Catch Me If You Can: A new year, a new post

The hardest thing about keeping a blog in Peace Corps Zambia is that in order to
update you not only need a computer but electricity as well as internet - and in
Zambia those are all hard to come by. NOt to mention that everytime you come out of
the village there's a period of adjustment that happens as you get acquainted to the
wonders of modern living. The last thing one wants to do is sit infront of the
computer so instead we sit around watching movies, cooking meals that'll give you a
hard attack, and playing board games. And then you wonder how you just wasted three
days at the house ("provincial resource center"). That said, the beauty of the provincial houses is that it gives us volunteers an opportunity to really take a break from living in the bush without having to spend two days travelling to the capital. I'm told this is unique to Peace Corps Zambia. I arrived to country and swore in with 50 or so volunteers but am only in the northern provence (the largest province) with 10 of my intake. For the most part I'll only see the other members of my intake when we have trainings in Lusaka about every 6 months, sometimes longer. The other way is to go on vacation or actually purposefully travel out of provence and use vacation days.

I've currently been out of the village for the past three weeks and am itching to get back to site. I was in Lusaka for two weeks attending our In Service Training where we basically learn the dos and don'ts Peace Corps Zambia after our three months of community entry. It is now that we should be equipped with all the necessary tools to begin our work in the village. As for the past week i've been at the provincial house in Kasama attending PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan For Aids Relief) training where we bring counterparts from our villages and together we get trained to put on workshops geared towards fighting the HIV/AIDS virus.

I'd like to take this opportunity to back track a little a talk about Christmas and New Years. I decided that I would spend Christmas and New Years in my province rather than plan an epic trip to a neighboring country or some large tourist destination. I figure I'd save my traveling for a later time in my service and wanted to really get a good footing of my our province in Zambia. For Christmas I spent it at the house with a few other volunteers and had a deep fried mexican christmas (everything was deep fried, including bacon and butter). A few days before new years I traveled with two friends James and Scott to Mpulungu (a small town on the shore of Lake Tanganyika). It was there at Mpulungu that I somehow ended being front stage dancers for one of the movers and shakers of the Zambian Pop Music (what?) scene, Dali Sol. I'll have you know that all this went down at some back alley stage - if I can even call it that. What i CAN say is that dancing with Zambian prostitutes is actually pretty and is definitely considered as an activity like "hey, you want to go dancing with hookers tonight?" Don't worry, I haven't gone home with any...yet. The following day we ended up embarking on the Zambian commercial fishing vessel that turned out to be 19 hours on one of the largest lakes in the world (please see previous post).

Hanging with one of the movers and shakers of the Zambian Pop Music scene.

After getting off the 19 hour boat ride we crashed for a few hours at the lodge we were staying at before heading towards the site of another volunteer from our intake to spend new years. It was at Babs' site that a few chickens were killed and fire works were set off. It's probably safe to say that most villagers in Mbala have never seen fire works and boy was it quite a site to have a little taste of home in the Real Africa. I believe we barely made it to midnight and had to start setting off fireworks around 10pm just to keep ourselves awake. As you can imagine, there's not much to do in the village when the sun sets - especially when bed time is around 8pm. Needless to say, I had a pretty mellow new years and birthday. Thank you for all the birthday wishes.

Below you'll find some photos from Mpulungu and Lake Tanganyika: