Sorry to take so long getting back to
you. It's been a bit busy throughout the holidays and I got a bit
lazy keeping up with the blog.
I guess the biggest news is that I
finally got a dog. I had always wanted to get one here, but I never
felt that it was a good time, or that I'd be able to take care of it
well enough. Diana had 3 stray puppies that found their way into her
house and just like the kitten I ended up with, she began feeding
them, and of course we got attached to the little things. One ended
up running off, leaving a white one with spots and a brown one that
was obviously the runt. We named them “Odi” and “Kalibu”. In
Bemba when you approach a house or something it's customary to begin
with saying “Odi”, asking if you are welcome to come in. The
reply, if it is in fact okay to approach, is “Kalibu”. We got a
lot of laughs telling villagers their names.
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| Odi posing in front of my herb garden. |
I ended up taking Odi home with me in a
basket, 43 kilometers, a marathon. On the way I stopped by a market
and bought a goat's foot for 1 Kwacha, about 20 cents. I arranged my
closest, Innocent, neighbor to help feed her, I'd give him extra food
each month, to allow more leftovers for Odi. I supply the treats,
kapenta and cisense (pronounced chi-cent-say), aka. baby fish. She's
growing fast and learning sort of. She can play fetch with a tennis
ball, but gets distracted easy. She steals things my neighbors leave
around, including cups, hats, rags, and tools. I have to go return
these throughout the day. Although she's beginning to understand that
she's not allowed inside, she still likes to play with my cat, Mama.
But, Mama does not want to play and groans and hisses and swats at
Odi. In response, Odi thinks this is a fun game, and tries to play
more. Mama gets treed a lot.
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| Odi "playing" with Mama |
I've begun taking Odi on my bike rides
around the villages, she's a bit slow, but can do 13 kilometers in a
day, pretty good for a little puppy.
For a quick holiday vacation I went up
to Kapishya Hot Springs, in Northern Province. A group of us almost
went during our Easter vacation last year, but it didn't work out.
The place was amazing. A small river runs along the lodge, feeding
the river is a small hot spring. The land has been worked by the
owner for the past decade or so. Almost anything will grow there, so
I spent quite a while wandering their gardens. As a parting gift, the
owner, Mark Harvey, gave me a ton of seeds and cuttings, as well as
about 10 coffee seedlings to give to one of my farmers.
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| Kapishya Hot Springs |
Just a kilometer or so away from the
lodge is a rocky hilly area. For thousands of years, the area was
inhabited with hunter gatherers, who left behind, among stone tools
and other artifacts, rock paintings. I was given directions, and
ended up finding 3 sites nearby. The concentric circles and the
circle with the lines radiating is supposed to represent weather. The
other looks to be a tiger fish.
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| Tigerfish painting |
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| No one has done real scientific research on these specific paintings, but the estimates are something like 20,000 years old. |
Coming back to the village next week
I'll be working on a few projects. I bought some seeds to begin a
Positive Living Group. I forget if I've mentioned this before, but I
hope to create a group of about 10 people who are motivated only by
the idea that a group will get together once a week and talk about
HIV/AIDS, creating a place for anyone (infected or not) to learn
about HIV. The group will meet at their garden, weeding, digging, and
talking. The gardens will create a bit of income for the members, and
I have a few books that can help guide our meetings. I don't want to
plan out too much of how the group will be months from now. Here, you
can never predict exactly what will happen, so we as a group will
figure out how we want to continue.
I've also begun a project for myself.
As I travel I'm always looking for unique carvings and statues. A lot
of what you can find here in Zambia was not made here. Finding
locally made things is difficult. So, I decided I'd make them myself.
I bought some chisels and sandpaper from a hardware store, and found
some wood around my house that should work nicely. My first project
is an African wild dog. I thought I was going to get a good one in
Tanzania. I found a carver at a small shop. He said he already had a
dog carving, but it wasn't quite right. I showed him a few pictures I
had taken of wild dogs in Botswana, and he said he could do it. I
came back a few days later, and all he had done was paint over it,
saying he had sold the other and made a new one. Hah.
I believe my fish farming group is also
about to begin redistributing fish throughout their ponds. When the
fingerlings were delivered earlier last year, not all that were
supposed to be delivered were given, many died, and some probably
escaped. The surviving fish now have grown and begun breeding. So now
we can start moving the babies to new ponds to let them grow. The
group was supposed to be building a housing structure for their pigs,
but that has fallen through. We will have to wait until the rainy
season ends to start construction.
This year I was finally ready for my
garden and the rainy season. I have been having trouble getting
pepper and tomato seeds to germinate, so I bought a pack for a few of
my good gardeners, who gave me back a few of the ones they got to
grow. I transplanted those to my garden and they seem to be growing
well. I also have pumpkin, watermelon, pole beans, green/spring
onion, garlic, coriander, hot pepper, maize, sunflower, and mint. A
friend gave me some poly pots to grow tree seedlings in. I've planted
some mango, avocado, red mahogany, moringa, and citrus. I had some
pawpaw seeds I planted several months ago, but forgot about them.
About 20 of them have sprouted, so I've moved those to poly pots as
well. Hopefully I will have enough trees to give each family in my
village a few by the time I leave in September.
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Mabote, from the water pump. The trail going straight forward leads to my hut. |
Although the rains can mess up your day
because you never know when they might come or for how long, rainy
season is by far my favorite season. I love falling asleep to the
sound of rain, and on the nights it isn't raining there is a symphony
of insects and frogs all around. Some nights it's storming all around
me, but the sky is perfectly clear above my hut, so I can watch the
stars and flashes of lightning off in the distance. Everything grows
in the rainy season, so the village has turned lush and green. A wall
of grass is slowly surrounding my site, a blanket of green covers
what was dead dry earth. Mangoes still drop throughout the night,
giving me breakfast for the cool morning.
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| Lightning over Lake Bangweulu |
