the bush

I bet you didn’t know it, but all of you know people who live in the bush. Just what is the bush?? It’s the country! Brian’s parents live in the bush, I had friends in school that lived in the bush, and maybe you even grew up in the bush! Technically, the bush is any area that is not in the city. And since Lusaka is the major city, anything outside of Lusaka is the bush. Often saying “the bush” conjures up ideas of jungles and spears and people running around in loin cloths.
Now I know this won’t help any of you who don’t know the towns around where we live, but picture towns and mileage near you. Okay, picture Kandiyohi (where we live now) as the village we will be near (Chongwe). 10 miles away from Kandiyohi is Diamond Lake. This is the distance approximately that we will be away from Chongwe. Now, picture the distance from Diamond Lake to Benson-around 45 miles maybe? That is how far we are away from Lusaka, the capital. Of course it takes a lot longer to cover that distance in Africa due to road conditions (twice the amount), but we are not that far from 2,000,000 people in the capital which is amazingly modern. They just opened a new cross stitch store, sewing store, and Birthday-in-a-box store! They have a bowling alley, museum, water park, movie theater, and shopping malls!
There are cell towers all over most of Africa at this time too. It is cheaper obviously than laying landlines to hook people up. We have good cell coverage at the college site. To get on the internet, you buy minutes the same way you do for your cell phone. Plug in the SIM (?) chip, and you’re connected.
We will have running water from a new 150 foot well that Gospelink had drilled. It is a gravity flow system; our house is near the cistern, so we will have pretty good water pressure too.
We are still working on electricity issues. We could go all solar (fairly expensive upfront), use a generator only (gets expensive in the long run), or use a combo of them and others. We are looking into a propane refrigerator and using kerosene lanterns (propane and kerosene are readily available in the capital); I’ll have a charcoal burner for cooking along with a solar oven. We may have a few small solar panel with a small amount of storage to keep things charged (laptop, phone) and be able to occasionally have a movie treat. There is a solar store in Lusaka, so we can always add to our system. The truth is, once it’s dark, people go to bed! Often by 8 pm you’re asleep, you don’t want to keep lights on anyways due to bugs.