I've been at site for roughly three months, and the time has passed quickly. Village life is so different, it can be amazing and awful and inspiring and frustrating... all in one day. I'm finally done wiht my community entry meetings. I had a cooking/soya demo with the ladies in Kabuta East (my furthest Eastern zone - about 17k on a bust path). We made soya milk, soya sausages, ifisashi (veggies and groundnuts), cicense (little fish) and chicken with groundnuts, kasava fritters (similar to doughnuts) and much more. It was a lot of fun. I facilitaed the workship with two women from the Breast Feeding and Nutrition group in Kabuta. We had to end our workship a little early though because the rains set it.

Rainy Season...

So we've gotten into rainy season here. There have been some terrific lightening storms... with orange lightening out on the lake! The plastic I put on the inside of my roof keeps me safe from the leaky places in the grass. It makes it a bit dark on the inside... thanks for the stars Mama.
I just planted a garden as well. Hopefully it will work. The sunflowers I wrote about last time didn't quite work out. Actually, I planted sunflowers and tomatoes grew instead!! Go figure....
So I was admiring my tomato plants when a big fat pig (literally) cam over and sat right on them!! Well, needless to say, my little plants were completely crushed beyond recognition. So this time around, I've put some prickly bushes around to keep the plant smashing pigs away from my garden. I planted carrots, tomatoes, onions, red and green peppers, garlic and rape (a leafy green). In December, I'll plant maize, groundnuts, soya, watermelon, popcorn and maybe pumpkins.
Just on a side note, I experienced transport in the pouring rain. My transport to the BOMA was in the back of an open bed truck, and of course it started to pour on my way in (for those of you who get letters with water dammage, sorry). Well, I just wanted to add that I looked at my rain coat before leaving and made the conscious decision to leave it... because apparently I thought that it's only rainy season in Nchelenge... anyway, I'm a little satly about the whole leaving behind of the rain coat incident... but luckly it hasn't really rained since I've been in Lusaka.

My New Best Friend?

I think I have a new best friend in the village. His name is Joshua... he's four. There are tons of pictures of him, he's super cuts. He comes over almost every morning to visit. He likes to sing and dance in my yard, he loves to be a little helper... oh, and he's teaching me Bemba, and I'm teaching him English. We make a pretty good pair!!

What!! You Can't Hear Me!!!

Bemba is quite an interesting language. One word can have three or four different meanings... depending on the context of the sentence of course. For example, the work "ukumfwa" can mean to hear, understand, feel, listen or hark. So when I say "nshaumfwa" I'm usually meaning, I don't understand. Well, there is this one little girl who likes to come over and visit, she's quite chatty, but unfortunately, she also speaks at the speed of light, and my ability to understand speed Bemba hasn't quite been fully developed yet... but I'm working on thet. Anyway... I digress... so if I say "nshaumfwa" -- meaning I don't understand, she takes it to mean that I can't hear her. So she takes a huge, audible, breath in and repeats herself at the top of her lungs!! She makes the funniest little face hen she does it, almost looking like a cartoon character, her eyes squeeze shut and her arms shoot backwards as her body lunges forward. It's pretty cute.

Nshima Until 2008...

I've been on a little nshima kick lately (that's the staple food in Zambia). And by kick, I mean, maybe... MAYBE making it twice a week. Well, my neighbors noticed that I bought some ubunga (what nshima is made from) in the market. They told me to give them K1,500 (which is the cost of the hammer mill) and they would get some ubunga for me. So I gave them the money, and a few hours later, their daughter came over with a huge bowl of ubunga. It was great, I would be able to have nshima for a few months of this amount. I thanked her for it, and went back to making flip charts for my meeting the next day. About 15 minutes later, she came back again, only this time with the biggest bucket on top of her head... FULL of ubunga!! Apparently, the huge bowl was just the extra that couldn't fit in the bucket! I filled every available bucket I had in my house with ubunga, and still had to send about half of it back because I just didn't have anyplace to store it... so now, I guess I'll have nshima until 2008!!!

I'm working on uploading more pictures, hopefully it will work. Check the my photos link if you're interested.