Afterthoughts

I have been back home a week now, and  already some of my memories of Zambia are starting to cloud over as my old life creeps up on me. Of course everyone asks "What was it like?" and I feel like I need some time for my thoughts and feelings to settle before I can really answer them properly. There were some times that were quite hard on a personal level - and it is great to be back with my friends and family who know me and love me. At the same time, I never want to forget all the people I met whose warmth and friendship touched me and whose stories humbled me, and I hope that I will be able to continue my connection with them in some way.

Nearly the end...

I took one last cycle trip the day before I left Zambia, for a final glimpse of life here and to get more photos, but with little success. Unless you know them already, many people really object to their photos being taken: even if you ask permission, they often refuse and if you try and snap surreptitiously, they usually spot the camera and shout at you! So I gave up and spent the time chatting with Patrick, my 20 year old guide, instead. Like many other people here, both Patrick's parents died young.  His home village is several hundred kilometres further north where most of his family still live, including his grandmother who looks after his youngest two sisters. As we stood on the rickety wooden bridge overlooking the railway, Patrick told me it would take him two days travel by train to visit them, with a10 kilometre walk at the other end. He found it unbelievable that it would take me less than 24 hours to fly all the way from southern africa back to London.
I am not sure how Patrick ended up in Livingstone, but at some point, Cowboy Cliff had given him a room to stay in at the pre-school and trained him as a cycle guide. He earns enough money to pay his school fees, which are due every three months. He is in the final class at high school, grade 12, and this week he was sitting his end of year exams in Physics, Maths, Chemistry and Biology. There are no free libraries where he can revise and everywhere is noisy during the day, so he does most of his studying at night-time when it is quieter. He told me how when he was younger, he and his friends would go and sit out in the bush together to do their homework in peace, but this arrangement fell apart when his friends started drinking or smoking marijuana, so he cut himself off from them and studied alone. Patrick dreams of qualifying as a doctor or an engineer and coming to Europe. The unemployment rate in Zambia is something extraordinary like 65%, so working abroad is a very common aspiration. Others make no secret of looking for a "mzungu" (white) girlfriend for their ticket out of poverty - whether they are married already or not. One taxi driver turned to me after a few minutes silence the other day, and asked me earnestly whether men were allowed more than one wife in my country. I am not sure what his follow up question was going to be if I had said yes! 
But Patrick is a lovely, genuine boy and spending time with him was a humbling experience -   one of the many delightful, hard working, open hearted people I have met during my time here, and who I hope I will stay in touch with once I get home.


This rather unexciting picture is a typical road scene - note everyone on foot, boy wheeling barrow, piles of rubbish and two friends greeting each other.

Beautiful things

This time next week, I will be on my way home so here are a few of the things I don't want to forget once I am back in the grey: the women wearing chitenge - colourful fabric wrapped round their waists - tall and graceful, balancing large bowls of vegetables on their heads and a baby on their backs; all kinds of butterflies - orange, yellow, white, brown and swallowtails checkered in black and white, yellow and white; long trumpets of orange honeysuckle, sweet smelling white jacaranda and purple and red bougainvillea; the sunset over the Zambezi, the orange sun gradually dissolving into the grey-blue haze as it slips below the horizon; children's faces; the blue blue sky . . .

A Typical Day

Most weekdays begin early - usually around 6.30 am, when it starts to get light. I wriggle out of my sleeping bag and go to put on water for my still essential cup of coffee - it's instant these days rather than a latte from the college Starbucks, but just as reviving. After breakfast, there is always last minute preparation for the day's classes: writing out wordsearches - no photocopier!- or finishing off the cutting out for the day's activities, packing up bags with books, glue, coloured pencils, scissors, tissue paper etc and scurrying around for sunscreen and water before boarding the bus at 8.30 sharp. Whoever had the bright idea of transporting a London bus to use in Zambia as a mobile library had not done their homework properly. Apart from the centre of town, most of the side roads in Livingstone are little more than dust tracks, full of lumps and bumps with the occasional remains of a strip of pitted tarmac. The bus can only crawl along at walking speed and turning narrow corners can be tricky. Two days a week, we take taxis as the bus cannot manage some roads at all. As we near the school we are going to, children in the road start waving to us and calling out excitedly "Kerry, Kerry" - they find it hard to pronounce "Kelly" - or "Hello, how are you?" as they run along beside us. At each school, we have three or four classes from grade 4 to grade 7. However the ages of the children can vary within each group as some children start school at a later age than others, but still have to go through each grade one by one - so you might have a Grade 7 class with kids of anything from around 13 to 18. Usually you plan two sets of books and activities, one for the younger groups and one for the older. Teaching finishes at lunch time and we will be back at camp, hot, dusty and hungry, between 1 and 2 pm. There is a rush for the toilet and to wash hands, grubby from sitting on the ground and sticky from glueing! After lunch of rolls and cheese, the afternoons are free. If it is hot enough, I will brave the cold water in the campsite swimming pool, while everyone else looks on in disbelief at my claims of how refreshing it is. Most days I do some washing as clothes get dirty so quickly. We wash them outside in buckets of cold water but if you hang them out early enough they are usually dry by evening. Then I might take a trip into town to use the internet or do some shopping but most transactions in Zambia are not straightforward and might take you ten times as long as the equivalent at home. For example, there will probably be a long queue for one of the few ATMs, which is quite likely to have run out of money by the time you get to the front. Or if you use the internet, it might take an hour to send an email as the connection is so slow. Back at the campsite, there is always preparation for the next day's classes, which can also take time, especially if you are trying out something new. It gets dark around 6.30 pm and then apart from a light over the cooking and eating area, it is hard to see anything in your tent or around the campsite and I am grateful for my head torch. Most nights we cook supper on our two gas rings- mostly variations on a stirfry but always tasty. Washing up is done in bowls of water heated in the  kettle. Once or twice a week, we go out to eat - my favourite is the traditional restaurant where everything is served with nshima (staple porridge) and you eat with your fingers. Then we might play cards or consequences. Sometimes there are groups of "overlanders" staying as well as us and the site can be quite full. There is a very basic "bar" which can be boisterous at times, but often we have the site more or less to ourselves. I am usually back in my sleeping bag by 10 pm, listening to the night-time noises: a blend of music somewhere, dogs barking, the train hooting, a bell ringing, chanting from a nearby mosque, an insect bleeping like an unattended alarm clock and later on, the cockerels crowing.

 Waiting for our taxis in the morning

On safari

I did the proper tourist thing this weekend with some of the other volunteers and spent a night in Chobe National Park in Botswana - just a river crossing from Zambia. We were driven round by a guide in an open sided safari truck and saw as many animals as you could possibly wish for. There were some really magical moments - a herd of zebras glimpsed through the trees, switching their tails from side to side - families of giraffes bending their necks gracefully to eat or seemingly doing the splits to eat something off the ground - baboons shaking fruit down from a tree to eat - a line of elephants strung out along the horizon like in a child's picture book - a fish eagle perched on a branch devouring its catch......and many more. But some of it also left me feeling uncomfortable - partly because being driven around for hours on end by a local guide made it seem an unequal, almost colonial kind of transaction, and also because there is something hollow about watching a lion padding along a track with six vehicles full of passengers beside him, all  leaning out and flashing their cameras! I loved the birds best of all. There are so many of them and so many different kinds, often exotically coloured - and the guide seemed to know the names of all of them. The picture is especially for my colleagues - it is the lilac breasted roller (if you look closely) which features heavily in one of the English intermediate 2 past close reading papers! I also quite enjoyed the bush camping which reminded me of my days of Girl Guide camp - complete with tripods holding canvas buckets to wash in, camp fire and loo tent.

School today and yesterday has been very intense, but rewarding too. Today I had three groups of all boys at a school out in the bush where the children are particularly responsive and friendly. A group of 12 -15  year olds spent about 20 minutes in complete silence absorbed in drawing and colouring in pictures of animals they were copying from the book we had read. It was a lovely moment.

Zwelopili Community Centre

Zwelopili is the Lozi word for "progress". (There are more than 60 local dialects in Zambia, and Lozi is one of the main language groups) This is the place founded by a retired teacher (not the pre-school as I said before) and is built of traditional materials - mud and thatched roof. It has no government support and the children here cannot take exams. They can come from around two or three years old, and the groups we see have the widest mix of ages - so planning a lesson is quite a challenge. The very little ones cannot speak English let alone read, and sometimes get up and wander off to another mat where there is a more exciting activity going on! I read "Cross Crocodile" all about a greedy croc, who wouldn't share the mango tree with the other hungry animals until wily monkey plays a clever trick on him. It is hard to know how much the children understand, especially as many of them are so shy that even if you ask them a direct question, they often don't answer it. Also, they are not used to being asked their opinions about a topic as they usually learn by rote - copying things written up on the blackboard by the teacher. But they seem to enjoy the activities - yesterday we made monkey masks which went down well  though preparing 24 monkey masks the previous day  took quite a while! The headteacher, dressed in an impressive dark brown suit, came round and thanked us for coming. Teachers and especially head teachers make an effort to wear formal dress - shirt and tie etc -  even if the clothes look as if they have seen better days. "The government will not come to us, so we have to help ourselves." he said an pointing to the kids in my group, several with runny noses and dusty clothes: "This one might be a minister one day and this one a doctor."

Footcream and rubber gloves

Monday and Tuesday are public holidays so schools have been closed and I have been catching up with washing etc. We handwash everything in buckets with "Boom", (local soap-powder) and if you hang it out in the middle of the day it is dry in a couple of hours;everyone finds my yellow rubber gloves hilarious for some reason, but I am mightily glad of them as you have to do quite a bit of rubbing and scrubbing. It is something of an undertaking to stay clean as the red dust gets EVERYWHERE - partly because it is so dry at the moment, but also because so few of the roads are tarmacked. One of the most familiar sounds is the soft swish of the brush - sweeping is a non-stop activity here, partly so I am told to show up any snake tracks more easily!  It is often done by men, though today a group of women were sweeping out the deep gullies that line each side of the main road to drain water  in the rainy season, but which are full of rubbish at the moment. In the poorer districts where there is very little motor traffic, if a car drives by, it leaves you choking in a literal cloud of dust. There are other vehicles in those parts - carts pulled by as many as four donkeys, or people wheeling large two-handled market trolleys. Your feet can get torn and sore from walking in the dust in sandals if you are not careful - one of the most useful items in my wash bag has been some foot cream, which I didn't really mean to bring, but turns out to be another lifesaver. 

Yesterday we spent some informal time at the orphanage again, with books and games. More volunteers have arrived, including one guy who was an immediate hit with the boys who fought to take turns  to wear his multi-coloured sunglasses! I read a book about improving your football techniques and spent time in earnest discussion about the importance of practising with both feet; I was conscious that the pictures all showed very clean children in smart football boots, whereas these lads play barefoot, but it was fun  - all those hours watching my sons play has taught me something useful after all!

We are not allowed to photograph in the orphanage, so I've been trying to take photos of some of the market women, but they are mostly reluctant to let me apart from this one.

cycling with Cowboy Cliff

My first attempts at adding photos. Apologies if they are oddly positioned but this is where my lack of computer savvy begins to show. (Mark, if you are reading this, I need you!) This morning, Saturday, I went for a 4 hour cycle ride guided by Patrick and his assistant Ezekiel.  Patrick works for "Cowboy Cliff" who I haven't met yet, but who sounds a bit like a local saint - of which I suspect there are many. Cowboy Cliff founded a pre-school for younger children which is funded partly by taking tourists on cycle rides round the parts of Livingstone you don't often see. I have the dodgy keyboard again, so won't say much here except to tell you briefly about the pictures. Number one is the two guides beside the Zambezi - you can see the spray from the Victoria Falls in the background. The next is the saddest sight I have yet seen - people (sometimes whole families)  literally breaking rocks by hand to sell for a living: 2 wheelbarrow loads for $1. Photo 3 is a termite hill. Apparently pregnant women eat the soil as it is supposed to contain minerals which are good for the growing baby. Lastly a picture of some men re-thatching the roof of a lodge which had caught fire.  I also saw a traditional village with mud huts. There are not so many of these any more as gradually people can afford to build more solid housing. The mud huts look picturesque, but have to be renewed every year after the rainy season. It reminds me a bit of what happened to the old fashioned  croft houses in the Highlands. Often the new house is built room by room, as the family can afford it and carry on living in the old house meantime.  In many ways, Zambia seems like Britain must have been maybe a hundred or more years ago.

Oh and I also saw a herd of baboons and some hippos in the river - well their backs peeping out of the water!

You have no new mail

It was not such a clever idea to bring several copies of "Katie Morag Delivers the Mail" with me I realise now: for most of the children that we see, there may as well be no such thing as mail, let alone postboxes or postmen. In fact according to Kelly (book bus leader, and my chief informant) there is no regular mail service at all, at least in this part of Zambia, unless you pay for it. If you want mail sent to you, you pay for a mailbox at the nearest post office, something most people cannot afford.  Not only is there no mail, there seems to be no system of public litter collection -at least not in the places we visit where rubbish lies around in heaps by the side of the road, waiting perhaps to be burnt or buried. Needless to say, there is no recycling either, so buying anything in plastic feels slightly shameful. The school we went to yesterday is in a compound ("suburb") of Livingstone. Most of the houses have no indoor plumbing and rely on a cold water tap in the yard - so there is no hot water either and certainly no indoor toilets, just what look like old fashioned outdoor privies. After a week here, I am beginning to realise that our campsite is really quite luxurious.  Nor is there much of the old health and safety that we know and love, though some of the taxi drivers are  strict about seatbelts - or at least if it exists, it is not always followed. We passed some workmen putting up what looked like a small mobile phone mast. There was a line of men pulling on a rope to  haul the parts up to the top, while others climbed up the mast to fix things in place - not a hard hat in sight.   I have also yet to see a pushchair or a pram - well I did see one which looked  at least 30 years old and was probably used for pushing other things in. All the mothers carry their babies tied on to their backs with colourful cloth. The babies look very cosy and comfortable and you never hear them crying, so maybe they are the better for it. It seems as if they are carried until they are maybe about  two  and can walk confidently on their own. Then, in the compound anyway, they seem to run around everywhere, even little three year olds, often running a long way from home to keep up with the bus. So since there is virtually no traffic in these areas, they have much more freedom than our children.

Luckily I did have some success with the football books and magazines I brought. A group of boys at the orphanage today looked at them avidly for an hour, while another older boy went straight for the childrens's version of Nelson Mandela's autobiography, which we read some of together so that was a relief.

It takes longer than a week or even four weeks to really get to know a place, and I feel like a very, very raw beginner.

The smoke that thunders

I went to see the Victoria Falls this afternoon. It really is like nothing I've seen before, you cannot imagine the amount of water crashing over - in fact it is so big you can't look down and see the bottom, all you can see is the spray, and this was not the falls at their height. You get right up to the bridge between Zambia and Zimbabwe where it might as well be raining there is so much spray. I'll have to go back again, if I can negotiate the journey.  there is a lot of scope for ripping off tourists and guess what I do look like a tourist. I realised when I got there I had been charged about ten times more than I should have been so on the way back in a shared taxi squashed up next to a rather large Zambian lady, I was only charged double, and felt quite pleased with myself.
This morning went well, I think: we were at a community centre this time, an even less official kind of school than the community schools. The groups were mixed ages from 3 to 11 and not many of them spoke English, but we seemed to do OK. With the very wee ones we flapped our wings like flamingos, quivered like butterflies and wriggled like snakes. The older ones read "Elmer" (thank you Lesley) I'm not sure how much they understood but they read it gamely and then coloured in patchwork elephants - you'll understand if you know the story. The children seemed even poorer than the ones I have met so far, but very friendly and keen to join in and draw or look at the pictures. The school was a traditional mud hut, with a thatched roof, incredibly sturdy and beautiful, but very primitive by our standards. As we leave, Kelly (our leader) has to walk beside the bus and another helper sits on the step looking behind, to make sure none of the children get run over as they all run along beside it trying to keep  up with it. Have to stop to get back to Campsite before dark (at 6.30 here) Also have to do my prep for tomorrow - I am having to dredge up all my mostly forgotten tips from Blue Peter - sticky backed plastic comes in very useful here.

Chileleko Community School

I realise I was unaware of another important travel rule:take ear-plugs. Staying in a campsite is not a haven of peace and quiet, not helped by the somewhat raucous nature of the camp-site owner and his cronies; and sweet dreams are not enhanced by the presence of the camp security light directly positioned behind my tent, making my sleeping quarters resemble one of those cells where they torment prisoners by keeping the light on all the time. But hey, this is all about challenge...tomorrow I may be able to move my tent down the line as one volunteer leaves and I will no longer be the newest recruit.

Today was my first day in school (yesterday was a national day of mourning for the ex-president of Zambia, Frederick Chiluba - a bit like having a day of mourning for Tony Blair I suppose. Everywhere was shut and even though he had been prosecuted for corruption, his death was obviously taken very seriously) I went along mainly as helper today, as it was really my first day of book bus proper. We had to go in blue taxis as the road to this village (not far out of Livingstone) has been partially washed away in places and the bus cannot negotiate it. A community school is one run set up by local people for children whose parents cannot afford to send them to the state school. I am not sure if there are fees as such for the state schools, but you have to wear a uniform and buy books and exercise books etc, beyond the reach of many. The school is in a small concrete building with about three classrooms - the teacher writes up the work on the blackboard and the children copy it down -and that's it mostly.School is for one lot of children in the  mornings and another lot in the afternoon because of the shortage of classrooms. We set up on mats outside under the trees and each age group has a session lasting an hour. Again, red dust everywhere and by the end of the morning, my trousers were covered - so you're right about the white trousers Rosie! Often the reading is done "together" so the teacher reads a couple of words aloud and the children repeat them, following the words in the book with their finger. After the book, there are crafty activities linked in some way to the subject matter - this group of volunteers are very hot on their animal masks and headbands so I'll have a lot to live up to.

The children were shy but some very friendly and keen. Writing their names on a piece of masking tape which they stuck on helped with names, as some are so unfamiliar. It was the last day for one of the other volunteers and the boys had asked her for a football which she left with the teacher, to be kept at school for everyone. As we left, I saw a group of children playing with a a ball made out of what looked like scrunched up newspaper, so I am sure it will be appreciated. Back to camp now to prepare my first sessions for tomorrow - elephants with trunks that swing maybe - or butterflies? Planning them will help while away the night-times in the tent at any rate.

First Day

19 hours after leaving Heathrow, I was laying out my sleeping bag in my tent in "Grubby's Grotto", feeling dazed, mostly from lack of sleep. The campsite, in a relatively well off part of Livingstone, is in the grounds of a very down-at-heel looking former colonial official building of some sort. Though the facilities are very basic, there are beautiful trees and even a small swimming pool - water is cold as it's winter here, but not too cold for us hardy pseudo-Scots. That afternoon, I joined the four other volunteers to go by blue taxi to the Lubasi Orphanage a mile or so away in a very different part of town. No proper roads here, just dusty red dirt tracks - and the dust gets everywhere. Very few cars either, an occasional bicycle and no white faces. This was a play more than a reading session, but I read "The Gruffalo" with a 12 year old boy. He struggled to read more than the simplest of words, but was obviously so pleased with himself when he managed a line. While it would be thought of as a much younger children's book at home, all the repetition makes it ideal for practising new words and apparently the children here have less sophisticated, more innocent tastes. We walked back through the market, goats and chickens running round, ramshackle stalls all over the place, some little more than a wheelbarrow with a few bunches of bruised bananas on them - hard to take in everything in my slightly halluncinatory sleep-deprived state, but one that struck me most was manned by five or six men all hammering out metal by hand from scrap to make cooking utensils, buckets. Making a living is not easy here. 

on the way

Five minutes into my journey to London, I realised I had broken the first rule of travelling. My bag was ridiculously heavy and unwieldy - not helped by the fact that I was also transporting an empty rucksack for my son....
The good citizens of Ealing rushed to my assistance up tube steps, and an elderly man insisted on carrying one side of the bag for 200 yards along the High Street, but last night my daughter re-packed all my carefully chosen belongings. Subjecting every item to tough scrutiny, she sternly replaced my own towel with something that looked like a duster, removed half my clothes, lent me her own lighter versions and fitted everything into a backpack half the size.

getting ready

I've had all the jabs, got the malaria pills, accumulated a collection of serious expedition items -  sleeping bag, camping mat, mosquito net, insect repellent, torch, water bottle -  and raised another £600 at a birthday party/fundraiser at my house. 
I have been incredibly touched by the fantastic open-hearted generosity of all my friends, family and work colleagues: it's nearly time to set off.


(the picture shows me talking about my plans or how to embarrass your children)

wobbling

As we all know, it’s one thing having a brilliant idea, but quite another to make it a reality. My brilliant ideas are prone to sabotage from my alter-ego scaredy-cat deborah, who worries about germs and getting sick, who likes to be tucked up at night in a cosy bed rather than sleeping on the ground in a tent and who certainly does not like the thought of what the brochure called “long-drop toilets.”  As the months went by and I did nothing, I felt ashamed of my lack of courage, as if all my bold words had been empty self delusion. I needed something to push me into action. When a good friend died of cancer around Christmas time, I realised how lucky I was simply to still be alive and kicking, to still have the opportunity to take risks, to have an adventure. At the same time, work seemed more and more depressing – the cuts, threats of redundancy and longer hours. What had I got to lose?

In the end, it seemed as if the decision took itself. I filled in the form, sent off the cheque - it was as easy as that.  When two friends came to stay in March to run a 10 kilometre race in the Borders in the dark, I was given my first opportunity to try some fundraising. ( I only did the less intrepid 5 k daytime version, but I did crawl under nets, splash through mud and wade waist-deep through a river tunnel.  Good training I thought for being out of my comfort zone in Zambia!)  I felt awkward asking people for money, but my colleagues at work were incredibly supportive and enthusiastic: for many of them, the work of the Book Bus seemed to really touch a nerve. I raised nearly £500 on that occasion, so thank you very very much everyone; I hope my efforts will be worthy of your trust and generosity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0AyXgOugaw - you can watch the race here!

In the beginning.....

Next Friday evening, I'll be getting on a plane for Zambia. While I know other people buzz about the planet all the time, it's a huge step for me. I've never been to Africa before - I've always been much too terrified of being bitten by a snake or catching some rare disease and living in a tent for a month is my idea of a bad dream!
BUT
last year, I went to a talk given by Quentin Blake, illustrator of the Roald Dahl books. In between drawing pictures for the audience of George making his marvellous medicine and of dragons with books for wings, he told us about his involvement with the Book Bus project. Equipped like a mobile library, the Book Bus, travels to schools and orphanages in Zambia and Malawi, with volunteers on board who read to small groups of  children who may have never seen a picture book before. The aim of the project is to give them some idea of the joy and adventure of reading, something that children in our society take for granted. Children in Zambia are taught in English, but most books they encounter are school text books, and they are taught in large classes where there isn't much opportunity for individual attention. When Quentin Blake showed us a picture of the bus, decorated on the outside in his famililar style, surrounded by kids waving and smiling, I knew this was something I wanted to do. I teach English and Communication to students who don't appear to value reading very highly, and sometimes I feel the education system doesn't either, so the idea of spending some time doing what I love with children who would enjoy it, was very appealing.   It sounded like an ideal way of doing something really worthwhile and travelling somewhere exotic at the same time.