Katombi Chronicles

And I'm back!

The last three weeks were spent with a friend on her village about 4 hrs from my home in Chito. This village (Katombi) is just about my favourite place here in Zambia.

I went for language studies, as has been the focus of these trips in the past. There is a lovely couple here that I spend a couple hours 3-4 times a week just sitting and chatting. WOW! It still amazes me that we can find enough to talk about in my very broken Lunda to be able to chat for nearly two hrs!

There is a wee satellite clinic that my friend runs and while I was visiting this time she allowed me to see her patients every morning. Great langue opportunities! And again, I just amazed myself with how much of the language I actually do know- and not just Lunda, I can kinda make out some Luvale also; kinda helpful since nearly every one up here seems to know Luvale better than Lunda!


Its also a slower pace, which is a nice break from hospital! And a slightly different focus: more Gospel outreach and less medical work.

We had so much rain the few weeks I was there that we were basically flooded in for just over a week. So thankful there were no medical emergencies to rush to hospital!

We had several adventures with driving because the forest road was so bad. Stuck in a log bridge one day in the rain over a seasonal stream. 8 men and several onlookers and an hour later we managed to get unstuck and be able to reserve the car to use an ox cart trail they had just been working one.

Another day, using a diversion that had been made especially for the motorcar, and the diff got stuck, and i mean STUCK on a stump that hadn't been cut down low enough. Let me tell you about this amazing lady I was staying with: she decided, well, I need the car to be raised up higher than the stump, lets put the jack under it, raise it up off the stump and drive off the jack. She had never seen or heard of this being done before, but gave it a go. When we finally arrived Loloma we found out that was a perfectly reasonably thing to do.


Many, many other adventures and little experiences that I wish I had written down for you day by day and really given you the 'chronicles'.
I'm back now at Chito. And glad to be back. Well... except for the ortho marathon tmrw and friday and the plastics marathon next week! The fun never stops