Happy New Year!!

We hope that your holiday season was wonderful! Heather and I had our Christmas and New Year in our village and it was actually a lot of fun. We ate with some families that we are very close to and went to a church service (however we opted out of the 8pm- midnight Christmas Eve service). We made cakes and cookies and even bought a goat for the festivities. I think I was a little late in hunting for a goat (as it was Christmas Eve) so after a lengthy search traipsing through the bush and asking at numerous villages, finally we found our Christmas beast. He was a mangy little guy that may have had a slight case of emphysema. We figured though that as long as we didn’t eat the lungs we’d be okay.

Now we are heading into Lusaka for our last Peace Corps meeting. This will be a fun week with the entire group that came to Zambia with us in January of 2006. We will even get spoiled a bit for this one; nice accommodation, safaris, horse back riding, and a “cheese cave”!! Going to this close of service conference definitely brings to home how little time we have left. And although we are mentally starting to check out and begin to think about life’s next chapter, we have seen that we must fully engage here until the end. We’ve come to a point where the relationships we’ve worked to establish over the past two years can be utilized to bring about change. It’s funny how when you’re first here, you’re so motivated to bring reform and improvement but that’s when you have no credibility with the people. Yet by the time the credibility is there the motivation has definitely slackened.

There are two issues we have in mind regarding the above mentioned. The one being very encouraging and the other being extremely disheartening, yet a bit hopeful.
The first is regarding the mango jam project. Two out of three women from last year retained their vision and enthusiasm and have been doing great. Now they’re seeing the fruits of their easy labor. If the women keep up the same work ethic, it’s very possible that within the two months of mango season they can make around 400,000 kwatcha. To put that into perspective, this is a little over $100.00 coming in only two months for people that don’t make much more on average than a dollar a day (not that living on a dollar a day here is at all comparable to trying to do the same in America). So, at this point in our service this has been very encouraging. We hope to continue to encourage and refine their business skills so that next year they can do just as well or better in our absence.

The second issue involves a funeral we attended the day after our return from vacation. There is a common occurrence at Kaonde funerals where someone puts “magical medicine” inside the coffin so that when the pallbearers are walking to the cemetery, they will become possessed and find the person that used witchcraft to kill the deceased. So this is what we witnessed at this particular funeral. Fortunately however, one of our close friends who is a Christian and the first born son of the deceased, forced the men to stop. This is a very good thing because when the coffin finds the “witch” often the pallbearers, using the coffin, will either beat the person to death or severely injure them. It was truly sickening the way the people turned the funeral of their mother who is a Christian lady into a circus. We have never seen so much hatred and maliciousness before. The women especially were screaming and cheering for the coffin to continue. Even once the pallbearers were stopped, they were angry and yelled for it to continue in hopes that it would go and beat their 85 year old grandmother, who was the mother of the deceased. Yet despite all of this the most upsetting thing was that two of the pallbearers are leaders at our church and very close friends. There is so much we thought and felt after this situation but it would be too much to write it all. There was a bit of hopefulness that happened throughout this however. I decided to call the two church leaders who were participating over to our house. We had a long talk about the event and it turned out to be a great discussion. Both men were amazed and very thankful that I would actually rebuke them like the Bible says to. They said that never happens here and we see that you are a “true Christian”. The fact that they saw the error of their ways and seemed genuinely repentant was very encouraging.

So these are some of the new happenings here. And funny enough it actually portrays our past two years quite accurately. We’ve definitely experienced some of our life’s highest highs and lowest lows, sometimes both within the same day. We’ve been so thankful to have so many friends and family supporting us and helping us to keep things in perspective.

Lastly, one of our neighbors just had a baby girl and wanted us to give her a name. We decided there would be no better person to be named after than my mom, Kristy Castle. So now in Kangombe there is a little Kristy Jilowa Kamalondo.