Happy Independece Day Zambia

So every year volunteers go to another volunteer's site for Zambian Independence Day which is October 24th so we can all go swimming in his lake. For the first few days the weather was great, we swam, drank beer and cliff dived. Well, the very last night it started to down pour and none of us were prepared for the rain. We ran around grabbing all our stuff, putting up our rain flys and soon many of us found out that the rain flys were pretty useless. Some had to move into his house but the problem was that his roof was leaking EVERYWHERE!! The tent that I was in was okay but I had to fix the rain fly in the rain and before I knew it I was covered in red mud and was drenched...I was pretty terrible but that is what we get in Zambia. After the rain fly was up I had to get into my nice dry sleeping bag all wet and covered in mud. At that point I really wished I was at home in a nice warm comfy bed but oh well.

Hope all is well...lots of love!!

Camp GLOW

So this past month one of my biggest projects in Zambia finished up. I was in charge with 2 other guys to organize and run this years Camp GLOW. Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) is an all girls camp that lasted for one week. 24 village girls within Serenje and Mkushi and the 12 volunteers came to the camp. The camp taught the girls about self esteem, assertiveness, sugar daddies, rape, how to say NO, boyfriends, the importance of education and how to prevent HIV/AIDS.
During the morning the girls had the educational sessions and in the afternoon they had fun events like climbing a rock wall, Jacob's ladder, pottery and canoeing. It was pretty amazing to see the girls complete these tasks since most of them have never seen such a thing. The canoeing was extra special to me since I was able to have a swimming lesson. Most villagers in Zambia are scared of the water and think all bodies of water are infested with crocodiles (most are). Watching the girls climb the rock wall was crazy. The wall is probably 90 feet high and the girls climb up it in less than 5 minutes when it took me like 20 :) but these village girls are a solid muscle. Then at night we did lots of dancing, singing and sewed sanitary pads. It was so nice to see these girls have fun and not worry about chores and such. By the end the girls are very attached to each other and us and several cried during the last night.
The camp was a great success and I'm very happy that I was apart of it.