I have been out of Lusaka for a week. Last Friday, I took a weekend trip up to Kasanka National Park with a bunch of friends/people I'd never met before. During November and December each year five million straw-coloured fruit bats take up residence in one hectare of Kasanka National Park's mushitu swamp forest. Saturday night, we left our campsite and headed for the swamp. We set up shop in the middle of the marsh and waited. We asked one of the guides when the bats would start flying. He looked at his watch and said, "two minutes". Two minutes later, at 6:15, like clockwork, the dusk sky was flooded with silent wings. It sounded like an ocean breeze as the entire colony streamed out from their roost in search of food. For about 25 minutes I was mesmerized by the erratic flight of the largest congregation of mammals in the world. I felt like I was watching a dragon army going off to war or something.



In the morning we hiked to where the bats' roost. We had to go through some heavy brush and I almost fell in a stream crossing it via a rotten log. The whole weekend was amazing. It's so crazy that I can get out of the city for a few days and find myself in a national park, breathing fresh air and witnessing nature in a way I never have before.

On a side note: Do you know what the ABC's of HIV prevention are. Abstinence, Be faithful, use a Condom. Did you know that George W. Bush only supports the first two and is ignorant enough to believe that promoting condom use means promoting sex before marriage ergo we mustn't do that because then kids might do something unchristian and actually have sex prior to the wedding night. Come on! A bigger problem here is that all the money the U.S. government earmarks for HIV/AIDS comes with the caveat that the promotion of condom use is essentially prohibited. Therefore the biggest prevention technique for not spreading AIDS is not condoned by our government under Herr Nitwit W. What really infuriates me is that people can be ignorant enough to believe that kids will abstain until marriage. So what if the bible says so, we are living in the real world! And in the real world people have sex. This is why religion can not dictate public policy and world health issues. We have to be realistic. And we are just not doing a good enough job.