Back in Lusaka

Gina's Post:

Didn't think I would be writing this for a few weeks, but I was able to get e-mail access due to an unexpected guidebook falling on my pinky toe from the top bunk of the provincial house this morning.  After 10 days of living in small villages, fetching my own water, and biking up to 60k per day on dirt roads, a little broken toe from that darn book was the last reason I thought I'd end up in the PC medical office.  The doctor wants x-rays tomorrow just be sure, but he said it should heal nicely, and I don't think it'll interfere much with upcoming training, as we'll really be focusing on language the next few weeks.

On a better note . . . thanks everyone for the birthday wishes for both myself and Scott.  I was able to spend my b-day at another health volunteer's site gawking at waterfalls and initiating a game of red rover with the kids hanging around at her clinic.  I then made my way to our future home, which I included in the last post.  We live on a family compounding consisting of a pastor and his wife and some of their six children as well as various friends/family members that I am unable to keep track of quite yet.  There are SO many things I could write about for my first impressions, but I thought I'd leave you with two for now:

Ant/Termite Hills:
The further up into Northwest Province you go, the bigger and more mountainous they get, sometimes towering upwards of 30 feet high.  At first they just dot the landscape like crazy little mountains, until you realize that entire villages are actually centered around them, with about one ant hill to each family compound.  When you take a closer look, you can tell these hills serve at least 3 very essential purposes for human bush existance:
1) I guess the soil they dig up is very clay-like and perfect for making mud bricks.  In fact almost every ant hill in my new village has a hole cut out of the side of it and a brick oven kiln within several feet of it.  I found that the handmade bricks in the huts up there are much more solid than the Lusaka area ones, especially after they have been fired in the kiln.
2) The numerous goats and sheep up where I live love to climb on the hils and make little paths all around them . . . almost like pseudo-mountains.  The sheep here are almost hairless and at first I thought they were goats except for their long tails and their baa-ing, so that took a little adjustment.
3) The two best places to get cell phone coverage in our village are of course by walking halfway up the anthills, so if you ever decide to call, you can just picture where we'll be standing as there is no network coverage inside our hut.

Food:
Our area is 19 kilometers on a very hilly dirt road from the nearest BOMA, or town, so it is very difficult for villages to buy almost any products.  They are truly subsistence farmers, but that said, they take pride in the diversity of foods they are able to grow/cultivate.  I think the next two years will truly be a lesson in how to eat locally.  Here are some foods that I tasted at site during my time there and their rating in Lunda:
1) Chawahi Nankashi (Very good)- freshly-cut pineapple almost every day, sweet potatoes in 2 varieties, freshly pounded coffee off the tree in our family compound, a small fruit that tastes like a mango, chinese cabbage and rape (a green leafy veggie).
2) Chanti Chanti (Just okay)- sweet potato and cassava leaves, goat/sheep meat, fresh sugar cane (delicious, but hard to eat), nshima yamakamba--that play-dough like substance that is made out of fermented cassava root instead of corn up in the Northwest.  It's the staple and eaten with every meal, so I better learn to love it!
3) Nakenga Wanyi (I don't like)- dried fish--although depending on how it's prepared I can actually like it, my swallowing a fish bone a few weeks back as well as eating the heads made me a little more weary of these things, dried catepillars--at first I thought I would try those, but for some reason I just couldn't stomach them when they were offered to me without any other relishes or other foods.

Yes, living in the bush will be quite a culinary adventure.  I also hear there are bananas, avacados, mangos, squash and fresh honey available depending on time of the year :).  And . . . lots of the villagers are interested in some of the foods we grow in America, so we'll definitely also have our own little garden.

That's about it for now.  Scott is still on his second site visit learning about fish farming implementation in action, and we will both be at our training sites for the upcoming national elections, which happen September 20th.  We'll probably have some interesting stories after those happen, but I don't want to jinx anything, so we'll save that blog for after.

I'll be in Mwnilunga area (our official site for the next two years) in mid-October, so feel free to start sending mail to our new address in the corner as it takes about a month and it will probably reach us by then.  Off to bed so I can get some x-rays tomorrow morning!

Take care,
Gina