Zambia March and April 09

Sorry sorry! Its been quite awhile between entries. Over the last two months there has been a lot going on in my life and Zambia. I spent a few weeks in the village after Zanzibar then attended an HIV/AIDS workshop with my neighbor Grace so we could do some planning on how to address this issue in our community. However, day 2 of the training she came down with cerebral malaria, which is very serious and can lead to brain damage and death. Luckily, she came out fine, but I did spend a lot of the week at Chipata Hospital. I was very worried about her and it was a stressful week. A note about Zambian hospitals. It was like a scene from 1919 WWI hospital. They placed Grace in the psychiatry ward initially because they didn’t know she had malaria and cerebral malaria makes you hallucinate and impairs brain function. The nurses are all in very traditional nursing uniforms. There was someone handcuffed to the bed. There is no sense that patients have a right to information on their care and treatment, as far as I could tell. As in America, there was little patient to doctor contact. I think my neighbor got even a bit more attention because there were only 3 patients in the ward and because there was a white person hanging around and very concerned about her care every day. The other patients and staff at the hospital found this latter thing very interesting. They couldn’t imagine that this woman was my neighbor in a village far away and that I was invested enough to visit every day and pester the doctors and nurses for information. Grace is fine now though, luckily.

Also this same week, I got a call from another neighbor that my house had been robbed. She called me every hour on the hour one morning with updates about the ensuing chase to apprehend the suspect. My honest reaction was one of mild upset. There is nothing in my hut of particular value to me that is not replaceable. That’s not to say that villagers might love to raid my hut, but to me the things of emotional worth would not concern them and things like camera, ipod, etc I do not leave in the village when I go. According to my PCV neighbor, word spread fast to her village 6K away that there was a “green and white bag” containing “lots of money and important documents” stolen. I had no idea what they were talking about, but I began to doubt my own memory of what was in my hut. So Drama and more Drama over the week about my break-in. Finally, I was able to return to the village with our Peace Corps Logistics staff member in Eastern province (a Zambian to help me navigate all this), only to discover nothing was taken! He hadn’t even managed to get in the window! From the account, we gathered that what happened was someone pried the window open with my hammer, which I stupidly left outside, and made enough noise doing so that it alerted my neighbor, who chased him up a tree and threw rocks at him. (All at 2 in the morning). The next morning, they caught someone whom they thought was the culprit. He received a THOUROGH beating by all accounts, from Headman Chitindi (my village headman). Then my Head Teacher took him to the police station. He was eventually released because I said since he didn’t take anything I didn’t want to press charges. I hope the beating was a sufficient deterrent. From hearsay, I believe it was.

Today is my 1 year anniversary of moving to my village! It’s actually sad to think that I only have 1 year remaining. It also makes me think I better get my butt in gear and do some projects, haha. I manage to stay pretty busy but I want to step it up this year. I’m hoping to do more HIV/AIDS-related things. I also am hoping to improve my language a lot. Those are my goals for the coming year.

In the month of April, I spent quite a bit of time hanging with new PC trainees. Two of them are moving to my district, so I went to their new villages with them for the first time, to introduce them to village life. It was a lot of fun and made me realize how much I know about Zambia. I also found it quite amusing that these villages found my language skills to be really good, whereas my own village is tired of the plateau my language has hit. A couple weeks later I was in Lusaka to be a trainer for the education program. It was cool getting to know the new volunteers, 10 of whom are coming to Eastern Province where I live.

On Sunday I’m going back to Lusaka for our Midterm Conference, where my intake meets up to talk about how first year went and what we want to do the second year of service. Then back to the village for a week and then my Dad is coming to visit Zambia! YAY!