World Malaria Day

Today is World Malaria Day, and Peace Corps Africa has been busy all month in preparation, with volunteers holding workshops, doing surveys, giving lessons on how to use a mosquito net (here's a hint: it's not for catching fish), and doing everything they can to educate both Zambians and Americans on the importance of fighting malaria in Africa.  On top of working in our communities to promote malaria awaremess (which I can't do, since I no longer really have a local community), we are also encouraged to write blog posts (or facebook posts or tweets or texts or whatever) to spread the word about this issue to people back home (one of the lesser-known but major goals of Peace Corps is to teach Americans about the world outside its borders).  It's certainly a noble goal and nothing to be scoffed at-- malaria is one of the top reasons so few African children reach their 5th birthdays, and for a disease that is so easily (and cheaply) treated and prevented the death toll is shockingly high-- but I'll be honest, I wasn't originally planning to do anything to acknowledge World Malaria Day.  It's not that I don't care-- nothing could be further from the truth-- but this month I've been a little busy leaving my home of two years and moving 6 hours away and packing and unpacking and repacking my stuff and learning the ropes of a brand new job and planning my first trip home in 2 years, and I just didn't think I could find the time, not to mention the energy or clearheadedness, to make a blog post.  But in Kasama the World Malaria Day packet had been cleverly pasted to every bathroom wall, and as I sat reading the information on the wall I realized malaria is not something to be overlooked for any reason-- it's been overlooked long enough.

Malaria has an interesting distinction in rural Zambia: there may be no other disease in the world that is taken less seriously in the local population in proportion to its actual seriousness and the number of deaths it causes within that population.  I have often heard Zambians in my village say they are suffering from a "touch of malaria" in the way an American might say they were catching a cold.  Often, the sickness in question is not malaria at all-- the person merely has a headache, a stomachache, even a hangover.  This may seem lucky-- at least the person isn't seriously ill-- but the mindset itself is troublesome.  For every sickness called "malaria" that isn't, there are several cases of actual malaria that are casually dismissed and left untreated-- after all, the thinking goes, that cold I called malaria went away on its own, so surely this will too.

And even when the patient knows (s)he has malaria, that does not guarantee that the patient gets proper treatment.  About a year into my service, my own host grandmother was overtaken by the parasite-- at first I thought she may just be tired and overstating the issue, a habit I had become used to encountering amongst my fellow villagers, but after a day or two it was clear she was not getting better, and I insisted that she get some coartem.  So she asked me to run down to the tuck shop and buy her a pill called "panado," which I found out later that evening was merely a type of aspirin.  There ensued a very, very long conversation (in Bemba, hence its arduous length) in which I explained to her the difference between a painkiller and actual medicine-- and with malaria, you always need real, actual medicine.

What is truly troubling about the ongoing malaria epidemic is that the problem-- in Zambia at least-- is not about the treatability/preventability of the disease, or even about the availability of coartem and mosquito nets.  It is about education.  Many Zambians don't know that they can get free mosquito nets from the government health facilities (assuming they are stocked), don't know that coartem costs only $2 (not cheap in Zambia, but much cheaper than seeds, fertilizer, or bags of maize meal), and most likely don't know how to use either one.  This issue is emblematic of the idea that you can't solve a problem by throwing money at it-- more mosquito nets and drugs are not enough, what we need is education.

And that's where Peace Corps comes in.  Rich or resourceful we certainly are not, but when it comes to teaching people new things, sharing ideas and encouraging education and growth, no one does it better than a Peace Corps Volunteer.  So this month (and hopefully every month), volunteers are working to teach Zambians in the village about malaria-- about putting mosquito nets over every sleeping man, woman, and child, about making sure everyone who needs to take coartem takes it in a timely manner, about avoiding mosquitoes and not leaving still, open water near the house where mosquitoes can breed.  And when we come in from the rain, drenched and shivering, or wake up with a backache or a headache or a cold, and our Zambian counterparts say "ahh, you are catching the malaria," we say "no.  You can not catch cold, malaria, or anything else from getting caught out in the rain.  And malaria comes from mosquitoes."  Happy World Malaria Day, everybody.  And if you're in an infected country, sleep under a mosquito net, and don't forget to take your meds.

Well, I'm back

Turns out, 27 months goes by fast. It looks like a good long time from the front, but before you know it you're looking back on those 27 months and wondering what happened to them. Only 3.5 years ago I sat in front of my computer, alone in my enormous senior college dorm room, staring at the Peace Corps application button and wondering if I had the courage to press it. Turns out, pressing that button was the beginning of an enormous and life-changing adventure.

As I sat in my mudhut in the African bush last week sorting objects and packing bags, I flashed back to my senior year at Smith, nearly 3 years ago now, sitting in my dorm room and crying in frustration because I couldn't get all my stuff (and God I had SO much STUFF!) to fit in my bags and boxes and bins-- sure, there was more going on than the pure stress of packing, I was sad to be leaving and nervous about the giant next step in my life (and the uncertainty of it-- I hadn't been given a Peace Corps assignment yet and wouldn't be for another 10 months) and absolutely terrified of change, but even without all that baggage (haha) packing is by itself a stressful experience. You never know what to pack and what to toss and what to give away, and what to put in which bag and what you'll need again before you leave and shouldn't pack at the bottom on a bag just yet. And it was 20x worse the following February as I stuffed obscure objects like clothes I didn't like and a tent that was hard to set up and a bag of white rice (turns out they sell rice in Zambia, who knew?) into my bags and then out and back in again, having never lived in a mudhut in Africa and having no idea what to pack. 2 years later I knew exactly what to pack, and my stress and neurotic anxiety stemmed not from nerves or fear or uncertainty or confusion, but from pure and unadulterated sadness. Because this ramshackle hut made of lime-coated mudbricks and thatching grass was my first "apartment," my first adult home, and it is hard to leave. 2 years ago I would have stressed neurotically about the hows of packing; this time around, all I could think about was the "why." Every object I packed, every item of worn clothing or small gift I gave away, every piece of cookware I put aside for my replacement, left a big lime-white hole in my hut, another reminder that this experience, improbably, is finally ending. 2 years ago I sat in this hut and thought "man, I've got 24 months here, that's all the time in the world!" Now I know better. No time is enough time, and I am always going to miss this place.

I had hoped to make my last month in the village an awesome month: I was going to bike all over, take pictures of my beautiful mountains, visit all the farms I could, say good-bye to farmers, sit out in the sun with a good book, spend time with my host family, visit and sit with my counterparts, and just generally make the most of what little time I had left. But 2 years in Africa has taught me that things rarely if ever go as planned. First I was sick with a different fluke illness each week. Then in the last 2 weeks the rains-- the ones we were waiting for back during the drought in December-- arrived with avengeance. They wore holes in the road. They flooded roads and bridges. They washed away bridges. Bike paths became rivers, and rivers became floods. One day I biked an hour in the rain and then walked (with my bike) across a bridge 8" underwater. Another day I had to climb over a bridge that was really a series of tree branches draped carelessly over a river that was surging up over the dark, wet logs, and then I lost my shoe in the mud and had to chase it down the river. Every day I was splattered with mud and water, wet and cold and frizzy-haired. I joked with my host family that between the illnesses and the rain, Kashitu must be punishing me for having the gall to try to leave.

On my last day it drizzled all day long, and though I started the day with a nice long bucket bath I was soon shivering cold and frizzy-haired. I alternated between shoving things into bags (and out of bags and back into bags-- old packing habits die hard) and sitting with my host family around their fire, shivering (the night before I had to walk home in the dark cold of an evening rain storm, through an ex-path-turned-river with a bike that kept stalling and sandals that kept falling off-- even with the hot bucket bath and nshima my grandmother prepared for me, I was still feeling sensitive to the cold). I wanted to go for a walk, harvest the last of my garden (lettuce! Big healthy leaves of lettuce, all wasted by the rain!), sit outside with my book, but none of these things were an option, because there was too much rain. Instead I smiled with my host family, helped them shell yellow maize and bake a chocolate cake (this was my "leaving cake," and it didn't turn out half bad), and occasionally hid in my dark, empty hut and watched it grow progressively emptier.

But finally overnight the storm broke, and on my last morning (Tuesday) the sky was cloudy and grey, but there wasn't any rain. I packed the last few things (sleeping bag, mosquito net, etc.) as the sun was rising, ate a power bar from America (all my dishes were packed), took down the last items (a poster of an elephant in a game park I'd left on my wall to keep it from looking too barren; a pair of sandals I didn't want to bother taking with me; a pair of capris that had been attempting to dry on the line in my house since Sunday) and went out to sit with my host family and the counterparts who came to see me off. I brought out my guitar to keep my hands busy, and spent the next 2 hours watching my host family and dodging smoke from their fire. The cruiser came at 8:30 and loaded my stuff (there wasn't much, and it was over fast), I hugged everyone good-bye (hugging is a bit of a no-no in Zambian culture, they're more into handshakes, but on special occasions they will do a hug/cheek kiss that makes me think of Europe), got in the back of the cruiser and watched my house and family fade away. The cruiser brought me to Serenje and dropped me and my stuff at the house, I brought my bags in and unpacked (I have stuff to leave at the house and stuff to take from the house, like clothes and electronics and food, so now I'll have to pack all over again), and that was that. Now I can no longer say "I live in a mudhut in Africa with no electricity or running water." The end of my first hard-core African adventure, and the beginning of a new one.

So now I'm in limbo: at the PC house in Serenje for Easter and waiting to head up to Kasama and begin the next stage of my PC experience. In case you're interested, my new mailing address will be:

Elise Simons

PO Box 410374

Kasama, Zambia

And since I'll be living in town, I'll have pretty reliable cell phone/internet reception, so keeping in touch will be much easier for me than it was before. And of course, I will soon be coming home on my month of homeleave. So stay tuned!

Happy New Year!

And so the shortest (er, longest, as I'm in the southern hemisphere) day came, and the old year died. And what a year it was! Some of my more recent adventures include a train ride to Dar es Salaam (trains are the only way to travel), a week collecting shells off the beach in Zanzibar, and a new year's trip to Kundalila Falls-- a waterfall just 60 km from my village, where I spent the night in a tent. Thanksgiving featured real live turkeys, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie, while Christmas featured santa hats handed out at cement tuck shops in the boma and baby pine trees in little black planting bags. At the start of December I harvested my beehive for the very first time (with major assistance from my Zambian farmers, who thanks to the veils I sewed them sustained only 7 stings during the process-- an impressively small number for African bees), and dug and planted my own 1/4-lima field and garden. I had my last official workshop on December 9, where 30 farmers helped me plant soya in my field. I had wanted to have them plant tree seeds and transplant tree seedlings for me as well, both as a learning-by-doing teaching mechanism and to save me a great deal of time and labor, but there had not been rain in my village for two weeks and I worried the trees would not survive in the dry, unwaterable soil, so instead I drew a couple of flipcharts and gave a 2-hour lecture (at least it felt like 2 hours) on intercropping and agroforestry (intercropping with trees).

As predicted, the rains have been terribly poor and painfully disappointing this season, and I along with the farmers of my village have spent days staring at the clouds waiting for rain and then had to rush when the clouds burst to dig and plant and transplant before the soil dries up again, meaning the work of a week is compressed into a day or two on a regular basis. This is not a healthy way to farm, but we are at the mercy of the climate and the clouds. Maize wilts in the fields, but farmers who were lucky enough to be a part of the Zambian government's conservation farming program-- and smart enough to follow the directives of said program-- planted some of their maize early (end of November, as opposed to mid-December) and so at least some of the crop is enduring the drought with aplomb. However, these are only small plots for demonstration, and the majority of the maize is late-planted and a little sickly. I planted my maize early, conservation-farming-style, and it still doesn't look that great-- I tell the farmers to go easy on me, this is my first time ever planting a field of any kind, and just because I'm not having much luck doesn't mean my methods don't have merit. Luckily other farmers are having more luck and serving as role models where I cannot. Of course the other crops-- beans, soybeans, millet, sorgum, groundnuts, cassava, sweet potatoes-- seem to be doing fine, but they are not the moneymakers, they are not the chief source of food, and they are not the popular topic of conversation. Which is a shame, because African sweet potatoes may be the best thing ever, and nshima made from millet is waaaaay better than nshima made from maize. But that's just one muzungu's humble opinion and so is largely laughed at and ignored when expressed to Zambian villagers.

I have also planted trees in my field-- an old traditional practice revitalized by the conservation farming/sustainability/anti-slash-and-burn movement. These trees-- pidgeon pea, sesbania, tephrosia, luceana-- have nutrient-rich leaves and also have the capacity to fix nitrogen in the soil by hosting nitrogen-fixing bacteria in their roots. This is seen as an alternative to both fertilizer and compost manure, the latter being very labor-intensive and the former extremely costly. A few other farmers have caught on to the idea and agreed to try it in their own fields, and since they are eons more capable with a hoe than I am I imagine they will soon by practicing agroforestry better than I can teach it. My garden is coming along nicely-- I have lettuce, tomatoes, onions, pumpkins, green beans, and marigolds-- pretty, and a good pesticide-- and it is all run on natural organic manure. Since the minor December drought ruined my plans for my last workshop, I had to plant my trees and my garden pretty much by myself over the last month-- it was a lot of work, but I feel much stronger and my thumbs much greener on the other side of the experience.

And when I say last workshop, I do mean last-- it is January 2012 and we are now getting into the last 4 months of my Peace Corps service in an African village. It's hard to believe I've been in Africa 23 months already. Of course I'll still have meetings and visits with farmers and I'll still bring chitenges on my bicycle to my womens' group and make banana bread with my host family and talk to farmers about harvesting beehives without harvesting bee babies and digging fields without cutting down all the trees and planting gardens without fertilizer and all that good stuff. But for the next 4 months, my energy will be focused on packing up, wrapping up projects, saying good-bye. I've made a new year's resolution to sit by my host family's fire with my host-grandparents every night after dinner for the remainder of my stay in the village-- this is an old habit, one I relied on heavily for language and cultural training during those first crucial months in the village, but over the past year I've fallen out of the habit a little, and I want to get back into it. I want to savor every last moment I have with them.

While I will be saying good-bye to my village, I will not be saying good-bye to Zambia just yet. I was recently approved to stay for a 3rd year in PCZ as PCVL in Northern Province, Zambia, which means I'll be doing things like site prep and volunteer support for the 40 or so volunteers in that area for the next year. It will be exciting and challenging and very different from what I am doing now-- I will be in a city, for one thing. And I won't be living in a mudhut with no electricity or running water. I won't be cooking on an open fire or teaching a Zambian family how to make s'mores. I won't have a cat who pees on everything and constantly leaves ticks on my couch, and I won't be biking 20 km just to buy peanut butter. So these are the things I will have to say good-bye to in 2012. Thanks for all the memories 2011, it's been real.

Storms in Africa

For the past week we in Serenje district have experienced a strange anomaly: rain and cold weather in October. This is strange for two reasons: for one thing, when it rains in Zambia, it RAINS. We're talking torrential downpours, skies darkening and grumbling for hours if not days in advance, clouds billowing and lightening bolts flashing, rain so thick you could take a shower in it, the type of rain that brings a complete transformation of the landscape, leaves the ground itself in a different shape from how it found it. A teacher in my village the other day complained about this "London weather," which was completely and bizarrely accurate; the weather has been cold and damp, muggy and drizzly, like a petulant rainstorm that can't decide whether it wants to precipitate or not. The other day it drizzled. Drizzled. In Zambia. Weird.

The other, more obvious reason this week's rainy-cold weather has been so strange is this: October is the peak of Zambia's hot-dry season. Let me say that again: we have been having rainy cold weather this week, in the peak month of our hot dry season. Sooooo, something is clearly wrong here. I mean, two weeks ago I was visiting a farmer to help him plant a tree nursery, and when I went to stand up from planting some seeds I found that I had to sit down again, the heat and sun had made me too dizzy to stand properly. Now don't worry, Mom, I've been drinking plenty of fluids and carrying extra water when I go biking (and trying to avoid biking in the middle of the day, but this is harder than you might think, assuming you plan to go anywhere at all), but nonetheless during last year's hot-dry season and this past September I have been surprised at how easily I get dehydrated, especially since I don't usually require that much water to begin with.

Yet this past week none of this has been a problem; instead, I have been forcibly reminded of the cold-dry season of May-July, when the sky stays cloudy and gray as though it's going to rain (or as if it's mourning the end of the rainy season, as it never actually does rain), when the women wear blankets around their midsections as if they were citenges and the babies are all dressed in the best knit woolens their mothers can find. Where a week ago I was hiding from the heat in my hut, sweating night and day, this past week I had to drag back out the winter blankets and fleece jacket, freshly laundered and put into temporary storage on a shelf, and now I huddle around fires and under blankets. Cleary the world is confused about what month it is.

The difference between this past week and the actual cold-dry season is that the weather this week has not actually been dry. It has been humid, thundrous, and occasionally drizzly. I have woken up each morning to a yard of wet sand, and each evening find watering my garden and tree nursery largely unnecessary, as the clouds have not cleared long enough for last night's shower to sun-dry away. Each afternoon this week I have had conversations with the strong African thunder, my side boiling down to such statements as "I hear ya, I hear ya" and "oh shut up." Yesterday I faced a dilemma I was not expecting to experience for another month: the old "is it raining where the meeting is being held, and thus should I bother going?" question. If it is raining, no one will show up, which means there's no sense in my going and getting drenched for nothing. However, depending on the size and direction of the storm, it may be raining where I am and not where the meeting is taking place, in which case I should ride through and away from the rain to reach my meeting. That is not, you understand, a question I would usually expect myself to need to answer during the dry season. Yet here we are.

This early rain could, potentially, have more serious of an impact beyond simply freaking out the muzungus. Traditionally the early rains start in November and become well-established in December, eventually tapering off in early April. Farmers, then, are advised to start planting their fields in late November/early December, and some plant even later than that (because they don't start digging until the rain loosens the soil, and digging with hoes takes a looooong time). So if these early rains are a premature start to the rainy season, that means many Zambian farmers are already a month behind. If the rains start early, they could also end early, and that could mean a crop-killing drought in March or even February. On the other hand, if the farmers attempt to plant their crops early and this turns out to be just a temporary fluke in the weather patterns, their crops won't make it to January. It is too risky to change the planting schedule and therefore much smarter to keep to the regular planting schedule. So essentially we have no choice but to keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.

All this is a long-winded way of saying: global warming is bad. Whether it's a massive cataclysmic event like the tsunami that hit japan or tornadoes and floods sweeping America or a subtle but noticeable and potentially harmful change in the weather, like the more-massive-than-usual amount of snowfall faced by New England last winter (followed by an unusually intense heatwave) or this early rain that could, potentially (and I don't mean to be an alarmist) be a sign of a drought, the bottom line is that our climate is changing, and at a more rapid pace than usual. We see signs of it every day. And while we can escape the cold fronts and heat waves with air conditioning and heaters, the developing world-- who rely on the current weather patterns to survive, whose daily actions are determined by the weather (no, really, they do not leave the house during rainstorms, ever), who have shaped their lives, their clothing and shelter, their sources and methods of obtaining food around the weather-- may not be so lucky.

Today dawned bright and sunny, still cold and crisp but holding the promise of a sky willing to hold its bounty off a little longer. Let's hope, for the sake of these people who have taken me in, fed me and shared with me what little they have, taught me and cared for me and encouraged me and loved me, that there are nothing but clear skies ahead.

A good week for alternative energy

People, both Zambians and Americans, often ask me what I do in the village, and it's a difficult question to answer. Not just because what I do, primarily, is LIVE in the village, which means the list of things I "do" in the village is very long and prominently features such incredible accomplishments as sleeping, reading, and cooking on an open fire, but also because my program within Peace Corps, aptly named the LIFE program, is multi-faceted and immensely broad. LIFE is an acronym for Linking Income, Food, and Environment, which is an umbrella that covers all topics from income generation to environmental education, from food security to reforestation, from organic farming to nutrition education, from beekeeping to tree nurseries to energy efficiency to animal husbandry and so on.

On top of this, the Peace Corps Volunteer experience itself is very broad and open-ended. Volunteers essentially write their own programs, tailor-made to suit the needs and interests of the village and the interests and abilities of the volunteer. So it is easy for a LIFE volunteer to branch out from the already-broad guidelines of their program and work in programs like fish farming, sanitation and health education, youth development, womens' empowerment, schoolteaching, etc. And, of course, when you work in Africa, just about every development program, directly or indirectly, relates back to the epidemic of HIV/AIDS.

But at its heart the LIFE program is about improved forestry practices. Zambia currently boasts one of the highest deforestation rates of all the countries in the world. The LIFE program was originally begun in conjunction with and to support Zambia's forestry department in reforestation and environmental preservation. We build fruit tree nurseries and woodlots for food and timber, teach farmers to plant nitrogen-fixing trees in their fields (agroforestry), discourage the slash-and-burn technique called chitimene and encourage "early burning" (burning in May-June before the tree seeds begin to germinate), teach in schools about the importance of forests and ecosystems, teach farmers to keep bees so they will have a vested interest in flowering trees to increase honey production, and explore alternative fuel sources to reduce the rate of deforestation caused by firewood-harvesting and charcoal-burning.

Encouraging forest conservation through the promotion of alternative fuel sources is a topic I find greatly interesting because it relates to the field of "appropriate technology"-- the idea that people at the local level should be able to use local materials and their own skills and creativity to find inventive ways to improve their own lives, rather than sitting around waiting for aid agencies to come drop expensive machines and solutions in their laps. Of course appropriate technology is not applicable to every circumstance-- certainly there are situations where people are sick or hungry and simply need to be helped as quickly as possible-- but they are also a plethora of situations where the best way to help a group of people is to empower them to take control of their own lives and solve problems themselves. This concept has led to the invention of products such as locally-built handwashing stations, maize shellers, honey presses, and ways to preserve food through drying, smoking, and refrigeration. It has also led to the invention of two popular methods of using fuel without chopping down trees: corn cob charcoal and the fuel-efficient stove. These two inventions tie into my program-- the reforestation and environmental sustainability part-- perfectly, and they're a lot of fun.

A fuel-efficient stove runs on the idea that a cooking fire in a tightly-enclosed, insulated space (as opposed to an open fire) creates a concentrated supply of heat, allowing a person to cook using only deadwood found around the yard. This not only saves trees but also significantly reduces time and labor spent searching for firewood-- an especially large problem for women and young ladies who should be in school. The stove is built from a brick-clay-mud-sand-ash-straw mixture (the proportions and ingredients vary based on what's available), leaving a hollow area inside for the fire and a hole in the top and one side for wind flow. After it's built you must wait 2 weeks for the mud to dry before you can use it for cooking; the fire and heat exits the top hole and heats the pot that you place over said hole.

I built my first stove-- my own-- one year ago, about 3 months after I was posted at site. I built it on a platform so that I could stand while cooking, and I was really happy with the way it turned out. I built two more stoves with two different women in October, and then in January I built a stove with a women's group. Then this past Saturday I built a large two-burner stove on a raised platform with two young teachers in my age group. It was wonderful to work with someone who showed genuine interest in the work I was doing. They were very excited by the idea of having a stove to cook on. The building process took the entire day-- the platform took most of the morning, but the stove itself only took a little over an hour to make. Carrying soil and water and mixing the mortar took a large portion of our time and energy. We had to carry water in large buckets from a river nearby, carry bricks one by one, shovel sand into bags and carry it to the building site on my bicycle, and then use shovels and hoes to mix the ingredients as thoroughly as possible, or until our arms began to hurt from the weight of the water-logged soil, whatever came first. By the time we finished we were exhausted and sweating under the weight of mud and dust, and I had dirt all over my clothes, face, and arms, but it was the type of exhaustion that comes from a long day's work, so it didn't bother me. I took pictures and exchanged hugs and smiled all the way home. It was a good day.

As a general rule it is wise to only initiate programs in your village if there is interest amongst your villagers; otherwise you are likely to be working alone. However, when I first read about corn cob charcoal in a training manual I was so enamored by the idea that I ran to one of my counterparts, Mr. Chola, and began talking so excitedly about the topic that he was inspired by my enthusiasm to try and make some with me, though he no doubt thought his volunteer had gone insane. It was very nice of him to humor me.

Corn cob charcoal is usually made by cutting a hole in an oil drum, filling the drum with corn cobs, lighting a fire underneath the drum, and then, once the cobs are lit, sealing the drum tightly closed with soil to start the carbonization process. My counterpart, however, was only willing to indulge my insanity to a certain point; while he's not an avid drinker himself, people in my village are very fond of the cultural practice of brewing beer and wine in oil drums, and cutting a hole in the very expensive drum to light a fire underneath struck him as ridiculous. So I agreed to try it his way, or the Zambian way: arrange the cobs in a large mound, surround the cobs with thick, fibrous soil and grass, light the cobs and burn them a little, then cover them with fibrous lumps of soil to make a large soil kiln that traps the oxygen inside and allows the cobs to carbonize. This is how charcoal from trees is made in Zambia, and Mr. Chola saw no reason why it wouldn't work with corn cobs as well. So we tried it, and I was shocked to find that it worked quite effectively: within 30 hours we had a large pile of cob-shaped charcoal.

All this took place one year ago, and then the maize-harvesting season ended and the supply of cobs fell, so we decided to wait until the next harvest season to start sharing the idea with others. Which leads us to this past Friday, when we called a workshop to show people our idea of an easy, cheap, environmentally friendly(er) source of fuel-- one that would not only save trees and money and labor but would also amend the soil (the carbonization process makes the soil fertile) and reduce the amount of harmful woodsmoke people are breathing, thereby improving the village's overall health. It sounded like a win-win situation, but unfortunately attendance at the workshop was frustratingly low-- of the dozen people in attendance, 7 were family members who already lived on the compound with me and were only present because I was holding the workshop in their front yard. Still, while this sort of low turnout is discouraging, it is also quite common. And as my mother keeps telling me, making a difference in just one person's life is more than enough.

So I took a deep breath and held the workshop anyway-- we built a mound of soil, lit it, and sealed it so the cobs would carbonize. Then we took charcoal cobs from another pile we had prepared the week before and began the second part of the charcoal-making process: turning the cobs into charcoal briquettes. This is done so the charcoal will last longer-- cobs on their own burn very fast. What you do is pound the charcoal into small pieces, then mix it with a glue made by soaking cassava flour in hot water and then straining it. This creates a sort of black paste, which you then pack into tin cans with the bottoms missing and pound down with a hammer. This creates strong, tightly compressed briquettes which, after they dry for a couple of days, will burn about as long as regular wood charcoal. Everyone at the workshop got the chance to make a briquette, and then we got to burn some dry ones (we boiled some water, which I used to wash up later).

So to sum up: you get to dig up a lot of earth and then light a pile of corn cobs on FIRE and then ATTACK the dirtkiln with hoes to get the charcoal out and then POUND the charcoal and get your hands all dirty mixing it and then HAMMER it into little briquettes for drying. Seriously, who wouldn't want to do this all day every day? My guests ultimately agreed that the entire process is a lot of fun. I'm tempted to say getting my hands covered in gross black stuff was the highlight of the experience for me. I personally can't fathom why I didn't have hundreds of people at my workshop; CLEARLY this is the coolest thing ever, right? They must not have fully understood the awesomeness of the process.

And that's my week of adventures in alternative energy sources. Who knew saving trees could be so much fun? When I biked to Serenje on Sunday I was 3 times dirtier than normal-- as I showered I found dust and bits in my hair (my hair is like velcro, so I wasn't surprised). But it's fun to get your hands (and chitenge) dirty-- that's why I'm here in Peace Corps, to spend time with nature, and if I can help nature in the process, well that's just a bonus.

Happy 3rd of July!

In Zambia,
independence day falls on a hot day in late October, and a random July date in
the middle of Zambia's southern-hemispheric winter doesn't have much meaning or
significance here, so I think the Zambian people can be excused for
accidentally celebrating America's independence on the wrong day. And to be
more fair, it wasn't even America's independence we were celebrating-- it was a
festival for Zambian commercial farmers, complete with booths and tractors and
cricket games, but there were burgers and fries and cotton candy and fireworks,
so in the name of self-centered American patriotism we Peace Corps Volunteers
just assumed the party was for us and our home across the sea. So happy 3rd of July, everyone! I guess Zambia
was so excited about America's independence, they just had to celebrate a day early-- understandable.

The fireworks were
not the most incredible I've ever seen, but they were certainly the most
exciting: several of them went sideways instead of up, and we were very lucky
the field didn't catch fire. We all had to stay alert, just in case. It was a
chilly night-- like I said, it's winter here in July, not frostbite-cold but
certainly uncomfortable, especially in a world of uninsulated houses with grass
roofs and ill-fitted doors, where 40 degrees can feel extremely unpleasant--
but the sun set at 6pm so we were done with the fireworks by 8 and able to
retreat to our sleeping bags. It was a nice party-- good food, sports to watch,
people to talk with, etc. It was nice to get out of the village for a little
while-- in Peace Corps we get the 4th, Thanksgiving, and all Zambian holidays
off, and since the 4th and 5th are both Zambian holidays I get to have a nice
long weekend, meet with Peace Corps friends, eat good food, etc.

I'll head back to the
village tomorrow-- I have a program each Wednesday at the school working with
the students during their "farming period" to teach them organic
gardening (and hypothetically I'm also working with the school's enivironmental
education and HIV/AIDS clubs, though in 2 terms the school clubs have yet to
have a single meeting), and then Thursday I'm making compost with a farmer on
the other side of my village. I feel like getting in and out of my village gets
easier the longer I'm here-- not just because I'm a better bike rider and in
better shape, but because I’m much more integrated in my community now. A year or even 6 months ago I’d leave my
village for a day and come back feeling like I’d missed something important,
like I was out of the loop again, a visitor in a strange land; now I know my
village well enough that I can go away for a week and I’ll still be a part of
the community when I get back. I’ll have
programs and projects and meetings, and time spent outside my village is not
the interruption it once was. Life in
the village is hard for a lot of reasons, but it gets progressively easier.

I’d like to wish you
all a very happy anniversary of our nation’s independence. If it weren’t for the US I wouldn’t be here,
in this amazing place having this life-changing experience. Thank you Peace Corps, and thank you USA.

Whatever your plans
for this holiday, I hope you’ll comment and share them with me—I love hearing
from all of you, in letters or online or however you prefer, and just because I’m
far away doesn’t mean I’m not thinking of my loved ones back home. I recently (thanks dad!) got a new laptop
with skyping abilities, so if you’re interested in chatting face-to-face my
brand new skype name is elise.j.simons and I’d love to catch up with you. I hope you had a memorable 4^th of
July, and 3^rd and 5^th and all the rest.

And I hope your
fireworks didn’t set anything on fire.

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!