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.