RPCV Nepal (2012-2014) currently interning in Lusaka, Zambia with the State Department for the summer

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Zambia update

Well, I have epically failed to post a blog a week, as I had originally imagined. I blame lack of internet. I guess I last posted after my first full week of work, and lots has happened since then!

I've just finished my first full month with the State Department, and time is flying by. So far, I have been fortunate enough to assist in many high impact projects and meetings that have further developed my understanding of how diplomacy works abroad. I came to Lusaka right before the Assistant Secretary of African Affairs, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, visited Lusaka, and spent my first week helping organize her visit and catching up on Zambia's political, economic, and environmental affairs. The Assistant Secretary of African Affairs is basically in charge of all the embassies on the entire continent, so she was a very high profile visit. I was lucky enough to attend an offsite meeting with her and other Embassy officials (including the Ambassador and USAID’s Chief of Mission) to an elephant orphanage on the outskirts of Lusaka. Weirdly enough , the Assistant Secretary used to teach at Bucknell, where I completed my undergrad. Sadly I did not have a chance to tell her I went there.
On a daily basis, I have had the opportunity to work in tandem with the Embassy's Wildlife Officer in attending government meetings regarding poaching and how to best conserve the natural capital that Zambia has to offer. These sorts of events have ranged from meetings with high-up government officials to local NGOs. Sometimes I get asked to help with other embassy events as well…last week I assisted the PEPFAR team (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) in helping take notes at a number of offsite meetings, and I also assisted in our National Day Event, which every embassy around the world has before 4th of July. It was at the Ambassador’s house and there were hundreds of people there from the Zambian government, other embassies, NGOs, etc. The food was, of course, American themed, and I helped make the numerous red/white/blue flower bouquets in the days leading up to the event as well. It was an “all hands on deck” event, so we had embassy staff bartending, serving food, blowing up balloons, etc. So much work for such a short event, but it was a great introduction to an Embassy-sponsored event during my first couple weeks.

 In light of the upcoming August 11 presidential elections, I have most recently been working on a number of political projects and work has gotten a lot busier as we near August. Most of my work has included writing reports (we call them cables here) to Washington on Zambia's upcoming constitutional referendum, as well as other environmental issues, such as the relationship between illegal charcoal production and electricity load-shedding. The charcoal cable is currently in the works, and I’ve gotten the chance to kind of “take point” on this project and organize all the meetings with government officials, etc, so that’s kept me quite busy. Election day, which I will try and write more on this weekend, will be quite busy, as our Embassy sends out election monitoring teams all over the country. Going to be a verryyy long day…we start at 4am and stay at the various voting stations until 2am or so. Pretty exciting!

Besides work (which actually I love and is fun), I’ve also been fortunate enough to travel to Kafue National Park and canoe the Zambezi River;  seeing these protected areas in person after reading about them at work has been helpful in placing the work I've been doing in context. I did a 4-day canoe camping trip on the Lower Zambezi River which I can honestly say has been one of the top 3 travel experiences I have had thus far in my life. It was amazing. Five of us, plus 2 guides, rafted down the Zambezi (which straddles the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe) for four days, camping each night on one of the many river islands, where we often slept alongside elephants. In the canoes, we drifted alongside (and in many cases paddled very hard) pods of hippos and crocodiles. Crocodiles are my favorite animal but honestly, it was quite unsettling to spot a massive one from the canoe about 30 feet away on a bank and then have it slide into the water.  Everyday we would get up at 6, have  breakfast around the campfire (seriously the food on this trip was amazing, considering everything was packed into our canoes…we had full breakfasts of bacon, eggs, toast, beans, etc. and dinners were pasta and veggies, chicken stew, potatoes, etc.), and spend the rest of our day canoeing and wildlife spotting. We could get extremely close to elephants, which was my favorite part of the trip…seriously sometimes we were 15 feet away! The elephants just let us glide up closely from the river, as opposed to a viewing them in a noisy car. At night we would camp on the islands and build a big bonfire, roasting marshmallows and drinking copious amounts of local beer we brought along. I spent 4th of July on the Zambezi and it was definitely a holiday to remember….someone had a speaker so we played some American country songs and built a big fire. There was one other American on the trip with me, alongside a Canadian, a Swiss-German, and a Brit, so it was nice to be able to celebrate the 4th with other people!

A week after I got back, I re-connected with 3 people from my canoe trip and we headed off on a 3 hour drive to Kafue National Park, which is the second largest NP in all of Africa. We spent Friday night doing a game drive and camped along the Kafue River before heading back to Lusaka on Saturday. I was extremely lucky in this trip in the sense that going to the national parks are often very expensive. You have to pay for lodging, food, game drives, park fees, etc. However, the people I travelled with had their own car! And we camped for $9 a night and brought all our own food, so we were able to keep costs low. Friday night we were fortunate enough to see a cheetah, which is fairly rare given that we were on a self-drive (normally the guides know where the animals tend to hang out). We got extremely lost following our cheetah sighting (we off-roaded to see it), which involved completely losing the road we were on and sticking one person up onto the roof with a flashlight to act as a spotlight while driving around looking for tracks. There was probably a solid 5 minutes where I thought we’d actually have to spend the night in the car. Luckily we found the road after a solid half hour of searching, and got back to camp in time to cook up dinner and have some s’mores before heading to sleep. The next morning we decided to do a quick drive on our way out of the park and not five minutes into our drive we saw a leopard!! I have seen leopards in Tanzania, but only at dusk and way high up in a tree. This leopard however, was on the ground in broad daylight, stalking some impala across the road. We had sadly interrupted the hunt, but it was quite amazing to see the leopard so close, they’re normally the most elusive of the big cats. No lion sightings, or zebra and giraffe. I have yet to see a zebra….

I guess otherwise I’ve just been exploring Lusaka more and hanging out! The weekends I normally try and run and get to the hash on Saturday, but otherwise it’s pretty low key. Last weekend I took my book to a nearby restaurant and read for a while and then got a massage, which was amazing (can’t afford this stuff in the states, gotta take advantage of the opportunities when I can!), and went to dinner at a great Indian restaurant with some people from the hash. Lusaka has a lot of great Indian restaurants. Weekdays I work 7:30-5:30pm so I’m usually pretty beat after work and because it gets dark here at 6pm, I normally just hang at home during the week, so I try and do my exploring on the weekends.


I’ve put a ton of photos up on my Facebook, but here are some below from the canoe trip and the Hash run this past Saturday:

With work colleagues at our National Day Event






Zambezi canoe crew!


Mid-hash run!


Post-hash


Eating nshima - Zambian food - at the Peace Corps office with some colleagues.


Post-hash festivities