Success Feels Splendid

As a volunteer in Zambia, I find myself constantly struggling with the reality of what I'm actually getting done over here. Most days drag by really slowly and I have to force myself to stay busy. Getting 'actual' work done is a frustration due to how slow everything runs. Motivation within the communities is also a big problem. You can't really blame the people, because life for them is hard. When the majority of your days are taken up with trying to produce enough food to just get by, taking the time to go to meetings voluntarily isn't a high priority. Naturally people want to see some instant improvements in their day to day lives and usually overlook the fact that knowledge actually leads to development. One of the most important tasks of volunteers in Zambia is just trying to motivate communities to want change and want knowledge.

As I said above, "Success feels splendid." I say this because I've devoted so much of my time in the village to trying to motivate my communities (I have 8) but don't usually feel like I've had much of an impact on them. But out of my eight villages, I have found 2 villages who show me time after time how eager they are to learn and actually want to try and change their positions in life.

The most recent example was a nutrition workshop I just put on in August in this particular village. I was lucky enough to find some free soya beans last year and I gave them to my Neighborhood Health Committee to grow. They harvested the beans in June and ended up tripling their yeild. This alone made me proud, because often even simple projects like this fail because of lack of cooperation between members. So the first day of the workshop we focused primarily on nutrition and malnutrition and all the ins and outs that go along with healthy diets.
The second day we had a full day of cooking demonstrations, mostly on cooking soya, and discussed the benefits of soya beans. That part was really a lot of fun. We made soya milk, soya sausages, soya flour, soya nshima, and different veggies with soya flour. Cabbage, cassava leaves, rape and wusi (some bitter wild green) to be exact. The gender roles were all over the place, it was great. Usually in Zambia the men steer clear of anything cooking related, but the men in the NHC were very eager to learn all the mechanics of all the dishes. They even had the women teach them how to pound the soya flour and cassava leaves, and learned how to properly pick the leaves off the cassava plant. It was really cool to see both the men and women working together in the "kitchen." Most men get pretty severely ridiculed in the village if they are seen doing a 'woman's job.'

But the most gratifying part of it all was that at the end of the workshop, the participants were very adamant about assuring me that what I had taught them would be put into practice ASAP. They were begging me to type up everything we had gone over so they could always be referring back to it. I guess the main reason I'm writing about this experience is that it is like a breath of fresh air to me. After so many disappointments in the village, I do struggle to keep my own moral up at times and having these two villages really convince me that they took something from what I taught them was just what I needed. And I'm happy that it was nutrition that they took something from. Not that other sujbects I train on (TB,Malaria,etc) aren't important, but I feel like malnutrition is the ONE thing they really have control over. You can sleep under a mosquito net and cover your body completely at night but still catch malaria. You can take all the precautions to aviod TB and still get it (believe me on this one!). But malnutrition is the one major problem in the village that can be controlled pretty easily with proper knowledge on the subject and planning ahead. As I tell the villagers, nobody is going to come and feed your kids for you. The health center won't give your kid food, its YOU (the parents) to conqueor this problem and now you have the knowledge to do so. So...lets all keep our fingers crossed that the information spreads like wildfire! or bushfire in my case!

My Majina-Namesake

Life in the village has been pretty entertaining lately! Somehow I've managed to keep my self very busy. I know I've been busy based on the number of books I get read in a week and my last 2 weeks in the village, I haven't read ANY books, well other than my "Nutrition and Diet Therapy" textbook I recently acquired from another volunteer. Between living in the bush, having dreds, and my newly found borderline obsession with nutrition I'm becoming quite the little tree hugger:) But to my fellow Kansans who might be reading: don't worry I don't think I'll ever reach the vegetarian status!

But on to more exciting topics. The coolest thing that has happened in my life recently was having a baby named after me. There is one family who lives in a neighboring village that I work with whom I absolutely adore. They treat me like one of their own and in all reality, I don't think I would have been able to stick out my time here without them. The father is my closest counterpart and closest friend in the village, and the mother is a sweetheart.

So Mama was pregnant and due in July. I was hoping she would have a boy because out of their 6 kids, only one boy so far and he was the first born. I also assumed the baby would have a religious type name because of the line-up of kids already. They have a Blessings, Gospel, Glorify & Thanks already. So when I returned from my vacation with Mom,Dad, Gma & Gpa, I was suprised to find a little baby girl, born on July 2 (3 days away from my birthday) named Tamra.

In Zambia, having a baby named after you is a really big honor actually. Usually here when a baby is named after someone they take the baby to that person a day or so after the birth and have a celebration in honor of that namesake or in Lunda they call it majina. But I wasn't around until about a week or two after the birth, so they didn't show off baby Tamra until I came back! Then we had a small celebration, killed a chicken, and drank some monkoyo, which is like a sweet maize drink.

It is cool to know that I've been able to make at least a small impact on someone's life, little as it may be, its somewhere to start.

What does all work & no play equal?

I guess I'm not a dull girl after all!

Whoops! It has been practically forever since I've jotted anything down here. My apologies! Between being somewhat busy, slow & annoying internet, and confusion on what people really want to hear about, I somehow forgot to update! A lot has been going on with me since my last update in October! I guess I should begin with work before rambling about the play!

Rainy season is upon us here in Zambia, which means 2 things:
1) People have shifted to their fields (about 1 hour walk from the villages) so they can really put in the hours of work needed to produce enough crop to sustain themselves for the year &
2) LOTS OF RAIN!

My Garden

Both things are definitely positive, but at times can make my life & job in the village incredibly frustrating. During rainy season the village is quiet, people are busy making a living, and only come back into town on Sundays for church. Meetings can be cancelled for weeks on end, if it happens to rain on the day it’s scheduled. But amidst all these fall backs, we are still managing to make some progress!

Back in November I took one of my "counterparts" to an HIV/AIDS workshop put on by Peace Corps in town. I was only allowed to take one person, which was a hard choice for me to make, considering I work with 8 different villages and many different people. But the man that accompanied me, was actually an excellent choice. I have never seen anyone I work with SO excited, motivated, & ready to learn as this particular man.

After the training, we sat down together and made a plan of action for what we were going to do back in the village. Long story short, we decided that our overall goal was to bring voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) to the villages in our area. This may sound easy, but in reality it takes careful planning & execution to make VCT worthwhile. Most the people living in our area have never been tested, because testing isn’t available at our Rural Health Center. The closest place for people to go for VCT is the District Health Center, which is a good 160km from my village, and virtually impossible to reach with public transport. Another setback to VCT is that there are still many myths in the village relating to the actual testing procedures. For example, many people believe that when the testers come, they take the blood back to the district and use it for JuJu or witchcraft.
In order to overcome all these drawbacks to VCT, we decided to do a catchment wide program sensitizing all our communities on the importance of knowing one’s status and addressing all the apprehensions people might have to testing. Our hope is that we can bring out mobile VCT to a big cultural festival that happens every year around June at the cave near my house, and in a sense, use the festival to promote HIV/AIDS prevention & testing.

That being the biggest project I am working on right now, there are also a few secondary projects trying to take way. With my help, one of my Neighborhood Health Committees has recently started a soya bean project to aid orphans and vulnerable children. Harvest should take place some time around May, so I am keeping my fingers crossed on this project, because in theory it could really make a huge impact on the health of all the people in my area. Meat is hard to come by in the village and very expensive. For this reason there is a huge problem with protein deficiency, especially in children. Soya beans actually provide more protein than meat and are much easier and inexpensive to grow. Once the first harvest is underway, we will do cooking demonstrations with the women to show the numerous ways soya can be used to enrich the foods they already eat, as well as introduce recipes, like soya milk.

The other two noteworthy projects I’ve been working on over the past several months involve two of my Farmer’s Cooperatives. The farmers in my area work only by man power, putting an unfortunate restriction on their output. One group had the idea to write a grant proposal to acquire a set of cattle to help them out with their labor, while the other is writing a proposal for tractors. The second of the two is the most ambitious because bringing that kind of equipment into the bush takes a lot of planning on the groups part. But so far they have a wonderful comprehensive proposal written, and it’s up to me to find the money! If this project succeeds, it also has the potential to completely revolutionize the farming system in our area.

Now…on to play!
I am definitely trying to take advantage of the fact that I am LIVING in Africa! Over Christmas and New Years I took a 3 week trek through southern Africa with 3 of my friends. Overall we saw 4 different countries and experienced a wide range of terrain! I’ll just give you the highlights:
1) South Africa: We really only spent time in big cities, Jo-burg & Durban, which was a much-needed taste of the developed world!
2) Lesotho: Here we did a 3 day horse back ride through the beautiful, rugged mountains, which proved to be one of the most relaxing times on the whole vacation.
3) Swaziland: Gorgeous lush mountains and valleys welcomed us to this gem of South Africa. I saw my first 3 of the big 5! Elephants, Rhinos & Lions!
4) Mozambique: Spending New Years on the beach was definitely the highlight of the whole trip. Although I didn’t get to go scuba-diving or snorkeling with the great whites, due to a storm off the coast of Madagascar, I did find the time to try surfing & play in the enormous waves!

The most recent vacation I took was quite a bit shorter, but equally as thrilling! My good buddy and I took a 3 day train ride to Tanzania, to hit up Zanzibar for a music festival. The train ride there was quite the experience, good & bad. We were both sick & the stinky toilets and frequent jerky stops didn’t help that matter much. But the plus was that we got to enjoy the beautiful scenery of Tanzania, including the Great Rift Valley. Part of the way we were going through a game park, where we got to see elephants, giraffes, wildebeest, zebras, etc. It felt as though you were experiencing them in the true wild!

Once we reached Zanzibar, a small island off the coast of Tanzania, the good times kept rolling. We were both feeling much better by that time! Zanzibar has some of the most amazing beaches in the world, with the white sand and blue waters you can’t find anywhere else. Inland is very lush, with monkeys running here and there. We spent most of our time (4 days) in Stonetown, a port city, where the music festival was being held. The days we spent exploring the narrow little back streets with vendors selling Zanzibar’s famous scarves & all sorts of other things a tourist might love, while the evenings we spent relaxing on a lawn in an old fort listening to the sounds of Africa. The artists came from all over Africa & beyond, most playing some type of Afro-beat sound. Probably some of the best, most unique music I’ve heard yet! Our last day in Zanzibar, we spent on Paje beach, napping and collecting shells. Interestingly, the tide at the beach was so low in the morning, that you could walk about a mile or two out into the ocean, water about knee/ankle deep, before you would reach the waves. Maybe it’s the inexperienced Kansas girl in me, but I’d never seen such a phenomenon!

So now that you see how busy I’ve been over the past several months, I hope you can forgive me for not getting a post up sooner!

Long Awaited Update!

I know, I know, I haven't updated my blog since June! My only excuse is that not much has been happening around the village lately, but my dear Mother informs me that people would LOVE to hear about even the experiences that I find trivial, boring, or just plain GROSS....so here I go:

Work has been going well as of August and September. I organized and carried out my very first health training for one of my Neighborhood Health Committees. In order to boost the "sustainability" of the training, I decided to carry it out without applying for funds from the district and to have different members of the group facilitate the training themselves. In order to do this, I had about 12 people (out of a group of about 27) volunteer to teach certain subjects. Each group got to choose 1 out of 6 subjects (Malaria, HIV/AIDS/STDs, Child Health & Nutrition, TB, Water & Sanitation, & Safe Motherhood & Family Planning). From there I met with each group individually, before the week long training was scheduled to begin, to give them sort of an indepth training on that specific subject & some hints on facilitating methods.

Overall the training was a great success. The NHC members gained a lot of knowledge on preventitive health care and having Zambian counterparts facilitate most of the training turned out to be a splendid idea due to translation issues. I don't know if any of you have ever tried to sit through a meeting or class with the teacher's lecture having to be translated, or even a teacher with an accent, but its TOUGH to pay attention! So that worked out very well. The biggest problem of the training however, since I didn't get funding through the government, was finding food for lunch each day. The participants seemed to think that I needed to bring it all for them, which we had discussed from day one would definitely NOT happen. Even when working with the Zambian government on projects such as this, they usually always require the community to contribute something, usually food, so I knew my members could manage. But eventually the group came together and figured out lunch plans & I brought cooking oil as my contribution.

So after I completed my week long training in Chisengisengi (a village that is 30min bike ride both ways from my village), I decided to meet up with some other volunteers in my district to ride out with our head boss lady to the Zambezi source, up in Northwest Mwinilunga district. This was exactly the get-a-way I needed after a stressful week of trainings. We saw the source, which is basically just a small puddle in the middle of a jungle, and it was amazing somehow. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Zambezi River, it is the river that feeds the magnificent Victoria Falls in Livingston...very huge! After visiting the source, we drove up to this big hydro dam that powers alot of northern Mwinilunga & got to SWIM, which is a sport that doesn't happen very often in croc & hippo & bacteria infested zambian waters!
Then after those 2 great activities, our boss & about 5 of my fellow volunteers, got to go camp at a game reserve close to our friends village. We are out in bush bush Africa, camping in a park with wild animals, in the most spectacular facilities. There were nice brick shelters with running water, electricity & even a proper toilet! Unreal. The reserve is private and owned by missionaries, which explains the luxuries!

So after this great adventure I went back to my village to get back to work, only to discover 2 days later, that dysentery had set in! This involved 2 long days of running to the toilet to squat for hours, barely being able to stand due to the pain in my abdomen! I don't want to get too graphic here, but I'll tell you 2 funny things I got out of this experience:
1. No more fear of bats in the pit. Imagine it is late at night and you wake up, only to realize you have GOT to go. So you run out of your hut to your "hole in the ground" that you call a toilet. You know there is a bat that lives there and under any normal circumstances late at night, you would stand there for at least 30 seconds shining your flashlight into the hole to make the bat come out before you squated down to do your business. But in this particular circumstance, you don't HAVE 30 seconds, so you go for it. And the bat does indeed fly right between your legs, yet all you feel is relief, not fear!
2. Joined the club. In Peace Corps Zambia we have this little thing we call the club. To most of you back home, this is going to seem ridiculous, as it did to me when I first learned about it during training. Yet as the time passes here in Zambia, more and more of my friends are joining the club, me included. So, what is the club? The club is basically pooping your pants. Right, I know you are thinking, "Come on Tamra, it isn't THAT hard to control yourself". But think again. Lucky for me, I was at my own hut when I joined! Many volunteers don't have that luxury, especially when considering in public transport, which usually consists of 8-13hours on some kind of open bed truck or bus! I don't tell you this to disgust you, but only to enlighten you a bit as to one of the major topics of conversation for peace corps volunteers in Zambia!

So once I got the dysentery taken care of, my next big adventure, which I've just returned from, was a camping trip into a national park directly south of where I stay. West Lunga National Park is a very bush park, meaning hard to reach for most tourists. Me & 3 of my friends planned a 3 day adventure into the park by boat. We brought out our own fuel to the camp entrance & spent 3 days paddling and riding down the Kabompo river & up the West Lunga river, which are both home to crocodiles & hippos! Luckily we had 2 park rangers with us, both armed with AK47s, to keep us safe. Along the way we saw many crocodiles (some so giant they almost could pass for dinosaurs!) , lots of very exotic birds, monkeys, baboons, snakes, but unfortunately no hippos. I guess the river was running a bit low, since we are at the end of dry season. It was a very beautiful ride..very hot, but totally worth the 3 day build-up of sunburn I acquired!

Now that that adventure is over, I'm headed back into the bush, to my village to take on the rains. Among setting up meetings with my farmer's cooperatives and other groups, I'm also working on a spectacular garden that hopefully will be producing in the next couple of months! My father would be proud!

Getting a little work done...Finally

Well I suppose it is about time for me to write a little bit about what I am actually doing out here in bush Africa, eah?

I've spent the last stretch of 4 weeks in my village only and actually had a fair number of meetings. It is hard to describe exactly what my job is here without going into immense detail about the decentralized health care system that Zambia has in place, but I guess I'll give it a whirl and try to make a long story short!

I am working primarily with the Rural Health Center(RHC) in my village, which is the only health center in the catchment area I work in that covers about 35km. The way that the health system works is that the RHC reports to the district, which reports to the province, which reports to the national. Anyways, in the area I work in, there are about 8 villages who have voluntary health "clubs" called Neighborhood Health Committees (NHC). These NHC's are the groups that I meet with most often. In an ideal world, the government would train the NHC's on all sorts of health issues, since these groups are the ones the government says are in charge of realizing their own health problems and reporting back to the Health Center (RHC). Anyways, this often doesn't happen due to how remote the villages are and how far behind the rest of the country Northwestern province is. SO this is where I come in!

My job is to meet with these NHC's and help them become trained on the major Health thrusts that are prevalent in their regions; Malaria, HIV/AIDS, Family Planning, TB, Water & Sanitation, & Child Health/Nutrition. The idea is to teach these NHC's everything they need to know in these health areas, so that the NHC can teach the rest of the community and also start to develop ways to prevent & treat certrain problems that arise. Alot of my job requires motivation and encouragement to the village, so they can realize that there is actually alot they themselves can do.

Anyways, over the past 4 weeks I've met with all my villages and have been pretty pleased that they are all at least on the same page as I am now (*for the most part). I was a little weary that the meetings would never happen, because I had bad luck trying to get my first 2 meetings underway. Lucky for me this time, all the meetings happened (granted they all started 2 hours late, haha) and now I'm off to a good start. Some of my groups need to be reformed, some retrained, and some are even a little more advanced and ready to start working on small community projects, such as health education. Which is nice for me, because it is very interesting to see how each different villages NHC's evolve differently.

But enough about work for now...I'm sure there will be plenty more on that later. An update on village life: Not much has been going on in the village lately. It is burning season here, where they burn all the bush grass, and one windy day they were burning behind my house and the kids accidentally lit my bathing shelter on fire..oops. I wasn't mad at first, but when they didn't fix it for 2 weeks, I was getting a little stinky (literally)! But life is better now that I am able to bath outside again! I also cemented the floors to my hut, which entirely changes the atmosphere in my hut, I now feel like I live in a mansion! haha. Except for my "pet" chicken that sleeps in the corner of my living room! One of my friends gifted me a chicken and I've yet to build him a house outside and the villagers tell me the bush animals could eat him at night, so I have to keep him inside!

Well I'm sure my next update will be more entertaining. I am fixing to attend my first big Lunda festival in the beginning of July. It is going to be at a giant cave and there is supposedly going to be alot of singing and dancing and eating. They even built me my own grass shelter out there and told me that I will have to kill some bush meat for the ceremonies! Could be antelope, or maybe even a bush baby (*they look like little furry monkeys, but I've yet to eat one)! SO be looking forward to details on this up-and-coming event!

will I ever make it back to the village?

I'm sitting here writing this blog, while waiting for the giant truck we are trying to ride home to fill up with people, so we can make a go at attempt #3 to get back to the village!

One of the first things you get used to in Africa is waiting paitently for transport, sketchy, packed transport at that! My neighbor & I had our first crazy day of transport on Saturday, it was just too ironic & funny not to write a blog about. And forgive me if this doesn't seem as entertaining as it did to us, it might be a "you had to be there story", but here it goes:

There is a mission bus that goes back to our village, which we weren't quite sure where it left from or what time, just that it only leaves on Tuesdays & Saturdays. So we call a taxi to come pick us up from our house in town. Taxi says I'll be there in 10minutes, which we know means more like a half hour. So we wait for over an hour and the taxi finally arrives. When we get to the bus station, the people tell us we missed the bus by like 10minutes, but don't worry, there is a canter (large open bed truck) going to the village also that day. SO we pay our money, and the guy tells me he can even drop me right at my house which is 18km past the village they are going. At this point I was stoked, because its not often I will ever have transport right to my door. So what do I do, I go and buy a bunch of reed mats, because they are too big carry on my bike and now I have transport! The truck driver said we were leaving at 12 hours, so we load the truck, stuffed FULL of luggage and people, but that is typical. At 13hours they say we are leaving, so we take off, but only make it to the gas station, where they proceed to rotate all the tires on the truck. We are thinking, wow, what a late start we are getting, haha little did we know what the day held for us!
Finally we leave town at 14hours. It takes about 6 hours to get back to our houses, so that would put us home just after dark (which for us in Zambia is LATE). We get about 15km outside of town and the truck breaks down. So we all get off while the men tinker with something under the hood. They say its fixed and we get back on and go another 2 minutes or so and guess what, the truck breaks again. So we spend about an hour waiting while someone drives from town to come and fix the truck. They say again, don't worry its been fixed, so we all cram back on the truck and give it another go, but lo & behold, we break again. At this point my friend and I are thinking, surely we will just drive back to town, since we are still so close and its almost dark, but NO they still think we can make it 300km on a broken truck.
The icing on the cake was that behind us, and moving towards us, is a GIGANTIC storm, and here we are with all of our luggage, trying to hitch back into town, into this giant downpour. So we jump on the back of another openbed truck heading back into town, kind of mad because the other guys didn't give us a refund, but happy to be getting back to town.
Then the downpour begins, lucky for us they had a giant tarp that we held up over the 20 of us in the back of this truck. But because the rain was SO heavy, the tarp was going wild, and just smacking up and down on our heads, at least we were dry though. It felt like we were being smuggled over a border or something, really was quite hilarious!
SO finally we make it back into town, lugging all of this heavy stuff around and try to find a taxi to take us back to the Peace Corps house. Most of the taxis are telling us NO because it is way too muddy, but finally we find one who consents. WEll sure enough the taxi gets stuck about halfway back to the house, so we are stuck walking in shin high mud home, with me carrying 3 large reed mats on my head, a huge backpack on my back, and a wood chair in one hand, and barefoot! I only fell about 3 times and was only about half covered in mud.
But just as we are almost home, my friend that I'm with says to me "Tamra, you know would would make this day even more funny..."and AS he says that he just bites it face first into the mud with all of his luggage! He wasn't really a happy camper in the end. But what can you do other than laugh it off and think...only in Africa!

I tell this story only to give a little taste of the fun of traveling in rural Africa. It is kind of fun because you never know what to expect and you just have to go with the flow...so what if you make it home maybe 5 days late...at least you made it!

Now I am going to give it a try for the 3rd time!Wish me luck!

And the Journey Begins...

*Wow! 2 weeks in and the bush is already starting to feel like home! Haha. Sort of. I've begun to "get used" (as they say in Zambian English: Zamlish) to many of the aspects of life here with relative ease. Adjusting to life without certain amenities, such as electricity and running water, wasn't nearly as hard as one would imagine, but when it comes to mingling with the "laid back country folk"- life is pretty awkward-that is the best way to put it. Lucky for me though, I've mastered the phrase "nachitiyi wanyi", which means "i don't understand" in Lunda! Whenever I pull that one out, I'm sure to get at least big grins, if not laughs! One of the best things about this Lunda culture: if there is a situation that is in ANY way awkward, everyone just laughs and laughs - hardly ever any long faces.
*As for my community, I'm very excited because they seem very motivated to start working, not just with me, but on community health problems as a whole. They really seem to have it together and are more organized that I expected! Now my job is to figure out where I fit in. By this I mean seeing where the community wants/needs my help and deciding the best way to transfer my knowledge-so not to create any dependency. Really just motivating and training will probably be my focus!
*I got to take my first bush adventure too this last week. My neighbor and I decided to visit our friend up north of us for her birthday and rode our bikes up an 80km (50miles for you american folk) bush path! Might not sound like much, but coming from the girl who hasn't ridden her bike more than a mile probably in 15 years, this was a feat! The locals told us we shouldn't take the path cuz it was overgrown and there were too many "mountains". But we decided we needed the adventure of it and that the Zam's didn't really know what mountains were, but let me tell you: they were mountains and they INDEED knew what they were talking about, haha!Good Times! But to make it better, we had to ride BACK 80km, then it was another 40km to my house. SO in the time span of a week, I rode my bike 240km, which is roughly 150miles! Hard work but quite relaxing!
*Anyways, more updates later!