I Give Thanks

Happy Holidays, everyone! I can't believe it's almost Thanksgiving and Christmas....this time of year always makes me miss home, and family, but I'm hanging in there and keeping my spirits high.

Hope you all are staying warm, enjoying the lasts of fall and preparing for the fun winter ahead. I am writing to you from Kasama. I am back up in Northern for the next ten days; for the next couple days, I have a training of trainers for Camp GLOW and then we have our bi-annual Peace Corps meetings so thankfully, I was allowed to stay up in Northern for it and have Thanksgiving amongst me cohorts here. It will be so nice, it was great last year and this will be our last Thanksgiving in Zambia so I am really looking forward to it.

Things in my life have been ups and downs the past few weeks. Let's start with one piece of good news-we got our funding for Camp GLOW so THANK YOU!! Many thanks to all of you who donated to this cause-it will be a great event and the Mpika volunteers are so grateful for your support! We will be sure to take tons of photos to post so you all can see what you helped achieve. As we say in Bemba, Twatotela Sana Sana-We thank you, very very much. Camp GLOW is really coming along, I am so excited for it! We have two new Peace Corps Volunteers in Mpika and they have brought a breath of fresh air into our Mpika crew, and have also been working as hard as we all have to make this camp a success. Barbara is an older volunteer who lives about 50 km outside of Mpika, and she got us connected with an NGO from the States called Project Thrive who have a Days for Girls Campaign, and we were able to get a donation of washable feminie hygience kits for the girls. They will be thrilled as the kits contain soap, a pair of underwear, a washcloth, ten washable pads and a cute little bag to carry this all in. We are so thankful to have been connected with them and look forward to seeing the reactions from the girls when they receive this gift. We also have our facilitators locked in-one is from CamFed in Lusaka and the other is from Nascent Solutions in Mpika. They both a fabulous women really dedicated to the work of girls' empowerment. So those are just a few of the happenings with this camp, I'll be sure to update after the Camp to fill in on the rest!

So I was pulled from my village about two weeks ago. It was the hardest thing, besides saying goodbye to my family prior to PC, that I've ever done. Zambia's rarely show emotion, so when my villagers cried when I let them know I had to leave for medical reasons, I too was overcome with emotions and felt touched, and very sad to leave this new family behind. My past year in the village has been such a great experience for me, and a great learning experience. I know now I can live without the luxury items like running water and electricity. I understand now when people comment how those who have nothing seem to be the happiest people, I was living amongst some of the happiest people this past year and despite having so little, they were so welcoming to me. I was so lucky to have wonderful counterparts who understood the work of Peace Corps and wanted to help with the process of educating their fellow villagers on health issues. I will miss the simplicity and the quaitness of village life-I really truly felt like I was living in a 'Little House on the Prairie' type life, and I loved it and could easily go back, if my health permitted. So all in all, I loved so much what I had and to leave it was really very difficult, for both the villagers and myself. Tears were shed but promises were made to visit before I left Zambia for good. I also gave away lots of remembrances-anytime you leave somewhere, Zambians ask for remembrances so many of my villagers got photos, clothes and school supplies. Hopefully this doesn't make the job difficult for the next year. So yes, in a nutshell, saying goodbye was a bittersweet farewell.

After I was pulled, I was taken to Kasama for a few days on R & R and then on Nov. 1st I made the move to Lusaka. Jobs were not set up and I was close to calling it quits in Zambia. I had further medical treatment for the week, and helped Les with some projects of his. Les works for an NGO Corridors of Hope so he needed some help editing reports and then he had a three day workshop so I volunteered to be the type writer for the session. It was good experience and kept me busy which was nice. I had interviews with KnowledgeBeat but was not keen on living so far out of Lusaka so I really pursued Save the Children. Luckily for me, Save the Children also really wanted a Peace Corps Volunteer so I had an interview this past Tuesday with the country director, who also worked with my Dad in Iraq so that's a nice connection. He was so nice and flexible so we worked out a work plan. I will be working two days with a partner NGO-Youth Vision-doing life skills work with a high school in Kafue which is in Southern province. The other three days, I will be working in their office on the Every One Campaign which focuses on child health and maternal health. I will be working on policy research and advocacy for this project so great experience! I am really excited. Now, since life's looking up for me, I can see how blessed I am and that really, the world wasn't out to get me. Maybe it's a sign that this is really the type of work I should get into. I had one solid year in the village with great projects and now, I'll have one year to work on the other side of the spectrum, to see how things work from the top down. I know I'll miss the simplicity of the village, and all my friends and counterparts from the village, but I am not complaining. I am just so thankful to Peace Corps staff for believing enough in me to keep me.

So yes, I give thanks this year for my wonderful supportive family and friends back home, but also to my ZamFamily-Peace Corps, villagers and my Zambian colleagues. I've got so much to be thankful for so I'm going to keep on giving thanks.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!!

Love and miss you all.