.a little slice of paradise.

We all packed up and left Nkhata Bay at 6 a.m. Monday morning, September 1st. I got back to my village Friday evening, September 5th. That's African transport for you in a nutshell. :)

Following a week of in-service traning in Lusaka, a group of us headed east to Lake Malawi. We all split up and basically said, 'meet ya there!'. It felt a little like rat race at times when we would see eachother on the road, knowing that the few you just passed on the side of the road had every chance of passing you up later in the day. But the Gods of hitch-hiking were smiling on Kai, Davy, and me because we ended up getting a sweet ride with a couple German World Bank guys who drove us all the way from a big bridge in the eastern province of Zambia to Lilongwe, the capital city of Malawi. They had stayed in a Holiday Inn in the Lusaka the night before and even offered us pastries they had taken from the continental breakfast earlier that morning when we all stopped for a lunch break on the side of the road. They helped us to swiftly cross the border and dropped us off right outside the Lilongwe Peace Corps house before dark. And the best part is they wouldn't accept any money so we literally traveled halfway across Zambia and into Malawi for FREE. Another part of our group showed up in Lilongwe later that night and although they looked a little more frazzled from travel and had spent more money they definitely had some crazy stories from the day.

We got to know some Malawian Peace Corps volunteers who were also staying at the PC house in Lilongwe, and they seemed pretty friendly. They helped us out a lot with how to get from Lilongwe to Nkhata Bay and also told us approximate costs since we all know there would be some minibus price inflation for the 'musungus'. Malawi is a poorer country than Zambia and everything there is incredibly cheap. Traveling to Malawi for vacation is popular among Zambian PCVs for that reason. However, even though the Malawian PCVs can pretty much go to the lake whenever they want, they don't receive as high of a living allowance as we do so it's a lot more expensive for them to travel to Zambia than it is for us to travel to Malawi. Also, visas into Malawi are free while a visa into Zambia costs about $150.

The 7 of us set out early the next morning for the lake, hopping from minibus to minibus along the way. At our last minibus station before reaching our final destination, we loaded our final van carlsberg in hand to celebrate the last stretch of 2 loooong days of travel and our first time out of the country in 6 months.

Nkhata Bay is nestled into rolling, rocky foothills on the northern edge of Lake Malawi. The water is a mediterranean blue that fools you into thinking its an ocean. The faintest hint of a boundary is in the faded outline of the mountains of Tanzania and Mozambique in the distance on a clear day. Most days, however, the lake and sky blur out the horizon line and the dug-out canoes become distant specks suspended mid-air.

Our group of 12 stayed in a beach house right on the lake, complete with a big deck overlooking the water ideal for both sun-bathing and star-gazing. Actually, a few of us only slept in our rooms for one night. Every other night we pulled our mattresses out onto the deck and fell asleep under the stars. Seeing the lights of the canoes full of fishermen at night light up the lake made braving the gnats and mosquitoes worth it. I didn't even mind being woken up every morning around 4 to the singing and chattering Malawian fishermen hauling in their boats full of that night's catch.

Nkhata bay is intriguing in that the lodges for travellers are dotted throughout the bay among the homes of the villagers. A backpacker is likely to feel that they are experiencing the "true Malawi" in a sense, and the villagers are able to benefit directly from tourism. Yet after living for 6 months in a village I was struck by the difference between this Malawian village on a hill and my village in a remote Northern corner of Zambia. The rural community of which I have become a part in Lufila has remained virtually untouched by the tourist industry and direct foreign contact in general. I am a novelty as I stroll down the main street (or dirt road if you want to be technical) because I am probably one of the first if not the first white person who has ventured to their community, let alone living there as they do for 2 years. Although tourism has helped the indigenous community in Nkhata Bay to flourish, I found myself feeling eager to get back 'home' to my village, to Africans who remain untainted by tourism. Malawians in Nkhata Bay are very friendly, but you can tell they are used to 'pleasing' foreigners, always knowing the right jokes to tell or what to say to make the sale. I missed the genuine friendliness of Zambians; the pure eagerness to get to know you as well as teach you their culture. Their smile hasn't fallen on backpackers from around the world, but instead, teeth or no teeth, illustrates a simple happiness to greet you. And if you greet them in their tribal language? Then it's as if you just handed them a million kwacha. :)

So as I wrote before, I was planning to get SCUBA certified in Malawi, and to my own surprise I actually went through with it. If I had known how tough it was actually going to be I might not have shown up for class Monday morning. I started to conquer one fear while another was magnified. Turns out breathing from a tank underwater goes against all intuition; remembering to relax, breathe slowly, and not freak out is the hardest part of scuba diving. I was that girl who made the instructors check her respirator themselves before diving and who literally cut off the cirulation in the instructors hand while going through a semi panic attack on the floor of Lake Malawi. My fear of deep water and enclosed spaces collided and the first dives we did were 2 of the most unenjoyable experiences I've ever had. I was ready to throw in the towel after day 2 but my extreme stubborness came to the rescue and by the fifth dive on the last day I was loving seeing all the beautiful fishies and was learning to trick my mind into not thinking about the fact that my only source of air was a tank strapped to my back. My fear of fish began to fade, as they were a welcome distraction to thinking too hard about my breathing. As for our group, 8 hours of class and diving a day paid off when we all passed and receieved our certifications on day 4. Although our grace underwater could use some work (lots of whacking eachother in the head with flippers) we all stuck it out and are already planning to dive in places like Mozambique and Zanzibar. Throughout the week, our instructors kept tabs on what they referred to as 'beer points'. If someone forgot to lay their tank down on its side before walking away from it, and one of them noticed, that person earned 1 beer point and at the end of the week had to buy everyone a round of beer. Does it surprise you that yours truly paid for drinks on the last day after class? :) Although we were pumped about getting certified, the 5 of us were ready to spend our remaining 3 days in Malawi soaking up the sun with our already lobster-red friends. On Saturday we all rented a boat. We got to feed some Fish Eagles and do some cliff-jumping before heading to a sandy inlet where we snorkeled a little bit and tried our hand at paddling a dug-out wooden canoe. Needless to say it's way harder than it looks and we all looked absolutely ridiculous. After enjoying a home-cooked lunch on the beach we headed back to our house to get ready for the Nkhata Bay night life. We were a pretty big group and definitely brought the party wherever we went. The owner of a neighboring lodge told me the craziest people he's had stay at his lodge have been Peace Corps Zambia volunteers. Makes sense I guess....Zambia is one of the only remaining Peace Corps countries that is truly rural, and we tend to take advantage of our time out of the bush-bush. Even most Malawi PCVs have electricity and running water. Not a single Zam volunteer has either. Long story short, the 12 of us left Malawi early Monday morning looking and feeling pretty worse for the wear. Luckily we had a couple days to 'sleep' on transport. We departed in our minibus alrady planning to make it back sometime during the remainder of our service. It was a wonderful vacation in a breathtakingly beautiful part of Africa, but we were ready to get back home to village life and 10 hours of sleep a night. :)

Due to some safety and security issues in my district, my really good friend Becky had to leave Mpika and move to Luapula Province on Thursday. Danielle, Jeanna, and I helped her pack. It was a really sad day to see her go. She has been a huge support for me, especially during my struggles in the very beginning. And she's my fellow minnesota soccer girl. :) I am hopping to visit her at ther new site in Mansa district in a few weeks. Hannah, an amazing volunteer in Mpika who had been here for about a year and a half was forced to end her service and move back to America for the same security reasons. We will miss her tons but I hope everything works out for her back in the land where everything works...

So it's back to village life for me. I missed it. Becky brought me back some starbucks coffee grounds from America (she recently went back for a wedding in MN), and I spend a good 5 minutes every morning just inhaling the aroma of the grounds. :) Plus my mom sent me about a 2-year supply of peanut m&m's so I'm in heaven. I can officially start working now, so I'm gong to be busy working with the neighborhood health committees (and forming or reforming them in most cases) as well as continuing to work with community leaders. The in-charge/midwife at the clinic is my counterpart/colleague so I discuss most of what I plan to do with him. He is extremely knowledgeable about health care in Zambia and a big soccer fan so I enjoy stopping by the clinic to talk with him. While basically running the clinic by himself, he manages also to study for further courses he is taking in Kasama. He always watches out for me, too, and if I have any problems in my village, such as thievery, he is the first person I go to. One frustration I am beginning to have is that no one can give me a straight answer as to the activity ( or inactivity for that matter) of my neighborhood health committees. Ba Chikwaba, my counterparrt, tells me none have more than 4-5 members, but the chairperson of each committee tells me they have 15 members (the ideal number). hmmm.... So I wrote bush notes to each chairperson and even hand-delivered some by bike letting them know I'd like to meet with their NHC's as soon as possible. At this point I am waiting to hear back from them. Hopefully by next month I'll have had a chance to meet with all 7 NHCs and assess whether they need to hold community meetings to elect more/new members. I feel a little rushed to get the ball rolling with them as soon as possible because rainy season is fast approaching and the pace of life slows down even more come November.

At this point I should probably explain a little more clearly my job and role as a CAHP project volunteer in Lufila. I think I tried to explain it a few months ago but it has even become more clearly definied for me since I arrived in Zambia 7 months ago. Here's a metaphor: pricture me as the hand holding the back of the bike seat and the NHCs are learning to ride the bike. I teach and support them, even giving them a little motivational push until ultimately they are on their own. My job is all about education and empowerment of the NHCs. Their role is to address the healthcare needs of their respective villages and my role is to build their capacity to do so. In the Zambian Ministry of Health structure, the ministry itself is in charge of 9 provinces. Those 9 provincial health offices oversee 72 district health offices. Within each district there are about 25 rural health centers (or gov't. clinics), each of which serves a catchment area that ideally contains 3-20 active neighborhood health committees. Decentralization of health care in Zambia aims to allow this hierarchy to work from the ground up, with NHCs communicating needs and issues as well as reporting on healthcare activity to their RHC (rural health center), who then reports to the district, and on and on up the ladder. In a perfect Zambian world this system would empower villagers in rural areas to work within their communities to address health issues...but of course the system is flawed. Frustrations occur during frequent breakdowns in communication and many NHC members are left understandably feeling powerless and insignificant. Their membership on the NHC is completely voluntary yet still a status symbol within their community. Some members are extremely motivated to address the needs of their community while others view membership as a sort of popularity contest. As I stated before, I am currently experiencing some frustrations with the NHCs in my clinic's catchment area because the committees were supposed to be formed 5 years ago and they have gone through quite a bit of training, yet not all members are active and many NHC communities have not been sensitized to the role of the NHC. A training is useless unless there are enough NHC members to implement the skills they learned in the training in their communities. I am ultimately supposed to train the NHCs in the 6 major health thrusts in Zambia and consistently do follow-up trainings on project design and management, action planning, and budget-making, etc. I am supposed to constantly monitor and evaluate their progress throughout the next 2 years. Yet I am starting to believe that social mobilization, forming the foundation of the NHC, is still a work-in-progress in my area. Although the NHCs were apparently formed 5 years ago, I feel as if I'm starting from scratch. Its ok though, because as a first generation volunteer in my village my main focus is to build a solid foundation with my NHCs on which the 2 generations of volunteers that will follow me can build. Building the full capacity of the NHCs is a 6-year process, according to Peace Corps and the ministry of health in Zambia, and rushing my NHCs now will only hurt them in the end. So I am trying to build good relationships with them as well as other community leaders so that my 2-year service here is not full of frustrations and so that life is a little easier for the 2 volunteers who will live here after I leave. In America, we become so used to always seeing tangible results. You put a lot of work into something fully expecting a result that is both measurable and reflective of the hard work you put into it. I believe the main objective of Peace Corps as an organization, although they may not come right out and say it, is not so much direct, tangible development as it is the building of solid relationships, 'keeping the peace' if you will. Education, whether it be in health, agriculture, or the rural school system, forms the cornerstone of Peace Corps grassroots development aims in Zambia, but you can only educate sustainably if you form good relationships with those in your community. Not only America but other first-world countries tend to exploit the third world and although aid intentions aren't necessarily malicious, the desire to force our way of doing things on those of a poorer and more vulnerable country essentially is, in effect. Peace Corps is by no means a perfect organization. It's disorganized and lacks accountability in many areas, but I respect it in that it doesn't place tangible development on a pedestal as many NGOs and other foreign aid agencies seem to do. Actually Peace Corps discourages its volunteers from constructing building or using large sums of donation money to fund rural projects. As cliche as it sounds, Peace Corps is working in developing countries like Zambia to build relationships, not monuments. They are much more interested in teaching a group of community leaders in the bush how to write a proposal to fund something like the construction of a well than a Peace Corps volunteer moving into the village and building the well themselves. Although the constant focus on sustainability can be both frustrating and exhausting, it has forced me to rethink my views on foreign AID to Africa. There is a constant dialogue among PC volunteers regarding the answer to development and the correct way to go about it. And the truth is no one knows the answer. But I have to believe that if living in the heart of an African village for 2 years gets me no closer to an answer to development here, then at least I will have come closer to understanding the hearts of Africans themselves. And despite constant diarrhea, contracting malaria, hitching rides in the back of tomato trucks, or riding my bike 30k just to buy eggs that have mostly cracked by the time I bike home, it's still a desire to understand Zambia and the people here, as well as to begin to formulate my own answer to devlopment that gets me out of bed every morning. That and the African sky. :) .much luv.
-katie


"the movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not exploitable ground but the living mother."



"the criterion is how you treat the weak. The measure of civilized behavior is compassion."