Day 12

After a early morning start today, we headed off on the bus again to the rural villages of Kafue. Upon arrival, we separated into groups of 4 and divided up the village between all of us. Each group needed to complete 10 different household surveys today, these surveys basically consist of information about the head of the household's education, age, children, disease, access to immunizations, etc. This village was very poor. All of the households were mud huts with straw roofs, they had shared latrines and a communal water tap. Few of the children had gotten any immunizations, and many of them had malaria and were malnourished. All of the men of the village were fisherman. One interesting thing I found out from the surveys was that most of the mothers were under the age of 20 (some with 3 kids already) and were married to men in their 50s. I didn't see many men around the village because they were probably out fishing for the day. The women were all carrying babies wrapped to their backs and were washing clothes, fetching water, sweeping, or cooking.

It seemed like having a white person in the village was the main attraction of the day. Everywhere around Zambia people tend to stare pretty blatantly at any white person, some of them call out "Muzungu!" which means foreigner in Nyanja, the local language. At one point today around 20 small kids were following me around, it was really funny! I kept smiling at all of them and then they would giggle. One kid poked me for awhile in the leg, another kid stared over my papers the entire time I was doing the surveys. All of the kids were so cute!

The rest of this week we will be continuing with these household surveys and compiling data from local health centers on prevalence of certain diseases in the area. Thursday we will write our report for the week and Friday we will present to the class.

Something completely random about Zambia, due to the poor quality of most of the roads, there are no speed limits (or none that I have seen). However, to ensure cars don't drive extremely fast, there are speed bumps literally EVERYWHERE! This method definitely makes people slow down but it has gotten pretty annoying...

More pictures!

Here's the group of us in Kafue. The Zambian flag is in the background.

These were the huts in the village where we were conducting the survey today.

The huts were very small and most of the doorways were covered with towels.

Here were some of the kids following me and giggling. I am definitely the odd one out here!

That's all for now!
Jenn