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:
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| With work colleagues at our National Day Event |
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| Zambezi canoe crew! |
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| Mid-hash run! |
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| Post-hash |
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| Eating nshima - Zambian food - at the Peace Corps office with some colleagues. |
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| Post-hash festivities |
