November 2010; Changilo

The wind and rain have returned with full force to our mountain village. Days are now regularly retired with brief but powerful downpours that send the precious topsoil, weakened by months of dehydration, into the seasonal river that cuts Changilo in half. As the agrarian calendar begins a new cycle of production and farmers make use of every clear-skied moment in the fields, I am resigned to what has become my "reading season."

This time last year, I was in the midst of my "community entry." The first assignment in the service of any Peace Corps Volunteer, get to know everything you can about your catchment area, was all at once exciting, strange, exhausting, and wet. Now I feel at home here and on most days, I just feel wet.

This is the view of my yard during the first solid rain of the year. It came out slightly better than my attempt to photograph the hail stones that followed soon after and if you look close enough you can see that my entire yard has started slowly migrating downhill. A common phenomenon in November, the erosion is largely due to the lack of ground cover around villages and is symptomatic of the desertification plaguing sub-Saharan Africa. The reasons for promoting agro-forestry species that help hold down and rejuvenate soils have never been more apparent. The early rains have no mercy for the loose dry earth but are a gift from God to the rural farmers who will count every rainfall now that the season has started.

On lighter notes, Lt. Pickles (our young vervet monkey) is terrified of the storms. I think that this must be his first experience with rain given his apparent age and the fact that he has become nearly impossible to keep out of my hut during the downpours. It gives me to opportunity to clean the wound on his foot and provides a source of entertainment. I have recently determined that it is much easier to mimic a monkey than to be mocked by one and that the phrase "monkey see, monkey do" is either a fallacy or a mistranslation and in any case not true. I will undoubtedly have more time to study the depths of this falsehood as the rains continue and I run out of books to read.

Getting out of the village for the semi-annual provincial meeting was a welcome respite from the rains (my area seems to be in some kind of meteorological anomaly as it was not raining in Serenje). Peace Corps Zambia tactfully schedules the November gathering to coincide with Thanksgiving to make sure nobody goes too stir crazy and it works. It certainly gave me something to be thankful for.