Placement and My Address

Hello again, everyone! It didn't take me too long to find internet after all - in fact it's in college. Apparently it's terribly unreliable, but never mind, hopefully it will work reasonable regularly! I'm missing you all lovelies, and grateful to everyone sending me news.

Well, I'm in placement now (eventually!). I'm in COSETCO, the Copperbelt College of Education near Kitwe in the Copperbelt Province. It's a lovely place out in the forest - very pretty and well-kept. And small, which is nice for getting to know people - everyone I've met so far seems lovely too, which is really important. So really I can't complain! I only have one worry, which is that they're all so enthuisatic about the HIV cause and have so many initatives in the college already that it makes me wonder how much work there is going to be to do here! It's fabulous that they're so uptogether of course, but I was longing to be busy! However, they assure me there's lots they need us for so I'm hopeful it will become clear (it is only the third day of placement after all!), and if not I'm sure I can use my initative to find some useful things today.

I've been partered with a guy called Chitalu, and I'm fairly happy with that - we'll see how it goes, but at least he's a nice guy, which is a very important first step! And we have another pair, Aggie and Deodatus, with us for the first month which makes it less intense. Plus it's loveky to have another girl around, and Aggie is a sweetheart. The four of us are living in a nice house, with electricity and running water - luxury!! Though both are unreliable, particularly the water, and as there's no shower it's still cold bucket baths, but I'm quite happy with that!

Now for a couple of stories to paint a nice picture of Zambian life for you all!....

Firstly the wildlife we've contended with, as I know everyone likes these stories! no rats here as yet (except a smelly dead one in the corner of our office when they unlocked it for us), but there are (live) bats and a wasps nest in there. and the house keeps being invaded by pigeons, i found three cockraoches this morning and there was a snake in the yard yesterday hee hee that's what you get for the beauty of being in the forest!

secondly, the joys of travel. it took us three days to reach placement (a 3 hour journey!). we left 8 hours late due to our staff not turning up to give us our materials so we could leave. that meant we were travelling at night - always bad in afrika. so we shouldn't have been too surprised when our bus pulled over in the middle of nowhere and told us to get off as it had decided it was too late and he was going home. so we stood in the pouring rain and with heaps of luggage. thakfully there was another bus close by, but it already had people on it, so the 8 of us travelling together plus all of our equipment could bearly cram in to the tiny bus - this was crammed even on African terms, with people sitting on each others laps and luggage up to the roof. we finally arrived at the nearest town soacked and freezing. this is where the other 4 will be working, we were supposed to go on to our college, but given how late it was we all stayed there for the night. now it's only about 30 mins from their college to ours, but no transport was available and they kept putting us off all day saturday, so we ended up staying another night 2 to a bed in Kitwe college, and finally made it up to Cosetco on Sunday morning. phew!

Here's my address, for anyone who wants to write - I'd love to hear from you. I'll endeavour to reply to you all, but I won't get into town to the post office very often and post can take weeks, so please don't be offended if it takes a while!

Claire Fox
SPW Peer Educator
Copperbelt College of Education
PO Box 20382
Kitwe
ZAMBIA

Much love and prayers to you all, as always,

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