Slowing down

Sitting in our office with a day and a half remaining before x-mas vacation, I announce, "I want to write a blogpost, but I don't know what about." These past four months have been such a whirlwind of adventures, certainly comprised of down-days and relaxed weeks, but most of it has whizzed by - nights melting into weeks streaming into days tumbling into months. These past two weeks, for the first time in a LONG time, I've been a little bored. It's okay though, it gives me time to get excited about and plan my trip, to leisurely compile information for one of our final reports, to catch up on my laundry-list of things to research online (who knew the GRE was changing its format come August 2011?? Not me), and to respond to emails that have been chilling out in my inbox (not helpful that everyone is in exams now - I won't get any back until I'm on the road and then they'll pile up again...). In other news, a fellow Montrealer has been staying here for the past few nights - for those of you who know Jory Cohen, he's doing an overland trip from Tanzania, through Malawi, Zimbabwe, up into Zambia and then back to Tanzania where he's pairing up with a local Tanzanian guy to start a micro-finance honey enterprise. It's nice to have a familiar face from home. I feel a little obnoxious at times playing Jewish geography and finding these random connections that probably bore the other interns and fellows listening in to our conversations, but it also links me back to what's going on at home, and instills in me a sense of comfort and interconnection. You know what that meansssssssss... you all need to come out and visit! Hahaha wishful thinking, right? We DO have a number of extra beds though, always available as long as you're cool entertaining yourself during the day somewhat. More to come soon - I'll try to post again before I take off on Sunday the 19th.

No, this wasn't posed...

Alice's awesome photography skills. We didn't tell you she's the official GRS photographer?

Oh! The rain

I don't think I would be able to live in Seattle. Or Vancouver. Or even England. Not because these places aren't beautiful - they are - they're romantic, charming, enticing, and endearing, but I have major issues dealing with rain day in and day out. Bursts of rain bookended by sun? No problem. A rainy day here or there? Completely fine by me. Even welcome at times (come on, who doesn't love those cozy, cuddly days when you have an excuse to be lazy or stay curled up with a good book - yes, even FaceBOOK counts). But we're going on our third day of incessant rain here and it's starting to give me cabin fever. It doesn't help that with projects wrapping up and the year coming to a close things are pretty slow in the office, so I've resorted to creating projects for myself: doing recon for X-mas break, catching up on much-needed emails, and researching the best way to make perfect popcorn (our addiction here in Zam). Hopefully the rain will break soon. If not, expect many, many more blogposts from me as I'm sitting antsy inside...

Mzungus at Manda Hill

If you've been reading my blog thus far, you can probably discern that my time in Zambia has been great and moderately wholesome so far. Yes, it's been punctuated by a ton of annoyingly redundant catcalls of "MZUNGU! MZUNGU" from babies up to older men, and a few potentially scary run-ins (crazy man in Kaoma), but that could happen anywhere, right? For the first time last week I felt specifically targeted and sneakily duped solely because of my mzungu status (and I'm not including being overcharged for taxis or food bought in markets - in my mind that's a given).

Alice, Lena and I went food shopping Saturday afternoon after the final VCT Challenge Day of 2010 (we got soaked in a torrential downpour, but that's another story). We hit up Manda Hill, a newly rebuilt American-styled mall that houses Shoprite - the mecca of international food products (we all salivated at the sight of Philadelphia cream cheese and smoked salmon, but that's another story). We stocked up on supplies for our ThanksChristMukkah dinner and trekked back to the car, bags and bags of groceries in tow. Manda Hill is an odd place - expensive by Zambian standards, it draws an expat and international crowd. At the same time though, wealthy Zambians and upwardly-mobile (or wanna-be upwardly-mobile?) Zambians hang out there too. Anyways, we loaded our stuff into the car, I hopped in the driver's seat, and slowly backed out of the too-narrow parking spots that are ubiquitous in Zambia, careful to avoid small children and people walking by.

Just as I was about to turn my wheel and pull into drive, a loud SMACK thuds on my roof. WTF? I thought to myself. There was no one there! I was being purposefully careful and perceptive! Maybe I just didn't see someone and this was a warning SMACK? I turn to the left and see a guy couched over, not screaming or crying, and a different guy comes over and says, "You just ran over his foot. You have to take us to the hospital and to the police." I kept on going with my three-point-turn, the dude wasn't even expressing pain. But then part of me panicked - what if I HAD really run over his foot? I could see the headlines already: "Mzungu Charged with Hit and Run at Manda Hill." The second guy who approached the car (with a strange, golf ball-like protrusion at his eyebrow, probably from a fight no less) continued bugging us to take them to the hospital, so I finally got out and went to look at the guy's foot.

"It hurts, oh! The pain!" he said several times. Right. That's why you weren't screaming in pain earlier. "Take off your shoe," I instructed. He did. "And now your sock." He began to pull it off and then stopped about halfway and continued, "Oh, I can't, I can't! The pain." "Take it off, NOW," I commanded. He did, attempting to shield his foot from my view, and... it was TOTALLY fine. this was approximately 4 minutes after I had apparently "ran over his foot," and there was no swelling, no blood, nothing crushed, no weird indentations...your body reacts very quickly to something like that, so I just said, "You're totally fine, stop lying," and brusquely walked back to the car, turned to the second guy and asserted, "Get OFF of my car, you're full of shit," and drove away.

Upon further pondering and discussion we realized that it had all the makings of a scam - first of all, I was driving a low-riding station wagon, there was absolutely NO way I could have ran over his foot if he were behind me, he would have had to be to the side, which he wasn't. Secondly, a second guy jumped in and did the talking. When Lena and Alice asked who he was he hesitated and said, "Uhhh, his brother." Thirdly, the "brother" switched from insisting we take them to the police and the hospital, to insisting we drive them to their "family doctor." Right. So we can pay him and then you can split the sum. Or so you can hop in the car with three white girls and then rob us. Or so you can make us feel like idiots. Either way, they were full of shit, and thankfully we were all savvy enough to avoid their sneaky little ploy.

Lesson learned? Be careful backing out of Manda Hill. Scammers are lurking...

Bat Migration and Colonial Relics

The bat migration was one of the cooler things I've seen recently. Maybe I was so blown away because I wasn't expecting it to be cool at all? I don't know. It is the largest (number-wise) mammal migration in the world, and one of the mysteries is that people don't really know where they go to or from – some have been traced to the Congo, but I'm not sure if researchers know their trajectory. And then there's the fact that it's barely mentioned in the guidebooks, very sparsely frequented, and in a protected park with ghetto dirt roads and unmarked trails makes it seem like that much more of a special, magical and personal discovery.

After an ambitious wake-up at 5:30 AM (still stuffed post-Thanksgiving desserts)) we finally hit the road by 7:30 or 8:00 (gas fill-up and cohort pick-ups were required). We drove about 6 or 7 hours through smaller and smaller Zambian towns, past the Copperbelt, kissing the south-easternmost edge of the Congo, until we reached Kasanka National Park. We set up tents and went to search out these strange, strange flying mammals. We arrived at the bat forest at about 5:15 to find the bats roosting. As depicted in every bat story and movie, they actually do hang upside-down. Lining tree trunks, covering branches like browned leaves of autumn, there was a plethora of bats. I expected to be grossed out – I imagined being surrounded by rats or mice – but they were surprisingly beautiful. With wide wingspans and cute faces, they imparted none of the negative connotations they usually are taken to represent. We ducked the rope prohibiting us from great views and snuck into the forest (where we were supposed to pay 270 000 ZMK – equivalent to $54 – for someone to guide us in...yeah right), and scaled tree-houses and key look-out points to have a heightened view of the goings-on. Between about 5:30 and 6:20 PM was the peak of their swarming – they leave their roost in order to feed on fruit – and the skies were legitimately FILLED with bats. It was potentially one of the simultaneously simplest and craziest things I've ever seen. We emerged from the wilderness to find everyone else sitting on benches like drones waiting, and a guy with a thick Southern African accent chastised us in front of people while we apologized, played slightly dumb, and were secretly thrilled that we duped the system and had an outrageous private view.

The next morning we busted out of there and drove another 6 or 7 hours north to Shiwa Ng'andu, an old colonial house in the middle of the bus built by an eccentric British dude in 1932. He modeled it after a stereotypical British estate and at its peak it employed 2000+ people and supported the entire village. After his death it was left to fall into ramshackle disrepair, and only in the 90s did the eccentric's grandsons refurbish the house and open it to tourism, The inside is still a little shabby and only alludes to the prestige and glamor it must have once garnered, but the grounds are impeccable and a bizarre disjuncture between cultures is created: straw huts next to a colonial estate; bellies swollen from malnutrition and ion imbalance beside opulence and silver and china; current working people, lives and events next to preserved relics of another era. Like I said, it's completely bizarre.

We camped about 20 km down the road at a lodge and campsite next to crystal clear shallow hot springs, and while we expected the springs to be a bit more dramatic, the lodge itself was a genuine oasis with flowers and herbs and lounging spaces indoors and outdoors and *surprise, surprise* INTERNET! In the middle of nowhere, I couldn't believe it.

One last highlight before moving on: I finally saw a Zebra! And not one but many! They're slightly weird animals, with the babies sporting long lanky legs, and the adults with legs too short for their bodies, but their pelts (do zebras have pelts?) are as gorgeous in person as represented on runways.

Lastly, yesterday was World AIDS Day. Here's my friend/other intern Alice's Haiku in honor of the event:

Red Ribbons Flapping.

Testing Today for Status.

Positive Freedom.