My first Zambirthday!

I'm terribly sorry for waiting so long to write again! I'm still enjoying my time in Zambia very much, and this week I had a wonderful 24th Zambirthday! All of the volunteers in Northern Province have been in Kasama all week for our PEPFAR workshop on HIV/AIDS. For those of you who don't know what PEPFAR is, it's the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and about 45 billion dollars given by the former president to countries all over the world. It was a week long training on HIV prevention and healthy positive living. We each brought a community partner from the village, and the workshop was in "Bemblish," a combination of Bemba and English. It was held at a very fancy guest house in Kasama, although the PCV's all stayed at the PC house. I found it to be very beneficial, especially for our counterparts, helping to clear up myths around HIV existing in the villages even today. Also, we learned many interactive games/lessons about HIV prevention that will be extremely useful in our communities. I'm certainly looking forward to bringing some of these tools to my community meetings when I get back to the village!

My first Zambirthday was fantastic! After the workshop on Wednesday, my fellow NorPro volunteers and I had Mexican food night, including margaritas, woohoo! My friend Ellyn even made some pancakes in the shape of the letters of my name in the morning. I'm very lucky to have such great friends up here in the Northern Province!

So I left my site a week ago now, and won't be making it home until the first week in September! Tomorrow morning I'll head down to Lusaka for our in service training, which comes 3 months after we were posted to our villages. Can you believe I've already been here for 6 months now? I can't!! The next two weeks will be spent in Lusaka with all the volunteers who arrived in February, working all over Zambia. It'll be the first time I've seen most of them since April. After our 3rd straight week of trainings... about 15 of us are going on vacation to Victoria Falls! I'll be sure to take lots of photos! Some of my friends are even talking about bungee jumping, which seems to be a huge tourist attraction down there...we'll see.

A woman on my compound (the daughter of the headwoman) just had a baby a couple of weeks ago! If you're on facebook, I've put a photo of him on there. They asked me to give him his English name, and I decided on Max. I thought it was an easy name to say, and nothing too crazy. I've heard some interesting names here, including Madinusa (Made in USA), Gift, Precious, Loveness, and Cupboard. Even though he may never know it, I was doing Max a favor with his name! His Bemba name is Kashinka, and his father gave him that one.

That's about all my big news for now, I've finally figured out how to get photos online with the slow internet in Kasama, so be expecting more soon (unfortunately, soon in Zamtime means a month or so). I hope this finds everyone at home well!