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This blog will be an account my life working in a Refugee camp in Northern Zambia called Mwange. For the next year, I will be working for Right to Play, a sport and development organization based out of Toronto. What follows will be a life altering experience. Stay tuned....
Sunday, June 12, 2005
June 5th
It seems the story about the Congolese rebels was way blown out of proportion and the gunshots that people heard actually came from some nearby hunters… Funny how stories can get twisted and turned like that…
Sophie and I celebrated our birthdays today and what a day it was. We had decided on having the party out at the waterfalls which meant tons of preparation. The first step was to get a goat. Seems simple but in actual fact is not… Let me explain… I decided to try to find a goat in the camp. When you’re having a party in Zambia, you always get a goat – kinda like a cake back home or something like that. It took me asking about 4 refugee families where I could find a goat before I actually found one. When I finally did, I spent 15 minutes haggling on the price of a tiny little male goat that I didn’t think was worth more than $15. I eventually got a price I could live with (though white people are always charged more), and then came the catching and tying of the goat. After another 20 min. the goat was loaded in the back of the truck and we were on our way back to town. I then had to run around town rounding up a generator for the power, a fridge for the drinks, balloons, a bar-b-q, plates, and tarps. By the time everything was set up, it was past the time we asked people to come, but of course, everybody was late and all the rushing around was for not. I spent the time waiting for people with my friend Peacock from the Peace Corps, swimming in the river…
The party went really well and everybody that came was really great… I even cooked the goat from start to finish starting with the slaughtering and skinning (a very delicate process involving cutting off the @#$&@!! Before you kill it).
