July 2011; Samfya and Chipembi

Cold season has arrived with a surprising velocity. It is as though all of the bitter winds from arctic climes had accelerated beyond braking speeds and brought a chill that doesn't usually exist in this part of the world by accident. In all actuality, the temperatures are far from extreme. It is more the lack of refuge and stark contrast with hot season that are an issue. These conditions appealed to my sense of self preservation and sent me North, towards the equator, to the more temperate province of Luapula for the July 4th holiday. Lake Bangweulu at Samfya was as beautiful as ever and her beaches still held the heat of a summer now gone from Mkushi's windy mountain scape. Our party shared the holiday with a few miners, some teachers from the States, and a church group engaged in mass baptism. The braii (cookout) was a highlight of the weekend with everyone chipping in on a great group meal. Max and I did our part by playing music for the party until neither they nor ourselves could stand it anymore.

After the festivities were over, I only had a few days in Changilo before heading a few hundred kilometers South-West to Chipembi. The number of new volunteers brought to serve as part of the Peace Corps Zambia family has grown with every intake. Now the training site in Chongwe is no longer sufficient to have both the Community Health Improvement Project (CHIP) and Rural Aquaculture Promotion (RAP) intakes training at the same time. Chipembi was identified as a viable training site for RAP given the local resources; an agricultural college and a girls' secondary school make up the majority of Chipembi "township." Thus the development of training center facilities were relatively simple, the challenge lay in finding adequate community resources for our trainees. Our team arrived the second week of July to address a community that had never heard of Peace Corps with the goal of turning it into a training site for 38 Americans fresh off the boat. We started by trying to find existing fish farmers in the area that could assist us with hands on training. Unfortunately, most of the ponds that we found had fallen into disrepair years ago due to poor management.

Our team located a basic school some 8 kilometers away that had semi-functional ponds nearby and they were happy to have us stock the ponds for them. Next we went to nearby villages and identified homestay families for trainees to live with during the training period. My job consisted of greeting families and explaining that: A) white folks can speak Bemba, B) white folks can eat nshima, and C) white folks don't mind living in a thatched house but we are a bit tall. I was the first white man that several of the families had met that spoke a local language so simply being around was enough to convince them that we were serious about bringing Americans to live here.

After a few weeks, Chipembi was just about ready for trainees to arrive. Our team went back to Lusaka to await their arrival (we finished with four days to spare) and I left team to go back to Changilo to a hut that would no longer be mine in one month more. We were preparing the site to train our replacements. We were getting ready to hand our lives over to complete strangers whose competency would depend largely on our own.