Well I believe hot season is upon us here in Zambia. However, I don't think we've endured the worst of the heat yet so I'm still anticipating horrible temperatures. Right now it's still pretty cool in the mornings and evenings which is nice but it gets pretty warm in the afternoon. The one nice thing is the wind. I must say however my relationship with the wind here is quite a LOVE/HATE relationship. Most of the times it leans towards hate since it brings copious amounts of dust into my home and prevents me from riding my bike like a normal human being. However in the heat, the wind can be most pleasant.

Anyways, got an interesting lift the other day from the Zambia election council truck in my area. The presidential elections are coming up in November 2011 and they are already going around to village registering people to vote. Apparently people must register to vote every time there is an election. There are not very positive feelings for the current president Rupiah Banda, so it will definitely be interesting to see how the vote turns out next year.

In Kambe, the big news is the digging of a well for my family. They scraped up enough funds together to pay a neighbor to dig a well for them in their yard. It's been an interesting process watching this. It's all finished except for a top/lid section. It's about 12 meters deep and the poor fella doing this work would build little foot holes in the side of the well so he could climb in and out of it. His son would be at the top pulling up the rope with a bucket attached to the end in which he would fill with dirt and such. The water doesn't look extremely clean yet- but it surely can't be much worse than my open cesspool of a water source right now.

Work wise- I have been busy at the schools dealing with the Chongololo Clubs. At Luchembe Basic- the students wrote letters to a school in Elk Grove Village. Peace Corps has a pen pal program, so that's how I got into touch with the teacher there. She is using her International Club as my student's correspondents, so it should be an interesting exchange. I also visited a village about 27k away from my hut. They are extremely enthusiastic about me coming to work with them. I must admit that I do not exactly share their sentiments. I am flattered that a village actually wants me to work with them and teach them things (more than I can say for a lot of my surrounding villages), but a 54k round trip bike ride is going to be tough to do on a regular basis. I have plans to return next week and teach a bit about conservation farming, but we'll see what happens after that. They do have a really nice river in this village- crocodile free- so that is tempting enough for me to go back and go swimming! (In terms of biking- last month I biked about 375k, just in October so far I have done over 125k- phew!!)

Other kind of funny news for me came the other day while listening to my favorite radio program- 'border crossings' on VOA. While I mostly listen to BBC for the news, this VOA program is entertaining because it's a world-wide music request show. The host is this really goofy guy, Larry London. It's nice because they always play every single request, and I'll often here of other peace corps volunteers throughout the world requesting songs along with lots of us from Zambia. Well Larry decided to take callers the other day to win a CD of some sort. I didn't even know what it was but I thought hey what the heck- I probably won't get through anyways. Well I did end up getting through and I won! They put me on the air with Larry and he asked me all about Peace Corps and Zambia. It's so funny since they never take callers, and I just happened to win. My big claim to fame in Zambia I guess.

Now for some funny question's I've received lately:

- what exactly is a cowboy? - to which I really didn't have a straight answer
- does snow come from heaven? - I didn't even know where to start on that one
- do Americans celebrate October 24 as Independence Day also? - That is the Zambian independence day coming up