Well my first three weeks at site have been good although I still have a ton to do (well, two years worth of stuff to do. Most days I wake up at around pa 6:00 koloko (+ or – 30 min) do some stretching, get some coals from the family near by, and then while water is waiting to boil, take a bucket bath. When I’m done with my bath the water is always boiling away so I use most of it for tea and use the remainder for Soya porridge which requires a bit of sugar to make it edible (it has a bad taste to it). I wouldn’t have bought more but they’re the only cereal that has some protean and vitamins in it that you don’t need to buy ten boxes of and spend hundreds of thousands of kwacha on to last a month. After eating breakfast, maybe listening to the BBC if I can find a station that comes in (I don’t think there’s a shortwave station that comes in well for more then 2 or 3 hours, but there is about 10 frequencies that play the BBC at various times throughout the day) and putting on sun screen, I either do one of three things.
-Go to the dimba (garden) of the same family I get my coals from (they gave me some space) and plant and water things. The garden has very clayey soil so I need to make sure to add some more loamy dirt so that the area near where I planted doesn’t turn to a solid substance which the seeds cannot worm their way through. Although clayey, the soil seems very fertile and I hope this means vegetables do well.
-Go to the BOMA, (market/town center) and buy produce and maybe meet with my forestry counterpart or with someone at one of the schools.
-Or stay home and read or try to converse with other village members or plant things in my very small garden inside my fence. Where back home in the states we have a fence to keep the goats pended in, in Zambia we have a fence to keep the goats out.
My village has to be in one of the most beautiful areas in all of Zambia (See Photo below). Small mountains jut almost vertically up out of no where made out of sandstone and granite, obviously left over from the ice age. My fenced in yard is filled with flowers and fruit tree saplings and I have started some cucumber, pepper and tomato seedlings to add to the mix. The weather has finally gotten colder and probably gets down to at least 50°F during the night and then heats up to 75 by mid afternoon. Lately it has also been really windy. I’m crossing my fingers that I can finally get internet on my cell phone which would mean that I could post a lot more.
A view from my front porch
My host atate in front of my kanyunba (house).jpg)