El Jardin

We’re beginning hot season, a joke compared with Arizona and Sudan, and I’m still sleeping with a wool blanket at night. I’ve still been working with my garden and every day it is looking better and better but the health of the garden is in relation to the amount of water I’ve been having to draw. Currently I’m drawing 80 to 100 liters of…

Life in Samuteba

I just returned to Solwezi, our provincial capital, after a two and a half week conference in Lusaka. While it was refreshing to see all the familiar faces from training, it also felt like a sensory overload to be in Lusaka. I went to have Indian, Thai, Ethiopian food and paid more for one meal than I spend in one month in my village….

Second Site Visit

During second site visit we stayed with Maria, a volunteer in Eastern Province. It falls between the first two weeks you are in country and gives you an opportunity to see what site is like. I went with Richard, April, Sarah and Musi. Sarah unfortunately left early, but April is going to be placed within my province. We were able to visit Maria’s school…

Zambia is home

While this message comes a few weeks overdue, I am finally living and an alien resident in Zambia. In fact only two days remain for me in my provincial capital before I am taken to my village: Samuteba, Mwinilunga district, Northwestern Province, Zambia. It is daunting, after so much training and traveling. I know I’m prepared for the time commitment, even if it has…

Drawings

This past weekend I went to Casa de Elizabeth along with my sister Laura to say hi to some of the children. I visited them for three days before leaving for Sudan in December of 2009 and after only a year the kids seem to have grown so much. Some of them I’ve been seeing since July of 2006 . . . Natan, in…

There Never Was.

“We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was.”   Reading Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy I found this quote. While placing it here, independent of its’ paragraph, page, chapter and book changes its’ context, as it stands alone I agree wholeheartedly. I never quite find the push to do all the things I desire or dream…

Desatured Sudan

Life is good lately and the internet is slow . . . hence my lack of posting. I have some random photographs from El Obeid which is growing hotter by the day. Hopefully within the next month the rainy season will begin. Last night A huge dust storm blew through Kordofan which means the rains are coming and this desert is transformed into green…

Election day in Sudan

A young physics teacher works at a Kareema polling station on the outskirts of El Obeid, North Kordofan State, Sudan. Elections in Sudan . . . there are so many different opinions. For many Sudanese there is a sense of pride in the elections, these are the first held in nearly 25 years. For many there is a huge frustration as the two largest…

Gracias a la vida

Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto . . . the words from on of my favorite singers, Mercedes Sosa. It’s not only a song about love for a man, but love for life, para todo que nos da la vida. It is a beautiful song my mother and my aunts have always played in our home and her voice and words…

Sudan

“How do you find Sudan?” is the question I get most often here. Yesterday in Ryan’s 8am class at Al-Neelain University one of the questions was spot on, “What did you think or know about Sudan before arriving here, and what do you think about Sudan now?” I wish I could say I was well-versed on Sudan. That I had a good understanding of…