I’ve been in Zambia one year now!

I’m in Serenje now to get groceries cause we ran out of food. It’s so frustrating. I was just here two weeks ago.

Well, mango season is just about over. For us, anyways. For awhile, there were so many, it wasn’t a problem that the neighbors were carting away a tub of mangos every day, but it didn’t take too long before it all caught up. They picked every ripe mango and now are working on the unripe ones. Right now, there’s probably only about fifteen mangos left on all of our trees and I doubt we’ll get to eat any of them.

It’s still rainy season though. Last week, it rained for three days straight. But then this week, it hasn’t rained at all. Nevertheless, the bushpaths are rivers. When you bike through them, your feet are submerged in water. I even saw a turtle swimming by!

Here’s some exciting news! I saw a cobra! It was just a mini cobra, but it was a cobra alright!

I also was witness to the loudest animal in the world. I really truly have no doubt in my mind that it has to be the loudest animal in the world. One night, this big (size of fifty-cent-piece?) bug flew into the house and as it vibrated its wings together, it let off this ear piercing screech. It was worse than one of those personal alarm things when you accidentally pull the plug. We didn’t know how to even get it out of the house – we didn’t have any free hands because we had to keep them over our ears. The Professor was intrigued.

The Professor is intrigued by many things, in fact. Just about every day, he proudly brings us a piece of bark or a stick he has found. And he’s quite a good watch-cat. When the neighbor dog sneaks over to our house at night to try to eat whatever we’re cooking, the Professor detects the intruder and runs outside to confront him. Zamdogs are so ridiculously abused, that all the Professor has to do is start to run towards it, and the dog runs away yelping, even though it’s twenty times bigger than he is. The funniest thing about the Professor, however, is his deep love for fritters. As soon as I come back from buying fritters, he knows! He’ll rip open whatever bag they’re in and drag one out. It’s pretty hilarious because as he holds it in his mouth, it looks as big as he is. If you get near to him when he has a fritter, he’ll growl something terrible.

The chickens are all broody now, so we’re trying to sync them up so they start laying eggs at the same time, so that we can get baby chicks from all of them. The problem is the roosters. They’re making my life miserable. If there’s one thing that would make me quit Peace Corps, it’s the roosters. I don’t know what to do. Abraham has decided to crow in the chicken house (right outside the window) at 4:00 AM every morning. So we have to get up, go outside, throw him and another chicken for him to play with into the backyard. An hour or so later, he’ll start crowing again, so then it’s earplug time. Then throughout the day, we have to put up with old ugly headless rooster crowing as well as Abraham. We’re trying to strike a deal with the neighbors – they eat their headless rooster, then we’ll give them Abraham. That way, we eliminate the headless rooster and move Abraham farther away from us, while still having him around to father the chicks. They don’t seem to understand the proposal, however.

Speaking of chickens, when I returned home after being away last time, I found that Doug had bought a new chicken, Peeps. A half chicken, really. She looks just like Fireball, but is still very young and doesn’t have a tail. Apparently, she was irresistible to him because she peeped so cutely. I was wooed at first too, I admit. She would come up on the couch with me as I was reading and sit on my stomach. Pretty cute. But then she started pooping everywhere and stealing the Professor’s food. So now she’s been banished from the house. Shoulda named her Poops, really.

After successfully making delicious veggie pies from recipes we found in the magazines Doug’s mom sent us, we were pretty convinced we could make absolutely anything on a brazier. After failed attempts at making peanut butter cookies and oatmeal cookies, however, I’m not so sure. Actually, I think they were just really bad recipes. The peanut butter cookie one didn’t even call for peanut butter.

I tried to dry mangos in the solar dryer, but they just rotted.

After two failed nurseries and a weed invasion, we finally got the garden weeded and hoed and are trying to get it going again. The only thing growing in the garden now is the loofah, and boy is it going crazy. We’ve been eating the leaves. Nothing exciting, but something to eat. We also made a new compost pile! A lot of work for just a pile of gunk.

The tree nursery is doing ok. Some custard apples, tamarinds, and leeches.

Doug’s been trying to teach some of the neighborkids the alphabet.

So the Pepfar HIV training went well. I was excited because several other organizations gave presentations about various things they were doing and two said they worked with maternal health or preventing mother-to-child transmission. My chance to get a Traditional Birth Attendant training!!! Unfortunately, one wasn’t working in my area and the other, like the Ministry of Health, is afraid to touch the issue. They’d rather teach NOTHING then perhaps be liable for some mistake. They’re basically ignoring all Traditional Birth Attendants, which is the way most village women give birth. Ridiculous. I’m trying to see if I can get medical gloves donated from a US hospital, aty leasty. (Zamlish for “at least”)

As part of our “Action Plan,” Mr. Chisenga and I decided I should train the Mpelembe teachers about HIV. So the day of the meeting, I showed up and of course he had forgotten. Rescheduled for a different day. Only had forty minutes, so we couldn’t cover nearly as much as I wanted to. It went well though. Adults are so much easier to work with than teenagers. We did spend too much time arguing whether or not a company had put HIV into contraceptive injections, however. I couldn’t convince them that even if this were true, the HIV virus wouldn’t be able to survive in a non-body-fluid. Another popular rumor is that manufactures put HIV into condoms. It really must be some Catholic Church conspiracy. We also had an argument about whether the “withdraw method” was ok for preventing HIV. Mr. Chisenga chipped in and said that no, it wasn’t, but that it WAS an ok method of birth control. Sometimes I can’t believe it. These are trained teachers at a government school.

I’ve also been teaching HIV in my Life Skills class. It’s frustrating as ever. Each week, we review, and each week they have absolutely no idea what we’ve talked about the week before. Last class, we were talking about “stigma” and that a person isn’t a bad person just because they have HIV. I was trying to give examples, like if one spouse was faithful, but the other was not and contracted HIV and then gave HIV to the faithful spouse, did that make the faithful spouse a bad person? They answered “yes.” In another attempt, what if a child was raped and got HIV – does that make the child a bad person? “Yes.” So frustrating.

After many attempts of getting a fish farming Peace Corps volunteer to come to one of my community schools to do a training, it happened! They were extremely tickled we came and even gave us nshima and chicken – with the gizzard. A very high honor, but of course I didn’t eat it. Unfortunately, the “dambo” (marshy) area where they live is absolutely the worst place to put a fish pond. Rob tried to advise them the best he could, but it’s not going to be easy for them. They also asked me to teach them about HIV! I was really surprised and luckily was able to do it spur of the moment. It’s a pretty bush area, so I hope I got some information out there. I love one of the teachers there, Winet, this cute little short chubby man that looks like an elf. They seemed motivated, and I’m also helping them fill out a grant to build a new “classroom block.” They’re twenty-five kilometers away though, so it’s a trek to do a go-come often.

So after being discouraged by Peace Corps, and just having a huuuuge delay in the project, I’ve decided to give up on my bike project. Even if I decided to go ahead without Peace Corps’ support, I wouldn’t be around to manage the project by the time the bikes came. I would need a couple months to get my proposal approved and write the contract with the organization, several months to raise the money, six months for the bikes to arrive, and then I’d be going home. Plus, when I asked the logistics guy months ago about having the bikes delivered to the Peace Corps Headquarters, he said it as no problem. Now I am being told that it's not ok and since he's leaving soon, whatever he said doesn't stand. Argh. I see I have some emails about it, if the internet will ever let me read them, so maybe it’s not a lost cause, who knows. It’s disappointing cause I was really excited about it for awhile. It seems like I can’t get anything accomplished here. Either the project is “too big,” there’s no funding, or the people I want to help just don’t want to be helped.

In other news, the Serenje Peace Corps House has been declared a health hazard by the Peace Corps medical people. They came to investigate after one volunteer got bronchitis and another had an allergic reaction so bad that he was sent back to the States. Others, including me, have always been complaining that our allergies are terrible here cause it’s just so dusty and moldy. So we started a cleaning mission and also have been approved to get all new sheets and such!


Handy Hut How To: How To Make Peanut Butter

Start a fire and roast peanuts. Pour roasted peanuts into a container and swirl around a bit until the shells become loose. Spend ten minutes blowing away shells, reswirling, and reblowing. Best to do it with your eyes closed and on the day you’re planning to bathe, because the shells become encrusted on your skin and hair. Once a lot of the shell things are gone, pour into twatwathing and start pounding. Blow away more shells if desired. In the meantime, keep roasting more peanuts and blowing the shells away until you have enough. Pound peanuts for forty minutes. Don’t panic when they don’t look like they’re going to turn into peanut butter – it happens all at once. Add salt and sugar to taste and keep pounding. Scoop out and put in container. Attempt to rinse out and scrub twatwathing with boiling water, but know that it’s never going to come out of all the crevices due to poor craftsmanship and is just going to get moldy. Set twatwathing out in the sun to dry for a couple days.



Renee – Thanks for the necklace! My sister and I used to make those kinds of beads with my grandma, but they never looked anything like that. They were pretty terrible.

Bonnibelle – I made a shirt out of those handkerchiefs you sent awhile ago. It actually turned out really good! The other Peace Corpsers were quite impressed. Thanks for the more books! And yes, if they’re in those envelopes, I don’t have to pay to receive them.

Anybody – Can someone check into how expensive those little blank return address label things are that you can print in the computer? I’m not having much luck labeling library books with paper and Zamtape.