lately

Things are good. The holidays have been good. The rains are here, so things are slowing down a bit. Mushrooms are in season, which is awesome!! I love a change in diet from time to time ;)

I got in a small bike accident. Nothing major. Glasses are a little crooked now ;) Mostly just a brusied spirit ;) It's beginning to be rainy season and so things are very muddy and slippery. I fell right by a school with the kids outside, embarrassing ;)

We went to Zanzibar for our first big vacation. It was beautiful. The water and sand was amazing! It was weird to be tourist though. So many people asking you to buy things, etc- just strange and expensive! We had to go to a nearby village off the tourist beach to feel a bit normal. I got real sunburn, I forget how amazingly pale I really am ;) During the trip we met with a friend here and lit Chanuka candles, and made latkes and chanuka cookies, super fun!

We are in Chipata now, celebrating Christmas with some other volunteers. We did stockings and I made eggnog from stratch for the first time in life ;) Gotta say, Safeway probably does it better ;) But it was good and nice hanging out with people. Hope you all had a great holidays!!! Write me and tell me about it, i miss you all!

A few weeks ago, our house was hit by lighting ;) We are totally fine! But craziness. Apparently the humidity here when it's raining lends to a lot more lightening. And we didn't know that you are supposed to turn your radio off in a thunder storm ;) ooops, so we had our radio antennea connected to our clotheslines for better reception and thus a great pull for the lighenting :( So the lighting found our tree, which was connected to our clothesline which was connected to our antennea. Needless to say, we do not have a radio anymore, it's fried ;) But everything else same and normal. Just learned a good lesson in turning things off when it rains ;)

I've been doing some monthly education trainings with my NHCs, on community planning and mobilizing things, it's going ok. And I did a mini training with my community health workers and my environmental health technician (EHT). It went well and I want to do more teachings on things they can do, but we will see. My EHT is going back to school, great for him, but sad for me and my community, he's an amazing asset that we are losing :( I'm also working with the traditional birth attendants (TBA) on making visuals for our upcoming TBA training with the district health office. I hope it goes very well. I'm excited to go to births with them in preparation to see how they do it here so I can add more to the curriculum on pointers on womens health, etc. It's been a while since my doula days in AmeriCorps, so I'm excited to see some babies be born ;) For world AIDS day, we had a HIV/AIDS tape viewing at my clinic and Q & A. I got the tapes from an NGO at the district and my midwife set up the battery and TV capacity, very nice. The NGO, Health Communication Partnership is great and I hope to partner more with them later.