World Malaria Day

April 25 is/was World Malaria Day.  TJ participated in activities which included diagnostic testing for malaria, information and net distribution, health counseling, and dancing with big scary pythons (of course) in Katete (about a 5 hour drive from the capital, Lusaka) with his colleagues from Seattle, Lusaka and all over Zambia. Here are some of his photos from the day. 

For more information on WMD:

http://www.path.org/projects/macepa-world-malaria-day-2009.php

http://www.rbm.who.int/worldmalariaday/

Rhythm of Life, larger than life

"On May 16^th 2009 Lusaka saw it’s first large-scale music festival and health fair, dubbed “The Rhythm of Life.”  Over 12,000 festival goers came to the Lusaka Showgrounds for a free, family-friendly all-day (and into the night) event that featured on-stage entertainment from Zambia’s top musicians, drama groups, visual artists, choirs and speakers.  The featured musician was world-famous Zimbabwean musician Oliver Mtukudzi who played two sets in addition to coming back to the stage to perform the festivals namesake song, “The Rhythm of Life.”  Other star performers included Matthew Tembo, the Mwale Sisters, Danny, Cactus Agony, Xploits, Maiko Zulu and Angela Nyirenda, among others.  

The success of this USAID-funded was a result of cooperation with the coordinating agency, Health Communications Partnership (HCP), the Zambian Ministry of Health, the National Arts Council of Zambia and hundreds of partners in the field of public health.

Concert goers were treated to musical entertainment but also had the opportunity to visit through the health festival where exhibitors were set up to promote the festival’s theme,  Move to a Healthy Beat.  The atmosphere was energizing.   Exhibitors distributed materials with information on malaria prevention, cancer screening, and HIV interventions.  Visitors received counselling on everything from male circumcision to high blood pressure and practitioners performed services including onsite weight checks, vision tests, blood donation, and malaria testing and referral."  

(so reads the beginning of my write-up for the Malaria Consortium.)

(Warning:  Here is where I start tooting my horn.)  I still cannot believe what happened when I turned over a set of designs and 4 photos of Matthew, Miriam, Ester and Margret to the folks at HCP.  THIS is what happened! Marketing! Pens, badges, posters, banners, tee-shirts, VIP passes, even the signs for the toilets.   There is something so thrilling about driving through Kalingalinga with the kids and having them notice...."MOMMY!  MOMMY!  The POSTER!  I saw YOUR poster!" And to see my work larger than life.  Thanks, guys.

Margret and Ester on the shirts (above).  All the artistes (below), with Brian the musical coordinator) from the Dream Team on stage in their ROL gear at the first public performance of "The Rhythm of Life" song.  Great job, kudos to Cactus Agony for his part in writing this tune.

Life and Death

(with sincere apologies if this offends anyone)

I have been experiencing 'safari photo' fatigue and needed to show something that you probably haven't seen from someone's brilliant trip to Africa.  I am rotten at photgraphing animals unless they are very small or very dead.  This unfortunate creature clearly falls in the 'very dead' category.  

The nile cabbage is providing cover for several of Hippo's cousins (just out of the frame) and also is hiding several of the pond's more ravenous residents...a bunch of crocs were making attempts at an afternoon snack but the poor thing was so bloated they couldn't even get a taste.

Wet and Dry

The family made the long (but now with interim road improvements, 

not-so-hideous) trip to Livingstone on a whim the other weekend.  

It looked a bit different in May (above) than October (below).

Papa (and Owen) taking in the view from the Knife-Edge Bridge in October (above). The bridge in May (below) 

Todd and Finn taking on water near the bridge (below)

Above, rainy season, Below, dry season

Sadvertising

There is no sugar-coating it. 

To add insult to injury this is $20 worth of shampoo

 for my sad flat hair that gets greasy to quickly...

mutinondo III: bug week

above: praying mantis with fly,  below: lifejacket beetle

Below:  Todd literally ran into this spider one night -- it dropped down from a tree and every night built a gigantic web across the path between our camp sites.  The kids took little bits of meat to throw into the web and watched as Mr/Ms Spider scurried across the web to catch it and wrap it up. 

Mutinondo II

Mutinondo

The first weekend of our end-of-term holiday found us in the Mutinondo Wildnerness, a 600 km drive from Lusaka for four days of camping, hiking, horseback riding, mountain biking, swimming and relaxing.  It was a fabulous break, enjoyed with several other families we know from school.  (above, Todd with Charles, Walter, Florence, Owen and Finn)

Long morning, long post

I spent a mind-numbing morning down at Lumumba Road in one last misguided attempt to get my zambian drivers license. I got a provisional license back in August after about 5 hours standing in one line and another but that was 6 months ago and the thing long-expired because were were so discouraged and confused about what needed to happen next.   Every person we asked seemed to have a different strange answer and anyway it was too late to do anything more that day so we left the building, defeated. We sent a ‘fixer’ to go stand in queues but he did not have any better luck than us and the provisional licenses we worked to hard for lapsed.

An upcoming road trip (with many police check points), meant we needed to rethink about our lapsed provisional licenses. So I spent the day in any number of different slow moving queues at three different Road Transport and Safety Association (RTSA) offices:  Ridgeway (a vaguely administrative office), Lumumba Road (a maze of service windows and closets) and Mimosa (bookings).

Queues and confusion

First was the queue for room 14, it is supposed to be Mr. Bright Phiri's office where we were sent from the RIdgeway RTSA office after visiting room 10 and 14 there. Onto data capturing -- line 9-- only because the line we were directed to from line 28 (line 12) was closed, as were the other 10 and 11 examiner's lines although the examiners were sitting there, it seems, just sitting there to tell people to go stand in another line.  Then to the cashier (line 18) where I insisted on paying for license renewals and conversion licenses and a booking fee which caused all sorts of ruckus as it took a good 20 minutes for her computer to print the booking receipts -- 20 long minutes with a huge and ever-growing line of irritated zambian men queuing up behind me.  

We (you would think We means me and todd but here it means me and Celia, my friend who has assured me that she would get me out of the hoop-jumping that I had previously been directed to do--the main reason Todd and I had failed to act beyond getting the provisional licenses ages go) but I digress.  We high tailed it out of there to travel 25km through mid-day traffic out of town in the total opposite direction of anywhere to take care of "the Booking." 

I have no idea what anyone means when they talk of "the Booking." Near as I can tell it does involve an actual book but beyond that I'm totally lost. What we find when we drive 25km and take a right at the Ross Chicks sign and a left another 2k down a wandering but paved road through several community farms is the RSTA "Booking" office. Not that you would ever know it:  there is no sign, no arrow, no indication, no nothing in fact to lead you to believe that this office even exists. Nonetheless, on a hunch, we took a little jig-jog left, asked a small boy with his mangy dog and his chickens if this was the driving place, he assured us that we should follow the road a bit and we would find the booking office. Of course we will.  Immediately, we find ourselves ON the driving test course -- a beautifully paved racetrack type speedway course in the middle of the cornfields.  

We park (after driving the course in fits of hysterical laughter) and find the same woman we talked to at 7:45 am at the Ridgeway office. It is now noon. Unsmiling, she says, "I told you that you would find me here." She did indeed but I had no idea what she was talking about at the time.  "You come with me."  It's straight out of Monty Python. I'm just going with it at this point and realize that I'm going to have to take an actual driving test.  Great. Fun! My name went in 'the book" and I'm scheduled for a test.

I get into the car with a jolly male 'examiner' and my other new friend from Ridgeway marches purposefully out to a bunch of orange cones set up all over the parking lot.   I have heard about these cones.  Our friend Miguel failed his driving test when he scraped a cone while being instructed to reverse through them and execute a 90 degree turn...without turning around to look at where he was going.  

My examiner directs me onto the course for my driving test.  Mind you, I have been driving here for a year but I have little clue about the official driving rules.  Driving here is fine and quite fun during the daytime--love those roundabouts, hate those mini-buses. You would think that driving on the left would be difficult to adjust to but half the time you have to drive on the shoulder or on the right anyway to avoid obstacles so it's more a challenge of remembering where you SHOULD be instead of where you actually ARE. Parking lots/Carparks are mindbogglingly difficult to navigate so the orange-cone set-up is making me sweat. 

Not twenty meters into the road/racecourse I meet my first challenge:  a marked pedestrian crossway.  "What do you do?" he asks.  First, I marvel!  In a year I've never actually seen a marked pedestrian crossway.  It’s gorgeous and I admire it appropriately, or perhaps, inappropriately.  Thankfully he tells me that what I need to do:  put the car into park and put on the handbrake.  Really?  "Really."  Then I look for imaginary pedestrians, errant chickens and creep through the test course which for me is driving about 200 meters, taking a left turn and pulling into a parking space.  

PASS!

We go find our Ridgeway-turned-Mimosa office friend who signs both my bookings paper and a mysterious "Pass certificate" and instructs me to go find three signatures.  "Any three?"  Any three.  I go back out to the scary orange-cone area and find three different examiners to sign my papers. "Ah!  You have passed, Madame!"

With good reason they decline to sign for Todd's booking so I collect myself and rush home to give todd his new license and booking receipt and send him out of town to go take his own driving test.  He too sees the orange cones and starts to sweat.  In the car, the examiner simply says to Todd: "Sir, you already have your license?"  Of course.  "So why is it necessary to travel?"  

PASS!

Epilogue

But the elusive license is still not in hand. I must take our signed bookings papers back down to the Lumumba road office -- office is a generous term, labryrinth is better--  and stand in more queues and more cashier lines and hope that our pass certificates made it back from Mimosa, but after that we will have our licenses!  No, wait, we will have our temporary license (which is an entirely different creature from our provisional license) and some day before we move away we may or may not have actual proper Zambian driving licenses.

The licenses are printed in South Africa so they can take a good 6 months to get back here. The temporary is only good for 60 days and extensions are good for 30 days.  Thankfully the queue for standing in line to get extensions and get your license blessedly has a "ladies' line" which more often than not has no one in it so I get to jump to the front and at least find out if I need an extension or get to pick up the card at long last.

23b

We have been in Zambia  a year now....here is a photo of our home at plot 23b Mwambula Road, Jesmondine.  It is the third and hopefully last home we will live in here.  It is rather large, rather nice and rather leaky and cavernous.  It has stone walls, dark wood floors, arched doorways inside.  There are heavy bars on all the windows and doors but the doors are usually unlocked and wide open!  It is unusual for Lusaka in that it has three levels --a sprawling ranch is more the style around town for expat housing.  We are slowly filling it up with everything we brought from seattle and everything we are acquiring here, although there are many empty closets and whole rooms we do not use.  We 'inherited' the lease from good friends who are next month moving to Arusha...they have been 6 months in the Netherlands waiting to see where they would end up.  We were very lucky to get the house when and how we did but we miss them so.  It was very strange to move into 'their' house in October but also very nice because we came already with such a good feeling from the time we spent with them.

We have a huge yard/garden but pretty normal size.  We have a nice big swimming pool and the best swing in town (hanging from the giant tree out front).  We have a beautiful garden with lots of big trees, tons of fruit trees, a vegetable garden and a great big strawberry patch.  Owen can ride his bike all over the place, finny can skateboard down the drive thankfully without getting too much speed.  This is very nice considering there is not a single public park in Lusaka.

The house sits on a little slope and the property is along an open stretch of land owned by the University of Zambia with two streams running through so we are so lucky to have a view of more than just the neighbor's giant fences and also lots of wildlife.  

Even with all this space, we are, of course, almost always in the same room sitting on the same bed or bench or couch together fighting about who gets to be in the middle.  

Chaminuka 2.0

A recent visit from a favorite Seattlite brought us back out to Chaminuka. It's only 40 minutes or so from our house but it's a world away. 

above, the grasses are about 8 feet high this time of year. 

 below, Zambia is on the tail end of the rainy season

Below, The lions were just as eager to have a friendly finny snack as last time (our infamous 'YIONS!' incident from last May). you can see he is intent on finny (who can now say his L's thank you very much) and not me....

On the job

It's not all fun and games here.  We actually do have to work once and a while.

See how hard I work?  The result (above and below) from a recent photo shoot. (copyright reserved)

science week

I had so much fun with the kids last week for science week -- I was asked to come teach the Key Stage One kids (reception to Y2, 4-8 year olds) something science-y and I settled finally on ANTS, using my experiences with the Discovery Park curriculum and adapting it for this gang.  I may have had more fun than the kids in fact, but now they all know me as the ANTS teacher and they keep telling me how they are all studying ants at home.  One 5 year old even announced that maybe, just maybe, he would be a scientists one day.  I was both surprised by and impressed with their enthusiasm for the subject.  One of Owen's classmates who is kind of...um, naughty....decided as he observed the anthill that he was going to be the "champion for the ants" and look after them.  He even brought some apple from his lunch for them "because they need to be healthy and strong!"  The kids especially enjoyed their 'field research' and spent their recess at the anthill watching after 'their' anthill and trying to track a single ant along it's journey to and from the anthill. (photo above) They even brought their teacher out to the anthill after class.

Below, Year 2 showing off how they remember that an ant has two compound eyes (thumb and pinky on the sides of your face) and three simple eyes in the middle of their forehead.

Every time I teach, I gain a whole new respect for the work that teachers do.  after a week of this I was exhausted and had lost my voice.  Owen has been so incredibly fortunate to have already had brilliant teachers -- Teacher Gloria (whose lessons we live daily), Mrs. Goethe, Mrs. Bentley and now Mrs. Anderson, Mr. Katemba, Mme Catron, and Mrs. Harvey to name just a few.  

If you are ever interested in easy science projects....ants are the antswer for sure (har har).  There is an infinite number of crazy ants facts out there and always a willing ant or two to show off for anyone willing and patient enough to just sit and watch...AND LISTEN!  I just learned that ants actually communicate through sound!  I'll leave you with this snippet from the Acoustical Society of America:  

"It is well known that ants do not respond to sound on a human scale. You can shout at an ant and it doesn't seem to notice. Yet many ant species communicate by means of squeaking sounds from a stridulatory organ on the ant's body, consisting of a washboard-like set of ridges and a scraper. The squeaking sounds are usually very faint but they pervade ant colonies. Sounds from individual ants can be heard distinctly and there are a number of different signals. The sounds are in the audible frequency range around 1kHz. Because ants appear to be deaf to airborne sound on a human scale, myrmecologists have inferred that they transmit stridulation signals through the soil, or other solid substrate. For a number of reasons, however, this mode of transmission is highly unlikely. A more likely explanation is that ants communicate with each other through the air using nearfield sound. As with other insects, ants are believed to "hear" airborne sound with their antennae, using hair-like sensors at the tips. By sensing the relative difference in sound displacement between the tips of the antennae, an ant can detect a stridulation signal in the nearfield, where displacement changes rapidly with distance, but can not detect sound in the farfield, where displacement changes more gradually. This explains how ants can detect sound from other ants while, at the same time, being unaware of sound on a human scale. This is fortunate for ants because they would otherwise be overwhelmed by background noise, both natural and man-made."

Lake Kariba

(above, the view from Kariba Damn.  Zambia on the left, Zimbabwe on the right)

We have been fielding many questions lately -- including, how was Christmas?  Christmas was a blur.  The kids had 4 whole weeks off.  We celebrated in style...lots of fun parties, a Christmas tree as proper as any other I've managed (OK, it was a giant origami tree but that is another story altogether), piles of silly presents, and a little vacation escape.  We went with another Seattle family --I collect Seattlites like other people collect Beanie Babies--out to Lake Kariba.  

Lake Kariba is a 3 hour drive from Lusaka through the scenic Chirundu Escarpment.  The main town on the Zambia side of the lake is Siavonga.  The Lake itself is HUGE, covering over 2,000

 square miles, and is one of the largest man-made reservoirs in the world.  Yes, sir, Lake Kariba is man-made -- it was created when they dammed a section of the Zambezi River in the late 1950's.   The dam, which generates power for Zambia and Zimbabwe, is one of the world's largest at 128 meters high and nearly 600 meters long.  Construction of the damn was no small feat with massive displacement of both wildlife and people.  Some 57,000 Tonga people were displaced and the resettlement project was considered a disaster.

Above, the family posing with a friendly border guard at the dam.  Below, the situation in Zimbabwe is an unforgivable tragedy.  The border is far from porous but these families were able to cross over to get sugar and mealie-meal (the staple food here) which is rationed even at the stores in Lusaka.  The exchange rate for Zimbabwe today is a bit over 37 million zim$ to 1$

Above, the beach at Lake Kariba.   Below, Owen on holiday.  Despite it's history, robust croc and hippo population, widespread bilharzia (a charming parasitic disease), and proximity to Zim and our least-favorite African dictator, Uncle Bob, the Lake is really beautiful and Siavonga is a favorite spot for local tourists.

swimming

This is a photo not from the fabulous marsh that sits behind our house....it's from the pool (before it got drained and cleaned).  We had whole families of frogs living in it - laying countless eggs.  We scooped up many many eggs and for a while had many many tiny tadpoles in a giant tub.  We had a hot spell, and well...we do not have a single frog of any size to show for our efforts.  Just a few photos to post as a froggy memorial.  Boo Hoo.

above - ribbons of eggs.  below, the doomed tadpoles