Blue Skies

Hey everyone, sorry again I haven't been able to post more frequently like I continue to promise. It is finally the dry season and we have clear blue skies over the country. Grass here is 8-10 feet tall now, and is beginning to dry up and get cut to save for thatch. Soon it will be burn season and this entire continent will be on fire again. So I have a ton of stories to tell, and I really want to write a few blogs each focusing on individual social or cultural topics. Thank you Brianna for organizing and getting me a new netbook computer. It will be here soon and I will be able to start writing blogs as they come to mind in the village. I am also soon to have a new solar panel from Voltaic Systems so I will have power on the computer even in the village.

OK so enough rambling, now that is it dry season I am very excited to be getting very busy. All of the villagers have finally come back from their fields and my little village is once again active and full of people with not a lot to do. So, let me tell you about some of the projects I am doing/have planned for the near future, then we can get into a few stories. I finally got a chance to harvest a pond! It was on my birthday, and it was so much fun! I have been trying to convince my co-op that it is ok to harvest, and I always hear the same thing "but we must wait for hammer mill," "we must wait til we have market," "we must wait til tomorrow..." I was getting really sick of hearing about how we have to always wait wait wait, so I asked them to do a partial harvest on just one pond and lets start selling fish by the side of the road and see if we can't start making money. WELL between just villagers and teachers in Kanzala we were able to sell everything we harvested! We did only one pass through the pond and it yielded 25kgs!!! I think my farmers really enjoyed seeing 500,000kw (fish sell for 20pin/kg or roughly $4. About $2/lb...) flow in for a very easy day's work. So now that they have seen the money, they are enthusiastic about harvesting more often. So we are aiming to begin harvesting 2-3 times a week now.

In order to capture a market that is not there, I have begun the project of building a little shop for them on the side of the road to use as a center for business. This shop is where we will have the hammer mill for the co-op to develop fish feeds, where we will eventually have a holding tank for the sale of fresh fish, and also where we are building a smoker so that we can preserve any fish not sold during a day. It will basically become their fish "store" where they can begin operating together as a business.

Because my farmers are so good at what they do, World Vision and myself are cooperating to make a center for people to people education of fish farming in the province. We are going to begin (next week is actually the 1st one) hosting 3 day workshops in my village where we bring in farmers from other villages who want to learn how to farm fish and teach them. We are starting with some farmers from another volunteer's village, but we will be hosting hopefully 1 workshop of this type every month with other volunteers' villages or villages that World Vision has an invested interest in. The workshops will have only about 2 hours of class room work, but then the rest of the entire training will be hands on in the field. We do this because rural Zambians can't learn from sketches and writing on a board, but rather they are really good at picking up skills when they can see it and do the work physically in a practical. The other advantage is that all of my farmers speak the local languages much better than any of us volunteers can. So I will not really be the one teaching the workshop, instead it will be Zambian to Zambian, people to people, education.

During these workshops we will have farmers stake ponds, help dig, slash grass (and learn all the other steps to maintaining ponds), harvest, and also do a small species identification class. My co-op wasn't very enthusiastic about the idea initially, but I had to explain and convince them that they are trading their knowledge for man power. Hopefully by the end of every workshop visitors will have a very strong grasp on all fish farming concepts from site selection through harvest, and in return hopefully my co-op will gain one extra pond. If they do 6-8 workshops like this a year that is 6-8 ponds more than they had last year, and that just means more fish for them to sell...

Another thing I am working on is trying to get even more local Kanzala farmers to take an interest in fish farming. An easy way to motivate Zambians is jealousy. When other people see us harvesting and selling fish, they become jealous and really want to be able to do the same. It is a similar concept with my chicken house and my garden.

OK, other things, I am working in the schools to do a letter exchange with children from my 8th and 9th grade classes with 3rd and 4th graders from Jackman, Maine back home. This is all to promote cultural exchange and give the kids some practice in writing formal letters. I have also gotten the head teacher to agree to 3 condom demonstrations a year with all the children grades 6-9. This is to promote better health practices concerning HIV/AIDS, as well as to prevent young girls from getting pregnant and ultimately dropping out of school. Every volunteer in Africa has to do some HIV/AIDS wrok because that is where we get the majority of our funding. I also have a large dam construction project going on in a fellow volunteer's site 60km away. I plan to do a lot of work in other volunteer's sites. Here in Zambia we have 4 different programs; Health, Education, Environment, and Fish Farming. So volunteers who are teachers or clinic workers who do not have the training to help local farmers with fish farming have been asking me to come to their sites to do consulting work and/or workshops.

Enough about that, lets get into some fun stories.

Not in chronological order, because, well, just because. So I recently took a very awesome vacation to Lake Tanganyika in the northern past of Zambia. It was an awesome hitching experience, but a long one. So I started off from Joe's site only 13km from my own. We got to the road just a minute too late to catch a hitch I am very certain I have taken before, and we ended up having sit out for 3 hours before we saw another car headed towards Solwezi. We caught a hitch and I made it to Sol by mid day. After getting lunch, I continued on to a fellow Volunteer's site in the middle of the Copperbelt province. I ended up hitching out of Chingola after dark because I had to stop for money and the grocery store before showing up to Nick's place. well, I caught this one hitch all the way, but the man's name was Bruce and he was going through a divorce. Me being friendly get to talking to him, and before I know it I am counseling him and on the phone with his wife trying to mitigate between the two. I had to explain how she needed to show up to court, and that is she got arrested think about you little girl... It was the most interesting 2 hours I have ever hitched in my life here, but it was FREE so I didn't mind.

>>> Side note, I plan on writing a blog, just about all of my hitching adventures, but so you know I took a total of 23 rides to get me to and from, and I remember them each, but can't possibly get into explaining them all now... BUT I DID GO ROUND TRIP 3200KM (2000MILES) FOR ONLY 35,000KW!!!!!!! THAT IS $7... 30,000 TO GET THERE, ONLY 5 TO GET BACK <<<<

ook, so I got to Kasama the following day by 1:30 in the morning, and finally Mpulungu by 1 the next day. I really enjoyed the lake, we ate fresh fish for dinner almost every night. I walked right down to the lake side market and would just pick the largest fish from the day's catch, pay for it, and that was dinner. The water is warm and crystal blue. We all spent a lot of time down by the water and walking around town. I went to the port one day and was trying to locate some local water charts, which they didn't have any. Then I tried to get permission to climb a tower there and take some pictures, but that too was shot down. WELL everyone in Zambia believes that all white people work for the CIA... So on my way out of the port the police wanted to question me about what I was doing there, and what I was searching for, and why I needed picture, and on and on... Finally we shook the cops, and I went to the local Dept. of Fisheries, and not long after I was buttering up all the people in charge, they agreed to let us volunteers to rent out a boat for FREE!!! all we had to do was cover fuel, and pay for a guide. So the following day we showed up and spent the entire day on the water. It was amazing. We asked them to stop constantly so that we could jump out and swim. We also got to visit some islands and local villagers on them. BUT, (the reason I am telling this story first) I LOST MY CAMERA!!!! I lost my camera in about 100 ft of water out in the middle of the lake when I put it on my wrist and jumped in the water to take a picture of the group. By the time I was situated on my life vest and ready to take a snap, I realized my camera no longer was on my arm! Oh,well. So you won't get any new pictures in this blog post. No pictures of Mpulungu, none of my new Rhode Island Red rooster, none of the progress on digging my cave, nothing new at all :((...

Ok well other fun story I have been building again. I have started to dig a cave in a termite hill in my back yard. Here in Africa there are hundreds of thousands of termite and ant hills that are the size of small houses in America. So Joe and I one day just said what the hell lets start digging. Well, my tunnel into the middle is finished and about 10 ft long. I have also begun to dig out the actual cavern part. I hope to be finished with it in a month or two.

Oh, and you don't have pictures of my chicken getting eaten alive by ants... One night Ryan and I were passed out, and around 3am the cat started hissing violently in the house. I immediately thought SNAKE, and jumped out of bed to get a light on and kill the thing. Well, the minute my feet touch the ground I start getting bit up like crazy by ants. They were not army ants and they were not red ants, they were a mean cross between the two. these ants are no longer than 5mm, but 1 out of 10 is a much larger protector ant with pincers strong and big enough to draw blood. My WHOLE house was covered in them, and my WHOLE yard was just alive and moving with trillions and trillions of these vicious things!!! One of my chickens had come down from the chicken coop, and was completely destroyed by the ants. I went back to sleep for a an hour or two to wait for the sun. When I got up again, the ants had not gone anywhere. I called over my host family and we started lighting thatch on fire and trying to burn them, as my host mom used her hoe to clear grass. The whole process took 2 hours to clear "most" of the ants out. It was a very strange experience and I went back into Solwezi for a night to pick up some cleaning supplies and insecticide.

Cool, well lets see here, I have read a bunch of books, and cemented my front porch, but those are just small things I have been keeping myself busy with. Life is good, and I am going to let this be the end to this post. When the new comp comes in you will see more I promise (again). I love you all! TUKA DEMONA, MWENDANGAHU MWANI!!!! I apologize in advance about any miss spelllings or gramatical errors in the above p