Program neighbor, who will be posted to his/her site in October, to visit their new site, 30 kilometers from our own. We'll return to our site around the 3rd or 4th of September, to marvel over how large our puppy has grown in our absence, and begin working on projects. The things I have in mind are a Halloween party for the kids in the village at the school (not that beneficial, but it'll be fun), holding an adult literacy interest meeting before we begin to plan classes and the corresponding nursery school, beginning an English club and an anti-AIDS club at the school, and strengthening some area women's groups.

For IST, we were instructed to prepare a presentation explaining some high points and low points during our first three months at site. It got me thinking, and I thought I'd share some moments. High Points: 1. Ba Allan informed us recently that he and his wife, who will have their eighth child any day now, are going to name the baby after me if it is a girl, or Chris if it is a boy. 2. Chris and I went down to the well together to wash dishes, as we do most days. A woman greeted Chris enthusiatically, then, in icibemba, proudly explained to her young daughter that in America, men wash dishes, too. She then mentioned something about how her husband should do it as well. We were very proud because we try to set an example of an even distribution of work, and change the attitudes concerning women, and it is nice to hear that people are getting it.

Low Points: 1. Receiving news that a friend of ours in our training group was hit and run over by a truck while buying vegetables at the side of the road. He broke many bones in his face and legs, and has spent the past month recovering in a hospital in South Africa. He was just moved to the U.S., where he faces several more months of recovery. He's a great guy and would make an excellent volunteer, so we hope he recovers and is able to return. 2. Returning to our house after five hours of absence, and finding two of our chickens mysteriously dead. One was a hen, the other a week-old chick. When slaughtering the hen, we found the cause of death was natural; an egg had burst inside of her. The chick had been crushed between the chicken wire and a brick chicken house. We think she got stuck and either a hawk or dog lunged at her and crushed her little body in the small gap. 3. About a month and a half ago, our host father was away one day, and our host mother sold beer at their house to make money. Naturally, there was a crowd of staggering drunks hanging out near our house. Chris was inside, sleeping because he was sick. I saw a guy going next to our bathing shelter to pee, which made me fume silently. Then I saw a man actually go inside our bathing shelter to relieve himself. I woke Chris, and he stormed over and began to scream in icibemba, at both the man and our host mother. Our host mother denied it happened, but the party broke up. Shortly before we left to come here, a new bathing shelter was built for us, on the other side of the house, in a more private location. 4. Our keys were pickpocketed at a large market the next village over, which meant we had to spend about two hours breaking into our house, and another three hours repairing the damage we'd caused.

-----------------------------------------------------

A Plea to Get People to Visit: We are going to be in Zambia for another year and nine months. This is your chance in a lifetime to visit Southern Africa and experience culture and get an insider's tour of the country. We really want to show people our new home, and writing about it can never adequately capture our life here. It's breathtakingly beautiful in parts, the people are friendly and open, and Zambia is home to both Victoria Falls and about a dozen national parks. Book soon to get a flight here for next summer.

Mom: I am going to send a package to your house in approximately three weeks. Expect to receive it around Halloween time.

I've been asked several times by Zambian women if Chris and I have babies that we left in America. Most girls my age have infants slung on their backs and a couple of toddlers with dirty faces and distended bellies trailing behind. There's a plethora of babies in our village. African babies, as I see them, are wonderful accessories. They're much cuter than white babies and they don't fuss and cry nearly as much either. Unless they see us, that is. Most of the babies burst into tears when we acknowledge them in any way. Chris and I are the only white people within a 30 km radius, and the only other musungus are also Peace Corps volunteers.

We got Willow in early June, the darkest puppy with the most expressive eyes out of a litter of three scruffy, half-wild little dogs. She urinated from fear when she was caught and touched by human hands, and trembled the entire journey back to our village. Within just under a week, though, she had lost all fear of us and instead wiggled her lanky frame into our laps to be pet. All the animals here are free range, which is a much better life for them, and Willow, too is free to be a puppy. She spends her days chasing goats and chickens, playing with our host family's very patient dog, and chasing guavas that we throw for her. I hope, and I think that we are, setting a good example for dog ownership, because Willow is not lacking from affection or food. People see that we are very fond of her, and the children will call her name ("Weeloo! Weeloo!") when we walk around the village and play with her. Some of the adults even will pet her. That may not sound extraordinary for you guys in America, but if you've been reading my previous posts, you know that Zambians do not have quite the same relationship with their dogs as Americans do. In other animal news, we have acquired two more chickens, bringing the grand total up to three. The chief gave us a young black and white rooster after Chris took his picture. One of the farmers Chris visited gave us a golden hen. She remains my biggest hope for actually getting eggs, because she doesn't stray far from our home. We've also heard that our first hen is sitting on a brood of eggs now, so we should have some chicks soon.

I had another venomous snake sighting one afternoon while Chris was at the garden with our host family. I was sewing in our insaka, our outdoor cooking structure, when I heard a rustle on the grass roof, about three feet above where I sat. I saw the end of a tail, too big to belong to one of the little lizards that frequently crawl around up there. I scrambled outside and sure enough, it was a large green snake. I called a few boys who were passing by, and one of them ran to get a man who lives nearby (Bashimpollo, father of Mpollo, the rambunctious and mischevious four-year-old I've written about before). Within a couple minutes, a crowd of about two dozen children materialized in my yard, all staring up at the insoka on my insaka. With precise aim, Bashimpollo hit the snake behind its neck with his slingshot, and its limp body fell to the grass, where the boys proceeded to beat it with sticks. Satisfied that it was dead, they stepped away, and I got my first clear look at it. It was about two and a half feet long, the thickest part of its body about half the size of my wrist. I ran to get my wildlife identification guide, and it immediately became clear the snake was a boomslang. Boomslangs have highly potent venom that prevents blood from coagulating, which makes its bite more dangerous than those from a cobra or mamba. When Chris returned later that day, we skinned it. Some girls watched with wide eyes and asked if we were going to eat it. I just wanted its skin, but Chris insisted if he had returned earlier and he didn't fear the meat was bad, we would have had it as a relish.

My counterpart, the head teacher at the school nearby, has received a transfer to another school near Kasama. He is very motivated and has worked well with the previous volunteer, so I am sad to see him go. The new head teacher, if his reputation is to be believed, has received the transfer because of his reported conduct with some of his young female pupils. One is said to be pregnant. In Zambia, teachers are very rarely fired; if they behave inappropriately, they're just transferred. Too often, male teachers take advantage of their position. In the case of the new head teacher, I haven't met him yet, so I think I will suspend my judgment of him. It may very well just be a rumor, but I worry about the girls in the village in general, because of the attitude that women should submit to men. Too many get pregnant when they are still children, and subsequently drop out of school, further hindering their progress in this patriarchy.

My new counterpart, Ba Catherine, has been teaching me about Zambian culture. A few days ago she taught me how to smear the floors of the insaka and toilet with a mixture of clay, ash, and water. Sort of like village concrete, I guess. It was a lot of work, and of course Ba Catherine had covered five times of much area as I had in the same amount of time. And that's supposed to be done once a week! On Sunday, she and BanaPeggy (the mother of Beauty, another of my favorite kids), brought over some peanuts, sweet potatoes, and a live chicken for a cooking demonstration. I couldn't bring myself to actually slit the chicken's neck, but I helped with preparation. First she dipped it in a pot of boiling water so that the feathers would come off easier. Then we plucked it, and cut it into pieces, and boiled it. The necks are reserved for men, as is the gizzard. The rest was delicious, delicious chicken though. The women also showed me how to make porridge; cooked sweet potatoes mixed with a peanut paste and either salt or sugar. It's one of my favorite foods here.

Chris and I have been tutoring a grade seven boy that lives nearby, Patricia's older brother, Mutale. His books are all in English, but most of the kids in the village do not understand much English. Part of my work as a RED volunteer is to sensitivize the community on the value of education; in a village where everyone are subsistence farmers, children miss school often because they're needed in the fields, and it's assumed they will have the same lives as their parents, and their parents' parents before them, and so on. So according to the Ministry of Education's guidelines, grade one is taught in local language, but after grade two all instruction is to be done in English. At my government-run school, the teachers will speak first in English, then Bemba, so the children can actually understand.

---------------

To all our readers: It's so nice to hear from so many people that you really enjoy reading our blog. One of the Peace Corps three goals is to educate Americans about the countries it is active in, so I feel like I'm accomplishing that much at least. It's really hard for me to write e-mails or messages to people because typing on my internet phone is hard, and I only get to Kasama to use internet about once a month. So while I can receive your messages on facebook and e-mail within a couple of days after you send them, I can't reply as much as I would like to. I'm slowly becoming a letter writer, though, so you can definately expect a reply to letters. Our new address, which I keep forget to post, is P.O. Box 410374, Kasama, Zambia, Africa.

Mom (and maybe Andrea): I got Andrea's letter. It was postmarked July 8th from Endicott and July 16th from Kasama- that's got to be a record. The pictures are so great, I can't believe how much older Makayla looks in a matter of 5 months. I miss the kids and you guys so much. I still seem to cry everytime after I talk to you or read a letter from you guys. I'm going to try to find some trinkets and mail them in a package.

I have a slip for a package at the post office, so I'll let you know if it's the package you sent, mom.

The open well where we used to draw water looks like a wishing well. It's a small clear pool engulfed by sandy soil and rocks, and is fed by a mini waterfall that cascades between the knarled roots of a tree. After all the men in the village got together and dug a new well, this has become the place for washing dishes, which isn't as romantic as its previous use, because now there are fragments of nshima leftover from meals littering the silt. Because we don't have the convenience of running water, we go once a day to draw water in a 20 liter jerry can (a container for cooking oil -saladi- in its previous life), then carry it the half a kilometer back to our house.

Two of the kids, both about four years old, were pretending to ride sticks in our yard, and Chris and I debated about what the sticks represented- bicycles, motorbikes, horses, oxcarts? I asked the boy, Mpollo, "Cinshi mulecofa?" -what are you riding? He answered "ncinga" with his trademark big grin. Chris' eyes got really big and he turned to me and said, "That is so profoundly sad. Children in the U.S. don't have to play riding bikes, they actually ride bikes!" The kids also improvise toy cars by poking sticks through the sip holes of old beer cans. The old Castle Lager cans the volunteer before us left behind are the treasured toys of Muso and Mpollo. Plastic bags are also wadded up and tied with tree bark to make soccer balls. So Mom, thank you so much for sending us toys to distribute. I'm sure they will be cherished.

Most of the clothing that makes it to the villages comes from European or American thrift shops or are donations. The clothing is then sold in little stalls and worn until its permanently dingy anf literally in tatters. Party dresses from the 1980s, with broken zippers in the back, seem to be the favorites of Zambian little girls. Garments that were manufactured as nightgowns for girls in developed countries have metamorphisized into everyday clothing as well. Most amusing though, is the boys who wear fitted tee shirts with sparkly letters or sayings like 'girls rule.' One of our immediate neighbors, a boy of about five or six, wears a now beige, but once white shirt with rhinestones and 'angel' printed in rainbow letters. On Sundays though, the whole village transforms, very Twilight Zone-ish, with everyone well-scrubbed, clothing spotless, and shoes are actually worn. Zambia, as we are told over and over, is "a Christian nation," which means, I guess, that everyone has to look their best for God.

Most of the children in our village have the big, distended bellies and thin limbs characteristic of malnutrition. The staple food is nshima, cornmeal and water cooked into lumps that is then broken into small balls and dipped in beans or greens. Nshima is eaten for lunch and dinner; people will say they haven't eaten if they have ingested anything other than nshima. The typical villagers diet is also lacking in protein; meat is expensive and people are without refrigeration, so it is a very rare treat. While mealie meal (cornmeal) is cheap, it doesn't provide the energy and vitamins children need, so although their bellies might be full, they're undernourished. There's also a hunger season once a year, several months after harvest, that is approaching soon. Most everyone are subsistence farmers, so they'll often sell too much food to get money, and not leave enough for their family.

To get some much needed protein in our own diets, we are keeping chickens for egg-laying. We paid a neighbor 20,000 kwacha (about $4) to make us a log henhouse. It's about 3 feet by 3 feet with a grass roof and elevated so that my head is even with the top of the roof. Best of all, it was constructed without the use of nails; it's sturdy but free standing. Finding chickens, however, has proved difficult. Everyone keeps chickens, but no one wants to sell them because they represent food security. Finally, Chris' community mentor rode his bicycle into our yard, with his young son on the back clutching a brown hen under one arm. I sat on our front porch with the hen in my arms, stroking her soft cocoa feathers, for about twenty minutes, while Ba Alan and Bashiamos, our host father, laughed that I was holding her like a baby. In my defense, I've never held a chicken before! We named her Kalipa (ukukalipa means to anger or hurt in Bemba) because she clucked angrily at us a lot that day. She is free range like all the chickens around, so for the first few nights we had to chase her around or ask a boy to grab her from a tree and then shut her into the henhouse for the night. Now however, she'll go on her own to her house every night at around 5:45pm. She has become very friendly with a gorgeous brown rooster from next door, but she is yet to lay any eggs.

The young boys here are very adept at catching animals. Near the school one day, we heard a pack of boys shouting excitedly from inside a grove of banana trees. Ten minutes later they emerged triumphantly, the oldest one dragging what looked from far way to be a young crocodile from the tail. We went closer to investigate, and it turned out to be a 3-foot long monitor lizard, vaguely resembling an iguana, but brown and with a heavier body. Monitor lizards aren't venomous, but they're a creature to be reckoned with. They can be very dangerous if harassed because they have strong jaws and a serrated tail.

Another time, a boy by the road was holding a genet he'd killed. Genets have sleek, long bodies and tails, big ears and pointed noses, and spots. They almost look like a cross between a house cat and a weasle. Birds, too, are killed by the boys with slingshots with surprising accuracy. In the early evening we were sitting on our porch with some boys, when we heard some birds begin chirping from a nearby tree. The boys picked up some pebbles and nailed two little birds, smaller than the palms of their hands. They are very tasty, we were assured. Every animal caught is cooked and eaten with nshima.

Our house is two rooms, plus a small storage room, with a grass roof and a cement porch. The walls are made of mud brick coated with plaster, and are now varying shades of purple and sky blue, after we used a large chunk of our settling-in allowance to splurge on paint. Also calling our house home are termites who like to tunnel on our freshly painted walls, mice who have shown little interest in our food and instead eat the platstic lining of our roof, ants who apparently really enjoy Chinese cabbage, and strangely, wall crickets. "Why," I asked Chris exasperated, shortly after we arrived, "can't we have a plague of something pleasant, like butterflies?" Prophetically, the next day as I walked into our bathing shelter, a swarm of beautiful blue butterflies rose into the air. Bathing here, in that sense, makes me feel like the heroine in a Disney movie.

Our double bed, shrouded with a mosquito net, takes up most of our bedroom, so we didn't bother to paint that room. From our flight over here, we liberated two thin red blankets that serve nicely as rugs on our cement floors. Opposite our bed are two shelves that hold most of our belongings. The sitting room is furnished with a table, two wood sling chairs, and a camp chair. A piece of purple fabric, or citenge, with Obama's picture and a map of Africa, is a nice wall hanging.

Our pit latrine is a separate plaster and grass building with a small square hole about five feet deep. We throw ash from our fires down the hole every so often, which makes the smell not bad at all. If you shine the flashlight down the hole at dusk, you can see bats flying around, which is both disturbing and kind of neat.

From when we wake up in the morning until dusk, there's a flow of children that trinkle through our yard. They have four favorite activities. The first is to say "mpeeleniko" (please give me) books, pens, plastic bags, candy, et cetera. When that fails, they request "lisheni cilimba," or play guitar. Or, increasingly, they'll say "Tulefwaya ukusambilia icisungu." This means they want an English lesson. One of my favorite kids, a girl of about eight years old named Patricia, is particularly fond of this. She'll listen attentively while Chris and I converse in English, not comprehending a word, but then will carefully repeat sentences. Once Chris and I were checking phone messages by the road, at the only tree in our village with cell phone service. Chris opened an e-mail and suddenly exclaimed, "Oh wow, this girl I worked with at Bassett, she popped!" Immediately, Patricia triumphantly echoed, "She POPPED!" So Sheena, if you're reading this, Congratulations!

Patricia asked me about my mother one day, so I showed her my pictures I brought. She studied them very carefully, and after I'd named off everyone in my family a few times, she'd point to them in subsequent pictures and name them. She was especially pleased when we went through my pictures from graduation, and I pointed to American Patricia, my roommate Trish from college.

In the absence of television or toys with which to amuse themselves, the next best thing to children here is the musungu man playing American songs on his guitar. Chris gets this request at least twice a day. When he starts to play, the kids will flock, tie citenge (brightly colored fabric) in a band around their hips, and dance. The crowd pleasers are always "Twist and Shout" and "What I Got" by Sublime. The children don't understand what the words mean, but they have developed int0 fine little backup singers. Mwenya, the youngest boy from our host family who is about 11, will often walk by our house on his way to the well singing "Looovin' is what I got."

Chris and I have decided to partake on a "door-to-door campaign" of the vilage, as my counterpart, the head teacher, amply calls it. On Saturdays and Sundays we visit people at their houses, with Ba Mulenga to translate, to introduce ourselves, ask what they think the biggest problems in the village are, and urge people to talk to us anytime. Some of the problems we've heard again and again are the scarcity of clean water sources, the need for adult literacy, gender inequality, and a lack of medical facilities. The women are overburdened with work and childcare, and want family planning (the average number of children in a family here is probably around 7 or 8), pre-natal care, and to learn about nutrition.

While our visits have given us a good idea of how we can help as Peace Corps volunteers, they're very depressing. We stopped at one house, inhabited by a skeletal-looking old woman with an apple-sized tumor on her inner cheek, that had only sniffing tobacco to make her constant pain go away. At another house, a shy, pregnant teen-ager cut cabbage as Ba Mulenga explained she had dropped out of grade six to get married and have a baby, which is sadly very common. We've also recently had a death in the village; a baby that was less than two-years old.

Our latest pictures can be found at:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=97895&id=713467480&l=dc0311ffd9

================

Todd- I'm glad to hear your students would be excited to write to the upper grade students at the village school here. It would be letters, in case you misunderstood, there are definately no computers. Comprehension of English is minimal (Zambia is actually slipping backward as far as English language goes; adults are more likely to be able to communicate in it than their children), although in schools they are taught in a combination of both English and Bemba. I'm sure if the teachers and I help translate though, your kids will be able to understand correspondence. It would also help kids here learn English.

Heather and Mom- Doreen is 17 years old, she was born two weeks after Heather, actually. See above for explanation of language. She likes dancing and playing netball (kind of like basketball). Write her a letter when you get a chance Heather, and I'll pass it on to her.

Sheena- Thank you for the card and picture. Your baby girl actually has the same hairstyle as Chris now; he let me cut him a mohawk one lazy afternoon.

Chris and I swore in as Peace Corps volunteers along with the 33 other people in our training class this morning at the American ambassador's residence in Lusaka. Chris read his speech perfectly, and singing the American national anthem followed by the Zambian national anthem felt pretty amazing. We feel really proud to be two of the 170 volunteers working hand-in-hand with Zambia towards development, fulfilling John F. Kennedy's legacy, and making Obama proud.

On that note, Chris and I bought Obama citenges yesterday. They're pieces of fabric with Obama's picture printed on them and the map of Africa. I intend to have mine made into a skirt. Everytime we say we're from America, we inevitably get a Zambian shouting "Obama!"

The next big event is moving into our new house in just a few short days! Our first house as a married couple... a mud hut in Africa!

Mwashubekeni mukwai from Lusaka. We get to spend the day at the Arcades shopping center, and it's nice having computer access. We even had milkshakes earlier!

A lot of Zambians seem to have the misconception that American animals can talk. We stayed with another PCV couple whose host father had inherited the movie Babe from the previous volunteer. He was convinced that pigs really talk in the U.S. Another trainee in our group was also asked if her dog back home can speak.

On the topic of dogs, Zamdogs are extremely depressing creatures. They are very thin because they survive on leftover nshima, and skittish because it is common practice to kick dogs here if they get underfoot or too close. The squeal of a kicked dog is a common noise. However, it's deeper than a cruelty to animals. People do not like dogs to be close to them because rabies is often a problem here, and most animals aren't vaccinated. The dogs here are also covered in ticks.

Chris and I had half a day off yesterday, so we went biking on this rough road about ten minutes from our n'ganda (host family's home). It was great mountain biking and very pretty, bilharzia-infected streams and all. Around 5pm we decided to turn around because it gets dark very quickly. Unfortunately, we got utterly lost, deep in the bush. It's unsafe to travel after dark, so I was thinking at one point that we needed to stop at a hut and ask to spend the night. Thankfully a woman showed us the way to the main road, and we were home before the mosquitoes came out.

Everyone was worried that we would not get enough to eat here, but quite the opposite is true. Our host parents' goal is to make us fat. Being called fat here is a compliment, and it means someone is happy, so every night our Batata and Bamayo keep offering us more ubwali and umunani. They've also had a talk with Chris about how he is not to take another wife here (polygyny is common in parts), and that we will have five children eventually.

A couple weeks ago we went to the Eastern region to stay with another PCV couple and learn what it's really like to be a volunteer here. The Eastern region is gorgeous, covered with rocky hills that Chris wouldn't stop taking pictures of. In these mountains live baboons. Baboons that like to climb down and steal maize from the farmers (Remember, 90% of the people in the village are subsistence farmers). So most of the farmers have "monkey houses" situated between the mountains and the corn where someone sits all day and yells to scare the baboons away. Mostly this job is appointed to children. We visited one farmer who had married a second wife just to fulfill this task.

We've been in a village about 40K from Lusaka for the past two weeks, staying with our host families. Everday but Sunday, we have four hours of language class and then three hours of technical training. So we're often out on the main road biking to and from class. You'd think people here would get used to seeing all the muzungus everyday, but little kids still cry "how are you, how are you, how are you" and sometimes kids will run beside my bike in flip-flops. Once I had six children that followed me all the way home. I guess I can't blame them though. Whenever I see white people that aren't Peace Corps trainees or volunteers, I stare too. Seeing white people here is very uncommon outside of Lusaka.

If anyone is itching to send us a care package, there are things we need. I've managed to rip all of my skirts on thorny branches, so a travel sewing kit or a needle and thread would be awesome. Hand sanitizer would be great too, because there aren't many places to wash your hands here. We also want sunscreen and bugspray, because we don't like the stuff the PC gave us. Mom, could you send a Girl Scout activity or badge book? Also, Hershey's bars would make my month. One of our PCVLs baked us chocolate chip cookies last week, and they were to die for, even thought they were crawling with ants. Chris' mom sent us a letter and I believe postage was something like 92 cents, and it got here within two weeks.

Feel free to call us too, just as long as it is after 6pm our time (12noon your time). We usually have our phone on on Saturday and Sunday. It's super expensive to call out here.

After a difficult 15 hour plane ride (I threw up just as we landed in Jo'burg; I think I caught Andrea's flu), we arrived in Zambia. The PC picked us up in Land Rovers, African style. The past three days have been mostly training in our American volunteer group bubble. Today is the first day we've been out.

Tommorrow we go on site visits. Chris and I will be visiting current volunteers, a couple, in the Eastern province. We also found out our permanent post; we'll be in the Northern province. Chris will be pioneering a LIFE program in that province, which is an honor. The Northern region is known for its rain and cooler temperatures, hills and waterfalls.

I'm typing against the timer right now, so we'll fill you guys in later.

December 9, 2007 -- Submitted Peace Corps applications online

December 20 -- Our regional recruiter called to schedule our interviews.

January4, 2008 -- Had our interviews in New York City

February 1 -- Received our nomination after being in the couples waiting pool for only a short time. Nomination was for sub-Saharan Africa, departing February '09.

July 5 -- Got married so that we'd have been married for at least six months before we departed, according to Peace Corps guidelines.

October 2 -- Our medical packets were received by D.C. The medical clearance process took exceptionally long because I went for several months without health insurance.

October 3 -- Received dental clearance

November 27 -- Received medical clearance after having to submit additional paperwork.

December 9 -- Our province officer called with our invitations to Zambia!

Since the Peace Corps has inundated my life, I've been much more aware of references made to it in popular culture. I had Mr. and Mrs. Smith playing in the background tonight while I was scrapbooking, and I heard Angelina Jolie (Jane Smith) say "I was never in the Peace Corps." Thus began my quest to compile a few of them, with help from the National Peace Corps Association's facebook page. My (very unscientifically reached) conclusion is that the Peace Corps is often sadly misrepresented as useless and ineffective, and its volunteers eccentric. However, the Peace Corps has been one of the U.S.'s most effective longterm foreign policies. I decline to comment on the character of volunteers, as Chris and I have encountered many people who've called us nuts when they hear about our plans. Which brings me to another thing which is misrepresented in the media; the continent of Africa. The media is quick to report on the misfortunes that are befalling Africa; AIDS, cholera in Zimbabwe, genocide in Darfur, civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, mainstream media never reports on the positive happenings in Africa. Last year, Sierra Leone, after almost a decade of civil war, held its first peaceful, democratic elections without help from the UN. HIV and AIDS rates have fallen drastically in Uganda due to intervention by the government and effective education campaigns. In 2005, Liberia peacefully elected the first female head of state in all of Africa. I had the great experience of visiting South Africa in 2007. South Africa too has had its share of tragedy; decades of apartheid and the murders of thousands of dissenters covered up by the white government. The South Africa I saw was the most beautiful place I've ever been, despite lingering prejudice and rates of crime. In her book Nine Hills to Nambakaha, based on her time as a PCV in the Cote D'Ivoire, Sarah Erdman describes Africa beautifully as "laughing yet troubled, strong yet crippled, and dancing." And for good measure, here's an article I found in my searches concerning the lack of reporting on positive news in Africa. Anyways, on to the pop culture references...

Animal House

Bluto: Christ. Seven years of college down the drain. Might as well join the f----n' Peace Corps.

Blood Diamond

the background: Danny, a mercenary smuggler, and Maddy, a journalist, meet at a bar in Sierra Leone in the midst of civil war.

Danny: Don’t tell me you’re here to make a difference.

Maddy: And you’re here to make a buck?

Danny: I’m here for lack of a better idea.

Maddy: That’s a shame.

Danny: Not really. Peace Corps types only stay around long enough to realize they’re not helping anyone. Government only wants to stay in power until they’ve stolen enough to go into exile somewhere else. And the rebels, they’re not sure they want to take over, otherwise they’d have to govern this mess. But TIA, right M’Ed?

Maddy: What’s TIA?

Danny: This Is Africa.

Family Guy

After his disastrous first day as a high school freshman, Chris asks Brian, the family's dog, for advice. Brian tells Chris about his time in the Peace Corps, and Chris decides to join and is sent to South America. There, Chris becomes popular and marries the chief's daughter. Chris' family joins him and his father, Peter, becomes known as the richest man. He exploits the natives, and Chris becomes angry. The family decides to leave and Chris reveals that he is a freshman to his wife. The natives chase and beat Chris with paddles, just as the upperclassmen at his high school did.

Frank Zappa - Who Needs the Peace Corps?

A satirical song about the laziness of people concerning issues in the 1960s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddZNSAYX8pk

Jumanji

the background: Alan has just been freed from the game after being stuck there in the jungle for 26 years, and runs into the street past a cop.

Policeman: You got some l.D.? Oh, let me guess, you left it in your other Tarzan outfit, right? Are you from around here?

Alan: I was! But I've been in Jumanji.

Judy: Indonesia. He was in the Peace Corps.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

the background: John and Jane Smith have just figured out that they are both assasins hired to kill eachother, and are revealing other lies they have told throughout their marriage.

Jane: "I was never in the Peace Corps."

John: "Oh, I liked that about you."

Shallow Hal

After a fight with Hal, Rosemary decides to rejoin the Peace Corps. Hal shows up at her going away party, hours before she is to board the plane, to apologize. They make up and Hal reveals that he has joined the Peace Corps and will be joining her overseas.

Even the best made plans have a way of unraveling. One of my first priorities was to make sure my birds would be well cared for while I was in Africa. My friend Suzie, who has watched them before, was overjoyed when I asked her if she'd mind watching them for two years. The plan was to hand her over three cockatiels before we left for staging. Then, on Friday, six and a half weeks before we leave for Zambia, one of the three eggs Devonny laid at the bottom of the cage began to cheep. The standard practice for preventing eggs from hatching is to shake them shortly after they're laid. I hadn't thought it necessary to do so, because the eggs were laid at the bottom of the cage, which generally doesn't bode well, and I had witnessed Harlow playing with them roughly. Plus they started to smell like, well rotting eggs. On Saturday, the little mistake Hester hatched: During our remaining weeks in the U.S., her eyes will open, she'll grow pin feathers that will transform into real feathers, and by the time she and her sister and parents go to live with Suzie, she'll begin to wean. As we prepare to leave our old life behind, a new life will grow and thrive. As we board an airplane and cross the Atlantic, she too will begin to test her wings for the first time and explore something new. Her hatching was inconvenient, especially since we'll miss her precious adolescence, but plans change.