Zambia Journal - Aug 22, 2005

We started off today by trying to find hardware that the rural village could use to connect to the Internet 30 km from anywhere- no success. Then we tried to confirm our tickets – no success. Then we went to the US Embassy to hear about what the US is doing to help the AIDS crisis in Africa and Zambia – no success there either, except that a couple of us were able to speak to a Zambian who works in the Embassy and find out what she really thinks of US policy. The billions of US aid is cleverly arranged to that 90% of it comes back to the US via US drug companies etc. Basically the US Embassy didn’t give me a nice warm feeling about its purpose in Zambia.
The remainder of the day was spent on wind up activities. We visited Bernadette in her home for lunch. We visited the post-partum leader of the Chipego Women of Hope in her home just to put a face to the name – she had very inconsiderately gone into labor when we might have met her in the Linda compound a few days earlier. We had dinner at the home of the leader of SWAAZ. We left the dinner with a bus full of us and Mtendere