Now I've been living in the village for two whole months, and the time has flown by.
The first few weeks were kind of slow, because school hadn't started yet. I would get up in the morning, woken by the sun and the roosters, and start my charcoal brazier for some breakfast. Then I'd do dishes, and have nothing to do til it was time to cook lunch. After lunch, there was nothing to do till dinner. And after that, I went to be not to long after it got dark. Wash, rinse, repeat. So I read A LOT of books. (I've read 15 books I hadn't previously read, plus a few I already had. Thinking about copying Musi Lisa and posting a list with ratings/reviews/recommendations.) I walked around and met some people, or hung out with my host sisters. I would have done work on my house, but there's only so much organizing you can do when all your stuff is in piles or bags on the floor and you have no furniture.
Then school started and things picked up. A very early morning was added to my routine--school starts at 7am. So I would go to observe classes for the morning, and do other things (similar to the earlier routine) in the afternoon. I went to planning meetings, hung out with the teachers in the deputy head's office (our spot since there's no teacher's lounge), and watched classes that I wouldn't be teaching (like math) just to see them. It was really nice to have somewhere to be besides my house.
I ordered furniture from a local carpenter in my first week, and it started rolling in a few weeks into the term. So as I've been getting each piece, I've slowly gotten things out of bags and off the floor. I got huge incentive to especially do the latter when I found a snake curled up under one of my bags. Yikes! I also made chitenge curtains and painted some things on my walls. My mud hut is slowly looking like a home!
One other thing I've done to fill my time is work with the organization Safe Love. It's based in Lusaka, and I don't know if they're in every province (I think I remember them saying it was only in a few). I've done a few presentations with the organization in my village and at a local college. My talking point was prevention of mother-to-child transmission, and it was really rewarding to know that the people I was talking to wouldn't have been able to get that info otherwise. Unsurprisingly, there aren't a lot of resources available to people in the rural areas on the topic. So it was good to be able to meet that need.
In other news, it gets REALLY cold here. It's gets to the point that you can see your breath in the morning, and that makes for an uncomfortable bike ride. I've been told that as it gets colder in July and August it may even frost in my area. I'm not gonna lie, I wasn't expecting frost in Africa. But we're in the equivalent of winter right now: cold season. It reminds me of late fall in the states actually. It's really cold at night, but still burning hot in the afternoon. Layers are key. :) It'll get colder in July, and then we'll transistion to "hot season," where it's unbearably hot all the time. And that's the other thing. It hasn't rained in the entire two months I've been at my site. I knew it was going to happen, but it's still crazy to try to wrap my mind around the fact that it won't rain again until November.
So I won't have blog-capable internet access for another month... I still have that much left of community entry, and then I'll be able to use the provincial house occasionally and blog more often (hopefully!). So it'll be a while before I update again.
