Chipata

So we just finished a week doing a site visit in the Eastern Province. Now we are in Chipata, our provincial capitol at the PC house. During the visit we saw our house briefly. It is nice. It has cement floors, I'm pumped about that. We will have to get the walls cemented though. and I hear if you 'lime' the walls it deters bugs and really brightens up the place, very important when you have no unnatual light :) So we actually have what is considered a 'bwana' house or expensive house. It has a tin roof, that means we wont hear rats running on our roof which is nice, but it will be very hot. poor rob, minnesota boy :( no fans, no air con. So if you want to send mini handheld fans that are battery powered please please do. He can only lose so much water weight ;) We plan on having ivy grow along the roof and maybe that will help with the heat and be pretty. I will post a picture when I can. The house kinda has two rooms, its smaller than alot of the other volunteers that are single, but we are thinking of having them do an additional storage room. That way we can have food and misc stuff somewhere to free up space. It sounds like changes to houses are pretty doable. Its just the matter of bartering and time it will take. Our bath shelter is tall enough for rob which is good :) our bathroom is good, just waiting for some westernernized inventiveness ;) Although, I gotta say I'm pretty used to the pit latrine now, not bad really. and our cooking area is pretty nice too and when they saw rob they said they would make us a bigger one ;) we only got to meet one person at my clinic I will work with, but he seemed nice. my clinic is really nice and big. i am excited to work there, I just hope there is enough staff for how big it is. Both our main work sites and our water is close so thats real nice. however, I can't say i'm not afraid. Our 30km ride from the boma (kinda a small townish) to our house is very hilly. We are more remote than alot of other volunteers that ar single and it seems like there really isn't transport to our place like some ohers, but it will work. I might have legs of steel when i get home ;) So we saw our site and then stayed at other people's sites for a week. I stayed with a health volunteer whose leaving next month and a trainee from my grop whose replacing her (I have a first time health site so I'm not replacing anyone). They are excellent. I'm really gonna be sad to see the volunteer go. She's from Eagan and she is just awesome. She cried when we drove away from her site for the last time and I cried with her :( The trainee whose replacing her, is great too. I really liked hangin with them this week. We basically did alot of greeting people, eating at people's houses, walking alot, listening to the volunteers ipod, (man i need one of those and a solar charger--i did not come prepapred like alot of others with thiis stuff ;) but basically we hung out. we tried to do some health meetings but they did not happen, pretty typical. I'm excited about trying to do a Traditional Birth Attendant training while I'm here. If I can pull that off I would be very happy. Also, I'm excited to try and hone my cooking skills since I will have the time ;) I was in a neighboring area to our site so I was a little bummed that I liked it so much but that's not where I will be ;) Rob had a volunteer to stay with in Petauke where we will live. So he got a better idea of how stuff will be. But it seems good. The Chipata house is beautiful. There are fruit trees (not any at our site unfortunately), there is also a hot shower, TV, a western kitchen, fridge, nice nice. So we will do language and tech here for a week with the other Eastern province volunteers this week. Then will finish up training in 3 weeks and go off to site. Things are good. I've only gotten sick once and it was just stomach stuff which I blame a pumpkin cake that we made at site. It was really good, but after not having sugar it was too rich for me. I also found out during site visit that I will be speaking Nsenga at my site, not Njanje like I have been learning, but apparently they are very similar so hopefully it wont be a hard switch. So if you want to send us stuff please send it to the petauke addy on the left of the site :) I would love to get letters from you. Hope all is very well. Love Laura.