wow

Happy Friday!

We are in Solwezi for a day of meetings that has proved totally amazing. The two FORGE Project Facilitators working on the women's center project referred us to an organization called ZPCT (Zambian Prevention Care and Treatment Partnership) last week. We met with 4 of their staff this morning, and their plans for Meheba are incredible. Next week they will be assessing the capacity at the Zone D Clinic and lab. Their plans are, beginning in October, to expand clinic services, staff and equipment to support comprehensive HIV care in Meheba. They want to improve clinic space, working culture, personnel training, and outreach activities.

Basically, they aim to create the Meheba equivalent of every Solwezi-based organization we are currently trying to link to the refugee HIV patients. It's incredible. Although they are USAID funded (which can be controversial in terms of donor agendas and the need to align indicators with these agendas), their attitude and ideas were amazing. So we are interested to see the results of their assessment and their next steps.

This completely reshapes our project plans for the next few months (and beyond), but hopefully just means that we no longer are going to be responsible for creating any type of clinical programming on our own (with very limited resources). We're thinking of conducting research/focus groups in each zone to help prepare for ZPCT's entrance this fall. Hopefully some of this research could comprise the basis for the thesis I need to write this coming year. We're also focusing more on the community sports league and some smaller ideas, like condom distribution in each of the stalls in the main market in Meheba.

The FORGE vehicle broke down a few days ago, so we had to hitch a ride into Solwezi last night with Mr. Mendes, the UNHCR Refugee Officer. He is a very nice man originally from Mozambique. We talked a lot about African politics on our ride into town. He also helped us find a guest house to stay in last night. We ran into our friend from Meheba, a Congolese refugee named Stephen, in the internet cafe. He was just returning from a trade fair in Ndola. We had dinner with him and talked a bit about his life prior to arriving in Meheba. It is a really powerful story which I'll save for my next post.

Then this morning walking along the main road in town, we ran into the country coordinator for the medical missions group that was in zone F two weeks ago. Ten minutes later, in Shoprite (a big chain like Safeway), we ran into William, the director of the organization that has just taken over operating responsibilities from CORD in Meheba. Small world!

What else, what else. The Finding Nemo watch I bought last week died after exactly 8 hours. Great. I am slowly able to ride my bike without excruciating amounts of lower body pain, but it is still pretty brutal. We had a great 4th of July celebration on Wednesday. In a rare flash of culinary inspiration, I helped make a batch of beer-battered sweet potato fries. They were delicious, even if Alice and Flora (our house ladies) could not stop laughing at me when I described the process for preparing them. They laughed at us the whole time. We also grilled some goat meat and made smores around the fire.

No fireworks, but a neighboring farm had some fires on their land late that night, so we watched this huge fire move across the horizon. (AAR left a nonfunctional water tower in the courtyard of the compound. If you climb on top of it, you get a pretty nice view) I thought people mostly did that to clear land for farming purposes, but apparently they also will light areas of the bush on fire in order to drive wild animals into a line of hunters moving toward the fire. Interesting!