The PCV crew at Kasanka National Park.

Reading this week:

• Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
• Theft by Finding by David Sedaris
• Revolt in 2100 by Robert Heinlein
• Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
• Where are you Going, Where have you Been? by Joyce Carol Oates
• The Petrified Ants by Kurt Vonnegut
• Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

This past week I helped teach at Camp TREE. TREE stands for “Teaching Respect for Everyone’s Environment” and it is a week long camp about the environment and related topics.

The Peace Corps camps that we take these kids too are a pretty cool opportunity for the kids. I say “kids” but these are really teenagers. In our case we took them down to Kasanka National Park in Central District. A lot of times these camps are the kid’s only opportunity to go to a place like a national park and see things like animals or an unspoiled environment they probably otherwise wouldn’t get to. It is also a rare opportunity for the kids to interact with other Zambian youths that aren’t in their community, away from the pressures of home and parents and the like.

This week there were the two PCVs running the event, Jenna and Bryan, along with six PCVs (myself included) helping out. We all brought three pupils from our village so we had a nice little gaggle of kids. There were various sessions planned, and we all helped teach various sessions. We held the sessions in both English and Bemba to make sure all the kids could understand.

The sessions were a mix of classroom type stuff, games that may or may not have anything to do with the thing we were teaching about, and some team-building exercises. One of my favorite sessions was talking about the food web and food chains. After going over some classroom stuff we went outside and made a food web as the kids all named different animals that eat each other. Then we demonstrated the importance of the food chain by having them do a “group sit” where everyone is in a circle and sit in each other’s laps. Then I removed one animal from the food chain and they all fell down. Exercises like that let the kids relate the things they were learning to things they have already seen around their village, and help to drive in the message while they still have fun.

We also learned some practical things, like how to make compost. Compost is popular in Zambia because fertilizer is so necessary for growing crops, and is a major expense for most farmers. Anything they can do to make fertilizer or compost more accessible is very popular.

Team building exercises helped the kids learn some stuff about empowerment so hopefully they can come back to the vil and help teach other people and kids about what they learned. In one exercise that was pretty enjoyable to watch, we blindfolded the kids and told them we were taking them to a maze. They had to keep their hand on a log and follow it while blindfolded to get out of the maze. Secretely, it was just a circle. To get out of the maze, you had to raise your hand and ask for help. The lesson here is sometimes you have to ask for help. I was pretty proud that the last two kids were two I brought. Never give up, never surrender!

One of the final things we did was go on a game drive. A lot of times these kids never really get to see the diverse fauna of Zambia because around their villages the animals have all been hunted. Going on a game drive is the only way they are really able to see things like pukus or warthogs. On our game drive we were hoping to see elephants but didn’t find any. Despite that, the kids had a great time riding in the back of a safari truck and seeing all sorts of antelope and birds and just the wilderness of Zambia.

I was worried about Camp TREE but going to it was such a great experience for the kids and they really got so much out of it. It was great watching their moments of discovery and seeing them get excited about looking at things through microscopes and picking up animals bones. They were so happy to be hanging out with peers and hosting impromptu dance parties every night. As I write this after we’ve gotten back the kids I brought are still wearing their Camp TREE shirts. A great success all around.

Reading this week:

• This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
• A Man without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi
• Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut
• Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut

So my girlfriend’s #1 dream during her time in Zambia was to ride an elephant and we got that accomplished in Livingstone. Also during our time in Livingstone we did a game drive in Mosi-o-Tunya National Park and took a booze cruise on the Zambezi. All activities I highly recommend. The elephant ride took place at the elephant cafe, which is in the park. The elephants are orphans and have been taken care of in Zambia for about 15 years, having previously been taken care of across the river in Zimbabwe. The girlfriend and I were the only two people riding the elephants that afternoon, so we got a personalized experience. On each elephant it is you and then the elephant’s trainer. Most of the trainers, it seems, came over with the elephants from Zimbabwe, and have been working with and caring for these animals for years. My elephant was named Danny and was the current bull. He was about 50 and was a very nice guy. The ride itself was probably about two hours, and took us on a jaunt through the park. We saw a good chunk of animals, including a giraffe, warthogs, impala, and zebras. Mostly it was cool to be riding around on an elephant and taking in the Zambian landscape. After the ride you got to do a meet n’ greet sorta thing with the elephants. You dismounted and then wandered over to feed the elephants some and thank them for carrying you around. Danny was really nice though suddenly being on the ground next to him and his giant tusks was rather imposing. He was calmer than I was and I sat on his knee so that was cool. You can pay to have a dude follow you around and take pictures and a video, and we did, and they produced a really cool video we’ll get to show to disinterested relatives for years to come. The next day we took a game drive through the park. For various reasons ours was kinda hokey (but cheap) and we went in an old British taxi. Once in the park you have free reign to drive around, with the only mild requirement being you stick to the roads. In the park we saw elephants, warthogs, impala, buffalo, and zebras, so that was pretty phenomenal. We also briefly glimpsed in the park some rhinos. Deep in the park you can go see white rhinos. These are a few re-introduced white rhinos and their offspring, and they are kept under constant armed guard. You can, however, go walk up to see them. That was a pretty cool experience and given the watchful eyes of the guards they seem pretty safe from poachers. The rhino we saw had a calf with her, and they were sleeping. The final animal experience we went on was a booze cruise. The main attraction here was, of course, the booze, though for me I was absolutely tickled pink to be on a boat and I asked to drive it and the dude for whatever silly reason totally said yes: The tour takes you up and down a stretch of the Zambezi actually only a little upriver of the falls, though given the amount of rocks I think it would be more than difficult to go over accidentally. It is on the banks of the national park, so there are plenty of animals around. We saw crocodiles and a whole lot of hippos, along with a very large amount of other booze-cruisers. The cruise ended after we watched the sunset over the Zambezi. It was gorgeous and I highly recommend. My favorite part is that the guy driving the boat, the bartender, and the grillmaster were all qualified to do each other’s job’s, which was the sort of skills egalitarianism I like.

Reading this week:

• The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson
• Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck, which might be my new favorite book.

The highlight of a trip to Livingstone is, of course, Victoria Falls. We managed to get there on I think day three of our Livingstone adventure, because riding an elephant was farther up on the priority list.

All around the falls are a variety of trails that you can follow to get different vantage points of the falls. Since I was most excited to see the falls in all their glory, as it were, I dragged us along the knife-edge trail first. All the trails are paved and easily accessible, except for maybe some stairs. So you head off down the trail and the you turn the corner and there are the falls.

We went when the water was low, so I guess they could have been even more impressive, but man they were amazing. Just a giant sheer drop cascading into a whirling vortex below. And it is incredibly long so as you walk along the knife-edge trail it just keeps going. The falls, um, fall into the first gorge in a series of seven gorges. Knife-edge is the spit of land on the Zambia side between gorge #1 and gorge #2, so you get incredible un-blocked views of the falls and as you keep going you just get more and more falls. Eventually you reach the edge of the knife-edge and on your right are the falls and on your left the Victoria Falls bridge.

The next trail we hiked down was the one that lead to Boiling Pot. Boiling Pot is where the river spills from the first gorge into the second, and is home to Nyaminyami. Nyaminyami is the river god that controls the Zambezi from the falls to Lake Kariba. His domain used to extend beyond that until they built the dam that created the lake. It was cool to see the home of a god. Down at the edge of Boiling Pot you can feel the power of the river and look up to see people bungee-jumping from the Victoria Falls Bridge. The path down there is pretty beautiful, being a lush forest and all. It is made slightly trecherous, however, by the number of baboons that live on the trail. They are entirely unafraid of humans, and while occasionally cute to look at, they stole my girlfriend’s soda right out of her hand:

After ascending back from Boiling Pot, we went over to the top of the falls. We didn’t go out into the river, because you’re supposed to have a guide to do that and we were pretty beat anyways. Then we walked along the trail to the bridge, which offers more stunning views of the falls and Boiling Pot, if from slightly farther away.

We probably spent about 6 hours hiking all around the falls and were pretty spent from the walking and from the utter insane natural beauty of the place. Time to get my butt to the rest of the natural wonders of the world.

Reading this Week:

• Screwjack by Hunter S. Thompson

After the Livingstone Museum, the second museum I dragged us to was the Railway Museum. This museum is juuuuust on the outskirts of Livingstone and while you could walk it was easy enough to take a cab. The museum is mostly centered around the history of the Zambezi Lumber company, who quickly expanded into the railroad business as a method of transporting their lumber. It features a wide range of trains from throughout the country’s history, and that day featured me being all excited and taking pictures of trains, and pretending to drive one:

I do love me a good steam plant. My girlfriend and I were 50% of the total tourist population that we saw there that day, so you can get yourself plenty of alone time with the trains. Included in the admission fee is also a guided tour. He takes you all around to look at the different trains and the history of the Zambezi Saw Mill, so that is pretty nice. The museum also features the Jewish Museum, which is a history of Jewish people in Zambia, as you might have guessed. I didn’t know it was there before we went, so that was a pleasant surprise. It was very recently installed and is very well done, and traces notable Jewish people and families of Zambia.

Reading this Week:

• Women as Demons by Tanith Lee
• Africa: Another Side of the Coin by Andrew Sardanis

After IST, I departed down to Livingstone for a debatably earned vacation with my girlfriend. Livingstone is, of course, famous as the location of Victoria Falls (perhaps vice-versa), but the first thing I dragged us to was the museums.

Livingstone, of course, features the Livingstone Museum. My neck of the woods features the Moto Moto Museum, which is billed by at least one guidebook as the second best museum in Zambia. It is second only to the Livingstone Museum. At the Livingstone Museum a lot of similar subjects were covered, like the history and pre-history of Zambia. It is unfortunate for Zambians and PCVs that a lot of the actual artifacts relating to the pre-history of Zambia are ensonsced in the British Museum, apparently, but what I bet you the British Museum doesn’t have is a sweet-ass double-handled hoe:

The most amazing part of the museum was the small room dedicated to ole’ David Livingstone. It had a variety of original artifacts, such as his cloak and his writing box. It also featured his original letters that you could look at. So that was really cool to see the things connected to a guy that had such an impact on the future of the African continent, for better or for worse.

The museum also featured this sweet ride:

All in all, if you’re in Livingstone I can’t recommend the Livingstone Museum enough. It’s close to everything, by the sheer nature of Livingstone, and if you’re a Zambian resident it is well worth the like K15 it took to get in there. Lots of background on Zambia as a nation if you haven’t seen that stuff before, and I think it is the only place you are going to see a lot of relics of the pre- and early colonial eras.

Reading:

• Many are Called by Edward Newhouse

IST stands for Inter-Service Training (I think). It is a two week training that is conducted after community entry, and it is split into two parts. For us, the first week was PDM, or Project Design & Management, and the second week was about HIV.

IST was a pretty good experience. I saw all of the RAP intake that is in Northern and Muchinga during Provs, but this was the first time I saw everyone else since we all departed ways during swear-in, and will be the last time we’re all together until Mid-Service Training in about 8 months.

The first week, like I said, was PDM. That was a bit of a misnomer, because I don’t think at any point we Designed or Managed Projects. The first three days it was just PCVs, and we talked about what we had done at our sites and what we had seen and stuff like that, along with a few riveting presentations on things like emotional fortitude. Emotional fortitude is, apparently, important. The last two days of the week we had Zambian counterparts attend with us. My counterpart was the only other fish farmer in the village besides my host dad, and is a fairly influential guy here.

These two days of PDM, with our counterparts in attendance, were a little more useful I thought because we saw more things. We had presentations on a variety of potential projects that we could undertake in the village, like beekeeping or rice production. The presentations were all a little too short to actually learn much, but I am hoping that my counterpart saw at least one or two things that he would be interested in starting here. He’s already spoken to me about compost; the average Zambian farmer spends a lot of time thinking about fertilizer, so anything that reduces their dependance on that rather expensive aspect of farming piques their interest.

The Friday of PDM week we took a field trip to an organic farm nearby Lusaka. That was interesting, not the least because they had extremely cute dogs:

The farm specialized in sustainable farming techniques, and the farmer that ran the place also had a large section of forest that he had re-grown. The forest was useful to him because it provided a great deal of inputs towards his fish pond and compost, as well as a place to keep his bee hives.

The second week of IST was about HIV. That week was not as useful to me because my counterpart was a no-show. The other counterparts seemed to get a good chunk out of it though. The week wasn’t so much focused on the actual disease itself, but things like positive living and the factors in Zambia that make HIV so prevalent.

Overall IST was pretty awesome. It was a great chance to see everyone again and to catch up on our experiences in the village. It was nice to be in Lusaka and be able to go to restaurants and the like, though I was excited for it to be over because my next stop was vacation in Livingstone.

Reading this week:

• Gilgamesh, Stephen Mitchell version
• Arabian Nights, Barnes and Noble Classics Edition

One of the big goals of the Community Entry period is to fix up your house so it is comfortable to live in. Making the place liveable has taken up a good chunk of my time, and I think things have turned out well.

The first things I did were a bunch of little things to help make the place functional. It’s best to keep things off the floor, so my first few days were spent putting in a whole bunch of nails to hang things off of. This was augmented by bending “soft wire” (think coat hanger wire but a little thicker) into various useful shapes. To hang pots and pans, I put two nails in the wall, strung some soft wire between them, and then bent up some hooks to string on the soft wire.

Soft wire is useful for a whole bevy of projects. My most ambitious soft wire project is a typing stand that I convinced myself I needed, which comes with a little bar that snaps down courtesy of a rubber band to hold up whatever it is you’re looking at. I also made hangers for my solar light that I put up in convenient spots. Another way to keep things off of the floor is to hang a soft wire hook from a piece of string suspended from a nail in the roof. That’s how I keep my eggs and potatoes off the floor.

Bigger projects include a coffee table and a couch. The couch is made from brick as supports with planks on top. On top of these are cushions, the cases for which I sewed from chitenge. I had quite the cushion-sewing spree there and I could barely stop myself. The coffee table is banged together from some planks and logs I found in the forest. I try to avoid cutting down trees myself, but fortunately (or unfortunately) when they make charcoal they tend to leave a lot of sticks laying around, so I just head into the woods and pick those up.

I also built an oven. This has dramatically increased my sugar consumption as I bake cookies, cupcakes, and banana bread (I also gave sweet potato bread a go; eh). The oven is made of brick. For both the oven and the couch, the mortar is just mud. That makes me feel better about building these things myself, because I have never been a bricklayer before and I figure, since it’s just made of mud, if it is terrible I can just take it apart and redo it. The oven works pretty well; you put fire in the bottom, and then there is a metal sheet separating the fire space from the baking space, and into the baking space you put whatever you are baking. The local kids seem to like my cookies.

The last important home improvement project I undertook was putting up some art. Fortunately, the Moto Moto Museum is nearby, and they have a gift shop with some artisan crafts. Otherwise I haven’t found much art. I got a picture of elephants, and another of giraffes, and hung those up. I have a carved wooden man and some small carved wooden animals that sit on my desk. From Chishimba falls I got a rather large fish so that’s sitting on top of one of my dividing walls. As an accent piece, I also hung up a fish-themed piece of chitenge on the wall. I’m an aquaculture volunteer, so I figured the house should look the part.

Reading this Week: Still working on Arabian Nights. It might in fact take me 1001 days to finish.
This week has been pretty solidly spent on constructing fish ponds. This is exciting, because doing fish pond stuff is the whole reason I am here.

I am now up to two farmers in the active process of building fish ponds. The previous pond we staked is nearly completed, and we staked a second pond adjacent to the first:

In addition to those two ponds, we have staked another farmer’s first pond. The impetus for this work is that I am leaving for training soon, and although I will be back in a matter of weeks Farmer #1 there wanted to get the second pond staked. Farmer #2, I think, got jealous that Farmer #1 was barrelling towards fish farming that he wanted in on the action, which is a-okay as far as I am concerned.
Having multiple fish ponds per farmer is ideal, and having multiple farmers with multiple fish ponds is extremely beneficial. The fish we grow (usually, in this area, the Lake Tangynika Bream) generally have a six-month harvest cycle. Six months after fingerlings are stocked, full-sized fish are harvested and sold. If a farmer has six ponds, that means they can stagger stocking and harvesting times so that they harvest a pond every month throughout the year, providing a relatively steady stream of income.

Since most of these farmers rather tautologically farm, they receive a large chunk of income only about once a year when the fields are harvested. This leads to times with little money and potentially little food towards the end of the year before the fields are harvested again. One of the advantages of fish farming is therefore that fish can be stocked so that the farmer is making money all year, instead of just once.

Additionally, having several farmers nearby provides security when it comes to resources, and improves the overall quality of fish farming. Small rural farmers rely on restocking fingerlings produced by the fish stocked in the pond. If a pond fails to produce fingerlings, nearby farmers provide a potential source to get more fingerlings, as each pond will produce more fingerlings than can be restocked. Having multiple stocks also provides genetic diversity. Nearby farmers, when they work together, also learn from each other and share techniques so that fish farming is improved throughout a community.

So that’s been this week in fish farming. If I had been up to anything more exciting I would have talked about that, but every day this week has been spent with the farmers helping them make sure the ponds have been built correctly. We hope to fill them with water and begin fertilization soon, to develop a plankton bloom before stocking. Fish!

Reading this week: Working on Arabian Nights. I don’t think it’ll take me 1001 nights but it is kinda long. So far I can’t tell if spending all my money entertaining fake friends is a good idea or not.

This week I went to half a funeral and munada. The funeral was for my host father’s brother. Funerals in Zambia are community events are you are supposed to make an appearance. The funeral was to begin at approximately 0900 and I was told to show up at the Mbala hospital then. The hospital has a main entrance and then a back gate that opens up into a green space. I got directed to the back gate and found a large number of people milling about. As I spotted people I knew from the village, it dawned on me that the rather large crowd was all there for the funeral.

At 0900 a small contingent went through the back gate and into the hospital, carrying the casket to retrieve the body. Women started wailing at this point, on cue. The rest of everybody just sort of milled around. I spotted a professional photographer going around at this point, so I suppose I could have gotten my picture taken (last time I saw these guys they had a little portable printer for on-demand snaps, as they’re called). Eventually they came back out with the casket and the wailing really picked up.

They didn’t have a hearse, but the casket was loaded into the back of an old-style Land Cruiser with a Ministry of Health logo on the side. After the casket was loaded, people started hopping into the back of two canters, which are largeish flatbed trucks. Once everyone was loaded up, they set off to the sound of sirens. At this point, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to accompany the crowd based on some unclear directions I got from my host father, so I stayed and didn’t see the burial. I don’t know how standard any of these things are, but I think this was a slightly up-scale funeral. The brother was buried in a cemetary a few kilometers out of town, as opposed to outside the village somewhere.

So instead I went over to munada. Munada is an open-air market held twice a month. This was the first time I happened to be in town for it, so I visited. The merchandise is unfortunately pretty similar to what you can get any other day in town, but it was concentrated and I am sure there are deals to be had if you’re good at haggling. The vegetable and produce selection was probably a bit wider than normal, due to the larger range of people attracted to the market, so that was cool.

But there was still lots to see. One thing was the piles and piles of clothes. Thrift store cast-offs are shipped here in massive tightly-packed blocks and sold by the kilo. At events like these they bust some of those open and you can sort through the piles of random clothes to find something that might fit for pretty cheap. Towards the back of munada were the meat sellers. You could tell the meat was fresh because right below the side of beef was usually the skin. They would chop you off a chunk with an axe (the exact same kind they use for cutting wood, etc). Besides going home with some raw beef, there were plenty of vendors cooking and selling meat. I regret not getting any. My favorite thing was not one but at least two different people running the shell game in the middle of the paths between vendors. That just seemed old-timey and quaint to me. Just like the movies!

So anyways those were the highlights of my Tuesday. Hope you enjoyed them!

Reading this week:

• Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

One of the things that has driven in the impact of poverty for me here in Zambia are the schools. It is a challenge to get an education here in Zambia, especially for rural kids or the urban poor, and it isn’t really anybody’s fault, it seems to me, it’s just the way things are.

Schools are split into primary and secondary school. Primary school goes from grades 1-7, and first grade starts at about age 5 or 6. Secondary school goes from grades 8-12, and after that is University. Kids are not required to go to school by law like in the US.

In my village, the closest primary school is in the next village over, about 4 km away. There’s no bus or other transport, so if kids want to go to school they have to hike over there. The nearest secondary school is in the boma (the term for town, as a step up from village), 12 km away. This is pretty impossible for a commuter, so if you want to go past grade 7, you usually wind up going to boarding school. Some primary schools actually go up to grade 9, and this is an effort to make school more accessible.

So now let’s talk about cost. I’ll talk about secondary school first, and also mention that currently the exchange rate is about 10 kwatcha (the Zambia currency, abbreviated ZMW or just K, as in K10) to $1 USD. To go to secondary school you have to pay school fees. School fees vary by location and school, but I’ll talk about my area. For the non-boarding schools, fees range from about K350-K500 per term, with three terms in the year. For the boarding schools, this price jumps up to K900 or more per term. For grades 8 and 9 at some of the primary schools, these fees drop to about K150-250, but that is for a rural area.

Now, primary school. Primary school is supposed to be free. It is in fact illegal to charge school fees for grades 1-7. But this, in most cases, is impossible. The school system in Zambia is pretty severly underfunded. As I said in the beginning of the post, I don’t really blame anyone for that, and this isn’t a criticism of any government policy, just an unfortunate reporting of the facts of life in Zambia for these rural farmers. Schools wind up charging school fees for these grades (they’re usually labelled “Parent Teacher Committee Funds,” or somesuch) to pay for basic school necessities like chalk and paper. These fees will also go towards paying volunteer teachers. They’re called volunteer, but they do get paid a small amount. The one data point I have is K400/month.

Volunteer teachers are required because most schools are understaffed due to a lack of teachers in the country. The older schools I see tend to have about half as many teachers as they are “supposed” to, based on the student population, and I know at least one school with only one government-paid teacher. His school has 150 students, grades 1-6, though there are 600 children in the area served by his school. There are three major reasons that keep those other 450 kids away. The first is school fees. When schools charge school fees for these grades, they are generally on the order of K10-20 per term. This is what drove the meaning of poverty home for me, because the thing between these kids and school is something less than $6 a year. That’s heaping a little too much blame on school fees alone, because the kids also usually have to show up in a uniform (usually home-made), wear shoes (most people wear sandals, known as “tropicals”), and have the materials to learn, all of which also add up. Then, when you multiply this by the number of children in a family, it adds up further. However, with that caveat, I think a Happy Meal at McDonalds runs on the order of $5.

Let’s cover the other two reasons real quick. One is that parents will require these kids to stay home to help work. Most of these villagers are subsistence farmers, growing maize and a small selection of other vegetables just to eat. Keeping the kids home to help work can be vital to keeping that up and running. The third reason that keeps girls home is that girl’s education is usually less valued than a boy’s. Women are not expected to be breadwinners, and the education required to be a good wife does not require school. In one of the nearby schools, of the 14 students in the 9th grade class (as a sign of the attrition rate, there are closer to 100 kids in 1st grade), there are only 2 girls.

Since the costs of going to secondary school are at least an order of magnitude higher, most kids only make it through grade 7 if they make it that far. That obviousely puts them at a major disadvangate for getting a job, or even really at having the math and reading skills needed to really make a farm profitable and successful. That continues the cycle of keeping kids out of school.

But enjoy this picture of my friend and a Zombie hoard of kids: