Ani's Visit! Change of Pace and New Home

ANI!!

I am so behind in my blogging so I thought I’d take as much time as I can to get up to date.

I was been blessed to have another visitor in April, it seems like people are coming around now that my time is almost up in the village. Ani, my friend from Arlington High School days, has come to see me. We had a great time. She amazed me by her follow thru and seriousness about the journey and I was so excited to host her. Ani came from Boston on April 2nd and stayed with me through April 14th. I took this opportunity to do all the things I always wanted to do in Zambia with her. I also did some things for the second time because they were that enjoyable.

Her arrival coincided with my Close of Service Peace Corps Conference when they take us to a gorgeous lodge and nature reserve to thank us for our two years of service. May 25th 2007 marked two years in country for me. My end of service date is supposed to be July 29th, 2007 but I’ve decided to extend for one more year. (I know y’all are like, is she ever coming back from Zambia, I promise this is my last year I have to go to grad school.)

So Ani came to meet me at Chaminuka Lodge where they had beautiful accommodation, and some fun activities to do in spare time. My friend Julia helped host Ani while I was doing my Peace Corps duties and took her around Lusaka. Here are the three of us...


One activity was to visit one of the few cheese factories that has its residence on their grounds. We saw the process of how they made cheese.




This is the finished product...

Then they took us into a “cheese cave” and we got to taste the finished product



Mmmm….Cheese (it’s soo expensive in Zambia so it was a treat getting a bunch for free)


Did I mention it was WINE and cheese…
Another activity was visiting the resident elephants



To my delight they had just had a baby.

They also have other game such as hyenas


Lions , Ostriches, etc.

Next Ani took a trip to my village to experience a bit of rural life in Zambia. We had some night fun dancing with the children.


Ani gave out some stickers to the children and other goodies..



Ani practices carrying water on her head…

Next we went to Livingstone to see the Victoria Falls, and we went on a sunset cruise

The Victoria Falls is the best place to spot rainbows…


And we went on an Elephant Back Safari, something I’ve wanted to do since I landed in Zambia…


And last but not least, Bunjee Jumping at Victoria Falls, the second highest jump in the world:

(Yes that’s my crazy a$$ hanging from rubberbands over water rapids)

And that was Ani.

Needless to say we had a BLAST! Thanks for coming Ani!!!


Leaving My Village

It was the saddest thing I’ve had to do in a long time. On May 16, 2007 I left my village. I had a series of closing meetings with all the different zones to prepare them for the next volunteer and to bid them farewell. There was a big celebrating that they planned for me. People came the night before and were cooking for the following day.



They killed 5 goats and 14 chicken for me and fed the entire party with more than 500 people (that’s my guess estimate of how many were there). I shook everyone’s hand, they lined up for me and I shook hands:



They gave me gifts:

They said speeches that humbled me deeply. We embraced…



And somehow we managed to take a group picture with most of the people in attendance.



I wish I knew how to put the video so I could share the words of these people that were kinder words than I’ve ever heard. It really made me feel like I made a difference, like my being there was meaningful and had helped many people. I’ll never forget Simakutu Catchment area or Kayoba Village. I’ve learned so much here and grown so much here.

Malawi

For my birthday I went to visit Malawi because I had never been there before. I only went for 4 days but I saw Lake Malawi and visited the Peace Corps office down there. I met some cool African American Peace Corps there and we quickly became friends, one of them even traveled with me to the lake...

I rented a car and drove a total of 780km on a MANUAL/STICK SHIFT vehicle on the other side of the road, I am officially a full blown driver. I couldn’t drive a manual before I came to this country and now I do it well!


Next Steps

As I said I will be extending for one more year with an NGO called RAPIDS (Reaching AIDS affected People through Integrated Development and Support) where I will be developing a large scale Voluntary Counseling and Testing implementation program for partners throughout the country. It will be a challenging feat but I’m up to it and it will be great experience for my CV.

I'm no longer in the village although my new house also has a thatched roof, it has electricity, running water, and a flush toilet. That way I won't have such a culture shock when I return to the US.

My new home...

What's New?

Lisa JONES!

Lisa JONES! finally came to visit my village and it was such a joy to have her there. We had been talking about it for ages. Lisa is working with an NGO in Lusaka and we became friends almost two years ago. We connected on the fact that we both had family from the Caribbean, hers from Jamaica, mine from Barbados, and we were both African Americans in Zambia (which is quite unusual sad to say). She has been my travel buddy and a friend to lean on and confide in. I'm so glad she's here, and am so sad that she is leaving in two months.

I had a meeting with my village counterparts during her visit so I invited her as a guest lecturer. She educated them on how Anti-Retroviral Treatment works in the body and on HIV transmission.

She also came baring gifts to the children in my village and they were so delighted.

Here they are with their new pencils, pens and other goodies.

We also went orange picking at a neighbor's place.

HIV Peer Educators

I trained 25 new HIV Peer Educators in my village. And I made them these lovely certificates which were signed by the District Commissioner and myself. People here really dig certificates. The training lasted for three days, the participants camped at NAPS training center and I commuted on my bike daily. The training included education on HIV transmission, prevention, correct condom use, how to conduct condom demonstration, male and female anatomy, how the reproductive system works, basic counseling skills and much more. I'm very proud of my trainees and they all developed workplans to start implementing in their respective areas. People came from as far as 30km away.

There were also some fun activities involved such as condom races where one group had to race the other group to see who could complete putting on a condom CORRECTLY and the fastest on a penis model.

The GRADUATES!

HIV Support Groups

The HIV Support Group meetings are beginning to be a bit overwhelming. I cycled about 20km out to this place in the mountains (where they allegedly have monkeys although I didn't see any on the way) to help facilitate an HIV support meeting. Now these groups are supposed to be small but there were about 180 people there. This area apparently doesn't get a lot of visitors, so we took the oppotunity to do some basic HIV education there were people argued with me that they wouldn't eat with an HIV infected person because of the fear of having the HIV transmitted through the food. It made me think of how much more work I still have to do.

Working with UN organizations FAO and WFP

I've also managed to connect one of the communties to an Farmer Field Life School sponsored by two UN organiztions FAO (Food Agriculture Organization) and WFP (World Food Programme). The purpose of the school is to build the capacity of communities to develop income through agriculture projects and to increase food security for their families and the greater community. We just completed a training with 3 other group to give facilitators the skills they need to teach the communities. This is the entire group trained:

And here are my community facilitators and me (with a bad hair day).