Hello everyone, tomorrow is a day I have anxiously been awaiting for what seems like a very long time. We are driving out to see our post villages for the first time. The name of my village is Kelondu. The name is derived from the word Kelong'a which is Lunda for river or stream, but not a big river. Last week, Peace Corps sent a representative from Kelondu down to Lusaka for a two day session with us. His name was Dominic Kashimoto, and he runs a shop and grows pineapples. We talked a little bit about expectations from both sides. The idea is that he will go back to the village for a few days and talk to people before I get there on Thursday. The drive from Lusaka to Kelondu is about 17 hours, so we will stop and stay in Solwezi tomorrow night. Solwezi I'm told is an interesting town in the heart of the mining areas of Zambia. Northwestern province will be one of the fastest changing regions in Zambia in the next two years because of the mining industry. There is talk of a Chinese uranium mine opening in Mwinilunga district and the building of a new railroad from the Copperbelt to Luanda, Angola for export of copper and minerals to the Atlantic. I have heard a story about villagers in Mwinilunga finding diamonds and rubies on their land.
I was very excited to finally get some details about my village. I will be about 500 meters from a middle school, and about 1500 meters from the source of the Zambezi River. There is a lot of beekeeping going on in the village, as the region is famous for its honey. You can buy honey for about 10 cents a pound there! I expect I will be doing some teaching and working with farmers a lot. I am so excited to get there. The education volunteers who returned from their site visits to their villages had giant smiles on their faces.
Training has seemed very long. My homestay family has been great, but I am very ready to be done with training and get to my village. The endless power point and flipchart presentations are numbing me. The hardest thing has been that nobody in Chalimbana, where I'm staying, speaks Lunda. Nyanja and Bemba are the languages here, so it's very difficult to practice Lunda. Another thing that has frustrated me is that I haven't seen any wild mammals in Zambia other than rats. Really, they should take us to a game park the first week of training. I am excited to have Nchila reserve near my village because it has some of the only true forest in Zambia and the richest bird life of anywhere in the country. I heard there are a lot of bush babies around there. I can't wait to see those big eyes! So awesome! I got lucky a couple of weeks ago and saw a Schalow's Turaco in Chalimbana. The rain is definitely dying down and the first signs of the cold season are here. We have crystal clear, windy weather, and you can see your breath sometimes in the morning. I am going to try to post some pictures here tomorrow. We'll see how it goes because the internet is pretty slow. Until then, keep sending letters and postcards, even if you have nothing to say. Postage is 50 cents for postcards and a dollar for letters. I promise to write back. Much Love.
Larry Maurin
Peace Corps
P.O. Box 50707
Lusaka, Zambia
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