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!

One Year In

A year and a week ago today, I was cold, stressed, and panicked. The cold was a normal consequence of living in New England in February; the panicked was because I couldn’t strike the right weight balance between my two checked bags and my carry-on and my stupid ipod wouldn’t load the two years worth of music and movies and tv shows I was attempting to bring with me; the stressed was because, well, what else would you feel when embarking on a two-year commitment to live in a foreign country?

Last weekend I talked to my mother on the one-year anniversary of speaking to her in person. On a Saturday afternoon one year ago she put me on a bus in Portland and stood outside the tinted windows waving and trying to guess what seat I was in (I eventually pushed my hand to the window to give her smile a general direction) until the bus pulled out of the station. A year ago Sunday I was eating Valentine’s Day brunch with my grandparents and extended family; a year ago Monday I was so nervous I lost my first breakfast and had to eat a second one (waffles. They were really good. Thanks, Dad). A year ago Tuesday I said good-bye to my college roommate (who just happens to live in Philly where we had staging), and with her the last familiar remnants of my American life, and gave her the winter jacket I had been wearing, as I wouldn’t be needing it where I was going.

A year ago Thursday I was exhausted, overheated, out-of-shape and carrying my weight in luggage, staring at the bright African sunlight outside the international airport in Lusaka, Zambia. I had been awake (mostly) since Tuesday morning. My arms were sore from the first round of vaccinations. My back was sore from the midnight bus ride to JFK, the hours-long wait in the terminal, and the excruciatingly long plane ride to South Africa (about 12 hours, but when you add in the time difference it’s nearly an entire day). That afternoon I had my first of many lessons in patience: due to a miscommunication, our welcoming committee was a few hours late, so we just sat, 48 young Americans not quite dressed for the climate surrounded by a ridiculously large amount of luggage, exhausted and still essentially strangers (we had only know each other a couple days, though it felt much longer), waiting. It was a beautiful sunny day; across from the shaded sidewalk where we stood, a large billboard loomed over a manicured lawn, announcing that Africa’s time was coming: “let’s show the world what we can do!”

Today, a year later, the weather is warm— these days I put on a fleece jacket in 50-degree weather and try to remember what real cold, what snow, feels like. Today if I had to pack a bag for a two-year adventure it would be half as heavy as the one I packed a year ago, and even if it wasn’t my bike-and-garden-worn body would be much more equipped to carry it. Today I am shocked at marvels such as being able to print a document from a computer in a different room (seriously, I just did this. The computer and the printer were on different sides of the compound. It’s amazing. Why didn’t I notice how cool this was when I did it all the time in college and high school?), and when my little laptop computer inexplicably stopped working yesterday it barely fazed me (I mean, it’s frustrating, but as we say in Zambia, “at least there’s still nshima”).

In the past year I have learned to speak a foreign language; I have learned to ride a bike (yes, I’m 24, shut up); I’ve planted and grown vegetables, cash crops, and trees; taught farmers to build a compost pile; opened a beehive without getting stung; ridden an elephant and pet a lion in the same day; walked on the rim of the biggest waterfall in the world; eaten a caterpillar; lost over 10 kilos; learned to use the metric system; learned to make a fire in a woodstove; and eaten mangoes and guavas fresh off of trees. It has been an absolutely awesome journey, full of adventure, self-discovery, frustration, challenges, and life lessons. If I could talk to my one-year-younger self, I’d tell her this: take a deep breath. Don’t worry about the packing or the ipod. This isn’t the end of the world; on the contrary, it’s the beginning.

Here’s to a second year in Zambia as crazy and surprising and difficult and wonderful as the first. Cheers!

The end of 2010

Happy new year everyone! It’s been a great year for me, as I hope it has been for you. This past month I have been very busy-- so much to write about and so little time to write it.

The first half of the month planting season was in full swing, so I was busy in my village planting my garden and working with various farmers in their fields. I distributed legume seeds to help crops with varying levels of success; no one likes change, and it takes a very special type of farmer to try new things or accept strange ideas. The same can be said for the basin-digging method promoted by the Zambian government: it saves time and labor and increases yield, but many farmers find it stressful and challenging to use this new, more mathematical and methodical style of tilling. They aren’t used to having to measure their fields and basin spacings, they’re used to just digging the whole field in one fell swoop, which is a lot of labor for them and increases erosion and weed germination. Some farmers were so tired from over-digging their other fields that they didn’t want to spend much time practicing the simpler digging method with me. As for the legumes: intercropping legumes with cash crops like maize helps increase nitrogen levels in the soil and increase the overall health of the land and the plants, but very few people are familiar with these plants and trees and are reluctant to plant them in case they do so incorrectly and harm their cash crops, their livelihood, the thing on which their entire family depends. I did manage to get a few farmers on board, and I’ve made it a goal to spend this next year talking to more farmers to prepare for the next planting season.

Around mid-December I bid farewell to my village and traveled by bus (about 12-14 hours) to Chipata in Eastern Province to attend a workshop on appropriate technologies run by an MIT program called D-Lab. The workshop lasted only 4 days; I could have happily worked for longer, especially since the shortness of the workshop meant many of our projects were left unfinished. Some of our projects included maize shellers, fuel-efficient stoves, corn cob charcoal, hand washers, and mango pickers, juicers, and slicers. While the technology itself was cool-- effective but still simple enough to be easily accessible to villagers-- what was more important was the inventive mindset we were practicing. In a country where schools teach through route memorization and standardized tests, it’s great to give creative minds an opportunity to think outside the box, to encourage them to find solutions to problems and not wait for the solution to be dropped into their laps. By thinking creatively, our Zambian counterparts may invent even better contraptions than the ones that already exist. My own counterpart started out asking me what we were doing and how we were doing it, but by the end of the workshop he had stopped following my lead and he was bossing me around. ;-)

After Chipata I returned to Lusaka and then traveled south to spend the holidays in Livingstone. On Christmas Eve I crossed the border into Botswana and entered Chobe National Park, the Elephant Capital of the World. We went on a boat tour and saw elephants swimming right by us, which was pretty cool. We also saw a leopard out in broad daylight, surprisingly. We spent the night in the camp, sleeping in huge canvas tents and drinking wine at table-clothed tables. It was an interesting merger of English colonial influence and the African bush-- it was a very classy sort of camping experience. I just hoped Santa didn’t get mauled by lions on his way through our camp…

Christmas day was more elephants and some lions, plus Christmas brunch in the camp with mimosas. In the afternoon it rained so hard it hailed and I got soaked! Despite the soaking and the lack of wrapped gifts or snow or pine trees, it was still a really great way to spend Christmas.
Christmas day we returned to Livingstone and stayed through the new year. I got to ride an elephant and pet a lion-- that was quite an eventful day! The elephants were part of an elephant sanctuary; the lions were young cubs raised in captivity but taught to follow their instincts so they could one day be reintegrated into the wild. The lion program faces a strange paradox: funding for the program comes from tourists wanting to walk with and pet the lions, but the presence of the tourists must make the lions used to people and slightly more tame, which it against the intent of the program. So the tourist industry helps and hinders the program’s ambitions simultaneously.

On new years ever I visited Victoria Falls. It is truly a site to behold. A bunch of us walked along the top of the falls to a pool where we could look down over the edge to where the water fell into mist. It sounds dangerous but was actually pretty safe-- the current was not very strong, so it was a bit like wading through water back home, except if you fell and didn’t get back up right away you might be swept the 50 ft. downriver and over the edge. The pool itself was right at the edge of the falls, so that was quite a sight to see. Overall it was an invigorating experience; a great way to start the new year! That evening I went on a sunset cruise and watched the African sun set over the last day of the year. Good-bye 2010, it’s been real.

So that’s my very busy December in a nutshell. While I missed being in my village, it was nice to get out for awhile and see other things. I feel rejuvenated, energized, ready to go. Of course I also feel sick because I spent 10 days sharing a hostel room with 16 other germ-carrying people, one of whom stole my cell phone, but I’m not gonna let this cold bring me down. I think 2011 is going to be a very good year.

Wireless at the Provincial House

My wireless won’t hook up.

This is a familiar problem in an unfamiliar time and place. It’s something I came to expect in college, huddled in one of the campus’ brightly-colored common rooms, fighting over 2,000 other students for valuable airspace before the onset of exams (half of us trying to do actual last-minute work, the rest simply refreshing facebook for the gazillionth time in a rush of desperate escapism), and it’s a familiar sort of general technologically-induced frustration I learned to cope with at an early age, huddled around a massive beige desktop in a closet-turned-computer-room and begging the antiquated AOL phone line to open up and let me in. Despite the impressive and constant leaps and bounds of technological progress, we all still seem to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get the stuff to actually work in the first place.

But this is a frustration I have been mostly liberated from these last 8 months. These days my biggest technological concerns involve finding enough dry wood (and it is raining nearly every day now) to light my woodstove and keeping my glass-coke-bottle-candle-holders from being knocked over by the cat. When I visited the Peace Corps Provincial House in Serenje in June, my first time there since being dropped off in front of a mudhut at the end of April, my fellow volunteers and I made a big joke of fawning over the oven and jumping in surprise at the brightening of a light bulb. Carrying nothing but a camera, ipod, flashlight, cell phone, and portable solar panel with me into the bush, I have been living relatively tech-free…by American standards, at least.

Don’t think this means I’ve been free from technical frustrations-- the cell phone, bought my first day in Lusaka, did not successfully connect to the internet like it was supposed to until nearly two months and thousands of failed attempts later (and unproductive phone calls to the Zambian network administrators), and while my ipod has been my saving grace, all the earphones I brought have broken, and I am currently reduced to holding a too-small plug at the right angle in the too-large socket so I can hear out of the left side of my last set of partially-working earphones that aren’t intended for an ipod at all-- but mostly my goal of freeing myself from my technological addiction has been successful.

Now, however, circumstances have changed. When my father and stepmother departed from Serenje in September, they left me a portable DVD player and very small, almost-no-memory e-series computer. And to make matters more bizarrely American, the provincial house finally (after a typical 6 month delay-- typical of Zambia, technological development in general, and technological development in Zambia) got a wireless internet satellite dish installed this week.
It couldn’t have arrived a moment too soon; this week is provincials, a Peace Corps general meeting that takes place twice per year. This is one of Central Province’s few opportunities to all be together at the same time, and it is also an opportunity to meet a fresh intake of new volunteers (“new” being relative-- they arrived in July and were posted in their villages in September). So, of course, being the 21st century Americans we are, we celebrated our newfound social opportunities by immediately staking out outlets and plugging in our computers. Oh the joys of wireless internet-- for a minute, sitting in a grungy room surrounded by unwashed 20-somethings and the sound of clacking keys, I felt like I was back in college. Then the power flickered off for 15 minutes and I remembered exactly where I was.

But while other people seem to have managed, despite the intermittent flickering of network power, to make some semblance of an internet connection, I am having some difficulty. One minute the little doo-hickey will say it’s working, and then the thingamajig won’t load and the whatsit says it can’t find the server. I suppose it’s partially due to the number of people trying to connect at once-- the line must be very busy right now-- and partially due to me not knowing this computer very well yet-- I did just get it two months ago, and haven’t had very many chances to use it since I don’t have electricity.

So I’m basically sitting at the dining room table fiddling around with my new computer-- turns out I have skype, which could be great if I can get enough internet connection to set it up and a strong enough connection to actually use it. Also, this computer has spider solitaire, which may be the only advantage of getting a PC instead of a Mac. I have a few more pictures from my safari trip, which I’ll post here eventually, though that means posting will take an eon. They’re very pretty-- South Luangwa is a beautiful place, beautiful animals, beautiful trees, beautiful skies. The sky everywhere in Zambia is amazing, actually, and if the moon is more than ¼ full it illuminates the entire landscape with silver light.


The week so far has been interesting-- in addition to the traditional meetings, we’ve also had a small appropriate technology workshop, where we’ve been finding creative (and cheap) ways to encourage health, fuel efficiency, and food security. We built a stove, the smoke from which feeds a meat smoker, and learned to make charcoal from corn cobs, which is a good idea because Zambians use a lot of corn to make nshima, their favorite staple food. But I think the real excitement will be Thanksgiving dinner-- we have two live turkeys, going to slaughter and cook them ourselves, good times. Peace Corps is hard core. We unfortunately could not find a pumpkin-- they’re out of season-- but I will be spending a good deal of quality time cutting apples for pies tonight!

Not much more to report-- I’m going to attempt a Zambian x-mas card this year, so if you think you’re entitled to one make sure I have your address right. One more good thing about Zambia: not too many x-mas carols on the radio starting this Friday. Not that I’ll notice, since my radio doesn’t get reception at my site…

UPDATE: Figured it out, I had accidentally mistyped the password when signing in, which begs the question of why the network claimed I had signed in correctly…anyway, good news, now I can post this!

What I've Been Up To Lately

Happy Zambian Independence Day!

Well, actually, the day itself was October 24, about 2 weeks ago, but unfortunately I was sick last week and wasn’t able to write about it until today. I celebrated my host nation’s 46th year of independence with a little trip to Northern Province.

In fact, I ended up seeing a little bit more of Northern Province than expected-- my friend Allison and I were traveling together, got a nice ride in a Tanzanian freight truck, but no one told us that we had to turn at Mpika to get to Kasama so we ended up going several hours in the wrong direction on a bumpy road full of car-sized potholes. Oops. We were eventually redirected by a lovely lady selling bananas at a police security checkpoint, and we managed to get a ride with a nice group coming from Tanzania…until they hit a pothole and busted two tires. Oops. Luckily we got another hitch relatively quickly, and this guy was going all the way to Kasama! Well, that was his original plan…until he got a call from a work colleague and discovered he was needed in Mpika for the night. By this time Allison and I were worried as well as exhausted and stressed-- was this guy going to abandon us in a strange city in Africa at night, just two little white girls? Nope-- he spent an hour in Mpika with us trying to get us a hitch (it was nighttime and most of the cars had left the area by this point) and then, when no alternative ride was forthcoming, he sighed, got back in his car, and drove us to Kasama. Because sometimes people really do come through for each other. Thank you Mr. Nice Guy, wherever you are.

The trip turned out to be worth the Ride Through Hell. The Peace Corps office in Northern Province is a cool place-- they have a bright yellow-orange kitchen, which I love, but apparently they’re planning to paint it a different color, which is too bad-- and it was great to see my Northern Peace Corps buddies again! We took a trip to Chishimba Falls-- there were more than 20 of us, don’t know how we all fit into that little bus but we managed it. The falls were absolutely beautiful, and I got right down on the rocks at the bottom of it-- really cool. It was nice to go swimming since it’s been so hot here, and the view was great.

From there we took a bus up north to Lang Tanganyika, which I believe is the longest and deepest lake in Africa, or something. We took a boat to a beach resort where we set up camp-- it was really beautiful, and the lake looked like a real ocean. I guess Zambia isn’t as landlocked as I thought it was. I may have to rethink the title of this blog. Here’s the link: http://www.isangabay.com/ anybody jealous? It was fun camping out on a beach. We took a really invigorating hike to Kalambo Falls, the second-tallest waterfall in Africa. It was quite a trek but I was surprised at my own endurance level-- Zambia has been good for me, I guess. And we’re entering mango season. Nothing like eating mangoes on the beach!

Got safely back to site with only a minor case of food poisoning. Ick. It was a great little vacation-- I loved seeing more of Zambia, it’s so beautiful and awesome here!

Last week on Tuesday it rained for the first time since April-- I’ve never gone so long without rain before, it was strange. It was a really great storm-- I’m sure I’ll get sick of rain quickly, but for now I’m enjoying it. It’s also nice because since the rains started it’s cooled off a little-- I can now actually leave my hut in the middle of the day, which is great. Unfortunately this also means all the wildlife is waking up-- the other night a tarantula waltzed in to my hut! Yikes! Rainy season here I come!

My First Zambian Vacation

It’s always a bizarre experience to leave your village. First of all, in my case, the process begins with a grueling 2-3 hour bike ride through sand and over rivers and up mountains, so by the time I arrive in the relatively urban town of Serenje I am tired, dirty, and sweaty in addition to the culture shock of re-encountering electricity and indoor plumbing. In Serenje, which is the location of the Peace Corps Provincial Office in addition to being the market where I do all my grocery shopping, I find a very different world from the quiet peace of my village. Many more people speak much more English (and quite a few don’t speak much Bemba, having moved to Serenje from one of the other tribal regions of the country), it is possible to buy things like cornflakes, green beans, and cheese (and refrigerate it) whereas in the village you’re limited to oil and sugar (and occasionally bananas), and your bathroom experience involves sitting instead of squatting. But stranger than all of this is the experience of leaving Serenje for a larger city like Lusaka or a vacation resort like South Luangwa, especially when you are going there to meet family visiting from America.

It is 5 hours direct from Serenje to Lusaka, but of course the journey is made much longer by traffic, rest stops, government checkpoints, and the overall fluidic pace of public transportation. I left Serenje at 7:30am and walked to the Serenje Junction at the Great North Road, where for only $12USD I was able to pay for a ride on a little blue bus from point A to point B. Unfortunately it took some time to get started, and then we made several stops in the major towns on the way south, including a bus change in Kabwe (which actually involved several bus changes-- the drivers couldn’t decide who was going to Lusaka and who wasn’t, I guess-- so I arrived in Lusaka a little after 4pm, after 8+ hours on a bus. I spent most of the time writing letters and watching the purple-blossomed Jacaranda trees, which have just come in to bloom.

Lusaka is not by any means the tourist capital of Zambia. In fact, before this trip I didn’t know there were hotels in Lusaka outside the $20USD price range. The city is as loud and dirty as any other modern city, though it has a markedly large number of roundabouts, and its main draw to me is the shopping center complete with fast food, a grocery store, and a movie theater. The people are relatively friendly, and when they put an arm around your shoulder 9 times out of 10 they are actually not going for your purse (though I kept my hand on mine anyway, just in case). I felt overwhelmed by the noise and activity but didn’t feel out of my element until I arrived at the hotel my father and stepmother had reserved just after sunset. At this point I had been traveling the entire day and had biked from my village the day before, so I was dirty and sweaty and gross, and walking into this hotel was like entering a completely different universe. It was like a quiet oasis from the bustle of the city, but nothing like the quiet of my village. This was the quiet of cleanliness and organized luxury. Desperate to fit in, I pasted on the biggest, most Zambian smile I could muster, checked in while throwing around a couple of Bemba terms to distract from my rugged village appearance, and rushed upstairs where I spent over an hour in the shower-- most of that time was spent scrubbing just my feet. Turns out they aren’t as tan as I thought they were. When Dad and Laurie finally arrived, I was about as clean as I had been when I left them 7 months ago, or at least the cleanest I’d been since February.

The hotel was so luxurious it didn’t seem to know it was located in a “developing“ country-- the food was excellent, the beds were pristine and comfortable, the shower always had hot water and the toilet flushed with minimal fuss, all the staff were friendly and helpful, and there were real live miniature crocodiles in the pond by the restaurant, no joke. 4 of them and a little baby one, all sunning themselves like statues and moving only to go for a swim. My father was more interested in the vibrant yellow weavers in the process of building their nests in the tall grass, but either way it was quite a show at breakfast. It felt a bit ridiculous to be here after being in my village-- this sharp an economic imbalance within one country is almost painfully ludicrous, though unfortunately not at all uncommon. The good news is a place like this, and the tourist industry in general, creates jobs for Zambians and helps the economy of the entire country. So you can have a great vacation and donate money to a country that needs it at the same time (though I doubt that will fly on your tax forms). I personally must have looked a right fool saying things like “wow, placemats and cloth napkins, that’s so cute” and “look Dad, the water faucet works, isn’t that awesome?” I guess Zambia has made me easy to please, which must be a good thing.

Dad, Laurie, and I spent two full days in Lusaka. On Sunday we went to the Arcades Shopping Center where the weekly Sunday market was in full swing, selling overpriced but often lovely crafts to tourists. Again, it’s hard to feel bad about spending money when it goes directly to support a Zambian craftsman/woman and his/her family. I bought lots of stuff, mostly gifts for Dad and Laurie to carry home for me, but also a lovely stone-carved leopard for myself. Since I had just been in Lusaka in August for IST, I didn’t go crazy buying stuff as I normally would have-- in August I bought a stone open-mouthed hippo, a red tie-dye dress, and a patchwork purse for myself (the last was from a woman who calls me her daughter because she lives in Chongwe where I had my training back in March. Apparently that’s all it takes to be adopted in this country). In addition to the stuff I bought in Lusaka I also got a bunch of gifts Dad and Laurie brought me from various relatives, including books, games, stationary, wind-up flashlights (my old one got stolen back in July-- oops), bathing suits, DVDs and a player, and a very small laptop. It was a bit like Christmas.

But the best Christmas gift of all came on Monday, and you can’t put a price on it (well, the company we rented the car from did, but that’s a different thing). The three of us drove east to Chongwe, about 45 minutes outside of Lusaka, and visited my host family from training. I had not heard from them in months and had been trying to contact them to plan a visit, and right at noon on Monday they called me and told me to bring my family over! It was great to be back in my red-earthed home, to see my Bamaayo and Bataata and sisters (who all ran to hug me) and brothers, my old one-room hut which is now housing another Peace Corps Volunteer from the new intake, and then it was bizarre to turn around and see Dad and Laurie standing there with me. Worlds merging. They had their first taste of nshima, the cornmeal-based staple food of Zambia, and got to see their first Zambian village. I tried for the first of many times to teach them some Bemba, but without much luck-- Dad was just getting the hang of “good morning” on his last day here. Luckily my Chongwe family speaks mostly Nyanja anyway, so we were all in the same boat.

Here is a picture of me, my American father, and my Zambian mother. Thanks for the laptop so I can upload pictures, Mom!

The majority of our vacation was spent in South Luangwa National Park in a place called Flatdogs (another word for crocodiles). We went on 8 4-hour safari drives-- perhaps more than was necessary since we were exhausted by the end, but I don’t know which ride I would take back as they were all fantastic. Flatdogs itself was lovely, with great people and beautiful chalets and tents and a pool and a restaurant with great food (and not just by my standards-- the parents approved as well, especially during dessert) and a place you could sit and watch hippos lounge in the water. We were so close to the park boundary we had night guards to make sure no animals caused trouble in camp (well actually it would be the people who caused the trouble, but they probably wouldn’t be considered the guilty party), and one day I was woken from a midday nap (it was too hot to do anything midday, so our drives were in the mornings and evenings) by a bunch of baboons and monkeys patrolling the grounds outside my window. Elephants, giraffes, and hippos were also known to wander through, and one herd of elephants spent the afternoon at the restaurant when their baby decided that would be a good time and place for a nap. Talk about non-interference parenting.

Our tour guide, a Zambian man named Malama, was also fantastic, informative and knowledgeable and unbelievably adept at finding animals-- in the evenings we went on night drives (which I think are only allowed in Zambian parks) and he could spot a crocodile hidden in the grass several meters away while driving on treacherous roads. We got within 15 ft. of a pack of napping lions, spent an entire evening hunting for leopards (picture safari of course, not armed safari), saw another lion climb a tree and nearly witnessed a stand-off between some lions and hyenas over a dead buffalo (it wasn’t nearly as dramatic as in The Lion King), got very close to several giraffes and zebras, spent 20 minutes waiting for a huge herd of buffalo to cross the road, and got so into the bird watching (and it isn’t even peak bird season yet) that Dad eventually caved and bought a Southern Africa Bird Book. We were joined on most of our drives by a lovely couple from California, and the five of us had great fun playing the best version of “I Spy” possible-- the constant, informal, exciting, rewarding, entertaining, educational kind. On our last morning we had a walking tour-- it’s actually easier to walk in the park than in my village because there are fewer tree roots and the hippos clear very good paths-- and we got very close to some birds, zebras, and ant lions (they build ant traps like craters in the sand). But far and away the best part about the safari was the elephants. I love elephants, love to spot them emerging from the brush, to sit and watch them eat or sleep or bathe or walk, to take pictures of them or just look at them. The worst thing is an angry elephant charging-- more destructive than just about anything, and elephants actually cause multiple deaths per year-- but an elephant at peace is more peaceful than any other animal except perhaps a giraffe. I may have to go on safari again just for the elephants.

Traveling from South Luangwa to Serenje and then to my village was a long, stressful, painful process. My becoming very nauseous on the small plane from South Luangwa to Lusaka didn’t help matters, and I very nearly lost my cool before we finally checked in at the Hotel Zen-- well, actually, it was a hotel in Kabwe called Tuskers, but it was very relaxing so I‘m renaming it. We proceeded to Serenje on Monday and visited my favorite lunch spot, the town market, and a few small stores. It was interesting to see these places-- the parts of Africa I know best-- through the eyes of newcomers. Things that never fazed me, like live goats or chickens tied to the back rack of a one-gear bicycle or bags of charcoal and piles upon piles of tomatoes being sold by brightly dressed women on the side of the road, were of great interest to them. We drove to my village (only got lost twice-- the car route is different from the bike route so I haven’t been on it much) but I didn’t really feel like I had returned home at all because I was seeing old familiar things for the first time. Even my own Bemba language skills and ability to banter with my neighbors seemed less like a familiar routine and more like a successful attempt to impress my guests.

My village family generously provided my parents with beer (which I had to pay for) and a live chicken-- which they somehow expected could be killed, dressed, cooked, and eaten on the road to Lusaka. Instead my grandmother cooked it with nshima for them. She also prepared a warm Zambian bucket bath for them (and for me-- yay!). We walked around, visited a few people, rested during the heat of the day, saw the school and the place where I go to get cell phone reception, and witnessed a great deal of bush burning-- it is much better for the environment (and safer) to do annual burning/land clearing early in the year, like in May/June, but to protect the July-harvested crops (and provide new fresh leaves to increase caterpillar growth for the caterpillar-harvesting season in October-November) most people here let their forests burn in September. It is beautiful during and devastating after, a black charred landscape full of dead leaves on blackened trees, though pink and purple flowers grow out of the ashes almost instantly. Though I would like them to see my village in greener seasons, I think they really enjoyed their stay.

Unfortunately they were only able to stay two nights and one day in my village before I helped them navigate the rental car back to Serenje. They left me here at the Central Province Peace Corps House/Office in Serenje and proceeded down the Great North Road to Lusaka. From there they will travel to Livingstone and Victoria Falls and then home. I will be here, slowly preparing myself to hop on my bike and return to my village, readjust to life there and become accustomed again to the pace of life and lack of electricity. It’s always a bizarre experience to return to your village