Last and Quite Possibly the Least

Well I'm writing this post to you from the comforts of home.  It was a long flight, there is just no way of getting around that.  We left Lusaka shortly after midnight, so that would have been early Wednesday morning.  The first leg was to Amsterdam and it took about 9 or 10 hours.  I was kind of squished as far as width is concerned but I was able to sleep from 2am til 7am about.  Not too bad, but it was not the most refreshing sleep.  Got into Amsterdam around 9 or 10 I think.  We had about an hour and a half before our next flight opened it's security so we wandered around that whole time, I don't we ever sat down we were just happy to stretch our legs and then the flight from Amsterdam to Chicago was about 8 hours.  That one was the worst, it was just really painful being squished in my seat, I say I sat for about 30 minutes and then I stood for about 15 minutes I repeated that cycle the whole time.  The width was pretty narrow, and Josh said it was bad for him too.  Josh got some sleep on the second leg of the trip I didn't.    

Well everything was really going pretty smoothly at this point, we watched as all of our baggage came down the conveyor we had a little extra attention at customs because of where we were coming from.  We made it though and called a taxi and we headed off to my Aunt's house.  But this is the one bad part of the trip.  We left behind my brother's checked bag, his huge suitcase.  It made it through customs we remember that, but we don't remember if it made it into the taxi or not.  So it was probably left at the curb in O'Hare, not good. Well we didn't realize this until we were in Slinger though, which is part of the problem if we recognized that we forgot a bag while we were anywhere near the airport we could have gone back and retrieved it, unfortunately it was too late when we realized it. Josh called the taxi company they said they didn't have it, and the airport said that it would have been taken back to KLM if it was found, but unfortunately KLM's O'Hare depart isn't going to open until later today.  

Well anyway I dropped Josh off there in Slinger and then I made my way up back home, coming back shortly after catechism had let out.  I think I made it back around 7:45pm my kids were still awake.  It was good to see them all, I can see how hard my absence was on them by their greeting of me, Crystal did a great job and had tons of great help, but I don't think I'm going to make a habit of leaving my young family for that long anymore.  Stayed up past 10 to help fight jet lag and I got up around 6:30am this morning after sleeping like a log.  Kids enjoyed their gifts so did Crystal.  But it is time to get back to work and I'm already back in the swing of things.

It was fun being able to blog my experience, I enjoyed using the blog kind of as a public journal of my trip and being able to share the events with I guess who ever cared enough to read them.  It was an amazing trip learned so much and experienced so much, the animals were amazing it was simply awesome to be able to spend that time with our missionaries and with the national pastors there in the LCCA, all who are truly brothers in Christ.  I had fun with my brother, and with the Plugers.  It was good and I'm glad I did it.  As I sign off on my (probably) final blog post just wanted to thank everyone for reading it and for posting comments see you around.  -Peter

UPDATE - I just heard from Josh that his luggage was found at the airport and that it was returned to airline and is waiting for him to go and pick it up, so he is going to have to go back to Chicago (tomorrow) to get the suitcase, not fun but it good that he found it.

UPDATE 2 - Just heard from brother he went all the way down to Chicago to pick up his luggage and when he got there he was informed that they had already shipped it to his house, and is probably going to be there when he gets back!  What a pain.

UPDATE 3 - Well it wasn't there when he got back, a couple of days later he called the airline, they said that his luggage was still at O' Hare!  Awesome.  Well they finally did ship it down to him and I want to say Tuesday night he had his luggage, so it took a week, but he was reunited with it.  And that I believe closes the saga of the trip.  It was a blast.

All set to go

Well we had another night out on the town.  We went to a crocodile farm today and it was interesting, the safety was definitely set at Zambian levels.  There were huge 1000 pound crocodiles behind some chicken wire.  and you can go within inches of them.  It was terrifying but also really cool.  We had crocodile burgers for lunch.  Did a little bit of running around and some more shopping in the mall and had lunch there.  We came back here had a shower got all of our stuff packed up and took a shower, and now we have an half hour before we leave, no time to put pictures on just a quick update, I'll probably post again when I get home, but that won't be for like 30 hours, ouch, not looking forward to all the traveling again, but looking forward to being home, missing my loved ones a lot.  See you soon.  Peter

Big extremes

This morning we started the day by going to chapel at the seminary at 7:30 it was nice a good message.

  Then we went into town. There are lots of extremes between the big city of Lusaka and the villages, the traffic here is crazy.  It is interesting as you are sitting in traffic people come up to you and try to sell you stuff, which i guess isn't that strange.  And they sell top up cards for cell phones, bags of oranges and whatever.  Well we saw one guy who had like 10 dog collars with leashes going from car to car trying to sell them.  This is really crazy who buys their dog collars from wandering people, and then a mile later we saw another guy selling the same collars, and the funny thing is that Zambians don't really own dogs as a general rule, we never saw anyone walking their dog.

I've included a picture of a guy holding a book about "Understanding Physics" which is like the strangest book that you can try to sell people who are stuck in traffic.

 We went grocery shopping in the morning and got some money.  They grocery stores here are really strange and sell strange things like duck fat, not sure what you do with that.  We went to a little village that has lots of souvenirs that you can buy.  I enjoyed trying to get people to go down on their prices one guy wanted to sell a bowl for 150kwatcha ($25( I countered with 40 and then just went on about how there were some small imperfections in it and it was kind of small and then I walked away and he finally went for 50 kwatcha which is like 8 dollars, I was proud of myself, but it takes a lot of time to get the price down.  Here is a picture of the market.

We saw the US Embassy it is huge and impressive.  We met with one of Chris' friends who lives here and we went to an Irish pub for supper and a couple of drinks, it was pretty fun.  It's late and I'm planning on hitting the hay, excited that I'm going to be going home tomorrow, late tomorrow yes, but the voyage will begin tomorrow.  Bye.

Back in the big city

Well we made it back to the big city it is one crazy bumpy five hour long drive there. It's a crazy drive but that when we got here Chris was really tired so he went to sleep and we went out to supper with Pastor sergeant and we went to a Indian themed restaurant the kind of Native American Indian it was really funny because it was very stereo typical we had steak and burgers and it was very modern restaurant in the big mall here in town it was strange because there was a white couple sitting on the other side of the bar and I couldn't help but stare at them because it was so strange to see white people and now we are back at the guest house and we are going to go to sleep hopefully tomorrow Chris will be good and we will be able to drive around in town and get a tour of the big city we are going to do some shopping here in town probably buy some souvenirs I don't have a whole lot else to report so I'll just to close it down at this point but we are definitely excited to be getting closer to the end of our trip it was a lot of fun and it was pretty awesome amor just said the last few days here the last leg of the trip goodnight everybody

whoops I guess it was just the flu

Hello, back again,

First of all no one has commented on my posts in a while, hello is anyone out there?
Secondly as you might be able to tell by the blog post title, Chris our host does not have malaria, the blood tests came back and they didn't find it, he still feels a little sick so they think that he has the flu, and it is possible I guess that he also had malaria, but it is pretty unlikely, so he was belly aching and complaining and it was the common flu, which really isn't anything to laugh at I guess, but I felt like telling Chris that he is big over exaggerator.  But oh well he was feeling better today sort of, he woke up fine but late morning had a little bit of a fever but it has come down and he is feeling, better hopefully he'll be all good tomorrow and the 3 of us can head out to Lusaka for a couple of days at the seminary there and to see the sights of the big city.  Here is a picture that Josh took of the Plugers today, they wanted him to take their picture for some publicity stuff, I thought I'd share it.

Okay lets see today we took it easy here around the area.  You know its the smells and the sounds that are really impressive about Zambia, there is always the sound of chickens, everywhere you go roasters are crowing and the smell of smoke, everyone cooks on charcoal, so there is always that pleasant smoke smell in the air.  But anyway, we went for a short ride w/ Jeanine today to a rural school to pay some school fees for some kid that goes there, but it was way out in the bush and I'll attach a few pictures of some really rural areas in Africa.  The grass thatched roofs are very common in the villages and rural areas, you really wonder how mcuh that helps in the rain, but of course it is cheap.

There was no one at the school so the trip was kind of pointless but right next to the school in this teeny tiny village there was a huge catholic church and it just seemed so strange to be there, the doors were open and Josh and I walked around it and explored it, it must have sat a few hundred people and we wondered if it filled up on Sundays, I think it pretty unlikely.

Out there in the village we saw a woman (in the red shirt below) with a hammer hitting big rocks to make gravel and she was selling little piles of gravel.  It looked like insanely hard work to be doing that in the heat with a hammer but she was really going at it.  Josh went up to her and asked her if she was making rocks, she responded no, I'm making money.  So that was funny the lady pulled one over on Josh.

On the way back from the little village Jeanine got a call that one their friends (who lived in Chipata, 2 hours away) their car broke down near Chris and Jeanine's house, so Jeanine headed on over and picked up her friend's kids while a mechanic towed her car and was going to fix the breaks.  Not having really good breaks on these roads would be a terrible idea, you are constantly slamming on the breaks because of goats and pigs and ox carts and cattle crossing major high ways, its nuts so you definitely want good breaks.  Well we stopped and got gas, the person before us had 3 55 gallon drums in the back of their pick up and they were filling them with diesel, we figured it would be worth over $1000, which is an insane amount of money out here.  Josh and I figured we had time to do some shopping while we waited for diesel.  We bought some chechengwe (the wraps that women wear around their waists) and I also saw a man fixing watches on the sidewalk, my watch has been missing a pin this whole trip and I keep thinking when I get back to the states I'll get it fixed, but I thought this guy could help, for less than $2 he got my watch going again.  It was impressive to see him work with these mechanical watches and fixing the tiny pieces.

Well after that we headed back to the house and had lunch, left over pasties from the night before they were good.  The friend eventually got her brakes working and she came and picked up her kids, Sean appreciated having some company for a couple of hours.  The rest of the day we just hung out and played games, Settlers of Catan and up and down the river we had homemade pizza for supper, Josh brought along some pepperoni so that was pretty tasty.

It is getting to the point were I'm really missing my family, and I'm enjoying it here but also miss being with them, it'll be good that tomorrow we travel to the big city of Lusaka, and we will be closer to going home.  It's been a really fun trip and extremely eye opening.  But will also be happy to be back with those whom I love.  Good night everyone, and leave some comments!

Pastor's Conference

Well its been a few days since my last post.  I have been away from the internet so I'm going to do a little bit of catching up now.

So, since Chris was sick with what we thought was malaria, we arranged for us to meet one of the missionaries half way between where we are staying and the pastor's conference.  It was getting close to dark and it is really pretty dangerous driving here during the day it gets really dangerous at night, so Janine just took us to a little village which was the halfway point and dropped us off and went back home and we were going to wait for the missionary whom she knew was not far away.  Well in that time I saw a small infraction a car bumped into a motorbike no big deal I think that kind of thing happens all the time here.  Well the missionary came and picked us up and took us back to Chipata where the pastor's conference was being held.  In the city (it has about 400,000 people in it) it was getting dark and was actually pretty much dark when we got there, and we were going down this really narrow road that was filled with pot holes and people walking on it in mass hundreds of people every 100 yards or so were on the road it was crazy and the bicycles, we saw a bike that had 2 live pigs tied on the back, that is pretty funny.  So the missionary is driving the land cruiser just weaving between traffic people and pot holes all of course in the dark, Josh and I look at each other like this place is crazy.  Well we get there and we meet then national pastors and missionaries.  They had just finished their soccer game, Malawi verses Zambia, Malawi won 2-0, which was always a major topic of discussion.  The first night we ate beef and nshima and we went to the mission house to have some fellowship with the missionaries.  We sat on the porch and had a good time talking until midnight and then we were super tired so we crashed at the other mission house that was next door.  It was kind of crazy going to the next house there were a couple of gats that you had to go through and there was a bit of cliff that you could easily fall off of.  And you had to really crawl down to get through a gate, it was pretty strange but we got to our air mattresses and got some sleep.

The next morning we woke up early went to the church to get our breakfast nshima and then we headed out to the place where the conference was.  It was at a lodge resort I guess, there were animals there like impala puku and ostriches, which were not fenced in, they were just running around, which I found to be kind of dangerous but apparently they didn't.  There were 2 papers for our conference that day, one was an exegesis of Ezekiel 34 by a National pastor and another paper about Funeral Practices of the people of Africa, that was also done by a national pastor who was surprisingly named Chibi.  Here is a picture of the conference we were outside on the grass under trees and there was a lake behind us, very nice view.

The national pastors just like the pastors in America, like to talk so there was much discussion to each paper, everyone wanted their 10 minutes to comment on each paper.  There were 60 pastors there so it make it kind of hard.  They were interesting papers, and we enjoyed hearing them.  Josh and I were greeted from the group and during our lunch and breaks the pastors came and introduced themselves and we did a lot of chatting. 

The lunch meal was served by the ladies it was neat to hear them singing while they made our lunch during the conference.  We had grilled meat for lunch and.... nshima.  It was very good.  I have a video of them singing, it is too big to upload here from zambia, maybe I'll upload it when I get to the states. They were amazing ladies cooking all that food for all those people.

 Later on there was a business meeting and following that there was a volleyball game.  Now I believe only a few people had ever played the game before, but it was amazing to see in about 30 minutes or so how quickly they picked up the game and were really getting into it, the two countries once again were sparring against each other.  The missionaries on in there as well.  Josh and I played as well on opposite teams.  It was fun.

After that back to the church for supper, there we had sausage and nshima, the sausage was a pretty far cry from anything that I've eaten back in the states but it was ok.  I went back for second on the nshima and that was a mistake, I was hurting for the rest of the night.  Then we went back to the mission houses.  Now I should mention that the 60 people or so are all moving to all these different places by about 4 or 5 land cruisers which are smaller than minivans.  I don't think any of the national pastors have their own vehicles that they come to the conferences in, so everyone crams in the back of these cruisers, it is nuts.  The second night the missionaries enjoyed fellowship again this time we were not up so late, like 10:30.

We woke up the next morning and just had a leisurely morning as we waited for our ride to Petauke, some of the pastors from Petauke were there and they were getting rides back from the missionaries so we went with them, there were 10 people in the land cruiser and I was in the back facing sideways, it was really bad, they don't make those things for big people to sit in the back, those land cruisers are really amazing and they are tanks nothing stops them but not so comfortable.

Well we saw some of the pastor's homes and were invited in as we dropped them off, it was nice to make friends with them, and then we made it back to Chris' house and heard that he wasn't feeling better and he had in fact been to the hospital and they have taken his blood, he may not have malaria, it might be an infection but they will get back to him and hopefully he will be feeling better soon.  I guess while we were gone he had a fever the whole time and just felt miserable.  One of the missionaries said that he would take us to Lusaka on Sunday and help us get to the airport on Tuesday so we'll see what happens.  Hopefully Chris will be better.  Ok, time sign off, Josh wants to get on the computer.  -Peter

Quickie post before I leave

Hello I don't have a lot of things to report on, our host Chris Pluger, is not feeling good with malaria.  He is taking the treatment for it but it can be days yet before it resides.  Last night he was having some hallucinations, and the intermittent fever and chills.  So he will not be taking us to the pastors conference as planned, but Jeanine (Chris' wife, also our host) will be taking us half way to Chipata and one of the missionaries, Jon Hartman will meet us half way and take us back to the conference.  There will be a paper by a native pastor talking about local funeral practices and we will be talking about other issues as well.  We won't be going until later today after one of the papers.  So we have some time here in Petauke to go for a walk and enjoy the nice warm day here.  And then at 4 we head on over to the conference.  Because we will not have our own car we will not be leaving early like we had planned, we will be leaving at the end of the conference on early Friday morning, the missionary John Hartman will be taking us back because it is on his way back home.  So I'm just making this little post even though very little has happened since my last post, but it'll be a couple of days before I'll be able to blog again.  Take care I'll be back with more pictures.  Here are some more pictures from the safari because I don't have any new pictures to load.  This first picture might look kind of boring but look very closely at it, and I think you can click on the image and view it at full sized, there is something in this picture see if you can find it.

And of course i have to include another picture of Dodger's uncle, here he is enjoying the view of the lion.