First day working on Linda Blind Farm

Seriously poor nights’ sleep – the huge dip in my mattress combined with dogs barking til all hours meant a fairly broken night, so I treated myself to a couple of slices of toast and marmite for breakfast around 7am. We spent the next hour waiting for managers Kennedy and Rabeccah to arrive, sat with Paddy (a 19 year old Irish lad) who was marking exam papers with a hangover before school.
Such an awesome welcome from Rabeccah and Kennedy – within minutes Rabeccah was transferring her belongings to her new gifted handbag and preparing to head into town. Before she went though we talked though our plans for last years school and Linda farm. She was very supportive and thankful that we had approached her first – giving donations directly causes all sorts of unseen problems… jealousy, corruption and the “gimme gimme” response so many people misunderstand. Thankfully she also sorted out a hefty taxi discount for us for the week. It was listening to these negotiations on her phone call that I noticed a pattern in the language she used…. The parts of the conversation that are conducted in English always seem to be related to time… words like “tomorrow” and “last time” are always said in English, the rest in their tribal language of Nyanja – I’ve come to the conclusion that time is not part of their language at all. When you live out here, this makes sense… everything out here happens in “African time”.
Our taxi driver, “Obey”, was part way through cleaning his cab when Rabeccah’s call came in and so my back seat was wet – in horror at the fact that his “Muzungu” (white person) passenger was getting a soggy bottom in his cab he immediately whipped off his shirt, whilst driving, and handed it back to me insisting I sat on it!
We arrived at Linda Farm about 945am and Songisa took us round – chuffed as nuts with the photobook of images from our visit last year. The team were already hard at work in the fieds, watering the rows by hand with a hosepipe. A Dutch family had kindly installed a new irrigation system last week, but sadly the river-fed water pump couldn’t deliver sufficient water in the time available each day to make it worthwhile – the cost of running the pump for that long just didn’t make it viable, so they are re-thinking the situation and connecting manual hoses to the system instead.

Tracey and I immediately got to work taking up hoses and working our way along the rows of onion, and cabbage under the scorching African sun. We broke for a surprising 2 hour lunch at noon and realised we hadn’t actually brought any lunch with us – D’oh! 2 hours is a long time to kill with nothing to do, so we decided to take a walk up river to the local bridge where we found a bunch of school kids waiting for their ride home. One of the lads was being taunted for being genuinely fat and with massive holes in the soles of his shoes, whilst the rest of the girls were obsessed by our hair and kept grabbing and pulling it in fascination.
The watering started again at 2pm this time in a field of aubergines for over an hour during which I managed to get wind and sun burn on my face and neck. Not our smartest first day… lack of food and lack of suncream, but at least we were still smiling and every single aubergine had had a personal shower (I became a little obsessed!).
We wandered back down the lane to meet the taxi around 4pm and met Bernard (the blind farmer) on his way home – how the hell this guy finds his way around is a mystery, let alone swing a scythe all day hacking bushes back. Incredible.
When we finally arrived back at the Sunbird we were hot, smelly and starving and so demolished a giant bag of crisps and a couple of beers each before heading over to the communal dining room for dinner….. pork and none other than aubergines! A fitting end to a fantastic day.

You're so FAT!

Me and Zita at the Sports Club

Up at 630am and went on a “Zambian amble” into town to get SIM cards for laptop dongle and Zambian phone – we also wanted to get gift bags, and a few more supplies for our room. True to African tradition, SIM cards cannot be registered inside an hour, so of course this required a trip to the Kubu café next door to the phone shop for a beer to sit and wait (and use their wifi).
Today was the day we were meeting friends we met last year, Zita and Edith, and we were excited, but also a little apprehensive… would they expect us to bring oodles of gifts? would they have brought half their family with them too, expecting the same thing? We took a taxi back to the Sunbird for lunch and to get prepared for the big rendezvous. Lunch was a little late and the phone was going constantly with messages from the girls letting us know they were already at the sports club waiting for us… we couldn’t eat fast enough.

Sports Club!

We nervously picked our way through the bush and past the church to appear at the side of the sports club and before we were anywhere near the patio Edith came running at us like a charging bull and nearly bowled me over… closely followed by Zita and before long we were both squashed in a group hug. As the arms disentangled and we all stood back to look at each other, Zita with her new long braided hair and Edith in the same familiar denim skirt and football shirt, it was declared in unison with huge grins “You’re so fat!, Look at you! What have you been eating?”
We had to laugh, we understood that in Africa to be called fat is a compliment on account of being rich enough to eat lots of food – but it’s still hard to not be slightly offended! We laughed along and hugged again, after which came the second round with Edith holding my face and repeating… “look at your face and neck, it’s so huge!” – yeah thanks Edith. Enough now.

Falls Garden Toilets

The Blue Arrows (Air force football club) were playing another Livingstone team… a local Derby, so the place was packed with people which was a great atmosphere and after the clouds and wind of the last two days, it was even nicer to have the sun shining on the sandy pitch.
We talked, we laughed, we drank and we met plenty of people. Then Mulenga (Zita’s boss also working for the Air Force) turned up with a crate of duty free beers for us and we were able to give him the two pairs of shoes he ordered from us. To our utter amazement, the beers were stashed in the sports club’s fridge and we were able to drink them on site! Not in England.
Despite the sports club having had a refurb, with a new bar out front and brightly painted pillars, somehow they didn’t feel it necessary to revamp the toilets, in fact, they considered them unworthy of toilet doors and so we had to go two by two to have someone guard the corridor from intruders. Time to move on to the Falls Garden bar with our friend Anastacia behind the bar… the music was put on and a fire lit in a mobile crate – Zita’s Uncle turned up and we talked a lot about global travel, Africa and the differences in culture. A switched on guy – he told us Zita was back at school and trying for her exams again, hopefully this time her Uncle will help her to get out of the situation she is in and better herself… something so hard for Zambians.

Tracey and Edith

24 hours of travel

After a long and busy day, Tracey and I, and our 6 bags of luggage, were finally loaded into the car and ready for the off. Being a Friday night at the end of school term, the M25 was of course a car park for most of the journey, but after an agonisingly slow 90 minutes, we pulled up the departures ramp at Heathrow’s terminal 5 – grinning like Cheshire cats.
Once our rucksacks were through the oversize counter and the donation cases were safely checked in, we headed straight to the lounges like a couple of clumsy kids.
The flight was amazing and the only complaint I would have is that we had seats on the wrong side of the plane… sunrise comes through the left hand side windows on arrival, not the right. However the second flight window seats did net us some cracking views of Victoria falls and the mighty Zambezi river as we came in to land.
The timing of our VISA approval was perfect and no longer had the stamp gone in, when the airport power went out…. we were through…. without a working baggage belt though our luggage took a little longer and was quite literally thrown by hand through the wall and into the baggage hall. Gotta love the Africans… thankfully anything of any value was safely in our cabin baggage.
Tired and hanging we made it to the Sunbird in Livingstone for about 2pm and were told the current occupants of our room were yet to move out, so we dumped our luggage in the dorm room of some other volunteers and headed into town for beer and supplies to kill some time.
Sadly we narrowly missed the phone shop opening times and so were forced to use the kubu café wifi to let everyone know we had arrived safe and well, albeit drained and a bit smelly.
After a dinner of Nshima and beef, beans, potatoes and coleslaw with salad – we crashed at 8pm.

the surprise was on me!

For weeks now I have been holding a secret for Tracey.. a friend who deserves more than anyone else I know, to be rewarded in life for her genuine kindness and continuous thought for others… so I traded in my Avios airmiles for an upgrade on the first leg of the outbound flight to World Traveller Plus… nothing special some gold carders might say, but to Tracey and I it would mean slightly wider seats, nicer food and more importantly, extra baggage allowance. Today was the day I would finally get to reveal it to her and see her excited face.

With 24 hours to go, and check-in open, I logged on to print our boarding cards having chosen our seats in row 35 six days ago. To my utter amazement, and for the first time ever, BA had kindly chosen this particular trip to upgrade us to Club World!!!!! Flatbed seats, lounge access and a half decent wine-list, my jaw dropped to the floor as I read the seat numbers 21K and 21J – I checked and checked again, I frantically printed the boarding cards as quickly as I could in the belief that if it were a mistake, somehow it would not be possible to reverse once the boarding cards were printed.

We were off and we were going in style! And if excitement levels allow it, we might actually arrive having had some sleep this time.

Packing and new laptop set up causing some severe stress!

You pay over a thousand pounds for a snazzy new Dell, complete with a permanent Office licence to ensure ability to use it when offline, only to discover that Outlook is no longer deemed part of Microsoft's Office suite and so you must either pay another $230 or use the inbuilt "Mail" application .... which has only half the features and way too much blue for my liking..... and who the hell is Cortana? doesn't she ever shut up? Getting a little frustrated but hey ho... only 3 days to go!

Packing is also becoming a bit of a challenge, everyone has been so generous with their donations that we are struggling to stick to the luggage weight allowance - despite having 4 cases of 23kgs between us as well as carry on cases. At this point it looks like I shall be wearing every single item of clothing I am taking and have my camera gear all hanging round my neck!