Having reluctantly dragged myself away from the bike ride to Livingstone with Beyond Ourselves on Tuesday evening (via a very friendly Lusaka farmer who rather randomly purchased a live cockerel on our way back to the city, placing it noisily in the boot), I am pleased to report that my reason for doing so was well and truly worth it.
Yesterday, along with the latest group of UK students here with the IDEALS programme (International Development through Excellence And Leadership in Sport), and a few others working with UK Sport or with one of the Wallace Group of universities, we visited a variety of the schools in and around Lusaka where Sport in Action runs programmes. Each area, from Chilenje (near where I live) to Munali to Kalingalinga, has its own character and personality and the children reacted in different ways in each place. Whilst I am sure some of the children have grown used to it over the years of the programme, the arrival or a truck full of mzungos at each site, sporting varying degrees of sunburn and choice of sunshade, must still be an extremely odd site. Nevertheless, we were extremely warmly greeted everywhere we went and it was not unusual to see the students carrying more than one young child or becoming immersed in an impromptu game of football or basketball. The only difficult thing was dragging ourselves away from each site in order to go onto the next one.
There was a serious purpose for the day of course, which was to familiarise the students with where they will be working for the next five weeks. Having already met their site coordinators and peer leaders from each site on Monday, and then experienced the ‘Tackle Africa’ workshop on Tuesday (which I was disappointed to miss whilst on the bike), this was their first opportunity to see the schools and meet the children. Judging by the way they got stuck in immediately and the buzz on the truck as we approached or after we left each site, I am sure group 2 will pick up seamlessly from where group 1 left off. The picture below is just one example of a very common sight yesterday.
Posted in 2013
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