Livin Life in the Village

The rains are upon us now. Its quite early this year compared to last year. They started in late November last year. I don’t mind too much since my house is water proof. I wouldn’t do last year over again….I’ll never forget the day that I walked round trip 10km in the pouring cold rain to come home and make some hot chocolate and sit in my chair when it began raining on my head in my house. That really sucked and was a low moment in my service. I love being a second year volunteer. Life is so much better. Work is flowing in and many friendships have been established. Its nice to be established here. The kids in my family are great and love them like me own. My sister Grace who just turned five is being sponsored by World Vision to go to school and we went to meet some of the sponsors about three Saturday's ago at Mtengulani. It was weird to talk with Americans again who are not Peace Corps. They were from Bethel Church in Washington state. They couldn’t believe it when they saw me walk in carrying my brother Teddy. It was a nice program. I was able to network with some of the people at World Vision and we just met this past Monday and looks like we will be collaborating on efforts such as fish farming in the future. I like partnering with NGO’s….makes my life easier when having workshops and trainings as far as getting food and supplies etc.

So the end of November I’ll be holding my first HIV/AIDs workshop in Fisheni village. I feel it’s the right time in my service to do this. It will be three days long and we are hoping to have about 35 people/couples attend. We are mostly going to be discussing prevention and treatment and the third day we are having VCT (Volunteer Counseling and Testing). I’ll even be getting tested myself so I can show them that I practice what I preach. I’m hoping to get more than 100 people tested. So that’s the next big project and I’m currently in Lusaka for IST (In-service Training). We spent the week mostly discussing our projects and talking about our COS (Close of Service) conference. I can’t believe I have less than 10 months to go. IST was good fun. Met a lot of new volunteers and had a great time out at Johnny's bar last night. Johnny's has a swimming pool that goes underneath the dance floor. Good times...wet, but good.

Then I’ll be preparing for World AIDs Day on December 1st. We are going to be sensitizing people on protecting themselves and doing a short condom demonstration at the local night club in Chipata. We’ll be reaching hundreds of people and hitting our target market.

Finally I’ll be preparing for the Field Day in Kapatamoyo. So many things going on and I’m also going to start looking into a budget to build new dorms at the High School and I may be asking for donors to contribute to that project. More information on that in the next few weeks. Overall things are great here and I’m absolutely loving it.