This blog is intended only to recount my personal experiences with the Peace Corps; it is not intended to reflect the Peace Corps' official stance or the opinions of other volunteers.
Official Disclaimer:
The contents of this Web site are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or the Peace Corps.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

My Second Zambian Vacation

I apologize for the length of time between blog postings-- my laptop caught a virus and imploded back in February, and using the one office computer for the length of time necessary to write a blog post is depressing (the computer is all by itself in a dark, tiny office at the end of the compound, far from the living room where the majority of the population dwell with their laptops), so I haven't been able to bring myself to write. However, thanks to a generous donation from the Simons foundation (my father), I now have a brand new laptop from which to check e-mails, write blog posts, and talk to all my friends on skype (so if you're looking for a face-to-face discussion, drop me a line), so hopefully I'll be posting on this blog more often now. If not, blame YouTube.
I have not been in my village much this past month-- I was in Lusaka in mid-May with the other 40+ volunteers from my intake for a week-long midterm conference, where our Peace Corps bosses had several meetings with us in groups and individually to make sure we were all still happy and healthy after a year in rural Africa. There was a medical exam and a dental exam, and lots of sitting in the waiting room waiting for the dental exam. What I remember most from the experience was Lusaka food-- pizza, subway, chocolate milkshakes, cake, pumpkin ravioli, french fries, etc. Not that I don't love nshima in the village, but it was nice to indulge a little. One evening a bunch of us were on a bus heading toward a restaurant-- 20+ young foreigners on a nice, touristy-looking bus-- when one cab driver at a gas station shouted "WELCOME TO ZAMBIA" at us, which would have been a lovely welcome if it hadn't been 16 months late. We had a lot of fun.
After a week in Lusaka, a bunch of us traveled to Central Province for a luncheon to celebrate Peace Corps' 50th anniversary. We invited volunteers, staff, and local Zambian officials and counterparts. It was a lot of work to put it all together but I think the end result was rather pleasing, though between that and the trip to Lusaka we were all exhausted. The food, again, was the best part. It's a good thing I have a 20km bike ride to my site or I'd gain 50 pounds.
Next I got to take a 4-day detour to my village, make a beehive with my beekeeping group, get stung 3 times around the eyes, read a book, go to a meeting at school that turned out to be canceled, and then it was back to Serenje and then Lusaka again for a vacation with my mother and my sister.
They arrived Saturday evening, jetlagged and sore and without their checked luggage, which luckily we were able to retrieve completely intact by Monday. We checked out the Sunday market at Arcades for some souveniers, visited my training host family in Chongwe on Monday, and drove up to see my village on Tuesday. We rented a car and driver from Benmak and I highly recommend it, the whole process was much less stressful with someone else in charge of transit. They really enjoyed meeting both my families-- my Chongwe family, whom I haven't seen since September, were overjoyed to see us, and I got to meet two young, adorable additions to the family (3 if you count the new dog, but he had fleas and wasn't very cute). At my site they got the tour of my house, garden, watering hole, kitchen, stove, dish-drying rack, outdoor shower, pit latrine, and cat (my grandmother brought him out like some sort of sacrificial offering to the muzungus, which terrified him so much that he ran off and didn't come back before we left). My grandmother also demonstrated nshima-cooking for my mom and sister, and then we all got to try local Zambian food. It was awesome, my families were wonderful hosts and guests respectively, and I was really happy with the whole experience.
The second half of our vacation involved a trip to Livingstone to see Victoria Falls. The lodge where we stayed, Fawlty Towers, was really nice-- and cheap!-- and had a pool, good food, comfy beds, etc. They also offered free bus rides to the falls every morning, so we went to the falls our first day (Friday). I had been to the falls back in December and I wasn't expecting this visit to be much different, but boy was I wrong! The waterfall was engorged with the past 6 months of violent rain storms, and the mist was so high you could see it miles away. Walking inside the park felt like walking through a rainforest during a storm-- water from the falls dripped down on us through the trees, flooded the pathways and and obscured the waterfall itself with fog that occassionally parted to reveal glimpses of the water behind. We had to rent raincoats (a dollar each) from vendors at the park entrance, and even so we got pretty drenched. It was truly a memorable experience. Who knew there was a place in Zambia where it rained during the dry season?
That afternoon we went on a game drive in Mosi-oa-tunya National Park. We saw giraffes, elephants, wildebeast, impala, waterbuck, warthogs, and several birds. The real highlight, however, was getting out of the vehicle and following one of the full-time "rhino guards" to see the oldest of the only 7 white rhinos remaining in Zambia. We got to stand pretty close to him-- he was busy eating and not much interested in us-- and I took lots of pictures (which were on Emily's camera, so I'll have to get the pictures back from her). He looked a bit like an elephant mated with a warthog. Really cool that we got to get so close to him!
On Saturday Emily and I took a canoe trip on the Zambezi and saw some hippos, and then in the evening Mom joined us to watch the sunset on the water and we got to see some crocodiles, hippos, and birds. Sunday we had a quiet final day, walked around Livingstone, and bought a few souveniers. It was sad and painful to leave them yesterday morning-- and not just because I was looking at 12+ hours on a bus from Livingstone to Serenje. I already miss them both and I really enjoyed their visit.
So that's May in a nutshell. Rainy season has ended, as I mentioned, and harvest season has begun. It is also "cold" season-- never lower than 40 degrees, but that feels pretty cold in an uninsulated house. This is not peak work-in-the-fields season, so hypothetically people will be more available to work with me, but of course they'll also be less interested in working because it's (relatively) cold and dark. So we'll see-- I'm heading back to the village now, ready to get back into the swing of things. I'll write again soon. Wish me luck!