I am finished with Community Entry and am about to head down to Lusaka for In Service Training (IST). I am so excited to be in Lusaka soon! There I will be reconnected with all the people I went through training with. After being separate for three months we are all planning on getting drinks and some good food.

Words do not explained to how happy I am to be eating non-village food soon. I literally have been dreaming about food, waking up every morning drooling (okay, I might normally do the drooling part). Last week I was reading a book based in Vegas and I had to stop reading it because it kept in talking about all the food and I just couldn’t handle it. I will say I’m not as in bad shape as some of my other Peace Corps friends. Another volunteer said she started crying when in a book she was reading the main character used an electric tea kettle. I’ve heard from multiple people who are so sick of having to start a fire for every meal they have resorted to just eating their food dry, like dry soya pieces. In the village there basically is no such thing as snack food or a quick meal. So Lusaka will be a needed break.

IST will be a total of two weeks. The first week we will be going over how our sites have been and program management. The second week will be more HIV training, and will be learning techniques on how to teach prevention. Because Peace Corps is all about sustainability we will bring a counterpart from the village to both the program management and the HIV training. That way, even after we leave Zambia someone in the village will be trained on these issues.

I believe I have setup a good foundation for my project in the community. The school committee and the community have been working tirelessly on building bricks to rebuild the school and a house for a teacher (communities are required to provide a government teacher with a house). The work we have done has slowly been paying off. The government said they were impressed with what has been done and announced the school as an primary school (this means it is officially a government school and not a community school). This opens the door to help get government funding and is the first step in getting a certified teacher in the school. I am hoping when I’m in Lusaka I can get more information about the learning standards for each grade so I can help make lesson plans with the community teacher. These standards have been very difficult for me to find, but will have a huge impact. I’m hoping by the beginning of next year, when the new Zambian school year starts, the government will place a certified teacher in the school.

Fish farming has been been a little bit slower. It is no surprise, I expected this. I did give a fish farming lesson in Bemba, which is painful and about the extent I have used Bemba in the village. So far I’ve helped farmers with site selection for new fish ponds, gave tips on how to improve the structure of existing ponds, and staked a fish pond and set up dates to do more staking (just call me Buffy the fish slayer). My main focus now is to try and find fingerlings (baby fish) for the farmers so they can stock their ponds during the start of the hot season in September.

The bee keeping has been another project I focused on. The last volunteer trained 100 people in the community on bee keeping, how to make bee hives and how to make wax products. He also found a company that would bring ten bee hives for every person and also buy the honey the hives produced (basically contract honey farming). Unfortunately this company pulled out of the deal. Which is really disappointing for the people in the community because it would have helped them immensely with financial security. However the bee keeping group has slowly been making and selling bee hives to people in other communities, so the group has been brining in a little income (not nearly at the same level). Now we are focusing on trying to make our own hives. The problem is not everyone can afford buying planks for the hives. Now, we are planning on try to and cut down our own trees to make our own wood planks for the hives. As you can imagine doing all this by hand is a ton of work. We’ve also been working on creating a business plan that fits the new direction of the bee keeping group. Hopefully we can get the bee hives made before swarming season, but this will be a difficult task.

One of my favorite things I’ve done during Community Entry is partake in the Under 5 weigh in. Once a month the the children under five get weighed, chart their growth and are given vacations (if needed). There is no clinic in my community and this is the only event where the clinic workers from the nearest clinic (1.5 hours walk away) come to the community. It is a packed event and the mothers usually get all dressed up to weigh in their kids. It’s is really funny to watch the little ones get weighed. They tie a hanging scale to a tree branch, then hook up sling that looks one of those swings for babies. About half of the kids cry when they are stuffed in the sling, and the other half just chill swinging under a tree branch while they get weighed. The babies really start crying when they see me the “musungu” (basically Zambians version of gringo). I seriously have never had so many babies cry at me than I have in Zambia. I guess stranger danger kicks in real hard when you see the musungu. One of my host sisters kids cannot even look at me with out crying, even if she sees me from a crossed the compound she starts running away crying.

During Community Entry I have learned a lot. For example, someone telling you “I live near by” it can be anywhere between a twenty minute walk to a two hour walk over a freaking Zambian mountain. Also, I guess my biking has gotten better because my host father stopped asking me if I “learned to bike in Zambia”. However my bike maintenance has not improved, while cleaning my breaks recently I somehow completely disabled my front brake, so now I only have the back ones working. But hey, brakes are for crying babies!