Hello all and Happy Thanksgiving!!!
I can't believe it is already thanksgiving yet again. And it is so strange to be at the Peace Corps house to celebrate with about 40 other volunteers and now being considered one of the old and vetern volunteers. It seems like just yesterday I was the newbie asking all sorts of questions!!
Life in the vill has been going well. It is caterpillar season again meaning that most of my neighbors spend every morning out in the bush collecting the caterpillars and then their afternoons squeezing out the insides and cooking them and preparing to sell them by the gallon. It is quite the long and smelly process I must say and I dont really enjoy the afternoons when the wind blows the smell directly into my house. Yuck!
I have also been busy preparing my house for the second season of rains. I have bought about 10 bundles of grass and I have had members of the Kumbi NHC around a couple times to put it on the house and stop the giant leaks that were coming in with even the slightest of rain. So far since the put it up I am happy to report my house remains dry :)
Right now I am once again in the preparing stages of some things. On 1 December is World AIDS Day and this year we are having a celebration in my village. It first started out as just going to be a graduation type ceremony for my soccer programs I have been meeting with since the end of September, but now it has turned into much more than that. The plan includes to start in the morning with a march (featuring a homemade banner) starting at the clinic, down through the shops, and to the soccer field, having some role plays, poems and songs performed by the students, a booth set up by the clinic, counsellers available to do HIV testing on anyone who is wanting to know their status (which we are hoping many will want to) and then a soccer tournament and a netball tournament for the girls. And as an incentive we will be having someone make scones and a zambian maize drink called munkoyo available at the end. So since I came to Kasama on Tuesday I have been running around and calling around buying things and in search of freebies from the district health office and other shops. I dont really know how it turned into such this big event, but here is to hoping it will all go well!!
Then a few days after I will be taking two grade 8 girls and one female teacher at my school to Camp GLOW, which is a weeklong girls empowement camp. We will be teaching the girls about many things including confidence and motivation, assertiveness, boyfriend and peer pressure, preventing pregnancy and HIV, and sugar daddies. We will also be doing a sport olympics kind of thing and arts and crafts. A lot of planning has been going into the week and I really think it will be a great experience and I am really looking forward to it.
So it is a busy and fun time for me lately!!! Once I finish the two big events I will make sure to put up an update of how it went and also some pictures.
Keep sending letters, emails, facebook messages and anything because I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to hear from my friends and family back in the old US of A.
