25.01.07 Cooking and Reading

Sorry its been so long since my last entry - its been hard to get to the internet cafe and my last two attempts were thwarted by power cuts. Thanks for the emails and for my letter from Helen! What a fantastic surprise.

Since last week so much has happened. I suspect this will not be a short one, so minimise the window and go and make a cup of tea or print it out for reading on the bus. Its quite therapeutic really - for me anyway!

News #1 is that I have moved into a different volunteer house. Its only about half a mile away from the old one, but its much nicer - an old 1920's colonial house with original teakwood floors, large grounds with a pool, and a lovely verandah to sit on in the evenings. The downside is that there are more mozzies and the floors creak so badly you can't move around quietly in the morning when you get up. The address is c/o Greg Bows, 50 Maambo Way, Livingstone, Zambia. Letters take 3 weeks; some parcels make it, some don't.

Project work has been going well. I'm still teaching at the Tourism College in the mornings. On Thursday 16th, I did a session on HIV awareness, as it has to be done as part of the government edict which ratifies the college. I felt a bit of a fraud really, as if you think about the statistics (as are believed on the ground) 3/4 of my class will already be infected with HIV (local views are 70% infection rate, rather than the 30 - 40% WHO statistics). Given the previous profession of some of them, it may even be higher. They had, of course, heard it all before, but the real issues are cultural. Men won't wear condoms, voodoo medicine men (yes, really) still say that you can cure it by having sex with a virgin - oh, and these are the same medicine men that do tattoos on several people using the same needles and razor blades on multiple people, and it is still thought of as better not to know your status than to risk social isolation of being known to be HIV positive. So, it was pretty awful standing up there and giving this talk.

On Friday morning we had a lot of fun. It was a cookery lesson effectively and this is what the two photos show. We'd been talking about the different things that us odd white people eat for breakfast, so I bought them a Kellog's multipack of cereal, some bread and peanut butter and lots of eggs, and they tried all the cereals, had toast for the first time, and made fried, poached and scrambled eggs, omelette and french toast. The cooking was done on a charcoal brazier - a first for me! They liked best the toxic coloured Strawberry Pops, but at first when they were mixing them with milk, they didn't understand why it wouldn't go into porridge, until I explained that it was meant to stay in little pieces. We then ate everything at the end, and they all liked the french toast. I had a few strange questions - like do we make the bread into toast for hygiene reasons, but it went really well and was good fun. You'll notice the posters for hair products in the background - our rooms are used as a hair salon in the afternoons to help pay the rent.

On Saturday morning we went to a local hotel where they got to see the bar, kitchen and restaurant areas and had people explain to them how things work in practice. It was fine until the end when the course leader turned to me and expected me to pay for the bus, which he'd not mentioned to me before. I politely refused as this had already been arranged before my involvement, but it is hard for them not to see us as walking banks, and it is hard for the volunteers not to give a lot, as relatively speaking we are so rich. But I can't fund everything, so I'm going to have to say no, awkward as it is sometimes.

Thursday afternoon was spent farming, and Friday afternoon was off, as some of the other volunteers went on a trip to the Zimbabwe side of Vic Falls (aka Mosi oi Tunya here). I helped Joyce take her class of disabled children to see Mosi oi Tunya - most locals never go - but I didn't see much as it was more spent looking after the kids. There was no point in me going as I'm off to Zim in March and it was USD250. How strange it is to be so careful with money! There were 6 of us who didn't go, and we had a really nice mellow weekend. It was all shattered a bit when one of the girls got ill on Sunday evening. I've spent most of the week so far taking care of her. She has malaria. We had to go to Livingstone General Hospital on Tuesday morning. For family reading this - I am so my father's daughter!!! But I think anyone of us would have been in turns shocked, horrified, frustrated and appalled at what went on there. I'll pass on detailed descriptions of the blood and gore on the floor, but what got me was when there were emergencies brought in, with people literally bleeding to death, the nurses only ambled up the corridor to take a look. When I say ambled, that includes stopping to chat to a couple of people and taking a phone call. No-one really rushed to clean the floor either and there were dozens of people walking through puddles of blood. It was truly gruesome.

The malaria patient is significantly better, so I went back to the college this morning. We did revision about our cooking last week, spent half an hour talking about different types of salad and then, at the students' request, we did a French lesson. It was really good fun and descended in to hysterics when one of the male students said "Madam, if I know a young french woman, how do I tell her I love her?" What is really satisfying though, is that the students are now much more chatty, they ask me questions like this, they respond more when I ask them questions and they seem to be enjoying the class. Since I've started teaching, we have gone from 14 to 22 students, and attendance and timekeeping is improving. I've bought them a new blackboard and when the books arrive, I'll spend some more of the donated money on course materials. I think thought that the best thing I can do for them is to make them more confident about speaking to foreigners and give them some knowledge about why tourists come to Africa, Zambia and Livingstone. And not to use the "m" word - mzungu. I told them that if I did the equivalent at home - e.g. called out "hey, black person" that it was illegal, they looked so shocked. So they don't use it anymore, and maybe they'll tell their friends and it won't be so prevalent. Hmm, I'm dreaming.

I have had quite a few "how on earth did I end up doing this?" moments, especially during the cookery lesson. It has seemed quite surreal at times, and given that I'm making it all up as I go along, it is even more strange. The so called course leader does very little organising, the syllabus is a few paragraphs from a City & Guilds text book on catering services (our course is to last 6 months) and there is no planning. It is a bit frustrating, and combined with the habit of saying what it is they think you want to hear, rather than what the true situation is, but the reality of the situation, as it is with most of the projects, is that whatever the volunteers can do is better than nothing and better than what there might have been otherwise, which is mostly nothing. In some ways, I feel that the expectation is so high, even if only in my own mind, that it is hard to know where to go, but again, the reality is that whatever I'm doing seems to be going down really well. So, I'll just have to keep doing what I'm doing, and keep my fingers crossed.

Yesterday I went back to the orphanage for the first time in ages. The volunteers have set up a reading club in the afternoon and I spent about 2 hours between 4 or 5 kids doing one on one reading sessions. I think that half an hour of individual attention is worth more than a whole day in school for some kids and its very rewarding. We are very short of basic books, so when I'm finished here, I'm going next door to the book shop to get a couple more. It is quite chaotic though as while you are trying to do reading lessons, there are 30 other kids running round screaming, but hey - kids are kids. I'll take my camera to the orphanage soon, but it will cause some degree of chaos so I'm steeling myself for this. Good chaos - in that all the kids will want their photos taken, and look at themselves on the LCD, but chaos nonetheless.

On Monday, I met with the head of the Zambian Human Rights Commission in Livingstone as I was interested to find out what they do. The office only opened 4 months ago, and is currently one woman, her assistant/driver and a cleaner. I met them all! Mabel - the investigator - described to me how local tribal law (there are 72 tribes in Zambia - I can say good morning in 4 of the languages so far) works within the overall legal system. It is now defined in statute what the powers of the chiefs are, but in reality, their power is still enormous. They control allocation of land within their tribal area, and she has one case of a family that was removed from their land at the instruction of the chief so it could be given to a member of his family. For a government organisation, especially one lead by a woman, to challenge this authority is very radical. I'll let you know if there are any developments.

More good news is that the weather is significantly cooler than it has been. There have been some unbelievable storms - I have never seen or heard rain like last night's, but generally it has been 5 - 10 degrees cooler and we are not wilting so badly.

I was worried after the last blog entry that I was focussing on the negative aspects of life here, and again some of the above might seem negative. It is hard not to get frustrated - so much needs to be done to provide even basic health care and education, but Zambia, and the rest of Africa is going to go at its own pace, irrespective of what outsiders want. It is just on a macro level the same issue I experience in my college, in the hospital and everywhere. The way we live life in the UK is not necessarily good and this isn't necessarily bad - I can only observe that it is a fairly major clash of cultures. Mostly it is manageable - but in the hospital, I struggled. One very good thing I've come across is that there are a lot of local volunteers - people who have given up jobs to focus on AIDS awareness education in target communities, or in my college, taking prostitutes off the streets. Although there is a huge amount of work to be done, the fact that there are individuals in the community who are leading the way is crucial to making progress. Most Zambians are incredibly friendly, open and interested and happy to have the volunteers in the community, and it feels a reasonably safe place to be. We don't walk around at night at all, but as taxis are so cheap and we have regular taxi drivers that we use, its safe to go out as well.

All in all, I'm well, happy, settled, and hopefully making a little bit of a difference to some people.