To say the road was bumpy would be the understatement of the year. Setting off the dirt “road” to the rural Zambian village where Caitlin had spent two years during Peace Corps was a nausea inducing experience. We were thrown from side to side as the taxi driver drove over giant bumps, up inclines, and steered around 3 foot ditches in the middle of the road. It felt like the world's worst roller coaster. Our driver even blew a tire (which I presume is a usual).

With no electricity, the days can be a bit slow for a western visitor, and I found myself spending about 5 hours of my time cracking one of the many thousands of peanuts the villagers gave us as gifts. From what I could make out due to my limited dialect, the villagers were very friendly and welcoming. Per local custom, every single person must have a formal greeting exchange with everyone else they pass by that day. So if there were 3 of us and we were meeting a family of 10, we had to have a full formal greeting exchange with every single one of them. Most of the children have never left the village and most of the adults have never gone further than the extremely small “town” (i.e. a few shanty shops) 23 miles away. The kids are all very obedient and seemingly love to help any adult with their chores. There is an interesting mix of conservative village values, such as no pre-maritial touching of any sort and no mentioning of the bathroom, with seemingly liberal attitudes, such as many women openly breast feeding in front of me. 

Overall, I felt truly lucky to be getting this unique, non-touristy experience of seeing how real rural African's live their lives. Here are some photos of the village and the locals. Despite their sometimes lack of smiles, they really enjoyed having their pictures taken (they so rarely have photos taken, they are not used to smiling)

Zambia for me felt familiar, like going back to your college town. I was excited to eat nshima, the staple food, test my memory of the local language and see the beautiful landscapes and my friends in the village. I was excited for Jed to see how amazing the people of Zambia are and how they are warm and generous despite the inherent adversity of village life.  However, I was admittedly nervous to return, for many reasons.  Maybe my friends in the village had moved or passed on. maybe the school I had worked with was no longer in use, leaving an education dearth where there is a great need. Maybe no one would remember me or care that I came back.  

To my surprise, I found little improvements in my former community and of course, they were happy to see me and welcomed me as if I had never left. While the government schools I worked with were still having the same inanely long meetings about the same topics they can't seem to resolve, the community school in my village that I worked with most, had recently been upgraded to a government primary school.  This makes a huge difference: now the school will be assigned a trained, salaried teacher, where previously the teachers were volunteers from the village. The upgrade also means new school buildings to replace the mud/thatch structures where the kids had previously been learning. They will receive textbooks and supplies instead of hand-me-downs. 

I was happy that a few ambitious villagers have had some new opportunities. One friend of mine is enrolled in a teachers course and we found him at the roadside doing research for his assignments on the internet on his non-smart phone! I would not have thought anyone in my village knew what the internet was, although he may be the only one. Another of my good friends got a job as a field officer supervising Early Childhood Development programs in the area, resulting in a preschool in the village. All these things gave me hope for the kids I came to love. 

Unfortunately, some things change and some things stay the same. A few drunk men still accosted us, wreaking and slurring. Some girls in grade 6 or 7 when I was there now are married with a couple kids. People who are sick still have to walk 5k to get to a clinic. However, as we say in the village, "pan'gono pan'gono," or little by little. Hopefully, I'll return in another 5 years and find peoples' lives improved in new ways and maybe I'll be able to contribute in some way. 

Besides a visit to Morocco last year, this is my first time in Africa. Although South Africa, where we just came from, definitely has a lot of elements of “Africa”, it is also pretty cosmopolitan and built-up, so I was excited to get to Zambia to see what I imagined is a more “typical” African country.

Trying to get off the bus in Lusaka, I could barely move as 15+ taxi drivers climbed over each other to try to get on the bus and grab us as customers. Lusaka is the “big city” in Zambia, but except for a few malls, it very much looks like a developing nation. The streets are filled with make-shift wooden stands where street vendors sell the locals all sorts of everyday goods (these are not tourist shops in any sense). The food shops have flies buzzing around all the food, but the food is surprisingly tasty (and very cheap). The majority of the vehicles have cracked windshields from the rocks kicked up on the dirt roads. 

Besides visits to the capital Lusaka, the towns of Chipata and Petauke and to Caitlin's village (blog posts on the village to come later), we also made a stop to one of the biggest waterfalls in the world: Victoria Falls. I have been to Niagara and Iguazu falls in Brazil, so I was curious to see how this compared. I was not disappointed. The falls are beautiful and were gushing water. The mist sometimes obstructed the view (as often is the problem with giant falls), but it was still fun as the mist turned into rain pouring down on us as we crossed bridges by the falls. As a side spectacle, there were baboons everywhere. Dozens would walk down the stairs and expect you to move out of the way (which we more than willingly obliged). Although the babies going for rides on their moms' backs or sliding down railings was cute, the 150lb dads who looked menacingly at us were quite intimidating.

Overall, Zambia was a great chance to interact with friendly locals, experience African culture and sample some local fare (see our food picture gallery). 

P.S. If you are interested in the local trends, this song is all over Zambia right now:

Our first attempt to take the train in South Africa failed miserably. the various websites instructed that you could only make bookings online, no less than 3 days before departure. As we were approaching the day of departure, we repeatedly emailed and called both companies, to no avail. When we turned to our Safari guide Jessie for advice, he laughed saying "this is South Africa, man. nothing happens online." (In the distinctive Afrikaans accent that I find impossible to mimic). Not wanting to risk the debacle of showing up at the station and having the tickets sold out and nowhere to stay, we gave up and instead flew to Cape Town from Johannesburg, for twice the price. 

Determined to take the train at some point though, we went to the train station on our first day in Cape Town. Naturally, the office for ticket sales had closed at 11am that day.  The next morning, however, we finally secured our tickets back to Joburg! Only then did I read that the train had been out of bedding for the last few months, due to a strike of the train-bedding-providers (who knew they had a separate train-bedding provider union?!). Writing this from the cozy blankets of the train, 3 hours into the supposed 26 hour journey, I can say we are very happy that they are no longer on strike and I hope they got everything they were bargaining for. (The train has no heat and is pretty cold). We are cozy, though, entertained by mountains and vineyards out the window. It's definitely better than the Zambia to Tanzania train we will take in a few weeks, which will be almost twice as long and much less comfortable. 

After many times where we stopped and Jed nervously asked "are we broken down" and I let him know this was just standard African train procedure, the train finally did break down.  We were told that they were going to have to get us to Johannesburg on buses, but that we were in too remote of a place to get the buses to us, so they weren't sure what to do. We were told it would be about a 3-4 hour delay, which normally wouldn't be so bad on a 26 hour ride, but we were pretty close to our destination and after 20+ hours we were a little restless.  Fortunately, they miraculously ended up fixing the train instead and we arrived only about 4 hours late in total.  Surprisingly, it was overall a pretty pleasant journey and a nice change of pace from the bumpy airlines.

Our previous blog post discussed all the wonderful things about Cape Town, of which there are many. We also wanted to try and see the other side of South Africa though, so we decided to do a tour of some of the townships around Cape Town (e.g. the slums). It was a bit of a weird scenario as you really want to be able to experience the townships with as little intrusion as possible...you feel weird looking like a bunch of voyeurs riding around in a van full of tourists taking pictures. We ultimately found a happy medium, signing up for a personal tour with a resident of one of the townships.

Our tour began with an inside look at the “apartments” of one of the townships. In a single room about the size of a college dorm room live 3 entire families. It has only 3 beds, meaning either the entire family shares a bed or all the kids sleep in the one kitchen that is shared by 18 families. As you can see in the picture, the conditions are pretty rough...the air felt very stale and was hard to breathe even for the few minutes we were in there. The families have very little possessions, because of the lack of space and fear of theft (and of course cost of goods).  Each family had about a small suitcase worth of belongings (e.g. the family on the left only have whats on the bed and that suitcase on the shelf). Our township tour leader, Laura, told us that in the worst apartments in the township, each single room is shared by 8 families. As elections or big events come, such as the World Cup, the government tries to make things look better and build a few new apartments to move people out of the ones falling apart, but it is always a short, small scale project and the new ones aren't even that much better.

Next we explored the shanty town portion of the township, which is full of makeshift shack houses. The advantage of the shacks is that you get privacy as you don't share with other families, however they are very poor, unstable structures that are susceptible to fires that spread through the community or break-ins. There are also no toilets in the shacks, and the community thus shares a single outhouse style toilet or uses buckets that are changed once a week. 

Lastly, we got to visit a pre-school that Laura founded from the funds gathered doing tours . Like everything else in the townships, it is a bit makeshift (the school is 4 storage containers put together), but this was definitely the uplifting highlight of the tour. As soon as we came in, 200+ screaming, smiling kids ages 3-6 came running over to us, demanding high-fives, giving us giant group hugs and singing songs. As per local custom, they all wanted to rub thumbs together and say “sha” meaning essentially “for sure” or “everything’s cool.” Although sometimes pretty cramped in the small rooms, they seemed generally happy and are able to learn some basics and also get three meals, which is more than most the kids in the township who aren't able to participate in this school. 

Overall, it was a very interesting, informative and worthwhile experience. Similar to how our country had/has social and economic issues following the end of slavery, the end of Apartheid in South Africa has not meant equality for many of the black and colored residents of South Africa. However, Laura is a beacon of hope for her community Guguletu, and we only wished we could do more to support her and her wonderful school.  For more information on Laura or if you find yourself in Cape Town, check out http://laurastownshiptours.co.za/about/about-laura/.