Stanley Explores Western Zambia

Mabuasehube Gate, Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, October 1

Elephant at our campsite, Mayukuyuku

I'm sitting in front of a crackling campfire here under the infinite starry canopy of the southern skies in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, listening to the yips of nearby spotted hyenas (the same guys who ransacked our camp garbage can last night, aided by a lone brown hyena), contemplating the past month of memorable travel here in Botswana, but also trying to recollect the details of our last three weeks in Zambia back in August.  It seems slightly incongruous to be sitting beside a campfire feeling like a San hunter-gatherer while simultaneously typing on a laptop, but such is the life of the 21^st century travel blogger.

Lusakan Lassitude

The second half of our Zambian travels began with three days in Lusaka (August 8-10).  These three days were far less carefree and relaxing than our sojourn a month earlier had been, as I had to spend large chunks of two days trying to remedy our lack of a Customs Import Permit for Stanley.  We had failed to get one when we entered from Malawi, and by the time we got to Lusaka, we were long overdue.  The bureaucrats at the Zambia Revenue Agency hemmed and hawed and dragged things out, but finally managed to get the relevant papers processed after soul-destroying hours of waiting for a bribe of US$ 30 (the initial request was for US$ 100, but the official seemed pleased with the smaller amount).  Unfortunately the TIP was only valid for 15 days, meaning that we would have to renew it before we left the country, but at least we weren’t illegal anymore.  We also helped Rob, a volunteer who was going to help out in Livingstone at the Olive Tree Learning Centre, change money at the Bank of China’s Lusaka office; he had been working in China, and a combination of bad luck and bad timing meant that he had arrived in Zambia with only Chinese yuan as spending money, a currency not accepted anywhere in Livingstone.  He returned to Livingstone on the bus with a sewing machine in his luggage for Olive Tree to use in income-generating activities.

Pachyderm paunch:  our resident elephant at Mayukuyuku

Our last day was spent by me trying to get some niggling issues fixed on Stanley:  our reverse lights weren’t working (we had been fined for that by the police in Zimbabwe), and our rear differential lock wasn’t working either; as well I wanted our tires rotated, and our emergency brake and rear brakes needed to be tightened up.  Mr. Mzinga, the mechanic who had worked on Stanley in July, spent the day working on him again, this time out at his workshop in a hardscrabble community out on the outskirts of town.  In the end everything except the diff lock got fixed; that required a switch that could not be obtained.

My friend Nathalie arrived back in Lusaka in the middle of our stay; it was great to see her and catch up on happenings.  Once again we stayed at her house, although the last couple of nights there were extra people staying at Nathalie’s, friends of her colleague Vicky, so we slept out in Stanley in her parking lot instead.  We had a great evening of Indian food with Vicky and her friends (back from a month-long road trip through Botswana and Namibia) and Nathalie at Dil’s, a Lusaka institution that has pictures of George W. Bush eating there a few years ago.

Patient queues of voters in Lusaka's outskirts on August 11

Underwhelmed by Kafue

Defassa waterbuck in Kafue:  note solid white rumps

On August 11^th we drove out of Lusaka late in the morning after a sluggish start.  It was election day, the culmination of a long and acrimonious campaign between the incumbent, Edward Lungu (whose campaign T-shirts we had obtained a few days earlier in Shiwa Ngandu, and whose campaign kept crossing paths with us in the north of the country) and the perpetual challenger Hikainde Hichilema.  We drove west out of town along a good road, past long queues of voters waiting patiently for their chance to exercise their democratic franchise.  It all seemed fairly well organized and cheerful and normal.  We drove west for 270 km towards Kafue National Park, one of the largest and best-known parks in Zambia.  It’s so big that it’s actually hard to get to some of the best areas (like the Basanga Plains in the north, which has no budget accommodation options anywhere within a 3-hour driving radius)), so we restricted ourselves to a small section near the main highway and stayed at Mayukuyuku Camp, right on the Kafue River about 10 km off the highway.

Puku, Kafue National Park

Egret in the sunset, Mayukuyuku

Mayukuyuku was a very pleasant place to stay, with a resident elephant who made life interesting at times, and lots of waterbirds and hippos in the river.  We had wonderful sunsets both nights, and on the 12^th we went out for a game drive on the local trails.  To be honest, this section of Kafue was a bit underwhelming, with not much game to be seen.  We had heard that Kafue is a great place to see cheetahs, but we saw no sign of them.  In fact we didn’t see any large predators at all.  There were plenty of puku, the red-flanked antelope that is like a burlier version of the ubiquitous impala, as well as the impala itself.  We spotted a Defassa waterbuck as well, a subspecies of the common waterbuck without the usual white ring on its rear end.  We had a great dinner of lamb, corn and sweet potatoes and I sat out under the stars playing guitar late into the evening. 

Lichtenstein's hartebeest

The next morning we drove out along the main highway west towards Mongu, passing through the centre of the national park.  On the way we saw more Defassa waterbuck and a new species for us, Lichtenstein’s hartebeest, as well as wooly-necked storks and spur-winged geese.  Overall, though, I didn’t think Kafue was worth the effort and expense (about US$ 180 for the two of us to camp two nights and spend two days in the park), as it didn’t offer much game that we hadn’t already seen elsewhere, and since (outside the camps) persistent tsetse flies mean that you have to keep your windows rolled up on the vehicle.  I think that if we had given Kafue more time and had gotten further into the interior, we might have found it more impressive, but we didn’t. 

Wallowing Through Liuwa Plain

At the pontoon ferry to Liuwa Plain

We ended up driving 424 km that day, all the way to Liuwa Plain National Park, along a generally excellent road (with one fairly awful section just outside the boundaries of Kafue). We bought fuel and restocked our fridge in Mongu’s huge new Shoprite, and then drove out of town along a brand-new road to Kalabo, a remarkable feat of engineering that cost over US$200 million to build.  It cuts what had once been 8 hours of grinding through deep sand along miserable tracks and through alarming river crossings to 50 minutes of driving pleasure, along the Barotse Plains, the floodplains that border the Zambezi River as it flows south from its sources in the northwestern tip of Zambia and in the Angolan highlands.  We were in Kalabo by 4:30 pm, getting our park permits for Liuwa Plain. 

Stanley on the Liuwa Plain

This (formerly) remote park is administered by African Parks, the same private trust that runs the Bangweulu Wetlands as well as parks in Rwanda and the DRC.  We paid our money (US$ 200 for three nights and two days in the park, including camping), caught the hand-pulled cable pontoon ferry across the river and set off for our first campsite.  It took us only 200 metres to get stuck the first time in deep, deep sand, although a small posse of local villagers soon pushed us clear again after some energetic digging.  It was the deepest sand we had seen since long ago in Paindane, Mozambique, and it was a foretaste of what was to come over the next few days.  We got to Kayala campsite, two kilometres from the ferry, had a fiery sunset, and popped the roof on Stanley.  We had a great show in the evening sky as all five classical planets were visible:  Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn (in order from lowest to highest in the sky) were all in the western half of the heavens.  It felt good to be completely alone on the plain; there were no other campers (the entire park gets only about 500 visitors a year) and the campsite caretaker was away at a funeral. 

Liuwa Plain sundowners

Terri at the wheel

We slept well and awoke at 7, just after sunrise.  We had a delicious breakfast of oatmeal, then packed up and headed further north into the park by 9 o’clock.  It was a seriously difficult stretch of sand driving, with minimal signs, deep soft sand and a confusing spider’s web of interlinked tracks requiring split-second decisions about which fork in the “road” to take. Stanley bucked and swayed alarmingly as we drove along the rutted tracks, bouncing alternately to each side. We got seriously stuck twice, involving lots of digging by me followed by pushing while Terri tried to drive out of the sand trap.  Just after our second escape, we were grinding through the sand when there was a sudden loud crunch under the car.  We thought at first that we had hit a hidden rock, but there are no rocks to hit, so we got out to see what was wrong.  A small drip underneath turned out to be the air conditioning (like all AC, it drips slightly with condensation on the outside), so we started to drive again, but there were still horrible grinding noises from under the car.  Further investigation showed that one of the rear shocks had sheared off the bolt that attaches it to the leaf springs, and the shock was now hanging loose and useless below the car.  I crawled underneath and removed the bolt that was attaching the top of the shock to the chassis, threw the mangled shock into the back and we continued along our way.  After two hours of intense concentration, grinding along in 4WD low range, we had covered about 25 km and arrived at Kwale campsite, where we cooked up bacon, eggs and tomatoes on toast and contemplated our next move.

Stanley breaks a shock

We had a reservation for a more distant campsite, Katoyana, for that evening, and were scheduled to spend the second night at Kwale, but given the broken shock and how slowly we were moving, we decided that it would be best to stay the night at Kwale.  Talking to the friendly campsite attendant, we learned that about 20 km away, at Matamanene camp, there was a mechanic who might be able to help us with the shock.  We set off early in the afternoon and had another miserable drive, getting stuck again and struggling to make headway in the deep sand.  At least we had bird life to look at:  crowned cranes and wattled cranes, both fairly rare and endangered, were out on the plain; we had seen them in Bangweulu, but we had lost the photos when my camera card malfunctioned, so it was nice to get photos of them again.  There was also a korhaan (a smaller version of the bustard) and lots of herds of zebras, although domestic cattle from the local villagers living in the park were definitely displacing the zebras near the villages.

We finally arrived at Matamanene at 4 o’clock to find that there was no mechanic.  We talked with Dan, the young Dutch biologist who runs the Liuwa Plain Carnivore Project, who gave us the name of a good mechanic in Mongu and said that we wouldn’t damage Stanley further by driving without the shock.  We thanked him and set off back towards Kwale along a more direct track.  We were finally out of the dense forest that we had been in since the ferry crossing and got out onto the open plains for which Liuwa is known.  Every year in about November the second-biggest gathering of wildebeest in the world takes place here as the rainy season starts in earnest.  The wildebeest gather from the highlands of Angola and areas in Zambia outside the park, where they spend most of the year.  We had heard that we wouldn’t see the big wildebeest herds, but that we should see lots of hyenas and other game.  As we drove along the track (still sandy, but not as soft and deep as before, so we could actually make forward progress), trying to navigate back to Kwale using vague directions from Dan and his employees and minimal help from our temperamental GPS, we saw a few lone male wildebeest here and there, more zebras and, just before dusk, one lone hyena.  Sunset found us still 12 km from Kwale, so we decided to sleep out on the plain rather than pushing on through the dark.  It was a memorable night under the stars, after a beautiful sunset, and we got into bed in Stanley fairly early as we heard the yipping of hyenas around us in the dark.

Crested and wattled cranes

We woke up the next morning to an unusual sound, like someone clapping their hands together very, very quickly.  It took a while to locate the source, which proved to be the Eastern clapper lark, a bird which displays every morning by clapping its wings together, first on the ground (where we didn’t see them, hidden in the grass) and then in the air, flying steeply upwards for a good clapping session, before gliding back to the ground.  We cooked up a hearty pancake breakfast to give us energy for more sand digging, then drove back to Kwale via a few seasonal waterholes that were listed (with their GPS co-ordinates) in our excellent Bradt guide to Zambia.  It’s been a very dry year in Zambia (and most of southern Africa), so the waterholes were mostly dry.  We had a good morning of watching wattled cranes:  they really are magnificent birds, especially in flight.  Our GPS had another bad morning, sending us in random directions and even losing track of where south was, but we eventually got back to Kwale and set up camp under the shade of some tall trees.

Bathroom bats, Kwale campsite

We ended up spending the rest of the day in camp.  We couldn’t face more sand driving, and there was plenty of birdlife to be seen in the woods.  The campsite looked out over the open plain, but there was almost no mammal life to be seen; I think that if we had managed to drive further north, as was the original plan, we would have seen more animals, but as it was, it was slim pickings.  The camp was a pleasant place to spend time, though; we were the only inhabitants, other than the friendly caretaker, and we took advantage of the hot showers to wash off the thick layer of sand that covered most of our bodies, meeting the resident bats that hung upside down beneath the shower roof.  We cooked up a big chicken curry over the campfire, letting it simmer all afternoon into a delicious thick sauce.  I went for an afternoon run across the plain, keeping a wary eye out for lions (there are very few in the park) and not seeing much wildlife in the grasslands.  Another pretty sunset was followed by some fruitless spotlighting for nocturnal birds; we could hear owls and nightjars, but could not find them.

Villagers on the move across Liuwa Plain

Spot the "road":  on the way back to the ferry

The next morning we woke up to find the enormous footprints of a male lion that had wandered through in the night (making me feel less clever for having gone running the previous afternoon!), breakfasted on oatmeal, then drove back to the ferry crossing.  It was easier going, as we chose a better track than the first time, but there were still long sections of tough sand slogging that Terri handled with aplomb.  Along the way we passed local villagers trekking towards the ferry in long caravans of ox-carts, dressed in colourful clothing that contrasted picturesquely with the golden grass.  Within two hours we were back at the ferry, without having had to dig ourselves out once.  It was an indescribably relief to reinflate the tires from their 1.0 bar half-flat condition so necessary in soft sand to 3.0 bars and then drive back onto asphalt.  We drove back to Mongu along the lovely new road, bought some food at Shoprite, utterly failed to find the mechanic recommended by Dan the carnivore man, and drove off towards Livingstone with one missing rear shock.

Made it!  Stanley waits for the pontoon

Overall Liuwa Plain was interesting, but didn’t quite live up to its hype.  I found it more interesting than Kafue, and seeing the wattled cranes was a big bonus, but the difficulty of driving in the deep sand, coupled with the lack of much game to see, made it not such a compelling place to visit.  My favourite parts of the visit were the night spent out on the plain, and the afternoon in Kwale camp.  I think that Liuwa Plain would be worth visiting later in the season, and with a lightly loaded, more powerful 4x4 like a Land Cruiser or a Pajero.  Stanley definitely struggled with the conditions!

Zipping down the Zambezi

Lovely barbecue spot overloking the Zambezi

It was an easy drive south along the Zambezi on a brand-new asphalt road in perfect condition.  It is such a new road that it doesn’t appear on our Tracks 4 Africa GPS map, which spent much of the trip complaining that we were off the road; the old road ran on the right bank of the river, but we zipped along the left bank, bypassing towns that were on our map and making great time.  At 3:40 we crossed a new bridge across the Zambezi and found a new campsite, the Sioma River Camp, to spend the night.  

Zambezi sunset in Sioma

It is perched high above the Zambezi, which here runs through a steep-sided gorge on its way downstream from the Ngonye Falls.  There was a lovely swing seat in the garden to lounge on, and a barbecue platform perched out over the river that was the perfect sunset-viewing spot.  It was one of those unexpectedly lovely places that is always a pleasure to stumble upon.

Ngonye Falls

The next day, Wednesday August 17^th, was going to be our last day of driving for a while, as we were bound for Livingstone.  We stopped in to see the Ngonye Falls:  they’re pleasant enough, but don’t hold a candle to the majesty of Victorial Falls.  We were in and out of the falls before the ticket man showed up late for work, saving us the admission price.  Most waterfalls in Zambia are classed as national monuments, meaning US$15 per person, plus a similar amount per vehicle, but I think that Ngonye Falls is run by the local government, so it might be cheaper.  The local council got its own back, though, a few kilometres down the highway where they run an extortion racket, extracting 65 kwacha (US$ 6.50) for any foreign vehicles that pass their roadblock.  Terri was incensed by this legalized highway robbery; it’s a good thing that other local councils around the country don’t follow suit, or you wouldn’t be able to afford driving down the road.  It’s not a road toll, per se; it’s just a tourist levy to cross the territory controlled by the municipal council of Sioma.

The rest of the drive south was uneventful, passing through some very pretty countryside indeed, until the town of Sesheke, where the road runs into the Namibian border.  From that point to the Botswanan border town of Kazungula, the asphalt of the road has disintegrated entirely, meaning that it takes three hours of careful navigating between car-sized potholes to drive the 130 km on this stretch, with the central 85 km being particularly awful.  At Kazungula the pavement returned to its usual immaculate state and we cruised into the familiar surroundings of Livingstone, where we had spent three weeks back in March.  We went straight to our favourite restaurant, Olga’s, for a celebratory lunch, then contemplated where to stay.  We knew that we would end up spending most of our stay at Jollyboy’s Campsite, but we wanted one night out of town.  We looked at the Waterfront, but its campsite was heaving with no fewer than seven overland trucks, as peak tourist season was upon us.  We found a much quieter spot at Maramba River Camp, then went out for sundowners at the Royal Livingstone, Terri’s favourite place in all of Livingstone.  It was good to be back in our familiar home away from home.

Happy at the Royal Livingstone

Lingering in Livingstone

Stanley, Terri and some OTLC pupils and staff

Volunteer family extraordinaire:  Jo and Rob and their 5 children

Digging the new latrines 

The next two weeks passed by remarkably quickly.  Rob and Jo, Terri’s friends from New Zealand, were in Livingstone to volunteer at the Olive Tree Learning Centre, and Jo did a lot of work on the fund-raising website for the school, deploying her impressive graphic arts and web design skills on the project.  Rob and their five children worked both at OLTC and at another school most mornings, playing with children and doing physical labour on the ongoing construction at OTLC.  Sadly, their volunteering stint was curtailed by a thief who managed to steal a huge sum of Chinese yuan cash from their hotel room; since that money was their travel money, they ended up changing their plane tickets to return to New Zealand early, a big loss both to them and to the OTLC project.  Apparently it was the fifth case of theft at that same lodge in less than a month, making it likely that it was an inside job either by the owner or by an employee.

The heart of any good school--OTLC inaugurates its new library

It was good to see the changes at OTLC since we left town in early April.  The new school building that was paid for by fundraising efforts at Terri’s former school, the Kumon Leysin Academy in Switzerland (KLAS), is now complete; the last windows and door gates went into place while we were there, along with electrical fittings.  Terri spent a lot of time huddled with the school’s business manager, going over accounts and trying to set the school on a path to financial sustainability, since KLAS will end its decade-long tradition of sending a student humanitarian service trip to Livingstone.  It was good to see the school expanding and moving in new directions, with the sewing machine and some donated computers being deployed in income-generating activities, and new teachers joining the fold.  Jo gave a great professional development session to the teachers.  We broke ground on new latrines for the students, and inaugurated the library, a sorely needed resource in a community virtually without access to books.  We even watched a partial solar eclipse one morning while working on the new sandpit for the schoolyard.  There is an air of progress and optimism in meeting new challenges that is heartening to see, particularly for Terri who has spent the past decade cultivating the skills of the people who run the school.  We spent some time setting up a sponsorship program to allow people to sponsor a child for a year at the school; taking photos of the children, and writing up their biographies, I realized again how lucky I have been in my own life, being born where I was, when I was to the parents that I have.  

The boss gets her hands dirty during OTLC construction

I won the genetic lottery; some of these students did not, and OTLC represents a chance to give these young minds a bit more of a head start.  The project has been going for long enough that Terri can start to get positive feedback about how well her pupils do after they leave OTLC and move into government primary schools.  It’s been a rewarding experience for me to play a small part in this project, and I look forward to doing so again in the future.  I think Terri can be proud of the help that she has given to children in a tough neighbourhood of Livingstone.

Rob putting his back into construction at OTLC

Jo giving some tech professional development to OTLC teachers

Spaces between leaves make pinhole images of the eclipsed sun

Our time in Livingstone wasn’t all work and no play.  We found time to go whitewater rafting, and it was an exciting full-day trip down some pretty big rapids indeed.  Neither Terri nor I went overboard, although one of our raft-mates did, while one of the other rafts flipped completely and it was some very shaken, scared rafters that we helped to pull out of the river downstream.  

Yes, that's an anti-malarial bednet being used as a fishing net!

We also went abseiling and hiking in a side canyon of the Zambezi while other, braver folks hurled themselves off the Gorge Swing.  I found a tennis court and a tennis partner, Darlington, and spent several happy afternoons playing.  The courts were in terrible condition, and the tennis balls were worse, but it was so much fun, good for my soul.  I got out running most afternoons, and we spent several evenings having sundowners at the Royal Livingstone, watching the sun turn the Zambezi various incredible shades of copper and gold. 

Terri abseiling outside Livingstone

Kids enjoying the new sandpit at OTLC

We met interesting people staying at the campsite as well.  The cyclists of the Joburg2Kili charity ride kept us amused for a few days when we first got to Livingstone.  

Tbe Joburg2Kili cycling team

The new school building at OTLC

Justin, our builder, finishing off the windows

Maya (the Land Rover), Cristelle and Terri

Cristelle, a French woman who has been travelling and working on various small-scale humanitarian projects for several years in Africa, in her trusty Land Rover named Maya, was a source of great information and inspiration.  Douglas and Keira, an Irish couple in another Land Rover, gave us lots of tips for our trip through Botswana and South Africa.  And the teachers and students of the Travelling School, a 16-student, 4-teacher high school semester abroad program that moves through Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa over the course of 4 months, gave Terri and me inspiration to think about setting up a similar program ourselves in the future; we’ve spent numerous nights around the campfire talking about it.

Child labour:  photogenic pupil Shawn hard at work

We also had some work done on Stanley, getting the rear shocks replaced (it was a long process, as the right shocks were not to be found and other shocks needed to be modified to fit our Colt) and trying to repair the rear differential lock (the right switch could not be found).  We extended both our visas and our CIP for Stanley (remarkably, both were free of charge and involved little bureaucracy and no demands for bribery, a welcome change from other encounters with the Zambia Revenue Authority).  And then, suddenly, it was September 2^nd and we were driving to the Botswana border crossing at Kazungula, keen to head into the wildlife centre of Africa.  It had been a wonderful five weeks in Zambia, but it was time to move on to fresh adventures.

Terri, our sign painter and the KLAS logo on the OTLC wall

The essence of sundowners at the Royal Livingstone

Another Zambezi sunset

How I will always remember Livingstone

Volunteering in Livingstone, March 2016

Martigny, April 23rd

Terri and I arrived in Livingstone, Zambia on March 8^th, more than six weeks ago.  It’s funny to think that since I left Leysin last June, I had not spent three weeks in one place at one time until our three-week sojourn in Livingstone, and it seems unlikely that I will spend three weeks in any other place for a long time to come.  It felt as though I had given up my nomadism for a while, but since then we have restarted our peregrinations in South Africa, so it’s normal service resumed.

Terri, Angela and the 15 Kumon students at Victoria Falls

After two enjoyable weeks at my mother’s place in Ottawa and another week in Thunder Bay visiting my father, getting a flavour of the winter that I have missed by being in the southern hemisphere (although Ottawa has had a record-breaking El Nino-fuelled warm winter), I flew to London overnight on March 6^th-7th and had ten hours between flights, so I hopped on the Tube and headed into the city to visit my friend Sean and his girlfriend Shelby.  We had an outrageously good tapas lunch at a restaurant in Katherine’s Wharf, a tiny chic yacht harbour tucked away near the Tower of London.  It was good to see Sean, whom I last saw in Bali 18 months ago.  We have crossed paths all over the world, from France to Egypt to London to Japan to Bali, ever since we met as bicycle tour guides working for Butterfield and Robinson back in 1997.  Sean had to hurry back to work, but I still had a few hours, so I went to the Botticelli Reimagined exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.  The first part of the exhibit was kind of strange:  20^th century uses of Boticelli’s Birth of Venus in all sorts of post-modernist settings.  The second part showed how the Pre-Raphaelites were influenced in the late 19^th century by Botticelli, and was more interesting.  The main part of the exhibit, paintings and drawings by Botticelli himself, was fantastic, even if The Birth of Venus and the Allegory of Spring weren’t there as the Uffizi in Florence wouldn’t let them go.  I really liked the painting of La Bella Simonetta, the young mistress of one of the Medici.  Then it was time to snooze my way back to Heathrow on rhw  and the next leg of my trip, refreshed by a few hours of companionship and culture.

The flight to Johannesburg was uneventful, and once there, I met up with Terri, who had flown in from New Zealand a few hours earlier.  We had a reunion, catching up on the past three weeks, and then got on separate flights back north to Livingstone.  I was stamped into my 123^rd country and emerged to find Terri waiting with Mr. Sakala, the driver/advisor who has worked with Terri on her Zambian trips since 2007.  We drove to YCTC, a youth vocational training centre run by the local Catholic diocese, and settled in for our long stay. 

Terri has been running a humanitarian trip for students from her former school since 2007, bringing in Japanese high school students to do work at a small pre-school that she has been funding for the past 9 years.  Even though she no longer works in Switzerland, the school ran a trip this year and we were on hand to help run it.  In contrast to previous years, we arrived a good 10 days before the students to give Terri a chance to do some time-consuming bureaucratic work and keep an eye on the construction of a new classroom building.  I had never visited Zambia, and had been hearing about this project for years, so when we both left our jobs last June to travel, we decided that it was a perfect chance for me to see the pre-school in action. 

My first impressions of Zambia were of heat, rain and a strange déjà vu.  I lived in Tanzania back in 1981-2, when my father worked for 2 years at a university in Morogoro.  Morogoro is on the train line and road leading to Zambia, and we would see heavily-laden copper trucks roaring along the road whenever we drove out of town.  Looking around Libuyu, the poor neighbourhood of Livingstone in which YCTC is located, I could have been back in Tanzania 35 years ago.  There were a few differences; cell phones have arrived in a big way, and the cars are all Japanese instead of the Peugeots, Volkswagens and Land Rovers I remembered, but the shanty towns, the women walking long distances with heavy loads on their heads, the dirt roads, the huge numbers of children and the Asian-owned shops were all familiar sights.  Although Zambia is held up as an example of Rising Africa (the 15-20 sub-Saharan countries that have shown sustained economic growth since about 2000), in the outskirts it looks more like Stagnant Africa.  Long line-ups at service stations for scarce gasoline, frequent power cuts and complaints of official corruption were drearily similar to my childhood memories.

I had never done voluntary humanitarian work, and I have to confess that my two adolescent years in Tanzania left me a bit skeptical of the entire aid industry, which too often seems to degenerate into empire building and boosting home-country industries, rather than bringing about lasting improvement in the lives of people in the target country.  Terri’s ongoing project in the poor neighbourhood of Ngwenya, though, was quite different.  

Some of the output of the Ngwenya quarries

It’s run on a shoestring, using money raised by students at her former school, the Kumon Leysin Academy in Switzerland (KLAS, or Kumon).  Students, Terri and (this year) her successor Angela raise money by selling snacks at school, running bake sales and a big charity raffle.  This year Angela and some of her enterprising students took fundraising to a whole new level with enthusiasm, persistence and the clever use of online fundraising tools, and raised far more than had ever been raised in a single year before.  That money, of course, goes far further in Zambia than in overpriced Switzerland and has a huge effect on the lives of over 100 pre-school and lower elementary pupils at the newly re-named Olive Tree Learning Centre.  The money goes to pay for half of the salaries of the teachers and staff at the school, as well as for the school lunch program and for occasional capital projects, such as the construction this year of a new building which will double the available classroom space. 

Brenda, the hand-washing monitor at Olive Tree

It might well be asked why a project that has been running for 9 years still needs ongoing funding support; one of the great complaints about aid and humanitarian projects is that they never become self-funding.  I had the task of having a look at the financial books this year and essentially the school funds about half of its ongoing expenses through school fees which, at 130 kwacha (about 12 US dollars) per term, or 36 dollars a year, are very modest but still beyond the very modest means of many parents in what is a very low-income area where huge family sizes are the norm.  If the school were to charge 300 or 400 kwacha a term (some of the schools for better-off students in Livingstone charge more like 600 kwacha a term), it would cover its expenses, but would in the process price out the very students that Terri has always wanted to help the most.  

School lunch line:  same as anywhere in the world

About a quarter of the students who attend the Olive Tree do so free of charge, as the school management feels that their families are too poor to be able to pay any fees at all.  The others pay a low fee that helps fund the school without making it a school just for the better-off.  The additional funding brought in by Kumon students is the difference between having another school for lower-middle-class pupils and having a school that makes a huge difference in the lives of the poorest children in a tough neighbourhood.

Olive Tree students 

The big construction project this year took up a lot of time and organizational effort.  Essentially a three classroom building, with two classrooms for the expansion of the school up to grade four and one multipurpose room that could be used for adult education or for income-generating activities to increase the self-funding capacity of the school, was being built from the ground up.  We watched the building rise from the extra plot of land that had been purchased a couple of years earlier.  One builder, a few permanent staff and some casual labourers methodically moulded construction blocks from sand and cement, laid a big concrete foundation slab and then began laying courses of blocks.  It all happened remarkably quickly, in a matter of perhaps six weeks in total.  What amazed me was the cost.  A fairly sturdy construction, tons of sand and concrete, doors, gates, windows, many man-weeks of labour, and it was all done for under US$10,000.  The same building would have cost 25 times as much in Switzerland, and 10 times as much in Canada.  Of course, the fact that building labourers work for 20 or 30 kwacha a day helps keep costs down.

At any rate, we watched the building foundations being prepared for the big day of concrete laying as we waited for the Kumon students to arrive.  Justin, the contractor, worked harder than any of his labourers laying blocks, mixing mortar and shoveling sand.  He had conferences with Mr. Sakala, our driver, who had been a builder in his day and was a masterful jack of all trades; they discussed the design of the building, the height of the concrete slab, the supply of bricks and sand.  I even got in on the act, trying to estimate the number of blocks we would need to produce, and hence the quantity of sand and cement we would need.

Starting to lay the foundation of the new school building 

The pre-school itself, still called the Little Angels Pre-School (the Olive Tree re-naming would happen while the Kumon students were there) was a hive of activity whenever we visited.  The school consisted of a main building with two classrooms and a tiny office, a cookhouse that had one room being used as a classroom during the construction (which had claimed one classroom as a storeroom for construction materials), a couple of latrines for the students and a chicken coop where the school supplemented its meagre income from school fees by raising chicks to adult size and then selling them for 45 kwacha (US$ 4) each.  It was a mildly profitable business that kept the otherwise chronically underemployed security guard busy. 

It seems as though every humanitarian endeavour in Livingstone has a similar income-generating activity (IGA, in the parlance) going to supplement funds from overseas donors.  Chicken raising is a popular one, along with sewing, vegetable farming and an Italian restaurant (Olga’s) that was founded to help support YCTC, the Catholic diocese’s training centre for underprivileged youth.  It’s a worthwhile idea to help projects become self-sustaining, but these IGAs run the risk either of not making enough money, or of falling into disrepair due to lax oversight.  Olga’s was apparently not making nearly the money that had been forecast, while YCTC’s IGAs (making furniture and selling clothing) were languishing because of cutbacks, lack of motivation and quality-control issues. 

The Olive Tree is attended full-time by two classes of pre-schoolers, and two half-day classes of grades 1 and 2.  The enrolment of almost 120 is about eight times what it was in 2007 when Terri got involved in the project, and the school is thriving.  The three full-time teachers run their classes with lots of energy and enthusiasm while the school lunch program for the pre-school classes has the pupils looking well-fed and healthy.  One day, walking around the Ngwenya neighbourhood around the school, Terri and I saw a number of students with the orange hair and bulging abdomens that are tell-tale signs of protein-poor diets and malnutrition.  I was amazed that the school was able to feed 70 kids four lunches a week on a budget of about US$100 a month.  That’s basically about 10 US cents a meal.  The staple starch of Zambia, maize-flour porridge called nshima (think of polenta) is unbelievably cheap, and it is supplemented by green vegetables, dried fish and beans.  And yet, despite these low prices, many of the parents of the neighbourhood, working piecework for the rock quarries of the area, are unable to provide enough food for their extensive families.  The school lunch is vital for the pupils, almost more important than the educational opportunities that are also on offer.  It amazes me how little money it can take to make a real, tangible difference in the lives of so many children. 

A joyful, tearful reunion between Terri and Miss Bwaliya

When we weren’t visiting the Olive Tree-to-be, we went to town to do grocery shopping, to buy construction materials and paint, and to visit some of the circle of friends and acquaintances that Terri has amassed over the years of coming to Livingstone.  The no-nonsense Irish nuns of the Little Sisters of St. Francis, Sisters Frances and Fidelma, provided interesting conversation and insight into the problems of trying to run charitable programs in Zambia.  Mr. Sakala gave us stories of economic mismanagement and official corruption.  Ms. Bwaliya, a dear friend who used to work at YCTC, told stories of her family and community that were straight out of Dickens or Victor Hugo, full of poverty, disease, untimely death and horrible crime; I was amazed at her ability to keep going and keep smiling in the face of such adversity.  Zambia has a huge number of orphans whose parents have died young of AIDS, and yet seems to have almost no street kids sleeping rough at night; the extended family takes in the orphans, swelling already large families to Biblical proportions. 

Saying hello to students at Luumono Elementary School

The main complaints that Zambians have about their country and their government are those that you might expect:  shortages of running water, electricity and gasoline; official corruption; a lack of jobs for graduates; and misguided economic policies that have hollowed out the small industrial base that once existed.  While economic growth has occurred over the past 15 years, its benefits do not seem to have been very widely spread.  There is still widespread and obvious poverty, and now that copper prices have fallen off a cliff and the copper mines that were once the leading exports are mothballed, and with a drought driving up prices of corn flour, many people are struggling more than before to make ends meet.  The story of decisions made in the 1990s to allow imports of cheap used Japanese cars and cheap second-hand Asian clothing were interesting and a bit depressing.  Livingstone had a Fiat car assembly factory, a Bata shoe factory and a textile mill that made blankets.  

Sister Bridgit, an inspirational young teacher at Luumono

Shortly after the cheaper imports were allowed, these three factories were gone, taking hundreds (perhaps thousands) of relatively well-paid steady industrial jobs with them and casting the former employees back into the more precarious world of informal employment.  It hardly seems the way to develop a modern prosperous economy, and it’s certainly not the route taken by Japan, South Korea, China, Malaysia and other Asian countries to raise the living standards of most of their populations.  With a hotly-contested election coming up later this year, Zambians fear both more economic populism and real electoral violence.

Zebras at the Royal Livingstone Hotel

At the end of the day, Terri and I often went to a couple of riverside restaurants to take in the breathtaking sunsets.  The Royal Livingstone has an air of colonial elegance and an unbeatable location, along with giraffes, zebras and impalas roaming the grounds.  One of the giraffes, a big male named Bob, took a dislike to me and would advance menacingly if he caught sight of me.  By the time we left Livingstone, Bob had been deported from the hotel back to a nearby national park for being aggressive with other hotel guests.  Terri and I would sit watching the sunset, sipping drinks and watching the passing birdlife.   It was Terri’s favourite spot to end the day.  We also went to the Riverside restaurant, just up the river, with an equally lovely view but without the genteel air of the Royal Livingstone.   Olga’s Restaurant, the Italian joint started as an IGA for YCTC (I feel like a proper NGO worker, spouting an alphabet soup of acronyms) and the Zambezi Café, a lively joint popular with the local Zambian middle class, were other frequent supper spots.  Then we would return to YCTC, often in the darkness of a power cut, and sleep under our sagging mosquito nets.

Bob the aggressive male giraffe

Then, suddenly, the day of arrival was at hand and 15 Japanese high school students and Angela, their South African-born supervising teacher, were at the airport (sadly, without their luggage).  The next 9 days passed in a blur, with work trips to the preschool, a cultural exchange with YCTC students, a class trip with one of the pre-school classes to a big cat centre and an amazing safari trip to Chobe National Park (across the Zambezi in Botswana, a trip which I will write about in a separate post).  The trip, honed over the years by Terri, was a good mixture of activities for the students.  Essentially Angela and the students had already done a lot of the hard work over the past 7 months in raising thousands of dollars to fund the project; that was their biggest practical contribution, and without that money Olive Tree wouldn’t be able to keep operating.  At the same time, though, Terri wanted the students to learn through doing and contributing, so we put the students to work making construction blocks, repairing broken windows and repainting the original school building.  They also taught lessons one day to the youngsters at Olive Tree, and escorted two or three pre-schoolers each on the trip to Mukuni Big Five, the cat sanctuary.  

Taro trying his hand at making construction blocks

I think that it was important for the Kumon teenagers to see the results of their fundraising, the smiling, irrepressible youngsters in their neat uniforms lining up for school lunches, eager to show off their poems and songs.  This sort of direct experiential learning leaves a much more lasting impression on teenagers than any number of academic lessons on the developing world.

Kumon students scraping before repainting Olive Tree

Taro discovers breaking rocks is tough

Daiki with three Japanese JICA volunteers

The impression can be so lasting, in fact, that students come back to Zambia on their own initiative to volunteer.  While we were there we spent a lot of time with Daiki, a former Kumon student who was on Terri’s first-ever Zambia trip in 2007.  He is now a graduate student in Switzerland, studying international development, and was on his second internship at YCTC.  He said that it was only a few years after the trip that he realized what a profound effect the trip had had on his conception of the world, and he was keen to try to help the students on this year’s trip get the most out of their experience.  It was great for me to have Daiki around as he was quite a good source of local information on what was going on at YCTC and in the wider community.  He also organized three local Japanese overseas volunteers who were working in the neighbourhood to come have dinner with the Kumon students one night and give insight into the life of an overseas volunteer.

YCTC dancers at the cultural exchange

The cultural exchange program with the students at YCTC got off to a slow start, with the YCTC group very late in arriving from their classes, but once it got going, it was a very worthwhile experience, with the Japanese demonstrating some typical Japanese skills like origami, calligraphy and wearing a kimono, while a group of YCTC students showed off their drumming and dancing skills.  Afterwards, there were throngs of Zambian students clustered around the tables getting their names written in Japanese characters or trying their hand at origami.  I think it was a good chance to bridge the huge gap in affluence, experience and expectation between the two groups. 

Drummers at the YCTC cultural exchange

Kumon students doing origami at the cultural exchange

Cheetah at the Mukuni Big Five centre

A caracal (African lynx) at the Mukuni Big Five

The grand finale of the "service" part of the trip took place on Friday morning.  Every year the youngsters who are finishing the reception class (kindergarten/pre-school) at Olive Tree take a class trip out to the Big 5 conservancy project at Mukuni village, near Livingstone.  The Kumon students are all assigned two or three tiny Olive Tree pupils to look after during the visit, and it's sweet to see the tall Japanese teenagers hand in hand with a pint-sized Zambian tyke on each side walking to the bus, sitting together on the bus, and then escorting their tiny charges into the Big 5.  For many of the Zambian children, it may be the first (or only) time in their lives that they come face to face with the charismatic megafauna that Westerners fly halfway around the world to see.  It was wonderful to see the excitement in their eyes as we walked past the lions, cheetahs and caracals.  The lions in particular took a keen interest in the small humans, sizing them up for a midday snack, and we were glad to have the strong chain-link fence between the felines and the pre-schoolers.  When Terri walked past the enclosure with Terry the lion inside, as soon as she turned her back on the lion, he perked up his ears, tensed his muscles and charged at her retreating back, only prevented from leaping on her by the fence.  It must have been a memorable and somewhat alarming visit for the Olive Tree children, and there were heartfelt goodbyes in the parking lot as they said goodbye to their protectors from Kumon.

After six whirlwind days of activity, hard work and service, it was finally a chance for the students to have a more touristy experience.  We went to Victoria Falls (my first visit after being in Livingstone for two and a half weeks) and experienced the awesome volume of water hurtling over the precipice.  At places the spray returning to the ground from the sky was like a second waterfall, drenching anything not protected by a waterproof rain poncho.  We could only really see one half of the falls, as the Zimbabwean half was completely lost in the dense clouds of spray.  

Victoria Falls, aka Mosi Oa Tunya, "The Smoke That Thunders"

Some of that Victoria Falls "smoke"

The waterfall’s spray is visible from many kilometres away on a clear day and is perhaps the most impressive part of an impressive natural sight.  That evening we had a celebratory dinner at the Royal Livingstone before heading off to the Chobe safari early the next morning.

One final coat of paint for the classroom.

When we came back from astounding Chobe, we had one final trip out to the Olive Tree, distributing some of the suitcases of donated clothing and sports equipment that the Kumon students had brought.  We talked through the figures:  the amazing amounts of money raised, and where that money was going to be spent.  We talked about what their efforts meant in giving youngsters in the poorest part of a poor country a bit of a head start through providing them with a safe space to learn and enough food to eat to be able to learn.  It was a bit heartbreaking seeing the crowds of youngsters from that neighbourhood who don’t go to school running wild in the streets, with little prospect of ever getting an education or a decent opportunity in life.  The educational needs of the community are far greater than one small school can provide for, but it’s better to do what we can than to do nothing. 

Mr. Sakala, his family and the Kumon students

As we waved goodbye to the Kumon group at Livingstone airport, it was a bit of a relief after 9 very intense days involving a lot of organizing and oversight, but it was also satisfying to have been part of providing both a possibly transformative educational experience to the Japanese students and a much-needed leg up to a worthy cause that is making a difference in the lives of a hundred families in Ngwenya township.  My long-held skepticism of a lot of large-scale aid projects is still there, but a small, focused effort like Olive Tree really does seem to be an incredibly efficient use of resources to do the maximum good.  There is still a ton of basic needs unmet in the townships around Livingstone (running water, sewage, electricity, health care, education) and it would be nice if the Zambian government did a better job of meeting these, but until (and if) that happens, projects like the Olive Tree will continue to play a vital role in trying to make a difference.  I am immensely proud of Terri and the program she has built up over the years, and I was glad to play a small part in this year’s trip.

Reunion with Natalie at the Royal Livingstone

And then, once it was all over, it was time for us to handle the last bureaucratic paperwork and have some fun.  On Monday, March 28^th we met up with a former colleague of mine, Nathalie, who is now working at an international school in Lusaka.  It was great to catch up with her and with the group of colleagues with whom we were travelling.  Then on Tuesday Terri and I treated ourselves to a microlight flight over the falls.  It was eye-wateringly expensive at US$ 165 for a 15-minute joyride, but it was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thrill, and provided by far the best overall view of the falls, as well as glimpses of giraffes, buffalo and hippos in the surrounding national parks. 

Terri going for a microlight flight

On Wednesday, March 30^th we packed our bags, said goodbye to YCTC and to Mr. Sakala and caught a flight to Cape Town to start the next phase of our journey:  our overland trip around Africa.  More on that (and on the trip to Chobe) later!

Moe, Terri and Angela and the impressive fund-raising figures

Late afternoon light on the Zambezi

That smile says it all; it's why people volunteer