Common street scenes we saw each day in Lusaka as we drove to school and back.
We saw these excavation sites everywhere. This is how a lot of people in Lusaka make a (meager) living: digging up rocks, breaking them up, and sorting them into piles. The rocks are then used for gravel or concrete. You can see how the ground has been cleared away in the back.
The classroom building at Chifundo school. (This was Sunday evening, while we were setting up.)
Sunset over the school wall. The broken glass bottles are Zambia's version of barbed wire.
Our group teamed up with the teachers who work at Chifundo year-round. We're in front of the insala, the other main building at the school.
We split the kids up into groups by age and assigned them colors.
They marched from class to class chanting “Red team! Red team!”
The kids rotated among five classes. Here's music, where they learned a hymn or praise song each day. We didn't know if the songs would be too difficult for them, but when we showed up the second day, the kids were singing on their own.
One of the posters at the school. English is the national language, but most of our kids spoke Nyanja or Tonga at home, so the school aims for the kids to learn English.
These kiddos had wandered into my classroom.
In arts and crafts class, Kara, Jade and Scott help the yellow team decorate its flag.
For one of the crafts, we took every kid's picture, then printed them on a photo printer we brought along. We'll return to this later in the week.
They made shakers in arts and crafts, then used them in music class.
June is winter in Zambia (still in the 70s in the day) so many of the kids wore winter clothes.
Dakotah with Dorothy, who founded the school (and other ministries to reach the community). She's such a godly woman, a great example of giving your whole life to help people.
Rob and Jodie, our pastor and his wife, taught Bible class. Here, the fifth-graders act out Daniel and the lions' den.
Daniel prays as he's surrounded by lions.
The kids line up for their lunch of nshima, the Zambian staple food. It's made of cornmeal and water, and it has a consistency similar to mashed potatoes.
For many of the kids, the nshima they got at lunch was their only meal. On Monday morning we noticed that the kids weren't very energetic, couldn't focus; later we realized that was probably because they hadn't eaten in three days.
Our team got the same meal as the teachers: nshima plus vegetables. On this day it was cabbage, top, and a vegetable called rape.
Jessica, Dakotah, Jade and Brandi demonstrate the proper way to eat nshima: You roll it into a ball, then grab some vegetable with it.
In games class, the kids ran relay races and played other Awana- or youth-group-style games. Often it turned into soccer by the end of the period. (Notice they're playing barefoot.)
Our two drivers, including Lawrence here, went beyond the call of duty and helped out a lot with VBS. They're considered middle-class because they have high school educations and jobs. They're also huge soccer (football) fans. But when we were unloading supplies, Lawrence picked up a ball and said, “So this is what the patches on a football look like” — he had never before seen an actual soccer ball in person.
We also taught the children the chicken dance.
I had to get my picture taken with Maxwell because of his Cubs shirt. Better still, it's a Chicago Cubs 2003 World Series shirt — the kind they had ready to go when we were so close to winning the pennant, but instead never got sold. Apparently they were given away in Africa instead.
Casey, who teaches third grade back in Texas, and I taught the English class. The kids are normally taught by rote, with lots of exercises and drills, so part of what we did was showing the teachers other ways of teaching.
One of the preschool classes doing a drawing activity. The younger kids spoke almost no English and needed a translator, but the older kids could speak it fine.
In one activity they picked cards with vocabulary words and drew them. The teachers were impressed when they went through the kids' work at the end of the day — they didn't realize that some could draw so well, because arts are normally not a part of their schooling.
When he picked the word “ground,” he thought of a football ground (what we call a soccer field).
We played games with cards to teach the kids math. One was essentially war, to recognize which number was higher.
In another game, each kid drew a card and added it to the ones they already had, eventually having to add five or six numbers together. The first to hit 50 won.
Before we left, our team, other people from church, and even some of our team members' students bought children's books and recorded themselves reading them. We brought over the books, tapes and boomboxes to the school. They were a hit — here they're following along to “Green Eggs and Ham” — and the Zambian teachers were thrilled that the kids now have a way to hear spoken English. When we go back next year, all the kids will have Texan accents. =)
When we ran out of stuff to do with the little kids, we often played outside. Here, Simon says “Be strong!”
Making an alphabet train to help the kids learn their letters
S is upside down, but that's OK.
In this activity, the kids put up a number of fingers, and the first person to count them all won. We played a tournament, and they loved the competition aspect. Overall, the idea that learning can be fun was a new concept for them.
Later in the week, the kids got back their pictures ...
... and made decorative frames for them.
They LOVED the pictures — after all, many don't have mirrors at home, let alone a chance to get their picture taken.
Bubbles also proved to be a big hit.
In all, we had 375 kids, half in the morning and half in the afternoon. Some 40 percent are considered orphans.
Another ministry at the school campus is a shop where widows from the community make beautiful batik-dyed fabric and sew them into clothing. This gives them a way to support themselves without having to beg.
They insisted I try on a shirt.
For our farewell meal, we took the teachers out to a nice restaurant, something they couldn't afford on their own. On the menu was a local delicacy: caterpillars.
They weren't too bad; I had six or seven.
But some people didn't care for them as much.
We took an R&R day in Livingstone, and on the way we stopped at “Banana Corner.” Janet, our missionary partner who's lived their for several years, berated them for charging us muzungu (white person) prices.
The Zambian flag
Looking down the Zambezi River toward Victoria Falls. It's easy to see why, in the native language, it's known as Mosi-oa-Tunya: The Smoke That Thunders.
It's really hard for a picture to convey the magnitude of Victoria Falls. Heck, it's hard to grasp it in person — it's a mile wide, wider than Niagara Falls.
Thankfully they had “raincoats for hire,” since the mist is more like rain. We still got soaked.
The mist from the falls also made for some spectacular rainbows.
We finished with a ride on the Zambezi, where saw the sunset ...
... and these guys. “Simon says, yawn like a hippo!”
Thanks so much for dreaming big with us and helping us make a difference in the lives of hundreds of Zambian kids. It wouldn't have been possible without your help.
We hope to return in July. See you then!
