I’m in Lusaka now for “mid-term meds,” where we get a medical check-up. Boo. Get to see everyone from my intake again though, so that’s good. We’ve actually lost a lot of PCVs along the way. Medical, quitting, etc. One in training, one right after getting posted, and four more recently. (One of them being one of the girls I was friends with during training) Guess that 1/3 dropout rate isn’t as ridiculous as I first thought!

I was just in Serenje working on a “Peace Corps Partnership Program” proposal to get my bike project underway. I’m working now with an organization called Zambikes. I’m not getting 300 bikes, but only 19, and am not distributing them all over Zambia, but only Mpelembe. I need to raise money to pay for all the bikes, then am going to resell them cheaply and use the money to buy shelves for the library. One bike will be reserved as a community bike for an income generating activity at the school. I just finished the draft of my proposal. Reminds me of college, spending hours writing a fifteen page paper. Once the project gets approved, I’ll post more about it and will probably need help getting the word out to raise money.

It’s been awhile since I wrote, it seems. Happy Groundhogs Day, President’s Day, Valentines Day, St. Patrick’s Day, and Easter! Doug and I celebrate Valentines Day by breaking our vegetarianism and eating “screechbugs,” those terrible loud bugs I wrote about last time. Apparently villagers love them and have been driving us insane digging them up all over our yard, flowerbeds, and field. We fried them up in cooking oil and sat on the floor staring at each other for about ten minutes before we finally got up our courage, did a countdown, and stuck them in our mouths. They were surprisingly good, but probably just because they were fried.

Doug had never been to the good old Luombwa River, so one day we packed up our bikes and headed there. I kind of forgot the way and we kind of got lost. It was the peak of rainy season, so the paths were basically small rivers themselves. We had to get off our bikes and sludge through for hours. My tropicals kept getting stuck in the mud and painfully ripping at my feet, so finally I just took them off, figuring if I’m going to get attacked by schisto/hookworm/leeches/snakes/crocodiles, it’s going to happen whether my shoes are on or off. That was much easier and was actually quite pleasant. Reminded me of old stream walking. We passed a house that was completely surrounded my water. The house and insaka were literally islands. It was absurd. After a long and terrible journey, we reached the Luombwa. Unfortunately, because we took a different route, we intersected it at a completely different point than I had been before, one that was totally unpicturesque and provided no spot to relax or picnic. Luckily, a fisherman with a dugout canoe just happened to be there and offered us a ride! Those ten minutes made the whole trip worthwhile. The canoe was long and skinny and sunk so that the rim was practically at water level! The water was moving swiftly, and the boat kind of spinned as he maneuvered it. It was dizzying and exhilarating! Amazing! Then we headed back to shore, got out of the boat, and began the long journey back home.

A couple weeks ago, I was host for “first site visit.” This is when the new volunteers first arrive in country and are immediately shipped off to an established volunteer’s site to see if they hate it so much they quit before training even begins. A couple days before they were due to arrive, Francis, a Zambian Peace Corps employee, came to my site and was appalled at the grass in the yard, high weeds, and falling down icimbusu fence. He demanded to see the housing committee and we spent the next three days laboring away trying to make everything look “clean.” Francis told the housing committee that they had to do the work, and that is part of our community contract, but I just can’t have people slaving away for me, so of course Doug and I were out there every day working too. In fact, we ended up doing more work than anybody, because people came in shifts over the few days, but we worked the whole way through. It was pretty infuriating, because I really don’t care if there’s grass in my yard, but Zambians do, so I had to waste three days in the hot sun scraping grass away with a hoe. (Oh, we came across a snakeskin in the weeds and as Doug was about to pick it up, they all yelled for him to STOP, claiming it was poisonous and he’d die. We tried to explain, to no avail, that it’s actually snake venom, not a discarded skin that can be poisonous. After they left, we picked it up to play with it. The Professor saw it laying on the ground and hissed at it, so maybe they were right afterall.) Despite the misery of its preparation, site visit itself went well. We had four girls – Kirstie, Kim, Caitlin, and Lisa. Ted, from my intake, came along too just to hang out. When they arrived, they said, “We read your blog!” which just seemed really surreal. They didn’t really seem shocked and awed at all at village life, which was good I guess, but a little disappointing from an entertainment perspective. They were rather frightened and disgusted by the chickens, however, much to the chickens’ disappointment. Poor little things had to put their little party hats away. It was fun having houseguests and Doug got a chance to spout out all of his bush trivia facts to captive victims. We stayed pretty busy. We toured the school, watched an IRI lesson, met with Mr. Chisenga, sat in on a teacher training, tried local brew at Justin’s, tried cassava at the headman’s, and learned how to clean the water filter. We were going to do a bike repair lesson too, but it got rained out. It rained so hard in fact, that it soaked the tents, so it was a big slumber party inside. It was fun having visitors. Very lively. We even celebrated my upcoming birthday by singing, opening my birthday package from mom/dad, and cooking marshmallows! (I felt sick just about every day they were there cause of all the good food they brought.) Cooking and washing dishes for seven people wasn’t as difficult as I thought it’d be. Guess I could be Zambian afterall! We gave the girls strawberry seedlings to take to their own huts when they get posted. Hopefully they’ll survive two months of training. The strawberries, that is, not the girls. Actually, the girls too - training is pretty rough.

Another big event – my birthday! We went to Victoria Falls to celebrate. The ride down was miserable. Terrible potholey road. We got stuck on a crappy bus that kept stopping, tried to overload the bus (I don’t think I’ve ever known pure rage before dealing with Zambian bus drivers and iwes stealing my mangoes), and poked along slowly. What should have been a seven hour trip was eleven hours. Thirteen if you count the two hours we sat in the bus waiting for it to leave. We arrived at 2:30 in the morning and went straight to bed. We woke up to find ourselves in the beautiful Jollyboys guesthouse/hostel. It really was awesome! And cheap, if you go the dorm bed route. The Falls were fun, but unfortunately, we picked a bad time to go – the end of rainy season. The river was roaring so much that the falls were pretty much invisible behind all the mist. What we did see was beautiful, however, and it was awesome being drenched in mist on a hot day. We even put our feet in the river twenty feet from where it falls over the edge! We tried to go down this path to “the boiling point” – this whirlpoolish area near the bottom of the falls. The path had been flooded over, however, so we climbed over huge fallen rocks to get there – pretty fun. To get out of the boiling point, we had to climb up a long set of makeshift stairs. Doug and I were both horrified at how difficult it was! Our legs were burning and we had to stop several times! Then I realized that I haven’t climbed stairs in over a year, unless you count the five steps in front of the GM shop in Serenje. Our legs shook and ached for several days after. When passing from Southern Province back into Lusaka Province, we had to get out of the bus and have our hands sprayed for mad cow disease. How you spray for mad cow disease, I don’t know. We weren’t too happy about being sprayed with some chemical when we don’t even eat meat. And then as we were waiting in line, a Zambeef truck went speeding by! We asked why in the WORLD they didn’t stop truck carrying BEEF, but they stopped us!?! They just said, “Oh, I guess the police man was sleeping.” (“Sleeping” = “not paying attention” in Zamlish.) I don’t know why they try to protect Lusaka Province so much. I remember on the way back from Eastern Province, they sprayed the outside of the car for tsetse flies. Maybe they should start doing HIV spraying at the border too. The actual day of my birthday was spent hitching for transport, getting stuck near Mkushi for several hours, and getting terribly burnt in the sun.

Rainy season is on its way out, it seems. I was rather unimpressed with it, really. There were a couple awesome storms, it’s true, but it wasn’t nearly as rainy as I was expecting it to be. Things look more beautiful and saturated during rainy season, which I will miss. It was funny looking at photos of the same spot during dry season and rainy season – from barren wasteland to tropical lushness! And I’ve seen more rainbows in Zambia than I’ve seen my entire life before!

And though I miss mangoes, it’s actually a bit of a relief that mango season is over. Dealing with people stealing my mangoes was one of the most stressful things I’ve dealt with, I think.

I’ve been having bad allergies at night since rainy season began. Sneezing, coughing, bleck. I think it’s cause the roof leaked onto the bed and now it’s probably moldy. Why couldn’t they just have helped me with the roof before the rains started, like I asked, instead of halfway into rainy season?!

The headman’s family hasn’t had good luck lately. First his brother died, then Jane’s (headman’s wife) father died the next week. Wizzy is off staying with his older brother Charles now, so I won’t see him again until school break.

A couple tomato plants are growing in the garden now, that’s about it. The loofah, lemongrass, and strawberries (the plants anyhow – no berries) are doing well too. The field is basically dead, but we will get some peanuts out of it. Out big corn harvest was about four ears of corn, each no bigger than my pinkie. I hope that I’ll be a better gardener back in the States. It really has to be the soil…

One day when I was doing dishes, Mrs. Mumba came over to show me the mole Joshua had killed. It was the most ridiculous looking thing I’ve ever seen! Huge! This thick square pudgy thing with huge nasty teeth. Probably the best fed animal in Zambia. She then insisted that I call Doug over so that he could admire it too.

It’s been a year and trying to feed myself hasn’t gotten any easier. I still can’t buy any food in Mpelembe, so have to go to Serenje once or twice a month to get groceries. I dread it each time – waiting for transport, carrying 500 pounds of vegetables and tomato paste through the boma and back to the village. Ack. Then of course, the vegetables only last a week and we’re back to nothing again.

Last time I was at the Serenje Market, I came across these round white balls. I asked what they were and I was told they were “soil.” Then she demonstrated that you could eat it. I just had to try that. Turns out a dirtball tastes pretty much like you’d think. Like dirt. Later I asked Mr. Chisenga about it, and he told me, “Oh, if you were pregnant, then it would taste very good!” I guess the dirtballs contain iron or something.

Jamie and Julie sent us this fun game called Fluxx. It’s cool cause the rules change as you play and it’s basically a good game in its essence. For example, cookies and chocolate beat war and TV. It doesn’t promote competition or “killing” the other player. It’s actually sad when someone wins, cause then the game is over. Anyhow, the day we got it, Doug and I started playing. After awhile, Doug started feeling kinda funny and weak. Then we realized that we had actually been playing for many hours and hadn’t even eaten all day! Oops.

We had a going away party for the Central Province volunteers who will be leaving soon. The theme was “ganstas, homies, and hoorats,” so we all dressed up and formed rival gangs. Stereotypical, but fun. We also had Ba Lawrence, the Zambian guard, act as policeman. If he caught you, he brought you to “jail” and drew a teardrop on your face. By the end of the night, I think I had more teardrops than anyone else. Most everyone else was “safe” inside dancing, but I kept sneaking around trying to free people from jail and hit the other gang members with water balloons. Stuff like this reminds me of how much I don't like the US because everyone just has to get drunk to have a good time, but also reminds me of how much I like the US because there's just so many more ways to be creative and fun. I can't imagine what a Zambian would think about a theme party. I've had a lot of internet time this week and was even looking at some of my old Facebook pictures. Makes me pretty nostalgic for all the fun times I've had in the States.

The new RED, LIFE, CAHP volunteers will be coming in May. Soon I will no longer have the title of the only volunteer in Zambia without a neighbor. They’re putting a LIFE volunteer in Chalilo – about thirty kilometers away. Now I’ll have someone to borrow sugar from.

Sometimes village organizations will write me letters, asking me to give them money or come to a meeting. They’re written in English, and sometimes they’re just so funny. In one, they addressed me as “sir” throughout the whole thing. Another was addressed to “Keli” of “Piscope.” Another just made no sense at all. I’m keeping them for souvenirs.

Zambians just don’t make sense a lot of the time, actually. When meeting with one of my community school PTA chairmen, he tried to explain to me that the PTA was like “a white elephant.” When I didn’t understand that, he clarified by telling me it was like “a bulldog without teeth,” and proceeded to draw a series of squares in the dirt to further drive home the point.

Another funny thing was when Mr. Chisenga told me about some guy from the US, but added that he wasn’t a “pure” American, because he was Indian.

Here ye, here ye – Mpelembe’s grade nine results are in. Out of 54 students, only 13 passed, and out of those 13, only 4 earned a score high enough to be accepted to a highschool. Ridiculous. And it’s not like it’s hard to pass these things, either. Out of eight subjects, they only have to pass six of them. And to “pass” means getting score above 40/100.

Besides the bike/library project, I’m still working on other small things. Still teaching Life Skills, which is frustrating as ever. During a lesson on good communication skills, they talked and didn’t pay attention through the whole thing. It was absolutely ridiculous because I was teaching about how to be a good listener and they were basically doing the opposite of everything I had written on the board. I tried to point out the irony of it, but of course they didn’t understand. We did have one awesome class, however. I taught about STDs, which bored them to death as usual, until I pulled out a condom and hammer to do a condom demonstration. Let me tell you, those kids got dead silent and all crowded around me in the middle of the room. They thought it was pretty funny, of course, but it went really well. Hopefully President Bush doesn’t find out now. I’m sure he’s an avid reader of my blog, afterall.

I’ve also been busy classifying and labeling books for the library. A huge task! I’m finally done with all the books I have currently, but I hope that more are on the way. I don’t know when that Zonal Resource Center will be open! It’s been basically done forever, but they just won’t officially open it. The workers just keep kinda puttering around, scraping off paint here and repainting there. I think they just want to prolong the job as long as possible because they get to sleep there. All I ever see them doing is cooking nshima out back.

I’m also helping Fumba and Mupundu community schools with grants to build new schools. Fumba just wants a better structure and Mupundu wants its own structure, as they are currently using a church. Most community schools are run from churches, actually. I’m helping them write the grant proposals, but I also think it’s a pretty pointless thing. Will their teaching really improve if they have a cement floor instead of a dirt one? They just want things to be given to them and for things to look good. I even tried to explain that teaching quality actually goes down with a tin roof because it’s really hot and you can’t teach half of the year because the rain is so loud. Oh well. One cute thing to point out though – On the form, it asked for the “total value of the project” and instead of writing a monetary figure, Winet wrote, “to further the development of our community.” I felt pretty bad making him cross it out.

I wanted to start a partner program with community and government school teachers, but again, it won’t happen because of funding. People won’t come to a meeting unless they’re getting lunch and a “sitting fee” (being paid to go to the meeting.) NGO’s have really ruined it for us measly little Peace Corpsers.

Meetings are usually frustrating. People show up an hour or so late – even the ones supposed to be running the meeting. Half the time, I never know about changes to the day or program either, because they just don’t think to tell me. Frustrating.

The biggest developments are, of course, with the animals. I’ll try to make it brief.

1) Chickens
- Doug finally got rid of the terrible headless rooster and Abraham!! He offered to give them our rooster and pay them if they would sell theirs. Whew! Abraham still comes around to mate, but he’s not outside the window crowing every morning.
- The Professor is terrified of baby chicks, weary of chickens, but is fearless when it comes to the rooster! He chases him around the yard and the rooster runs away like a, well, chicken.
- Peeps ran away. We thought for sure someone stole her or a chicken hawk got her. It was a pretty depressing day until Doug was biking to the school and saw Peeps at one of the neighbors’ houses! Fireball likes to pick on Peeps (she’s probably jealous cause they look similar) and the neighbors had been peeling cassava, so I don’t blame her for running away. She’s back now, hopefully for good.
- We built a state of the art chicken laying shelter on the back porch, so the chickens won’t lay on top of the charcoal bag anymore. It was really fun to build, brick-laying and smearing with mud, and actually looks quite stunning!
- We’ve accumulated a pile of Fireball and New Chicken eggs (Poco isn’t laying yet), so as soon as someone goes broody, we’re going to try for baby chicks again!
- The chickens can be pretty bad sometimes. One morning, Doug had a bowl of oats in his hand and Peeps decided to perch on the side of it. The bowl went flying into the air and Peeps landed on the table, knocking the other bowl of oats onto the floor. It was a complete disaster.
- New Chicken hurt her foot and was standing around like a flamingo for a week. Doug cleaned it off and put a new bandaid on it every day until it healed.
- One night last week, we were awoken by some strange noises. We went outside to find that impashi (flesh eating ants) had invaded the backyard! The chickens had all fled (except for New Chicken who was bravely, or just stupidly, trying to eat them.) We lit some grass to scare the impashi away, got bit a lot, recovered the chickens from the neighbors house, and let them sleep in the house for the night. Whew.

2) Cats
- Yes, that’s catS. On our way back to Mpelembe last week, we stopped in Tushenis, a shop in Serenje, to get some last minute groceries. Doug came across this funny little black kitten and as we were swooning over it, from around the corner comes this absolute little puffball. Kinda tabbyish, but brown/white/black with white booties. Looks kinda like Fluff. I just had to have it. Tushenis practically forced it on me as well, because another one of their cats is pregnant. So we put it in a box and brought it home! We named him Finnigan, and he’s just the cutest little thing you ever saw! Pure puff! He follows you around wherever you go, trotting as fast as his little legs will carry him. By the time he reaches where you were, you’ve turned around and gone somewhere else and he has to follow you back. He loves to curl up on my lap and sleep. The only problem is that he won’t eat. We didn’t realize it, but we must have taken him away from his mother too soon. Attempts to feed him end in him being covered in peanut butter and baby formula. The most pitiful thing was when he nuzzled up next to the Professor, searching for a nipple! He’ll drink water and he licked at some pancake batter the other day, so I think that’s a good sign. The Professor’s mother is also a Tushenis cat, so the two might actually be distantly related.
- When the newbies came, we put the Professor in his “restraint harness” (aka his sock sweater), so that he would be calm. He gets sleepy and good when he wears it. Much to our surprise, however, when we took it off, he remained good! We thought maybe it was just a farce to impress them, but when they left, he was STILL good! No more biting and attacking, a lot less food stealing, and he loves to sit on our laps and purr! It’s a complete 180 from the devil-cat he was. Maybe he finally eradicated the house and yard of all the demons and now can rest easy. (He still chases demons at night though, that’s inevitable.)

3) Bees
- February and March is the swarming season in Zambia. This is when hives split and look for new homes. The bees will clump together in a tree like a big blog of jello, sending out scout bees to look for a new place to live. It’s the best time to capture bees, because they’re just hanging there and you don’t have to cut down a tree and cut apart an already established hive full of wax and brood. (We realized that you HAVE to capture African bees, because they don’t naturally flock to wooden boxes baited with wax like they do elsewhere.) So last month, I discovered two swarms of bees in the mango grove at the school! We went back at night (they’re calmer when it’s cool and dark) to capture them. Doug climbed the tree they were in and I stayed in the tree next to it to pull the branch they were on closer to him. We spent several hours scooping bees into a bucket, waiting for them to calm down, then scooping more. Doug did the dirty work, but we both got stung many times. We weren’t sure if we got the queen, so we decided to capture the other swarm too. I captured that one, scooping them into my empty bookbag! We biked back home in the moonlight with a bucket of bees strapped on my bike and a bagful of bees on Doug’s back. We dumped one swarm straight into the bee box and put the other in too, but kept it in the bucket with a paper seal as the lid. Supposedly, by the time the bees are able to chew through the paper, they will have accepted the smell of the other queen and join hives. Unfortunately, we captured super-bees who must have chewed through in record time. When we went out the next morning, there were piles of dead bees from the battle that ensued during the night. Others had escaped and were reswarming on a nearby tree. We managed to recapture and trap them, but the next day, many were dead, and the remaining bees were chased away by impashi. We felt terrible for being responsible for so many bees deaths, and I was about to swear off bees forever, but then just last week we found another swarm! This time we were better prepared and did the job much more quickly and with less stings. When I left Mpelembe, the bees were still in the box, and I’m praying to the bee gods that by the time I return, they still will be there. Honey harvesting begins in May!!!
- When Doug put on his “bee suit” to go check on the bees, he looked so ridiculous, I couldn’t stop laughing. Shirt buttoned all the way to the neck and tucked in, jeans tucked into his socks, baseball hat with a mosquito net draped over it. When Patty saw him, however, he exclaimed, with absolute sincerity, “Monika bwino, imwe!!!!” -- “Look good, you!!!!” It’s interesting to wear whatever terrible concoction you can create in the village, looking like a complete fool by American standards. But Zambian fashion knows no rhyme or reason. I’ve been complimented on terrible things and scolded for what I thought was fine. I think that no matter what I wear or how I do my hair, I look completely absurd to them, so it really doesn’t matter.

4) Zamdog
- This is a less happy story. One night last week, we heard a terrible crying noise outside my house. We couldn’t tell if it was an animal or a person. Doug went out to investigate and discovered the most terrible ratty looking little puppy. It was covered in botflys, fleas, and ticks, has fur missing from its head, and is somewhat crippled in its front paws. After removing the bugs and giving it a bath, it looks better, but it’s still a pretty ugly little Zamdog. We asked around and found that one of our villagers “threw it out” because it “looks bad” and advised me to do the same. He later showed me one of its siblings, which was about three times its size. Apparently, this puppy was probably abandoned by its mother because of its paws. Without milk, it hasn’t grown properly. It was also abandoned by its owners who forced it to sleep outside on wet dirt, hence the botflys. Finally, they “threw it out,” sentencing it to die a slow lonely death. The puppy is currently sleeping in a Jungle Oats box in my insaka (that’s all it has strength to do), but I do not want a dog right now, cute or ugly. (I won’t be able to bring enough food back from Serenje to feed it, I won’t know what to do with it when I’m away from Mpelembe, and I don’t want it giving any disease to the cats. There’s plenty of dogs running around it can catch things from.) I can’t “throw it away” and I can’t give it to another Zambian. Either is cruel. I’m going to see if maybe another Peace Corpser will take it - if it even survives. I really don’t know what to do. I got tears in my eyes thinking about that poor little puppy being thrown out in middle of the night, wandering scared and lost in the dark until it was just so sad it stopped in front of our house and started crying and crying. Poor little thing. I just don’t understand the mindset of Zambians, to treat animals so cruelly. They really see them as lesser beings. Dogs are just for protection (awful protection at that, because they’re beaten so much, they run AWAY from humans, not attack them) and cats are just for mousing. It’s fine to yell at them, beat them, and starve them. I realized that Bemba and Zamlish don’t even have endearing terms like “puppy,” “kitten,” and “chickie.” It’s just “small dog,” “small cat,” and “small chicken.” Take that, linguisticers!

So as many of you know, Dreamland Ballroom burned down, along with part of the midway. I can’t believe the Park’s luck. About one hundred years from when the old Dance Pavilion burned down and Dreamland Ballroom was built in its place. Weird. I learned of it over the phone, and then it was just so sad when I hung up and was stuck in Serenje with no one who even knew what Conneaut Lake Park is.

Since Doug was never able to get his work permit, he has been on a visitors permit, which unfortunately lasts only one year. We thought this was the case, but only found out for sure a week or two ago. So looks like he’ll be heading home in July.

Once mom sends me the right thingamadoodle, I’ll try to get some more photos online! No one even knows what my hut looks like!



Jamie & Julie – Congrats on the ball and chain announcement! Brady & Nikki, Tony & Carrie, now Jamie & Julie – geesh! Thanks for the books, game, etc. Thanks for the dead ant that stowed away to Zambia too! Doug got nostalgic reading the Co-op paper you used for packaging. Not so much with the Giant Eagle one though.

Mom & Dad – Thanks for the birthday package! I waited ALMOST until my birthday to open it.

Pussy Willow and Buster – Happy Birthday!

Bonnibelle – Hope the cruise is fun! Thanks for the hot chocolate (delicious!), crackers, soap, syrup (Doug LOVES pancakes and LOVES real maple syrup), etc!

Sarah – Already told you, but thanks for the zines!