Peace Corps Chapter 1 Capwa (finished in Bemba)

Hi America! So it's official I made it through training and swore in on Friday as a Peace Corps Volunteer! I really can't believe it has already been two months and I am done with training. Training was a great but very tiring experience. However last week we took our final language test, we cooked American meals for our home-stay families, we moved out and said goodbye to the Zambians that have been hosting us the last two months and we moved to Lusaka for our swear in ceremony. It was a weird experience as I was moving out of my home-stay families last Thursday. As I packed all of my things, said bye to my host- dad, sister, brothers, and exchanged our final gifts I couldn't believe that I had only known them for two months. They were almost like an "RA" in a college dorm, they taught me how to cook, how to clean, how to use a Brazier to heat my bath water and were always there if I had any problems. So although it was really sad to say goodbye to them, I promised I would visit the next time I was in town (probably after our community entry in January) and then wished me well. They also gave me parting gifts of a Zambian broom (no handle but shockingly effective), a pot and a wooden cooking spoon. The gifts were so sweet and thoughtful and things I will actually use in my village.
So we left our villages and moved to Lusaka for our big ceremony. Friday was the big day- SWEAR IN!! It almost felt like my college graduation. We all got dressed up, put on make up for the first time in Zambia (one of my male friends commented- "Kelsey you look so different today, I almost don't recognize you"- I took it as a compliment? ) and we were off to the Ambassador's house. His house was beautiful and as I told my parents looked like an American house in the middle of Zambia. There was real coffee, fried chicken, wonderful scones and I must say we all ate like we were going to move to an African village for two years- Oh wait, we are. So the ceremony was great, a few people made speeches in the local language, we took an oath to protect the U.S. , and we were officially sworn in as volunteers! I almost wish we had hats or something to throw in the air like graduation but instead we just clapped and took some great pictures next to the Peace Corps flag ( pictures to come soon). So the next day we hopped on a cruiser, drove 10 hours and finally landed in Luapula, my new home! So since being here we have been hanging out, enjoying some good movies for the first time since being in country, cooking on an actual stove and enjoying each others company. Today was a crazy day of shopping for EVERYTHING for our hut. From a bed frame and mattress, to pots, pans and nails we got as much as humanly possible as this will be the only time that a cruiser comes out to our site ( the rest of the time I will be carrying it on the back of my bike). So we are finally done, just with a few things left to get tomorrow before I move to my village for good!! I have mixed emotions as this will be the first time really living on my own and even more so living with people that don't speak my language but really I am also very excited. I am excited to learn more about myself, more about how I cope with living on my own, living with people so different than I am and living in and decorating/ renovating my very first home! As my mom said in her last letter to me "Your first house will always be a mud hut in Africa" which I think is very cool. So sadly that is all that is really new for now. Tomorrow I will officially start my "Community Entry" which means I am not allowed in the Provincial house until Thanksgiving and then after that until Christmas break. This is a time where I am supposed to not do so much "work" but really just get to know my village- get to know my neighbors, my counterparts and who i will work with and who I won't work with, and get settled in my hut and make it my home! So sadly I won't be able to update my blog until Thanksgiving time but I hope everyone is settling into Fall in the U.S. it is funny because we are coming into hot season here as October is supposed to be the "hottest month of all" ( i truly can't even imagine how it could get hotter than it is now but I guess I will find out!). So thank you to everyone who has e-mailed or facebooked me congratulating me on Swear in or just saying hello. I think about everyone often and although I might not be able to respond know that every e-mail or letter or postcard that I get means the world to me! They are little connections to home that make my day every time I get one so please keep them coming! So love to everyone back home, I think about you all often. Wish me good luck in the village and when I come back I am sure I will have many stories to tell! Love to everyone and miss you all very much!
Twalamonana ( see you later, more like talk to you later)
Kelsey

I'm famous... in Kalaba!

Muli Shani everyone! ( How are you in bemba). So I know it has been a while since my last blog post and although I would love to update everyone on every minute of my life here in Zambia, there is only so much time in a day and more importantly so much time until this computer probably freezes. So since I last wrote I have been in training learning as much Bemba as possible before I am posted at my site. The most exciting has been the last two weeks though where I have been on "Second site visit". So about two weeks ago I found out I would be going to Luapula Province for my service! I was so excited because after first site visit I really fell in love with the part of the country and it was my first choice by far. Last Sunday we all packed up and headed on our 10 hour cruiser ride to Mansa, which is the provincial capital of Luapula. Every province has a provincial house where peace corps volunteers can go to kind of "recharge" from the village. It is where our "Peace Corps Provincial House" is and where I will call my home away from the village over the next two years. It has a tv, shower, computer, library and anything else I could possibly want on my down time. So we spent the night at the provincial house and then headed to a PCV Brittany's site. I had met her on second site visit and she was great so I was excited to go to her village. I and three other trainees stayed with her for second site visit. It was incredible and we got to learn so much about her site and how she works there. We also got to spend a night at the waterfalls which was beautiful and such a nice break from our busy schedule in her village. Luapula is known as the province of waterfalls and I plan to visit many of them on my free time here!

Friday however was definitely the big day where everyone got dropped off at their own sites by themselves for the first time ever! Everyone was pretty nervous to see their house, meet their counterparts ( the Zambians in their village that would be our co-workers) ,neighbors and see the village they will be living in for two years. So my village is named Kalaba, it is 35k off the tarmac which means I basically have to bike 35k to get to the main road which I am oddly excited about and it is truly in the "African Bush". I am also what Peace Corps calls a "first generation" which means no other Peace Corps volunteer has lived in my village and I am most definitely the first white person that has lived in Kalaba, much less the first white person most of these people have ever seen. So I was to stay in Kalaba from Friday until Tuesday and wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do or who I was supposed to meet. Well was I in store for a surprise, the moment I got there my counterparts and everyone else it seemed in the village came to greet me and work on my house. It was a whirlwind of a few days which included very high highs and a few lows (which included me trying to climb up an ant hill beside my house to try and get cell phone service only to see the whole village staring at me like I was a crazy person). All in all Kalaba was great and I am excited to go back there in a few weeks and start working. They are a very active community but they have a lot of issues ( like having no clean water source, no nurse to staff the clinic) that I am excited to work on.
So many of you may be wondering what the title of my blog post is about. I wanted to give you all one little story from Kalaba so you could get a glimpse into my life. So Sunday is most people's day to rest and go to Church as most Zambians are very religious Christians. So I went to Church ( as I promised I would go to all of the Church's in Kalaba because as I explained to my counterparts Zambia doesn't have "the Church of the Jews"), and then my town was playing in a soccer game. I was very excited to go as my brother was an excellent goal keeper in High School and played soccer his whole life ( shout out to you B), and I truly enjoy watching soccer. So we get to the soccer game and this is when I realize I am famous. Everyone basically turns and stops what they are doing to stare at me ( Zambians arent afraid to stare for prolong periods of time). Then I sat down with my counterparts and was swarmed on both sides with children and adults alike who truly just wanted to sit near me. They stared a little more and then when I spoke my little Bemba I thought they were going to fall on the ground. Not only was I white but I spoke their language, how was this possible!? So the game was great although it did end in a tie (0-0) it was so much fun and I got a small bit of what Brad and Angelina feel ( without the cameras of course). It was a great time and I just had to laugh to myself and wish that all of you were here to watch my famous status in Kalaba.

So sorry this is shorter than some of you may hoped. I am exhausted from a physically and emotionally draining few weeks of speaking only Bemba and broken english, seeing what a true Zambian clinic looked like and how many problems it faces, and seeing my very own hut for the first time! So now I am back in Mansa and looking forward to making some mexican food and speaking english for a while. Tomorrow we go back to Lusaka where we will have a two day counterpart workshop with our counterparts from the village and then it is back to my homestay family in Chongwe who I truly do miss! So only two weeks of training left after that, I really can't believe how time has flown by but now I am just excited to get back to Kalaba and start my real work.

Love to everyone back home. For all of my fellow chosen people Happy New Year and have a easy fast if I can't update before Yom Kippur. Everyone else I send my love to you and thanks for all of the sweet e-mails and messages. I don't have barely any phone network in my village except for under a few trees so I will try and get back to all of your e-mails as soon as I can.

Mwende Bwino ( travel safe)

Kelsey

Mwapoleni Mukwai!

Mwapoleni Mukwai- very excited to have my first Bemba title for my blog! Mwapoleni Mukwai is the greeting in Bemba for when you first meet someone or haven't seen someone in a long time. Since I have been gone for almost a month now I thought it was an appropriate title. So first and foremost I want to thank everyone who has written or e-mailed me over the last few weeks. For those of you who don't know I do have an internet phone here and can receive e-mails on my phone just about everyday. Sadly I can not respond to as many or as long as I would like as they haven't quite gotten the "crackberry" in Zambia and I still have a normal phone with a normal keypad, thus writing is quite a challenge. However do know that for those of you that send me an e-mail I will at least write back with a little thank you!
So now that the logistics are out of the way back to the important stuff! So I have been in Zambia for about three weeks now and I am loving every minute of it. There is so much to catch everyone up on but I will start with where I left off on my first site visit. So to summarize it was wonderful! I stayed with a CHIP volunteer that was just hitting her one year mark and she was great. Shockingly enough she was from Atlanta and went to UNCW for college so we hit it off from the start. After our long journey we arrived in her village and her and her two other PCV friends went on to host a wonderful three days together. We cooked pasta, tacos and rice and soya, we asked her and her friends about a million questions about their service and just tried to soak up every minute. The next day she took us to her NHC (Neighborhood Health Committee) where they were painting a new building they had just gotten as well as putting up posters and planning for a VCT event ( Voluntary Counseling and Testing- aka HIV/AIDS testing) that was coming to her village soon. They were all so sweet to us and all of the bamaayos ( mothers) cooked us a typical Zambian feast, it was about enough food to feed an army even though there were only four of us girls. So I wish I could give you more of a minute by minute of my time but basically the next day we went to this Lake near where the PCV lived and relaxed and asked more and more questions. Oh and I had my first official hitching experience- we hitched on the back of a truck filled with rocks, no wonder the ride was free it was not the most comfortable I've had!
So now back to today. So I have been living with my host family for two weeks now and love love them! So my family is composed of my baamayo (mom) my dad, three brothers and a sister. I am the 7th PCV they have hosted so I think they are basically pros by now. I live in a small small round mud hut. I have a mattress on the floor ( of course with my mosquito net covering me) as well as two small tables and my water filter. There is not much room for anything else but at the end of a long day of training it is my favorite place to come back to. I live in the middle of my families compound which includes their house ( small mud house with a tin roof) and a few other small huts for cooking, bathing, and the other boys to sleep. They speak a little English so it that has made adjusting a bit easier but they are insistent on me learning Bemba so they talk to me and study with me almost every night. As for my "typical day" it is a little hard to describe because in Peace Corps nothing is "typical" or "uniform" and everything is scheduled to change! However to generalize Monday through Friday I wake up around 7 am and I am at language training in my village by 8. My language class is just me and one other girl so the one on one attention is wonderful. Also it is in the village which makes it easier when we need to practice our Bemba, we just walk right out the door! So language is from about 8-12 and then I walk home to have lunch with my family ( probably Shima, a protein and a vegetable, probably doused in oil and salt- Zambians LOVE oil and salt). By 2:00 pm or 14:00 hours I am at the training center for our technical training. Our technical training is anything from HIV/AIDS education, Malaria training, guest speakers or cultural programs. Then by 5:00 we are usually done, just in enough time to bike home before it gets dark, take a bucket bath ( which I have learned to love very quickly), sit around the Brazier and watch my bamaayo cook dinner, eat and I am in my hut by 8:00 pm asleep by 9 or 10. So that is my day in a nutshell. On Saturdays we have half days and Sundays we have free. Last Sunday I went to my first Zambian funeral with my bamaayo. It was one of the most interesting and overwhelming experiences I have had yet but I am so glad I went. The people here are so honest and open about their emotions that they just wail and wail and nobody tries to stop them. It was almost a freeing experience in some sense and I think it is something that you don't see in the West very often.

So I know this is an extremely long post but I feel like everyday I learn something new and experience something completely out of the norm. So for now all I can say is that I am truly loving Zambia, the people are the most accommodating and hospitable people I have ever met. They treat me like their daughter even if we have just met on the street and they would offer me dinner even if they didn't have enough to feed their own family. Their country is beautiful and everyday all I have to do is look at the Zambian sky and know I am doing the right thing. Whether it is in the morning as the sun is coming up and the sky seems to go on forever , my bike ride home as the sun is setting and the most beautiful colors can be seen, or at night before bed as I brush my teeth under the most stars I have ever witnessed in my life, the Zambian sky is incredible. So I guess that is it for now! I don't know how often I will get internet or how much I will be able to update the blog but I promise anytime I get near a computer, a blog will be posted!

So I love and miss everyone very much and if I don't get to post in the next few weeks Happy Birthday to all those back home and know that I will be thinking about you on your special days!
All my love, Ba Cas ( what my host family calls me, "Ba" is a term of respect and Cas is their version of Kelsey since they can't pronounce my name).

I made it... finally!

Hi everyone. I can now say I am officially writing you from Zambia! So the journey so far has been that, quite a journey. We had our pre-orientation in Atlanta where everyone met, we got our yellow fever shots and then got to the airport Wednesday night. Unfortunately our flight left an hour late from Atlanta and then was delayed a bit more in the air, giving us approximately 20 minutes to get 60 people, half of which didn't have boarding passes (stupid delta) onto our connection to Lusaka, obviously that didn't happen. So we spent a few hours in the Johannesburg airport trying to talk to everyone from Peace Corps in D.C. to Peace Corps in Zambia to the U.S. Embassy in South Africa to try and figure out our little pickle. Around midnight Zambia time (we arrived around 615pm) we finally got the message to get a hotel and fly out the next morning. In the Peace Corps spirit, that didn't happen quite as planned either. Half of our group that was supposed to fly out at a 10 am flight was bumped to a 7 pm flight and the other half got on the plane.. we thought the peace corps gods were testing us at this point, but still remained in high spirits! So we spent another day in the Johannesburg airport, needless to say if you ever are there I can tell you where all of the good napping places can be found! But we enjoyed our last few "western meals" and got on the plane and arrived in Lusaka last night around 9pm to a welcoming peace corps staff! It was so nice to finally be in Zambia and breath in Zambian air. We got into our government hostel, had a few Zambian beers and fell into our beds under our mosquito nets (which are quite whimsical if I do say so!)

So today was finally the beginning of training! We had a few intro sessions about medicine (started my malaria meds today, bring on the crazy dreams!) and then broke into our two groups- Community Health and Rural Aquaculture ( I am health but my program is called Community Health Improvement Project (CHIP) so they call us Fish and CHIPS, get it? ) So we had an overview with two wonderful women from CHIP about what we will be doing and our first site visit which starts Monday! So I found out two really exciting things. First, I will be learning BEMBA as my language! It is the most spoken language in Zambia and means I will either be placed in the Northern, Central or Luapula province, I am beyond excited to start learning. Secondly I learned that for my site visit I get to go to Luapula! Two other girls and I from Health along with 4 people from Fish will hop in our land cruisers on Monday morning ( at 6 am!) and head 8 hours north to Luapula ( the fish people have to go 15 hours so we got lucky!) Everyone has said how beautiful Luapula is and refer to it as the "Water province" because it is known for all of its beautiful waterfalls and rivers. It is in the north western part of Zambia, bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo ( but no worries mom we are completely safe!)We get in Monday night and stay until Thursday morning when we head back to Lusaka. I am so so excited to finally get to the African Bush and see how another CHIP volunteer lives, and she speaks Bemba so I can get a jump start on my language! So right now we all just went grocery shopping for our site visits ( smores and pasta two of my favorites on the list) and now we have some free time in the local "mall" to walk around. Tomorrow is another day of shots and measurements for our bikes, another thing I am extremely looking forward to, not the shots but the bike riding!

So I know this is an extremely long first post but I just feel like there is so much to catch everyone up on! So much happens in a day here and it is all so exciting and amazing. I also forget to say I had my first meal of nshima ( corn maize) with some greens ( look kind of like collard greens) and a few wonderful zambian bananas ( they are much sweeter than the ones in the U.S.). So I am considering going back to being a vegetarian while I'm here as Zambians eat mostly red meat ( kidneys as one of the common meals) if meat at all and I think it might make things a bit simpler. So we will see, it is only day 1 really and so much has already happened!

I should get my phone soon and it is supposed to have internet so feel free to send me some e-mails with updates on everyone!

Ok love to everyone and I hope you enjoyed my first real post! Sorry again about any misspelled words or crazy sentences, Zambian internet isn't quite as fast as in the U.S.!

Africa, here I come..

So the day has finally come, I am in Atlanta, GA and about to head to my "pre-orientation departure" which will take place here over the next day and a half. I will head there at noon today, have a few lectures on "what to expect" (even though I have read every book and blog that has ever been written about what to expect), and then tomorrow it's vaccinations and off to the airport! My emotions right now are rushing through me a thousand miles a minute. I am anxious, nervous, excited, and so much more. I have been talking and thinking about this day for over a year now and can't believe it is finally here. I just wanted to take a quick minute to thank everyone who has had coffee, dinner, drinks or just a phone call with me over the past few weeks. You have all been so supportive and I can't tell you how comforting it has been. I know we will all grow and change throughout the next two years and I wish everyone nothing but the best. Once I get to Zambia I will probably have limited internet access during training but will try to update my blog as soon as I can.

Thank you all again for everything, especially to my family who has been my backbone throughout this entire process.

Lots of love to everyone.

Kelsey

Here goes nothing..

Hi everyone and welcome to my first ever blog! Although I haven't been one of the keenest or most knowledgeable about the blog world, I thought it was only fitting to have one while I am gone. As most of you know, I am leaving on July 20, 2010 for my Peace Corps Service in Zambia, Africa. I will be serving as a "Community Health Development Extensionist" which involves educating rural Zambians about HIV/AIDS. I am so excited for this journey to begin as it has been a long time coming.

I began applying to the Peace Corps in April 2009. After many medical reviews, shots, tests, appointments, legal clearances etc., I was finally medically cleared on June 9, 2010. On June 10, 2010 I got the call I had been waiting on for over a year. I was officially offered an "invitation to serve" in Zambia. Since then it has been a whirlwind of researching Zambia, reading blogs, watching youtube videos and talking to everyone who has ever been to Zambia or knows anything about Zambia (thanks to mom!). So now I am two weeks out and finally back home in Greensboro, North Carolina. I will be spending time with my family and getting ready for this incredible journey ahead of me.

Although there is still a lot of unknown details about my Peace Corps service (what village I will be living in, what language I will be speaking, how close I will be to the surrounding volunteers, etc.) I will find out all of these details after my first 9 weeks of training in country. However this is what I do know so far:

1. I will be living in a mud hut with a thatched roof and no electricity or running water. Yes, I know you all think I am crazy but I am really looking forward to living a life completely opposite of the one I have always known.

2. I will be living with a host family during my first nine weeks of training. During training my days will be filled with Language training (there are six languages throughout the country which you get to choose once you get there), health education and cultural education.

3. My main mode of transportation will be an off-road bike which Peace Corps provides for me. I could be as far as 40-60km to the nearest village or town so I am thinking I will be a fantastic biker by the end of my service!

4. I will be getting a cell phone once in Zambia with texting abilities being the cheapest way of communication. However I probably will only have Internet services once every few weeks (also not completely known until I get there). So the best way to contact me is by writing me the old fashion way! My address during training is posted on the side of my blog and I will update it with a local one once I get to my village.

I think that is all of the details for now. So I hope everyone enjoys the blog and are able to get a little sneak peak into my new Zambian life!

Love to everyone who has been with me on this rollercoaster of a journey. There will be good blogs and sad blogs I am sure, so hang in there with me and enjoy the ride!