10 April 2008

Continued from the previous

Barely made it in time to pick up the visas. Whew.

Anyway, I am in Lusaka primarily to renew my Visitor's Permit for another 3 months (April 21-July 21) which is my third and final renewal. Despite the Permit's seemingly limitless pages on which to stamp renewals, one is only permitted three (9 months) in addition to the entry visa you get at the border (3 months) for a total of one year. Since I was not able to secure a position under the Honorable Ministry of Health and Paper-Shuffling before Mpelembe's Clinical Officer and EHT left, I have no recourse but to leave by July 21st. Then I am told I cannot reenter Zambia for one year.

I wanted to write about personal developments and revelations and so forth, and now I have the time. One thing I have really noticed about myself (and to some extent Carrie as well) that we've gotten from the States (and I'm not sure if it's good or bad or both in different circumstances) is a rugged sense of individualism. Zambians absolutely love to help - in any capacity from cutting trees, to drawing your well water, to digging a hole. And frankly I get annoyed when it happens. The funny thing is, one part of me is grateful for the help if it's a big project, and one part of me resents it. Every project I embark upon I want to do all by myself (or with Carrie, depending on the project). I get a real sense of pride when I singlehandedly build or do something, and that's diminished when someone helps me. I also am less confident of the quality. Sometimes with good reason. As I've said Zambians have a very set way of doing things.

A good example of this dilemma was a week ago when I was cutting apart an already fallen tree (the one the kids cut down so they wouldn't have to climb to get caterpillars) to make into boards to make a door. The tree was one of the hardest of Zambia's hardwoods called Kapanga, and it had been felled many months ago so was well aged or cured or whatever - harder than when it was fresh. I had cut through the central trunk to make a 6 foot long log that was about 2 feet in diameter (The tree is 23 years old if anyone cares). About the time I finished and was trying to figure out how I was going to split it in two to start milling it into boards, our other neighbor Kapiria comes over through the woods. I told him what I was up to and he wanted to help. So he starts hacking a line down the trunk on which to split. I winced with every slightly off center stroke (not that I am an extremely accurate logger) and finally said I was going for lunch and "tapali ubwafia" - no problem - in reference to me continuing. He mentioned they use poles to split the wood usually and said he would look around. I ate lunch then went to the Headman to ask for the spikes and he had them and a sledgehammer head. I went back to work and shortly both the Headman and Kapiria return. I was going to use a hand adze to cut a straight line on both sides of the log so that it would split exactly in half, but they decided to start splitting right away. It was slow arduous going. I still did most of the spike driving (as evidenced by the worst blisters ever), but was bothered by their assistance. The worst was at the end when it was clear that the tree was not split on a straight line at all. The heartwood had even gone in one half only. This translates into an immensely larger amount of work for me to make each half into a level plank, as I have to cut away everything higher than the lowest point. Finally I have make a large adze out of the hoe handle and axe head, so it won't kill me, but still.

Okay another very American and non-Zambian trait of mine is a desire for privacy. Our hut is placed such that all sides and the all parts of the yard are visible from the frequently used path that passes through our yard. So if you go to read a book on the porch, inevitably some kids will come over and sit by you, probably followed by watching, noisemaking, or asking for things (usually a combination of all of those). This makes it very unpleasant to read or do anything at all outside. Even if you are in the garden the kids usually see you through the grass fence or reed door and let themselves in. I've given up caring about the cultural taboo of not wearing a shirt (it's not super taboo anyway, some men (and women) go shirtless when doing something sweaty) when I'm working hard like hoeing a garden bed or chopping wood. My desire not to be bothered has at times even led to me moving about different parts of the porch as people pass, to avoid being seen. Pretty silly I suppose. But if you had to greet everyone who spots you and had to explain what you're doing to half of them who sit down, and try to deter a quarter of them from helping, you might do the same. The only time we can read is to go sit in the mango tree by the garden. Even so, some people will come to your closed house and "odi" (the greeting for "may I come in?" which isn't much of a request, since I've said no to the kids and they come anyway to ask for stuff) for several minutes.

So generally we read in the darkness of the house. Of course the neighbor kids still bug us and sit on our porch and ask for things.

One definitely good trait I've inherited from the West is a respect for animals. Zambians see all animals as either a source of food or a tool. They throw rocks at dogs and goats, don't feed dogs enough, and smack them for the slightest infraction. They steal wild birds' eggs and baby birds out of nests to eat. In spite of the tiny size of wild birds' eggs and the much larger size of chicken eggs, most people in our village won't eat chicken eggs. Because of living on the verge of starvation, Ndumfwa ("I Understand") - the neighbor's dog (the single survivor from 4 puppies) - comes over and eats scraps of food we put out for the chickens and the chicken's eggs. I didn't believe at first that a dog would know that there's food in eggs, but after 4 or 5 eggs disappeared and I noticed the dog lurking around a lot, I decided it did. This also explains why whenever we leave the hut for days, Joshua always takes our eggs to put inside their house. I asked how to protect the eggs, and the neighbors said to hit the dog. Frustrating.

Another good one, possibly related, is respect for the environment (certainly not terribly common even in the West). When Zambians are driving they throw their trash out of the window. Always. Rural Zambians have no compunction about chopping down any number or trees or burning any hectares of land. They happily use fertilizers (subsidized by the state) and pesticides - when they can get their hands on them (which is probably more from lack of information). I try to minimize the number of trees I cut, and when I harvest bark for rope, I only harvest one strip per tree, so they can heal it back over. In their defense, trees do grow very fast here and many species will grow back from stumps. Unfortunately they've reduced the forests to only fire tolerant trees and shrubs with an open canopy in most places. Also I imagine there would be a lot more wild animals if they didn't burn. To their detriment, burning drives destructive insects away from their normal foodsources and onto crops. There would be more trash in the village, but most people can't afford to buy a lot of products that tend to come in wrappers. Of course Zambia has no garbage trucks in most parts, so trash is burned (Lusaka is riddled with the reek of burning plastic at times) or buried. We have a pit out back where we put all our trash, so I guess we can't be saints on this cause. Kids reclaim a good portion of the plastic to make soccer balls. They also scavenge condoms from somewhere to blow up for the center of the soccer balls. Needless to say, that practice worries me a lot. That's the main reason why, at HIV/AIDS trainings, they tell people to put condoms down the pit latrine.

Ok can't think of anything else for now. So howabout some wacky Zambian things.

I saw a hand painted sheet today outside of one of the bus terminals in Lusaka with the following: "HIV/AIDS WAS CREATED IN A SECRET LABORATORY IN NEW YORK CITY, USA, FOR THE PURPOSE OF TAKING BACK AFRICA. IN [2000 something] 6[or so] FOREIGN MEDICAL WORKERS IN [some African country, not Zambia] INTENTIONALLY INJECTED THE VIRUS INTO [some number of people, subsequently infecting some high number of people (which wasn't equal to the number of people who actually have AIDS) and so on]". I remember reading the story on BBC. Some poor European doctors in some North African country were accused of giving people aids and have been in jail for several years. Rediculous.

It's a widely held view in rural Zambia (at least Mpelembe) that white people only have white skin because we haven't spent enough time in the sun. They must think we are indoors all the time back home, or that it's always cloudy or something. We tried to explain that we will get a little darker, but eventually just burn. They wouldn't hear of it.

In the market they sometimes sell balls of white clay they simply call "soil". Carrie bought two not understanding what their purpose could be. She asked the head teacher and he explained that they supposedly have a lot of iron and that when women are pregnant they crave them.

All cooking pots in Zambia (usually cheap aluminum affairs) must be cleaned on the inside, but especially the outside with sand and water. Women scrub their hearts out to keep the sides and bottoms of pans and pots spotless (this is an immense amount of work when you consider that almost everyone cooks over sooty wood or charcoal flames and usually no soap is involved). Pointing out that it's just going to get dirty later that day when they make dinner does no good. Neighbor lady even came over and scrubbed one of our pots randomly.

Whenever Zambians get almost any illness, they claim it's Malaria. Even when the symptoms are totally inconsistent. Sometimes they will admit they have a cold though.

Ran out of those. Now back to what has happened lately.

Actually this part was a while ago. For about a month I was teaching first the neighbor kids, then a bunch of random kids how to write. It started when Patty (5 or 6 years old?) wanted to read some books. Eventually I brought out some kids books with the letters and tried to explain them. Kids found out and the next day 10 kids were all huddled around. The request arose for writing lessons and so I gave like 12 kids pens and paper and we all practiced the letters. Sometimes we did numbers and I would reward the kids with gum if they could get to 100 (sometimes a string of numbers like 70-79 would repeat itself, but I gave them gum anyway). After our supply of gum and pens was exhausted, fewer kids came. Still I usually had between 4 and 8 kids. We ran out of paper and kids lost/forgot/were not the same kids I gave pens to, so we started writing in the dirt. The kids loved it! Their favorite part was erasing letters with the sound effect "kshkshkshksh". They went wild. It was hard to keep the kids all oriented so that they were seeing the letters I wrote right-side-up, so we had a lot of M's and W's confused. Also some kids are dyslexic, and some have never written before. Sometimes kids who were obviously old enough to be in a grade beyond writing letters would come. I think they just liked the personal attention and my exclamations of "cawama" (it's good). After class (back when we had paper) the kids would rush up to me to get their papers graded.

One day when class was almost over, I had to run to the school for something and I left the kids with their writing tablets (magazines) in the insaka to continue. Joshua (who I trust) and Wizzy (who is 14 at least and is the Headman's son, and who I told to watch the kids) were both there. I was gone for maybe 8 minutes and when I came back all the kids had left and Joshua was wailing nearby. Apparently Iron Mumba came over after I left and chased away all the kids and hit Joshua. He said that the kids would have stolen the magazines and then we would blame it on him, so he had to chase them away and hit his son for not alerting me to this fact. Obviously I would have assumed the kids and not Iron Mumba stole the magazines. It made no sense. My little schools attendance fell off a lot after that.

One day I was teaching some kids in the insaka and I had some peanuts drying. When the lesson was over I told the kids they could go home and I really had to pee. I got distracted by something else and when I returned I saw that all the peanuts were gone. When the kids came back the next day, it was most of the same ones, and I asked why they stole the peanuts. One older kid said it was this 3 year old kid they brought along that did it. I said he was lying and there would be no school that day. Ever since then my teaching career has basically been over. Doug's school of writing excellence turned into Doug's school of hard knocks I guess.

One day maybe 2 months ago, Carrie and I made a trip to the Mulombwa river. Carrie had been talking it up and wanted to go for some time. So one auspicious morning we set off. Right away I noticed the neighbors had lowered my seat again when I lent it to them. So there was a long delay while I struggled with stripped bolts and a broken rear rack. Finally we got going. When we reached the road, I dismounted briefly and my saddle fell apart. This was the saddle I bought to replace the original saddle that broke. Good beginnings for a picnic at the river. As we went further, Carrie wasn't entirely sure of the way and since it was rainy season we soon found ourselves biking/walking through between 6 inches and 2 feet of water that had flooded the road. It was so terrible it was funny. For me anyway - Carrie was kinda upset about it. After a long time we asked where the river was and a guy just up and offered to lead us all the way there. So onwards we trekked. We passed an area so low lying that a woman was pounding cassava in an insaka that was an island in the middle of a small lake along with the house. Finally we reached the river. It was huge! Really wide with a fast current. This guy who was sitting there checking his fish traps offered to take Carrie and I out in his dugout canoe. It was awesome, the canoe was barely above water level, very tippy, and it seemed the current would sweep us away in the middle. The river had flooded so that many trees were submerged near the bank. After the center with the current was a grassy waterway with slow moving waters. It was nice. The fisherman said that there used to be lots of crocodiles in the river, but they had killed them all. We ate our picnic and it started to rain a little. We biked along the river looking for something or other, then biked/sludged back home.

Our corn finally produced months ago! We had 4 delightful ears of corn between 3 and 5 inches long and up to maybe 3/4s of an inch wide from maybe 20 corn plants. Guess we should have burned or used fertilizer. We didn't have enough compost for the whole field (not really even enough for the whole garden). The corn was quite good, what little there was. Very sweet. One day I was walking through the field and I saw a snake! It was 3 or 4 feet long and black. I yelled for Carrie and we got the camera. It turned out to be a cobra, how cool is that. It reared back and spread its hood. I had glasses on so I wasn't worried (they are usually spitting cobras). We backed off eventually and let it slither off. Recently I saw a much longer black snake - just the back half - sticking out of the pit latrine. At my approach it went down the hole. Probably after a mouse.

We have these terrible biting ants (imposhi) that move in nomadic columns in search of food. They often come at night. If they come into your home, your only recourse is to spend the night in someone else's house (the good news is they clean your house of all insects and crumbs). Other PCVs have had their chickens killed by them. They eat anything. Twice they have come after the chickens. I don't know how they locate food, but they managed to climb up our elevated coop and attack our chickens. We were awakened by strange scratching sounds in the middle of the night. We went out and realized it was the chickens using their beaks to detatch imposhi that had latched on. We tried to use burning thatch waved on the ground to cause them to flee, but there were so many and they kept biting us. There are several different size imposhi in a colony, and the biggest ones love to climb unknown up your pant legs and bite tender areas and your armpits. The chickens decided to literally fly the coop. We brought some inside the house and one ran to the neighbors.

They attacked again recently, which was more terrible because only I was there to defend the chickens, and New Chicken was sitting on the eggs and so refused to move in spite of being under attack. It took nearly an hour and much burning thatch to convince the ants to go elsewhere. At one point I tried to clear the ones out of our laying shelter (which has grass for padding on the floor and a thatch roof) to get to New Chicken and the eggs. The only method is with fire, so naturally I accidentally caught the nest caught on fire, which caught the roof on fire, and caused New Chicken to flee. The flames were huge, but luckily I had been working with lushishi (bark rope) which requires soaking in water, so was able to use a nearby bucket to put the fires out before they ignited the hut's roof. I grabbed and dried off the eggs and put them in a basket with New Chicken. Luckily none of them were hard-boiled and I was able to pull off all of the imposhi from the chicken. Disaster averted. The laying shelter roof wasn't even damaged too much.

We ate bugs! There are the rather large bugs that screech really loud at night during rainy season. The kids in the village dig up their holes during the day and eat them. I had been finding a few at night when they leave their burrows to feed to the chickens. The cat also drags them in sometimes. "Look what the cat dragged in" - actually "Listen to what the cat dragged in". The bugs are so loud it hurts your ears! Carrie and I decided to try them. I killed two quickly by putting their heads in fire. Then followed the recipe we had been given. Pull off the legs and wings, fry in cooking oil, eat. They were pretty good actually. Kinda like shrimp or crab or something.

Mango season ended some months ago. There were a few unripened ones hanging around Carrie and I tried to keep secret, but the kids found them and stole them. We also had many big green oranges on the orange tree by our insaka. Carrie and I both left Mpelembe at one point and when we came back, there were only about 6 oranges left. I don't know why Zambians eat unripe fruit. Carrie claims it's to make sure that someone else doesn't get it before they do.

A couple of weeks ago Carrie and I took a trip up to Mansa and Samfya in Luapula province. We mainly wanted to go to Samfya, which is on Lake Bangwelu, but we thought we should check out the Peace Corps House in Mansa and get some food for the trip. Mansa turned out to be a terrible city. It's like if Serenje were dingy-er and much bigger, but exceedingly spread out. Walking anywhere took forever and the streets have no logic to them. Turned out that day was Easter, so instead having a low-key night maybe watching movies at the house, a bunch of people were there and were going to drink and play twister. Someone started watching Pirates of the Caribbean 3, which we wanted to see, but then the power went out. Apparently happens all the time in Mansa. The next day we bought some cheese, bread, PB&J. The cheese was moldy from the power outages, and the bread was stale. Ugh.

Anyway, we went to Samfya. Right down to the water. There were 2 guesthouses, both ridiculously expensive, so we camped on the beach. I must admit, those thermarest things are essential to camping. Even on sand our hips and shoulders would get so sore and we'd have to roll over every half hour, all night. In the evening, we got rowed across the way to the actual town and got some good nshima. I ordered nshima with fish!!!! I decided to violate my vegitarianism to try the fresh local fish. It was delicious. We found some secluded spot on the beach and set up the tent and slept poorly. The next day we tried to find out about going to one of the islands in the middle of the lake (it's a big lake), but the boat only leaves on certain days and was too expensive so we just laid on the beach, drank hard cider, read, and swam. The water was really nice once you got in. Now I probably have schistosomiasis. We'll know for sure if my urine becomes bloody in the next 10 years or so. It was worth it. There is also a single dose cure. We put on sunscreen (except my legs which were judged by Carrie to be dark enough) and we both got sunburned on the backs of our legs and Carrie on her back as well. Damn. It's been many years since I got really sunburned. Hurt like hell and made sleeping that much harder. It was neat watching the fishermen go out in their dugouts and cast their nets. They didn't bring in much. We also wanted to see crocks, but they are on the other side of the lake. That night we asked around the guesthouses for nshima, but they said they didn't have any power to cook. Eventually, the one guy let us use their charcoal brazier and their mealie meal. We just had to buy the eggs.

I built Carrie a swing as a surprise one time when she had to go to Serenje. I braided together 3 strands of lushishi, and then three of those braided strands to make strong rope. I milled down a log into a board for the seat. It was pretty sweet. We put it up and used it a little. Mostly the kids who pass by and the neighbor kids use it. They broke it a few times from swinging wildly. I broke it once cause I'm too heavy :(

We are considering getting a dairy goat! We want to start a project in Mpelembe to get people to take care of dairy goats (which are rare in Zambia) as a source of income and protein for themselves. Carrie is trying to get a grant to make the goats available cheaply for the villagers. First we want to buy a goat for ourselves so we can teach ourselves before we teach other people. We've read up on it a bit, mainly in "The New Goat Handbook" and an article in a magazine my Mom sent. The handbooks warns that goats have the sort of curious behavior that may seem to result in "malicious pranks". I can only picture them putting a full pail of milk on top of the barn door. We started to build the goat house. The log I was splitting will be the door, and we have gotten the posts for the raised floor already. The floor will be raised to keep the goat dry in rainy season, and so we can gather the "berries" for natural fertilizer. I bought chain and a lock to tether the goat (we'd love to just let it loose, but it would eat our and the neighbor's crops. Also someone might steal it because milk goats are much bigger than the dwarf goats most people keep and probably will look very different). Carrie and I are super excited about getting a goat. They sound so funny and intelligent. And of course, then we get fresh milk!!! No more Nido or Cowbell for our oats and coffee. We're hoping to give out free samples of the milk to people to get everyone interested in the project too. A Peace Corps Volunteer in Mkushi district has already started a goat project in her village, so we may even get a goat or few from her. A baby goat would be really cute. We are so eager I might try to get a goat on my way back from Lusaka. Probably not though, because the PCV with the goats hasn't gotten back to us with the number of the farmer she bought from yet. I wrote down some numbers from the telephone book and may try them on my way back. Who knows.

I guess that's all the updates!

Now I will try to recall who to thank for packages.

Emilie! Thank you so much for all your goodies and the nutritional yeast flakes. We've already almost eaten everything.

Dad! Thank you also for the goodies! The toothpaste was also much appreciated.

Nonna! Thank you for the chicken book! I'll have to bring it back for Dad, as this would be an especially suitable method of chicken-raising in the garden plot.

Everyone with land should get chickens! Fresh eggs are so much better than factory farm ones. Even if you are in the city it is feasible. There is a book on urban chicken husbandry out there. I know Carnegie library has it.

Can someone (not everyone) send us non-animal based rennet and mesophilic milk culture? Co-ops might have both. I know the East End Food Co-op had rennet. We want to make Chevre! Thanks!

Mares eat goats and lambs eat goats

Long time no blog as they say.

Well. What has happened in the past few years I've been in Zambia? First to expound on the issues raised in my last post.

One day Joshua was walking to school with their white (good, wise) rooster bound at the feet. I asked him what he was doing and he said that they were selling their rooster to "Ba Head" (the principal) to pay for school fees or books or something. I said I'd pay him 5 pin if they sold the "headless" (evil, ugly, defeathered) rooster instead. We went back to their Insaka to discuss the matter with the great patriarch Iron Mumba. After much confused broken Bemba and incomprehensible gesturing, Joshua and I made Ba Iron understand that I wanted them to sell the other rooster and that I would even be willing to give them our beautiful rooster as a gift as incentive (better than 5 pin for them and us, as our rooster was one of those delightfully chronologically-defective individuals who begin crowing at 4 or 5 am, and roosters cost like 20 pin). Most of their misunderstanding stemmed from the fact that Carrie and I are known to desire our hens to produce eggs. Rural Zambians are convinced that a rooster is necessary for the hens to lay. So why would we give away our rooster if we wanted eggs (they failed to think about the fact that our houses are definitely within rooster walking distance, and that we had eggs before we bought the rooster). How they explain why women menstruate even without having constant sex is unknown. Anyway, they finally sold the terrible rooster at the road (Ba Head didn't want it) and now have our rooster and the white rooster.

Post script to this drama is that I had taught our now ex-rooster my chicken call (a whistling pattern) and so he comes over and steals food whenever I try to round up our hens to eat. He's a pretty bad rooster, he fails to mate with our hens most of the time because he runs after them really slowly, gives up early, and doesn't understand how to trick them.

We didn't eat the last batch of eggs from our 3 laying hens and have allowed New Chicken to sit on them (~15 days out of 21 so far). Candled the eggs to see the embryos. It was pretty cool. They are sort of swimming around in the eggs. New Chicken attacks the cats viciously whenever she is off of her nest for exercise or to eat.

She nearly killed the kitten (who I have yet to mention in depth). He either had a heart attack, a stroke, an seizure or something like that. He was unhurt from the attack, but started pawing at his head and then stopped breathing and went completely limp and unresponsive. I pinched him as hard as I could and he didn't move. I gave him CPR and he came back to life after the first breath into him. Scary as I had a puppy die on me a month before that in the same manner.

We had a puppy for less than a week. One night we heard this terrible yowling outside the hut and I found a miserable looking tiny puppy with hair gone from his forehead, congenitally in-turned front paws and several bot flies and infected bot fly exit wounds. We put him in the insaka with some water and decided to take care of him if he was still there the next day. He was. Pulled out 6 or so huge bot fly larvae, gave him a bath, put on antibacterial gel, and force-fed him reconstituted milk. He wandered around a little, usually just to leave his clean bed of straw and lie in the dirt. We asked around to see if someone lost a dog (figuring it wandered off and had a terrible time in the forest), only to find out that this kid has ukuposa'ed (thrown out, as in garbage) the dog because he said it looks bad. Ok it did look bad. Especially when he brought over its brother who was easily 2/3x as big and healthy and bright-eyed. Obviously ours was a runt that maybe the mother rejected. The kid tried to sell us the healthy dog offering to hit ours over the head with a hoe (why didn't they do that in the first place? why cast it out to die a slow and painful death?). It only strengthened my resolve to make our dog healthy. Not that we particularly wanted a dog, but we couldn't just abandon it. It seemed to be getting better until one day it got really bloated with diarrhea. It became less and less responsive and iridescent flies started laying eggs on its posterior (carrion flies I believe). After washing off the eggs it was in terrible shape and eventually quit breathing and went limp. I was pretty upset about it, and Carrie had gone to Serenje so it was especially hard to bear alone. I buried it between two old Cassava heaps in the backyard under moonlight.

Boy that's f-ing depressing huh.

So when Carrie and I were in Serenje last we were in "Tusheni's Grand Bazaar" and we saw these kittens creeping around. Carrie fell in love with the long haired one and I agreed it was pretty cute. I'm sure she gave a lengthy description in her blog if you want to read about the kitten. We named him Finnegan, though we usually refer to him as "Little Cat/Kit/Kits", which I imagine will actually become his name as per New Chicken's example. He is pretty damn cute, but looks terrible when wet. He is always climbing up us, uselessly attacking the other cat Professor and bounding about like a kitten.

After the first colony of bees absconded, we heard of another swarm near school. We put it in our hive (only 3 stings for me) and put on paperclips to keep the queen inside. Of course she needs to mate to get the colony going so we had to take them off eventually. A few days after that the new colony absconded. Sigh. They built a tiny 2x2" section of comb before they left. At least they contemplated staying. Swarming season is over so now we may resort to kidnapping a colony which has already established itself in a dead tree (our neighbor has offered to open the hive up for 3 pin).

Went to Livingstone (Zambian side of Victoria Falls). The ride there was terrible, as the road is in extreme disrepair and we took one of the smaller busses to save ourselves 10 pin or something. Ended up taking 2x as long as it should have. The guesthouse (Jollyboys) was delightful and cheap. Even offered a free ride to the falls. We went there and hiked all the hell around it. Of course it was rainy season and we didn't realize that the volume of water going over the falls is so great at this time that the mist actually obscured about 3/4s of the falls. Silly us. It was still gorgeous and awesome (as in inspiring awe). We saw it from the side, the top, and the gorge at the bottom where the river executes a nearly 180 degree turn (called the Boiling Point, due to the madly roiling nature of the water movement. There was a big log stuck in the whirlpool just going around and around for who knows how long. We had to hike through a flooded path and ate some wild dates to get to it). At the top about 10 feet from where the water actually falls over the cliff I first stuck my leg in and then (much to Carrie's dismay and anxiety) my whole body from the stomach down while holding onto a tree branch (don't have a heart attack Mom, I think there were some rocks I might have been able to grab onto had I slipped off the limb). I just let my lower half be bobbed around by the current. Fun! Dangerous! Carrie took pictures! We got soaking wet hiking beside the falls. It was fun.

Then we went to get some souvenirs! Can't tell what they are since some will be presents. Took a long time. Those guys are hucksters of course. "What kind of wood is this carved out of?" - "Mukwa" (I've cut down mukwa trees and it didn't look anything like it). After we were on the minibus back from the falls to Livingstone, I realized that the light weight and lack of coldness indicated that some of our items were carved from wood with lots of paint instead of the "river rock" that lines the river gorge. Damn. Oh well. Some stuff is pretty sweet. Carrie kept trying to get close to this olive baboon that was eating trash at the falls. It was so tame. She almost touched it practically.

Half the garden beds are functional. One whole row of stawberries, 8 tomato plants, maybe 10 green bean plants. In the field our watermelon plants are finally making watermelons and a discarded watermelon and tomato seed in the compost grew and are very productive (though I think the neighbors/chickens are getting most of the tomatoes). Had to repair the grass garden fence, which partially collapsed during the rains. Rainy season is basically over. Beginning cold season. My favorite.

Oh god, I am supposed to pick up Carrie and my's visas for our upcoming trip to Tanzania at 2 so I can't finish this blog. It's already 3. Maybe I will be able to get back to the internet after I retrieve the visas. We are going to Zanzibar island - spice and cultural mixing pot of the ancient world! in Junish.

Sorry I never have enough time to post!!! I even am staying an extra day in Lusaka and I still am running short on time. All bureaucracy takes longer than one thinks of course.