PCV Finally

i am currently in mansa, i also am now officially a volunteer after our graduation on monday. the graduation itself was not all that interesting, although it was nice to see my homestay family one last time. we swore an oath, apparently the same one used in the military, signed our names to the two year commitment, and were welcomed as the newest volunteers in peace corps zambia. tomorrow those of us being posted in kawambwa district are heading up to the district capital, kawambwa, where we will finish up our final shopping on thursday and friday. on saturday i am being taken to my village. i am excited that it is finally almost here, but also nervous--but, it's a beginning, and hopefully i will settle in quickly.

the training group has now split up, and it was sad to say goodbye to several of them who had become good friends but who have gone to different provinces. i will see them 3 or 4 times a year from here on out, which will certainly be strange after having seen them every day for the last nine weeks.

You'll Need a Chitenge for That

We've made it into Kitwe for the evening, we were moved out of our homestay houses this morning and into a college campus just outside of the city where we will be staying for the next couple of days. Our graduation ceremony is on Monday at 11 am, there are going to be a variety of different speakers so the production has the potential to go for a very long time. Once we've been sworn in we will officially no longer be PCT's but PCV's...woohoo. It is exciting but also sad and a bit intimidating; sad because I will have to say goodbye to many of the friends I made during PST and will not see them for another three months when we have in-service training. It is intimidating because I will be dropped off in my village on the 19th--I will be the only white person there, I will not know a soul in the entire village and surrounding countryside, I have absolutely no activities planned to fill the day other than what I can think of to try to keep me busy, and I don't speak the language hardly at all.

With that said I have received some more news about my site from the previous volunteer and there are some reasons to be excited. Apparently there are several women's groups in the area who are interested in starting a small sewing/knitting business, as well as one that wants to learn about small animal husbandry and beekeeping. My house is supposed to be very nice, I have a Mango tree and Raspberry bush in my yard, and the old volunteer left most of his furniture there so I don't have to worry too much about furnishings. I also acquired a hammock this last week which I am thrilled about.

This last week was busy but fun. The trainees staying in Chankalamo village decided to have a goat roast on Thursday with all our families in order to thank them and celebrate the end of PST. I had to transport the live goat to the site of the roast several days before on Tuesday--I found out later that the best way to transport a male goat anywhere is to simply sling it across your shoulders. But, I tried walking it over, a trip highlighted by me crawling into a thorn bush in pursuit of the goat after it slipped the rope, a laughing mob of children surrounding us as I tried to drag the goat up a hill, and me being tempted to break out my Leatherman and slaughter the thing on the spot. But, I finally prevailed, and thoroughly enjoyed the goat meat several days later.

The Nyanja families attending put together a mock initiation ceremony for young girls that was extremely interesting. The highlight was a lot of dancing and laughter, although the actual ceremony is very serious business and quite the production from what I've been told by volunteers who have witnessed it. One interesting tradition that two of our female trainers exhibited for us concerns respect: before they went out to dance they approached the old women who were doing the singing and drumming and laid themselves on the ground in the fetal position at their feet and clapped three times. They then rolled over and repeated the process on their other side, then got up to dance. The gesture was met by ululating whoops of appreciation from the bamayos--apparently it is a Bemba tradition, but since they are cousins with the Nyanjas that tribe appreciates the act as well. Things started to deteriorate when I was pulled into the dancing area by a determined bamayo so that I might represent the Bembas as it was mostly Nyanjas who had been doing the dancing. I dragged Brad with me so I wouldn't be alone in my humiliation, a bamayo wrapped chitenges around our waists, and we proceeded to break out our best moves. The Bemba and Nyanja dances are slightly different, but both involve a prodigious amount of hip movements that are supposed to be fluid; I sincerely doubt whether mine were so, but I certainly gave it my all as my aching hips and legs could attest. I did hear from both our trainers who speak Bemba that I received a lot of compliments from the bamayos afterwards--I think that was probably a result of all the chibuku the women were consuming, but I'll take it. There are several pictures of Brad and myself in action, but I am hoping that they never reach the public sphere.

Impashi

this past week has been extremely busy as PST is starting to wind down. we have all of our final tests coming up, as well as some last second projects that we need to complete before we can change our acronym from PCT to PCV. on top of all that i've been selected to give the speech for the bemba LIFE group at the swearing-in ceremony, so there will be some extra work involved there as well. but, we only have a week left and then we will be heading to our villages, which i think everyone is excited about. i also found out that my village is called muyembe, and is located in kawambwa district, and is supposed to be very nice.

the big excitement of the last week was that my homestay family's house was attacked by impashi, or red ants. i woke up at about 1 a.m. on tuesday and could hear them talking out in the yard. i wondered what could be going on but fell asleep again before i could give it much more thought. when i walked outside the next morning the yard had been burned--there isn't much vegetation in the yards anyways since they intentionally keep them bare in order to be better able to see snakes, prevent their houses from getting burnt by run-away fires, and not provide a habitat for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. but what little greenery there had been was now gone, and i asked my bataata why. he explained that the red ants had attacked and then had started for my house so they had to burn the yard in order to stop them. red ants here can attack in the millions, and they bite viciously just as the ones in the states do, and there is really no way to drive them away except with fire which has some obvious drawbacks. so, my homestay family was forced to spend the entire night out in their yard while the ants took over their house. my bataata said that they saw them crawling down the walls of the house and ten minutes later the entire room was completely blanketed with them...it's an unpleasant experience to say the least, and i'm glad i was spared it, although i felt badly for my family that couldn't sleep the entire night.

my mailing address is going to be changing once i leave here; if you are planning on sending me a letter, please send it to the new address since i will be gone from kitwe by the time any letter sent from the u.s. gets here:

Joshua Meservey
PO Box 710150
Mansa, Zambia
Africa

please remember that the envelope must say "air mail" on it or it will be put on the slow boat to china. the pc house in mansa, my provincial capital, does not currently have internet so my access to email is going to be extremely limited, if i can get it at all. i will always enjoy receiving emails, but if you write to me via snail mail i promise to write back to you--i can get your mailing addresses from the letters you send me. i may actually be getting a PO Box in kawamba, the nearest town, since i will only be in mansa about once a month. i will be sure to let everyone know the new address if i do get it; if i do, the kawambwa address will probably only be good for letters, packages would be safest going to the mansa address.

Montezuma's Revenge

well, as you probably can guess from the subject line i am no longer a member of the unbearably smug "i-haven't-been-sick-yet" club, but fortunately i'm not a member of the "oops-i-crapped-my-pants" club, as some in my group are...i was able to accelerate down the hallway towards the bathroom quick enough to avoid that particular fate. the medical officer's prognosis is that i got food poisoning from some milk i had in mansa; i'll spare you the details, but i woke up early on saturday morning and got brutally ill in the bathroom. i slept until sunday morning, waking up long enough to dash back to the bathroom, drink some oral rehydration solution and curse parmalat. i still have some lingering symptoms but am feelling better, i hope by the end of the week i'l be 100%.

my site visit to luapula province the previous week was an interesting experience, we stayed in a village where a current pcv is stationed. we participated in a soya cooking demonstration where i had to give a brief talk about the nutritional benefits of soy beans to a room full of zambian mothers; if the volume of laughter i elicited is any indicator, i was a wild success. the difficulty is that most zambians out in the villages have never heard a muzungu attempt to speak bemba, so they find it unbearably funny. the adults usually keep their laughter somewhat under control, but children absolutely dissolve when you break out a "muli shani" at them. it can be a bit disconcerting, but i've decided to use it to my advantage and simply assume that every time a zambian laughs at me it is only because of my speaking bemba, and not because of any ridiculous thing i'm doing.

we finally received our site placements, i will be in kawambwa district replacing a pcv who has left. i don't know much about the site since the pcv who was there hasn't written the site description yet. i do know that there is a river very near by along with a waterfall, that the house is "cute," is about 40 km from the boma (town, in this case Kawambwa), and that the entire district forestry office was recently transferred because of a bribery scandal. but, everyone i've talked to there loves luapula province, all the pcv's i met in mansa, the provincial capital where the pc house is located, were all extremely friendly and very good about mixing me up oral rehydration solution. so, it looks like it's going to be a good site.

we've spent the last couple of days at kasisi farm, a model conservation farm started and still run by jesuit priests about 100 years ago. farmers come from around zambia to learn more sustainable, efficient farming techniques, and the custodians are also involved in a lot of experimentation with different agricultural technologies. i've certainly learned a lot, the highlights probably being how to make cheese, chutney, pickled products, and jam (my group's apple jam didn't turn out quite as envisioned...the next day people were eating it off of toothpicks). we also toured a local beekeeper's operation that included an unscheduled dash through the woods after we'd conducted a too-close examination of one of the hives; i have a hard and fast rule here, namely that when the expert starts running, i also start running. so, when i saw the agricultural agent with us on the tour darting through the trees screaming and waving her hands around her head i also began darting (but not screaming) and nearly trampled the girl in front of me. several people got stung but i wasn't one of them, so i don't regret my actions.

my other running story involves us having to evacuate a classroom the week before last in mwekera when a fire got too close. zambians have a fairly laissez-faire attitude about burning, which they do for any number of reasons but mostly to clear land. they'll often set a fire and then leave it, checking back on it every couple of hours or so. case in point: there was a fairly large fire burning next to my homestay family's hut several weeks ago and i asked my bataata if he was clearing land for some gardening. he replied that no, he had been trying to kill some red ants near the well and couldn't quite control the blaze which was now burning the immediate area. in the case of us evacuating the classroom someone was burning trash a ways away and lost control of the fire; it eventually ended about 10 feet away from the classroom after several workers at the mwekera compound strategically doused certain areas and burned firebreaks in others. a girl named tess actually had her hut burnt when a field fire ran amuck, the walls of houses are mud brick but usually the roofs are thatch, which burns very well. fortunately they were able to rescue all of her stuff before it was damaged.

i hope you all are doing well, thank you for the emails and letters as each and every one is truly appreciated. i wish i could reply personally to you all but i really can't, but do please know that i appreciate the effort.

Vendetta Anger

well, i've had a fairly full week, with a lot of interesting things going on, but also some difficult things. we've lost two more people from our group, one had to leave as his body simply hasn't been able to handle the malaria prophylaxis. he has only been sleeping for a couple of hours a night and has started getting sick, so he really didn't have many options. it was tough to see him go as he didn't want to at all, it was just that his health would no longer allow him to be here...too bad.

last week one of my friends named doug was cycling back to his homestay house and came across his homestay mother crying at a neighbor's house. apparently the husband had beaten her badly; doug cycled back to our training compound in mwekera to get help and the peace corps sent a vehicle and got the lady to a hospital. the husband was arrested, which is actually surprising as woman here, while not 2nd class citizens, are at the most 1 1/2 class citizens. domestic abuse is rarely reported and hardly ever prosecuted, and often times the wife is blamed, even by her own family, if she is beaten. i think it is pretty safe to say that the husband would not be sitting in jail right now if a westerner (doug) hadn't gotten involved. zambians are warm and friendly people, but, as with all societies, there is a dark side that is revealed occasionally.

we had a speaker several days ago who was talking about zambian culture and tribal practices. it was a very interesting talk, and at the end she spoke for about half an hour about zambian and similar society's anger. she described most western anger cycles as on a diagonal extending upwards and in a linear fashion, meaning it continues escalating until a definite resolution is reached. either there is an apology, violence and conquest, or something similar, just as long as there is a resolution. she said that the zambian anger cycle could best be described as a spiral that grows and grows, perhaps completely undetected until it explodes. an apology may not be enough to stop the cycle, as in zambia sometimes an apology is seen as an admission that a harm was indeed inflicted. there is a saying here, "there is no sorry after death," meaning the damage has already been done by the time an apology has been offered. the speaker went on to say that this same anger cycle can affect entire societies, and can build for even hundreds of years until it finally erupts--the term she used was "vendetta."

She said that vendetta is a primary reason for many ethnic and tribal conflicts, and gave as an example the current iraq war and the bosnian wars. the iraq war was declared ended more than a year ago, and by western standards it was. yet, according to the speaker, we're witnessing vendetta anger in iraq; similarly, milosevic's attempt at genocide in the balkans was vendetta anger that exploded. she mentioned in passing that she doesn't believe the vendetta anager has been addressed by either the serbs or albanians, which doesn't bode well for the future of the balkans.

she said that the only way to address vendetta after it has spiraled beyond control is through a mediator who will fairly address both sides' grievances. i didn't get a chance to ask her how you can mediate a dispute in which one side is completely implacable. how can the u.s. stop the vendetta anger of the terrorists when their grievance is our very existence and our most cherished beliefs, like equality, pluralism, freedom of religions and speech, etc.? i wish i'd had the chance to ask the question.

so anyways, sorry if i bored you with that but i thought it was very interesting and probably a profound insight. other highlights of the week included my sampling caterpillars, which were really, really gross. i also witnessed several chicken slaughterings, which were predictably gory. as part of our training we have also planted a vegetable garden, which is doing very poorly indeed. we had an embarassing session during which our tech leader went down and examined the garden, and was slightly less than enthusiastic in his assessment of our gardening skills. ah well, live and learn.

next weekend we are leaving for our site visits, i am going to be traveling to luapula province for 10 days with the other bemba speakers, so i'm not sure if i'll have email access. after i get back my shipping address is going to change as well, as i'll only have a couple of weeks left of training and then i will be posted at site where my mail will be delivered. i meant to bring the new address with me today but i of course forgot, i will try to get it out to everyone. thank you to all who have been writing, mail is undeniably the highlight of everyone's day when they receive some. i hope you all are well.

Homestay

sorry my communication has been so poor, things are extremely busy and the only chance i have to use the internet is on sundays when we come into kitwe. i am currently staying in the village of chankalamo, which is about a 30 minute bike ride from the training station in mwekera where we have classes about 3 times a week. the other three days we have our classes right in the village or one of the neighboring ones.

i'm in a homestay right now, which means i'm living with a bemba family in chankalamo. i have my own hut which is nice as some of the volunteers live in the actual houses with the family, which i guess is pretty awkward. the houses are tiny, my little hut is just a tad smaller than the family's house that holds anywhere from 5-7 people. the family is extremely nice and very excited about having me stay with them; the father speaks pretty good english but the mother speaks just about none, nor do the children.

i eat all my meals with the family except for lunch on thursdays and sundays. zambians are extremely hospitable people, and so do everything in their power to make their guests, which means me in this case, as comfortable as possible. i eat my meals with whichever male family member is around, and occasionally with the mother if there are no males available. they do not allow children to eat with the guests for fear they would do something embarassing; they apologize if i drop something, and once the mother was very embarassed when she served herself first from a particular dish because she thought i was done with it. the food is not bad, i had to choke down a chicken gizzard one night given to me as the honored guest, but fortunately we eat by candlelight so i didn't really have to look at it. usually the meal consists of rice, nshima, and a couple of steamed vegetables and once in a while some meat. nshima is a thick, paste-like entree made by boiling ground maize that everyone eats in zambia as it is very filling and extremely easy to make. it is pretty much completely tasteless and pure starch, but it is handy to use as a masking agent for something gross you're trying to eat. i've several times had to pile nshima on something that was particularly unpalatable, but that's rare. as i said, the food is mostly good.

the weather has been very nice, usually in the mid 80's during the day. there is literally no chance of it raining until the rainy season, which doesn't start for a couple of more months. it gets surprisingly cool during the evenings, i sleep underneath a blanket and with socks on and i'm still chilly sometimes when i wake up. the family provides bathing water twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening; my mother doesn't realize that i haven't built up the same level of tolerance to extreme heat that zambians have (i've seen them move coals around with their fingers, pick up metal pots that have just been used on the cooking fire with their hands and carry them into the house, and other such craziness), so the bath water is inevitably scorching. i always end up hanging out in my bathing shelter waiting for the water to cool until i work up the courage to start using it.

i haven't been sick at all yet, which i'm very grateful for. i've had several friends get pretty sick, one of the guys in my program named brad ate kapenta, a sardine-like fish, for lunch several days back. he then hopped on his bike and only made it a couple of kilometers down the road before he got badly ill. we've also inducted the inaugural member of the 'oops, i crapped my pants club,' which happened last week. apparently there's a pcv up in luapula province where i'll be stationed who is a five-time member, so the guy in our group has some catching up to do.

there has been one kid who already got malaria, even though we're on a malaria prophylaxis called mefloquine it can still sneak through. he's fine now, there are apparently some really good drugs that will kill it quickly once it's been diagnosed. we had a class on malaria, and the crux of the issue is that you don't want any part of it. essentially the parasites attack your red blood cells and end up shattering them, leaving your veins full of "minestrone soup," as the trainer put it. it was right about then that the kid next to me passed out cold, spilling his water bottle all over the place. after he was revived he explained he didn't do well with blood discussions, and that maybe the trainer could just give him a pamphlet or something. so i give him credit for a witty response to the situation. anyways, in order to test for malaria you have to do a blood slide; in order to practice, we had to lance our fingers and put blood on a microscope slide. that was my least favorite part of training so far. the trainer explained that when pricking your finger you need to do it "with intent," which translates into no pussy-footing around, just jab the thing into your finger. it was a little nerve-wracking, but i eventually got some blood flowing.

we've lost four trainees out of the group so far, it's been sad to see them go. one of them was a retired fellow who was my roommate in johannesburg and philadelphia; he was a really nice guy and very popular, so that was upsetting. but for the most part spirits are high, we're getting so much information crammed into us that it has been very hard to process so far.

Zambia Finally

well, i was able to get some (brief) internet time tonight, which was a pleasant surprise. i made it in one piece, and have spent the last two days in what is called pst, pre-service training. tomorrow we are headed up to mwekera where we will be training for 9 weeks, after which we get sworn in and are on our way to our villages. i have found out that i will be speaking bemba, which is probably the biggest language spoken in zambia, and is used primarily in luapula province which is located on the eastern side of the arm of zambia that extends to north. supposedly it is very beautiful with lots of waterfalls and mountains but no animals as they've all been killed.