The Home Stretch...

I can hardly believe its week 9 of training...but at the same time I feel like its deff time for a change. Its a Sunday afternoon and I grabbed a ride with my Tech teacher to Lusaka to pick up some photos for my host fam and hopefully upload some photos ( they are loading to facebook as we speak- picasa won't work!)

The past few weeks have been busy busy filled with my 2nd Site visit, Bemba lessons and tests (My Language Proficiency Interview is Tuesday- EEK!!) and hanging out with my family.

HIGHLIGHTS:

My site is in a village called Luyeye right outside of Kasama in the Northern Province. My house is huge but right next to Luyeye Basic...so I had over 75 children on my front stoop my first night. My Zonal Center School, which is about 1.5 K down the road is a Special Needs School for diabled children. I LOVE it! The kids are great, everyone is just so accepting and friendly and they use ASL! Very excited to be able to work with them. The Nothern Provincial house is sweet... got to shower and watch Entourage...made brownies! I love when I get to cook!

Saturday was Ba Leonard's Bday so we threw a bit of a party for him... with a pinata (balloon from the tuck shop filled with candy-- that actually broke before we could get it to him so we used a rubber glove!!) and it was good times. He tried stabbing the pinata with the stick because we forgot to describe how to swing at it...

About a week ago Laura and I made pizza and soya nuggets for our families with some supplies from Lusaka on braizers and they turned out pretty good. I think we deff turned them on to Pizza! I feel like I am slowly becoming lactose intolerant though... uuuugh. Well see how that goes...



I hitched back from Chongwe to Chalimbana with Katrina, Bob, and Anne Marie a week or so ago in a Shake Shake truck... hilarious... details to come at a later date.

Wednesday we had to go to the Immigration office to get our work permits. It took hours... with all 36 of us waiting in an ally and being ushered in a few at a time...wonderful! I finally get to the desk where the man hands me my permit and asks me to sign to confirm the information is all correct. I look down at the permit that looks similar to a passport with my photo, name, birthdate, and Place of Birth: CHINA, Nationality: CHINESE. Needless to say I burst out laughing! They insisted that I should sign and that they would "fix" the details, which really meant they crossed out CHINA and wrote "USA" on my official Work Permit... nice. I have a copy that I will try to make a copy of and send home to someone at some point, its hilarious.

I was sick Thursday night/ Friday morning and it made me realize how great EVERYONE is. My friends all checked in on me... even my lazy bakafundisha Ba Leonard! My Ba Mayo was worried sick and prayed for me to get better and cooked me pumpkin (yum) and I got a call from Jorge! A day of staying in my hut and reading Entertainment Weekly front to back (Thanks Mom!) did the trick and I was back to working order yesterday...just in time for a volleyball match against the PST trainers. They beat us 3 outta 5...but it was still fun!

My NEW ADDRESS:

Ellyn Lambeck/PCV
Peace Corps Zambia
PO BOX 410374
Kasama, Zambia
AFRICA

I swear in Friday and then head up to Northern this coming weekend. There I will move into my big empty hut and begin my three months of "Community Entry." I am going to miss my host family, Kebeleka, and my fellow trainees like crazy... I will be doing lots of crafting, letter writing, reading with all of my lonlely/down-time so please do write! I also have something on my phone now called "Nimbuzz" where I can use AIM and G-Chat so feel free to message me if you see me on!!

Love you all, look for my pics on Facebook.