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.