First few days

Greetings everyone,
Well, I am in Zambia at the Overland base in Livingstone. We had a great, uneventful flight from D.C. to Johannesburg and then a good stay at a hostel in town before heading to Zambia on Thursday. It’s very surreal to be back here. Getting on the truck, it was as though I had only stepped off of it yesterday. The base on the other hand is a different story. It has changed so much since I was here in ’05. The last time I was here we had only tents, a (new) French drain toilet, and a lean to thatch hut with no walls that served as the office/entertainment centere/kithen. Now there is a complete logistics center with concrete walls (they continued with the thatch roof to keep with the local look), a brick and steel warehouse, a chalet, and thirteen covered tent areas. The retaining wall that overlooks the gorge has been extended and raised and there are now seven trucks instead of three. It’s amazing to see. The pictures on the overland website do not do the place justice. I’ll try to find somewhere to post pictures that everyone can access. Everything is going well so far. Last night we had a short intro by our leaders and then dinner. One neat thing is that we do some things in the British style, such has having tea after every meal. Then this morning we went through the official orientation. Our immediate leaders spoke again and the then leaders of the two humanitarian aid projects that overland started spoke. The LIFE project which deals with material assistance to widows and orphans within the villages and the SAM (Sustainable Agriculture and Microenterprises) project. The SAM project teaches basic agriculture to villages and helps support them in the growing and selling of crops in order to build up a stable economy within the village. We then went to a few of the villages to see some of the projects at work. That’s about it for now. We are going out to some villages from Monday through Friday of next week so the next update will come sometime next weekend. Until then take care and feel free to post responses. I love hearing from everyone back home.