I realize it’s been months since I’ve written; several of you reminded me of that when I was back home recently. I would attribute my silence to writer’s block if I were an actual writer, but perhaps it’s just a case of sheer laziness; in any event, in an attempt to make up for it I have written my longest post ever, in hopes it will compensate for three or four posts.

I’m currently in Dadaab, which is in the Northeastern part of Kenya, for the second time. It's a semi-arid area, from the air once can see that it's flat with red earth; the only vegetation is clumps of thick, bushy shrubs armed with some truly vicious looking thorns. The weather, as usual, is extremely hot (the “wrath of Dadaab,” one Caseworker calls it) though it’s not even hot season yet; my hair has started to get long again, so in the middle of the day with the sun beating down it feels like someone wrapped my head in a wool blanket, and then set the blanket on fire.

Dadaab is the largest UNHCR operation in the world, as it encompasses the three refugee camps of Hagedera, Dagahaley, and Ifo (Dagahaley means "rocks" and Ifo means "dust" in Somali, some of the most apt names I've ever encountered). All told there are about 300,000 refugees, mostly Somali, living in the camps; it’s estimated that about 6,000 more a month are arriving from Somalia as the fighting has intensified in the south, with no end in sight. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to visit any of the camps as the security situation has been deemed too unstable, but I'm hoping that the next time I come up here things will be better and we'll be able to leave the compound we are staying in.

The UNHCR compound that has been built up here is strange, to say the least. Smack dab in the middle of a part of the country that is mostly barren and populated with refugees is a chain-linked, razor-wired compound that has small houses, sandy paths lit with ground lamps and delineated with white bricks stuck into the earth, a tennis and basketball court, several restaurants and bars, scores of new Land Cruisers and heavy trucks, and air-conditioning in all of the accommodation rooms. It seems entirely out of place, as I guess it is, though no doubt the long-term workers who are stationed up there are extremely grateful for every one of the amenities. The compound houses about 155 UNHCR workers doing 2-year stints, and any number of other workers from different organizations, all of whom would probably gladly maim you for a cheeseburger. We are restricted to the compound, so whatever entertainment there is to be had has to be found inside--lots of book-reading, movie-watching, and long email-writing.

On this trip I am serving in a different capacity as the first time I stayed up here. I am now the Field Team Leader (FTL), which means I essentially handle a lot of the logistics for the trip, provide guidance to the rest of the team on JVA policy, and liaise with implementing partners, among other things. The new position is a challenge but I’ve enjoyed it so far--there are (brief) times when I miss interviewing, however, as there are the occasional humorous or interesting moments that can occur in interviews. For instance, I was once interviewing an Eritrean refugee in Shire up in northern Ethiopia. We always ask about any medical problems the refugee might have, and this particular man reported that he had a “hemmorhage.” I glanced up quickly from the form I was filling in as this was obviously a very serious problem, although the refugee didn’t show any immediate signs of being about to keel over. I asked where the hemmorhage was, exactly, both so I could accurately fill in the form and also provide precise information for any doctor we might need to bring rushing in to save the man’s life. My interpreter paused long enough to give me a slightly surprised glance but began interpreting nonetheless, while in my mind I cycled confusedly through the possible physical areas in which the refugee could be experiencing such a serious medical event and not be dead. My confusion only began to grow as the man’s explanation seemed to last much longer than what was necessary for simply naming a body region--further, the reply was becoming animated and, to my deepening concern, quite graphic as he began pointing to his crotch area. Things were bordering on the obscene as he lifted himself slightly out of the chair and began grabbing at his groin and butt area before a light went on in my head: not “hemmorhage,” but “hemmorhoid.” I threw my hands up and cut off what was threatening to become a strip-show: “I got it, thanks, let’s move on.”

Dadaab is known among the field team for a number of things, but it’s most notorious for being home to a lot of scorpions and snakes--a field team member was once evacuated from here after getting bitten by an unknown creature. When we walk around at night, then, we’re often scanning the ground for any suspicious activity, nerves at a slightly elevated level. Twice already on this trip I have stopped dead in my tracks, heart jumping about in my chest, and stood for a few moments with eyes bulging at what turned out to be a curved stick lying on the path. Similarly, a friend of mine once launched herself several yards down the path we were walking on after a tree flower, blown by the wind, tumbled across her feet.

So it was in this context that several days ago I was walking alone at night to the cafeteria when I felt something clamp onto the back of my ankle, right around my Achilles Tendon. I unleashed a hybrid goose step/karate kick straight out in front of me and then shook my suspended foot in the air while taking a few small crow hops on my planted leg, all while resisting the urge to send aloft a warbling cry of panic. In retrospect, this entire sequence was one of the finer athletic achievements of my life, as not only did I not collapse in a heap in the sand during these frantic gyrations, but I felt whatever it was on my ankle shake off. I spun about, already determined that anything more hostile than a snail was going to send me careening through the darkness, only to be confronted by a thorny branch lying there benignly. After a few deep breaths and taking a moment to collect my scattered nerves, I continued on towards supper.

Our worksite is the small International Organization for Migration (IOM) compound within the larger UNHCR compound. The worksite is laid out in a rough square of cinder blocked buildings topped with tin roofs; the middle of the square is a bare, sandy area for vehicles and such. Unfortunately, our offices are in two buildings on opposite sides of the square, so in order to get to the other side one has to slog across about 40 yards of sand in the burning heat, a stretch that has unaffectionately been nicknamed “the desert.” Now, normally I incline more to the “lead-by-example” school of managing, but when the desert is involved I like to take the opportunity to empower my team members to build their personal capacity through increased responsibility--in other words, I delegate, as in “Stop your whining and get across the desert to ask Fundi where those paperclips are. And bring me back a Coke as well.” Normally these trips across the desert end with the trekker standing in my office in front of the a.c. unit that is going full blast and mumbling things like “come on, give it to me” while I yell at them to stop blocking the air flow to my desk.

Every evening an IOM bus takes the refugees back to the camps after we’ve finished interviewing them (a brief aside: like most organizations, JVA has its own unique lexicon that is primarily acronyms, with a few, mostly irreverent, abbreviations and nick-names thrown in as well. So, for instance, refugees are often referred to as “fugees,” interpreters as “‘terps,” and Somali women wearing the hijab with an additional veil across their face so only their eyes are visible as “ninjas.” But back to my story) The IOM bus driver is a cheerful old Somali guy with a longish, silver goatee, the tip of which has been dyed orange with henna, and which immediately became something I aspire to have one day. Mohamed, as he is named, is friendly and gregarious and strolls about the compound while waiting for the refugees to finish and chats up any JVA staff members he comes across. The very first time I met him his face lit into a friendly smile and he gave me a big wave and called to me “Yes, my brother Ibrahim, how are you?” I had to wonder if perhaps Mohamed might be bordering on senility after this greeting as he called to me as if he knew me, as if I really were his brother Ibrahim. When I ventured that my name was actually not Ibrahim but something else entirely he gave a dismissive wave of his hand as if this were mere foolishness on my part. “Ibrahim, inshallah, this time next year you will be a Muslim, and will be called ‘Ibrahim’.” It hasn’t been uncommon, then, for the rest of the trip to hear Mohamed bellowing a greeting to “Ibrahim,” a white boy from Maine, whenever I emerge from my office into the desert.

As is to be expected, I guess, we have a lot of IT problems on these trips. We’re all linked via wireless access points to the server laptop we carry with us and to the printers; when the link goes down, something that can happen for any one of approximately a billion reasons, work grinds to a halt. The FTL’s (me, in this case) number one priority is then to fix the problem at any cost so everyone can get working again. Since I am almost entirely IT illiterate these episodes are really trying and involve a lot of frantic phone calls to our Nairobi IT people, or me speed-walking across the desert to plead with the IOM IT guy to come take a look. It seems we have gotten most of the IT problems on this trip straightened out after having laptops, a replacement printer and wireless access point and cables sent up from Nairobi, though the replacement printer regularly emits an ominous grinding noise and will periodically simply stop printing. This is our last option for a printer, so it going down will be catastrophic for the circuit ride, so much so that every time the grinding noise starts my blood pressure jumps 15 notches. I’ve forbidden people from saying words like “uh oh” within a five foot radius of the printer, or even grimacing when they’re around it. I now have an entire routine I go through with the machine to get it running again, which consists of dismantling as much of it as I know I can put back together (which keeps the operation fairly limited), lots of sweating, heavy breathing and mumbled comments like “Come on, you piece of garbage; wait, I didn’t mean that.”

The last time I was in Dadaab I was doing interviews the whole time, and one in particular sticks out. It was a middle-aged Somali lady with three or four teenaged children; she was dressed in a slightly worn hijab and had a tired face that was just starting to show the beginnings of wrinkles. At the beginning of the interview she anxiously asked if she could talk to me without the children around; she then told me that one of them, a boy, wasn’t actually her child but he didn’t know that as she had kept it from him. These secret foster relationships aren’t all that uncommon among Somali refugees as it is exceedingly shameful to be an orphan or a bastard in Somali culture--I once had the foster father of a teenage girl tell me that he had never disclosed that she wasn’t his biological child as he was concerned she would become distraught to the point of suicide, thinking that she was a bastard or an orphan. So, oftentimes to protect the children from societal scorn parents will pretend foster children are their own, and will never tell the children.

The woman told me that she had decided to tell her son that he wasn’t her biological child as he was now old enough to know. Then, during the interview, she told me the story of how she had come to raise him. She was from Kismayo, a port town in the southern part of Somalia that has been wracked with fighting for going on 20 years now. A particularly vicious round broke out while the woman still lived there as two clans fired artillery shells and RPGs at each other from opposite sides of the town; after the shelling, the militias moved in. The woman, shattered from a vicious assault, fled with her three small children, having to leave her husband and several other family members dead and unburied behind her in their destroyed home. They joined a terrified mass of people streaming away from the burning city as the fighting raged behind them, and then, on the edge of town, she came across a little boy just old enough to walk. He was alone with no relatives in sight, and none of the other people fleeing knew the boy or where he came from. The woman grabbed him and continued her flight, now with four young children and without money, food, a family or husband or even a country, across Somalia and into Kenya, finally arriving in Dadaab. Seventeen years later she told her son about where he came from.

I sat stunned while I listened to the story. Unfortunately, I’ve heard far worse as far as violence and suffering are concerned, but the idea that she could spare a thought for an abandoned child just shortly after her world had collapsed around her was staggering. I stared at her for a moment; she looked ordinary, weary, not heroic or superhuman at all, yet she had performed one of the greatest feats of unequivocal heroism I had ever personally heard of.

I hope you are all well.

Hello All,The below is an email I wrote about three weeks ago but have only now gotten around to sending.I am sitting in my hotel in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, writing this at the moment, myself and two other people from JVA flew in this morning from Nairobi.  We’re on our way to Shire (pronounced sheer-ay), a town in northern Ethiopia near Shimelba refugee camp, we should arrive there tomorrow after a short flight from Addis.So, obviously I’ve been thrown right into the mix here as I was only in Nairobi for about a week and a half before this trip.  I will be in Shire for three weeks before I go back to Kenya for a little while before heading out again.  This is generally how the schedule goes for caseworkers, on average we spend close to three weeks out of each month traveling—hectic, but also a great opportunity to see a lot of interesting places.I hope to write a little bit about Shimelba, which will be my first camp experience with JVA when I return, so in this email I’m going to make some random observations about Nairobi.  It’s a huge city, much larger than Lusaka and better developed, but also much louder, crowded, and dirtier.  The hurrying crowds and mobs of vehicles piloted by drivers I suspect to be slightly deranged gives the city an exciting, bustling feel to it—apparently the roads were not designed to handle the amount of traffic they now carry as there is almost a perpetual traffic jam throughout the city.  My very first experience with this utter chaos that is driving in Nairobi came on my trip back from the airport.  A friend had arranged for a taxi driver named George to pick me up.  I walked out of the terminal to see a smiling Kenyan holding a sign with my name on it; I was a little strung out from more than 30 hours of traveling from the U.S. but was relieved to see him.  He is a friendly, talkative guide who hustled my bags into the cab, hopped behind the wheel and gunned us out into traffic.It only took me a few minutes to realize that this indeed was a far different place than Lusaka.  Traffic isn’t all that bad and is fairly orderly there, but after only a few kilometers of driving in Nairobi I had already made the decision to pull my elbow that had been hanging out of the car back inside to keep it from getting clipped.  There were no lines in the road, which meant it at times fluctuated from two to three lanes and then back again, depending on how many vehicles could possibly squeeze into the available space.  It is a motley collection of automobiles ranging in size from large 18-wheelers (called lorries here--as a former British colony Kenya insists on using improper English) to small motorcycles, all blaring their horns and trying to cut one another off at every opportunity.  There is a constant game of chicken being played out on the roads, with the driver with the most nerve usually winning a desired spot and a tongue-lashing from whichever other driver he had to almost run over to get there.  I commented on the seeming anarchy of the situation to George who had been rattling on about Kenya and Nairobi, pointing out interesting features along the road, glancing over at me to see if I was properly engrossed, all while steering us through the swirls and eddies of the traffic while I stared resolutely ahead refusing to make eye contact with George, hoping thereby to encourage him to concentrate fully on the tangle of cars all around us.  George nodded vigorously in agreement at my observation, and flapped his hand unconcernedly at the mess currently in front of us: “Like right now, I don’t even know where the lane is,” and then launched happily into another explication on the state of tribal relations in Kenya while I eyeballed a matatu (minibus) and lorry that were both converging on the spot we currently occupied.Yet George is a bit of a magician as he managed to get us to our destination alive, which is all I was asking for at that point, while also providing a brief tutorial on Kenyan history and politics.  That was my introduction to Nairobi traffic and my awe of it has only increased since then, especially as I’ve since been a pedestrian trying to navigate a road crossing.  There doesn’t appear to be any standard procedure for pedestrians in the city; they don’t have the right of way, but I’m assuming it’s illegal to run them over as well.  Usually what happens is a large group of walkers will gather on the edge of the road that needs to be crossed.  Finally, at the slightest hint of a break in traffic, one intrepid soul will plunge into the gap followed hurriedly by the rest; my theory so far is that the larger the group, the less willing a driver will be to hit them all as it will mean more damage to his vehicle.  Hence, in these situations I try to get on the edge of the group furthest away from oncoming traffic in order to provide as much of a human buffer between me and the vehicles as possible.I was delighted to find that Nairobi has a lot of second clothing markets, like in Zambia.  There are always gems to be found in these places as it is all cast-offs from the West; what makes it particularly interesting is that oftentimes the clothing will be quite old, from the 80’s and early 90’s, which means one can easily find a t-shirt with a slogan from those eras (I saw a t-shirt in Zambia that said “You’re beautiful…NOT”).  On my first full day here I and some friends went to one of these markets, stall after stall stuffed with old clothing.  The hawkers here are slightly more advanced in their attempt to cheat you than in Zambia; most of them have removed the size tags from the trousers, so when you tell them your size they randomly pick out a pair of trousers and declare them to be the right ones.  In order to prove it, they will produce a plastic measuring tape and run it around the waist and down the inseam to prove their point.  What is delightful about this entire process is that if the pants are indeed too long, they will position the tape right at the crotch and show you so you’re assured they are starting in the right place, then distract you with their other hand that is bringing the tape down the pant leg while sliding the tape back a few inches up at the crotch.  So, when the tape reaches the cuff, they will have slid the tape on the other end far enough back that it shows the measurement you told them earlier.  The merchant will then declare “exact,” while random other hawkers who have gathered around to watch the muzungu get fleeced will nod solemnly and, in chorus, declare “exact.”  The merchants are slick enough about the bogus measuring that it took me a few seconds to figure out exactly what they were doing; if I didn’t have a preconceived opinion of merchants at these markets as hybrid con artists and entertainers, I probably wouldn’t have caught the fudging at all.  Fortunately I did though, otherwise my feelings would have been hurt when one hawker told me I had a 38 inch waist and then “proved” it—he was able to chop off about 6 inches with some fraudulent measuring of the shorts’ waistband, then by measuring over the shorts and shirt I was wearing managed to add several inches to my waist despite me sucking it in.  I could only laugh at the sheer brazenness of the display, and left with my self-esteem intact.At another stall, as per my normal bargaining routine, I pointed out various flaws I found in the clothes I was interested in purchasing.  The particular gentleman I was dealing with at the time, named Boniface, would immediately dismiss my criticisms and declare that the item’s brand was “nice.”  I pressed him about a stain on a particular set of trousers hard enough that he obviously felt the brush-off couldn’t work any longer, and so turned the trousers inside out and declared that the stain was “on the outside, not inside.”  Unsure why this was supposed to reassure me I then made the observation that I would only be comforted by that knowledge if I planned on wearing the trousers inside-out.  He stared at me for a second and I could see the wheels turning as he cycled through his list of selling tactics.  Finally, he grasped the trousers by the waist, flipped the brand name up for me to see, and declared “Dockers, they are nice.  Nice brand.”  Well, touché, no way to argue with that, so I slapped him on the back and forked over the money.I have had a lot of people asking me about the plane fire I mentioned on Facebook; it happened when we were trying to make it to Shire, the day after I wrote the above email.  We had flown on a small, two-engine prop plane from Addis Ababa to Mekelle and landed there to allow some passengers to get off.  I was mostly asleep when the plane started down the runway to take off, but still felt it abruptly start slowing down after it had gotten up to take-off speed.  I thought this was strange but couldn't give it much thought in my sleep-addled state until I was hit in the head by a guy grabbing the back of my chair to jump up.  I opened my eyes to see people sprinting down the aisle towards the front of the plane; I then turned around and saw smoke filling the cabin.  Meanwhile a jam of people pushing forward was developing at the front of the plane; a man jumped into the aisle, spread his arms and yelled "Selam, selam" ("peace," in Amharic).  The crowd of people seemed to ease back slightly at the man's commanding tone until a stewardess appeared yelling "Go, go" and flapping her arms wildly towards the exit.  That was the end of Selam-ing and the mad rush began anew with increased fervor.  I decided I should join at this point and moved down the aisle picking up the various baby accessories the woman in front of me with a child was scattering about in her haste to get off.  I finally made it onto the runway and glanced down the length of it to see it a single firetruck with an anemic flashing red light trundling its way towards us, rather pathetically I thought.I have mentioned more than once in these emails from Africa that I have moments of perspective when I can fully see the absurdity of my situation at the moment--this was one of those times.  I was standing in the bright sunlight of northern Ethiopia with a small plane on fire behind me, surrounded by crowds of Ethiopians chattering excitedly in Amharic and Tigrinya, children wailing, the field next to the runway swarming with Ethiopian soldiers sprinting towards us while I stood dazedly holding a baby-blue bootie and pacifier.  When I was younger and trying to picture what I would be doing at the ripe old age of 27, when I would be operating in that mysterious, hazy but momentous sphere of adulthood, this was not what I envisioned, not even close.  I lacked the imagination for it and could as little picture the details of life in Africa as I could Mars; yet my young heart would have been thrilled though thoroughly perplexed to see me standing on that runway.After watching for 15 minutes small groups of men battle in vain with fire extinguishers and water to put out the fire we were put in a Land Cruiser and taken back to the airport, though not before I had memorized the plane's tail number in case they had any ideas of putting us back on the same contraption.  We waited for about five hours for another plane to be flown up from Addis; it was funny to board the new plane, the same type that had caught on fire, and see 95% of the passengers crammed into the front section with the back almost completely deserted.  We eventually hurtled down the runway and lurched into the sky while the gentleman behind me chanted prayers in Amharic.  Then we were out over the emptiness of northern Ethiopia; from the air it looks incredibly forbidding, all jagged rock and dustland gouged with ravines, sun-blasted and baked into hard edges, lonely roads twisting through on their way to small clusters of browned building with tin roofs flashing at you in the sunlight, little outposts seemingly huddled against the extremity of their surroundings.  It's hard to believe people can survive out there; I spent the entire short plane ride to Shire with my forehead pressed against the window marveling at the landscape and wondering about the people who live there, hopeful that I'll some day get to meet a few of them.

As most of you probably know, I am back home in Maine now. I ended up leaving Zambia fairly quickly as I was offered a job in Kenya that I decided to take, so in order to have as much time at home as possible I had to rush to finish up with the CDC and Peace Corps and then head to Maine. It was a whirlwind last couple of weeks, so much so that I still feel like I haven't had a chance to entirely process what my experience in Zambia meant to me and what leaving it has meant as well. Hopefully that will come later, though I don't have all that much time as I am leaving for Kenya on the 27th.

I have told some of you that I have seen that I am going to try to write out some stories from my time in the village before I head back to Africa. There were some things I wanted to write about but never managed to get to, so hopefully telling some people will keep me accountable. First though, I wanted to say a little bit about what I was thinking as I left Zambia.

I usually like telling stories to illustrate a point I'm trying to make, as it spares me the difficulty of coming up with an original thought, so I'll do the same here. More than a year ago I was sitting with ba Saya on a lazy, hot Saturday afternoon in the shade of the big Mango Tree in his yard, as was our custom, trying to elude the grip of the intense African heat. His wife, a bubbly, plump, brown-skinned woman, a pure Bemba from Kasama who called me "my son" and made me smile just to look at her, was sitting on the porch shelling Maize slowly into a wide and shallow woven reed basket. Collins was sitting on a short, roughly-carved wooden stool next to ba Simbaya and I who were perched precariously on dilapidated bamboo chairs. Shadrick, the youngest son of about 14, was wandering aimlessly about the yard while the only daughter, Chipo, assisted ba Saya's wife.

We talked occasionally but mostly we sat in companionable silence, which very much counts as doing something in the village. I had spent a lot of time at ba Saya's place but had never really taken the opportunity to examine his house thoroughly; as a government employee, he was one of the wealthiest people in the village and therefore had one of the nicest houses. It was a rectangular, concrete building that once had been painted blue around the base and white higher up, but now the faded paint was peeling off everywhere, leaving ragged, star-shaped patches of bare concrete speckling the walls. The slanted, corrugated tin roof was rusting, the piece of chitenge cloth hanging in one of the doorways was frayed and faded and billowing slowly in a light breeze. The other doors were manned by heavy, chipped and battered slabs of wood, one of which had cracked in the middle allowing the bottom part to swing independently of the top. Around the house, the yard was displaying an entirely typical Zambian village scene: chickens pecking and scraping at the hard-packed dirt of the yard, goats clomping impudently through on their way to make someone's life miserable, piles of shelled groundnuts drying on a reed mat on the ground, a brazier full of sparking charcoal burning to the side. Here, of course, were all the signs of what the West would consider poverty at first glance, but there was something else as well. I leaned back in my chair and looked again: the mother chatting quietly with the daughter who was languidly picking out twigs and small stones from the shelled Maize, the son strolling out of the yard to run an errand for his father, Collins sitting on his small stool to my left playing idly with a piece of bamboo, Saya to my right watching his wife and daughter in between his short spells of dozing off. It was then I felt a stab of an emotion I never expected to feel out in the village: jealousy.

By nearly every conceivable measure, I was far better off than this man who lived in a rusted, peeling paint concrete building in the middle of Africa; I was born and raised in the U.S., that mythical land where most people own cars and go to school and have more than two shirts and live in massive houses with electricity, running water, microwaves, televisions, toasters, DVD players, ovens, etc., etc., etc...even my living allowance of $250 a month put me on an economic level beyond him. And yet here I was envious of him, which seemingly made no sense; there were probably very few people in Zambia who wouldn't leap at the chance to have grown up with the privilege and wealth that I did. But that was the case, I was jealous and feeling the truth of the lessons we're all taught from a young age, about how unimportant material possessions are compared with the importance of home and family. Ba Saya was in a safe place where he well and truly belonged, something I hadn't felt since I had left the U.S. more than a year earlier, and wasn't to feel for another year. Home, and all that it means, was more than 6,000 miles and seeming worlds away from me.

The difficulty of being so far from home is doubtlessly what made the experience as special and meaningful as it was, yet there is also the constant, building pressure, the alienation, of being someone different. It's one of the reasons Volunteers form such strong friendships so quickly--being with another PCV means you're not different, there's someone else like you there and, together, you can face all the people who think you're strange, can joke and commiserate with one another when people laugh at your white skin or your hair or your clothing or your accent. Similarly, it's one of the reasons that PCVs, when they make it to the provincial houses after a stay in the bush, lay on the couches and watch hour after hour of movies, or devour four month old gossip mags, or want to simply sit with other Volunteers and listen to Americans talk--they want to reconnect to the culture where home is, where they feel smart and competent and normal.

So, finally, after two and a half years of feeling consistently out of place, of feeling different and strange no matter what I did to not be so, I am in place and not (as) different and strange. I am home, and don't need to feel jealous of ba Saya any longer.

I hope this post finds you well and recovered from the holidays. My Christmas and New Years was a lot of fun as I rattled around in South Africa, Swaziland, and Mozambique throughout; I hope to eventually write about my travels there as Mozambique in particular is a beautiful and interesting spot, but I first wanted to write a little bit more about the people who made my time in my village so memorable.

One of my best friends in the village was a man named ba Saya, the agricultural officer for Muyembe and the surrounding areas. He is originally from Northern Province and is a Namwanga by tribe but married a Bemba, moved to Luapula and then eventually to Muyembe with his family. Because most of my work was agriculture-related we necessarily spent a lot of time together, and became fast friends (his son, Collins, who I’ll probably write about some time, was my best friend). Ba Saya is a few inches shorter than me with a receding hairline and a thin moustache struggling for survival on his upper lip; he has a slight gap between his front teeth and a slow smile that creases his face and deepens the wrinkles on his forehead and sets his eyes shining. It was an infectious smile, and I couldn't help but grin back in return every time. There was actually a lot about ba Saya that made me grin regularly; he was genuinely excited to learn, and often after I had explained something about, say, a new agriculture technique his face would light up and he'd let loose with a delighted 'ooooooookay,' shake his head admiringly and give a chuckle. Given that most of the answers I’d provide him with I had usually looked up a few minutes before in a reference book in my hut, he had far too high an opinion of my knowledge and abilities, and was personally insulted when other people didn't have the same ardor for listening to me ramble on as he did. He also took it upon himself to be my protector in the village, arguing with Zambians about prices they were charging me that he thought were too high, heading off drunks who were staggering their way over to talk to me, and once giving an assembled group of villagers a tongue lashing when they complained that Peace Corps never gave them free stuff. At the end of these interventions he would inevitably turn to me with an aggrieved shake of his head and declare, "These Africans..." before launching into a disquisition analyzing the shortcomings of Zambians in general and those specifically of whichever person we happened to be dealing with at the time. I would always assure him that I didn't take it personally, but he would remain unsatisfied at what he perceived to be the lack of respect for the infinite knowledge I was bringing.

I have a lot of great memories of time spent with ba Saya, but two stand out. The first involved his bike that he struggled to keep together the entire time I lived in Muyembe. He did a lot of cycling to other villages and would often walk back pushing the bicycle after a tire was punctured or the chain broke or a spoke snapped. He was sitting on my porch with me one evening smoking a cigarette; I had started giving him flavored pipe tobacco which he rolled into cigarettes and enjoyed immensely, and it had become a bit of a tradition. He'd had a particularly trying day of struggling with the bike and was bemoaning the fate of being cursed with such a contraption. So, I taught him the word 'cantankerous' to better describe the bike; after obtaining a faint approximation of the correct pronunciation, he was visibly more cheerful. Thereafter whenever he would refer to that bicycle he would always use cantankerous, as in "I was going to Milindu on that cantankerous bicycle," or "the tire on that cantankerous bicycle..." Frankly, it made my day whenever I heard it, although I wasn't aware of how fully he had grasped the nuances of the word until a few weeks later. We were biking back from Kawambwa and he was slightly tipsy after having drank some home-made beer in town and was asking whether I had any more pipe tobacco left, but I had run out recently. He asked if it was possible for me to get any more and I explained it was from the States and so would be difficult to get, especially since my parents didn't approve of smoking and so wouldn't be likely to send it. He urged me to try but I told him I was quite sure they wouldn't budge on the matter. He ruminated on this unpleasant news for a few moments as he wobbled his bike up a hill, then visibly perked up. He glanced over his shoulder as he teetered precariously on the bike, and made his final plea: 'No ba Joshua, you must tell them not to be cantankerous.'

My other favorite memory is when a Programme Against Malnutrition (PAM) project that involved giving away fertilizer came to the area. Naturally a village meeting was held and two PAM representatives explained the project and the proper application of fertilizer...for more than four hours as I went slowly cross-eyed. I would usually attend these meetings even if I wasn't directly involved, and was always placed at the front of the room as a sign of respect for my position. That was very nice and flattering but it also prevented me from falling asleep or pounding my head against a desk which is what I normally wanted to do at these things. I have never met someone who can beat a dead horse like a Zambian can; I think largely it's a result of a culture that didn't have reading and writing until less than 100 years ago and still relies heavily on oral tradition, and the boredom that is rampant in the village; sitting around and discussing something ad nauseam counts as entertainment. Yet as I sat glazed over at the front struggling to maintain my cultural sensitivity I couldn't help but think that Westerners would have finished this meeting in half an hour tops, including a coffee break. It was finally finished though and everyone trooped over to ba Saya's house to receive their fertilizer. I first went back to my hut to get my camera as I knew there would be the strong possibility of a bicycle being loaded to a point that defied belief, and I didn't want to miss a chance for a good photo. By the time I got to ba Saya's house the proverbial wheels had already started to come off; he was standing on his porch and I could tell he was getting excited as he tried to explain the process to the farmers, the same process that had just been discussed for four hours. They were grumbling about the amount of fertilizer and asking for more, while ba Saya tried to maintain his authority and an orderly process, the prospects for which were rapidly slipping away. As the grumbling got louder he in turn got louder and eventually hopped off the porch and into the middle of the group--I knew when he switched from speaking English to rapid-fire Bemba things were getting real. Soon he was shouting excitedly and flapping his arms about while kicking up a small dust storm as he pirouetted about to facilitate his haranguing of first one offending farmer and then another. There wasn't much I could do to help and any moral support I might have lent was badly compromised by my poorly-stifled laughter, so I snapped a picture and beat a hasty retreat. Looking at this picture still makes me laugh more than a year later: there's ba Saya, his shoulders hunched with the force of him chopping down with his hand to accentuate a point, a bedraggled list of recipient farmers clutched in his other hand that he is gesticulating with to further strengthen his case, surrounded by a milling crowd of clearly unimpressed farmers while a little dust lingers in the air.

A few hours after the whole affair I wandered back over to find him sitting in the shade of a Mango Tree; he was the picture of deep contemplation as he sat clad in a pair of shorts in a beat up bamboo chair with his chin sunk nearly to his bare chest. When he saw me approaching he heaved himself out of his chair with a world-weary sigh and shuffled over to greet me. Fighting back a smile at his spent demeanor, I asked him how things had gone; he gave a slow sad shake of his head and said, 'ba Joshua, you know, these Africans...'

We are enduring the worst of the hot season right now; it rains so much in Luapula that I would often grow tired of it, but now I am fervently hoping for the rains to begin to break the heat. I've woken up several nights with my sheets soaked through with sweat, and now lie on my side to minimize the surface area I can sweat from. I also have a fan set up as close as I can get it to my bed without risking injury to myself, though if it's hot enough it barely helps as it simply swirls scorching air over me.

I traveled down to Choma district in Southern Province a little over a week ago to see two of my Peace Corps friends get married in a village ceremony. It was a lot of fun and was nice to spend a few days back in a village. The village itself was in a bit of an uproar the whole time we were there; one foreigner is huge entertainment in remote areas, so more than a dozen is tantamount to the circus coming to town and setting up the center ring in your front yard. Plus there were all the preparations for the wedding feast that took a small army of women several days to prepare; I wandered over a few times to stoke my appetite and admire the process of cooking that much food over open fires. Cooking is always a long production in the village, but to prepare that much food in massive cauldrons is truly a feat.

A brief aside: by most measures many villagers are highly uneducated, especially the older generation and women as they are the first to be taken out of school, it's not seen as critical for a girl to be educated like a boy should be, they tend to get married and have children at very young ages, etc. In remote areas it's not uncommon to find people who have lived their entire lives in the same village, without even having been to the nearest town that has proper shops, electricity, tarmacked roads, and things of that nature. So, their life experiences and education are extremely limited; yet, they also are unparalleled experts at what they do. I've sat around watching women cook, for instance, and they have it down to a science and an art--their movements are deft and sure, there's little wasted motion, no pausing to try to remember measurements or times, and they move with purpose and strength (I realize strength isn't commonly associated with cooking, but watch a bamayo stir heavy, thick, gruel-like nshima with a carved wooden spoon and you quickly understand why they could probably cripple me using just their forearms). Or there was the time I was sheltering from a thunderstorm in an office building at a refugee camp. I stood on the porch watching the storm probe the earth with preliminary rains, like liquid skirmishers, gathering itself to unleash a torrential downpour. Then three women with large bundles of firewood--some of the poles were easily five or six feet long--came into view. I stood gaping as they trotted by at a fast clip, eyes fixed straight ahead, chins tilted slightly up, necks straight and rigid, in order to keep the 50 or so pounds of firewood in place on their heads...and each one had a baby fastened with a piece cloth to their backs as they nimbly maneuvered down the muddy road. And it's the same thing with the men as they carve furrows out of the ground for their fields with home-made hoes, or build a charcoal mound or take down a tree with an axe. I always enjoy watching these people who are some of the most deprived in the world and yet who possess world-class skills in their areas of expertise. It's a delight every time.

Back to the wedding: on the first day I was given the chance to slaughter a goat which I gladly took up. I had never killed one though there was not a day in Muyembe when I didn't want to, given that they are evil incarnate (If you want to start most any Volunteer raving, ask them how they feel about goats and you'll probably hear stories about how awful they are and how the Volunteer had plotted to covertly kill a few of them as an example to the rest. I had a friend in Eastern Province who found one in his outdoor kitchen; he wrestled it to the ground and then proceeded to slap it four times in the face before finally letting it up). Now village knives are notoriously dull which leads to painfully slow slaughters and traumatized PCVs, and the bare piece of metal I was handed that was ostensibly a knife was no different, but I started in anyways. The accepted method is to saw away at the goat's neck until the goat dies or you collapse; fortunately the goat died first in my case, though it was nip and tuck. After it was over some of the village men took over the butchering, obviously having concluded from my slaughtering efforts that I wasn't entirely competent in the goat killing/slaughtering arena. We rescued the testicles and fried them up and ate them later; they were marginal at best, and I ate them mostly for bragging rights which, in retrospect, isn't a great reason.

There was, of course, plenty of dancing. Before the wedding started some of the older women started an impromptu session, something I smugly expected to be only for females until a very determined old lady grabbed me. I briefly calculated my odds of being able to beat her off and put them at 50-50, maybe 60-40 in my favor if she was tired from nshima cooking; but, I hadn't embarrassed myself in a few hours so I decided to give in and start dancing, which would be punishment enough for her and the other women anyways. I went into my normal routine which has been, unjustly I think, compared to a slow seizure, like maybe it's happening underwater, and continued my normal routine of convincing myself that all the laughter was merely admiration being expressed. The dancing was mercifully brief by Zambian standards, cut short no doubt by the women's concern that I might need medical attention, and everyone filtered off to prepare for the ceremony.

After changing into my less dirty shirt I settled in to watch the wedding. The groom came out escorted by a parallel line of dancing school girls. He shuffled along and appeared to be limping though he clarified later that he was actually executing a prescribed dance step, and made his way once around a hut. The bride came out of the hut and they were covered with a chitenge, a piece of cloth essentially, locked pinkies, and then shuffle-limped to several chairs that had been set up on the edge of a bare patch of ground. All the villagers, including many from the surrounding areas, formed a solid circle five or six people deep all the way around the chairs and the open area; a very intoxicated man was on crowd control duty which consisted of him flapping his arms and yelling loudly as he rushed around the inner part of the circle and mock charged anyone who threatened its integrity. There was then several brief speeches from the different headmen attending, along with the bride and groom's village parents. Directly following that was a ceremony to exhibit how the bride and groom were prepared to care for their respective in-laws if and when it became necessary. The pair carried a plate of food to a line of people meant to represent their families of which, as a friend of the groom, I was a part. They then moved down the line kneeling before each person and offered them the plate; the person would select something to eat and the bride and groom would move on to the next person. I found the process to be interesting for a couple of reasons; one because I enjoyed the fairly elegant symbolism, but also because it highlighted the cultural reality in Zambia that relatives, even by marriage, are expected to provide for other relatives, including distant ones. It is somewhat common and perfectly normal for children to be raised by grandparents, aunts and uncles, or cousins, even if the child's parents are still alive, and for wealthy relatives to send money for schooling, food, transport, etc., to relatives they've never even met.

Things then rapidly moved into the gift-giving phase; essentially the master of ceremonies stood in the center of the circle and browbeat everyone until they came forward with money or a gift. The m.c. would then hold up whatever the person was offering, announce how much it was or, if it was a gift, offer his best estimate of its worth which was usually wildly inflated. All of this was mortifying to the Americans present, especially the bride and groom who had asked that this part be skipped, but perfectly normal to the assembled Zambians. We all breathed a sigh of relief when the gift-giving had finished, the end of which also marked the end of the ceremony.

The rest of the day was spent relaxing and stuffing ourselves on goat and chicken. We built up a big bonfire and stood around chatting and listening to the general hubbub of the large crowd still socializing and excitedly discussing the day's events. Excitement among the Americans would also occasionally flare up when a wind scorpion would approach. I had heard of these things but had never seen one until that night; in Zambia they are alternatively known as wolf spiders although they are neither a scorpion or a spider. They are big and hairy with large, over-sized jaws that can be a full one-third of their body length, which can reach five inches. While their physical appearance alone qualifies them as something I kill or run away from on sight, the most disconcerting feature of wind scorpions is that they are highly aggressive and target any light source; they lie fairly flat most of the time but when approached or if they sense something nearby worth terrifying (a half-asleep Peace Corps Volunteer walking barefoot to the pit latrine in the middle of the night, for instance) they raise their body off the ground on their hairy legs and sprint straight for their prey. One of my friends in Northwestern Province where wind scorpions are very common told me that the first time he saw one he bolted into his house, leaped onto his bed and wrapped his mosquito net around himself. Another guy, a former college rugby player built like a boulder, was sitting on his porch eating and ended up tossing a full plate of food in the air and jumping into his yard when he turned to see one glaring at him from an eye-level ledge inches away. So, to see one of those things busting out of the night in a scuttling, hairy, spider-y kind of way is alarming, to say the least, and they were out in force that night, attracted by the bonfire from which I risked burns in order to be close enough to see them coming. Leaving the safety of the fire was hard on the nerves; we were able to track several girls' progress to and from the pit latrine by their shrieks whenever a scorpion charged them or when the guy with them for protection would yell "look out!" and point to an empty patch of earth at the girls' feet.

The next morning we packed up our tents and backpacks, said goodbye to the village, hopped in the back of a pickup truck and roared our way over potholes and bumps into Choma. From there everyone scattered, either to Lusaka or Livingstone or back to their villages. I was exhausted but satisfied: dancing with mayos, eating goat testicles, avoiding wind scorpions--there's really not much else I could have asked for.

I hope you are all well. All the best, Josh

i hope this post finds you well, things in zambia continue on mostly the same. i realize it's been another long stretch since i last wrote, i have found that there are fewer things of interest to report now that i live in a modern city. the lack of items of interest hasn't stopped me, however, from writing possibly my longest post yet, so consider yourselves fairly warned.

i did get malaria last month for the first time, although i was fortunate as it was a fairly mild case. malaria is a scary illness for people without access to proper medication, and is responsible for more deaths in sub-saharan africa than hiv/aids--one of the great tragedies of the disease is that it's easily treatable with a number of different medications. i ended up taking coartem which is cheap and highly effective, although it also seemed to tick off the malaria parasites before killing them. i had been able to operate more or less normally before taking the medication, but a few hours after my first dose i had to struggle up the stairs to my bed where i had a vicious bout of the chills that set my bed jitterbugging up and down. i had one more bad evening (malaria works in waves--the parasites enter your bloodstream, destroy a bunch of red blood cells, then stop to reproduce. they re-emerge more strongly about 24 hours later and repeat the process) and then that was pretty much it other than fatigue and a general lack of strength and stamina. even though i was quite sick it wasn't nearly as bad as it can be and usually is, i've been around people with a serious case and they can just barely move; some pcv's have had it to the point that they couldn't get out of the bed to go the bathroom and general unpleasantness ensued (this is a common enough occurrence that having malaria guarantees a bed to yourself, even if there are other pcv's around who have no place to sleep).

over the fourth of july holiday i went out to malawi again, back to the same place i went for easter of '07. i won't say much about it as i've already written about lake malawi, other than to say that it was just as beautiful and relaxing as last time. malawi is similar enough to zambia that it feels familiar--the languages they speak are all also spoken in zambia, and the primary tribe in malawi, the cichewa, populate most of the eastern province of zambia. getting there can be a hassle though, it took us two full days of traveling to get to our final destination and that was even with some extraordinary luck hitch-hiking.

'hitching,' as it's known here, is a popular way of getting around for everyone, peace corps volunteers especially. shortly after arriving in country i overheard several veteran pcvs discussing whether they should hitch to lusaka from mansa, and one said that she didn't want to as she 'already had enough stories.' that is usually the way hitching goes, you're almost always guaranteed to have a tale to tell when you've finished, although it's usually one that's only funny after some time has passed and the fatigue and aggravation have receded. pcv's have some spectacular hitching stories and some have amazing luck, but i'm a grade-a cancer during hitching attempts, which is why i've mostly given it up. however, we decided to give it a shot anyway and were eventually picked up by a german expatriate named ully; now, one of the reasons i enjoy africa so much is the interesting people you meet, and ully did not disappoint. he's an engineer who's lived here for more than 20 years, an ex-special forces commando who grew up in west berlin and is personal friends with the zambian vice-president, rupiah banda. he's a big, barrel-chested guy with a wide face and short, salt and pepper hair and a commanding air about him, and is possibly slightly paranoid; he told us on one stretch of road that it was a bad place for car-jackings but that we shouldn't worry as he carries a .357 ruger revolver in the vehicle with him, which he had his girlfriend riding on the passenger's side fish out from beneath her seat so we could properly admire it. he is also certifiably insane on the road; 140 km/hr was his preferred cruising speed, and he apparently viewed potholes not so much as obstacles to be avoided but as challenges to be confronted--he told us that he had customized the suv's shocks with some sort of inflatable device, which is why he didn't bother avoiding the potholes. all of that made for an interesting ride but also a pleasant one as he gave us sandwiches, sodas, and candy bars, cranked the american classic rock he was listening to from his satellite radio, and worked on setting a land speed record to chipata. i often have moments over here where i am deeply, deeply grateful for the experience i'm having, and as i sat back in padded suv comfort while ully drove at 140 km/h with his knees as he wrestled with opening a bag of crisps, all while regaling us with stories from his commando days as led zeppelin songs pulsed through the vehicle and the brownish landscape whizzed by me outside the window, i had another one of those moments.

last month i traveled to luapula for a going-away party for my group. i've mentioned public transport in my emails enough that most of you are probably tired of hearing me complain about it, but you're going to have to bear with me one more time. on this particular trip i was feeling smug at my good luck in getting a mostly-empty bus that left close to on time, until we pulled into a petrol station in kapiri mposhi that is about two and a half hours from lusaka. i was half asleep as the bus had left at 4:30 a.m., but i still heard the zambian a few seats over stand up and make a general announcement that 'the bus is on fire' before speeding down the aisle. normally that sort of situation would send me in a panicked gallop off the bus, shoving people aside if necessary, but sometimes in zambia people tend to badly overreact so i ignored the warning. a few seconds later, however, i started smelling smoke; this was an interesting enough development that i snapped fully awake. my mind was further focused when i noticed smoke pouring into the front section of the bus, and people streaming into the aisle. i joined them in what i hoped was a collected manner, resisting the urge all the while to trample a mother with a baby on her back who was not moving with the dedication i thought the situation demanded. when i finally made it out the left front wheel hub was producing clouds of smoke, the result of a 'problem with the bearings,' according to a mumbled explanation from the conductor. kapiri mposhi was already my least favorite zambian city, and the following four hour stay in the parking lot of a petrol station as i tried to avoid drunken street vendors did nothing to approve my opinion of it. but, we finally got under way and i safely arrived in kazembe after an 18 hour journey.

i am now one of 6 or so volunteers from my intake remaining in zambia, the rest finished their service last month and many of them are back in the states now. it was sad to see them go, i have a lot of good memories with many of them. i have been surprised at the depth of the friendships i formed here, and looking around the peace corps community it's obvious that many others have done the same. i think i'm surprised because, apart from perhaps a few close pcv neighbors, you only see other volunteer friends once every few months for a couple of days; yet somehow you still manage to connect with them and form a very strong bond. there are a variety of reasons for it, i think the biggest being the intensity of the shared experience. working as a pcv in zambia is such a bizarre, bewildering, thrilling, unique experience that it is only another volunteer that can really understand what's happening with you. when you're struggling to articulate your irritation or sorrow or elation over something that happened in the village, you don't need to be eloquent or fill in the gaps in your story for another pcv because they already know what you're trying to say...no matter what you're trying to express, chances are that the person who best understands will be another volunteer. so, you come to rely on volunteers in many of the same ways you relied on family in the states (the first time a pcv visited me in my village i very nearly tackled him with a hug i was so delighted to see him, after a week and a half by myself). my friend katie described this dynamic best when we were sitting around reminiscing towards the end of her service and the beginning of my extension, looking back at our time in the country and marveling at how far we'd come. she said that the peace corps experience was like a bizarre blind date where you're thrown in with a bunch of strangers, only to fall in love with them. that's the best description i've heard of all of this so far.

i'm not sure if this got any coverage in the states, but the president of zambia, levy mwanawasa, had a serious stroke at an a.u. summit in egypt at the end of july; reuters and the bbc reported that he had died, and the president of south africa even issued a condolence statement. as it turns out the reports were premature as he did not die for about another month; on news of his death a mourning period of 3 weeks was declared that just ended last week. zambia has only had three presidents since independence, so this was an unprecedented situation and there was some concern about how the country would deal with it. however, everything remained calm and the government continued to function, and elections have been announced for october 30th. as sad as it was for the people of zambia to lose a president who by all accounts was a fairly decent head of state, it was at least encouraging that there was no violence and the succession of the vice president to acting president was smooth and orderly; too often in africa and elsewhere these types of situation devolve into a crisis.

i'm currently in lusaka nailing down the final details of the job i'll be working for my last 8 or so months of service. i have finally gotten everything arranged, which is a relief as i've been working on it for a while. i'll send you more details on the job later, the biggest aspect of the transfer is that i'll be leaving my village earlier than expected.

a large part of what makes my village life so interesting at times is, of course, the people who live there. one of my favorites is a man named ba zungo. he's a retired school teacher who probably weighs in at 90 lbs. soaking wet; he's about 5'5" maybe, his face is deeply lined and his balding head is studded with tight tufts of white hair. he has a strange habit of screwing up one side of his mouth when he speaks which gives his face a lopsided appearance during conversations, an impression that becomes even more pronounced when you notice he is missing two of his front teeth on the right side of his mouth. i'm assuming he can walk normally but i've rarely seen it because he staggers everywhere he goes as he is perpetually drunk on kacasu, a village-brewed moonshine that can literally make you go blind or worse--the fact that ba zungo is still alive is a testament to the stunning tenacity of the human body.

ba zungo gained brief notoriety in a small circle of my pcv friends when shawn, richard, and joel were all at my house one day. ever the gentleman, ba zungo lurched into my yard to greet the visitors, and immediately asked them why they couldn't assist him financially. they for their part asked him why he didn't spend the money he used on kacasu to meet his other needs. ba zungo straightened up, blinking owlishly for several seconds as he pondered this impertinence; then, a look of triumph flashed across his face as he hit upon the ideal retort. turning to shawn, thrusting a finger at his pendant-adorned neck, ba zungo parried with his own query: "let me ask you a question. what is that necklace?" so that gives you an idea of what a thrill it is to talk to ba zungo, it is regularly the highlight or lowlight of my day.

a short time ago i happened across him early in the morning looking particularly sharp; his shirt, rolled up at the cuffs to hit just below his wrist, were clean, his trousers bunched around the waist by his cinched-up belt looked pressed, and his vest was only missing two buttons. i remarked on how smart he looked and he launched into a long soliloquy about how hard zambians work and how he in particular toils night and day, but when he gets dressed up no one asks him to work. reflecting that this seemed like a solid strategy for shirking one's duties, i said goodbye and we parted ways. later that day many of my villagers gathered to help build a nearby house. ba zungo, now thoroughly drunk, saw me and told me he was on his way to change as he now was going to be doing some 'rough' work and he didn't want to spoil his clothes. he went on at length about how difficult the job would be and how messy he was going to get until i managed to shoo him gently out of my yard. even with all his claims about his work ethic, however, i still wasn't surprised when i looked over about an hour later and there was ba zungo, sitting on the ground and shouting orders at everyone that they were all ignoring. i decided to walk by the house for a closer look on my way to the river; ba zungo, apparently exhausted from hindering other people's work all day, was now stretched out flat in the shade while about ten men, all pouring down sweat, bustled around constructing the house in the intense heat. i laughed and filed away the memory to tease ba zungo with the next time he claimed to work hard; however, i'd underestimated him; as i walked away he spotted me from his supine position, and his thin voice floated after me: "you see ba joshua? this is how we africans work."

i hope all is well in the states, i know things are great in new england right now, given the boston sports teams' successes. i've spent hours hunched over the computer trying to download clips of red sox and patriots games, cursing slow internet and drinking up every 2 second clip i manage to watch. it's a great time to be a new england fan, it just figures i'm half a world away while it's happening.

i am currently down in lusaka, we've just had TOT (training of trainers, part of peace corps' ongoing love affair with acronyms) which is basically a logistics meeting for all the trainers who will be helping with the new intake of volunteers due in june. i'll be helping to train the life group for the last 3 weeks of training, should be fun. this also is a reminder that i now have been in zambia for a full year, seems incredible.

my friend joel has left, back to the land of milk and honey. we had a great time while he was here, the presence of not one but two muzungus in muyembe really thrilled the children--they got some quality white man watching in. joel and i started playing frisbee on the soccer pitch when we didn't have much else to do, giving us an opportunity to showcase our 2 inch vertical leaps, mediocre running ability and lead hands. the first time we played i looked up after the first few tosses to see knots of children literally sprinting towards us to get a look at what we were doing. every frisbee game after that we'd be surrounded by kids which made it difficult to chase down errant tosses--a problem since 90% of our throws could be categorized as such. once we grew tired, though, it was nice to have them around as they would scamper after particularly bad throws as well as the occasional hat hurled in frustration. plus, the game was so foreign to them they probably didn't realize you aren't supposed to allow the frisbee to bounce of your hand/knee/face or launch it 20 feet over your partner's head.

last week the life/rap programs in luapula held a week-long workshop for village counterparts on a variety of subjects. it was a good time and beneficial i think, there were several interesting discussions about gender. it is funny to hear zambians air certain opinions on the topic, mostly because we westerners have been trained to be so highly sensitive about the subject; zambians, however, will blithely bust out with a sexist comment. as the only american male at the workshop it was sometimes up to me to try to counter some of those opinions since the american girls probably didn't have as much credibility in zambian eyes. one counterpart in all seriousness opined that good nutrition lessens divorce since "women aren't so difficult, if they're well-fed they will be happy." knowing i should say something, i broke in and offered that that was probably only true if there was chocolate involved. somehow, the girls later forgot to thank me for defending them.

we always try to incorporate hiv/aids discussions into every workshop we have, simply because all other development work we try to do is pointless if zambia doesn't start halting the epidemic that is absolutely crippling the country. so, hiv/aids education is critical and serious, but there are moments when it is difficult to maintain the somber face the topic deserves; i usually find myself wondering what the appropriate facial expression should be when watching a zambian counterpart struggle to demonstrate the proper condom application method using whatever model we have had to press into service (a bike pump once, usually bananas or cucumbers--a pcv once used a bottle of beer in a bar. he told me later that he was feeling pretty good about his extension technique until he tried to fill a condom with a liter of water to prove his boast about how strong condoms are. the condom broke, spilling water all over the floor and leaving him to try and convince a skeptical crowd that he'd been using one that had expired).

we recently had our province-wide meetings; me, shawn, richard, maneesh, and parker all decided to kill and roast a pig as we'd done during manfest '06. we spent a lot of time bragging about how this pig would be the best pork anyone had ever had, since we'd done so well at shawn's the one time we'd tried it (we now understand that that particular success was what is commonly referred to as "blind luck"). i killed the pig and we then convinced the guard to clean it, who finished the job about 3 times as quickly as we could have. we stuck it in the ground and continued raising expectations of magnificent pork among the other pcv's. about 14 hours later, with an expectant crowd gathered around, we pulled the pig out. silence...and then richard turning to erin and discreetly inquiring if she could run to the store and get 5 extra bottles of barbecue sauce. the pig was nowhere near cooked, a serious blow to the assembled male egos. several rash promises were made (mostly be me and shawn) to eat the thing anyway to prove all the complaining crybabies wrong but cooler heads prevailed and we ended up butchering the thing and roasting it like crazy. the pork turned out ok but what little faith the girls had in our culinary abilities was forever destroyed.

well, very sorry it's been so long since i've written, i don't have a very good excuse for my apathy other than that i feel like there's not too much going on that's worth writing about. i work in an office all day now in front of a computer, and most of the time feel very little like a zambian peace corps volunteer, seeing as the essence of that experience is getting dirty and smelly for weeks on end in the bush, emerging to eat enough dairy to get sick, and then heading back to the village. however, lusaka is proving to be a lot of fun of the more conventional variety; there is a large community of western aid workers, embassy staff, etc., who live here and manage to keep themselves entertained--braiis (cookouts), ultimate frisbee, the hash (a group of people who get together and run pre-laid out courses that are deliberately confusing so most people get lost--all for the sheer pleasure of it...weird, i know) and other activities along those lines. the beauty of it is that, specifically with americans, there is an instant bond and the feeling of kinship that comes with being countrymen in a different country--that feeling is so strong that many of them are even willing to cart peace corps volunteers around in their vehicles and overlook the fact that we're the american equivalent of poor relations with bad table manners.

my new job is in the public health sector, a field i knew next to nothing about before starting this job, so i've been learning a lot. the program has a heavy emphasis on anti-retroviral therapy and antenatal care; as i've spent most of my life being largely grossed out by the idea of childbirth, i've had to spend a lot of time with a dictionary figuring out what all the terms associated with antenatal care mean...however, discovering, for instance, what 'meconium' is has not helped me in the grow-up-about-childbirth category at all. since smartcare (the name of the project i'm with) concerns electronic medical records, many of the people i work with are software/computer guys--there's actually only one other person in the office without a computer background, so i spend a lot of time exchanging eye rolls from across the room with her. pretty much the only way to confuse me more than i am when dealing with antenatal terms is to use some software programming lingo around me. on the rare occasion when i haven't successfully avoided a software-related task, i find myself during the briefing meetings trying to take my cue from people who know what's going on: i'll watch them out of the corner of my eye, and if they nod in agreement to something that's been said i'll nod as well in what i hope is a sage manner, and throw in a concurring grunt if their nodding seems to be particularly committed. the irony is, of course, that i used similar methods in the village when i was confused, so it's a technique i've perfected.

over easter i went down with a group of pcvs to livingstone in southern province, to see victoria falls. this was my third time down there so i'd seen the falls before but had never done a proper tour of them, and decided to do it this time. the night before i went a girl who had gone earlier told me she spent the entire time they were at the face of the falls simply shouting "it's intoxicating!" well, that actually proved to be a pretty good description of the experience. in tonga, the language of the tribe in that area on the zambian side of the zambezi river, the falls are called mosi-oa-tunya, "the smoke that thunders." david livingstone reportedly said upon first seeing them "...scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight;" i wasn't able to muster anything quite that poetic, although i took a stab at it with "holy crap, they're massive." and i was right, they are massive, about a mile wide and 360 feet tall, the water plume it sends up can sometimes be seen 30 miles away, and during peak flow times about 105,000 cubic feet per second of water plummet over the falls. obviously, though, numbers don't begin to capture the size and power of victoria falls that you experience when you're close up against them.

the falls stretch in a gently curving fashion all the way across the zambezi river, the far side being lost in the mist. livingstone island, a small patch of tangled, heavy vegetation perched on top of craggy sheets of bare rock sits directly in front of the falls, only about 200 feet away, and offers an unparalleled view and the opportunity to get completely drenched. there is a small clearing where crowds of people congregate before heading down the trail that takes you over the bridge and onto the island; here, people who have just returned from walking the trails are wringing out their clothing and checking to see if their cameras survived the trip, while tourists preparing to head down the trails are donning rainjackets and wrapping their electronic gear in plastic. my group stopped here briefly so we could make similar preparations; i opted for a stylish red sox poncho (some of my more low-brow companions claimed to be embarrassed by it; normally that type of mis-guided remark would upset me, but this time i simply reponded with the observation that they're stupid).

as you start down the trail the rock path starts to become slick with moisture, and soon the overhanging branches are shedding heavy drops of water on you. there is a steady roar and you can glimpse through the trees a mountain of churning water, and then you step out from the relative protection of the woods and into one of the bare overlooks jutting out over the edge of the gorge. chunks of greenish-white water tumble slowly over the lip of the falls and disappear into the fog below, and a perpetual haze of mist comes streaming back up with force, as if fired from a water cannon. the slick black face of the cliff off to your right has swathes of soggy moss clinging to it, made into tenuous islands by the streams of water gushing down the surface of the rock. the trees toss and sway in the wind churned up by crashing water, the same wind that is sending sheets of fog swirling around you and driving heavy rain onto your head and shoulders, all in the midst of a bitingly sunny day. you turn and look at your friends; the closest ones have an exhilarated look on their faces that are flushed red from being pelted by water and wind, their eyes are squinting against the onslaught and their soaked hair is plastered down on their heads. farther away your friends are fuzzy smudges in the mist until they get closer and their bodies begin to take on definition, the same silly grin creasing their faces that you know is plastered on your own.

then you step onto the cable bridge that leads to livingstone island; it hangs there over a gorge, in front of the face of the falls, streams of water flowing down it ankle-deep in places; pot-bellied indian men with their shirts off are dancing and laughing in the driving fog, kicking and splashing in the pooled water like children after a rainstorm. you lean over the edge of the bridge with a hand raised to protect your eyes that are being pelted so insistently with water; a slightly dizzy feeling grips you as you confront a wall of angry water whose dimensions can't be discerned as they're cut off by the mist, a wall barreling its way down into the gorge. your disorientation is increased by the confusion of competing gusts of wind striking you from below, behind, above, and in front, and you're completely overwhelmed with the giddiness of being in the grip of an unimaginably powerful force. it is, in a word, intoxicating.

so, victoria falls is beautiful, though the experience is much more than simply viewing them, the sensations you experience in the mist and the rain and the wind are equally important. it's the only natural wonder of the world i've seen, and it was all i think a wonder of the world should be. as always, you'd be much better off seeing it for yourself rather than taking my word for it. i hope you are all well. best, josh

it's been a whirlwind month or so, i'm back in lusaka after a lot of traveling. it looks like now i'll be starting my new job in the middle of february as there have been some problems finding housing for me here in the city--in the meantime i'll take the opportunity and go out to eastern province to visit some friends there.

this account of the last month is going to be more of an 'impressionist' piece, basically an excuse to transgress even more rules of proper (i.e. good) writing than i normally do.

four of us headed to kasanka national park in the middle of december to watch the annual migration of straw-colored fruit bats. there is a two-month period every year when, for reasons no one's sure of, a swarm of approximately 12 million of these bats migrate to a small forest in kasanka national park. every evening they leave the shelter of the forest en masse to feed on fruit in the surrounding areas; i've been to watch twice, and the spectacle has not gotten any less amazing. we walked with a guide out to the edge of a plain that borders the forest in question; right around dusk a few bats started flapping their way up out and out of the treeline. that must have been some sort of cue for the main body of bats, because suddenly an absolute swarm of black dots swirled into the area and started towards us--being from maine i couldn't help but be reminded of a massive cloud of black flies. for 45 minutes about 12 million bats that can reach up to 1 kg in weight each streamed over our upturned, gaping faces, a perforated torrent bobbing and weaving but all moving in the same general direction. it ended as abruptly as it had begun with just a few stragglers flapping their way out of the woods and into the darkness, leaving us still mumbling incisive observations like 'wow, that rocked,' and 'that's a lot of freaking bats.'

we returned to our campsite and crawled into our tents; i'd strategically placed mine on a slightly damp, muddy-ish bit of ground thinking it'd be softer. what i somehow failed to think about was that this is the middle of the rainy season, and damp, muddy-ish ground at the base of gradually up-sloping land just above a swamp might potentially be a natural drainage area. all of this did occur to me at around 2 am when the bottom of the tent started rippling like a waterbed and we were forced to wade our way out of a newly-formed river that would probably get marked on most maps. we spent a cramped and cold night in the land cruiser with me huddling in the back, trying to hide from the accusing glares i knew the others were firing into the dark at me.

after that adventure/misadventure, we drove to kapiri mposhi and got on a train for dar es salaam. it took about 45 hours total to get there, most of which was marked by a lot of boredom and sleeping. there were some fun moments, such as when we passed into tanzania and found ourselves without any way of communicating with the people selling food outside the train. doug had gotten his hands on a swahili phrasebook and kept trying out different phrases, most of which were met with puzzled stares. the rest of us tried a melange of english, bemba, nyanja, and lunda, figuring that by talking slowly and loudly and enunciating clearly, people who had no experience at all with those languages would be able to understand us (on an entirely unrelated side note: back when joel was still visiting we went to the kala camp that houses congolese refugees. we started talking to a small group of boys, none of whom was older than 10 probably: i perpetrated my bemba on them, joel spoke with them in french, their native language is swahili, and they understand some english. so, these pre-teens knew 3 1/2-4 languages...great, i thought, now i can feel inadequate in 2 more languages besides bemba.) doug soldiered on with his own method though, at one point leaning almost entirely out the train window in pursuit of a chipati, mumbling unintelligible swahili at a street vendor while nicole supervised the process. nicole: 'that's not going to work doug, even if he understands you you're not going to understand his response.' doug, ignoring her, continued butchering swahili until nicole poked her head out the window: 'iwe. chipati. CHI-PA-TI?'

fortunately food was sold on the train, otherwise we would have starved to death. also fortunately, the train travels through selous game reserve, the largest reserve in the world, just before reaching dar es salaam. we saw giraffes, zebras, impala, warthogs, etc., as we cruised slowly by, lending some excitement to the monotony. from dar we took a ferry to stone town in zanzibar island, the largest of a cluster of islands collectively known as zanzibar. the island is outrageously beautiful, i felt the entire time as if i were living in a postcard. the whole island is ringed almost entirely by beaches--white sand, tall palms with thin, softly curved trunks that look as though they're constantly blowing in a gentle breeze, bright turquoise and green water, small thatched shade shelters, and arches and rock formations carved by the ocean into the mostly-coral shoreline. stone town itself is an interesting mixture of the old and new--narrow, twisted streets paved with cobblestones, the drab gray, soaring buildings that give off a slight air of neglect and antiquity crowding right up to the streets. looking up from street level there are only narrow slices of brilliant blue sky to be seen between the buildings, along with the wrought iron balconies that stud the faces of the structures and the tall, slatted black shutters swinging out above the street. arabic script flows along the sides of the buildings and above the doors of the mosques, through which barefoot men in orderly rows can be glimpsed genuflecting towards mecca. the dull, humming drone of the three-times-daily call to prayer echoes down the streets and hangs in the humid air. bundles of black wires snake up the sides of the building to connect to the antennae and satellite dishes poking into the sky from the jumble of tin roofs, each one a different shade of rust. men in white flowing robes with beards stride along the streets next to women wrapped completely in multi-colored hijabs but for their faces, clutching, incongruously enough, expensive cellphones and handbags. indian men and women, black africans and white, gawking tourists perpetually in danger of being run down by a scooter or large, rough wooden wheelbarrows piled high with goods pushed by men shouting warnings round out the population. the busier areas are chaotic, loud, and very exciting.

we made our way to the eastern side of the island to a place called jambiani. we stayed for the evening at a spacious, whitewashed house with columns out front and the sandy beach running right up to the porch. i wandered out into the warm night and sat in a reclining chair, gazing up through the palms at the bright expanse of stars stretching from horizon to horizon. as i dug my feet into the sand the palm fronds overhead clattered lightly together in the soft breeze, making a sound like rainfall, punctuated by the crash of the breakers against the beach about 25 yards ahead of me, the white foam from the waves glimmering dully in the dark. the owner of the place sliced up a pineapple for us and we chewed on the sweet, juicy pulp contemplatively, i for my part wondering how i'd been so lucky to end up in a place so beautiful.

the next two days were spent in bwejuu which was equally beautiful before we headed back to stone town. some more impressions of those following days: dancing on the beach during new years, fireworks spiralling up into the night sky and shattering over the applauding crowd, then falling asleep on the beach to the sounds of music, surf, and the quiet laughter and chatter of the people spread about over the beach. scubadiving, swimming along in a silent blue world, watching brilliantly-colored fish move over the surface of the mounded coral that rose in lumps from the sandy floor of the ocean, twisting slowly onto my back and watching platinum air bubbles with highlights of silver tumble and roll their way towards the surface. columns of small silver fish rising above my head, the entire formation flashing as the filtered rays of the sun caught their sides as they darted collectively at our approach. the gaunt ribs of a shipwreck looming out of the dull blue smudge of the water in front of me, a few small kicks lifting myself up and into a hole in the oyster-festooned side of the vesssel, allowing the current to pull me down through the body of the wreck, admiring the shattered remnants of the craft now chunky with marine growth, threading my way through the long fuzzy fingers of brightly-hued kelp stretching towards the surface and swaying slowly in the current. lying sprawled on the hard canvas canopy of the boat, letting the bright sun dry us off as we munched on falafel and spicy potato balls, the deep blue of the ocean spreading all around us, pitching us back and forth in the swells, islands dotting the horizon. standing under the shade of a massive tree at the end of a spice tour as a man with a sharp knife moved through our group offering us chunks of local fruits--pineapple, jackfruit, papaya, mango, oranges, limes, the juice running down our forearms. visiting the night fish market where all the local seafood is offered, each small wooden stand illuminated with lanterns and candles, piling a paper plate high with kebabs of barracuda, snapper, shark, king marlin, tuna, calamari, octopus, lobster, mussels, crab legs, all cooked up on the small wrought-iron braais and washed down with sugarcane juice. sleeping on the topmost deck of the ferry back to dar es salaam, 5 of us sprawled in a corner being rocked to sleep by the slow rolling of the boat. piling back into the train, exhausted, a little sunburned, sand infiltrated throughout our luggage, broke, saddened at leaving, yet still slightly jubilant and wildly happy at the experience we'd all just enjoyed.

hopefully you got a little taste of what it's like to travel to zanzibar, although i honestly can't begin to do any of it justice...it's just something you have to experience for yourself. i've been lucky enough to travel to a lot of amazing places, and though i debate back and forth with myself on this one, i think zanzibar so far was the best. if you ever get the opportunity...GO!!

I hope this email finds you well, I’m fine although a bit harried from trying to make all the last-second preparations for leaving my site. I’ll officially be leaving muyembe village on December 17, so just a few short days left. the following are a few odds and ends i've been meaning to mention in previous emails but never really got around to.

I keep waiting for the village to feel differently now that I’m about to leave, more dramatic some how, but it doesn’t. life continues on pretty much the same as always, with me bumbling my way through the village experience. I’ve told all my close friends that I’m leaving, their disappointment and sadness at hearing the news has been slightly gratifying but mostly painful. I’ve shared a lot of adventures, funny moments, mis-steps, and cultural understandings and misunderstandings with all of them. It is difficult to cultivate a friendship with most Zambians beyond a certain level because of any number of barriers—race, gender, culture, class, language, etc. but with some of my friends we were able to get beyond those, and the results were incredibly rewarding, allowing me a longer glimpse into Zambian life and the companionship of people with whom I could have an honest conversation about difficult topics.

One such friend is bana kaunda, the lady I wrote about some time back who lost her oldest daughter to a stomach ailment. Because of the barriers to friendship mentioned earlier, some people are hesitant to approach me to talk, ask if I wanted to join in an activity, etc., but that distance was never a problem with bana kaunda—she was always at ease with me and didn’t hesitate to ask if I wanted to be involved. She would wander over, for instance, and ask if I’d like to help her pound cassava (of course I said “no, that’s woman’s work,” but I appreciated the gesture nonetheless), or, just recently, if I’d like to observe a pre-marriage ceremony.

Realizing that this was a chance to add to my already impressive record of challenging Zambian gender stereotypes, I agreed. my status as a muzungu, my whiteness, and the fact that I was willing to take pictures of it all granted me exemption from the normal restrictions on male participation in this sort of thing, an informal ceremony intended to prepare a young girl for her impending marriage. The girl has to remain solemn at all times and immediately obey all instructions from the collection of banacimbusas—older, respected female teachers responsible for guiding the younger women of the village—who are conducting the proceedings. It was funny to watch these dignified women, quite drunk, squabbling about the details of the different rituals, dancing, laughing, and generally behaving as any group of friends the world over do when enjoying themselves. One old lady in particular was constantly hustling her stout body about, shouting orders at the girl, dancing, singing and laughing, her lined face lit with energy. At one point during her dancing she got a bit carried away and began hiking her chitenge above the knee-level threshold deemed acceptably modest in Zambian society. The other bamayos shrieked with laughter at her to stop, echoing the silent scream I’d emitted inside my own head. All in all it was a fascinating time and I was very fortunate to be allowed to watch—to my knowledge I’m the only male in peace corps zambia who’s observed this sort of thing (plenty of female pcv’s have).

I don’t think I’ve ever written about my charcoal-starting travails, mostly because it’s not that interesting and reflects badly on my ability to perform simple functions. Suffice to say there have been multiple occasions when it took me more than 2 hours to cook a meal, highlighted by me nearly hyperventilating after spending minutes blowing with all my strength on a single stubborn spark. However, I’ve persevered, refused to be beaten and finally conquered the problem: I bought a kerosene stove. It works pretty well although there are a few design flaws, most noticeably the one that enables it to try to kill me by emitting fireballs. The first time it happened I was cooking breakfast and received a glancing blow after I’d somehow convinced myself it was a good idea to bend over the burner to get a closer look. I was left looking singed but a good deal warier of kerosene stoves.

We’ve had a mini-drought that’s just broken, thankfully, in the last week and a half or so. Obviously, rain is hugely important for agricultural purposes but is also crucial for replenishing the nearby river that provides all the drinking, bathing, and washing water. The swimming hole I bathe in had gotten particularly disgusting, the last few times I was in there I couldn’t see my hands held at my waist below the surface—whenever I’d get water up my nose I could practically feel the schisto attacking my brain directly.

The higher water level also makes it easier for me to fetch all my water. I use an old 20 liter kerosene can that is really heavy when full. To fill it entirely when the river is low I have to clamber out on slippery rocks into the middle and then try to hop back on the same rocks while lugging this heavy, unwieldy can. I never attempt this when people are around to watch as the potential for humiliation, which despite my frequent interaction with I’ve never gotten entirely used to, is simply too great. If people are around I assume a pathetic, bewildered air (easy as it’s only incrementally removed from my normal village expression) and wait for someone to take pity on me and order their child to fill my jerry can.

Zambia has the women’s world featherweight boxing champ, esther phiri. She’s a national hero and her bouts attract huge television audiences inside of zambia. She recently fought and beat a u.s. contender, opening me up to some good-natured ribbing from the Zambians I was watching the fight with and with whom I’d been trying to talk smack. The concept of ‘talking trash’ hasn’t really taken hold here, and it soon lost its thrill after the third or fourth time I would make an outrageous claim, something like ‘I hope esther’s enjoying her last few moments of being able to walk,’ and all the Zambians in the room would pause and give the comment the type of thought usually reserved for an idea with actual merit. when the fight was over i left, the first time in my life i've received hugs and handshakes from fans cheering for a person i'd just spent an hour trying to insult.

I attended esther’s previous fight in Lusaka when she beat a Romanian challenger. The title bout was a big disappointment with the challenger hurting her arm halfway through the 2nd round and conceding, but the 3 or 4 preliminary fights were a lot of fun. There was a huge guy several rows from us dressed in a fatigue hat, tank top, cargo pants, and chunky boots. Throughout each fight he would shout ‘jab, jab, jab, jab’ incessantly and so earnestly I felt like he’d be mortally offended if the boxer didn’t heed his advice. In between rounds he would turn to his companions and regale them on the same theme, waving his arms about and bobbing his head forward with the force of his conviction: ‘the jab, it is important. Yes, very important.’ At one point he rushed shouting to ringside, apparently so the boxer in the corner could more fully grasp the nuances of his advice. The security guards posted there to prevent just such occurrences dallied conspicuously on their way to remove him, although they assiduously attacked any smaller troublemakers.

Apart from the delight I took in watching the proponent of jabbing, the fights themselves were interesting. I was struck at how boxers moved when they were in tight with their opponent—I could only compare it to how I’d seen a snake dance about with its body raised off the ground as if a wire were running the length of it. The fighters would move the same way, erect in the middle of a hail of blows, moving with a fluid but incredibly rapid smoothness that would necessitate jerky or abrupt movements in non-boxers. When the boxers would start to really slug it out the crowd noise would swell into a mob roar punctuated, of course, by the bellowing from a few rows over: ‘jab, jab, iwe, jab!’

i hope you're all well. have a merry christmas and a happy new year.

i'm currently in lusaka, i just returned from about 9 days of hanging out with my parents and sister in cape town, south africa. it was a great time that i'll probably write more about later, for now i'm going to mention a few things about life back here in zambia.

a lot of you have asked exactly what i'll be doing in my new job in lusaka; the short answer is, i don't know. the program is relatively new and just starting to go nation-wide, so there are a lot of as yet unspecified work areas within the program that i'll be able to work on. the project itself has been initiated by the center for disease control (cdc) with pepfar (president's emergency plan for aids relief) funding. the cdc contacted peace corps and asked if there were any volunteers who could help them on the project as they needed people with village level experience, people who knew how to interact with villagers, explain concepts simply and clearly, organize village meetings, etc. since my peace corps group has an overlap problem that is forcing us out of our villages early, it worked out perfectly for me to join up with the cdc project. the title of the project is smartcare, and it has developed a small card with an embedded computer chip that will hold a person's entire medical history. the card can be read by a specially designed software program, so if a patient enters any clinic in zambia with smartcare capabilities, his medical information can be accessed by the clinic officer. currently all medical records are found in paper exercise books stacked in the clinics (if they bother to keep records at all), which obviously presents any number of problems. if the smartcare program is successfully implemented in zambia, it will be much simpler to track disease statistics (including hiv) and will help clinic officers accurately diagnose health problems and prescribe the proper treatment. it's a colossal undertaking as only 5 pilot clinics have smartcare currently, and the cdc has now started the process of getting the program into every clinic and hospital in the country. so, i and a couple other pcv's (and some ngo's and the zambian ministry of health, they'll help a little too) will be helping them do that in some capacity or another. so, in mid-january i will be moving to lusaka and start working with the cdc. obviously, leaving so early is bringing sooner than expected a lot of the emotions i thought i wouldn't have to deal with for a while about moving from my village. to keep it simple, it's a roller coaster, with doubt, sadness, guilt (that ever-present friend of all pcv's), happiness, etc., all making themselves felt. but, ultimately i know this is a great opportunity to do some valuable work.

i've mentioned before zambians' kindness and hospitality, but something i don't think i wrote about was that this concern for muzungus' well-being seems to be shared even by strangers. my pet theory concerning this phenomenon is that all white people are seen as foreigners (the meaning of the word muzungu, a word directed at me approximately 6 million times a day), which means they're guests, which means hospitality usually demands that they be treated helpfully. i left my bike in kawambwa one day to accompany tom, my missionary friend, to kazembe to look at the orphanage he was building. on our way back it began to pour, and i had visions of my bike getting entirely drenched. when we arrived at the store where i'd left it the bike was sitting underneath the roofed porch and a zambian man i'd never seen before was drying it off with a rag.

similarly, i was recently riding in a minibus up to kawambwa and hating every second of it. my knees were ground into the seat ahead of me and i was carrying my heavy bag on my lap as there was no place to set it. people were pressing into me from the side and behind, and sweat was trickling down my back while the hot, stagnant air reeked of body odor and fish. then, we drove into a rain storm and suddenly water was pouring down the side of my face from a leak just above my head. the entire bus erupted into a chorus of 'tsks, tsks' and the man behind me thrust his cupped hands out to try to catch the stream. there was a general stirring as people squirmed and twisted to make way for a bucket to be passed forward, which the man held up to the leak until it stopped. i slumped forward, wet and still hot, tired, miserable, and wishing the ride was over, but with one difference: now i was smiling.

we recently had a week-long workshop in mansa and instituted a rule with punitive intent: if you were late to sessions, you had to sing and dance in front of the entire group. the only problem is, zambians love singing and dancing and are blessed with virtually no self-consciousness; the only people hustling to their seats were the americans while the zambians continued to amble in leisurely. several times, a zambian would be serving his sentence in front of the group and be joined by other zambians of their own free will. at one point dan's two counterparts were up singing and dancing; dan, being new to the country, trying to be supportive and engaged, and forgetting that he is white, joined them. now, i've reflected a lot on zambians' previously mentioned un-self-consciousness, and concluded that part of it is that they're tremendous dancers, so they have no reason to be embarrassed. this is not true for white, male pcv's, however, of which dan is one. furthermore, sometimes a pcv's self-delusion concerning his dancing skills, coupled with zambians' supportive attitude and general unwillingness to criticize a muzungu, can result in some truly heinous dance moves. dan entered the fray and immediately perpetrated a flamenco/macarena hybrid dance on the unsuspecting crowd; this being a professional occasion i had to content myself with chortling behind my hand and biting back the taunts that instantly sprang to mind.

but here again is one of the beauties of living in zambia: it's okay to be a rotten dancer. no matter how wretchedly uncoordinated and awkward one looks on the dance floor, you're still going to be a rock star--a standing joke in pc circles is that the first time a volunteer dances in the states he will find himself alone in the middle of the dance floor, gyrating clumsily and wondering why he's not being mobbed by happy people wanting to dance with him. so, later that night as i found myself with my arms slung around the shoulders of two sweaty zambian guys as we hopped around the dance floor in time to the beat of euro-techno music, i had reason, not for the first time, to be grateful that they don't mind terrible dancing here.

i'm in lusaka for about a week for our mid term medical examinations, after a year all pcv's come down here to get poked and prodded and searched for parasites, diseases, etc. usually some volunteers get a nasty surprise when test results come back, but fortunately most of the stuff that gets picked up is easily dealt with.

i came down a few days early to explore getting a position with an ngo or some other sort of aid organization. the next group of life'ers coming into the country will get here in february--this is the group slated to replace my intake, so we have to leave our villages earlier than expected to make way for them. so, while it will be sad to leave my village earlier than expected, it is a great opportunity to get an interesting position with one of the many organizations that do aid work in this country. usually ngo's are fairly willing to take on pcv's as we're university graduates from the west, we have development experience, and, most importantly, we're free labor since we'll still be supported by peace corps. currently i'm looking at trying to work with iom, crs, or world vision, although the difficulty so far has been making contact with someone in these organizations in the position to make a decision about taking me on. but, i'm hopeful something will work out, it's an exciting opportunity.

this email is going to be entirely random as i really don't have much to report, so i'll just write a bit about a few things i find funny/interesting about my life over here...if you look for a coherent theme to these stories, you'll be disappointed.

work in the village is going well, i've been doing mostly dry season gardening projects and seed multiplication for certain plants. people have some time on their hands right now as harvest season is over and planting season has not yet begun, so traditionally this is when volunteers have the chance to do most of their work.

we recently got some karaoke cd's that can be played on our dvd player at the mansa house, an addition that has brought a whole new element to the social life of the house. it's generally agreed that i'm the most enthusiastic singer, which is a bit like getting the 'most team spirit' award for sports--it's the only nice thing that can be said about someone's efforts. but hey, i'll take it.

i've been slowly beginning to get the knack of traveling by minibus around lusaka; it's not for the faint of heart, that's for sure. the busses themselves are uniformly ramshackle, closest in size to a 16 passenger van in the states except narrower with a lower roof. they're moving masterpieces of jerry-rigging, testaments to the ingenuity and 'makedo-itevness' of whomever's in charge of keeping these things running...i don't know how they keep it all together without duct tape, but they manage. occasionally the conductor will have to kick and punch and pull at the side sliding door to get it to open, and then jam it back into place when it needs to be closed. many of the windows are broken out and taped over with thin plastic, and often the interiors are stripped so just bare metal is showing all about. i once sat with my feet on a piece of metal flooring that was removed to reveal the gas tank directly below; i've watched a gang of men lift a minibus off a curb where it had gotten stuck, and it's practically standad operating procedure to have to give the busses a push to get them moving. they cram 4 or 5 people onto benches designed for 3, then go careening around town blaring their horns, committing any number of traffic violations and ill-advised maneuvers, leaping out of the bus to try to convince potential passengers to risk their lives with them, and fighting with other bus conductors. they speak mostly nyanja here in lusaka so i don't understand most of what they're yelling at each other, but often it needs no interpretation, the basic gist of an obscenity usually translates effectively.

bargaining over prices is a fact of life here, one i usually don't enjoy very much. as a white person you're instantly marked as a tourist, and people will often jack up a price accordingly. taxi drivers are the worst for this, often quoting a price that's 2 to 3 times higher than it should be. i love watching another pcv bargain with a taxi driver because everyone has their own method; elly will skewer them with a glare, heave a world-weary sigh, then say "ok, now give me a serious price." some volunteers will browbeat a taxi driver, lecturing them that they shouldn't try to cheat us just because we're white. others will claim they're just a volunteer and don't have the money to pay an outrageous fare. some pcv's critique the quality of the product they're purchasing, pointing out flaws that should merit a lower price. shawn used this technique occasionally. i accompanied him one day on a shopping trip to the market to buy some cloth for his mother. he entered a little stall and asked the price of a chitenge, and was told 10,000 kwacha; as i wandered away to look at another part of the market i heard shawn's opening gambit: "10,000?? that thread had better be made of real gold..."

when quoted the white man's price i usually erupt into laughter like i've been told a great joke, and sometimes i'll even slap the person's shoulder like i get it and hit them with a follow-up joke, like, 'is that the price for a ride or the whole car?' (i didn't say they were good follow-up jokes). my nuclear option is the walk-away, i turn and take a few steps as if i'm prepared to leave, at which point i'm usually called back with a better offer. the walk-away has to be used cautiously though, a few times i haven't been called back when bargaining for some crafts that i really did want; then, of course, my pride wouldn't allow me to return and admit they'd won.

occasionally bargaining over a price becomes a matter of principle, you resent the fact that they tried to cheat you so you find yourself haggling ferociously over something like 500 kwacha, approximately 25 cents. i was in shoprite once and saw shawn waiting grimly by the cashier with a dogged look on his face. i walked over and asked him what he was doing, he replied he'd been waiting about 5 minutes for his change and wasn't going to leave it until he got it. there's a permanent change shortage in this country, and shoprite is notorious for shorting their customers if they don't have enough change. but shawn had had enough of being short-changed and was making a stand, a statement of principle, even. another 5 minutes passed as i waited with him and eventually he wilted in the face of the cashier's greater determination not to give him any more money. we trudged out of the store and i asked him the amount he'd been owed. '100 kwacha,' he replied.

i hope you are all well.

It's been a while since I've written as things have been hectic here. A new intake of volunteers flew in so I've been down in Lusaka for the last couple of weeks helping to train them; we've only just finished getting the last of the new Luapula volunteers placed in their villages. It was interesting to see how they reacted to being dropped out in the bush, it brought back a lot of memories of how I felt more than a year ago when I was placed. For the most part they smiled bravely and waved as we pulled away, but I've been told that almost all the female volunteers cry when they get left, and probably some of the guys as well. Quick tip: should you ever find yourself dropping off a girl in the middle of an African village for the first time, resist the urge to try to be funny. Humor is wildly underappreciated in those situations, as I discovered.

A large group of us attended the Mutumboko ceremony just before I headed to Lusaka to help with training. The Mutumboko is a traditional Lunda ceremony (the people in my area mostly are by tribe Lundas but they speak Bemba because they were conquered by them some time in the past) performed by the Mwatta Kazembe, 1 of 7 paramount chiefs and the 2nd most powerful in all--only the Lozi king in Western Province commands more land and therefore more respect. The ceremony attracts about 10,000 people every year, so it's a big deal. The ceremony is really too complex to give you much of a detailed account of all that happens, so I'll try to hit some of the main points. Basically, it's pandemonium as soon as the Mwatta emerges from his palace. He came out dressed entirely in white with beads, an old Lunda sword, and a cow tail swish hanging off his costume in various places--he looked very Druidic. He followed a set path to the river with various stops to perform small rituals of varying significance, most of which was lost on me. At one point he crawled and rolled in the dust towards a sacred tree, sacrificed food like chicken, cassava, grounduts, etc. to the ancestors living in the river by tossing it all into the water, and was carried on the shoulders of his bodyguards back to the palace (his attendant knelt before him and the Mwatta climbed onto his shoulders. the Mwatta was quite a bit larger than his attendant yet the man gamely rose in slow motion, his whole body swaying and trembling with the exertion. Several minutes later the carrier had to be relieved, after which I'm sure he collapsed somewhere...it was a funny series of events) During this procession a soldier who was part of the protective circle formed around the Mwatta and his entourage by linking their arms together happened to catch my eye. I gave him a grin and a thumbs-up and suddenly he reached back and pulled me into the circle. So, there I was with the Mwatta Kazembe, his bodyguards, and his witch doctors with painted white faces and feathered headdresses. In the 14 months of out-of-placeness I've experienced here, this topped them all so far. But I was having a great time and his entourage was large enough, about 30 strong, that no one really noticed. I was, however, deeply interested to know if my presence so close to the Mwatta was some sort of taboo (only in the last 20 or 30 years have white people been allowed to attend this ceremony at all) that would result in my getting speared when people noticed me. Fortunately, no unpleasantness resulted.

The entire ceremony was basically a sustained shoving match as people jockeyed for the best viewing position. Thousands of people would run, jog, bump, and jostle their way from one station to the next. It was hot and clouds of dust hung suspended over the crowd during the last procession. I had lost contact with the other pcv's during all the commotion, my shirt was soaked through with sweat, the massive slit drum that had accompanied the procession was booming away, and I could taste the fine grit of dust in my mouth as I jogged along a short way behind the Mwatta's entourage. Occasionally they would suddenly stop and he would swish his cow-tail whisk around and do a bit of a shimmy while still sitting on his attendant's shoulders. The crowd lining the way would go wild, cheering, whistling, hooting, and trilling their voices in high-pitched cries. Then the slow, stifling, herky-jerky jog would begin again; this continued until we reached his palace, about a kilometer and a half away. There, the crowd made a rush to accompany the entourage into the palace while the soldiers tried to close the gates, which is how I found myself mashed up against one of the iron doors of the gate after I'd tried to use a massive soldier as a blocker through the rush. I scraped along the door and was basically shoved into the palace grounds by several soldiers behind me trying to get in, the Mwatta went into his palace, and that was it for the morning festivities.

The afternoon ceremony was a succession of different people performing the dance specific to the Mutumboko, culminating with the Mwatta coming out with war hatchet and sword. He danced for a few minutes in an elaborate costume, brandishing his weapons to symbolize the Lundas' victory over one tribe or another in the past. Once he had finished the Mutumboko was officially over...all in all, really interesting stuff.

It's strange to say goodbye to all the Luapula volunteers being replaced by this newest group. For those of you who've been reading my posts all along, you've often heard me mention Shawn, Richard, and Parker, my usual partners in the various expeditions I've undertaken and all of whom are leaving within the next couple of days. It is sad to see them go, but the new group is shaping up to be very solid as well. I'll end here as this post has gotten far too long, hopefully I'll be able to write another in the next month or so as I should be back down in Mansa towards the end of September. Stay well.

I'm currently in mansa on my way back from 4th of July vacation in Livingstone which was good times all around. A big group of pcv's were down there for a few days, all but one of whom was from my intake. so, I got to see some old friends from training for the first time in a while which is always nice.

The highlights of the trip for me were the lunar rainbow and the whitewater rafting. one evening we went down to Victoria Falls to see the rainbow that appears for a few days during every full moon; during the day there's always a rainbow as the falls throw up so much mist, and we were lucky enough to be down there when the moon was bright enough to create a rainbow as well. The rainbow looked like a gray version of a regular rainbow except it was incredibly long, it emerged from the mist in the gorge and traveled all the way up the face of the falls until it curved up and over the lip. The gorge is deep enough and the mist so thick that you couldn't see the rainbow all the way to the bottom, it simply disappeared into gray mist far below. Pretty neat sight, something I didn't realize existed.

The rafting was intense, the Zambezi is one of the best rivers in the world for it. We could only run the second half of the river as the water volume was too heavy for us to shoot the first series of rapids, but the second half was plenty. I've done some rafting in Maine but there were spots on the Zambezi where the water was bigger than anything I'd ever been in before--in fact, there are spots where people go surfing on the waves that are created. At the beginning of one rapids (appropriately dubbed 'the washer machine') we dropped into a big hole which made the wall of white water in front of us appear even larger than it was. I was in the front of the raft and when we hit the raft simply stopped, skewed into the air at about a 45 degree angle, then slid off down the side of the water wall and got completely buried. The guy sitting across from me came flying across the raft and knocked me out into the water. I've grown up around water, am a strong swimmer and was wearing a life jacket and helmet, but as I was getting sucked down through the rapids I experienced several moments of "deep concern" (a guy in the raft with me said I looked scared when I first popped up, but I corrected his misperception). There's one general, down-stream current to the river but there's also a cacophony of other, smaller currents flowing every which way-when you're in the middle of it it's incredibly disorienting. I was surfacing long enough to grab a quick half-breath before I'd get smacked in the face by another wave, spun around and then taken under again. I was finally spit out at the far end of the rapids and floated about in a pool until a kayaker retrieved my bedraggled self and ferried me over to another raft. Once they'd pulled me in I lay on the bottom trying to project an air of nonchalance, an effort hindered by my loud gasping for air and clearly waterlogged state. It was amazing just how massively powerful the rapids were, I'd never experienced anything like it before.

One of my next door neighbors got some batteries for her radio recently and has been playing it full-blast; the kids I hang out with have now taken up dancing as one of their main pastimes. 4 or 5 of them, ranging in ages from probably 3-6, will wander into my yard and start a spontaneous dance party, it's high comedy. Bellies bulging forward and torn shorts flapping around their spindly legs, they crouch bowl-legged and begin slowly, like they're underwater, shimmying their hips and waving their arms back and forth. They're still so young that they aren't able to dance as rapidly or as fluidly as adults, so they mostly resemble small, black old men tottering about the yard. These dancing interludes are quickly becoming the highlight of my days.

I've started a gardening project and seed multiplication program with the smallest and poorest village I work with, called Chifwesa. About 50 people live in the village, their huts scattered throughout the bush, some of them very isolated. I've grown to enjoy more and more visiting them as the people are incredible; the last time I was there 3 different families presented me with armfuls of sweet potatoes and groundnuts. This type of generosity is typical in all villages but more pronounced for whatever reason in this one. Yet I cringe when I see them disappear right before I leave because I know that they're going to get me food to take or to eat there. It is difficult for me as I don't need the food and they very much do. A few times I've even tried sneaking away or leaving abruptly so I wouldn't have to take their food, but every time they make a determined effort to give me something. If someone from their family hasn't already gotten me something the man will tell me to wait while he hustles out to his field and digs up some sweet potatoes or groundnuts for me.

So why don't I simply refuse? Part of it is that it's a custom, a show of respect. But the bigger reason is the pride it gives them. Poverty is largely a corrosive attack on people's dignity; when they present me with a gift that I express appreciation for, it is dignity-confirming--they have something of value that even I, an obscenely wealthy (by their standards) white foreigner enjoys. When I thank them profusely (my gratitude is always genuine; given the circumstances those handfuls of groundnuts and sweet potatoes are absolutely some of the nicest gifts I've ever been given) I can see their faces glow with pride. Accepting their gifts with gratitude and humility may well be one of the most important things I do over here to mitigate the effects of poverty. So I invariably end up biking away from Chifwesa deeply, deeply humbled, ashamed of my own selfishness, and filled with admiration for these people's generosity. I undergo the same experience when I attend church and watch a stream of people move forward to make an offering. The sums themselves are tiny, but taken as a percentage of their income I'd be willing to bet it would shame most people in the west who consider themselves charitable. These villagers are generous in the midst of their need, they give from their want, and it is sometimes staggering to watch.

Well, I've rambled on for long enough, I hope you are all well and enjoyed your 4th of july holiday.

I was actually able to motivate myself and write two posts within the space of a couple of days, first time that's happened I'm pretty sure.

So, a couple of random village stories. These are both taken from my journal for which I apologize, but I promise I will not subject you to 'journal-ly' talk (example: I was watching the sunset today and started thinking about death, and how someday I'll shuffle off this mortal coil...nobody wants to hear that junk, which is why you put it in a journal. Back to the story).

Right now I'm sitting in my chair watching a ragtag band of iwes (children) furiously sweeping my yard, they're setting to with such vigor they've kicked up a small dust storm. This is high comedy marked by collisions, loud cries of "iwe!" (you) and lots of sweeping to cross-purpose as one child will brush the leaves and twigs in one direction only to have another sweep it back into the area just cleared. So, essentially, the yard has been divided into 8 mini-kingdoms, each cleared by sweeping the refuse into the neighboring area.

This all started when I promised the kids clustered around me that I'd give them each a sweetie if they swept my cluttered yard free of the detritus that had collected in my absence (it collects even when I'm here although not as quickly as I'll occasionally kick a bit of it away on my way out of my yard). There was a brief pause as they processed my heavily-accented bemba, sifted through my outrageous sentence structure, and parsed my misplaced inflections; then their faces lit up when the import of my words dawned on them, followed by a stampede out of the yard, bare feet thumping against the packed dirt, laughter and squeals of delight trailing behind them. Silence settled around me, and I imagined birds chirping, crickets singing and a soft breeze shushing through the trees. Then they returned, bursting into my yard wielding makeshift brooms of twigs (the conservationist in me wondered how many bushes' deaths I'd just commissioned because I'm too lazy to sweep my own yard) and began their mostly ineffective but ferocious sweeping. There was one kid standing in the middle of the yard beaming at me, clearly wanting to make sure that I noticed that he was working so he could be justly rewarded later. The problem was that he wasn't really sweeping, he was mostly flailing the ground with a few bedraggled twigs while he maintained his 100 watt, self-satisfied smile directed my way. He either thought I was unfamiliar with what constitutes sweeping (actually, a reasonable conclusion to draw, there is nothing in my village conduct that would have disabused him of that notion) or that I was more interested in form and a pleasant demeanor than actual results. I gave him a sweetie anyways because he made me laugh.

Early one morning joel and I helped one of my village friends, ba Kaunda, to harvest her groundnut (peanut) field. Ba Kaunda is one of the most respected women in the village and a banacimbusa, a teacher of tradition to younger women in the village concerning marriage, keeping house, etc...very important in the village setting. She looks the part as well as she is tall and big boned with high, prominent cheekbones; she is highly educated by Zambian standards and speaks very good English. She is easily my best female friend in the village, which is how I ended up helping her harvest her groundnut field. I was enjoying the time, it was early so the day was still cool and the village mostly quiet. I could look across the river at the dambo (low-lying, swampy area with high elephant grass) and admire the brassy rays of the early morning sun slanting towards us. The work was easy, there were 2 iwes hoeing the plants out of the ridges and piling them together. We would come along after and pick the shells from the plants and deposit them in a large mealie meal sack. Ba Kaunda was plying Joel and I with questions about life in America which we'd do our best to answer, asking in turn about Zambian life for comparison purposes. We covered a lot of ground: wealth, sexual norms, food, grieving, at times laughing at the strangeness of the other culture's traditions or marveling at just how similar we could be. There was a brief pause in the conversation and we worked on in companionable silence until ba Kaunda asked another question: "did you know that while you were gone my daughter died?"

No, I hadn't known. Her oldest daughter had died in Chimpempe while away at school and had been buried there, the body unable to be returned to Muyembe. Ba Kaunda explained that it had been a stomach problem of some sort, nobody seemed to really know but it had killed her daughter quickly. As she was explaining this to me the slightest tremor ran through her voice and she bent quickly over a pile of groundnuts. I stared down at my feet, embarrassed to witness this dignified woman's pain and understanding how awkward and inadequate I was. She shakily finished her story, the hurt almost palpable in the air. I offered my condolences, fully aware that the words I voiced were part of the American grieving ritual where certain stock phrases are expected and used, but which are probably mostly meaningless over here.

I'm hesitant to tell stories like that, which is why my posts are usually filled with only funny (well, attempted funny at least) or innocuous tales. The sad stories happen in a certain context that is usually too difficult to describe in a post. I don't want people to only believe that all is death and despair over here, as nothing could be further from the truth. Yet it is true that tragedy seems to lurk nearer the surface in zambia, and strikes frequently. Mostly, I told this story to someone on the phone who asked me to write it down, so I did. Hope you all are well.

i'm going to apologize ahead of time for this post, i'm a bit wired at the moment from two consecutive long days of public transport and lots of sugar consumed during transit.

easter vacation was an absolute blast. at lake malawi we spent about a week at a place called mayoka village, beautiful and very relaxed. i've decided that one of my favorite things about traveling in africa is the variety and quality of people you bump into. it takes a certain type of traveler to cruise around africa for long periods of time so often there's a feeling of almost instant kinship and camraderie when you run into other travelers. just on this trip alone i met people from germany, sweden, switzerland, u.s.a., iceland, zimbabwe, malawi, britain, canada, lebanon (an older gentleman named kamal who lived in sierra leone for a long time but left when the fighting broke out; he said he made the decision to leave when the hotel he was holed up in got rocketed by the rebels trying to flush out the nigerian peacekeepers hiding in the basement...good call), ecuador, and probably a few i'm forgetting.

i've decided anyone speaking with a british accent can sound sophisticated no matter what, even if they're discussing foot fungus or the like--this led me to wonder if i should start buttressing my arguments that are based on shaky logic with a hint of a british accent.

joel and i spent the first few days of our stay mostly hanging out with kamal and his group until they left and we met a couple of girls, cat and susie, from seattle who, despite thinking that boas are an acceptable fashion accessory, were very cool. we later met two american guys who joined our contingent, one of whom was born and raised in new york but has managed to escape the fate of being a yankees fan (this could be key to breaking the vicious cycle that is being a yankees fan), and in fact has the good sense to be a red sox fan. that's how i found myself one evening discussing red sox minutiae, like who was the second baseman when the sox won the world series (mark bellhorn, better known as "blowhorn" in my circle of maine friends; it defies the imagination how a guy can strike out that much). this type of fascinating discussion inexplicably drove cat away although susie, also fortunate enough to be a sox fan, hung on.

the guy from sweden (andreas) had just recently been expelled from zimbabwe; apparently he spent an evening antagonizing a government official (launching the conversation with "so, i hear you guys are torturing dissidents down here"...subtlety, apparently, is not a skill he has acquired in his extensive travels). it was fascinating to listen to his story as there were two zimbabweans there who work for advocacy groups in that country, one of whom knew the government official in question and let andreas know he'd been extremely lucky to only get expelled from the country. i had mixed feelings about the whole thing. on the one hand it had clearly been unwise, pointless, and self-indulgent; he could simply leave the country, yet the people still there trying to change the system probably had their work made just a bit harder by his conversation. on the other hand, it's hard not to secretly cheer when someone stands up to those arrogant, bombastic jerks currently running zimbabwe. it's saddening to talk to zimbabweans about their country, they speak about how beautiful and modern and free it used to be, an african success story, only to see it now crumble beneath the hand of a tyrant. it is now a virtual police state where torture and beatings and arrests are commonplace, where people simply do not talk about politics in public for fear of being overheard by the secret police. it's tragic, but if mugabe can somehow be removed the country still has the capacity to rebound.

on to happier things. lake malawi is beautiful and massive and has a surprisingly tropical feel to it. you can see mozambique if you look directly across the lake, but it's long enough that looking down it only reveals more water. mayoka village is perched right on the shore of the lake and consists of a scattering of chalets and a big dorm room; the whole complex is built up the side of a hill steep enough that when you're looking out towards the lake from the main dining room/bar/hangout porch area all you can see is water and the far shore, as if the building rests in the water. the place is run by two south africans named gary and catherine, who say the word "cool" in a manner i hope to someday mimic. it's soft and drawn out, accompanied by a beatific smile and nodding head, as if their use of "cool" was an acknowledgment of some greater cosmic truth you had just helped them glimpse.

i am now scuba certified as i took a dive course during my time there. i'm completely hooked, everything is more interesting 12 meters under water. the lake houses about 850 varieties of cichlids--brightly colored fish, usually electric blue although i also saw some that were pure white. what i enjoyed even more than the sensation of swimming through a massive aquarium was the terrain of the lake, huge jumbles of boulders everywhere and cliffs we would swim to and peak over and see only blue turning to darker blue to black, an expanse of nothingness that inevitably fires the imagination and makes you wonder about what exotic creatures could possibly be lurking down there. occasionally we would swim beneath overhangs and watch the air bubbles get caught beneath the rocks; the bubbles have the hard, metallic silver color of mercury and would tumble and undulate across the bottom of the rock and finally escape and drift towards the surface. everything appears graceful underwater, even my multiple faceplants into the sandy bottom when i couldn't "maintain positive bouyancy" (a phrase that i mostly understand). in a word, diving is cooool.

this post is far too long, the people i met on this trip who had a severe enough lapse of judgment to ask me for the blog address are probably already regretting it. i'll try to write later about south luangwa national park which we visited; if we meet someday and you're interested to hear more about lake malawi, mayoka village, et al, i'll be happy to bore you to tears with interminable stories. stay well.

i am currently in lusaka as i begin my easter vacation. we are going first to south luangwa national park in eastern province, then on to lake malawi which is located in, yes, malawi. should be good times.

it is with sadness that i announce the end of moustache march, an annual luapula tradition. it's a fun time but can also have serious implications for our work (parker claims people stopped attending his meetings when he had a moustache last year), social life, and general self-esteem. i am pleased to say that i was the proud owner of one of the "best" moustaches, meaning the most gross looking; others who will not remain nameless (shawn) did not fare as well: it looked like a caterpillar with mange died on his upper lip.

the great (or not so great, depending on with whom you speak) hair experiment has also ended, i am now clean-shaven with a buzz cut for the first time since i've been in country. it was for the best, and may have preempted a threatened haircutting intervention by one of the girls. plus this means i can now attend kim's birthday party, she made a general announcement that anyone with moustaches or other similary unacceptable hair manifestations would not be allowed in the door.

my friend joel has been visiting me for the last month, he was a pcv in guinea but was evacuated after the country began to experience a lot of internal unrest. it's been great having a good friend from home around, we've spent some time at my site but have also been traveling around kawambwa district seeing what there is to see. since joel spent about a year in guinea he's well acquainted with the strangeness that can occur over here sometimes, so he's had no problems adapting to pc zambia life. although, in my opinion, he has actually assimilated a bit too well, as he now professes a love for a maize-based drink called super maheu, a fate that doesn't normally befall someone until they've been in country for a long time and the resulting food desperation and loss of taste buds has set in. joel's poor culinary sensibilities has actually plunged him in the midst of a long-standing feud between shawn and i: shawn claims that super maheu is delicious and can serve as both food and drink (probably because of the floating maize chunks), whereas i claim that liking it is the surest sign one can receive of approaching senility. richard has even joined the fray on shawn's side, something that saddened me and made me realize that things like "logic" "truth," and "sound reasoning" were going to have no currency at all in the discussion. things degenerated to the point that my manliness was questioned: my formerly long, flowing hair and love of musicals aside, i'm as manly as the next guy. an uneasy detente now exists over the subject.

well, i'm going to keep this short as i have pressing business to attend to (i'm watching the red sox season opener!! parker has a friend who'll be watching the game, he wisely decided to tell me about it knowing that if he didn't it would be a serious blow to our friendship). hopefully i'll have time in the next month or so to let you all know how my vacation went and how work is progressing. hope you all are well.

well, it's been quite a while since i have written anything, i've been at my site for an extended period of time so haven't been able to get to the internet. however, i'm hoping to write a bit in the next few days, so maybe that will make up for my delinquency.

my closest pcv friend in luapula province and closest neighbor's name is shawn, you may remember me mentioning him in connection with the pig slaughter during manfest. i may just start following him around every day as some how he gets himself into ridiculous situations on a semi-regular basis, most of which are extremely funny in the re-telling. his latest fiasco began when he got malaria for the second time. malaria hits pretty hard and fast so your decision-making can become rather fuzzy, which apparently was true in this case. shawn took some anti-malaria medication but misread the instructions and ended up swallowing twice the prescribed dosage. as one of his village friends said after shawn told him how much he'd taken, "that's not good." several hours later shawn had a high fever and his heart was racing so his friend, mulonga, decided to take him to the hospital which was about 10 kms away. however, it was 10 o'clock on a moonless night, and trying to navigate a wet bush path with someone on your bike rack in the dark is just about the least pleasant biking experience you can have. to complicate matters, shawn weighs more than mulonga so the front of the bike kept popping up into the air, leading to multiple crashes, some of which were in mud puddles. several hours later, covered in mud and thoroughly exhausted, mulonga pedalled into kawambwa with shawn clinging feebly to the bike rack. as it turns out there wasn't much that could be done other than to wait for the affects of the drug to wear off, so shawn spent the night in a mosquitoe net-less hospital room with an i.v. in his arm, watching the mosquitoes buzz over to bite him. he traveled to lusaka the next morning and was given a clean bill of health by the peace corps medical officer (although, as i pointed out to shawn later, they probably should have run some tests for pre-existing brain damage, considering that he hadn't been able to follow the simple instructions on the medication's box...he wasn't amused).

when shawn told me the story i really wasn't surprised by the lengths to which mulonga went to make sure that shawn would be okay. volunteers have a lot of stories about their villagers looking after them, sometimes even when they don't know the villager very well. i think there are a number of different reasons for it, one of which is that zambians have such a strong sense of hospitality and obligation towards their guests. we live in the villages and try to assimilate as much as possible but in certain respects we'll always be guests, which means that zambians, especially our friends, very much feel that they're responsible for our safety.

i was in kazembe about a month ago with my missionary friends, tom and amy, and we were sitting around in a van waiting for the butcher to show up with the beef that they'd ordered. the guy was already an hour and a half late, which means that he was only a little late by zambian standards. we were chatting away when i noticed a procession coming down the dusty main street of the town towards us. it was a group of six men carrying a bed on their shoulders in much the way you would carry a coffin; they were sweating heavily and some had their jaws clenched as they labored under the weight of the bed and the woman lying in it. one of the woman's hands hung limply over the side and her face was turned towards us, eyes shut, her countenance not so much pain-filled as resolute, as if she were trying to hang on. silence settled over the car as we watched them trudge on in the direction of the hospital, until amy quietly said "sometimes you just forget..."

she's right, sometimes i just forget about the depth of poverty many people are facing over here, and the situations in which it places them. there are a lot of reasons for my forgetfulness: one is that i have become familiar with it and it seems nearly normal, but a big one is self-preservation. however, there are moments like the one described above that serve to suddenly and painfully remind me about how difficult life can be. it was a sobering moment, made all the sadder because moments like that occur many times a day all over the world.

so, as i said, i hope to write a few more emails in the next several days. my friend joel is going to be visiting me soon for hopefully an extended stay, he was with the peace corps in guinea but has been evacuated as the country has become a mess over the last few months. we also have the annual luapula celebration that is known as moustache march, followed closely by mullet may coming soon...the events in question are probably going to be as gross as the names would suggest (when planning activities, we usually start with a basic query: how can we look the most physically repulsive? and go from there). hoping you are all well

These are mostly from Namibia and a few from Livingstone. Hope you enjoy.

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well, my christmas/new year's vacation has just about ended, i am now back in lusaka and am heading up to mansa tomorrow. the time away flew by, of course, but i had a wonderful trip and have no complaints. so much happened it would be impossible to recount them all in an email, but i'll try to give you some of the highlights.

namibia is far more developed than zambia and has a very western feel to it as it is a big tourist destination for germans and south africans. it was strange to suddenly be surrounded again by wealth and so many modern conveniences: the running joke throughout the trip was that it was like an extended episode of the "beverly hillbillies" as we wandered slack-jawed around gas stations and exclaimed about things like how many different types of candy bars there were. we also discovered a kentucky fried chicken restaurant in windhoek; if you've never seen a group of male pcv's descend on a kfc after having spent months in the african bush, it's a ferocious sight...we ended up eating there 5 times. the first time three of us, myself, parker and brad, split the family meal which was 12 pieces of chicken and a bunch of sides. the lady actually rolled her eyes at parker when he made the order, but she obviously didn't have any experience with peace corps as we finished it off without breaking a sweat. the best kfc moment involved brad several days later, however, when he tried to eat a 21 piece bucket all by himself. at about piece 13 he began to look as if he'd taken a suckerpunch to the solar plexus, and he declared defeat at piece 16 and spent the next several hours walking about in slow motion. ari and parker had split a 21 piece in a show of solidarity and managed to struggle through to the end, but not before i had to give parker a peptalk and ari appeared to be taking a nap. so, a bit humbled but much wiser about the advisability of trifling with the 21 piece kfc bucket, we took a several day hiatus from the colonel. (endnote: later in the day richard went back to kfc and they were closed with a sign hanging on the front saying they had run out of chicken...i swear. also, parker counted it up and realized he'd eaten 24 pieces of kfc chicken during the trip).

skydiving was the most fun i had on the trip. eston, doug, and i along with our tandem instructors and 3 soloists all climbed into a small plane and began the ascent. there was very little talking or movement as we were all crammed closed together and the wind whistling by the open door made it difficult to chat. i spent most of my time craning my neck to look out the window at the ocean and desert stretching out all around...it was an incredible view. suddenly, the plane erupted into a flurry of activity as we reached the drop point 12,000 feet in the air. the soloists went first, striding to the open door and leaping out one after another with arms and legs spread as if they were belly-flopping into a pool. as they jumped the rest of us, strapped to our instructors, were frantically scooting our way across the floor and towards the door. i barely had time to give eston a thumbs up and doug a slap on the back before they were gone so abruptly it seemed like they'd been sucked out the side of the plane. then it was my turn and i was sitting with my legs dangling out the side of the door with the wind screaming by and my heart in my mouth. we rocked back as we discussed during our breif training session, then forward, toppling out the side of the plane. the ocean where it met the horizon tilted up towards me and then slanted diagonally as our momentum caused our bodies to swing until we were falling with our heads pointed straight towards the earth several miles below. we both flung our arms out, arched our backs and bent our legs at the knees and plummeted for about 45 seconds towards the ground. the wind was whistling by my ears so fast it sounded like a mechanical hum, and i could feel the air around me grow noticeably warmer. i opened my mouth to let out what i hoped was a manly whoop but the air pounding up at me almost instantly dried my mouth and throat. stretched out below me was sand and ocean and the town, swakopmund, a perfect view until we dropped into cloud cover and everything was partially veiled by a gauzy haze. then we were through the clouds and the instructor yanked the rip cord, my shoulders were jerked back and my legs swung forward and we drifted slowly for about 5 minutes until we touched down. there was a lot of backslapping and whooping back on earth, and shouted exclamations like "that was awesome!" and various other profundities. i've had some time to think about the experience but that word is still the best i can come up with with: it was simply "awesome."

there were a lot of other interesting and fun things that happened as well. i ate a ton of food, hamburgers, pizzas, chinese, mexican, indian, basically everything i could get my hands on. we saw ostriches, kudu, meerkats, zebras, and hardly any insects, which was a pleasant change. we went to sossuvlei, home of the world's largest sand dune at 350 meters high. i'm too lazy right now to convert that into feet, but take my word for it, it's a lot. we hung out on the beach (first time i'd seen the ocean in 7 months), went fishing, saw 3 different movies in a theatre (DO NOT SEE "Deja vu," it's awful. the girls liked it but the guys hated it, which, as parker pointed out, is a classic case of taste vs. extreme irrationality), and basically bashed around windhoek and swakopmund and enjoyed a lot of amenities we'd forgotten were so nice to have.

merry christmas and a happy new year to all! hope you're having a great time with friends and family and that the credit card company hasn't been compelled to repossess your house. i'm currently in namibia--for the geography nuts out there, you must realize that a large part of this country is covered with the sands of the namib desert. so, here you have a boy born and raised in maine spending christmas in the middle of a desert...very strange. but, i'm having a wonderful time and will hopefully write a much longer update when i get the chance. topics that will be covered: bungi jumping off victoria falls bridge, skydiving over the namib desert, and having to take a valium to steady my nerves after said adventures...just kidding, mom (about the valium part). again, merry christmas and a happy new year!

i'm not going to tell much of a story this time, instead i thought i would write about a lot of random little facts and incidents i experience on practically a daily basis. these little things aren't very important on their own, but when taken all together they add up to what is now my life...enjoy (or just delete this email if you think it's going to be boring).

i have a cellphone and i can get enough coverage to receive text messages in the mornings or evenings if i patiently stand on a certain rock about half a kilometer from muyembe while holding the phone up in the air.

i have to walk through tall grass every day to reach my garden. i am curious to see what is going to happen first: either i'm going to be bitten by a snake, develop eye strain searching the grass for the critters, or finally have a heart attack the next time a frog, mouse, or other tiny creature rustles the grass next to me as i walk by.

most pcv's don't go out of their houses in the middle of the night, myself included. africa can be scary in the dark, so most of us keep little buckets by our beds in case nature calls during the "wee" hours (hahahaha).

i start a brazier every morning to cook my oatmeal, usually by piling dry grass on top of the charcoal and lighting it. i'll then spend 15 minutes blowing on the tiny ember i get going until i nearly pass out, and swinging the brazier back and forth by its handle. i usually give up and dump large amounts of kerosene all over the charcoal...that works great.

the malaria prophylaxis we take is called mefloquine, the side effects it induces that i've heard pcv's complain about are as follows: hallucinations, insomnia, depression, mood swings, loss of appetite, loss of hair, and extremely vivid dreams. many scientists question whether mefloquine is effective after 3 consecutive months of taking it.

malaria kills more people every year than AIDS, the vast majority of which are in sub-saharan africa.

my daily attire in the village rarely changes: cargo shorts, chaco sandals, t-shirt, wide brimmed hat, belt, leatherman, and a carabiner clipped to a waterbottle. i usually wear the same outfit for at least a week in a row.

i have some sort of low-grade stomach sickness about 50% of the time.

on any given day i will usually spend 5 or 6 hours reading and working in my garden; sometimes it's longer.

traditionally, male pcv's lose 15 lbs and females gain 15. the currently popular theory on the discrepancy is that females don't metabolize carbohydrates as well as men, and since the staple food here is a pure carbohydrate (nshima), that leads to the weight gain.

my scruffiness often attracts comment from zambians; i have been referred to as "jesus," "ja man," and my personal favorite, "lion of judah."

i try to burn all my trash on my brazier in the morning; if i throw it in my trash pit the neighborhood kids will raid it and take most of it, which is the experience a lot of pcv's have at their sites.

kids are everywhere in the village, everywhere. i think most women of age to bear children in muyembe either have a newly-born infant or are pregnant. there are a lot of unwed mothers in my village, and zambian law provides no recourse against deadbeat dads.

i hate goats with all that i am. they make the most awful noises you have ever heard, and it's usually when i'm trying to take a nap. sometimes when i'm inside my hut a group of them will hang out on my porch bleating and blatting their fool heads off until i come charging out to chase them off, vowing to kill them all if i ever get the chance to do it undetected.

mangoes are now in season, and they are hands-down the most common fruit here. there are so many that large amounts of them rot on the ground because the people can't eat them fast enough...that's saying something with so many hungry people around.

it is now the hunger season, when farmers are working the hardest but have the least to eat; most families are now eating one meal a day.

belief in witchcraft is almost universal in luapula and other parts of zambia. even educated zambians who will laugh at such beliefs will instantly seek a hex cure or an amulet from a witch doctor if something inexplicable happens--no one young is ever believed to have died of natural causes, it is always the result of witchraft, a superstition that has led to many nasty incidents.

hitchhiking is one of the most interesting things you can do in zambia. you don't stick out your thumb, you flap your arm up and down and the driver will almost always pull over. some haggling over price may then occur, but most likely you'll soon be on your way although you may be perched on the back of a flatbed truck with bags of maize all around.

mushrooms are in season, so a lot of villagers go out into the bush to collect them and then cook them up...i don't like them all that much, but i've been eating a lot lately. villagers will eat an amazing array of vegetables/leaves that we would never dream of touching: cassava leaves, pumpkin leaves, and a bunch of native bush vegetables i've never heard of.

some of you have asked about religion/christianity over here, a question i haven't addressed yet mostly because i still haven't figured it out. zambia is one of the most christianized countries in africa; practically everyone goes to church, and pcv's have any number of stories about villagers trying to convert them. yet from what i've observed, culture will invariably trump religion; rwanda was estimated to be 80% christian right before the genocide erupted. i think zambian christianity is of a comparable quality and depth to that of what rwanda had.

well, that's it for now, i'll probably do another installment of minutiae somewhere down the line. i hope you all are well

back down in mansa for a peace corps activity that finished up on friday, then we had a huge thanksgiving dinner yesterday evening with every pcv from luapula there except one, along with two volunteers from a canadian ngo that operates up in my district, kawambwa, and two pcv's from other provinces...basically, there were a ton of people and it was nuts. i am happy to report, however, that despite being separated from an american thanksgiving by thousands of miles, i was able to eat myself to the brink of stupor. so, the evening was a wild success in that respect.

things have been going well at my site, i've found myself spending a lot of time on soybean trainings which i didn't expect but which is wonderful. on tuesday i am going to be in the kala refugee camp giving a training on soybean nutrition/cultivation, and will be following up with them several times after the training--i expect i will be visiting there fairly regularly. in the next several weeks my agricultural officer and i will be visiting a lot of farmers out at their fields to give them some direction in the use of the seeds and fertilizer some of them were given from an organization known as programme against malnutrition (pam). the inputs were distributed only to households that harbor orphans, so this is a real chance for some of these families to get ahead a bit and simbaya (ag. officer) and i are planning on keeping close tabs on the farmers to make sure they take advantage of the opportunity.

there was some excitement in my village several weeks ago, muyembe's chief was offically recognized in a ceremony in kazembe by the paramount bemba chief, mwatta kazembe. the chief and an entourage that i was invited to join but declined traveled to kazembe for the first half of the ceremony and then back to muyembe for the last half. i followed the sounds of the drums and singing over to the chief's new "palace" (basically just a bigger mud house), and arrived with plans to remain as incognito as possible in the back of the crowd. i had been warned that i would probably be expected to dance during the ceremony, a situation i wanted to avoid if at all possible for my own sake (and the villagers', for that matter). i found a friend standing behind the crowd of people and joined him, but i still had a good view of the square of people that had gathered with the chief and his retainers forming one side while several hundred villagers comprised the other three. i had just congratulated myself on being able to slip mostly undetected into a favorable vantage point when the drumming stopped and one of the chief's retainers walked across the open dancing area and motioned me forward. my heart flip-flopped and i broke into an instant sweat; i slowly followed the retainer towards the chief, all the while racking my brain for a graceful way to extricate myself from what was shaping up to be a potentially epic, embarassing moment: namely, me dancing solo in front of hundreds of my villagers. fortunately that was not what was expected of me; as it turns out, i was merely placed in the chair directly to the chief's right. so, there i sat, next to a zambian chief and his retinue, helping preside over a ceremony honoring the chief's newly-validated position. i cast about in my mind for any relevant experience i may have had in the past that i could use as a guide to how i should conduct myself, but surprisingly nothing sprang to mind. i decided a grave/dignified look would be appropriate to the moment, yet i wanted to also exude a benevolent and fun-loving vibe as well. things were starting to get confusing so i decided to simply adopt the deer-in-the-headlights look which is what i normally wear about the village anyways. i was able to wait out the rest of the ceremony without being compelled to dance, so the look ended up serving me well.

here's the latest in your friendly africa news. somalia is currently in the grips of a civil war as a provisional government tries to fight off a hard-line islamist army that is slowly but surely gobbling up the country. hundreds of thousands of somalis are fleeing. the fighting in the darfur region of the sudan has spilled over into neighboring chad, with reports of the same janjaweed arab militias that are murdering, raping, and looting their way across darfur now plying their trade in the areas of chad bordering the sudan. there have been similar reports from the central african republic, the government of which has called for its people to "mobilize" to fight the threat, whatever that may mean. the loser of the recent elections held in the d.r.c., jean pierre bemba, has declared that he will not accept the outcome, even though it seems clear he was beaten handily and has failed to produce any evidence of foul play. given the fact that this is the country that has only in the last couple of years partially emerged from a civil war that claimed about 4 million lives, i don't think there are words strong enough to condemn bemba's actions. he is clearly willing to allow the civil war to continue and intensify to its old levels in order to support his crass power grab...4 million people!!!! it is absolutely beyong my capacity to understand how a man who claims to care about his people would flirt with re-invigorating the most costly war in terms of lives since WWII. bemba appears willing to send the d.r.c. spiralling back into the abyss, all so he can claim power.

about a week and a half ago i was sitting in my hut when some things began falling from the roof. upon inspection i realized they were termites, very small larvae, grubbish-looking things that squished when i began stepping on them; apparently they had been living in my roof and for some reason had all chosen the same moment to drop down. after shaking out several that had fallen down my shirt i put on a hat to keep them from getting into my hair. as i sat on a chair and watched them fall and begin crawling about, and as i heard them plop onto the floor, my desk, my dishes, etc., i realized that the experience ranked very high on my "this-is-disgusting" list. the list is being constantly revised but the falling termites catapulted to the near top of it almost instantly, and i suspect will stay there for a while.

i hope you are all well and thoroughly enjoyed turkey day--i certainly did, although there were no turkeys to be had so we had to be satisfied with chicken, duck, and rabbit...i guess things could have been worse.

i am back down in mansa for a couple of days, my work permit has finally come in so i picked it up this morning--only a couple of months late, not bad.

the last couple of days all the guys in luapula province except for two have been up at my nearest pcv neighbor's house in kani village; it was the venue for manfest '06, the first of its kind in zambia. it came about because shawn, the pcv located in kani, began digging a massive hole in his front yard underneath a termite mound as an energy/frustration release. he then invited all the guys up for a couple of days to help dig and engage in general manliness, which more or less was what happened. i won't bore you with all the details, but it was a great time; some of the highlights included various rules we implemented governing our conduct, such as "absolutely no bathing allowed," and "you must eat at least two huge pork sandwiches," etc. we baked a pig using a pit filled with charcoal, and it was delicious. one of the interesting experiences i fairly often have in the village is viewing the entire process of food--i watch it grow, get harvested, cooked, and then eaten; or, as in the case of the pig, i watch it get slaughtered, butchered, cooked, and then eaten. WARNING: THE NEXT COUPLE OF SENTENCES DESCRIBE A PIG KILLING, PLEASE SKIP DOWN TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON"T WANT TO READ ABOUT THIS.

i was busy tending the fire when ryan told me the slaughtering was about to happen, which i didn't want to miss. i rounded the corner of the hut and richard was carrying the pig which had been bound with strips of chitenge material, and it was making a terrible racket and struggling. richard finally had to place it on the ground and shawn strode up with a hoe handle and bashed it right between the eyes which temporarily stunned it. richard held it down while shawn began sawing at its throat with a knife, which was a little slow but better than most slaughters i've seen/heard about. when it was over we hung it up and began cleaning it, something no one had ever done before on a pig or even seen done. shawn mistakenly thought i knew something about the subject so i stood by and offered helpful tips like "um, i dunno, cut there maybe?" and "ah, i think that's the liver, wait, no, the spleen...hold up, do pigs have spleens?" i did a little cutting and we finally got it mostly cleaned and de-bristled, which proved to be the most laborious part of the entire procedure. so, we declared manfest '06 a wild success and stipulated that everyone had to take baths at the guesthouse we spent the night in last night in kawambwa since we all had to share a bed with someone else. the weekend was a lot of fun and a great stress-reliever.

one moment i want to mention is when we were all sitting around in the nsaka. shawn dumped out a lot of the trash in trash pit and started a small fire to burn it, the accepted procedure for getting rid of trash since there's no such thing as trash removal in zambia. two little girls from the next house over came and started rooting through the trash and both ended up leaving with an armload of empty jelly cans, super maheu drink bottles, etc. we started laughing at their tenacity as we watched, and then travis said "y'know, we laugh, but just think..." that thought hung in the air for a while, and i reflected for a moment on it and realized a couple of things: that scene was not strange or jarring for any of us as it's something we witness routinely, or at least something similar to it; it may seem callous of us to have laughed although it wasn't malicious laughter, but i've already concluded that laughter is one of a series of defenses we raise in order to protect ourselves from the suffering that is common-place over here. if we didn't have those defenses and instead had to bear the undiluted brunt of daily tragedy it would paralyze us and we would be totally ineffective. and finally, we as westerners were moved to sadness by the scene and what it meant, but those little girls were not in the least. they went away laughing and smiling, arms full of new toys. i still haven't fully drawn my own conclusions about what that means, so i won't comment on it.

a girl from my program who's been in luapula for about a year and three months was just medically separated; when pcv's go home or are sent home it is always upsetting, not just because people are usually losing a friend but also because fellow pcv's are essentially the only emotional support we have in zambia. when a pcv goes home early it shakes that support system a bit. but, none of us blamed her, the breaking point came after her house was robbed for the third time a couple of weeks ago. she spoke with peace corps personnel in lusaka and they made the decision to medically separate her because of the emotional complications that arise from having something like that happen to you.

i've been hearing more stories about a particular zambian political figure. apparently he espouses expelling certain foreigners from zambia; i heard a rumor that he even specifically mentioned the peace corps in an interview, saying how the white people with long hair, shorts, and dirty t-shirts weren't helpful and should go. my first thought upon hearing that was that he must have personally seen some pcv's, because his description was pretty much spot-on as, at least for the guys, the long hair, shorts and dirty t-shirts are practically a uniform. this was a rumor so who knows if there's any truth to it; i also would be very surprised if the politician were able to rally any support for a p.c. eviction as americans are generally very well liked here.

life in muyembe is fine, i am trying to get mushroom cultivation/preservation off the ground, and i am planning on being busy with some green manure crops in the next couple of months since the farmers will start planting maize once the rains set in a couple of weeks. i just realized this is unbearably long so i'll cut it off now. sorry for the length, thanks for all the communications i've been receiving. i hope you all are healthy and happy

i guess the big news coming out of zambia recently is that the presidential elections have come and gone, largely without incident. there were a few riots in lusaka, kitwe, and ndola, but for the most part things were peaceful as was expected. i was a bit chagrined to learn that the zam elections hadn't really cracked the u.s. news cycle--it was a huge deal here in zambia of course, and even across africa as a lot of people watched closely to see if zambia's reputation for peaceful elections would remain intact. fortunately it did, zambia has way too many problems already to add violence to the mix.

we were in standfast mode for about 10 days, which means all pcv's were confined to their villages and not allowed to travel. things were very slow in muyembe during that time, even by village standards, as most people were preoccupied with the elections and not interested in doing much other than listening to the radio or discussing the latest developments. so, i did a lot of small projects around my hut, worked on my garden, read, wrote, and listened to the bbc to get updates on the election. there was some controversy as the leading opposition candidate, michael sata, accused the incumbent, levy mwanawasa, of stealing the election, but all the election monitors have declared it legitimate and honest. there are some who have their doubts still but the point is moot since mwanawasa has been sworn in already for his second term.

i traveled down to mansa yesterday with 3 other pcv's, but before we came down we spent a day and night at a volunteer's house in mwense district. during the afternoon on thursday we decided to go swimming in a local waterhole, a glorious event as it was actually deep enough to plunge in over my head. the water was cloudy and according to katie, the pcv who lives there, the villagers said there were snakes that hung out by the water. but, we kept our eyes open and didn't see anything that required me to run screaming out of the water. we got out and had walked 15 or 20 yards with me bringing up the rear, cleaning my glasses with my head down when i heard a loud crashing/rustling noise. i looked up to see the tall grass that edged the waterhole shaking violently as a large something that i couldn't see rushed through towards the water. brette and katie had frozen in front of me, and i noticed the latter's mouth was gaping open. "what was that?" i asked. "that," said brette, "was a crocodile." naturally, i was interested to learn if a crocodile had truly been hanging out on the edge of the waterhole we had been swimming in for about 15 minutes; we talked about it longer and they were both positive that what they had seen was indeed a croc that was probably 4 or 5 feet long. we decided taking an alternate route back to katie's hut was in order, and the trip back was made in stunned silence, broken only by the occasional "you've got to be kidding," and "that was crazy."

we told the story to some village boys who wandered up, and they told us that what we had seen was actually a large monitor lizard. but, brette and katie still think it was a crocodile as they got a good look at it, and pointed out that it doesn't seem likely monitor lizards get as large as what they'd seen.

my other animal story comes from my friend travis. he was bathing several days ago and something was itching on his back. he reached for a small mirror he keeps hung up in his bathing shelter to check it out--he happened to glance up right before he grabbed the mirror and saw a snake placidly resting on the top edge of it. he said later that at that moment he was torn: he couldn't decide whether to simply abandon all dignity and run from his bathing shelter stark naked in a bid to save his life, or attempt to get dressed before running out and hope the snake wasn't feeling particularly aggressive. he decided his life wasn't in imminent danger and managed to get his shorts on before bolting to find his neighbor who came over and bludgeoned the thing to death. according to the neighbor the snake was a black mamba, but they can be difficult to identify so the jury is still out on that one. travis said he then walked back to his hut and felt in some ways as if he had cheated death, seeing as only moments before he had nearly placed his hand on a black mamba (which are extremely bad-tempered), and that he should commemorate the moment. so he sat down, got out a spoon and ate a kilogram of raw sugar to "celebrate life," as he put it. soon after he felt sick of course, but he doesn't regret it.

transport can be hairy in zambia, but usually provides fodder for a lot of good stories later. on our way down to mansa we were absolutely crammed into a large bus that was already over-filled. travis ended up standing in the aisle with several other people, brette and katie sat up front in the bus door/driver's area, while i sat on a wooden locker behind the partition that separates the driver from the rest of the bus. a lady with a young child sat next to me, and the child proceeded to kick me in the thigh throughout the trip. riding that far up front is neat though as you have a good view of the road and can watch pedestrians, cyclists, and goats scatter before the bus' approach. of course, i was also able to scrutinize the cracks that spider-webbed across the entire length of the large front window, and had a clear view of the dashboard area that housed the odometer, speedometer, etc.; it was somewhat disconcerting to observe a red light that spelled "STOP" blinking there for the duration of our trip.

i'm in mansa for provincial meetings and i decided to bite the bullet and pay for some internet time at the local internet cafe so i could get out an update.

i've been at my site for a little over a month now, there are ups and downs but over all i would say that things are going well. i am somewhat busy--very busy actually when compared with what i am supposed to be doing for the first 3 months at my village. i am currently working with a woman's group that is interested in starting a small shop in muyembe, the proceeds of which would benefit the local OVC (orphans and vulnerable children). there are also plans in the works to help a few other women's groups with some income generating activities, such as soya bean production, sunflower seed oil production, and perhaps some small animal husbandry. i will also be traveling to the nearby refugee camp in the next couple of weeks to offer my assistance; the camp is called kala and is run by world vision and unhcr, it harbors those who have fled the long-running war in the democratic republic of congo. perhaps the project i am most excited about though is working with a missionary couple who are building an orphanage for double orphans in kazembe (children who have lost one parent are considered orphans in zambia; those who have lost both, double orphans). they want the orphanage to be self-sufficient, so i will be helping them plan a large garden, perhaps do some small animal husbandry, and probably plent of soya activities as well with them. there is a desperate need for orphanages, especially well-run ones, in zambia; most orphans are taken in by relatives or even a neighbor, but they constitute a large burden on families that are already struggling to feed their own children. plus, many babies are abandoned--the kazembe orphange will be trying to take in abandoned infants primarily.

life in a zambian village is strange, as you can imagine. i am a constant source of amazement and amusement for the many, many children running about muyembe; they will often come into my yard and simply stare at me as i sit reading on the front stoop. most of them have distended bellies that are a sign of malnutrition, runny noses and a hacking cough that is indicative of internal parasites. but, like children anywhere they run about playing, laughing and fighting, although there is no doubt that their lives are difficult.

i attended a funeral the first week at village, a blind old lady i did not know died. the bell at the catholic church was rung signalling the death, and people began to slowly make their ways towards the house. i went with two of the group of young guys that i hang around with, anjiou and patrick, and we sat with the men outside the house while the women went inside to mourn. there was an absolute din coming from inside, wailing, crying and screaming, and i was extremely grateful that men are not allowed inside during these occasions. the younger men, myself included, went to dig the grave after a half hour or so, which turned out to be brutal work. the ground was hard-packed clay that would be ripped up a couple of inches or so at a time with a hoe, then dug out with a shovel. fortunately there were about 20 men there who took turns spelling each other; being able to dig seemed to be a matter of pride and most of the men would become insistent that they get to take their turn. i even took a hand for about 5 minutes; i stood in the hole up to my chest, sweat pouring down, limbs burning, lungs gasping for air, launching soil up and out of the grave, all the while trying to adopt an air of nonchalance so all the zambians clustered around watching wouldn't think the muzungu was a wimp (which they do any way, they assume i am incapable of doing any physical labor for myself; if i attempt to do so when there is a zambian around, they will try to stop me so they can do it on my behalf.) when i heaved myself out of the hole a "well done" issued from a man i didn't know in the crowd, and i sensed that they appreciated the effort--i'll admit, i relished the small sense of accomplishment i experienced when i managed not to collapse in the bottom of the grave. all told, it took about 4 hours to dig the thing.

the funeral service in the evening was short; it was preceded by a procession that snaked through the village, led by the priest and altar boys and trailed by the mourners, many of whom were singing. afterwards all went back to the mourning house and sat about for a brief while to show their respect, after which they were free to leave.

in muyembe there are several other customs governing the conduct for a funeral--i'm not sure if these are bemba traditions or are exclusive to my village. before the bell can be rung signalling the death, the chief must be informed. the family will send a small gift, a chicken, some money, etc., and tell him what has happened. he will then not eat from that point on until the body is buried, which is why the burials happen within the day. the chief is then responsible to contribute something to the funeral, although i don't believe he attended as i did not see him there. after the burial, those who were very close to the deceased will spend the night once at the house; village members not as close but who want to pay their respects will go for about an hour to sit at the house every evening for a week. if there is a surviving spouse (and this is a bemba-wide tradition), that spouse must be released by the family of the deceased before he/she can remarry. the permission is granted in some sort of ceremony that varies slightly: a white substance (maize meal, chalk, etc.) will be sprinkled on the head of the survivor, or they will wear a bracelet of white beads until it breaks, at which time they are cleansed of the deceased's spirit and are free to remarry.

perhaps my favorite time in the village is church. i will hopefully in a later email have the chance to explain more about the service, but for now i will talk about part of the offering service. specific sections of the church every week are invited to participate more fully than the other parishioners when the offering is being taken. altar boys stand at the head of the single aisle running down the center of the church while the chosen section forms a double line with women at the front. they then do a slow dance-shuffle down the aisle, swaying to the singing and drumming, to deposit their money in the waiting baskets; the women are usually more animated than the men, although usually the men do well also, shuffling rhythmically along, dipping and twisting their torsos. sometimes there is a teenage boy bringing up the rear, suffering the burden of needing to appear cool, who will only indulge in a demure slouch down the aisle. the inescapable thought i have every time i watch is that it reminds me of a conga line, although more artistically executed. i did not participate the first time my section (st. anthony's) performed, but i am planning on shaking what my momma gave me down the aisle the next time. zambians are generally boisterous, upbeat types, and it could cause a sensation when they see the muzungu joining in, however poorly.