zambian diaries

Africa is hot! I woke up this morning after some heat-fevered dream
that I was competing against another teacher to win some kind of class;
the details are a bit fuzzy, but he was making fun of my use of cologne
while I got the class to say that I smelled better anyway. The class
was voting that they liked me better. I can't even blame these dreams
on the Larium yet. Figuring I was done getting sleep for the night. I
flipped open my laptop and looked at the time, 1:40, and wiped off the
sweat while comtemplating what to do to fill 4 hours until it was even a
reasonable time to get up. My roommates get up to take a bath around
2am (that's some dedication to cleanliness!) and then go back to bed,
and mostly I spend the time listening to the UFO bird going strong
outside. I was reading City of Falling Angels on the plane (funny what
you'll read when your choices are P for Peril, the latest Tom Clancy
knock-off, and Maeve Binchy in the airport bookstore) talking about the
lack of ambient noise in Venice; the average decibel level there is
around 10 less than the average city. I wonder what it is here in
Africa, but it's got to be lower than that, cause that bird sounds like
it is sitting on my windowsill and making a sound straight out of Close
Encounters; a two tone, off pitch, low whistle. Just enough noise to
remind me there's a whole part of the world that I usually forget about
in the city. And keep me entertained in the middle of the night. I'm
contemplating the nature of African birds that sing during the night,
when strangely about 3am it starts to get real light, which mystifies me
for a while until I realize that I hadn't reset my computer clock and it
was really 5am, not 3. The bath made slightly more sense at that point
(although not much) and my sleeping ego felt less bruised, since I had
actually managed 5 hours instead of merely 3.

That's pretty much the highlights so far. Things will continue to be
pretty slow until I get out to the hospital, which won't happen until
next week, if then. I have to interview with the Zambian medical board
on Tues, then will likely fly out on Wednesday after doing my shopping
if they give me the thumbs up. I'm guessing I need to shop for around a
month's worth of groceries, which will be tricky, since I usually shop
for about 2 days worth at home. Somehow I doubt you can buy a month's
supply of cilantro and french bread, but I'll give it a try. In the
meantime I keep myself entertained by spending a fair amount of time
changing into what I hope will be a cooler set of clothes, only to
realize that it didn't make that much difference and all I've really
accomplished was getting another shirt sweaty. I'll get the hang of
this fairly soon, I would guess.

More to come soon, but I'm still in the process of setting up my email
and phone service, etc.