Most the time life is pretty ho-hum and I forget I’m in a different country. It’s just life. But every so often, things happen that remind me. Like sitting at the clinic and watching more chickens walking around than people. Then having the Health Worker come into the waiting room pointing and announcing to everyone that a man there tried to commit suicide by drinking battery acid. He just kept going on and on about it. I couldn’t believe it. Just so different than the US.

It’s mushroom season now! Some are so huge, over a foot across! We’ve gone mushroom hunting with the neighbor kids a couple times. The best is the Telfia, which grows half under the ground, usually under piles of leaves. It looks like a big egg, but then you peel most of it off and there’s a mushroom-shaped mushroom inside, all clean and shiny! It tastes kind of cheesy.

We made a sweater for the Professor out of a sock. At first he was horrified and tried to back out of it, like he does when he gets his head stuck in a jar, but soon he gave in and will wear it all day. It makes him sleepy. I think because it keeps him warm. Zambians are of course bewildered by it since there’s no concept of having a “pet” here, just something to throw rocks at. Kapiria gets a kick out of telling people about the time he came by the house and saw us bathing the chicken.

When we first got the Professor, Wizzy decided that he was “too fierce to kill the rats.” Does he consider them beneath him? Will he only go for Puku? No, it’s just another one of those confussing Zamlish terms. “Too” in Zambian English actually means something like “very.” Like the headman’s instructions: “When the rains are coming too much, you are putting the seeds in the ground.” Another one is “just ok” which seems like it would be not very good, but here means good. Like “just fine” I guess. So if you ask someone how they like something and they say “just ok,” they actually mean good. Back to the Professor. I don’t know how Wizzy ever determined in the first place that he was fierce, this scared mewing little kitten, that he proceeded to turn upside down and drop to the ground.

We’ve also just now found out the word for “why” – “nindo.” In Lala, anyhow. There’s still no word for it in Bemba. After many frustrating conversations, I had pretty much given up and accepted that there was no word in Zambia that meant “why.” Which would make perfect sense, seeing how they never question anything. The next mystery is “pene” which someone says at least once per sentence it seems, but no one is able to explain to me what it means.

Speaking broken Bemba is fine I think. Like someone who speaks broken English, it makes everything you say sound funny. And it also keeps you on your toes because you have to think of more creative ways to say what you want. Like, “You have water because rain” (“You’re soaked.”) or “Ratbird” (bat). Bemba’s so simple though, that sometimes you get it right. “The chicken is making eggs.”

Fallingdownpantsboy (aka Patrick aka Patty) gets on my nerves most of the time, but he can also be pretty cute. One day, it sounded like he was inviting us over for dinner. We kept asking him to repeat, cause we couldn’t believe that the Mumbas could possibly be inviting us for dinner. After much repeating, we were pretty sure we understood, so we went over to their house. Once there, Neighbor Lady said “Bufi!!” (lie) Apparently, it was his own little idea to invite us for dinner. Another day, he was looking through some of our magazines and commenting enthusiastically about all of the pictures. A wheelchair was a bicycle, a lawnmower was a motorcar, any town was Serenje, and any animal was meat to eat. He narrated a loving picture of a father and son with a scolding “Iwe iwe!!” He also declared that a man stealing someone’s wallet was Peter.

His brother Oldmanface (aka Odrick aka Makumba) is also cute. Not looking, but acting. Whenever I say anything to him in Bemba, he repeats it back to me in question form word for word.

The roof is finally patched!! Justin never came through. He hasn’t been too reliable since he opened his homebrew bar. Jameson Kunda, another from the housing committee and teacher at one of my committee schools, brought his son and two nephews over to do it. (All roofs in Zambia must be thatched by kids, cause adults would fall through. Or, at least, Jameson Kunda thought he would fall through.) They just laid more grass up there and I guess it’s supposed to stay put. Hopefully the house will be less damp now. It was getting pretty bad.

New Chicken went broody, so we strung her up in a cage for a couple days, which we read can break broodiness. I guess by keeping her away from the nest and keeping her belly cold. The spraybottlefan that Cathy sent also works well for keeping chicken’s bellies cool! If you flip them over, they’ll just lay there helplessly and let you spray them. They’re such odd creatures. They’re absolutely expressionless which makes it hard to tell if they’re deeply contemplating something or thinking nothing at all. Probably the latter. Sometimes they’ll go into a deep telepathic trance with each other too, but sometimes one will break it before the other and walk away, leaving the other to look like a fool for being in a trance by itself. Anyhow, the broody cage worked and she layed for about a week then went broody again, along with Pocahontas and Fireball. Now only Fireball is laying.

Doug and I decided we want to try for baby chickens again (if they chickens ever start laying again, that is), so we bought our own rooster, hoping it would win pecking order (and thereby mating order) over the terrible headless enemy rooster. We bought Thor, a very beautiful black and green iridescent roster from the Headman. As soon as we let him go in our yard, he ran away and we didn’t see him again until the next day. We asked if we could trade it for a different rooster, so we got Abraham, a also beautiful black white green and blue iridescent rooster. He lost pecking order. Now we’re right back where we started from, but 25pin short and another bird to feed.

I really hate the neighbor’s rooster. He crows almost as annoyingly as the rooster in Chongwe during training. It’s driving me insane, really. It spends most the day in our yard crowing its terrible crow. I don’t know what to do.

The neighbors are annoying me too. Always begging for stuff. Lying about everything. They eat more mangos from our trees than we do. And they’re always walking through the backyard – stepping on the field and walking right past the icimbusu, several times when I was in it. Even in Zambian culture, that is supposedly considered rude.

We have gotten to eat a lot of mangos though. Besides just plain mangos, I have mangos in my oats every morning, which I’ll really miss once mango season is over. We’ve also made mango pancakes, mango cobbler, mango bread, and mango jam! The solar dryer is in ruins just from being outside the one or two times we tried to dry tomatoes, so I tried to just set it up in the insaka as an air dryer for mangos. Last time I checked, they looked green and were surrounded by fruit flies.

In other failures, still no bees.

In other failures, we’ve grown two nurseries which have grown strong, but then just die. So our joy at not having to water the garden during rainy season doesn’t matter because we don’t have a garden. In the time we’ve raised the two nurseries, the garden has been completely overgrown by weeds. It’s quite overwhelming just to look at it.

The field is growing well, though, if the neighbors would stop stealing our pumpkin leaves.

I think Doug and I are literally the only ones who ever take books out of the Peace Corps House’s Reference Library. We’re always getting excited about some book about vegetable diseases or goats. Recently, we found a book about “Microlivestock” and there was a section about carrier pigeons! Apparently, they’ll fly hundreds of miles a day back and forth to their feeding and nesting locations. (Pretty stupid creatures, it sounds like. Why don’t they just nest near their food?) I’ve seen some birds that resemble Morning Doves (Move Doug!) on the path to the school, so if I can only capture one, I think I’ll try to set it up to fly back and forth from my hut to the Peace Corps House in Serenje. That way I can actually communicate, seeing how I have no cell reception. I don’t know if a Morning Dove is the same thing though. And I’d have to convince the guards to feed it.

We also found a book of Abe Lincoln jokes. Not jokes about Abe Lincoln, but jokes by Abe Lincoln. Let me tell you, he was no comedian.

Another funny Zambian thing – They love to put these furry car covers over their dashboards. Hideous.

The new school year is starting up now, so hopefully the Girls Club and Life Skills will work out better.

I’ve still been sorting books. I have a bunch of little notebooks by category I sort them into instead of a card catalogue.

We had a Grade 2 IRI Training for Community School and Government School teachers, in our zone and the next. It went well. One of the teacher’s relatives died and we were all expected to go to the funeral, however. It was weird. Not in a church or anything, just a hut. A few people at a time went in where there was a mattress on the floor with a body covered by a sheet right there in front of you. We just sat there a few minutes, then left.

Pretty much everything else workwise has been frustrating. I set up a meeting with Mr. Mulenga of the clinic and Mr. Chisenga (who is apparently the head of the Neighborhood Health Committees) to discuss how I could be working with the NHCs and Traditional Birth Attendants. The whole thing was just frustrating, everyone arriving late, difficulties in communicating. It basically came down to that nothing could be done because there’s no funding to do trainings. Zambians will NOT go to a meeting over an hour or so unless there’s food and a “sitting fee” – money just for going to a meeting or training. In the US, you have to pay if you want to be educated, but here people expect to be paid. The also told me that the Community Health Workers are useless and don’t work and have already been given bikes by other NGO’s – something they could have told me months ago when we were discussing my bike plan. Later I talked with the head TBA and she seemed uninterested and only wanted me to give her things. I might still try to work with people who are willing to do trainings without sitting fees and those will be the ones who get the bikes.

The bike project is going along very frustratingly and may not happen at all. The organization who donates the bikes requires this big contract and lots of follow up, which I may not even be around for, and certainly can’t track with other PCVs I distribute bikes to. They would also like to do a rolling plan with money raised from selling bikes to bring more bikes in, which I like the idea of, but I would need some way to pass the money on to the next interested volunteer after I leave. I tried to set up a meeting with my APCD (Education program director in Lusaka) about all this, but she wasn’t in, so I talked with the former APCD, who basically thought that the project was too big for one Peace Corps Volunteer to do and wants me to hand it over to an NGO. The whole thing was very discouraging and disheartening to not be supported after being so excited about it. She was supposed to get me the contact information, but of course she has not.

Mr. Kasolo, the Clinical Officer got transferred, and Mr. Mulenga left for more training for six months, so now the only employee left at the clinic is the janitor. There’s no one to work with if I wanted to. And no one for Doug to if he ever did get his work permit. (And why don’t they want people to work for free?)

Last frustrating thing was the Jatrofya meeting, where Peter was to come and teach about farming Jatrofya, give out seeds, and make arrangements for payment. I had Mr. Chisenga announce it at a PTA meeting and posted flyers around. The day of the meeting it rained – the only thing that keeps Zambians away from meetings more than no sitting fees. No one came. Five hours later or so, we saw the headman, all dressed up, heading to the meeting. We told him it was already over, no one came, and Peter had already left. It couldn’t be rescheduled because the seeds needed to be planted right away for the rains. Some people have stopped by the hut since, however, so we’ve been able to distribute a good number of seeds, but not nearly as many had the meeting taken place, and certainly we’re not representatives of OvalBioFuels to explain any of it to them.

After thinking to myself, “Wow, I’ve been in Zambia almost a year now and haven’t gotten Malaria!” – I got Malaria. It started with just an eyeache. Then the next day, I slept all day, headache, weak, hot, sweaty, cold, no appetite. Then the next day, same again, but just completely foggy, couldn’t really walk right without feeling like I was going to pass out. The thermometer Peace Corps gave me didn’t work, so I wasn’t sure if I had the over 101 temperature that is one of the main determinants. (The thermometer is in Celsius anyhow, so I wouldn’t even have known.) I started to take my Malaria medicine that night and went to Serenje the next morning, as instructed by the Peace Corps Medical Handbook. The next step after taking the Malaria test was to go to Lusaka, but once I got to Serenje, I found that all the Malaria test kits in our medical chest were expired – most by over a year. I called the Medical Officer and she told me just to stay in Serenje and take my medicine. Another volunteer called and asked if our PGSO (jack of all trades worker at the PC House) could go to the clinic or somewhere to get a new one. I don’t know what the result of that was, whether she said no, or they weren’t available in Serenje, but it didn’t happen. I took the expired test and it said I had Malaria, so I called back and told the Medical Officer. She told me to take my temperature and call her back. So I took my temperature and called back to find that she had “knocked off” already. Frustrating. I would have rather just relaxed and gotten better in my hut then have dragged myself to the roadside, waited an hour and a half for transport, and rode two hours sitting upright (anything but laying down was difficult) for two hours only to have to recover at the Peace Corps House which I’m terribly allergic to and is always very noisy with people clattering around and music playing loudly all day. Anyhow, I’m feeling much better today, just a little hot. It was really only three days that were bad.

Now I’m still in Serenje for a Pepfar (HIV) Training that starts Monday.


Little boxes in the village
Little boxes made of sticky-thatchy
Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes, all the same
There’s a brown one, and a brown one, and a brown one, and a brown one
And they’re all made out of sticky-thatchy and they all look just the same
And the people in the thatch huts all farm in the cassava fields
And they all live in little boxes, little boxes all the same
There’s a farmer and a farmer and a farmer and a farmer
And they all get put in boxes and they all come out the same
And the men sit in the insaka and drink their chibuku
And they all have fifteen children and the children don’t go to school
And the children go draw water and then to the cassava field
And they all get put in boxes and they all come out the same
And the young girls get pregnant and marry and raise a family
And they all get put in boxes little boxes all the same
There’s a brown on and a brown one and a brown one and a brown one
And they’re all made out of sticky-thatchy and they all look just the same



Handy Hut How To – How to Do Laundry
Take the following outside to the insaka: Laundry, two wash bins, soap, stool, bucket. Place one bin on stool (for washing) and the other on the ground (for rinsing). Draw a bucket of water. Dump half each bin. Draw another bucket of water now and get it over with, because if you try to draw water with soapy hands it’ll cut right through. Do your best to wash the clothes as the water gets black from dirt and dye and throw into rinse bin when done. Rinse, dump out wash bin and fill with water again for second rinse. Use old water for new wash bin and pour clean water into new rinse bin. Ring out “clean” laundry. Pull clotheslines from out of bathing shelter and tie to trees. Hang clothes. Hope it doesn’t rain.




Bonnibelle – Silly Sayings!! The Green Olive cracked me up. Thanks for all the library books!! Especially the kids atlas and the dictionaries. They’ll be good for the library. And thanks for the Christmas presents! The chicken books look funny.

Michelle – Thanks for the packages! The necklaces, chimes (it’s funny, I had just been talking about wanting chimes and was thinking of trying to make them out of bamboo), all the treats, magazines, books, containers, etc.