The Road Less Traveled

The rain has been relentless and it has taken its toll on our mud roads. This week’s task was to deliver school supplies to the community schools and also to spend a day with our colleagues Mark and Tyler giving them a learning tour of MCC’s work in Lusaka. The water on the roads made our tasks much more challenging.

This is a mini-bus that we passed on the road to one of the community schools.

Comparatively, the road in front of our house doesn't look so bad!

Here are some of the students at Needs Care school with their new notebooks.

Much to their surprise, Mark and Tyler ended up doing some teaching at Needs Care school.

Does Tyler look familiar? Tyler was a featured teacher in the current Common Place magazine, I'm sure autographs can be arranged.

All Play and No Work? by Charlene

Just in case you think our time with Dave and Ruth was one continuous romp on the beach, I wanted to highlight some of the time that we spent with our local MCC partners.

Chisomo Drop-In Centre

The children from our home church in Winnipeg have been raising funds for Chisomo since last September. Dave and Ruth brought the money with them and with it we were able to meet some of the basic needs of the street children who stay at the centre. We bought 50 pairs of shoes so that each of the children there now has a pair. Many of the children arrived at Chisomo barefoot after living on the streets. We also purchased 80 kilos of beans to add some protein to their diet and we added a few things to their basic kitchen supplies such as oil, sugar and detergent. The children at Chisomo were very appreciative and they did a thank you song for us and then we moved outside for some drumming and dancing (during which most of the kids kicked off their shoes so that they could dance better!).

Jordan distributing shoes to the Chisomo children.

Nice Shoes!

Dancing is best done in bare feet

Needs Care

Needs Care is the name of a community school in a local compound here and the school is definitely in need of care. The school was started by a woman named Esther who saw that many children were not attending school since their parents could not afford to pay a $5 school fee or purchase a uniform. She now has 225 students who attend her school, they meet inside a church building that is not yet completed (it was started years & years ago) and it does not have a completed roof which creates some complications during rainy season. Her annual budget is just about $0! Esther and 5 teachers are all volunteers working without any kind of compensation and the children pay nothing to attend the school and uniforms are not required. All of the supplies at the school have been donated by “well-wishers”. MCC donates school kits annually and the school does not have any text books and home made black boards are the only teaching tool. Dave and Ruth had brought some donations from friends and family back home and were able to purchase 200 notebooks, 100 pencils, 50 erasers, notebooks for the teachers and they were able to give each teacher a financial gift to thank them for their efforts in their community. We had a good time on our visits to this school. The school kids enjoyed having Jordan and Caleb join in on their games and they loved having their pictures taken. As a thank you for our donation they had a school assembly with drumming and plenty of bum-shaking dancing.

The little drummer boys

Charlene posing as Sally Struthers

These children just started kindergarten this week.

These kids also prefer dancing barefoot on the school floor.

Esther (crouching) and her team of teachers

Yummy Inswa! - by John

Mmm, a big plate of termites

So, a few weeks ago we posted a blog about eating caterpillars. They weren't horrible, but weren't all that great either. Nonetheless, our friends Dave and Ruth posted a comment, something like "Bring it On", so we did. We arranged for our maid to fry up a big batch of Inswa, which we know as termites (see this Wikipedia entry). They are pretty popular around this time of year in southern Africa, they come out, fly around and mate, and then loose their wings, so people pick them up and cook them up.

We did a sort of taste test, and had about a 50/50 reaction. I found them crunchy, oily and pretty good, they make a nice snack. Others had a different reaction.

Danica likes Inswa!Caleb likes Inswa a lot!

Erin is still tasting....

Erin expresses her disappointment

Jordan would prefer other forms of protein

Regardless of the negative reactions, I predict that it's only a matter of time until Inswa hit the frozen food aisle at Superstore, or that we will find the McInswa burger at McDonalds.

Special Guest Correspondent - Dave Sawatsky

Dave getting in touch with his inner African

John and Charlene, our gracious hosts, have invited me to post a “guest blog” entry, and so what follows is a somewhat random set of impressions of our very short time in Africa:

Food: Although we have had much food that is familiar, we can now boast that we have eaten octopus, flying ants (inswa), and impala, as well as several varieties of fish that I’ve already forgotten. J&C are threatening, uh, offering to fry up some caterpillars as well, and we will probably have nshima (corn based staple) before we leave.

Yes, this is a fried ant. Yum Yum.

Commerce: While there are stores & shops that look and feel very western, we have been struck by the number of informal micro-businesses that line the roadways – both inside and outside of the city – selling everything from fruit & vegetables to lawn mowing services, tire repair (“tyre mending”), plumbing, gravel, fish, etc etc using not much more than a makeshift booth or a sign on a tree. Hawkers also stand at many of the busy intersections (the ones with traffic lights) to sell fireworks, hats, DVD’s, and puppies – yes, puppies. And no discussion of commerce would be complete without mentioning the ubiquitous CelTel (cell phone company) booths which are housed in everything from tiny roadway shacks to shipping containers and are virtually everywhere, including the compounds. All in all, there is no shortage of industry.

Streets - the roads less graveled: Easily the worst roads I have ever traveled, many of the secondary streets in Lusaka are barely passable, filled with massive potholes (on streets once asphalted) and ruts carved from draining rainwater. Even the main road to Livingstone has a 60km stretch that takes 1.5 hours to drive because of the poor condition of the road. The roads in the compounds are even worse. There are also no streetlights or sidewalks, unfortunate because many more people walk than drive. In any case, I will never again complain about potholes in Winnipeg…

A casual stroll

Fauna: Our safari day in Chobe park in Botswana probably deserves an entry of its own, but the highlights included elephants and hippos and seeing a pack of wild dogs devouring an impala (even the tour guide took pictures!). On the other end of the scale, there are many interesting & unusual spiders, snails, centipedes, beetles, etc – many of which are co-habitating with us at the MCC guest house. And for all of our preparations to prevent malaria, we have seen very few mosquitoes!

People: We have found people to be very friendly and welcoming to us, whether we are walking down the street or meeting people at the organizations MCC is supporting. The kids said they felt like rock stars when we toured the compound, as kids repeatedly surrounded us, eager to shake our hands and say “How are YOU?”. Finally, it is hard not to notice the slower pace that people take, so much so that seeing someone running (or even walking briskly) is the exception.

Jordan teaches Zambian kids to dance (?!?)

I should stop for now, and leave other stories for friends and family when we return. We are so grateful to have such good friends here who are masters of hospitality and who know their way around Lusaka/Livingstone. Thanks, John and Charlene.

Dave

Christmas in Zanzibar

Hello dear readers - we are far behind in our postings, but now have a bit of free time, so we will try to get caught up.

We are fortunate to have spent Christmas on the exotic spice island of Zanzibar.

Our friends Dave and Ruth and their boys Jordan and Caleb are visiting us for a month, and just about the first thing we did when they arrived was to turn them around and get them on another plane to Dar Es Salaam, and then a short hop to Stone Town in Zanzibar. We met up with Al and Carla Kehler and their girls, Katherine, Elisabeth and Olivia, who are also friends from Winnipeg, and are now living in Kampala, Uganda where Al works with the UN World Food Program.

Here is a picture of all of us together

The first place we stayed was the Mnarani Beach Cottages in Nungwi, which is at the northern tip of the island.

It was a bit surreal to be in a tropical paradise over Christmas, but it was great to be there with good friends.

Merry Christmas!

The kids all got along great, and we did things like snorkeling and a sunset cruise on the ocean.

Getting on the boat for our cruise

Dave and Ruth in the sunset

The water was very warm and very blue, the breezes were warm and the sun shone the whole time we were there.

After Al and Carla left, we moved to another hotel near Stone Town. From there we took a tour of the town, did a bunch of shopping and sightseeing. Stone Town is known for it's elaborately carved doors and other interesting architectural touches that show a wide range of Arabic and Indian influences.

A very fancy door

We also went on a spice tour, where we learned all about how different spices are grown. Cloves and other spices are still a big part of Zanzibar’s export business.

On the spice tour

Our Spice Girls

This is Nutmeg

Our time on the island was nicely wrapped up by a great meal on the beach of our resort. We loved Zanzibar and want to come back.