Well as most of you know, my time in Zambia has drawn to a close and I have now returned to the United States. It has been a crazy last few months in the Peace Corps, but I will try to sum it up the best I can.

After Kevin moved to live with me in my village in March we had a great last few months working on projects together and wrapping up my work. We met with all of the groups that I had collaborated with in order to talk about their action plans and long term visions for how they will continue their work without me. I am so proud of all of the different groups that I worked with: the youth peer health educators, the HIV/AIDS support group, the malaria control groups, the girls empowerment club, the neighborhood health committees, the community volunteers, safe water groups, and more. They accomplished great things and as much as I might have helped them along the way, they truly taught me a lot. I would be remiss, however, if I didn't mention that it was never, ever easy. And I am quite confident that my community counterparts and friends would agree with me. All of the work that we accomplished was slow, tedious, and often frustrating. There were unpredictable obstacles, minimal resources, and often an overwhelming lack of moral.

But because of the obstacles that we faced, we had to learn how to be creative, to adjust, and to push for the things that were important to us. I, in particular, had to learn how to let go of my western notions that change happens quickly and that with a few to-do lists and delegated tasks group work was easy. In Zambia I had to learn how to be more flexible, to recognize that we might have to start over, reschedule, or cancel (again and again). But as I have returned to the land of to-do lists and electronic calendars I am incredibly grateful for the work experience and ethic that Zambia instilled in me in this way. I feel confident that I can work in a resource poor setting and get creative when challenges are thrown at me. And I can give a great pep talk to boot; half my time there I felt like my primary job was to be a public health cheerleader, encouraging the team to keep their spirits high and please please please show up for the next meeting. No pompoms necessary.

Leaving Mwasemphangwe was emotional and at the same time exciting. It was exciting in that during all of my wrap up meetings and going away parties people really made me feel as though what I had done mattered. They told me that it mattered that I wanted to come and live with them in the first place, it mattered that I had become their friend and their neighbor, and it mattered that I had tried to partner with them on improving their community's health. They recounted changes that had occurred in their lives as a result of my 2 years of work and it made me feel inspired for my future public health career. But the goodbye was also extremely emotional and upsetting. I said goodbye to friends that it will be impossible to keep in touch with. I said goodbye to friends who were sick with terminal illnesses and to children who will grow up and move away. I said goodbye to the first house I ever lived in by myself. I said goodbye to a village that made more self aware and simultaneously more self confident than I ever imagined possible. I said goodbye to a unique, non-replicable experience that changed my life.

The village held a great farewell party my last night where we killed a goat, a pig, and my remaining chickens. We took pictures, made speeches, and reminisced about when I showed up two years earlier, naive and "less red" people said as they looked at my too many times sun burned skin. My best friend in the village asked what I would miss the most and the question has been repeated to me numerous times since I returned to the U.S. I will miss the freedom of each day to accomplish, explore, adventure, or relax at will. I will miss the sweet- strong scents of earth, animals, and human activity. I will miss the noises of bird calls, animals, children, singing, and drumming as I fall asleep at night. I will miss eating nsima and the sense of belonging that accompanies communal meals, everyone washing one another's hands before and after the meal and scooping nsima and relish from the same pots. I will miss feeling physically exhausted by household chores (believe it or not) because it feels good for hard work to be rewarded by the fruits of your labor: food, water, and other necessities. I will even miss the loneliness and the self-awareness that I gained from having so much time to myself. Most of all I will miss my Zambian friends, Chewa Tribe culture, and the people in general with their inclinations towards laughter and generosity.

As most of you know, Kevin and I will be moving to Seattle where we will both be starting school at the University of Washington. He will be starting medical school and I will be starting a global epidemiology master of public health program. We are excited to be close to family and friends again and feel ready to re-enter academia (though ask us in 3 years and see what we say then). We feel lucky to have had such a warm welcome home from so many family members and friends.

Zambia will always be important to me. I know that it has moved me, changed me, kicked my butt, nursed me back, and rewarded me for my efforts time and time again. During the first year of my service my counterpart and I held trainings for all of the community's ten Neighborhood Health Committees. During the trainings, I took a quote from Margaret Mead and translated it into Nyanja for everyone to understand: Never doubt the ability for a group of committed citizens to change the world. In fact it is the only thing that ever has. A year and a half later I was at the clinic saying goodbye to community volunteers and a man caught my attention and said to me, "Madam.... I am still trying my upmost to change the world."

And with that he reminded me of why I first decided to come to Zambia, not to cavalierly "change the world" but to inspire and motivate others to take ownership over their community's health and work together to improve their lives. In the process I learned an incredible amount about myself, found my husband, made amazing friends, and established what my future career patch in public health and community service might look like.

I said farewell to Zambia for now but Zambia has indelibly imprinted itself within me. And everything I do from here on out, changing the world and letting the world change me, will be in some way because of Zambia.

This is the end of the Arianna In Zambia blog. Thank you for reading over the past 2 years and encouraging me throughout this adventure. Please stay in touch. A whole new kind of adventure is now beginning.

by Kevin and Arianna

In no particular order...

1. You cannot say "hello" to a group of people. You need to greet each person individually even if there are 3o people. We've tried many a time to say "hello everyone" when we meet a group of people. They look embarrassed for us and then each individually come up to say hello and ask about our day. Every single one of them.

2. You can indeed sweep a dirt yard and make it a "cleaner dirt" but it's still dirt. Likewise, a house made of mud, is inherently dirty. But dirt can get dirty. And dirty dirt is the worst.

3. Thunder and lightning don't necessarily mean rain. At times there can be deafening thunder and no rain. At other times there are blue skies above and then it starts pouring. It's always when you don't bring your raincoat with you (after toting it about on your bike everyday for months) that is really starts to rain. It's always when you say, "well looks like rainy season is over!"

4. Always bring toilet paper with you. Everywhere.

5. "Now Now" or "Very Soon" really means "in the next couple of hours." But "Anytime from now" means possibly today....or in the next few months. As in, " I will have the report ready for you anytime from now." It always keeps us pleasantly surprised when things actually happen on time.

6. Humility. We've learned to ask for help on the simple day-to-day actions of how to keep house, how to communicate, and how to navigate a culture very different from out own. We've made mistakes, we've been embarrassed, we've been humbled by kindness, nature, and human compassion. We've been at our sickest, our very most disgusting state and we've been challenged in physical and mental ways we never before imagined.

7. Bravery. After every humility instilling experience (and there have been so many) we have had to bounce back. We've tried again. Speaking Nyanja publicly, washing sheets wet with malaria fever, trying the new skills we were taught the day before, catching ourselves before making the same mistakes...we've learned to try again and again. Thank goodness for humility because it leads to good-humored bravery. And with bravery we've learned that in the face of something scary or daunting, the hardest thing to do is just to START doing, to take the first step towards something difficult or challenging. But once you do, the rewards can be great and the cycle starts again.

8. Bugs taste GOOD. But fried in enough cooking oil we suppose almost anything can taste good...

9. There is really nothing more amazing then living with the person you love. After almost a year and a half of hitchhiking across Eastern Province to see eachother, living together has been the greatest reward. And you certainly save on prepaid talk time.

10. We really are limited with our creativity on baby naming in America. In Zambia, one of the most common boys name's is "Bornface" (no joke). Other favorites we've come across include "SimCard," "Cloudy Skies on a Breezy Day," and "Mavuto" which literally means "Trouble"

11. We've learned about sadness and we've learned about acceptance. We've become close to many people living with HIV/AIDS and we've seen friends and neighbors pass away from the disease. We've seen children weak with malnutrition and we've seen countless families mourning the loss of a child to malaria. And, as community members, we've experienced so much sadness, so consistently and so personally. We've learned alot about the human ability to cope and the power of a community to support its' members. We've dealt with our own feelings of guilt and frustration at having so much (medicine, food, mobility, etc.) while so many people that we care about don't. We've learned about cultural impacts on sadness and acceptance and our experiences in these areas will affect us for the rest of our lives, undoubtedly impacting our future careers as health professionals.

12. If you really want to gross Zambians out, describe American food. If you want to totally shock them, show them pictures of what Americans wear: " Americans wear their underwear out in the streets?!?!"

13. You can stuff yourself with sweet potato, pumpkin, fresh maize, and boiled groundnuts but you haven't eaten, and you can't possibly be "satisfied", until you've eaten nsima.

14. How to kill and prepare a chicken. (And, inherently, how to stop naming your chickens and their chicks. It's just too weird to say "oh Clucky Lucky tastes way better than Mr. Feathers doesn't he...")

15. It takes at least a good 6"-10" layer of grass to thatch a roof well. Any less and you will be wet. This was NOT a fun lesson to learn.

16. Butchering a cow is a political act: ribs for the headmen, a leg for the chief, bowels for the other VIPs. Your cut of meat depends on your role in the community. Food is not just about nourishment here, there are strict hierarchies and etiquette that have to be respected in every realm of food, from washing hands to salting food.

17. "Cold Season" is relative.

18. Hot Season is NOT.

19. Protein is important. Children burn acres of bush just to catch a few field mice for supper.

20. There is always room for one more person in transport. Nine passengers can fit in a small sedan. It's not comfortable and it certainly doesn't smell great but it is possible. You usually just end up holding someone's chicken or baby (or both).

21. People always talk about the "key to development" but there is no quick fix or easy answer to development. The BEST kind of development though is development focused on justice: health justice, economic justice, academic justice, gender justice, and so forth. Development is complicated and messy. And ensuring equitable development is tricky and time-consuming. But it IS possible.

More coming soon

Kevin and I head back to the village after a trip, luggage strapped to the back of the bike and trying to negotiate the deep sand.

The Community Based Distributors celebrate the end of their training before heading back to their communities where they will sell birth control, condoms, and chlorine to rural and isolated villages at discounted prices.

A lot of you have been asking me about some of the details of my work and how I organize and stay in touch with the people that I partner with in such a rural area. I’ve realized that in my descriptions of my work here I’ve failed to describe my main tool for grassroots public health organizing: the bush note.

To communicate with people in a rural area, dozens of kilometers away, one must simply write a note, fold it, write a date, a name, and a village, and hand it off to someone walking in the right direction. The note gets handed from person to person until it (usually) ends up in the right place. In order to invite people to trainings, meetings, or remind work partners about projects I often end up writing dozens of bush notes a week. It’s amazing how far they can travel. I’ve even experimented in sending bush notes to Peace Corps Volunteers in different districts across Eastern Province by handing them to people in cars or buses and asking them to drop them off and start the process again in rural places far away. They’ve all been successful (though one ended up at another PCVs house one month after I initially sent it…who knows how many hands and eyes passed over that note). Mobile phones were introduced in Zambia a few years ago and have become prevalent even in rural areas but still the importance and functionality of bush notes has persisted.

Recently, in preparation for a large community event held last week I wrote over 50 bush notes (this time with the assistance of carbon paper)in order to make sure that people from all areas of my catchment area were mobilized and informed of the event. We held the first annual Tikondane Day. Tikondane is the new community based organization that one of my counterparts and I helped form for People Living With HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). In Nyanja Tikondane means love eachother. There were numerous nonfunctioning support groups when I arrived in Mwasemphangwe and it has taken my entire service here so far for Tikondane to fully emerge into the productive and solid group that it is today. The members are all PLWHA who want to support one another, reach out to other PLWHA, care for the sick, fight stigma in the community through education, and encourage people to go for VCT (Voluntary Counseling and Testing of HIV). We raised enough money for the group to register as a community based organization with the government and now they have started a beekeeping business to help them sustain their efforts in the community. In order to raise awareness of the new organization we held Tikondane Day 2011. The goal of the day was to introduce to the community a cohesive support group full of people who are strong, healthy, active, and HIV positive. It was a total success. Over 300 people arrived to celebrate Tikondane Day and 107 of them were HIV tested at the event. There were drama performances, poem recitations, dancing, music, and a big football match.

My counterpart with whom I helped form the group, the chairman of Tikondane, announced in a speech at the end of the day, “thank you for teaching all of Mwasemphangwe that a friend with HIV is- most importantly- still a friend.”

We had a great women's day celebration at Kevin's village in Petauke. It got started with a women's day march 300 women strong!

Well I am long overdue in my next blog post but I’ve been away from the internet for quite awhile. Zambia is lovely right now. We are in the midst of rainy season and the land is bright green and healthy. It’s hard to describe what rainy season is like here in Zambia but it is a hugely important part of the year and as a result greatly impacts my life and work here. (And vice versa my Zambian friends find it hard to believe that we don’t have a solid rainy time period in America, that depending on where you are in the U.S. it might rain on any given day). It’s like the land just woke up after a desiccating 6 month nap. In January all growing things that bloom broke into flowers, blossoms, pods, and seeds that grow by the hour. Sometimes I will accompany my neighbors into their fields and mark the visible changes that happen to the maize plans or to the pumpkins literally overnight. Seeing things grow in such an intimate way is something that I never really experienced nor was involved in so personally before coming to Zambia. The rainy season is all about cultivating and farming. If the rains are unfavorable or the labor interrupted then people’s entire food security for the rest of the year can be dangerously jeopardized. It is an important time for Zambia, affecting everything from the nation’s economy to the family household’s wellbeing. During rainy season grass grows everywhere that there is a spare space of dirt and it can grow HIGH. Once the rains are over and the grass has dried a bit people will cut it and bundle it, saving it for the future thatching of a building. But in the midst of rainy season when the grass still waives green and tall the landscape looks drastically different than it did 6 months ago. Another volunteer recently came to visit me in my village and as we turned a corner down the 2k dirt path that leads to my village she was incredulous as to what exact path we were planning on taking. At this point in the rainy season, everything is so overgrown with grasses that many foot paths, including the one that I travel most, is hidden or obscured by the tall plants. Not only are tall grasses a favorite hideout for the mosquitos that carry malaria but they are also considered ugly and unsightly if they are allowed to grow on the dirt yard compounds surrounding houses in the village….And Zambian women in the village are not afraid to tell you if you are slacking off in keeping up village aesthetics . I am yet to perfect the masterful art of cutting grass with a hoe. Ideally you just scrape the surface of the dirt so that you bring up the grass from the roots but not much of the dirt surrounding it. Despite my new hoe skills I’ve gained in country I always seems to dig too deep when cutting grass (must be my big muscles). As soon as I start to cut my grass my yard soon looks like I’ve gone digging for buried treasure in hundreds of little messy holes around my house. Needles to say my neighbors love it when I decide to cut my grass and it always tends to draw a crowd of laughing and well entertained villagers. Turns out making people laugh (….at me…) is a pretty big part of my work here.( And I’m good at it.) Usually I give the kids in the village “sweeties” which are actually kids vitamins that I have tricked them into thinking are candy to help me clean up the embarrassing grass cutting (hole digging) mess that I make in my yard during the rains. Another challenge of rainy season is mold. My roof was removed and rebuilt/thatched after last year’s rainy season and it takes at least a year for the grass to settle into a condensed sealant from the rain. So this year my house is a lot leakier than it was this time last year. Most PCVs stretch black plastic under the grass thatch inside the house inorder to catch falling dust or dirt from the grass and help with any stray leaks. With the assistance of some American garbage bags and ductape I’ve managed to control the leaks in the plastic cieling but everything that originally got soaked in December hasn’t quite managed to dry in the humid wet air of January and February. I am constantly surprised by the items that have managed to grow mold here. I’ve now battled mold on my nalgene, notebook paper, bed sheets, and shoes. With the aid of a lot of strategically placed plastic I’ve managed to keep my mosquito net- encased bed dry, which is important as it is my sanctuary from bugs and critters.( PCVs learn to protect their beds early: tuck in the mosquito net at all times so nothing can crawl in and ALWAYS keep your mattress dry.) There are few things that I love more than traveling through Zambia right now while the fields and plants are so vibrant. I love it especially when I hitch a ride in the back of a pick up trick and I can lay back with the wind blowing as we travel through the green gently rolling hills with Celine Dion blaring from the stereo (Celine Dion is hugely popular here as is a lot of 90s pop in general). Maize grows tall, reaching far above my head and they’re interspersed with fields of sunflowers that nod gently, 4 feet tall and blooming brilliantly. The groundnut (peanut) plants are bright green and bushy right now. Although food is still scarce (indeed this time of year is still called “starvation season”) we are beginning to have some fresh foods available such as dhove. My absolute favorite food in Zambia, dhove is fresh maize that is plucked from the fields early and put right next to the fire to grill for a few minutes. My other favorite food in Zambia, fresh pumpkins, are also starting to be harvested right now. People break the pumpkin into large pieces and put them in a pot with a bit of water and steam them lightly for a few minutes. You eat the whole piece, skin and seeds in all. (Pumpkin seeds actually help fight intestinal worms in kids). Although food is still scarce and many families are down to one meal a day, the return of dhove and pumpkins to the fire means the hardest days of the year have passed and the harvest season is just around the corner. Work is going well in the village. I am partnering with a local NGO and together we are organizing 30 villages to construct protected wells and access safe water. These villages will be digging the wells, molding the bricks, and forming safe water committees in order to create invested ownership in the wells’ creation and maintenance. I’m also organizing a community based distributor program where 40 people are being trained on how to disseminate family planning and health materials such as birth control, condoms, and chlorine. These community based distributors will get to charge a little money for the items they are selling and use their profit to continue buying the supplies on a discounted basis from a mass distributor of health materials. The result (hopefully) is that these items will end up in geographically diverse and isolated areas and the Community Based Distributors will end up making a little income for their families as well. With only a few months left in my service I am really trying to put my experience into some kind of manageable perspective. One of my friends here summed it up well when he said, “Who will dig your hole for you in America?” I pondered his statement for awhile before I asked, “what hole?”. He explained that it is a Tumbuka tribe expression that basically means, what will you do with your lessons learned? During the past 22 months I’ve experienced so much, learned so much, and been extensively challenged physically, mentally, and emotionally. I’ve been given really spectacular tools and insights and my last few months in Zambia are not necessarily the end of something great but more so the beginning of something enduringly important. I need not only appreciate everything that has happened, but DO something with it and based on it. It’s a good perspective to keep in mind as I approach my last few months in Zambia.

The major part of a wedding in the Chewa Tribe is the wedding procession. Over 400 people attended the wedding and took part in the mini parade to the wedding shelter.

The singing and music were the best parts. Three choirs and a ton of guitars and drums showed up and played together. The video can't do it justice. The song they are singing talks about Arianna meeting KO (the name Kevin's village calls him) and when they saw each other, they loved each other, and thus came to marry.

It's sweaty and it's dusty and hot season is in full swing here in Zambia. Villagers are starting to wake up around 4:00am so that they can get to their fields and start cultivating before the heat comes in full force around 10:00am. People stay indoors or in the shade all day until around 16:00 when they return to their fields to get a bit more work done once its "cooled off." Peace Corps Volunteers learn to love their huts' cement floors because they stay relatively cool most of the time. After I bike home at the end of the day I often find myself lying spread out on my cement floor for an hour or two (maybe thats why I'm always dirty?) Hot season means a change in bugs too: out go the ants and in come the termites. The first rains will be coming anyday now...

The Gwesani Malaria project is in full swing and we have completed 3 out of the 11 Malaria Field Days in the community. Above are a few women showing their new mosquito nets that they received at their community's field day. We are giving out 100 nets per field day and over 200 people have been attending each event and receiving malaria education about how they can control the spread of the disease in their villages. Pretty exciting. Coordinating the Malaria Field Days has been a real challenge since mosquito nets are in high demand and we need far more than 1100 nets inorder to reach 100% of people sleeping protected everynight. Despite the difficulties of giving out limited but much needed resources, the field days have been a real success. The newly trained Malaria Educators are doing an awesome job of teaching community members and the community has been very responsive in promoting the Gwesani project and socializing people to start using their mosquito nets consistently and correctly.

Another project that I am really (really!) excited about is a new bee keeping cooperative that the local HIV/AIDS support group and I just started. The group just registered with the government as an official Community Based Organization after we have spent the last few months writing a group constitution, forming bylaws, and mobilizing a solid membership base. They named themselves Tikondane Support Group (Tikondane means "love eachother"). Above is the group hanging their first bar beehive (ooo african bees). We will be hanging 50 hives total this first harvest season and have even found a company to buy the honey back from us after we harvest it. Zambia is the biggest honey producer in Africa and with twice a year harvests Tikondane might be able to start making a good bit of money which they will use to buy nutritional food supplements for people living with HIV/AIDS, transport people in need of hospital care to hospitals in town, and pay for the school fees of children orphaned from parents who have died from AIDS.

I've also spent the past week listening to election results from AmericaLand on my shortwave radio (my radio consistently makes my daily "What I'm thankful for List"). Above is my main hut decoration, an Obama chitenge made in Tanzania. I voted from Zambia a few months ago and, despite the election results, it was nice to hear that there was good voter turnout in the U.S. As hard as it is to stay up-to-date on American politics from over here I try my best and I'm proud of the progress made by the Obama administration so far. And I am always moved by the inspiration that he has provided to people in all of the Southern African countries that I have visited to become more politically involved in their own governments.Thats all from here folks. Kevin and I will post pictures after our village wedding in a few weeks!Your sweaty friend,Yanni

So another cold season has gone by and we are beginning to sink into the hazy and dusty depths of hot season. I've done a poor job of keeping up with my blog but work has been busy and I've been on the move a lot lately. Several of my projects have had pretty major developments (I talk about my malaria project in particular in more detail below) and my social life has kept me entertained for the most part as well (a busy social life? not what I expected when I signed up for the Peace Corps!). And while days go by slowly, life moves pretty quickly here in Zambia. Peace Corps Volunteer friends have finished their services and gone home and new Peace Corps Volunteers have come to replace them. A new cat has moved into my house uninvited so now I'm keeping two cuddly rat-eaters at home. Farmers are burning the land to prepare for the next farming season so the earth is charred and seems to be aching for the rains to come. The burning also drives mice out from the fields so people have been feasting on field mouse for dinner most nights. Yumm (And I'm not being sarcastic here)

A year into my service and I'm still keeping up with the same routines that I did when I first moved into my village in Mwasemphangwe. I make jungle oats in the morning and do house chores like fetching water and most recently smearing a fresh layer of mud on the outside of my hut. I usually work everyday but Sunday, traveling on my bike to different villages for various programs or just working from the clinic. I cook for myself some nights and on the others I usually eat with the women in the village at the house of my headman's first wife. Each woman comes and presents nsima and relish and we eat one woman's cooking at a time until we are all satisfied or the food is finished. We sit and chat and I try to keep up with the latest gossip about who married who, how many cows the neighboring village has, who is pregnant, and who has had a particularly good crop. I'm so thankful for these women's kindness and friendship. They're truly responsible for making my village a home to me.

And for all you faithful blog readers (hey, mom and dad!) who haven't heard, Kevin and I recently got engaged! We will be having a traditional village wedding in November while the rains are still light during which there will be a lot of singing, a lot of dancing, and A LOT of food. We will eventually be having another ceremony after we return to America. We're really in love and really excited about our future together. Thanks, Zambia!

And on to a slightly more boring topic: work. Although I haven't written about it much on this blog, the majority of my work here has been devoted to a project I started with the community called Gwesani Malaria (In English, Topple Malaria). The project is part of a behavior change pilot study that I helped kick off for Peace Corps - Zambia. The community health workers and I interviewed over 100 mothers of children under 5 in the community and conducted a "barrier analysis survey" where we tried to understand why people do or do not take measures to prevent malaria in their families. Our results were really interesting. We found that while most people know that malaria is caused by the mosquito, they still attribute malaria to other causes such as juju magic, eating unripe mangoes, being caught in the rain, and other reasons. Many women said that they could utilize resources such as insecticide treated nets (ITNs) if their husbands or parents-in-law would only approve. Also, most of the mothers doubted the efficacy of interventions such as using ITNs; they didn't see much connection between preventing malaria and using a bed net.

My Zambian counterpart and I took those results and we began to generate behavior change social marketing messages. We are in the midst of training 180 Malaria Educators comprised not of traditional medical workers but of trusted local traditional leaders such as village headmen and traditional healers. These Malaria Educators will provide community education at 11 Malaria Field Days that will take place throughout my catchment area. At these Malaria Field Days we will be educating people about malaria basics and how to use ITNs through drama and other activities. We'll also be doing mass malaria rapid detection blood tests and treating people who are sick or carrying the malaria parasite on the spot. Perhaps most importantly, I applied and received a grant that will allow us to distribute mosquito nets to families with children under 5. The community is enthusiastic and mobilized around the Gwesani Malaria project and I am incredibly excited to see the project develop. We'll be gathering data after 3 months on the impact on malaria incidence and mortality.

So, life is good. I'm excited for my ZamWedding next month and for Gwesani to pan out over the next few weeks. And I'm feeling really lucky lately to be surrounded by so much community development, such exciting challenges, and such incredible love.

Look out for more GLOW pics soon!

One of my primary project here has been recruiting and training classes of youth peer health educators. I received a grant from the US government that allowed me to hold a one week training workshop for youth who applied and were accepted into the program. I trained 20 peer educators in HIV/AIDS, puberty, STIs, sexuality, peer pressure, early marriage, early pregnancy, and other Life Skills competencies. These youth will help me to teach Health and Life Skills in 6 different Basic Schools as well as throughout the community in churches, clinics, and villages. They will also help me train youth health educators from different geographic areas of our catchment area. By the end of the year, we hope to have over 60 peer health educators actively providing health education to youth in the community. Above is a very telling picture of 2 of the trainees during a discussion on gender.

One of the peer health educator trainees practicing a presentation he prepared on puberty and the female reproductive system.

On the last day of the training, the peer health educators came to my village to practice delivering health education in the community. Above, 2 of the educators are performing a drama about the dangers of early pregnancy (pregnancy before the age of 18) and the importance of VCT (Voluntary HIV Counseling and Testing) as numerous villagers and myself look on. The training was an incredible success. It was so exciting to see youth facilitating conversations about gender, health, and development with various generations of people in the community. I am so proud of the peer health educators' hard work and commitment to improving the health of the community.

This is a picture of Kevin playing with my next door neighbor, Beauty, and my cat, Devi. Beauty is a two year old girl who I spend a lot of time with in the village. She comes and sits with me in my hut when I am reading and holds my hand, escorting me around the village when I'm socializing with friends. This picture pretty much sums up why I'm so happy here in Zambia.

This is a picture taken with most of the Camp GLOW participants and the Permanent Secretary of Eastern Province (sitting two over on my left).

We had an AMAZING week of sessions and fun. It was without a doubt the highlight of my Peace Corps service so far...I'll update more on the event later this month. For now, THANK YOU SO MUCH TO ALL DONORS FOR MAKING GLOW POSSIBLE!

A few weeks ago I celebrated the one year anniversary of my arrival in Zambia. So much has happened since I arrived in the country, both here in Zambia and at home in America. My family has grown significantly and now includes a baby nephew, a brother-in-law, and a large group of Zambians that I love dearly. I've gained new, unexpected skills such as how to farm, cook new insect foods, and speak a very different language. I've had some of the highest moments of my life and some of the lowest moments of my life (sometimes within the span of a day) .

I'm still so excited for the rest of the time yet to come.

First, thanks so much for all of your supportive emails and for your many generous donations to Camp GLOW. It meant so much to me that so many of yall had such positive feedback for me! If you know of anyone else who might be interested in supporting our efforts please direct them to our sponsorship page on the Peace Corps website. We are still in need of quite a bit of donations.Zambia has truly changed overnight. While two months ago it was hot, humid, and the land was a brilliant green, it is now cold, dry, and…. Burning. All of the farmers are currently burning their fields in order to clear the land for next year’s harvest (an agriculture practice that PCVs and development agencies try to discourage due to its extremely harmful impact on the land). While I no longer have to tote around a raincoat everywhere I go or wipe mold off all of my clothes, dry season means freezing nights, freezing bucket baths, and the return of deep, treacherous sand to bike through. It also means that an intense war has broken out in my hut. It is woman vs. ant, ladies and gentleman. And the odds are not in my favor.Once cold season strikes the ants in my village take refuge in the houses. Within a few days time, the ants moved into my house, covering the floors, climbing into my food bins, and slipping through my mosquito net to swarm me while I am sleeping in my bed. I spend several hours a day waging a pointless battle. On the bright side, I’ve got plenty of roommates now?When I’m not strategizing my next insect oriented blow, I’ve been incredibly busy with work, especially my malaria behavior change projects, and I have also spent a lot of time traveling Zambia. As most of you know, my mom and dad visited Zambia in May. We went to Livingstone, Chipata (my provincial capital), my village, and South Luangwa National Park. We saw Victoria Falls at one of its strongest points; we were soaked just standing on the bridge overlooking the falls. In the National Park we saw leopards, hippos, lions, giraffe, buffalo, impala, and dozens upon dozens of different kinds of species of animal I don’t usually get to see at home. And in my village, my friends and neighbors threw a big party in honor of my parents and my parents were even escorted to meet the Chief at her Palace. It was amazing to have the home I miss so much come to me here. And it was even more special to be able to share my new life with the people I love most. It was difficult when mom and dad left but it will only be a few more weeks until the next contingent of the Rubin family arrives… Aviva and Dylan will be arriving in Zambia on 7 July! We’ll be traveling around Zambia a bit and they will be spending quite a bit of time in my village, helping out in the clinic and getting their fill of nsima (our maize traditional dish…a toned down version of grits). Then we’ll take the train up to Tanzania and travel around Zanzibar. I can’t wait for them to be here!Shortly after my parents left I got sick with malaria. It was a terrible experience and I spent most of my time lying on the couch of the Peace Corps House in Chipata with a fever. I feel a lot better but I’m still exhausted – as in I go to bed at 6:30 instead of 8:00 these days (not too much to brag about). A hyena killed a cow in my village just after I returned from my sick leave so for the first time since moving into the village I’ve had plenty of red meat and iron which helped with my recovery. We’ve been feasting on beef all week.I’ll be coming in to Chipata again in 2 weeks to celebrate a friend’s wedding and then my own birthday. I don’t think we’ll be able to scrounge up any 4th of July fireworks but we’ll make our best barbecue attempt. There is even talk of trying to get our hands on a kiddy pool…pool party?Stay well over there in AmericaLand. Lots of love!- Arianna, The Ant Slayer

“It is not my right to speak up. And, if I did, no one would listen... I would only be punished.”

- A. Phiri

In rural Zambia, women are the foundation of the economic, social, and productive fabrics of the community. They cook, they clean, they collect water, they care for the children, they represent their families in church, they control the health care of their families, and they frequently manage family income generating enterprises. However in Zambia, as in many developing countries (and though rarely recognized, even in developed countries), women are considered intellectually and socially inferior as compared to men. Zambian women marry young, usually between the ages of 15 to 20. They are encouraged to bear children immediately following marriage, which has resulted in high rates of obstetric fistula and even maternal death amongst young mothers. Because female education is not generally valued, most rural Zambian girls rarely complete their primary schooling.

Traditionally, Zambian women don't discuss issues of gender inequity with men, especially their husbands. They are encouraged to be sexually subservient and cannot negotiate condom use. It is widely accepted for men to openly have multiple concurrent sexual partnerships; in the face of one of the highest HIV/AIDS rates in the world (around 14.5%), women are being infected with HIV at a startling pace. If a women protests it is legitimate grounds for a divorce. Domestic violence is also widely accepted in the community.

As a Peace Corps Volunteer facilitating health development in the community, gender inequity is without a doubt the biggest impediment to my work here.

As a result, two of my PCV friends and I are planning a Peace Corps Camp GLOW event to take place in Eastern Province from 9 August through 15 August. Camp GLOW, or Girls Leading Our World, is a camp facilitated by Peace Corps Volunteers in multiple countries throughout the world that focuses upon female empowerment, gender awareness, and youth skills development. Thirty girls from 15 schools throughout Eastern Province will be selected by their schools to attend the camp accompanied by 15 teacher counterparts. The camp will highlight: self-esteem building exercises, body image awareness, art education, sports, health education, guidance from Zambian female role models and advisors, and leadership and communication skills development. Camp GLOW will also provide the opportunity for the female students to share ideas and experiences with each other ranging from encounters with sexual abuse to the potential for community advocacy. With the assistance of community-based Peace Corps Volunteers, the teachers will return to their schools to begin implementing gender awareness into school-wide curriculum. The PCVs will also support the girls in creating local GLOW clubs that will continue working on gender equity focused activities and promoting dialogue in village communities. Eventually, we hope future GLOW events will also include young male campers and counterparts as well.

We have received numerous donations from the business community of Eastern Province. Individuals have stepped forward to donate food, conference space, and materials. However, we still need to fundraise $4,000usd to provide food, lodging, and educational materials for all particpants; we are seeking the support of our friends and family in the United States to make Camp GLOW a reality. We have applied for a Peace Corps grant through which individual donors can contribute to our project online through the Peace Corps website. If you would like to make a donation, please visit this link: https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.donatenow or visit the Peace Corps website, click on Donations, and then click on Volunteer Projects. You can search for Camp GLOW by either typing A.Rubin into the search box or by selecting Zambia as the search country.

Gender inequity and the oppression of women in Zambia is preventing development in all sectors, from the economy to the healthcare system. By reaching out to young women and their teachers, we hope to not only impact the lives of the 60 Camp GLOW participants, but to also start a movement of awareness and dialogue concerning positive and negative gender norms in Zambia. We hope to provide young women with a support system that would help them, if they so choose, to live and think differently than those before them. We hope to prove that the problem isn't that women don't have a voice, but that no one is listening....yet.

Thanks for all of your help and support, dearest blog readers. I'll keep you updated on GLOW progress as it develops.

After 8 months in country, few things shock me about my life in Zambia anymore. I know thunder and lightning don't necessarily mean rain, meetings won't start for at least 2 hours after they are scheduled, and unidentifiable insects can still be quite tasty...usually after being soaked in lots of cooking oil that is. I can tell one bush "path" from another bush "road." And I'm not frightened when snakes fall out of trees in front of me while biking (okay okay, thats ones a bit of a lie). But something that continues to shock me/surprise me/move me is people's immediate and unconditional kindness towards one another and myself.

I was visiting a village to do a practice village inspection with one of my Neighborhood Health Committees a few weeks ago (see the pic below) and the village was so excited I was there they insisted on giving me a chicken. Having a chicken slaughtered in your honor is one of the greatest gifts you can receive in Zambia and you have to eat the gizzard to show that it was "your" chicken. (Add some grits to the mix and I could be at home in the south). A few days before I had a bike breakdown while cycling to a meeting with my counterpart. While waiting for a pump, the family who owned the farm I was stranded on insisted on packing my bag full of fresh avocados, maize, and cassava. A few days ago while hitching back from holiday in Namibia we were picked up by a really kind Namibian who drove us 600 kilometers, let us camp on his front lawn, and gave us warm showers and hot coffee. We are now nearing the end of starvation season, the time when villagers are running out of food from the last harvest but their new crops aren't yet ready to be picked, but people always looked out for one another in the village, ensuring that everyone had at least one meal a day. Even when some families had no maize flour to make nshima, their families or neighbors always provided for one another. Life can truly be challenging in Zambia but the "it takes a village" mentality is alive and strong. People take care of one another and I'm constantly astounded by how that care has been consistently extended my way and has deeply affected me as well.

I just arrived back in Lusaka today after 3 weeks away from my village. I attended a 1 week PEPFAR workshop in Chipata with a counterpart from my community and then headed on holiday to Namibia with 5 of my friends ( see pic below). We had an amazing time sand boarding in the dunes, road tripping around the eastern part of the country, hiking in some of the tallest sand dunes in the world, quad biking in the Namib Desert, and seeking out copious amounts of steak and beer. Namibia used to be a German colony and thus the staple foods include: red meat, draft beer, and and game jerkey. Though its nice to return to my nsima diet, I will miss my constant 10 day meat coma.

Happy Birthday Emily! Happy 38th wedding anniversary Mom and Pops!

As part of my malaria work I've been going from school to school teaching the malaria basics: how malaria is spread, what the signs/symptoms are, and how it can be prevented. With grades 1-5 I've followed up the lessons with an "art contest" where the children draw one of the ways of preventing malaria that they learned about. I've had some pretty hilarious drawings come out of it (i.e. eating sweeties while in a mosquito net is apparently a very good way of preventing malaria) and soon I'll be posting the pictures in the clinic in celebration of Malaria Day at the end of April.

I have been working with all 10 of my NHCs to gather health data and related information from every village in the Mwasemphangwe area (there are over 300 villages in my catchment area). In the picture above, I was training one of my NHCs on how to go door-to-door and what kinds of questions to ask to gather the most relevant health information. This NHC is practicing how to inspect treated mosquito nets in the house and how to gather information from their fellow community members.

During our trip to Namibia we visited Soussevlei and Sessriem in the Namib Desert where there are some of the tallest sand dunes in the world. This is a picture of my boyfriend, Kevin, and I before our entire group climbed one of the 300 foot+ dunes.

Well rainy season is well underway in the Mwasemphangwe area and the land is lush and green, the crops are growing visibly taller everyday, the villagers are busy in the fields, and everything I own is very, very damp. And since we are nearing the end of February, the end of mango season is also close in sight. I haven’t mentioned much about the mangos on this blog but from November through February life in Zambia is ruled by two things: farming and mangos. My hut is surrounded by 7 mango trees and my entire village and the fields surrounding it are also abundant in mango trees. During the height of mango season, I was eating mangos for breakfast and for lunch. I had so, so many mangos on my hands I didn’t know what to do with them. I brought bags of mangos to my Zambian friends’ houses (not like they didn’t have their own mango explosions on their hands to deal with). I carried boxes of mangos to the clinic to give to the pregnant women, waiting to give birth. I dried mangos on extra window screens, mixed mango with soya and made curries, and chopped mango into jungle oats. My clothes were covered in mango juice (many of them still are permanently) and I began to carry dental floss in my bag at all times knowing that at some point during the day I would be eating a mango…again. At night, laying in bed, I would hear a familiar sound of a bump and roll on my grass roof; yet another ripe mango had fallen from one of my trees and in the morning I would find myself eating mango…again.

Mangos began to be a challenge, a burden. “How will I do all my housework, health work in the community, and manage all of these mangos??” But finally, February has come and with it the amount of mangos available has slowly begun to dwindle.

Alas, the guavas have begun to ripen on their trees. They never said this job wouldn’t be challenging…

When I haven’t been imagining new ways to cook or dry mangos, I’ve been extremely busy training my Neighborhood Health Committees and working with them on developing health actions plans for their communities. My work is as varied as helping one NHC plan how to get safewater via a borehole dug in their community to helping another NHC make a community garden that will help feel orphans and vulnerable children in their area. The work is varied, challenging, and slow but I’m really enjoying the community organizing aspect of the health work. I’ve also been teaching Life Skills once a week at my local basic school. I teach grades 7, 8, and 9 (about 200 kids in a day) and we talk about issues like self-esteem, peer pressure to engage in risky sexual practices, pressure from families to marry early (for girls usually around the age of 14 or 15), HIV/AIDS, puberty and sexuality, goal setting, etc. During the introductory sessions I asked the children to close their eyes and imagine what kind of futures they want to live. Do they want to get married? What kind of relationship do they want with their husband/wife? Do they want children? How do they plan to avoid or manage diseases like HIV? Do they want to be a farmer, a teacher, or a nurse? What kind of person do they want to be in the community? I asked them to write their visions of their future down on a piece of paper, and stick it in a plastic bag that I will return them after we finish the Life Skills class next December. I imagined that it would be an easy activity for the children however what was supposed to take 15 minutes ended up taking 1.5 hours: the kids said they had never been asked to think about their futures before. They’d “never thought about the options.” It was a challenging exercise that has set an entirely different tone for the Life Skills classes for the rest of the year.

In other news, many of you may know, but I have a beautiful new nephew named Erik Thor Rubin laughing and crying his way through the first few months of his life in Iceland. Congratulations Josh and Meredith!!

I’m sorry I’ve been slow to add photos to the blog but I’m still trying to find a feasible way of doing so. Also, I didn’t realize quite so many people were reading this blog; please forgive all grammatical and spelling errors! Thanks again for all of your letters, emails, and love packages

Stay well,

Yanni

Happy (belated) New Years to everyone! It has been awhile since my last post and there is a lot to update you on. First, my intake officially completed our Community Entry period! My first 3 months in the village have come to a close and it feels like a lifetime ago that I first came to Mwasemphangwe; I have had an amazing time getting to know my village and catchment area and while I have (at times severely) gotten my butt kicked while adjusting to life here, its been a really rewarding first 3 months/butt kicking in the village. Next week I will hit my 6 month mark of arriving in country. In the past half year I have learned so, so much. I've learned how to cook and eat caterpillar, how to dance traditional dance, how to build a 3 stone fire, how to carry water on my head, how to speak(ish) Nyanja, how to thatch a roof, how to cook nsima, and how to tell lightning and thunder from an actual storm. I've learned how to sweep dirt compounds with tree branches and how to pick and get the best mangoes from the highest branches. And I've learned how to deal with the incredible amount of attention I receive on a daily basis and -also- how to simultaneously deal with an entirely new sense of isolation and quiet.

I've been working hard in the clinic and in the community since I last wrote. My World Aids Day event was a huge success. Over 100 people attended our candle light vigil and over 200 people came to the actual World Aids Day event, 90 of whom went for voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) HIV tests. There was drama, original poems, skits from school children, food, a movie projector with informational films, dancing, drumming, condom demonstrations, and a soccer match. Next month I will be giving orientation trainings to all of my Neighborhood Health Committees, NHCs, who were newly elected by their communities last month. There are 10 NHCs and 10 people sitting on each NHC so I will be training at least 100 people in the next 6 weeks on how to conduct village health inspections, teach others about local health issues, and plan their own public health intervention projects in their communities. I am really excited about these orientation trainings and looking forward to cooking up individual project plans with each group soon.

I hope everyone had very merry holidays wherever they may be in the world. I spent Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa in Chipata with friends at the Peace Corps house there. Then I went to Malawi with other friends to celebrate New Years and relax on the beautiful shores of Lake Malawi. It was a great vacation, packed full of snorkeling, fresh fish, boat trips, and crazy nights staying awake past....oh, my usual bedtime of 8:00pm.

I just came back to Lusaka today for my intake's In-Service Training (IST). It will be great to see people that I haven't seen in months. This is also my first time back to the city since I was posted to my village in September and it has been a bit of a shock to the system. The first thing we did was use fancy flush toilets at a shopping mall. The second thing we did was get chocolate milkshakes. And who knows, after we are done using the internet we might repeat both again! I will be in Lusaka for the next 2 weeks so I'm sure it will be two action packed weeks abundant with flushing and chocolate. I will try to upload more pictures at some point later this week.

It was decided during this vacation that 2010 is, undoubtedly, the Year of the Dance. I spend a majority of my time - both literally and figuratively - dancing. I dance my way out of awkward situations and I try to dance my way into new opportunities. We dance in church to show our thankfulness and we dance in the village at night around the fire to show our solidarity as a community. We dance through a complicated and often challenging language, stumbling and fumbling and somehow being understood (I hope? Or else people are just incredibly nice to me). We dance as volunteers when we come together, relieving stress and laughter. We dance through new experiences by bike, on foot, in the beds of flatbed trucks, and on buses. We dance, we dance, and we dance and its exhausting, but its invigorating. So, 2010, Year of the Dance, here we come.

More to come soon!

I am sharing a sunflower field with my closest neighbors in the village. We'll press the sunflowers we grow to make cooking oil for personal use and to sell in the community. This is a picture of the very beginning of cultivating the field; we built ridges to plant the seeds on and the sunflowers will be fully mature for harvesting by March. I'll try to get a picture of my garden up soon as well. I'm growing peas, carrots, tomatoes, rape, cabbage, squash, basil, rosemary, cucumber, chili peppers, and (unfortunately) lots of weeds.

This is a picture of the sunflower field I am sharing with some of my closest neighbors. It is located right between our house and these are the planting ridges that we began building last week. We will press the sunflowers in the spring in order to make cooking oil.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

While I'm dissapointed to have missed celebrating the holiday that I love so much with the people that I love so much, I definitely had a very good- albeit unique- Thanksgiving holiday. All of the Peace Corps volunteers from Eastern Province came to Chipata to celebrate together. We cooked all of the essentials and even managed to include canned cranberrys, pumpkin pie, and a real turkey. And we had corn bread of course (gasp....a food item based on corn? what a suprise here). It was a bit overwhelming to be around 40 young, energetic, and slightly eccentric volunteers at first after spending so much time by myself in Mhuklangombe. However after the initial shock wore off it was great to have the opportunity to do things like play trivial pursuit, watch movies, cook, and shower (!!!). I feel lucky to be surrounded by so many interesting, diverse, and dynamic people. It definitely contributes to my ability to cope with the challenges and obstacles of village life.

My Thanksgiving day was interrupted, however, by an unexpected trip to a mission hospital a few hours away from Chipata. I had been bit by a spider a few days earlier and what appeared to initially be a benign bite began to swell, change color, and grow grow grow. Peace Corps took me to see a great doctor who quickly put me on medication and I'm spending a few extra days at the Peace Corps house to make sure that the infection subsides before I return to site (where, no matter how hard I try, staying clean is quite a challenge). Hows that for a Thanksgiving day adventure?

In other news, I recently acquired a kitten from a neighboring village. His name is Devi (throw back to my India days). He is just bigger than my hand at this point and is totally 100% spoiled. I feed him kapenta (sardine like dried fish) and he lives inside my hut when I'm not there. Before coming to Chipata I had to transport him to a friend's house where he is staying while I am gone. I tried to figure out how to ride a bike 5k with a kitten in tow and I finally settled on doing what a Zambian woman would do with her baby (because let's face it, I am my mother's daughter and my pet is basically my child... Oliver has two beds ) so I put Devi on my back and tied him in a chitenge traditional cloth. As I biked, the people in their fields doubled over in laughter when they saw the crazy muzungu (the word for a foreign English speaker) riding along with a bright blue helmet and a kitten being carried like a baby on her back.

Work has been busy. Next week is Child Health Week, a nation-wide event where clinic workers travel to the most rural locations in their catchment areas to deliver vaccinations and medications. I am hosting the inaugural Mwasemphangwe Development Coalition meeting where leaders in development in my area will come together to discuss and prioritize development goals for our community. And lastly, I am planning a World AIDS Day Celebration complete with positive speakers, condom demonstrations, a candle light vigil, theatre groups, mobile VCT, and a football match. The work is interesting and exciting right now and I enjoy being busy and challenged by the unexpected obstables and opportunities of working on grassroots issues here.

So, there's alot to be thankful for. More than anything, I am thankful for my strong and constant ties to home. This time last year I would have been hosting FriendsGiving at the O.House in Boston, cooking up a storm of pies with Aviva in Atlanta, or attending the annual Pot Freaking Luck with my crew in Atlanta. And while I'm far away from all of these events that mean so much to me, the people that compose them are very, very much with me no matter what I am doing. So, Happy Thanksgiving and keep the letters and lovin' a coming.

It is difficult to know how to begin describing the past six weeks. To list the many lessons I've learned, embarrassing moments I''ve experienced, new tastes, smells, and sensations I've felt still would not do justice to the magnitude of newness of my new life. I'm still yet to truly process (oh where is my O.House living room filled with Tufts girls when I need it) everything that has occurred in the past few weeks. But I am settling into a routine that I enjoy in my village and am less and less exhausted from the sheer stimulation of being an outsider attempting to settle into a new and tightly-knit environment.

So much of my day in the village is devoted just to the needs of living. I wake up at 5am and build a fire and put some water on to heat and I sweep my hut and the dirt yard/compound and shelters surrounding it. Usually I eat jungle oats (pretty much oatmeal) for breakfast and spoil myself with instant coffee, which is definitely my guilty pleasure at site. Sorry sorry to my Starbucks employed sister. I usually fetch water from the village borehole for drinking that I chlorinate and filter and then fetch water for washing dishes, etc. I usually have to do some bike maintenance before I go anywhere since I'm cycling over sand and dirt covered mountains ...which is fun, but certainly tough on the bum. I usually head to the clinic or a community meeting, sweating profusely as I go. We are still in the midst of hot season (at least the high 90s F everyday) and rainy season has just begun as well. As in, at 5:15pm on Wednesday the heavens opened up with a large crack of thunder and it's been drizzling ever since then. So between the humidity, the heat, and my Norwegian genetics, my face is usually some shade of red. The villagers think it's hilarious.

For lunch I usually eat groundnuts (peanuts) or some of the lovely granola bars or dried fruit I've received in my love packages. In the afternoons I work in my garden (attempting to demonstrate how to practice sustainable and organic agriculture as most families are still heavily reliant on chemical fertilizers), do laundry at the borehole, try to pimp my hut, etc. In the evenings I usually bring some kind of ndiwo ( vegetable relish) to a family in my village and we eat nsima (the maize paddies/mush) and the vegetable together around the fire. If I can stay up past 8pm I usually sit around chatting with the women or join the traditional dance/ female right of passage that has been going on for the past few weeks in the village. Watching the women dance is incredible. They move their bodies in ways that I can't ever imagine accurately describing , singing call and response songs back and forth and drumming for hours into the night. The women have certainly taken me under their wing, teaching me how to cook, smear mud on my outhouse floor, fix my that roofing, and handle the work village life entails. One of the most interesting parts of living in the village is just being so extremely conscious of how much I consume. I have to plan out how much water I will use to cook and bathe in a day, how much wood or charcoal I will need, and what kinds of food I will eat. All items that have wrappers or packaging must be disposed of in a rubbage pit and sit there near my house until, well, forever or at least until I burn it. I'm really enjoying having this new awareness, weighing my decisions and actions carefully before I commit to the physicality that fetching water on my head or building a fire will entail.

My first week in the village, I was taken to the palace of the Chieftaness in Mwasemphangwe. I was formally introduced and she gave me a new Chewa (my tribe) name. She named me Daliso, which means Blessings. Most people exclusively call me Daliso now. And many people have shortened the name and simply call me Dolly. It's amazing to be giving a talk at a basic school about HIV/AIDS prevention and have a pupil raise his hand and say, "Um, excuse me, Dolly, but can you explain the difference between female condoms and male condoms?" So, Daliso I am.

I have a chicken coop and, as of now, a family of 2 chickens that I'm hoping will soon multiply. My chickens are Clucky Lucky and Henny Penny. It was a bit of an arranged marriage between them but they appear to be getting along well (the Chief gave me Clucky Lucky initially, name not included). I am far too attached to them to ever allow them to be eaten. Those chickens are going to die of old age! Everyday I wake in the morning and run out to their coop to check for eggs. Alas, Henny Penny hasn't come through yet and I continue to buy eggs from a neighboring village. The other creatures in my life include Casper the Friendly Mouse (because I hear him in my house but never see him). He is a great listener, bad conversationalist. I also have a small zoo of insects including a few scorpions, wall spiders of all shapes and sizes, and some overly-friendly grasshoppers.

While I am still in the midst of community entry there is still a lot of exciting work for me to do in the community; I help in the clinic weighing babies or listening to fetal heart beats and give short trainings on issues like HIV or malaria in the community. I will be working in the clinic, the local schools, with several sustainable agriculture groups, and primarily with my Neighborhood Health Committees. As a side project, I am helping a friend start a Positive music group of people who are living with HIV and want to perform and sing about stigma and the importance of getting tested. I am also helping the Safe Motherhood group start a garden that will help pay the costs for women who need to deliver in a hospital in Lundazi. So far I've stayed extremely busy, which I think has helped curb the initial shock of living by myself for the first time in a very, very different land.

When I am on my own in my hut I write in my journal a lot, I read a lot (so please send books or magazine!), I sew, I play the guitar, and sometimes I go for runs despite the crazy looks my friends in the village give me. All of the above usually help me decompress and my journal helps me stay positive on the most challenging of days (Every entry I make I end by writing 3 things I'm thankful for. Peanut butter, packages from home, weekly calls from scott, doxycycline, my great and email-happy family, and BBC radio have all made the lists). Despite how hard some of the days are here, if I leave this country with anything, it's going to be smile lines...and maybe some parasites. I spend an immeasurable amount of time laughing at myself and at the crazy-incredible-unexpected surprises of everyday life here. I spend a lot of time "going with the flow," waiting for things to start, and attempting to understand what is going on around me. But, in general, I'm really happy. And every now and then my breath catches in my chest as I crest a beautiful ridge on my bike or sit around the fire at night with the women in my village and I think, "This is my home. This is my life." You are so much of what you love and I can feel Mwasemphangwe seeping into who I am bit by bit, everyday.

More updates to come. Stay well and warm over there!

So much love,

Arianna..... Er, Dolly.

Well, it's official folks. Yours truly swore in as a real-life Peace Corps Volunteer last Friday, September 25th. Swear-in was a great event, held at the U.S. Ambassador's house and attended by several hundred people. We said our oaths, signed out commitment sheets, and began our two years of service filled with delicious American snacks and real brewed coffee (which may or may not have been the best part of the entire shin-dig...coffee!). I was asked to give the volunteer speech in Nyanja, which was a really exciting and touching opportunity. Our pictures and soundclips were all over the Zambian radio and newspaper the next day.

Right now I am at the Peace Corps provincial house in Chipata and I will be posted at my site TOMORROW. We have spent the past 4 days decompressing from training and purchasing all of the gear we need to fill our huts for the next two years. I have bought everything from a hoe and vegetable seeds to a cooking brazier and several pounds of peanut butter. I bought gallons of light blue paint to make myself feel at home as well as lime to spread on my walls to keep the termites out. Tomorrow is the only time I will ever get a ride to my site so I am wracking my brain trying to imagine all of the items I won't want to strap to the back of a bike for 90k in the future. Yup, that list includes 50 rolls of toilet paper.

I haven't updated all of you on the details of my village after my initial visit yet. My village is extremely small with around 50 people in it only. There are, however, villages within 1 or 2 kilometers on either side of my village. While my village is within the Mwasemphangwe area, it's specific name is Mkhulan'ngombe. Sorry to keep giving you multi-syllable / only semi-inpronouncable names to learn. I am based out of the Zonal Rural Health Center, meaning that I have around 10,000 people in my catchment area. Within my catchment area I will work predominantly with Neighborhood Health Commitees, comprised of village volunteers who help plan and coordinate health interventions within their communities. My clinic is AMAZING. They do HIV testing and counseling in the clinic, there is an in-patient care area, they are fully stocked with vaccines, and there is several full time clinic workers. It is an utter rarity in Zambia and I feel so lucky to be based out of it. My house is small but has a nice porch, a bit of privacy, and two mango trees (see the picture below). My closest neighbor is only 20 kilometers from me which is also a Peace Corps rarity. We are- however- VERY far from any kind of town or marketplace of any kind. In fact, I'm only 15 kilometers from the Malawi border and I'm quite sure that, technically, Malawi has my closest market. Because of this absence of a market, my village has very graciously given me a garden....and a field.... to grow my crops in. I'm planning on starting small with the garden ( we are supposed to be teaching perma-garden skills within our villages) but who knows...maybe eventually I'll manage a field or two of maize. I'm so glad that I can't hear all of you laughing out loud right now as you read this.

My first 3 months in the village are designated "community entry" during which my job is to conduct rapid needs assesments, hold community meetings, and get the input and experiences of as many community members as possible. The goal of community entry is for me to become a trusted figure (and hopefully friend) within the community, someone who can work as a co-facilitator with villagers and not as the sole project leader. I bought a guitar (and I don't know how to play the guitar). I have a good supply of reading material. And I am planning on working on my Nyanja fluency. Hopefully this will tide me over for the first 3 months in my village. Watch out for lots of letters in the mail in the coming months. And for real, you better write back.

It was sad to leave my friends heading to other provinces but I am excited (and nervous) for the weeks to come. I have been working so hard for the past 9 weeks in preperation for everything that is going to begin starting tomorrow. Some days are harder than others (and some days are very very hard) but at the end of everyday I fall asleep knowing that I belong here and that, for now, I am doing the most fufilling work I could ever imagine having the opportunity to take part in. This week I realized, for the first time, as I was writing my speech in the random random language of Nyanja just how proud I am of the work my fellow PCVs and I are doing here with out Zambian counterparts. Sorry for the overly sentimental blog post but that has pretty much been the theme of the past week : excitement, dread, anxiety, celebration, pride, and just about everything in between.

I will not be leaving my village or district very often during community entry so I probably will not update my blog for quite awhile. Please (!!!!) keep in touch by email as I have close to full reception within my village.

Sending you all fist-sized termites full of love,

Yanni

The Nyow is a coming of age tradition for men in the Chewa tribe (the tribe in Eastern Province, and the people I will be living with). Young boys get taken from their homes to live in Nyow camps for 3 months at a time. They only come out dressed in disguise, like you see above. Usually at night they light fires in the villages and do traditional dancing while children run around screaming in fear. During the day, the Nyow wander the villages shreaking and howling, demanding food from the villagers so they can bring it back to their secret camps. They are quite scary, but one strangely gets used to having them around howling and shaking their bone rattles in the middle of the night. Many people in Zambia are trying to reform Nyow traditions - however - as teenage boys are forced to miss school for long period of time when they are living in the Nyow camps.

These are my host brothers and sisters in Kapamangoma, where I have been living during the past 9 weeks of training. Joyce, my host sister who has become one of my closest friends in Zambia, is sitting just to my right.

This is my hut in Mwasemphangwe! It is really lovely with 2 mango trees out front and my cooking shelter is just opposite. I have an outdoor bathing shelter and pit latrine as well.

Is the name of my future village in Eastern Province! Yup, as my father said, I will soon be a proud Mwasemphangwe-er (say that 10 times fast).

Today I left my homestay family for a 10 day site visit to Eastern Province. We came into Lusaka today to buy food for the week and then we will set out tomorrow to stay with a few current volunteers in my province. Then I will get dropped off in Mwasemphangwe to spend a few nights in my future hut all by myself! After I sufficiently bond with my new village and hut I will have to find my own way back to Lusaka through a combination of hitching and bus transport. It was terribly sad to leave my homestay family today and as I rode off (mountain biking...with luggage...yet another new skill I have gained here) I saw my sister, Joyce, start to cry. Last night was her birthday and to celebrate all ten of us in the Likeobama family had a Zambian dance party in the living room complete with a real battery powered stero and pineapple drinks. It felt basically like college again...

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of class, exams, and cultural integration. We have been learning about the Zambian political and economic system (basically the Chiefs trump everyone, even the president must bow to the Chiefs here) and we have been totally immersed in learning Nyanja. I really love the language of Nyanja, full of strange nuances and round-about grammar styles. Every sentence is like constructing a song or jigsaw puzzle. Apparently noone in my village speaks English so I'm really looking forward to becoming more comfortable (slash HAVE to become more comfortable) with the language soon.

There are so many parts about my life here that I am slowly getting used to and actually starting to love. I love bucket showering at sunset after I bike home. The cliche African sunset everyone talks about (and the Travel Channel glorifies) is justified amazing. Each night the sky turns pink, purple, and neon orange as the sun and moon compete for a dominant spot in the sky. It's my favorite time of day, when I let the entire day wash over me, staring out over the valley that surrounds my hut and bathing shelter. I'm actually getting pretty good at the pit latrine as well. Not to brag (and sorry to provide too much information about my bodily functions, but you might have to get used to it on this blog), but I'm darn good at the pit latrine now. And the hole in my latrine is SMALL. We're talking about 5 by 5 inches. I'm okay at ignoring the crickets and flies that pop out of it as I enter the chimbudzi toilet now - however you must ALWAYS be wary of using the toilet with excited crickets around, that's for sure - and I'm slowly builing the leg muscles necessary as well. Mazel Tov to me.

I'm also getting used to eating nshima at every meal, sugar in every cup of tea, and the fact that wherever I go people will laugh. They will laugh at my Nyanja, at my bike helmet, at my dirty feet, and at my blond hair. But I've also learned that in Zam Land, people laugh to show they are happy more than anything else. People are always laughing, by themselves, in groups, and sometimes without saying anything, people will greet eachother laughing, happy to see oneanother. It's really incredibly actually, it's a part of the culture that I really love (and will happily laugh over for the next two years).

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AVIVA!!!!!!!

So much has happened in the past 10 days since I have last updated. I found out that I will be learning the language of Nyjanja and will be posted in the Eastern Province of the country where I will be living with people of the Chewa tribe. (Secretly, this is what I was hoping for all along). Eastern province borders Malawi and is also the closest access point to Mozambique. It is in a valley which means that it gets VERY hot come October but it also has incredibly lush vegetation (they grow peanuts!) after the rainy season. It is also home to two of the biggest game parks in southern Africa. The Chewas - or Chichewas - are a matriarchal tribe that live in densly populated and centrally governed villages. They are also known as the "rat eaters" of Zambia. I am really excited to move to my site come September 26th.

For now during the next 9 weeks of training I am living in a hut on the compound of the Likeobama family (yes...an incredible last name, I know). I live in the village of Kapamangoma which in Nyana means Village of the Beating Drums. I have 4 host brothers and 3 host sisters. My 19 year old host sister, Joyce, has become an amazing friend and has really taken me under her wing. She shows me how to watch my clothes in the river, how to sweep my dirt floor (which is still very anti-intuitive for me), and how to tell one bush path from another. My host father, Augustini, is a preacher at the local Catholic church and a farmer of nearly everything. So far my host family has been incredibly inviting and while it is hard being treated like royalty all of the time, they have made my transition into Zambian life quite painless. A recent spout of bed bugs has been my only major problem thus far.

On a typical day I wake up around 5:45 and bucket shower in a grass lean-to that my family built for me behind my hut. I eat a breakfast of sampo (corn porridge) and then bike about 5 k to an mphala (hut) near my community for language class. There are 5 of us learning Nyanja and for 4 hours each morning we slave over the Bantu language trying to keep up with our teacher, ba Charles. After language class I bike home for lunch with my hostmother. Most meals consist of a stewed vegetable and nshima. Actually, a meal is not considered satisfying in Zambia unless it includes nshima. Shima is a corn lump made out of mashed corn meal (what Zambians call "mealy-meal") that is poured into boiling water until it becomes pasty. You use it the same way you use Indian chipati to scoop up food and eat it with your fingers. So far I can only manage one lump of nshima per meal but my host mother has made it her personal goal to work me up to two before I leave her home in September.

After lunch, I bike about 7 k to the training center where all of the other CHIP volunteers and I have technial training. Training ranges from learning how to treat malaria nets to practicing nutitional farming techniques. So far training has also focused upon exploring the ongoing development/aid debate. Peace Corps is a human resources (volunteers being the humans) development agency but its approach is different in that it recognizes that good development agencies are temporary ones. If we do our jobs right, Peace Corps won't be in Zambia in 20 years. Our job is to facilitate change and help local health and education initiatives flourish, not to force it upon anyone. The end goal of course being sustainability, over my two years here I work with numerous "counterparts" who take over the projects we co-create as a team. While no development agency is perfect, I appreciate that this is the approach of Peace Corps. It has been difficult traveling and seeing the results of other agencies that - for example - build a borehole but do not teach people how to mantain it. Or, hand out food once a year but do not teach people how to harvest the particular seeds or practice more sustainable irrigation techniques.

Tangent..

After technical training I usually bike home and join my host mother in preparing dinner. If there is time I play net ball with the kids (kind of a more extreme and violent version of dodgeball). We build two fires outside and the women eat around one and then men around another. I am usually in bed tucked into my mosquito net with my Nyanja flash cards by 21:30.

I hitched into Lusaka todaywith a few friends to use the internet and buy new sheets (thanks to the bed bugs) and I am buying supplies to take back and make s'mores with my host family tonight. The weeks ahead will be arduous as training days are long and tedious but I am really enjoying the content and it is so fun to learn something tangible (such as how to grow protein packed soya beans) and then actually have the opportunity to practice it. Ones bum does get quite sore however from biking so much on bumpy, sandy, rocky roads. And I am quite sure my route is uphill both ways...

So, please, keep the emails/texts coming. I can check them on my phone and it makes me giddy each time I get an update from home.

Love!Yanni

Wow.

The first week in country has been crazy, busy, and incredibly rewarding. Thanks for all of your supportive emails and messages!

After a 3 day trip and lots of plane food and bad movies we finally made it to Lusaka last Thursday. Zambia has been everything I expected and more. It is EXTREMELY rural and the majority of the country is bush. In Lusaka, the few buildings that are taller than two stories stick up above the rest of the tin ceiling-ed shops and market carts. It takes many hours to drive anywhere (as I recently found out) as we must always drive around the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola areas that jut into the country. We are in the middle of the dry (and cold!) season so much of the land is covered in dead tall grasses that farmers are now beginning to burn to prepare for the rainy season in October. The country varies greatly in appearance depending upon which province you are in but everything I have seen so far has been incredibly beautiful. Each night I am completely awed by the southern Africa sunsets. The entire sky gets hot pink and the sun appears huge and bright orange in the sky, setting in only a few minutes to leave the earth dark purple and blue for at least another hour.

I really like my fellow Peace Corps volunteers. There are 42 of us in all. Half of us are CHIP (community health improvement project) volunteers and half of us are RAP (rural aquaculture project) volunteers. In country, the call us the Fish and CHIPS group (hardy har). The Zambia Peace Corps population is one of the organization's largest and Zambia is home to the most Peace Corps volunteers in all of Africa. There are over 200 of us in country at a time! That being said, I feel like I have already met over half of the Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) here as many of them came into Lusaka to welcome us and help up begin out training.

On Saturday a group of 5 other CHIPers and I traveled to the Central Province (about a 5 hour drive) to stay with a current volunteer in her village as our official first site visit. (The idea is to give us an idea of what living in a village will be like early on so that those who aren't up to the job can get out early). We had an amazing time: we ate good food, met her Zambian "family" and counterparts, visited the local clinic, and camped out in her front lawn an insaka. Most volunteers have a cement hut with a thatch roofed, a pit latrine, a bathing shelter, and an insaka (a cooking hut). Yesterday one of her neighbors brought us a live chicken. Yup, a live one. So, with less than a week in country I found myself slaughtering, plucking, and gutting chicken for the first time. Way to dive in head first, eh?

Tomorrow we will find out what languages we are learning and also move in with our host families. We are leaving Lusaka for a town about an hour away and we will live in 5 villages surrounding the town, biking in for our language and technical classes. I am excited and nervous to move in with my host family!

So sorry for the quick and dry description of what is going on. I mostly got online to tell all of you that I now have a phone and it is free (!!!) for you to call and text me. From the U.S. my number is 01126 0977745402. You might need to drop the second 0, I'm not sure.

Also - in advance, I apologize for my terrible grammar and spelling for the rest of the 27 months that I am mantaining this blog. I'm typing fast to save those Kwachas!

Okay, I love you all very much. I'm looking forward to posting next time and telling you what language I am learning and perhaps even which province I will be posted in! Stay well.

- yanni

I figured I would give all my avid blog readers (hey, mom and dad!) a little background and briefing before I ship off to Zambia in only two (TWO!) days. My job as a Peace Corps volunteer will be as a rural Community Health Extentionist, working on and contributing to projects relating to HIV/AIDS and malaria prevention as well as issues of food security. My projects will vary from teaching sex education to planting community gardens and from handing out bed nets to working with women’s organizations and informal clubs. I have staging in DC on Tuesday where I will meet my fellow training class and they will pump us full of vaccines and information and send us on our way to Senegal. From Senegal we will head to South Africa and…a few days after we began…we will land in Lusaka, Zambia. We will have a 3 day orientation before heading out to stay with current Peace Corps volunteers throughout the country. From there we will reconvene at a farmer training camp about an hour away from Lusaka in order to start our 3 month homestay and training. It sounds like training is pretty intense, 9 hours a day and 6 days a week. During that time I will discover (1) where I will be living for the next two years (2) what language I will be speaking for the next two years (3) what my exact work will entail for the next two years (4) how much I like the taste of caterpillars.

Zambia is a landlocked country in the southern region of sub-Saharan Africa, home to the Zambezi River and the beautiful Victoria Falls that you see as the photo at the top of the page (It’s one of the Wonders of the World! If that’s not incentive to visit I dunno what is.) Zambia was a British colony until 1964 (formerly known as Northern Rhodesia) and used to fare pretty well as a competitor in the global market due to its large amounts of copper natural resources. However, when the copper prices plummeted in the 1970s, so did the economic security and social indicators of most Zambians. Now, with a population of around 12 million people, Zambia’s national average life expectancy is around 38 years old (according to the CIA). Over 15% of the population is living with HIV or AIDS, ranking it at the number 6 spot for the highest HIV infection rate in the world. While corruption is highly prevalent in the Zambian political system, it is a peaceful country known for its acceptance and recognition of numerous identities and ethnicities. Zambia’s self-allocated tagline is “The Real Africa.” A funny juxtaposition: the international community often refers to Zambia as “Africa-light.”

One would think that by this time when people ask, “so why are you joining the Peace Corps and moving to Zambia, Arianna?” I would have a great answer, or even just a solid answer, or even just an answer. However, still, when asked this simple question I usually stammer and say something along the lines of “the issue of public health blah blah blah” (yup, you’ve probably all heard it). Sometimes I’ll give Maia’s mother’s answer and say, “I’m just following my destiny!” (but that really only goes over well when in the right crowd). In truth, the best answer for why I am moving to Zambia and joining the Peace Corps is because I really want to. I believe in the mission of the organization and I feel both passionate and curious about my place in our complicated system of global communities. I am humbled and confident in the face of this opportunity to contribute to the health infrastructure of Zambia and, probably more so, learn from the new people and world around me. For now, I know it is the right choice and the right place for me.

And, with two days left before departing for Zambia, I am a jumble of emotions: antsy, nervous, and extremely excited. I am ready to be in the place that I have been reading and daydreaming about since April. I am ready to practice the skills and knowledge that I have been gathering over the past four years in college. I’m ready to test out those quick dry- zip off – odor resistant- bug proof – jet propelled clothes I’ve acquired from my favorite store (REI, duh) and more than anything I am ready to face the challenge and opportunities I know await me. I am also ready to receive your packages filled with delicious goodies and books.

I am sad to leave for this little bit of time but I am lucky to have an EXTREMELY supportive group of friends and family who themselves are off doing amazing things. From Boston to Atlanta to Michigan to New York to Texas to San Francisco and to Iceland (way to throw a curve ball on that one, Josh and Meredith), the people I love are all doing extraordinary things. Send me letters and let me know how seeing patients, building cars, building robots, meeting clients, teaching classes, taking classes, and general balling out is going. I’ll update all of you via the blog whenever I get a chance!

And – as the beer koozies my family printed up for my going away party say– One finger cannot catch lice.

The inaugural post. One month from today I will be headed to an unknown location with unknown people and an unknown amount of baggage to embark on the biggest adventure of my life yet to date. I am nervous, anxious, and incredibly excited.