hey hey, fellow straight dopians!
i used to post fairly infrequently, but then i left in september to go to zambia to work in peace corps rural aquaculture program (aka, RAP or “i build fish ponds”). after three months of tech and language training together, the 22 other people in my group and i were posted to our villages, spread out all over zambia. if you can do month math, you would have figured that we have all been living in our villages for close to six months now. right now everyone in the RAP program in zambia (both my training class, 2002, the training class before mine, 2001, and a few people from 2001 who loved it so much they extended their service for another year) all just spent a week in a lodge outside of lusaka (the capitol of zambia), doing meetings about fish farmers associations, marketing fish, etc. right now, i am in a strikingly american style computer cafe in lusaka (actually, i am only guessing it is american style, as i have never been to one in the states - there is a lot of chrome). it costs 15,000 zambian kwacha/per hour to use the internet - since not many people probably have reason to be up to date on the exchange rates, that’s in the neighborhood of three bucks. it’s not a dsl line, or whatever the really fast thing is, but it aint slow, neither.
now that anyone who cares is up to the minute, i can bring you briefly, up to speed on the last six months: i’m living in a village with about 30-40 other people (people, especially kids, kind of move in and out), all of whom are related. my village (called sankengi) is 3 km from kanyama, which has a small school, a terribly understaffed, undersupplied clinic, and a market where you can buy cooking oil, sugar and, thank god, cigarettes. kanyama is also the chief’s capital, which is why it has all those things. it is 70 km from mwinilunga, my boma (British Overseas Management Area), where there is electricity, a post office, guest houses, a bar, a big market, some stores etc. all of this is in zambia’s northwest province.
it takes me 5 hours on my bike to get from my house to the post office (5 if i push), which sounds pathetic - that’s what, 14 km.hour? but in my defense, it’s really bitchly hilly, and the first 50 of the kilometers arent paved, and are really sandy.
my house is made of mud bricks, and it has a thatch roof - no electricity, and we get out water from a scoophole a few minutes walk from the village. there are something like 73 different ethnic groups in zambia (and thus, 73 different languages - many are dialects); i am speaking, although not very well, lunda. 2 of the men in my village speak really, really good english, but the women and kids just speak lunda. (i have a suspicion that one of the women knows pretty good english - when they are trying to explain things sometimes and there is a word that i am just not getting, she will fill it in for me in english).
anyway, i dont know if anyone has any questions about life in peace corps, life in an african village, life in a zambian internet cafe, but if you do - post away! i think i’m coming back to this place tonite (it’s right across from the hotel), and then next week (a group is going on vacation at vic falls for a few days, and we have to come back through lusaka to get back to our province). so while i might not answer right away, and i might not even answer for several days, if it is at all possible for me to check on my way back through lusaka on thursday or friday i will.
also - if anyone has any good, sound-bite style gossip news from the states. i know about the war and about sars, and there were some bombings recently in saudia arabia (got all this from my short wave radio), but little details are hard to come by, and the bbc almost never talks about american movie stars doing stupid things.
ok. hopefully people have questions, or atleast gossip.
love
sneeze