FINALLY HERE!! (slight change of plans)

So we finally made it to Africa! It's 8:30 pm on Friday 5/7 and we changed our plans slightly so we're now in Livingstone until Monday. We flew into Lusaka on late Tuesday night and were greeted at the airport by Luhana, Marion and Charles (head of environmental education programs at KnowledgeBeat). They drove us from the Lusaka Airport to Chilanga, which was about 45 minutes outside of the city, to the KnowledgeBeat (KB) office where we stayed for the past 2 nights. After going over our schedule with the folks at KnowledgeBeat and realizing that we would not be leaving for Ngoma (the remote village we'll be volunteering for in the Itezhi-Tezhi province), until Monday / Tuesday time frame, we decided to take advantage of the extra time and re-route ourselves to do Livingstone first instead of in between our Ngoma and Cape Town times. We're here until Monday at which point we'll take a quick flight back from Livingstone to Ngoma and then do the 8-9 hour drive with KB team to Ngoma. In the meantime, we're staying at JollyBoys backpacking lodge, which is pretty hippied-out lodge full of Europeans and other Americans/foreigners who have been spending time in the 'bush' volunteering, teaching English etc. It's a cool little scene, but we're a little too exhausted after our day to take part this evening. After the 7 hour bus ride from Chilanga to Livingstone and not yet fully recovering from our jet lag, we’re ready to recover and prepare for tomorrow, which will be a more active day with our 8:30 am bike ride, and then tour to Victoria Falls (both Zambian and Zimbabwe sides). We'll be doing a one day safari the next day, and then we’ll be back to Lusaka to prepare for our trip out to the villages.

We did however make some good progress with the KB team last night in securing financial information that Annie and the KB team has needed to know since June 2009. We’re hoping that we were able to transfer some of my hard-earned excel skills to Marian.