We have started rehearsing for the Christmas production, though I don’t yet know what the Christmas production is (I want to say the nativity but it’s such an easy answer). Years 3 to 6 are the chorus, so they just stand at the back and sing about Jesus and Mary to the tune of ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’.
During the first rehearsal I noticed four Year 6 boys sitting at the back, their lips motionless. I purposefully made my way over to where they were slumped, giving them my best disapproving stare as I approached.
‘If you don’t start singing I’m going to stand you up in front of everyone else here and make you sing these songs by yourselves. Do you understand?’ Four heads nodded uncomfortably.
Then, just as I was congratulating myself for performing my duties with such humour and zeal, one of the boys spoke: ‘Sir, we’re Muslim and we’re not allowed to sing these songs.’
Oops.
So finally after like two months of being here we have our car and can start having a life! Tis a big scary tank of a thing, a Nissan Patrol, but I won’t pretend to know about engine size and the like. The main thing is that it will go wherever we want it to!
And so on Sunday we took it for its first little mini venture to Lilayi Lodge, a place just outside town with its own little game park. Just on the drive up from the main gate to reception we spotted a family of warthog, a couple of waterbuck and some impala! Having been somewhat animal deprived thus far every moving thing was of great excitement (people that have lived here for some time merely refer to impala etc as DLAs, Deer Like Animals!). As this game park contained nothing dangerous we were allowed to go off on a walk on our own which was just bliss – one doesn’t get much opportunity to just walk here. So armed with our little map of the major routes we set off. The other great thing about walking as oppose to driving is you get to see all the little things you otherwise wouldn’t notice. The first thing we came across were dung beetles complete with rolling balls of dung! I was probably more excited by these than a lot of the other animals we saw that day! They’re just the kind of thing you see on wildlife documentaries but never in real life! We also spotted roan antelope, zebra, wildebeest and young, hartebeest bushbuck and to top it all a giraffe with baby! I love giraffe they’re just the most crazy looking animals.
Though it was fabulous to be able to walk around with these animals, we both agreed it did feel somewhat contrived. It is an artificially stocked game reserve, as with all the game parks belonging to the various lodges, so the animals would have been brought there from other game reserves or national parks for the sole purpose of entertaining the guests at the lodge. But then we were wondering whether any wildlife in
It strikes me as being a rather peculiar state of affairs, to live in one of the poorest countries in the world and yet be able to watch the latest James Bond film on less than a week after its
The first film we saw here, quite a few weeks ago now, was Mamma Mia. It provided ninety minutes of light-hearted relief which we desperately needed. And so we determined that we would make going to the cinema a regular event, partly for the escapism, but also because we can walk there and it is all there is to do here anyway (and it is the only place we have found in
We have had quite a lot of success with the films we have seen, at least, we are yet to see something that has made us think that weekly outings to the cinema are not such a good idea after all. New films appear frequently enough that we have not yet had to watch the one about a talking dog (though we have had to sit through the advert for it a few times) and the selection available seems to divide itself fairly neatly between serious, though rather violent affairs and children’s movies, neither of which we particularly mind watching (we have, however, had to draw the line at the film about the talking Chihuahua and High School Musical 3 where children’s movies are concerned).
Those of you who have not yet seen Quantum of Solace I would certainly recommend it (though my criteria for watching films at the cinema are somewhat skewed – they just have to be showing on a Wednesday afternoon for me to watch them). The critics who could not find a plot were not looking hard enough; while it was certainly understated and played a secondary role to the general violence and mayhem that abounded throughout the film, its subtlety rendered it all the more gripping. Having no aspirations towards film criticism I think that is quite enough of that.
It is typical of Africa that while I am able to go to the cinema any night of the week it has taken me nearly two days to get onto the internet.
Someone told me the other week that
In Roma, the area of
Roma apparently accommodates a large number of diplomats, so the rent is being paid for by, well, you actually along with people like you all over the world. Teachers certainly cannot afford to live near the school (living in the school doesn’t really count); I know of one teacher who lives within walking distance, but I think it’s her husband’s job that pays the rent. I don’t know who lives in the more expensive places; people who build their walls too high to peer over.
Food doesn’t come cheap here either. In
We tend not to buy meat or alcohol with any regularity. While cheap meat is available it looks of dubious quality and so we have reverted to the mainly vegetarian diet we enjoyed in
And then there are cars. The cheapest cars you can get cost around $6000 and are of the small, Japanese variety that look like they might disintegrate if you stared at them a bit menacingly for a minute or two. To get a car that would allow you to escape from Lusaka, the roads rather quickly become less like roads and more like pot-holed stretches of concrete that might have once been roads a long time ago, is likely to cost you twice as much and be of the big, Japanese variety that would make you disintegrate if you were ever foolish enough to step out in front of one.
The school neglected to mention that cars are a little expensive in
(I thought I’d better write something on this blog too, to justify it being called ‘Paul and Rachel’s blog’. I’m afraid it’s not going to be quite as witty and articulate as Paul’s contributions).
Days start pretty early for us here, getting up about half six, as Paul has to begin lessons at half seven. I get a lift out to yoga practice on Monday with a load of PTA women who I’ve been adopted by (with no one here being our age we swing between acting older and socialising with people nearly twice our age, or act younger and play with their kids!). Paul’s teaching day finishes about half one so I can go and try and use the internet in his classroom, or help make wall displays until he can come home at four. With it being evily hot at the moment an after school swim is always nice, unless there are people having lessons in it etc when we can just play in the baby pool. Bedtimes are fairly early too due to the early starts and the fact that with the current heat one tends not to get much sleep anyway.
I try to get out to Munda Wanga, a wildlife park/sanctuary, once a week to help set up an environmental education programme focusing on birds of prey. As with most things though, progress here is pretty slow, for example they are having problems transferring their funding in to a Zambian bank account. So I talk about my ideas with people which they are always very positive about, but then nothing really gets done, we might paint a wall, and then I spend the rest of the day birdwatching (yesterday I saw a fish eagle!).
I teach piano Wednesday, Thursday and Friday afternoons and have 4 pupils so far. There are older kids who want lessons too but I think I’ll work up to the more advanced ones…
Wednesday evenings we try and go to the cinema or have a meal out at
Thursdays our maid Linda (though I really have to stop myself from calling her Shelia!) comes to do our washing and ironing. We have no washing machine so it all has to be done by hand, and everything has to be ironed that has been hung to dry outside to get rid of putsi fly eggs that, once laid in damp washing, will hatch on contact with skin and live quite happily under the surface of the skin until the larvae are ready to turn in to little flies once again. Delightful. I have my riding lesson first thing Thursday morning. Tis especially nice when we go out on hacks over the surrounding hills and I get to see a bit of countryside (but I get told off for using that word, here it’s ‘bush’). Unfortunately one of the ladies I usually ride with is on crutches at the moment after being thrown off her horse on to a fence last week….
Friday is shopping day and I get a lift with one of the part-time teachers (another Rachel) and go to
Weekends at the moment pretty much depend on whether anyone wants to take us anywhere as we are still without a car (‘when we have a car….’ has become our most common saying). This Friday it’s the fireworks display at one of the other international schools in
People say that, while it gets hot in
When temperatures reach forty degrees Celsius during the day and remain close to thirty degrees Celsius at night, it is difficult to appreciate that being almost a mile above where the
The days are tolerable enough so long as I keep a bottle of water within reach (I am currently drinking about four litres of water every day), but the nights are insufferable. The nights have always been warm, but the heavy heat used to lift sometime after
In the morning I no longer linger in bed; I quickly remove myself from the damp sheets, peeling them from my clammy skin. The shower is cool and refreshing, and, for a few brief minutes, I do not feel the same unrelenting weariness that the heat induces the rest of the time.
People say it will rain soon. It has thundered a few times in the past week, but the distant growls have been empty promises. In
People say it will rain soon. People say.
The following was written on Thursday 30th October.
The rest of the world often seems a long way away from
In search of news coverage with the scrutiny of Newsnight, I have started reading The Economist, something I have not done with regularity since I was at university. Then, as now, the world was preparing for Americans to elect their next president and I, at the time taking the module Government and Politics of the USA, had a greater interest in the outcome than many (I even stayed up to watch as the results were announced state by state and felt very smug that I knew what the electoral college was). Now, I am more concerned by the outcome of a different presidential election.
Today, Zambians will vote for who will lead their country for the next three years (the remaining years of former President Levy Mwanawasa’s term). There are three candidates in the running, but only two have a chance of winning the race: Rupiah Banda, the vice-president who has looked after things since Mr Mwanawasa’s death in August and Michael Sata, a rather intimidating old man who, as some White Africans (many of whom have come from Zimbabwe) remark, has something of Mugabe about him.
The third horse, who perhaps had no expectation of winning but rather intended to build a platform from which to launch his campaign in 2011, is known as ‘H.H.’. He is a businessman and so, according to many Zambians, is unqualified for the job. The school driver put it to me thus: he, as a driver, can find his way around the busy streets of
There is no way of knowing who will triumph out of Banda and Sata, or what difference, if any, it will make who wins. There is not the relentless polling in Zambia that there is in the United States, and even if there was - and there are indeed some polls - I am not sure how valid their findings would be. To talk to people in Lusaka and to see the open-backed trucks cruising up and down full of young men vocally showing their support for Sata (enticed by promises of more jobs and lower taxes, though how these lofty ideals are to be achieved is unclear), one might be forgiven for thinking that Banda had lost already. But Banda, or so I am told (all of what is written here is based only on what I have been able to gather from talking to various people), has greater support in rural areas. Banda also has another advantage: completely free and fair elections are a rare thing in Africa and if one were hoping to influence the outcome it would certainly be easier to do so from the position of acting President (it should be noted that foreign funds, from the United States in particular, have been pumped into these elections to make proceedings as transparent as one would expect them to be in a democracy; but money is hardly a guarantor fair play).
If Banda does prevail, and that is the result most White Africans and foreign nationals are hoping for (many justify their preference with a catalogue of clichés: better the devil you know, the lesser of two evils), then with Sata’s overwhelming support in
The result of the election has now been announced with Rupiah Banda the victor. From within the confines of the school compound all seems quiet, for the time being.
After a ten-hour overnight flight and a morning spent shopping for crockery and bed linen in a supermarket that was busier than Tesco on Christmas Eve, we arrived, crippled by hunger and a lack of sleep, at what was to become our home. Our home, a bungalow of sorts I suppose though more
Over the next few weeks we slowly acquired various pieces of wobbly furniture: a sofa and armchairs, a coffee table, a dining table and chairs. And as pictures went up – of our windmill, of
There has been a lingering intention to start a blog since Rachel and I arrived in
