Happy Holidays!

Merry Christmas everyone! This year I biked to some waterfalls by my site and spent the day with a few friends. It was beautiful there and really nice being around all that nature. It wasn't Christmas like we have in the states, but definitely a great way to spend the holiday. Then it was back to the village until the beginning of January when I started my vacation. We were going to Livingstone, on the other end of the country. The first day I traveled to Mpika (took about 6 hours). Then the next day we traveled from Mpika to Lusaka (about 8 hours) and stayed the night. The 3rd day we finally reached Livingstone! After another short 8 hour drive.

We were there for about a week and had a blast! We went on safari and saw all kinds of animals. We saw hippos, lions, red lechwe, dung beetles, the fish eagle, lions, elephants, giraffes, and much much more. One of the most exciting things that I saw was an elephant chase after some lion cubs.

We spent a day at Victoria Falls, went to the market a few times, and went to High Tea at the Royal Livingstone. High tea is a really fancy hotel and at high tea they serve all kinds of fancy pastries, cakes, tea sandwiches, quiches, and puddings. I couldn't get enough good food!

The week was over way too fast and then we began the long trip back up north. On the way back we spent a few days in Lusaka (the capital) and I finally got new glasses and my work permit.

G.L.O.W. Girls

A couple weeks ago I attended my first G.L.O.W. Camp. Its an event that's put on by Peace Corps every years for girls 13 to 18 to teach them women's empowerment. Each volunteer brings two girls and a teacher from their respective villages. Then everyone spends one week at the camp while the volunteers talk about HIV awareness, family planning, sugar daddies, boyfriends, and planning for the future. Its only a start to what these girls need to learn, but in just one week you could see these things making a difference in the girl's lives and attitudes at camp. It wasn't all just sitting there learning. We also played sports and games, did arts and crafts, and danced. I helped another volunteer do her health talks. We made a great team I would say. Since we are both health volunteers we did health talks on: puberty, the male and female anatomy, family planning, and quickly discussed pregnancy. This next term we are supposed to go back and create a G.L.O.W. Club in our schools. A lot of these tend to fail, but I have high hopes for my school. The teacher I brought was the most active in the sessions and I could tell that these topics were also very important to her. The girl I brought, Matilda, doesn't speak much English and I think that was part of the reason why she was so shy in the beginning. But it was great to see her come out of her shell and start interacting with the other girls. She came alive when it was time to play sports. It was really a fantastic thing to watch.

The Whole Glow Camp!

Megan and I doing our health talk.

The girls playing sports. Matilda is the girl in the skirt running (front right)

World AIDS Day

This one is a little old. I'm trying to catch up on some blog entries.

December 1 was World AIDS Day. I wanted to have a celebration in my village. So I set up a football tournament (with the help of my clinic officer) to have the championship game play on World AIDS Day and all the other games played the proceeding weeks. Then I went to the school asking them to work on several skits and traditional dancing. Then I was going to do some health talks with my counterpart Gilbert. I wanted all the entertainment to come from the village. To show them that this celebration is something that they are able to do in future years. My village also had a few VCT (Voluntary Counseling and Testing) counselors to do HIV testing. The event was going to take place on Sunday 1 December in the afternoon, after church.

The day of the event things didn't go as smoothly as planned. The two teams that won the semifinals showed up....then two more. Turns out that due to communication problems two other teams showed up ready to play. So we had to completely change the program and squeeze in two football games instead of one. Then only the traditional dancers showed up from the school so no skits were done.  Then my counterpart finally let me know that he was playing in the football tournament and didn't want to do the health talks because he was worried that if he had done the health talks and his team won people would claim that there was fowl play.

I quickly found a new translator and gave a few health talks and tried to make sure people knew why this event was happening. Then I was busy checking up on everything: the counselors, traditional dancing, and football tournament. Despite the challenges things went smoothly and I heard a lot of positive feedback from my villagers.