Hey pals!
I’m finally out at my site after 3 months of training! Right now I’m in what’s called “community entry” until mid July. Community entry is all about integrating and getting to know your community and during CE you’re not really supposed to travel anywhere, unless it’s for official Peace Corps reasons.
So far in the ville I’ve had a few meetings to explain my role as a volunteer in the LIFE program and assess what people in my community are into. The results were basically what Ba Bright, my host Dad/counterpart, told me people in the village wanted to do/learn about, which turns out is improved gardening techniques, making fish ponds, chicken rearing, and bee keeping.
Since I’ve been in my village so far I’ve been harvesting with a different neighbor every weekday, as a way to get to know the people in my community. So basically I’ve been harvesting peanuts everyday, and afterwords whoever I’m harvesting with usually just loads my bag up with peanuts, so I have way too many at the moment.
One day though I was supposed to harvest with my neighbor Ba Andrew, who’s a community health worker and is going to be my counterpart for any health related work, but he told me that there’s an agriculture show in the town over from me. So we went to the show where people were displaying different crops they’ve grown. There was also a ton of traditional dancing going on, involving lots of drums and hip shakin’! The people around really wanted me to get up and dance so I did. The chiefteness of the area I live in was there and she gave me 5 kwacha (the equivalent of 50 cents USD) I guess because I tried so hard to do the dance thing.
For the next few weeks I’m going to work on making my garden, and it’s going to be an example garden, for different garden techniques. I’ll try to keep updating everyone on what things I’m up to out here!
-Dill <3
