Category: Peace Corps

Well my first three weeks at site have been good

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)

Welmp, maybe it’s tomorrow the momentous occasion finally comes to pass…

Well, I wasn’t posted on Tuesday after all, as I didn’t feel good Monday and have been was simodzi modzi on Tuesday and Wednesday. Now I’m probably getting posted on Friday, I’ve gotten almost everything I need save for an ax, a bunch of twine, 2 more small jerry cans and my phone with internet on it which I’m so pissed it doesn’t work. I have no idea what I will be doing for the next couple weeks but it will probably involve a lot of settling in and maybe getting some seeds started which reminds me that I need to collect a bunch of cans and bottles to use as pots. Alright, that’s all for now but I will probably be back within Internet usage in two to three weeks as I guess I need to get my visa renewed. That is, of course if I still can’t get internet to work on my phone… gerr shouldn’t have waited and bought it there. Why don’t you call on Saturday

Well, trainings done (thank goodness, I hardly had time to think)

Blog 2008 04 27
Well, trainings done (thank goodness, I hardly had time to think). Just have a couple more days of chaos getting the stuff I need (the list is endless) and then I’m going to be posted. During training, what I did in my “free time” was spending it studying chinyanja. Tech was for the most part pretty good although, though called “tech,” it wasn’t technical enough for my liking, but I like to get into the details more then some. The last week has been a whirlwind. Tuesday was the eventful day that we would all be tested on our language. I somehow managed to memorize enough chinyanja to pass. The tech test was a breeze, it just started too late so that it was dark before I had finished. I passed everything though. Wednesday was “Cross Cultural Day” in which we invited some of our host family members to come and hear some presentations done by soon to be PCV’s in the various Bantu dialects spoken where the PCV’s were going to be posted. After the speeches were done, we all ate a Semi-American meal (Soya Tacos and burgers and dogs) which the volunteers had prepared. It was good, especially because I had been eating bread for a lot of my breakfasts and nshima with lapu (rape) or chiŵaŵa (I think I have the spelling correct, think of the small dog and you basically have the pronunciation right – it’s pumpkin leaves) relish for just about every other meal I had with my family. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t bad, just I was used to a more diversified diet.
Anyway, getting back to the last week, on Thursday we put all of our stuff on the bus and drove to the Lusaka main office for admin sessions the majority of the day. Then we moved to a resort/campsite/cattery/bar place for this night and the next, I guess just to relax a bit after training was over.
Friday was our swearing in ceremony in which we all dressed up, some in traditional garb, others with ties/skirts. The ceremony was somewhat formal; the guest speaker was the minister of Tourism, Forestry and Environment which is the LIFE programs department. After the ceremony was over and we had all been sworn in and eaten lunch, I got a driver/admin person to drive me to a solar panel store to buy a deep cycle battery. As it turned out, the address I had been given was the same place I had been before, although having seen the battery I eventually got at action at a wildlife sanctuary we had gone to, I was more willing to get it. This didn’t stop the ordeal from taking 3+ hours of trying to test my various devices on the battery (which is an un-sealed lead acid battery)
Then Saturday, with our Landover’s almost twice their normal height what with all the luggage plus everyone’s bikes stuffed onto them, we set out on the long ride (8-10 hours, depending on whether you get stuck behind a smelly 18 wheeler going 20km an hour) to Chipata.
Today we went to Shopright, the grocery store and one of the only stores open on Sunday save for a few vegetable stands, and bought enough food to last at least a month. The Provincial House is almost just like a college dorm, save for the daily power outages and with them, no running water. It’s a homely place with great people and I wish we would be able to stay a few more days just to relax before the eventful day we get posted (probably Tuesday). Tomorrow I need to buy an insurmountable about of things because I am moving into a bare house. Alright, hopefully I also get internet working on my cell phone so that I can post more regularly.

-Tidzionana (We’ll be seeing each other [again, I think I have the spelling correct, chinyanja is a very vocal language so you don’t see things written a lot])

Going to Zambia tomorrow

2008-02-21

Going to Zambia tomorrow, probably won’t have internet access for a while…. The momentous occasion looms close! The last two days have been similar to most “training” programs and haven’t really been the meat of leaning about Zambia. That should begin when I get off the plain very early Saturday having spent close to a day (15.5 hours or so to South Africa, 3 hour layover and then 2 hours to Lusaka) traveling. Got my Yellow Fever shot and took my first malaria medication, fortunately I’m taking the daily medication that doesn’t cause sleepiness, nightmares (and daymares) and other even more serous side affects. Only thing I need to do is always put on sunscreen and I’ll be fine. I think I’ll get some sleep…

I as I will be going to Zambia in February, I have decided to make my blog into a place where I will update those back in the US of my travels. To start things off, I have posted my aspirations statement which is something I needed to write to introduce myself.

Aspirations Statement
Zambia
24th of February 2008

A: The professional attributes I plan to use, and what aspirations I hope to fulfill, during my Peace Corps services.
An attribute I envision being one which will often fit with tasks needing completion is leadership by example. I see it advantageous for me to know how to carry out something I have proposed or to find knowledgeable others who can work with me in carrying out the goals I have conceived. Then, not simply to tell a group what I recommended, but also actively start the process and make sure they understand what I suggested. At the same time I need to insure that I am not doing the task for the group. I also see it essential that groups are more productive than members acting alone. To make sure this is the case, I will try to resolve any conflicts that may arise and to make sure members of a group are carrying out the tasks that suit them best.
During my time in the Peace Corps I hope to better learn how to interact with and lead as wide and diverse an array of people as possible. But more importantly I hope to understand how, to not only lead people, but to have them become my friends and I theirs.

B: My strategies for working effectively with host country partners to meet expressed needs.
Two strategies I see as vital to working effectively to meet, possibly opposing, needs are flexibility and compromise. I have found that if you can work with partners in a friendly cooperative manner and not grudgingly, much more gets accomplished. The challenge is being flexible and making compromises without loosing sight of one’s initial goal. This will be even more difficult in a new country and culture with new ways of thinking. Therefore before making final conclusions, I will listen carefully to what others have to say and then base my decisions on the wisdom of many.

C: My strategies for adapting to a new culture with respect to my own cultural background.
I grew up and went to high school in the midst of white middle income suburbia. My environment was one where everybody had similar looks and a similar economic background, even if we didn’t all have exactly the same beliefs. Therefore even going to college was somewhat of an eye opener. Although Hampshire College is not the most ethnically, or economically diverse school out there, it does have a wide range of religious and societal views.
A specific example of an interaction I had comes from my second semester at college in a class I took titled “Introduction to Media Production.” From the title, I figured it would be a fairly straightforward establishment of the skills needed to make video, audio and still photography. However, the professor had a different interpretation: a look into the underpinning philosophy of media. The instructor came from the essence of urban – inner-city New York, he was black, and he was gay (all things I had had little exposure to in my upbringing to this point). These were things that he felt made him stand out and he wanted to be different, regardless of what the issue was. Therefore class discussions were often loaded and intense. Because I still thought to some extent this class would be a hands-on look at the technical details of producing media, I found it somewhat frustrating when our first assignment was to write a paper. The subject was based on fairly incomprehensible essays by a writer of media production, on the correlation between translation, adaptation, and illustration. I wrote the paper with a somewhat satirical tone, and when I started on it, I had only intended to get it done as quickly as possible. However, when I finished it, I realized that I had just clarified almost all of my philosophies in two pages, and to this day it is probably a paper I like most. As the class moved on, I tried to understand the professor’s views, and I realized that they were not that different from my own, only they had different roots, and a different context.
This class also made me realize that you very rarely get from an interaction or other occurrence what you expected. However, if you let yourself be open to new ideas, very often it is when the surroundings you find yourself in are entirely foreign, that you grow the most. That is one of the primary reasons I applied to the Peace Corps: because I knew that I will be immersed in perhaps the most unique and original experiences I will ever encounter.

D: The Skills and knowledge I hope to gain during pre-service training to best serve my future community and project

a. Learn a new language – although a great deal of the time from now until I go over seas will be spent familiarizing myself with the various Bantu derived languages in Zambia, as I have never learned another language and my retention of new words is slow, I suspect that this will be one of my bigger challenges during training

b. Learn about agriculture specific to Zambia – as I am sure agricultural practices are very different in rural Zambia then in industrial north east US – both because of climate and technological resources available – in order to be able to help meet the needs of my communities it is important I understand how their present and potential infrastructures work.

c. Learn the business structure of Zambia and how it differs from the US – as things like becoming a corporation or LLC in the US are managed on the state level, I see myself needing to learn how, or whether, someone can file so that individuals have limited liability – something even more important for agricultural businesses in drought prone areas. I also see learning the tax system in Zambia and whether there are ways of getting tax discounts for small businesses in their infancy as being important.

d. Learn the resources that are available and how best to utilize them – in the “your assignment” booklet I was given, it seems a large part of my job will be to bring these resources to my communities, and that the more resources I am aware of, the more help I can be.

e. Learn cultural differences from Zambia and the US – never having lived in a substantially different culture or class, it is important that I understand the new environment I am living in.

f. Learn what technologies are available and best suited for rural Zambia – as it can play a crucial role in either helping or harming the environment, I need to understand what if any technologies are currently available in my communities and what ones can be easily utilized that would benefit both the local people, the environment, and the economy at large.

E: How I think Peace Corps service will influence my personal and professional aspirations after my service ends.
The truth is, I don’t know. I suspect that I will have a lasting connection to Zambia and Africa, but I don’t really know what that connection will be. I joined the Peace Corps because it is a new adventure in my life. At the very least what I would like is to form friendships and bonds that will last forever. I would also like to start a business when I get done with my time, and as every step of my life has shaped what my business will be, so I am sure will this.