So as most of the people who read this know, I have been home in America for the past week and a half. My stepfather passed away after a long battle with cancer a week ago today and I came home for my two weeks bereavement leave. Its been a pretty difficult experience but its been really great to be surrounded by my family and friends again. I didn't realize how much I missed everyone and everything before I came back. But I am headed back to Zambia on Sunday and to be honest I can't wait to return as amazing as it has been to spend this time with my family and friends again I really do miss Zambia and especially the other volunteers in my intake, I keep seeing their updates on facebook and it makes me realize how much I really want to be apart of that.
So right before I left Zambia I was on my second site visit, meaning that I got to actually see the site where I am going to be living for the next two years. I am a third generation volunteer which means that I am the third volunteer to be living at my site. There both are positives and negatives to this. I do get a pretty much furnished hut because the other volunteers have left behind a lot of their furniture and other essentials that they don't want to bring with them back to America however, my village is also going to have a preconceived notion of what a volunteer is like who I am before I get there. For example one of the the volunteers before me didnt allow children in her yard so therefore none of the kids in the village will come near my house which is something that I'm defintitely going try to undo while I am at my site, I'm thinking coloring books and some crayons and bubbles might help undo that one. As for my actually dwelling space I've got two separate huts. One has two rooms, a bedroom (aka a room that just fits my double bed) and a small sitting/misc. room. My other hut is small cooking space. I really like the set-up for my site because I had quite the traumatic experience with rats when I was studying abroad in Uganda so I like the idea of having all my food (and the critters that might be enticed by that food) in one place and sleeping in a completely separate dwelling.
I also got to spend a few days with the volunteer that I am replacing and that was pretty great. It was nice to have the perspective of someone who has been in the village for awhile and to see some of the projects that he has done during his service and some of the schools that he has worked with. I also got to see the Provincial House for Eastern Province which is like the headquarters for Peace Corps in my province where volunteers can spend a few nights each month to hang out with each other and have some of the finer things in life like electricity and indoor plumbing. Second site visit as a whole got me really excited to move to my village and start my service although I'm not sure how my move-in/site placement date with be affected by my time at home but thats not something that I am really going to worry about right now- at least not until Monday when I am back in Lusaka.
Oh and just a quick note I was looking at some old posts and saw some gross spelling mistakes and I just wanted to clarify that most of the time when I am updating my blog I am doing via my cellphone which has an old school small keyboard and I use text prediction so any weird spelling things/words can be attributed to that. I just had to clarify that to make sure that my grammatical integrity remains intact.
