Sasha Kasthuriarachchi

13:34 on August 17th 2011

Post | From Spectators to Spect-actors: Training AIDS Action Clubs in Theatre for Development

Since May one of the things that has been keeping me really busy is training our AIDS Action Clubs in new Theatre for Development skills. The results of the SWOT analysis, that we conducted earlier this year, showed that new skills in Theatre for Development were high on the list of priorities for AIDS Action Clubs, and so we knew that this was something that we definitely wanted to address out in the field in Zambia and also through the use of volunteers through the Engage project. I studied drama at university and so I was in the perfect position to develop and deliver a training package for our AIDS Action Clubs so that we could see how well the training would work in practice and also iron out any problems before volunteers started to come out to help us in this area.

Having spent a great deal of time out in the field with our community groups and watching a range of theatre for development performances I was already aware of the areas that our clubs had been trained in by our partner organisation SAPEP. This included, stage management and acting skills, script writing, facilitation skills and also aspects of peer education and community mobilisation. Having watched several theatre for development plays from our clubs, I noticed that they are predominantly didactic in nature – they present a difficult or problematic situation to the audience, for example, a husband stigmatising his brother in law for having HIV, and then also present a solution either through a character of a counsellor or adviser who provides vital information to the other characters that makes them change their behaviour.

The MARS Theatre Group in action at an event sponsored by World Vision

This is a really effective means of disseminating vital healthcare messages to the audience – especially in extremely rural areas where access to radio and television is limited. Clubs also use many different community mobilisation techniques that work to attract audiences to their performances – these range from drumming and dancing to singing and they help to attract people from miles around. When I first came to Zambia and watched a MARS Theatre group performance I was amazed to find a field that had previously been empty ten minutes before, suddenly heaving with hundreds of people who had been attracted by the group’s drumming and singing!

The Training

So what was my training going to involve? I decided to develop a training package for our community groups that focused on two main areas:

1) Games Training

2) Forum Theatre

Just so that I don’t confuse everyone with drama-style jargon (no air kissing involved, I promise), I’ll just offer a little explanation of each area. The first involves showing how games and icebreakers could be used to mobilise communities and attract audiences as well as build skills such as teamwork, cooperation, listening and communication within the AIDS Action Clubs. In my experience of using drama with youth and community groups, I have found games a really useful tool to discuss difficult issues such as peer pressure, bullying and relationships. During the SWOT analysis, many clubs said that teamwork and cooperation were problematic issues for them and so I thought training around this area would be particularly useful.

The second area is Forum theatre, which is a participatory form of theatre that enables the audience watching a performance to actually get involved. Instead of just passively watching a performance and being provided with the answer to a community problem, spectators can get up and try and solve the problems that they see on stage, by acting out different solutions themselves. In this way, Forum theatre creates a dialogue between the audience and the actors: they are challenged to question what they see before them and get involved! I’ve used Forum Theatre in schools, prisons, with people who have been going through rehabilitation for class A drug abuse and with young women around sexual health issues and in all these cases I have found it to be a fantastic tool. Essentially it enables people to think critically about an issue and empowers and challenges them to try and solve the problems that they face.

Community members from Kayuni zone involved in a forum theatre session

A typical forum theatre play shows a main character who is confronted by a challenging or problematic situation represented by another character or characters. For example, it could be a woman who decides to go for voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) for HIV, but when she tells her partner that she wants to go, he reacts badly, at first trying to dissuade her and eventually threatening to leave her if she goes ahead with it. This initial play always ends badly for the main character without a solution to the problem but the difficulties that the main character experiences can nevertheless be overcome. After the sketch has been played through once, the person facilitating the forum theatre session explains that the play will be repeated and then invites spectators to stop the action and replace the main character and try out different strategies that help them to solve the problem they are facing. In this way, spectators are transformed into ‘spect-actors’ and the overall purpose of forum theatre is revealed: it presents a problem and then opens the floor to the audience to find solutions.

Oliver translating the rules of forum theatre in a session in Kayola zone

Importantly, in forum theatre the main character is not simply a victim – they are oppressed by a certain situation but they can fight back. (This is the most succinct way I’ve been able to explain forum theatre, mostly with the help of a UNESCO and CCIVS toolkit, so thanks guys! You can read more about that toolkit below….)

The Power of Theatre

Theatre is a great way to discuss issues especially around HIV/AIDS and sex and relationships as it creates a distance around sensitive issues and means that they can be explored in an indirect way, for instance, by looking at the motivations behind a particular character’s actions. As one group explained to me, drama enables them to raise awareness about problems such as child abuse within the community, without people feeling as though they are being accused of a crime. Forum theatre in particular has already been used to teach people about HIV/AIDS issues: UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) and CCIVS (Co-ordinating Committee for International Voluntary Service) developed an amazing toolkit called Act, Learn and Teach: Theatre, HIV and AIDS Toolkit for Youth in Africa which teaches people how to use forum theatre in the context of HIV/AIDS education. I’m not about reinventing the wheel and the information that I gained from this toolkit was really valuable, as I hadn’t had experience of delivering training on forum theatre in relation to HIV/AIDS before. It also increased my confidence, as I knew that I was definitely going along the right lines in terms of the training I was developing for the AIDS Action Clubs.

A Few Challenges…

Creating and delivering the training did however present me with a number of challenges. I initially developed three days worth of training – with each day focusing on a different element. Our monthly meeting with SAPEP staff at the end of April (where I was told I would be delivering training the following week – panic stations!!!) soon put a stop to that – apparently three days of training was never going to work. As Kenneth, our project officer for Mazabuka explained to me: ‘People can take time out for one day’s worth of training, but asking people to come back for three days means they can’t do anything else like focus on their farming, or take care of their families ”. So I quickly scrapped that plan! Eventually, I came up with about 3-4 hours worth of training (including time to translate) but I knew that getting through the whole thing would probably be difficult as it would require communities to turn up on time (which is just never going to happen) and so I had probably put in more activities than I actually needed. I found that going through my training plan with the officers from Monze and Mazabuka made things a bit easier in terms of translation – trying to explain activities like human knot (a team game) and concepts like forum theatre in another language is difficult especially if you’re not familiar with it either!

Human Knot in action

An Eye Opening First Few Sessions

My first training session in Mazabuka with the clubs in Ngwezi ‘B’ zone was a real eye opener and helped me hone my training plan for the remainder of the sessions that I delivered. Ideally, when running a drama training session like this, you want everyone to be involved so that the session is active and no one can get bored or go to sleep in a corner. For this to work, I find that a good number of people in a session is around 10-15. At Ngwezi ‘B’, 40 people attended my session! What could I do? To overcome the problem I decided to ask for ten different volunteers for each game, but this proved to be pretty tiring for everyone involved and also meant that the session took longer as time was spent asking for volunteers, then making some people get up and then getting others to sit down…I soon noticed how quickly people’s attention started to wane!

When people start to get bored some ridiculous, energetic icebreakers usually wake them up!

Explaining how forum theatre worked was also really difficult – whilst the explanation I had written down in my session plan could be translated, the concept was still quite complicated and difficult for most people to understand.

Forum Theatre has rules for the audience...

...and rules for the facilitator.

All our AIDS Action Clubs are well versed in play creation and so when I asked them to create a short sketch showing a community issue that we could then use in a forum theatre session, they created a play showing the problem and the solution. It was at these points that I was especially glad to have Kenneth or Oliver from SAPEP on board! Kenneth suggested that we ask the groups to create ‘a sketch that shows a problem, in the style of a one-minute play’. All the groups were used to doing one-minute plays illustrating an issue and so straightaway they knew what he meant! (I eventually started using volunteers from the audience as models to show how forum theatre works!)

Explaining how forum theatre works using human props. And no, I haven't just attacked someone.

Another image of me explaining forum theatre somewhere else, just to prove that the person in the other photo wasn't injured.

Another challenge in my first session and even later on was making sure that the groups understood that in a forum theatre session, only the main character (the person being oppressed by a particular situation) can be replaced. So sometimes, we had people stopping the action to get involved, and then suddenly inventing the character of a counsellor who gives advice or even replacing one of the antagonists in the play and then being ‘understanding’ and ‘nice’! We really had to emphasise the importance of only ever replacing the main character as it should be up to that person to change their situation, otherwise they have to rely on someone else to change their behaviour and this is not something they can control, especially if the situation happens in real life.

I also learnt how to adapt my sessions to working in a ‘limited resource environment’: I’d prepared flip chart sheets with the aims and objectives for each session written on them as well as rules for forum theatre. However, on arrival in some of the zones, I didn’t even have a wall to stick my flipchart paper up on!

The training in Tusole Zone in Monze was in a field.

Oliver getting creative!

So I usually had to make use of the nearest tree…and then the wind would rip them off and carried them away.

Before...

After.

There was still enough space to write ground rules and expectations.

Eventually, I started making my sheets more durable by sticking layers of sellotape onto them, which stopped me from having to rewrite them every week.

I’m Learning All The Time!

Despite the challenges, delivering training in the communities was an amazing experience – I noticed that the games and icebreakers were really popular with everyone and during the evaluation at the end of each session there was always a list of everyone’s favourite games. In their evaluation comments, many people said that they had not only enjoyed the games because they were fun but because they also taught a range of skills like leadership and communication and are also a useful way of keeping the audience entertained!

No Rule, a game focusing on issues of power and control and gender issues was particularly popular as it really made people think about the issue of gender violence, which is a big problem amongst our communities. In the game, the person established as a ‘leader’ is constantly changing the rules and the people participating eventually feel out of control and powerless and therefore are quite frustrated and angry by the end!

Oliver found playing the leader in No Rule hilarious!

I used this game to highlight how constantly changing the rules in a situation such as a relationship is a tactic for maintaining control and for a person who is a victim of domestic violence, it can also be terrifying as they never know what will make their partner angry and lash out next.

Oliver and Kenneth were pretty snap-happy during the training sessions (Kenneth in fact calls himself ‘The Snapper’, is known to take hundreds of photos in one day, and then wonders why the batteries in your camera run down). So, I thought now would be the perfect point to include a collage of photos from the training sessions.

My experience training the AIDS Action Clubs also really helped to increase my awareness of the complex and different issues that communities are facing. Common topics that were suggested as ideas for forum theatre plays included: a man refusing to go for VCT with his wife and then stealing her ART medication on her return from the clinic, a wife refusing to have sex with her irresponsible husband and so he makes the decision to abuse their only daughter instead, countless stories of families abusing orphans they have taken under their wing, and girl children wanting so desperately to go to school that they become involved in sexual activity with older men so that they can gain financial support to cover their school fees.

Whilst hearing these stories is upsetting, I know it is the reality in many of the communities we work with and I think that if using techniques such as forum theatre can bring about discussion around some of these issues, and show people how to overcome such problems, then that can only be a positive thing.

Between May-August, I have trained 49 clubs, and 232 people in Theatre for Development. All the clubs came up with action points at the end of each session focusing on where they would be using the skills they’ve learnt and so I am hoping to see the games and forum theatre in action when I make my monitoring visits to the clubs. It has been a really rewarding experience and I am so glad that I got the chance to do it as part of my project during my Vodafone year.

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Posted in Post

22:34 on July 27th 2011

Post | Chisila Community School Receives a Special Delivery, All Systems Go On Teacher Training and Some Fantastic Fundraising!

I can’t believe I am now almost at the end of my Vodafone World of Difference Year – there is literally only just over a month to go till the end of my placement and it feels like it has gone so fast.

It’s also been a while (two months!) since I last blogged, so there is an awful lot to tell you, mostly in relation to our Schools of Good Hope project. This blog promises to be (yet another) long one…

A Special Delivery for Chisila Community School

June began with an exciting donation from Chorlton High School to Chisila Community School. This was a big delivery of presents: over 100 personalised gift boxes for each child at Chisila. In December last year, Chorlton High School pupils had worked extremely hard and really gone the extra mile to collect a range of items for each gift box, which included basic hygiene products, toys, games, stationary and books. Each pupil had decorated their box, written a letter to the child it was going to and some had even created hand painted T-Shirts for some of the pupils in their partner school! It really was an amazing effort, and when the shipping company picked the boxes up at the end of January, we knew that the genorosity of the pupils at Chorlton High School was going to have a huge impact on the children and community of Chisila.

Some of the boxes from Chorlton High School

A letter to a pupil at Chisila from a pupil at Chorlton High School

So, I hear you wonder, why were Christmas presents arriving in June? Well, if there’s anything I’ve learnt during my Vodafone placement is that there just isn’t a need for speed in Zambia. Delays at the port (which involved our shipping company having to write letters back and forth to get the goods released – as if things couldn’t get any slower, the level of bureaucracy needed snail mail) meant that we weren’t able to pick up the boxes till the second week of May. By that time, the boxes had taken around four months to arrive – in true ‘Africa time’ style. We decided though, that since we had waited this long, we might as well make a huge event out of the donation and make sure that everyone who was anyone should know about the impressive changes that have been happening at the school.

The date for the event was set as June 3^rd and we got busy organising the boxes and making sure that each child on Chisila’s register had one and that no pupils had been left out. As we were going through them we were again amazed at the amount of effort that had gone in to creating each one – there was a box with a complete football kit, accompanied by a photograph of the previous owner playing football, toys and books that looked brand new, and a huge range of sweets, soap, pens and pencils!

The contents of one of the boxes

Chorlton pupils had managed to create a gift box for each of the 97 pupils who had been at Chisila last Autumn but luckily for us they had collected so many items that it meant there were a few extras: 53 extra gift boxes infact. This was brilliant as the school had already enrolled 12 new pupils since last year (something whch Chisila community members have attributed to the partnership programme), and so we were able to give each of them a box as well. In truth there were so many extra boxes that we decided to divide up their contents into books, stationary, and toys and donate a small box containing all of these things to the other schools involved in the Schools of Good Hope programme so that they could also benefit from Chorlton High School’s generosity. We also made sure that Chisila School itself got box of useful things as a gift: this contained an atlas, calculator and stationary for the teachers at Chisila to use during lessons as well as a Manchester United flag to decorate the classroom!

The teachers at Chisila receiving the Manchester United Flag

On the day of the event Chisila community turned out in huge numbers and I was excited to see that they had even made a banner celebrating their partnership with Chorlton High School. We had also taken the time to invite a few important diginitaries to the event: this was not only to show off the achievements the school has made over the course of the year and the success of the partnership, but to also to garner more support for the school from important community members and local government. It was therefore great to see village headmen and elders at the event, as well as the District Commissioner and a representative for the District Education Board Secretary from the Ministry of Education. Importantly, if Chisila community school is known to and recognised by the Ministry of Education they will be a lot more likely to receive help, funding and support in the future, which will be great as they continue to expand.

The banner created by Chisila Community School

The day started with A LOT of speeches (again, something else I have learnt about Zambia is people love speaking in public…for hours) and although this went on for what felt like forever, every speaker said very encouraging things about the school and recognised the huge effort that the community had made. I was most touched by some of the testimonies made by the women from the community: “This is where grandmother’s work for their children so that they can say: “Our grandmother’s built that school.””

Community members giving testimonies through song and dance

The speeches were followed by a quick tour of the new school buildings, which were almost near completion. The District Commissioner was so impressed by what the community had done themselves that she said that as soon as the building was ready for use, the Ministry of Education would supply the building with electricity, making it one of the only community schools in the area of St Mary’s to have an electricity supply.

The Chisila Community School building on the day of the tour

The District Commissioner being given a tour of the new Chisila school buildings

The most recent picture of Chisila Community School. Classes are now taking place in the new school building.

Once the tour was complete, it was time to give out the gift boxes – the part that the children and I had been waiting for! It was really incredible to see the smiles on the children’s faces as each one came up and received his/her gift boxes. There were so many great photos on the day, I thought I’d just insert as many as possible into a little photo collage below!

One of the things I noticed the most was how each child was really protective over their box, as though they were afraid it would be taken away from them. Usually when I see children opening presents they are so excited to tear off the wrapping paper, or the lid and see what’s inside. In contrast, the pupils at Chisila opened the boxes really carefully, took out each item slowly and then ever so quickly put everything away. Some even sat with their arms wrapped around their boxes. Seeing this made me a bit sad, but I was also glad that through Chorlton’s hard work, each child at Chisila would now at least have some toys, games and other things of their own.

Our Teacher Training Makes its Mark

Leading on from one of my previous blogs back in April, our teacher-training programme is now up and running and we are already starting to see some incredible results! As I’ve said previously, the initial aim of the Schools of Good Hope programme when we set it up in September 2010 was to improve the resources at Zambian community schools through a UK-Zambian schools linking programme. However, during the course of the year it quickly became clear that we actually need to improve all the schools that we work with on two fronts: by training teachers and improving resources. Teachers are essentially the best resource that the pupils attending community schools have and by providing these untrained teachers with a crash course in basic teaching strategies, we hope to furnish them with new skills and approaches which will help them to improve their classroom practice, thereby becoming more effective educators who are better equipped to provide the best possible start for the children in their communities. PEPAIDS aims to make sustainable changes in the communities that we work with and by capacity building teachers and hopefully arming them with the skills to positively impact the quality of basic education in these communities, the Schools of Good Hope programme hopes to make long lasting improvements.

Vincent Heselwood, who has been volunteering for PEPAIDS for the last year, developed a syllabus of teacher training for all our community school teachers that is currently in the process of being piloted. Excitingly, the syllabus that Vincent developed has been approved by the Zambian Ministry of Education: they were particularly pleased with the fact that the syllabus is also culturally appropriate to Zambia as it uses examples that people are familiar with, especially in rural settings. For instance, to explain the need and importance of developing lesson plans, Vincent used an example of moving goats from one place to another, i.e. they need to plan where to take them, the method by which they should travel and how to check that they’ve arrived. This example is strikingly different to the examples that are usually used when training teachers in the UK e.g. comparing lesson planning to a three-course meal.

Teaching lesson planning using an analogy about goats!

We’ve also stuck with our plan to train community members in each area so that each school has a number of ‘back up’ teachers just incase the currently in role teachers decide to move on to new pastures. We will be focussing on training community members that have qualifications equivalent to Grade 9 or above as this is what has been recommended by the Ministry of Education in their operational guidelines for community schools.

So far, Vincent has delivered training on lesson planning, modelling (how to communicate different concepts to pupils), learning styles and attention spans, games and activities training, classroom management and behaviour management. (Our realisation that we needed to address the issue of how to manage bad behaviour immediately became clear in the initial teacher assessments, when one teacher mentioned that he ‘whips’ his pupils.) Vincent has also tried to emphasise the importance of making lessons exciting and through the training we’ve tried to practice what we preach – using dynamic techniques, games and other activities so that the teachers can see the methodology in practice during their own learning. So during the session, Vincent has been teaching teachers how to model modelling in the classroom…ah, the mind boggles.

Some dynamic teaching in action!

All hands up!

The teachers demonstrating modelling

Already, we’ve seen some remarkable results from the training, clearly showing that teachers are really putting their learning into practice in the classroom:

- Teachers are now using the Zambian Basic Education Syllabus for Grade 1 – 7 for the first time

- All the teachers, who had never before planned lessons, are now using weekly forecasts, which helps them to plan in advance the subject being taught, the objective of the lesson, and the grade it is appropriate for.

- Corporal punishment has been abandoned in all schools and teachers are now using different behaviour management strategies. (A lot of teachers found the idea of making a child do pointless tasks as a form of punishment absolutely hilarious!)

- Many of the teachers are now developing their own classroom resources and teaching aids: for instance, Maurice Maingaila from Chisila Community school is now using sticks and bottle tops as counting aids in maths lessons.

- Word of mouth recommendations have resulted in teachers from other nearby community schools, who are not currently part of the project, attending our training sessions.

Vincent explaining how to use a weekly forecast to plan lessons at Mujika West Community School

Vincent giving the teaching and learning folder to the teachers at Chisila to help them implement their training

The teacher training also launched our latest piece of ‘technology’ to be used in community schools – a very basic version of a white board. Many of our community schools lack blackboards and so to overcome the problem in the interim period, Vincent has created our own portable, fold up white board – made out of a piece of flipchart paper covered in thick strips of sellotape! It’s been a real hit with all the teachers taking part in the training, and now requests are coming in from other schools in the surrounding areas, asking for their very own fold-away white board. Take that Dragon’s Den!

PEPAIDS patented fold away whiteboard in action!

The impact and positive effects of the whole Schools of Good Hope programme over the course of one year has really made us realise the potential of this project to make a massive difference. As a result, we’ve decided that one of the things we’re going to apply for funding for is to to extend the project to a further five schools in the Mazabuka and Monze districts. So, since April I’ve been getting a lot of practice in proposal writing and budgeting and if I’m honest, it’s been a huge learning curve for me. It sounds silly, but a few months ago I hadn’t even heard about a Gantt chart but now my vocabulary is all about ‘project delivery’, ‘outputs’, ‘outcomes’, ‘aims’ and ‘objectives’. Proposal writing is a lot of work, but if I can get funding to continue the work that I have been doing over the past year, that would be fantastic for the charity.

Some Fantastic Fundraising!

Our Schools of Good Hope programme just wouldn’t be the same without the participation of our UK link schools, as well as UK schools who have fundraised for the programme generally over the course of the year. As it’s the end of the academic year, we decided to total up the amount of money that has been fundraised for this project by all six UK schools and it has come to a whopping total of £1825! This doesn’t even include the value of the donation from Chorlton High School (worth approximately £900) as well as the countless other material donations of shoes, footballs and stationary. As if it couldn’t get any better, I was recently contacted by Lucy Tasker from Abraham Moss High School, who explained that they were changing their old uniform in the next academic year, so would I be able to take all the old uniforms? Of course I would! We decided that the smallest uniforms could go to the children at Mujika, whilst the others could be sold to generate an income that goes directly to the Schools of Good Hope programme. Meanwhile, Hajra, a student from Abraham Moss, was doing a work experience placement at Cheetwood Community Primary School and decided to do a presentation on PEPAIDS to the staff and students at the school during her placement. Everyone was so impressed with her presentation that the school decided to donate all of their old school uniforms as well! We are now going to use all the fundraising to buy teacher toolkits and classroom starter packs for all the community schools, so they are equipped with all the right resources. We’re also in the process of working with a local organisation in Mazabuka that trains street children in carpentary skills to see if we can buy desks and chairs for some of the schools. As you can see, the impact of the UK schools involved in our programme has been tremendous so I’d really like to say a huge thanks to all the staff and pupils at:

Suckley Primary School in Worcester

Chorlton High School, Manchester

Abraham Moss High School, Manchester

Davyhulme Primary School, Manchester

Cheetwood Community Primary School, Manchester

Parrswood School, Manchester

St Philip Howard Catholic Sports College, Glossop

Looking back at the project over the last year, I am really proud of the achievements that we have made in a short space of time. Fingers crossed we’ll get the funding to continue doing even more!

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Tags: AIDS, AIDS Action Clubs, AIDS epidemic, AIDS orphans, community work, development work, income generation projects, Matthew Oldfield, peer education, Peer Education Programme Against AIDS, PEPAIDS, poverty alleviation, Sasha Kasthuriarachchi, SWOT analysis, theatre for development, vodafone world of difference, world of difference, Zambia. HIV
Posted in Post

17:08 on May 20th 2011

Post | Life Lessons

Life in Zambia is different, can be difficult and sometimes I have had to find this out the hard way. When I was making my preparations to go back to the UK at the beginning of March, I took a few precautions to try and make the place I am staying in secure – I asked my neighbour to look out for the house, and I locked everything up, even buying extra padlocks for doors I thought needed to be made more secure. I didn’t have anyone to stay in the house while I was away but I assumed it would be okay – I had spent a week in Livingstone on holiday over the Christmas and New Year period and everything had been fine. It’s fair to say now, that my assumption was wrong. When I returned I discovered I had been robbed. I think all my feelings became magnified due to tiredness – I had stepped off a ten hour flight and then met with some medical volunteers, made the two hour journey back to Mazabuka, sorted the volunteers accommodation out and then only returned to my house – and so the discovery of the robbery made me a bit fraught. My first hint was that something wasn’t quite right was when I found some clothes on the ground outside the house. For a second I thought, ‘Did I leave some clothes out to dry and they flew off the line?’ but my instinct told me that wasn’t the case. When I got in the house I found that pretty much everything of value had been taken, a rather amazing feat actually when you think about the size and weight of some of the things that had been stolen which included the fridge, a double mattress and a large chair.

I was lucky on that day to have Wilson and Bernadette from SAPEP with me. They were absolute legends and provided the level of support that you need when you have a bit of a crisis – Wilson contacted other members of the SAPEP team and informed them as to what had happened, whilst Bernadette contacted a friend who also happens to be a policeman and asked him and his colleague to come over to the house. Wilson also suggested then I start making a list of everything that had been taken as the police would want it – a really helpful suggestion as it helped us to work out what exactly was missing.

The list in the end included cutlery, a TV, bedsheets, sofa cushions, a game of South African Monopoly that I had bought in Livingstone (and felt weird playing especially since all the stations were now airports and the prices were in Rand), toaster, kettle, microwave clothes and a fan (that I am really missing right about now).

The new Scrabble that we bought back with us to Zambia made up for the loss of the Monopoly...

Aside from those things, what really struck me was things that had been taken that wouldn’t be considered of value back home – rice, pasta, olive oil, a jar of marmalade. It made me think that whilst robbery happens due to opportunism, it can often be a result of poverty and the resulting desperation: I don’t think you often hear of burglars in the UK stealing food. In Zambia, where most people live on less than $1.25 per day, food is a commodity of great value.

I was extremely lucky in the fact that most of the items that had been taken didn’t actually belong to me, they belonged to the landlord from whom I had rented the house and so in the grand scheme of things, I actually came off very lightly. I had taken most of my electrical items – including my laptop, speakers, phone charger, video camera – back to the UK with me, something which I am now extremely glad about. The robbers clearly knew they had plenty of time and had been through every part of the house – they had even smashed through some of the internal doors I had locked.

They hadn’t gone through it with a fine toothed comb though – I had hidden the SAPEP laptop in a leverarch binder before I had left, and I was so glad to discover that they hadn’t found it! Over the following weeks, I had do some uncomfortable wrangling with the landlord who insisted that I pay for everything to be replaced – something which I couldn’t afford and that I was also unwilling to do. I am paying a higher rent already because the house is ‘furnished’ and my landlord didn’t consider dropping the rent now that the place is…decidedly unfurnished. There was a bit of back and forth between us where he suggested I was irresponsible for not having anyone in the house and where I said that if this was a requirement it should have been in the contract. An uncomfortable situation all round! I was going to suffer without a fridge though and so I went around Mazabuka looking for the cheapest one I could find – eventually I discovered that a fridge would set me back £300. Eeek! Although my rent is slightly lower than what I would ordinarily be paying in the UK, cost of living in Zambia really isn’t that different, so shelling out on a fridge was really something I could do without. Luckily, Bernadette, who by this point was starting to look like some kind of angel to me, came to the rescue and said that she had a spare fridge that she would lend to me. I was overwhelmed by her generosity – Bernadette manages a family of four on her small salary and times for her are really tight so I couldn’t believe that she was willing to help me out in this way. So, four days after I got home, Bernadette and her friend Joseph drove the fridge up to my house and helped to get it into the kitchen. I could now buy cheese again – hooray!

Bernadette Kadimba aka The Angel of SAPEP

The new fridge with bonus Disney stickers

Having the experience of being robbed also means that you get to have some quite funny and some slightly frustrating experiences. In the weeks that followed my landlord asked me with increasing regularity about whether I had heard anything from the police. I hadn’t and I assumed that if they did discover any leads or apprehended a suspect, they would call me. One afternoon, my landlord visited and sprawling himself across the sofa that no longer had any cushions on it, he said “You know sometimes with the police, you have to bribe them. Give them a little…something”. Bribe? The police? I know that bribery and corruption are everywhere in Zambia – if you are driving a bit too fast and the police stop you they often say “Well you could pay a fine of 2,000000zmk or you could just give me 50,000zmk now….” but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to get into all that. I had already heard stories from colleagues about how they had once tried using bribes to get themselves a work permit quickly (for me the process took a frustrating 5 months) but the costs just spiralled out of control. Also, I am in Zambia on a work permit which I am pretty sure can be revoked for things likes trying to bribe the police! Can you imagine? That would put me and the charity I work for in a pretty sticky situation. So I politely said that no, I wouldn’t be doing that, and if he thought it was necessary, my landlord could by all means pay the police himself.

The cushion-less sofa now serves as a place to store random items...oh, and as a seat for my landlord!

My landlord also insisted that I get the police to give me the police report immediately as once this was written we could further the investigation. I called the police and explained the situation and someone said they would call me back. The ensuing conversation went a bit like this:

Policeman: ‘So I heard that you want the police report?’

Me: ‘Well my landlord wants it.’

Policeman: ‘Why does he want it?’

Me (feeling a bit stupid as I was talking to a policeman who probably knows how to do his job): ‘Erm…my landlord thinks that once we have the report, the stolen goods will be easier to trace.’

Policeman: ‘I see….’

[SILENCE]

Policeman: ‘Well, I can dictate the report for you, but it really needs to be typed. Can you type it up?’

Me: ‘What? Erm…’

In the end I had to say no as I wasn’t really that concerned about the police report and I also wasn’t about to do someone’s job for them. The reality in my situation is that none of the things taken from my house are probably ever going to be recovered. The robbery could have taken place during any point in the three weeks that I was away and it’s likely that it was all sold on immediately afterwards.

Getting back to work

I’ll freely admit that after all this happened I did lose my mojo a bit – I couldn’t sleep properly, waking up to every sound, and every morning I do go into the kitchen to make sure that the fridge is still there. I felt better after I had tidied up the house a bit – getting rid of the broken wood and glass, and putting up photos to make the place look a bit more like home again. What I knew would make me feel better was community work – you can’t not feel jolly when doing this and I started longing my next trip out in the field.

I didn’t have much time to sit around and be miserable though – the day after we arrived home I took the volunteers to their orientation meeting with SAPEP. Pri, Tulsi, Beth and Susan were a lovely bunch of medical students from The University of Nottingham and they were going to be with us on a medical elective placement for three weeks. They were great fun and Vincent and I got to know them really well during their stay – we even gave them dinner one night at our house (we still had our Shoprite pots and pans and the herbs and spices we brought from England, PHEW!). They enjoyed their work at Monze Mission Hospital and the visits out in the field on the motorbikes and made good use of their weekends in Zambia, even going to see Lake Kariba at one point. The volunteers were planning to climb Kilimanjaro top fundraise for PEPAIDS and I recently found out that they made it to the summit! Hooray! Their fundraising is going to make a real difference to our HIV/AIDS work on the ground here and they are already halfway to their target of £1200.

A week later, we had a planning meeting with Oliver, Kenneth and Nina from SAPEP, where we decided how best to use a donation of £1000 that we had been kindly given by an organisation in the UK. (By the way, if these pound signs and numbers looks weird on your screen it’s because my keyboard doesn’t actually have a pound sign and so I had to do some copying and pasting from Word.) We eventually decided that we would use the money to run a psychosocial camp for orphans and vulnerable children in August: it’s an opportunity for these children to relax, have time to play with other children and also talk to child counsellors so they can voice any problems they are experiencing. Hanging out with Oliver, Kenneth and Nina after three weeks away was great – they are some of the soundest people I have ever met and they never fail to make you smile.

Oliver - how could you not like this man? (Yes, those are my sunglasses)

I was also reminded of Zambians love for the old nshima when they visited: Nina had brought us quiche for lunch and when it was time for food Kenneth took a piece saying: ‘Ah, time for fork food. When are we going to have a real meal?’

A Special Delivery

Additionally, I’ve had some really amazing news since I’ve been back: the boxes from Chorlton High School finally arrived! Aubrey Kasonde from Send Zambia apologised for the delay – there had been a misunderstanding with the Zambian authorities that required a lot of letter writing back and forth. After my experience at the immigration offices when trying to get my work permit, I gained a good understanding of the huge levels of bureaucracy that sometimes effect things here and so I had already thought that some kind of delay would be inevitable. When we went to collect the boxes I was struck by the awesome amount of work that Chorlton High School students had done – there were 20 huge cardboard boxes full of presents for the children at Chisila. They had really outdone themselves!

Some of the boxes from Chorlton High School

Some of the boxes were filled with gifts for individual pupils, whilst others contained soft toys, and T-shirts decorated by Chorlton pupils. I think the community and school children at Chisila will be really overwhelmed by this donation and I am looking forward to meeting the community at the beginning of June. Wilson suggested that we make this meeting a really big event and invite people from the Ministry of Education so that they can see the amazing progress Chisila school is making. That way, the community can also put pressure on their local MPs and the Ministry of Education to support the school with funding and trained teachers.

One of the gift boxes from Chorlton pupils

And finally…some interesting pets

One of the things that has really brightened up my mood since I’ve been back has been the number of interesting pets that have come to live in or live outside my house. Early visitors were two frogs who decided to make their house in some clothes that the robbers had dropped outside during their smash and grab spree. We eventually put a bowl of water out for them and now they happily swim about in the water and curl up in the shirt during the hottest part of the day. (Yes, we didn’t feel as though we could take the roof from over their heads so to speak). The frogs have been named General Hammond and Teal’c after characters from Stargate SG-1 (yes, I am a sci-fi fan).

In absence of a photograph of Teal'c the frog, here is the original from Stargate SG-1

And this is General Hammond!

There’s also been the drunken flying beetle who crashes into the lounge window every night without fail and then has to be turned back on to its front so it can do exactly the same thing the very next night. Our most recent ‘pet’ (if you can call any of these creatures that) is a chameleon who has now been christened Attenborough. He started off by hanging on the kitchen blind and has now taken to mooching about everywhere in his slow, chameleon-like way. He had a near death experience recently when he was hit accidently by a flying slipper (I now make sure I walk around the house really carefully incase I find him underfoot) but he recovered well and seems happy.

Attenborough

All in all, even though my return to Zambia started off with a bad experience, it’s difficult not to look on the bright side. The people here are so kind and generous, even when they have very little, and I really enjoy the work that I do and the people and communities I get to work with. Even though I am 9 months into my project, I still feel so lucky to have been picked for this opportunity. Plus, you can’t beat your house being visited by a range of weird and wonderful creatures – something that just wouldn’t happen if I was in England.

So, I’m keeping my chin up and I’ll keep smiling!

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Tags: Africa, AIDS, AIDS Action Clubs, development work, HIV, Peer Education Programme Against AIDS, PEPAIDS, Sasha Kasthuriarachchi, vodafone, vodafone world of difference, world of difference, Zambia
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20:19 on May 18th 2011

Post | woduk Sasha’s World of Difference channel – 3rd phonecast

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15:05 on April 29th 2011

Photos | Ready…Steady…SWOT!

As you’ll know from November 2010 to early January 2011, I was very busy running a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis for PEPAIDS so that we could establish some key baseline data for some of the activities that are going on in the field. The main aim of this analysis was to establish the kinds of activities our AIDS Action Clubs are running with the communities, where UK volunteers skills and expertise are most needed and what challenges and issues our clubs face and how we can best assist them to overcome these.

This survey was also important because for the last two years our partner NGO, SAPEP, has had very little funding from other donors outside PEPAIDS and so they could not afford to visit all the clubs they had been working with. This was mainly a result of the global economic crisis and the fact that one major funder of HIV/AIDS programmes in Zambia – the Global Fund – ended up pulling out of the country in 2010. PEPAIDS has therefore been the sole funder of SAPEP for this period, and due to the lack of other sources of funding, some of the AIDS Action Clubs had not been worked with or visited for a period of two years. My year with the charity funded by the Vodafone World of Difference scheme presented us with an important opportunity to conduct a survey to find out the current status of our AIDS Action Clubs. How many of them had survived without continued support from SAPEP? Were their membership numbers decreasing or increasing? Were they all still running activities? These were all questions we wanted to find the answers to.

An AIDS Action Club discussing their strengths and weaknesses with Wilson during the SWOT Analysis in Ndeke zone

At this point Wilson realised he'd been caught getting a bit too comfortable...

I surveyed 69 out of 125 clubs across the districts of Mazabuka and Monze and it was a really exciting experience because for two and a half solid months I was in the field meeting and talking to communities. I also had to learn to be comfortable on the back of a motorbike and conduct the survey in all weathers – as the months progressed it became wetter and wetter, and more than once I had to conduct a meeting soaked from head to toe!

Much of my time in February was spent compiling the data and making correlations between the results, which were eventually compiled into a 55-page report (yes I did lose the will to live a little bit by the end). We have already started using the report to plan SAPEP and PEPAIDS’ future strategy, especially in relation to which areas we need to apply for funding for and what areas to prioritise in the field.

Planning the next two quarters of activities in the field based on the SWOT analysis results

I wanted to share a few of the most interesting results with you and in some cases explain what we will now be doing to respond to these needs in relation to the expansion of PEPAIDS’ volunteering scheme.

AIDS Action Club membership has increased and all our clubs are running activities

In terms of club membership, 38 out of the 69 clubs surveyed across Monze and Mazabuka reported that their membership numbers were increasing. This equates to 55% of the total number of clubs surveyed reporting an increase. The most popular reason given for increasing membership were the income generation activities (IGAs) that clubs had been encouraged to start in order to make their club activities sustainable: many clubs explained that outsiders were attracted to the evident benefits, skills and economic empowerment gained by club members through IGAs and therefore wanted to join. Livestock IGAs such as goat or chicken rearing were most frequently mentioned as responsible for increase in club membership as these programmes also enable empowerment and sustainable livelihood at an individual level.

Chicken and goat rearing are some of the most popular income generation activities

A chicken coop in Ngwezi 'B' zone

Vitally, through the SWOT analysis we discovered that not only is club membership increasing, but also many of our clubs are still running outreach activities regularly. The majority of clubs surveyed reported that they were delivering outreach programmes once per month, whilst others were running weekly and fortnightly programmes. Some clubs even indicated that they were doing outreach in the community more than once per week! Only one club out of the 69 that took part in the survey said that they were not running any outreach programmes.

Ndeke Women's Football Club. Sports activities usually happen during the dry season and provide an opportunity to sensitise communities to HIV/AIDS issues. (Photograph courtesy of Matthew Oldfield)

The fact that despite a two-year gap in support from SAPEP over half the clubs surveyed reported an increase in their membership figures and the majority of clubs are also delivering activities in the community really speaks to the strength and sustainability of our programme and the work that has been done on the ground. SAPEP’s work uses a ‘ladder of empowerment’ model where they capacity build communities and clubs on a grassroots level to combat HIV/AIDS and focus on making everything they do sustainable. Eventually, SAPEP aims to be able to leave some of the communities we work with so that they can move on to work in other areas. Due to the gap in funding that occurred, SAPEP had to leave certain communities earlier than it would have liked to but the SWOT showed that despite this many clubs continued to increase their membership and deliver activities.

Income Generation Activities Are The Name of the Game!

I’ve already mentioned that IGAs are a popular reason for people deciding to join our AIDS Action Clubs but through the survey we discovered that for many clubs, IGAs formed an essential ‘back bone’ to all the other services being delivered within the communities. The results of the survey clearly showed that many clubs are selling assets from IGAs to assist those who are sick or going through a bereavement or using a livestock pass on programme to give orphans a goat or chicken so they can support themselves. IGAs are therefore fundamental in enabling AIDS Action Clubs to provide care and support to the vulnerable groups that they have in their communities. Many clubs also cited that being able to generate an income also helps to alleviate poverty within the community and club members often identified that IGAs have clearly enabled many of them to improve their livelihoods, find individual empowerment, and sustain themselves and their families. Clubs have also found that having economic independence can reduce their dependency on donations and handouts and many clubs emphasised how activities that reduced and alleviated poverty would improve life for the younger generations in their families. Ultimately, the majority of our clubs are now looking to scale up their IGAs so that they can use the profits to run bigger projects in their communities.

Carrots and maize and many other fruits and vegetables are grown by the Ngwezi B club. The profits from selling this produce goes towards caring for people living with HIV/AIDS.

Running income generation programmes are, however, not without their difficulties. Many clubs stated that they lacked livestock management skills, which has resulted in the death of livestock due to largely preventable diseases. We quickly realised that this is quite a serious issue for AIDS Action Clubs and their communities because they not only losing a valuable source of income but it also impacts on other programmes that rely on the profit made through the IGAs, such as the delivery of care and support in the community.

To try and overcome these problems and capacity build our clubs in the area of livestock management skills I am now looking into recruiting volunteers who are studying agriculture and farming at university and see if they could come out on volunteering placements with PEPAIDS to support our clubs in the field. Some students on these courses are required to complete a placement abroad and I really think that PEPAIDS would be in a position to facilitate students’ elective placements in this area. I am also in the process of looking for assistance on a local level by liaising with the Zambian College of Agriculture in Monze and seeing if people studying or teaching agriculture and farming there would be willing to work with PEPAIDS to assist our programmes.

Prevention of HIV/AIDS is Still a Big Issue for Our Communities

After the introduction of anti retroviral treatment (ART) in 2004, the focus of the Zambian government and many donors quickly moved from HIV/AIDS prevention programmes to increasing and improving the distribution of ART and increasing communities access to it, especially in the most rural areas of the country. Whilst SAPEP understand the need for this, they still believe that prevention should remain a key focus in their work. For every single person that starts effective ART in Zambia, 6 new people become infected with the virus and so for us, preventing people from becoming infected with HIV and enabling them to make informed choices about their sexual health is of paramount importance.

Peer educator Pennias with two nurses at Ndeke clinic. The nurses teach HIV positive mothers how to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV.

But what would our AIDS Action Clubs say about this? Do they still see HIV prevention as a key aspect of their work in the communities? The results from the SWOT analysis showed us that HIV/AIDS prevention is indeed still a huge priority for our clubs. The most common activities that clubs delivered in their communities were to do with HIV/AIDS prevention: from sports outreach and theatre for development which raises awareness of the issues surrounding the disease to under-five and antenatal clinic outreaches through which people are encouraged to go for voluntary counselling and testing.

Infants being weighed an under-five clinic. Clubs usually do outreach sessions at clinics as they can reach a wide audience.

Furthermore, when we asked clubs how they decided which activities they would prioritise they indicated that the main motivation is the reduction of the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in their communities and education around the disease. Many clubs also want to ensure adherence to ART through their work: some clubs mentioned alcohol abuse as an issue in their communities, and as a result of this, adherence is a problem. The fact that clubs are primarily selecting activities aimed at fighting the spread of HIV/AIDS also indicates that there is still a ‘felt need’ in the communities for HIV prevention messages to be spread.

Vitally, a large proportion of our clubs mentioned the importance of stigma reduction in their work – through their prevention activities many more people are now willing to go for VCT and publicise their positive status. Stigma around HIV/AIDS, however, continues to be a problem and poses huge challenges to the work that the clubs are doing.

Some of the clubs explained in detail the kinds of opinions, myths and misconceptions that they face in the community which range from people believing that ‘if you go for VCT you will die’, to ‘everyone doing sensitisations [awareness raising about HIV/AIDS] are HIV positive’. Perhaps the most shocking statement I heard was when I was conducting the survey in Ngwezi ‘B’ zone in Mazabuka, where a club stated that there were still many negative attitudes towards HIV in their community and that a prevalent idea is that people shouldn’t avoid catching the disease because it ‘comes for people’.

Where do volunteers fit in?

I’ve already explained how volunteers can assist clubs to overcome challenges relating to livestock management, but how can they support the HIV/AIDS prevention work that our clubs are doing? One thing that AIDS Action Clubs have specifically asked for is training and capacity building in the area of sports and theatre for development, which are key areas of the prevention programme. For sports we are currently looking into recruiting volunteers who have recently achieved their coaching qualifications as well as university/college students studying sports science. However, I think that volunteers with a keen interest in sports or knowledge about a particular sport could also still visit Zambia and help to capacity build our clubs.

During a short trip back to the UK, I visited The University of Manchester and spoke to their drama and Applied Theatre students (undergraduates and postgraduates) about our new volunteering scheme in Theatre for Development and how UK volunteers could deliver training sessions to our clubs on new theatre techniques. The use of Applied Theatre in the field of sexual health and in a development context also seems to be a popular research area – it was recently the subject of a PhD student’s thesis at the University of Manchester between 2006-2009. Importantly, I think that the Theatre for Development work that is being delivered by our AIDS Action Clubs in Mazabuka and Monze would be a great candidate for research at university level and so since my return to Zambia at the end of March I have been busy sending out details of our Theatre for Development volunteering programme to universities teaching Applied Theatre both in the UK and worldwide. With a little help from Twitter I have also been able to link in with professional applied theatre practitioners working freelance or for well-established theatre companies and already I have had several enquiries from people asking how they can get involved in our volunteering scheme! The amazing power of social media! Ideally, we would also like to engage with existing Zambian theatre practitioners and luckily through a SAPEP colleague, I have been able to get in contact with John Kapesa who is a theatre critic for the Times of Zambia newspaper. John has kindly offered to link us with some groups in Monze and others based nationally, and so hopefully we will be able to get some training delivered through these contacts.

The MARS Theatre Group in action

In the meantime I am focussing on developing my own training in Theatre for Development, which I will be delivering to some of our AIDS Action Clubs between May and July. I am looking to deliver sessions on drama games and icebreakers, and on Augusto Boal’s methodology – particularly Image and Forum theatre. From my own experience of watching Theatre for Development performances from our AIDS Action Clubs, I really feel that these techniques will help to capacity build our theatre groups in the field, and will also work towards engaging and mobilising the communities that come to watch the plays.

I taught the Galaxy Theatre Group how to do Human Knot and I can't wait till I can run a proper training session with them!

The communities also asked for updates on HIV/AIDS from UK volunteers as they are keen to ensure that the information they give out to communities is up to date and accurate. Therefore, future volunteers on our Health volunteering scheme will hopefully deliver training to communities on topics such as ART and Preventing Mother to Child Transmission. Our latest batch of junior doctors from the University of Nottingham have written a really interesting report for us on Preventing Mother to Child Transmission which has given us a really valuable insight into the levels of knowledge on this subject in the communities and how SAPEP interventions enable communities to understand where to get tested and how to access treatment.

I’ve only written about a few of the results that came out of the SWOT analysis (and that has already made this blog come to almost 3000 words!). There were so many other interesting and useful results that will now shape the planning of our future work. We now have a far better picture of the activities going on in the field as well as the challenges and problems that our AIDS Action Clubs face. This research has also enabled us to establish some important baseline data, in terms of age, gender, frequency of outreach activities, reasons for absenteeism and membership figures. Crucially, the results have shown that the Engage project plan is going in the right direction: all clubs that took part in the survey were interested in volunteers capacity building them with a range of skills from sports to livestock management.

Working in the field whilst conducting the SWOT also showed me how well received SAPEP is in the community. Clubs and communities continually asserted how the skills and knowledge that SAPEP brought to them were absolutely invaluable – one club even went as far as to say that ‘SAPEP is our mother. Without them we wouldn’t be here’. Furthermore, I saw for myself how fantastic SAPEP staff are in the field, in terms of engaging with clubs, facilitating sessions and challenging opinions – I feel lucky and privileged to be able to work with them.

Oliver

Kenneth

And of course, Wilson, the Irish Princess

For me, the greatest thing about collecting this data is that we were able to find out the needs of our clubs and the communities they serve, first hand. Hopefully, we can now respond to these needs and do everything in our power to ensure they are met.

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17:09 on April 19th 2011

Photos | Eight months into our Schools of Good Hope Programme and Some Very Bald Legs…

I am now almost eight months into my Vodafone World of Difference year and I wanted to take some time out to reflect on the achievements made during the course of last year and this year on our Schools of Good Hope programme. As well as having three successfully established school linking programmes, we’ve had a variety of fundraising efforts for the programme from Christmas concerts to appeals for donated shoes. Two of our schools have created dedicated fundraising teams, whilst the other has also involved the pupils’ parents in the programme so that they can provide additional support to the school’s efforts. Schools of Good Hope has now been integrated into two school’s curriculums and I am really pleased to say that we now have two new UK schools interested in getting involved in the programme.

The Low Down with the Schools Fundraising Teams

Abraham Moss High School managed to raise £130 for Mujika School through their Christmas concert and are now linking with local primary schools to get them to donate unwanted shoes as well. After consultation with the school and the community of parents and teachers at Mujika, we decided that the money raised will go towards buying exercise books, teaching books and a blackboard for the school. Whilst I was back in the UK in March, I met with some of the pupils involved in the fundraising activities for Mujika School. Some of the pupils who are in Year 10 are learning about PEPAIDS as part of their citizenship GCSE which they will take next year. Vincent Heselwood, a qualified teacher and PEPAIDS volunteer, and I spoke to the pupils about the current activities at Mujika and some of the challenges they face so they could get a real picture of how Mujika School compared to their own school. We also had great fun making a short introductory video about the pupils at Abraham Moss to show the pupils at Mujika. As part of my visit I also collected some letters that the pupils had written to the children at Mujika School, which I will give to them on our next visit.

Abraham Moss Fundraising Team, with their teacher, Lucy Tasker in the centre

The pupils learning about Mujika School for their citizenship GCSE

All about Mujika West Community School!

Pupils at Cecilia’s School of Good Hope were also really lucky to receive letters from their partner school – Suckley Primary School in Worcester – and spent January and February writing their responses. The pupils really enjoyed hearing from the pupils from the UK and if all goes to plan, they are hoping for a visit from the teachers at Suckley School in the summer.

Cecilia's pupils were really pleased to receive their letters!

In my last blog I also discussed some of the developments happening at Chorlton High School where the pupils are now focussing on a new book donation scheme called ‘Drop Everything and Read’. I wanted to see how they were getting on, so in March I visited the school and had a meeting with some of the Charity Ambassadors. It was great to hear the reasons why they decided to get involved in the project and also the types of activities they were planning to raise more funds and donated items for Chisila Community School. To make sure that everyone gets to know about the fantastic work they are doing we made a short film with them about their role as Charity Ambassadors that we could show to the pupils at Chisila School and we also did an audio blog, which they really enjoyed! Some of the pupils responses really showed what they were getting out of the programme: for instance, Georgia, aged 15, said that her favourite thing about being a charity ambassador is: “Getting to see how what I am doing changes people’s lives – it’s really fulfilling to see that I am making someone’s life better. ” Another pupil, Daniel, aged 12, mentioned that receiving feedback from their fundraising and donations via photos and video also worked really well because he could straightaway see the impact of their efforts.

Some of Chorlton High School's Charity Ambassadors with the Rachel Hockey, the Library Resource Manager

Roooneeeeeeyyyyyyyyy!

Even though this year’s Schools of Good Hope scheme is considered a pilot involving three schools, we have already managed to expand the project to include two other schools that are involved in fundraising for PEPAIDS and the Schools of Good Hope programme. Parrswood School in Manchester is getting involved in our Rooney Raffle – where they are raffling off one of two signed Wayne Rooney England shirts for PEPAIDS. The pupils are aiming to raise £2000 for us, which would be fantastic! Chorlton High School have also agreed to raffle off the other Rooney Shirt for us and the pupils have planned a range of stalls where they can sell tickets and get pupils to donate their old football shirts starting from the 3rd of May after they return to school from the Easter break. The chance to win a Rooney Shirt is also going to be advertised in the Chorlton Connection magazine so that even the parents are aware of this fantastic chance to get their mitts on a shirt signed by Mr Rooney, with a certificate of authenticity and presented in a GLASS CASE (I mean, what more could you want?!). Tickets will be sold at the dance and music shows happening at Chorlton in the coming term as well and I can’t wait to see how much they raise!

Helen Allen, PEPAIDS Chair, with one of the Rooney shirts!

Waxing legs for Charity – no pain no gain!

Meanwhile, the latest school to get involved in our programme is St Philip Howard Catholic School in Glossop in Derbyshire. Vincent used to teach at this very school and the pupils have got busy organising a range of fundraising events that started in March. Quick off the mark was pupil Adam Coomber, who decided that he was going to get his legs waxed in front of the whole school to raise money for PEPAIDS and who had amazingly been sponsored £160 before the event actually happened at lunchtime on Friday the 18th of March. Vincent visited the school on the same day and spoke to four classes who are planning some fundraising activities and all of them were keen to raise as much money for us as possible. He then went to check out the leg waxing happening in the school hall and wound up having his legs waxed too as a steady stream of pupils paid £1/£2 to tear a strip off, and 10p to get in and watch! The school have arranged for fundraising activities to continue for the whole of Lent which includes a cake sale and a Smarties tube collection in each form (did you know that a Smarties tube filled with 20ps actually equates to £15?) as well as having a myriad of other ideas in the pipeline. All in all, I think St Philip Howard is doing a brilliant job!

In the absence of a photo of Vincent or Adam getting their legs waxed, I had to make do with this.

Progress in Zambia

Meanwhile in Zambia, the enrolment and attendance in all the schools involved in the programme has increased. The committees involved in the running of these schools have said that this is a direct result of the Schools of Good Hope programme as parents and community members now feel that the school is worth supporting and are therefore more likely to ensure that their children attend school. The school buildings are also gradually being developed – Chisila’s new building is at window level and is now just waiting for roofing, window and door frames whilst at Mujika School the building is complete and has been plastered. At Cecilia’s School of Good Hope, they have laid the foundations for the new school building and are just waiting to see if they can raise more money to continue their building project.

The gradual development of Cecilia's new school building

Capacity Building Our Schools Through Teacher Training

Even with all these successes there is still a lot of hard work to be done. One of the key aspects of this programme is that as well as supporting our Zambian community schools with donated resources and fundraising so they can buy books, stationary and other materials – which all our schools seriously lack – we want to make sure that we improve the quality of the education that the children receive. Our intention over the next few months is to attempt to provide basic training in UK teaching techniques to help capacity build existing teachers within community schools by building upon their present experience. Most teachers in community schools are untrained volunteers who do an amazing job in exceptional circumstances and with the bare minimum of resources. By providing these untrained teachers with a crash course in basic teaching strategies, we hope to furnish them with new skills and approaches which will help them to improve their classroom practice, thereby becoming more effective educators who are better equipped to provide the best possible start for the children in their communities. By capacity building teachers and hopefully arming them with the skills to positively impact the quality of basic education in these communities, the Schools of Good Hope programme hopes to make improvements that are sustainable.

Evidence teaching at Mujika School

To start this process off, Vincent visited all three Zambian schools and conducted class observations and a teaching needs assessment in February, the aim of which was to get a clearer general picture of teacher practice and pupil capability within each of the schools currently involved in the programme and to gain an understanding of how best any training offered could benefit the teachers and the schools as a whole. The three schools that are currently supported through the Schools of Good Hope programme are all extremely different from each other: there is a huge disparity between the facilities, training and experience of the staff at each school and so it would be impossible to expect positive results from a single uniform training approach. This was made extremely clear through the teaching assessments conducted by Vincent, which highlighted the different challenges each of the schools face. Mujika West Community School has a solid bricks and mortar structure, but that is where the resources come to an end – there are no desks for the pupils to sit at, the children lack exercise books and writing materials and the teacher uses a blackboard the size of an A4 piece of paper. The teachers at Mujika are untrained and the lessons lack any structure and focus making it difficult to see what actual learning is taking place on the part of the pupils.

Vincent interviewing Maurice from Chisila Community School as part of the needs assessment

The tiny blackboard at Mujika school

Conversely at Chisila Community School, pupils are currently being taught in a cramped and basic makeshift building, however the school has a blackboard and benches and the pupils have exercise books and a few writing materials. The teachers, although untrained, plan their lessons and follow the Zambian National Curriculum with help from a local government school, and although the teaching is very didactic certain subjects such as Maths and English are clearly being taught at the school. However the teaching methods hardly involve any pupil interaction, teamwork, competition or group work and are often very teacher focussed – that is using the ‘chalk and talk’ method.

Their classroom may be cramped, but that doesn't dampen the Chisila pupils enthusiasm for school!

The standard of teaching at Cecilia’s School of Good Hope was markedly different to the other two schools: this is the only school in the programme where all the teachers have a teaching certificate and have been formally trained and the result of this was clear in the pupils’ lessons some of which used visual aids, games and various questioning and group work techniques.

So how can PEPAIDS improve the teaching and learning at our community schools? Well, we believe that:

“Better Teachers = Better Learners = Better Education = Better Prospects”

Having a strong solid education in the community schools that we support undoubtedly improves the future prospects of the pupils: educated children are more likely to make their way into employment, avoid risky sexual behaviour and will be in a better position to take care of their parents in later life. In Zambia, education is a direct route out of poverty.

In May, Vincent will begin delivering basic teacher training to everyone teaching at Mujika West Community School and Chisila Community School. We have opened the training opportunity out to everyone in the community as we wanted to provide more opportunities for people to work in the schools, as there is always a danger that when a teacher is trained they will be likely to move on to better prospects. If we have a larger pool of teachers to choose from, then we can ensure that the learning of the pupils is not affected if people do decide to leave. The basic teacher training course will provide overall guidance and advice on the fundamentals of teacher training – from lesson structuring and planning, engagement and behaviour management techniques to monitoring. As well as all this, Vincent will also be running sessions on introductions to basic literacy with all three schools and workshops on classroom activities. Already 15 people have signed up to the teacher training sessions and we expect many more people to attend when the sessions begin in May.

Vincent running a lesson with some of the pupils at Chisila

We are also aiming to provide each teacher with a resource pack: a booklet of ideas for classroom activities with illustrations and step-by-step instructions on how to use each idea. This will be accompanied by a ‘bag of tricks’, which is a cheap set of resources that can be used as part of his/her teaching. The bag of tricks will include basic equipment such as chalk, paper, a hardback notebooks for registers, recording marks and lesson planning, to things like dice, two mini whiteboards and markers which could be used in lessons.

So, it looks like May is going to be very busy! Hopefully it won’t be too long till my next blog – I’ll try to keep them a bit more regular from now on but in the meantime, enjoy this video about Cecilia’s School of Good Hope, in case you haven’t seen it already. Bye for now!

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Tags: AIDS, Chisila Community School, community schools, education, HIV, Mujika West Community School, orphans and vulnerable children, Peer Education Programme Against AIDS, PEPAIDS, teacher training, vodafone world of difference, world of difference, Zambia
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08:55 on February 11th 2011

Post | Sasha’s World of Difference channel – 2nd phonecast

Listen to my latest phonecast

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08:51 on February 11th 2011

Post | Sasha’s World of Difference channel – 1st phonecast

Listen to my latest phonecast

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16:53 on February 3rd 2011

Photos | Wading through rivers, cars getting stuck on tree stumps, and some exciting developments: a typical two months of the Engage Programme

First of all – huge apologies for not having updated my blog for almost two months. It has as usual been an extremely – almost ridiculously - busy time for me and the Engage project. The last two months have been filled with fantastic work, exciting new developments, amazing fundraising and… some slightly dangerous situations. I even managed to fit in a holiday! Yes indeed. So, sit back, relax and maybe even get yourself a cup of tea, because this blog is going to be a long one.

How Can We Best Support Our AIDS Action Clubs?

From mid November last year till the end of January 2011, I was conducting a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis with the AIDS Action Clubs (AACs) that we work with, which will help PEPAIDS and SAPEP establish a baseline of all the activities that are going on in the field. We haven’t been able to collect much data surrounding the activities being delivered by AACs prior to this and so this analysis is very important because it will also help us to get an idea of the challenges that our clubs are facing, and what opportunities there are for us to help them overcome some of these problems.

SWOT-ing in SilwilliZone

From the beginning, the results were extremely encouraging – many of our clubs in the Monze and Mazabuka districts were very active even without regular supervision, and were conducting a broad range of activities from outreach and HIV/AIDS sensitisation work through sports and drama to a variety of income generation activities (IGAs). Numerous clubs have recognised that the key to ensuring their sustainability is for them to have a diverse range of IGAs and a lot of the groups are already looking to scale up their activities to bring in a greater income and to reduce dependancy on ‘hand outs’. It is fantastic to see the community taking their development into their own hands and I think that the progress and development of our AACs is a huge testament to the hard work of our peer educators and project officers who have worked closely with communities to ensure that they are not only empowered but that any developments at community level are sustainable.

An AIDS Action Club discussing their strengths and weaknesses

These visits have also provided me with the opportunity to find out where UK volunteers’ skills can help to capacity build the clubs, so that I then know which audiences of volunteers PEPAIDS needs to target. Many of the clubs are keen to have the input of UK volunteers, as they feel that building their skills and knowledge will be extremely beneficial at both club and at individual level. So far, clubs have requested updated information on HIV/AIDS and antiretroviral therapy, and training in drama, sports, entrepreneurship, and livestock management skills – all of which I am happy to say form part of the Engage Programme. It’s a great feeling to know that the project idea we planned months ago is heading in the right direction and really will address the communities’ needs.

Whilst I was encouraged by many of my meetings with the clubs, the work also brought me face to face with how HIV/AIDS deeply affects all these communities in a multitude of ways. It is evident not only in the subjects that the communities discuss – from caring for AIDS orphans to taking care of the sick in their community – but in the frequency and number of funerals that take place. In each of the meetings I have conducted – and I have there have always been some clubs who have been unable to attend due to funerals or sickness. This really brought home to me once again the impact of HIV/AIDS in the areas that we work in.

George, the peer educator from Ngwezi B zone takes a surprise photo. Here they have a specific group for People Living With HIV/AIDS.

All in all, I met with 65 clubs in 18 different zones and now I am in the process of writing my report with recommendations for both PEPAIDS and SAPEP. As well as focussing on the areas where volunteers can capacity build our fieldwork programmes, the report will identify the common support needs and challenges faced by our AACs and will form the basis for future SAPEP funding bids so that we continue to support communities where they need it the most.

A Few Interesting Barriers

The community visits between November and January were not without their challenges and funny moments. Some of these were just logistical – e.g. issues with transport. Although we have a project vehicle, we try to minimise fuel costs by using public transport to travel into a town and then using the vehicle or motorbikes to access the rural areas. The first half of the SWOT analysis was conducted in the town of Monze – 60km away from Mazabuka where I live – and the bus journey takes one and a half hours. In reality, it usually takes a lot longer: over the first 8 days that I was conducting the analysis in Monze, I had buses delayed due to animals, bags of maize and mattresses being loaded on, buses breaking down and being moved to the side of the road for over an hour and some buses that wouldn’t leave until they were ‘full’ i.e. overloaded with people! As you can imagine the amount of travelling (120km per day minimum plus up to 80km in the project vehicle) and the constant delays can be very exhausting and stressful as you find that you are constantly arriving late to your meetings. On the plus side – timekeeping in Zambia isn’t a very pressing issue and so your best bet it to try to relax. It’s likely that even when you turn up 3 hours late (as I sometimes did), the community won’t have started arriving yet!

Some of my travelling companions!

Some problems that I faced were just unexpected. On the last day of the SWOT in December, we travelled in our 4×4 vehicle to Mayaba zone to find that the meeting had been cancelled due to heavy rains. We had planned to have the meeting outside but the ground had become waterlogged and since there was no shelter, the community had dispersed. We decided to rearrange the meeting for January and so turned round to head back home…when our car got stuck on a tree stump.

We tried reversing, then going forwards but it was clear that we weren’t going anywhere. Luckily, we were soon rescued by a local villager carrying an axe (what are the chances of someone like that just being around?), who then proceeded to chop madly at the tree stump until we were free. Hooray!

Axe man saves the day!

That wasn’t the last time I had an unexpected adventure. In January, when the heavy rains were in full swing, I conducted the rest of the SWOT on motorbikes with the ‘dream team’ – our two project officers, Oliver Mukampaila and Kenneth Bbweluuma. Many of the dirt roads were waterlogged by then and it was likely that even our 4×4 vehicle would get stuck, so travelling on the bikes was our best bet. Kenneth and Oliver had done a reconnaissance mission to some of the zones in the early part of January to find out which areas we could definitely not visit due to the rains and bad roads and as a result 2 zones in rural Mazabuka were ruled out. I was not prepared however, for how BAD the supposedly ‘good’ roads were. On the first visit to Kayola zone, it started to rain heavily and then the bike got stuck in mud and a huge swampy hole – I slid off the back and tried to desperately grab on to Oliver who kept telling me to ‘chill down’. I had also worn the wrong footwear – walking boots instead of wellies. Oh dear. In my defence, the weather in Zambia can be surprisingly deceptive: the mornings are stifling hot and sunny and in the afternoons the rain clouds gather and it pours down. I wasn’t alone though in my choice of incorrect footwear: both Oliver and Kenneth had shiny black formal shoes on that quickly became caked in orange mud. The result of all of this was that on reaching Kayola, all of us had to remove our shoes and socks and sit in the sun in an attempt to dry off.

Oliver didn't escape the Kayola trip unscathed

One of the last meetings I facilitated was in a rural area of Monze and involved me having to cross a bridge that was under water because the Magoye river had swelled and burst it’s banks due to heavy rain overnight. Oliver tested the water by wading across to see if we could make it, and then instructed us to take off our socks and boots and roll up our trousers.

The 'bridge' across the Magoye River

I am not as pleased about this as I might appear

I’ll admit that I had a mild sense of trepidation – the water was pretty fast flowing and we had to all hold hands and make a chain to get across, whilst avoiding broken branches and big rocks. The project officers then made their way across pushing and carrying the motorbikes – no mean feat when you consider how heavy those bikes are!

Taking the bikes across

Halfway there!

I spent a lot of January in this way – going out to communities, getting soaked, conducting questionnaires and generally being inspired by what I heard. We even conducted the SWOT in someone’s house in Dumba zone during a thunderstorm!

Meeting in the peer educator's house due to the thunderstorm

The experience was made even better by having Oliver and Kenneth facilitate the sessions with me: the SWOT could have been a very boring process for our clubs, but they engaged with the community in such an energetic way, and injected lots of humour into all the discussions that we never failed to have a laugh! The experience also improved my knowledge of the local language: our clubs often discussed in detail their various income generation activities from goat rearing to bee keeping and so I eventually caught on to particular words such as the Zambian word for goat – ‘npongo’, ‘nkuku’ meaning chicken and ‘bolla’ meaning sports.

Me and an npongo in Kayuni Zone
There were some confusing moments though, when, for example, the question ‘Has the number of members in your club increased or decreased?’ was met with a 10-minute answer involving lots of references to npongos and nkukus! I’ve also learned to introduce myself in Tonga and explain where I am from and who I am working for – pretty cool I think!

Some Time To Be A Tourist

I took a week off after Christmas and decided that it was finally time to go and visit Livingstone and the Victoria Falls. I think I visited at just the right time – the rains had arrived and so the falls were really spectacular as the Zambezi river was quite full, but the view wasn’t too obscured by spray.

The spectacular Victoria Falls

On my first proper day of my holiday, I randomly decided that it would be a good idea if I got up at 7am and went to throw myself off the top of the Batoka Gorge at 8.30am as part of an ‘adrenaline rush’ activity known as the gorge swing. It was only when I was at the top of the gorge, strapped into my harness and watching another tourist jump off and become very small, very quickly, did I realise how far down it was.

Jumping off a cliff is never going to feel 'right'.

By then it was too late, and when it was my turn to step off the cliff I literally had to drag my other leg with me. My scream got caught in my throat and after 3.5 secs of free fall the rope tautened and I finally began to swing. Despite the initial feeling of abject terror, I really did enjoy it and I probably would do something similar again.

After that, I entered the Victoria Falls Heritage Site and spent time just walking all along the falls and viewing them from different points. I then met a tour guide who offered to take me on a walk along the top of the falls (I’d seen people on the opposite side standing right at the edge where the waterfall begins and wondered how they’d got there) and so I decided to do it. It took about 2 hours and involved crossing the Zambezi river on foot and trying not to get caught up in the current so that you didn’t get dragged over the side.

Yes that is the edge...

...and so is this!

By the time I got to the Angels Falls pool (a natural 8m deep pool right at the edge of the falls), I felt so wired that I needed a sit down. So I sat, right on the edge of the falls, looking into a huge gorge.I’d had nothing but a black coffee all day, but having spent most of the time feeling terrified, I didn’t have an appetite!

Later that week, I visited Livingstone Island – where David Livingstone first saw the Victoria Falls in Zambia and I then went on a day trip to the beautiful Chobe National Park in Botswana which involved a river safari and a game drive. I had never been on safari before, and although it was rainy season, there was still plenty to see: hippos, crocs, lions, elephants and all sorts of birds. I even got to see a lioness and her cub hunting, in true David Attenborough style.

An amazing display by a hippo on river safari in Chobe

The final highlight of my holiday was the Lion Encounter experience, which is a lion conservation project that enables tourists and volunteers to get close to lions in a safe environment. I have always wanted to see these big cats up close, and I was not disappointed! I was even given the opportunity to walk with them and stroke them (they feel a lot like dogs) and I now know a lot of random lion-related facts that will probably help me out in a pub quiz some time in the future. For more information about this project, you can check out www.lionencounter.com.

Lions stroke

This isn't the lion playing 'fetch'

And finally: New Year, New Developments

My work in 2011 started with a great piece of news: I had finally found a solution to PEPAIDS shipping and storage conundrum! Since the middle of November last year, I had been researching into how we could ship out items donated by UK schools, as part of our Schools of Good Hope programme, at a reasonable cost. By this point, one of the schools – Chorlton High School – had collected almost 250 shoe boxes of gifts and everyday useful items for the pupils at Chisila Community School. At the time we had been quoted several prices by a range of shipping companies – all in the range of £5000-£7000, and which were most definitely out of our price range! If we ended up having to pay that kind of money, it would completely outweigh the benefits of having received the donations in the first place.

CS Wave NG Wave

Towards the end of December 2010, we had our first break through in this area: Ready Steady Store, a storage solutions company, kindly offered us some free storage space in Worsely, where we could store all the items that were being donated to us while we continued to look into shipping. This was absolutely amazing for us as it now means that we have a storage facility that we can use to store donations from all our projects and events for the next couple of years. A huge thanks to Claire Cooke at Ready Steady Store for making this possible!

Meanwhile, after emailing a range of shipping companies with not much success, we happened upon a new possibility: a company was shipping items out to Zambia from the UK in a shared container and the next container was was due to leave in January 2011. The company charged £1 per kilogram as well as handling and collection fees, but for us this was much more affordable and I calculated that the cost would come to just over £200. I emailed them on New Year’s eve – and I’ll freely admit that I wasn’t trying to get my hopes up: I didn’t know if there would be any space left, or whether the container would leave at the beginning of January. But my luck was in – when I returned to work after a week off on Monday 3rd January, an email from Mr Aubrey Kasonde was waiting for me asking how big our shipment was and where they would need to pick it up from.

The AMAZING amount of donations, posters and T-Shirts collected by the Chorlton High School pupils

Send Zambia ships out items to Zambia for Zambians living in the UK, but they also send out a range of items for charities working in Zambia. They were absolutely fantastic and so accommodating – we’ve not only received a discount on the items we are shipping out but the company has also offered to increase awareness of our schools project and PEPAIDS work in general amongst the UK-Zambian community and even get them to participate in giving donations for our project and also help to raise shipping funds. We have always been keen to raise the profile of our work amongst Zambians living in the UK and so this kind of opportunity is invaluable to us! We’re now expecting the shipment to arrive in Lusaka at the end of February and we can’t wait to give the gift boxes to the Chisila pupils!

Chorlton High School are now in the process of launching another project, as part of their ‘Drop Everything and Read Scheme’ where Year 7 pupils donate a book from their childhood that they really enjoyed and then write a letter explaining why it meant so much to them. In conjunction with this, the library team at the school are also going to put together a range of books that are no longer needed to send over to Chisila, whilst Chorlton’s Charity Ambassadors find ways to fundraise the cost of shipping. All this progress is just fantastic and now that we have Send Zambia on board, we’ll be using them to ship out other items collected by other schools throughout the year.

At the end ofJanuary, we even managed to get some publicity for PEPAIDS in the Manchester Evening News about all the work we are doing and we may be able to get more coverage about our schools programme in the future.

Looking back on what has been achieved so far though the Engage programme, I am already looking forward to what the coming months will bring. We’ve had so many successes and overcome some challenges, that I can’t help but feel positive! The best feeling for me is that I know that the work we are doing is so worthwhile – just meeting and talking with the communities showed me the impact we have had and can continue to have in the future.

In the next few months, my work will include linking in with the drama department at The University of Manchester to see if any of their Applied Theatre students would be up for volunteering with our AIDS Action Clubs over the summer months. I am also in the process of developing a training outline for some of the theatre groups using my own drama background so I can pilot capacity building training sessions with them towards the end of March. Meanwhile, our Schools of Good Hope volunteer co-ordinator, Vincent, is also busy conducting a needs assessment of our community schools and developing training for all the Zambian teachers we work with.

This year is also PEPAIDS’ 10th birthday, so watch this space as we’ll be organising some great fundraising events to celebrate.

So, it’s still all systems go and by the looks of things, it will continue this way for the next few months!

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Tags: AIDS, Chorlton High School, HIV, Income Generation Activities, Manchester Evening News, needs analysis, Peer Education Programme Against AIDS, PEPAIDS, Ready Steady Store, Send Zambia, SWOT analysis, weather, Zambia
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15:37 on November 28th 2010

Post | Testimonials about HIV and AIDS

I recently visited Chisila Community and asked whether some of the community members would mind giving testimonies about HIV and AIDS on camera. Several community members agreed to do so: an amazing development, as a few years ago the stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS was such that noone was willing to talk about their experiences with the illness. Now, we have several women and children on camera talking about how HIV and AIDS has effected their lives – a testament to the work that SAPEP has done with the community around the disease and preventing stigma.

So here it is!

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Tags: AIDS, AIDS epidemic, AIDS orphans, education, HIV, HIV positive, orphans, OVC, poverty alleviation, voluntary counselling and testing, vulnerable children, Zambia
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15:27 on November 28th 2010

Post | Zambia – A VERY Surreal Place…

I’ve been in Zambia for almost two months now and I’ve settled in to life over here whilst my work on PEPAIDS’ Engage project has really progressed at lightening speed. However, even though I feel like I have been here for ages already, there are still so many things that surprise me every single day, and moreover, there are things that make Zambia a completely surreal but also amazing place to be. Eventually, these aspects might become the norm for me, but before they do, I wanted to make a short list of my experiences so that I don’t forget them!

Small buses

Nope, it’s not just that you’re waiting for ages for one and then two come along at once. And it’s not even that you are stuffed into these small blue mini buses like sardines in a can, and then the bus proceeds to career along the pot hole filled roads at break neck speeds.

What I always think is quite cool on small buses is how honest people are. To pay for your ticket you have to pass your money forward to the conductor – a guy who leans precariously out of the bus while it is moving, shouting to passers-by the destinations the bus is going to – and then he counts out all the change and your fellow passengers pass it back to you. Your change is always right – no one swipes even the smallest note off you. People also trust you to pass their money on to the conductor, and sometimes when I’ve drifted off into my own little world, I get a tap on the shoulder from someone behind asking me to pass their money on. It’s amazing, and each time I use a minibus I think how this would never happen back home.

Big Buses

On a Friday, a couple of weeks ago, I went to book a bus to Lusaka for the following day. The man at the bus company dutifully wrote my name down and said that I could pay for the ticket on Saturday. So far, so straight forward. He said that I should make sure I was at the bus station at 10am the next day. So, I turned up at 9.45am on Saturday and waited to pay for my ticket. A man behind the counter said to me that he needed to call to find out whether there were still seats on the bus available. I proceeded to look confused and I continued to have this expression on my face when he turned to me and said: ‘I’m afraid the bus is full”. The following conversation then ensued:

Me: “But I thought I booked a place on the bus yesterday?”

Man: “The bus is full from Livingstone.”

Me: “So how are you supposed to book a bus in advance?”

Man: “You have to turn up on the day and find out if there are seats.”

Me: “But I turned up yesterday…”

Man: “The bus is full from Livingstone.”

Me: “Okay, so how do I make sure next time I have a seat on the bus?”

Man: “You have to book your seat in Lusaka.”

Me: “But Lusaka is the place I want to go!”

So, apparently to book a bus to Lusaka, you have to be in Lusaka first. Confused? Yes, so was I. I asked Wilson Nyirenda, director of SAPEP, to shed a bit more light on this matter, and as it turns out, to make sure you have a seat on a bus, you have to physically be at the start point of the buses’ route (e.g. Lusaka or Livingstone) and not somewhere in between. If you are in Mazabuka you can’t even pay for your ticket from the start point because by the time the bus gets to you – from Lusaka or Livingstone – your seat will have probably been filled. The only way to get a seat is by chance – so you need to wait in the bus station most of the day and perhaps there will be a seat on one of the buses for you.

My interesting (if a little frustrating) bus experience didn’t stop there. I went to a different bus company and booked a ticket with them. The bus was due to arrive at 10.30am, and when it didn’t, I figured I’d give it another half an hour and then find out what was happening. Presently an estate car pulled up with about 6 people in it. The ticket man gestured towards me. “This is your bus”, he said. It didn’t look like a bus to me and so I said so. The man didn’t seem to understand why I seemed a bit baffled. “It’s driven by the bus company owner” he said. “See you next time”. I decided I didn’t have anything to lose, and I really wanted to go to Lusaka so I got in the car.

It was a pretty smooth ride all the way and I really enjoyed it – it was better than being on a coach. The only hairy moment came when the car started to lose power and then just began to glide along the busy Kafue Road into Lusaka. Eventually it slowed down to such an extent that I began to wonder whether it was worth getting out and walking the rest of the way – something that my fellow passengers proceeded to do. The engine held out however, and I arrived in Lusaka at 1pm – 3 hours after first trying to set out. By ‘Zambian time’, that wasn’t too bad.

Selling odd things

One thing you have to get used to in Zambia and especially in Lusaka are people selling goods, along the road, or at bus stations, that we might think are a bit odd. On the way into Lusaka there are people lining the roads and who come up to the cars waiting at traffic lights and knock on the windows to sell their products. The most interesting thing is that there isn’t a pattern to what they sell. On the way into Lusaka our car stopped at traffic lights and whilst we were waiting a man appeared at the window carrying a toaster in one hand and some padlocks in another. This begs a few questions – how did he choose his items? Has he had success in selling toasters and padlocks before? Does he always sell these things? Taking the bus back from Monze, another thing you often find being sold to you at your bus window are: eggs. Back home you wouldn’t get on a bus and think – “What I need right now is an egg” but perhaps, I thought, this saves people time from looking round a supermarket. It was only later on that I realised that the eggs were already boiled – they have a feather stuck into a hole in them so they’re easy to peel once you’ve bought them. A nutritious and delicious snack!

What you can fit into a luggage rack

In Zambia anything can go on public transport. On more than one occasion I have sat next to a woman with a bowl under her arm that has a chicken clucking quietly to itself inside it. Huge bags of mealie meal (used to make nshima) often fill the aisles and so you have to step on them, or over them if you can, to get to your seat.

Fancy a basket of chickens?

Or maybe a chicken behind your seat?

The luggage racks on a bus can be full of live things (goats, chickens, cockerels) or just people’s shopping. On my way back from Lusaka, the bus conductor showed me to my seat at the back of the bus and I noticed that it was particularly dark where I was sitting. I presumed that the lights were not working and so I just settled down to have a bit of a snooze on the way home. Later on though I realised that this wasn’t the case – it was just that someone had put their mattress into the luggage rack and so it had covered the whole ceiling at the back of the bus!

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Nope, it's a mattress in the luggage rack.

Insect swarms

Coming back from a day out in the bush, I noticed a huge swarm of insects in Mazabuka that had come out after it had rained particularly heavily. It was amazing – each insect was about two inches long and there were thousands of them, as far as your eye could see up into the sky. In the filling station, there were hundreds of them circling around, attracted to the light. The best thing was that although it was an exciting sight for me, most people went about their business and didn’t bat an eyelid about what was happening. A man in a car must have noticed my awestruck face, as he said “Are you afraid of insects?”. Luckily, I am not too bad with creepy crawlies, which is a good thing because when the rainy season starts in full swing, Zambia gets hit with a swarm of flying ants. Apparently they arrive in such numbers that people often have to sweep them up into piles that are knee high!

I also recently had a firefly in my room, which was brilliant! I watched it flit around flashing its little orange light but eventually I decided that I really needed to help it to leave and find its glowing friends. This was easier said than done as it involved me chasing it around the room for half and hour with it going everywhere but towards the door!

Makua Makua! (White man, white man!)

I stand out in Zambia and so what this means is that people love to talk to you in the street. Sometimes this means people want to shout ‘Makua!’ at you to get your attention – again a strange experience for me, because until I came to Zambia, I never thought I’d ever be described as ‘white’, let alone a ‘white man’! From the children walking home from school who shout ‘How are you?’ to adults who give you advice such as ‘Is the place you are going to moving? Slow down then, and relax, this is Zambia’, people are always ready to talk to you. Zambians by their nature are funny people – they love to have a laugh and a joke with you and this translates into many of the interactions I have had with them. From advice from passers by to iron my clothes (everyone in Zambia has crisp perfectly ironed clothes, no matter where they live) to laughing and joking with communities in rural areas, as they try to make me a real Zambian wife, interacting with people over here is always great fun.

So those are my experiences so far – and also many of the reasons why I love Zambia. It is a place that whilst being so removed from home, is so friendly, where you are referred to as Mamma if you are female, and Big Man if you are male and where people are more than willing to stop and have a chat with you, offer advice and make sure you are okay so you never feel alone. It’s somewhere where you just have to stop and get out of the car at the side of the road because there will undoubtedly be something new for you to see.

On the way back from Tusole community, I got out of the car to photograph a woman fishing.

My experiences out in Zambia with the people have by far been the best – from being taught how to be a true African wife, to learning how to cook the Zambian staple nshima, I’ve enjoyed it all.

Learning to put on my chetengi...

My Zambian mother teaching me how to cook nshima!

Eventually some of the things I’ve mentioned will just become normal to me, but this being Zambia, I am pretty sure there’ll be plenty of other things to learn and that will continue to surprise me over the course of the next year!

Wilson eventually had to step in to help.

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07:12 on November 17th 2010

Post | Brand new video update about Cecilia’s School of Good Hope!

Hello! Just a quick post today to say please view our latest video for our Schools of Good Hope programme. It focuses on recent events at Cecilia’s School of Good Hope and will be shown to the parents and pupils at Suckley School in Worcester today!

Have a look and enjoy!

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Tags: Cecilia's School of Good Hope, HIV/AIDS, orphans and vulnerable children, Peer Education Programme Against AIDS, PEPAIDS, SAPEP, Schools of Good Hope programme, Suckley School, Zambian community Schools
Posted in Post, Video

11:27 on November 10th 2010

Post | A Short Video About Cecilia’s School of Good Hope

Cecilia’s School of Good Hope was the inspiration for our Schools of Good Hope programme, and this school was the first one involved in our pilot scheme. Cecilia’s school is now linked with Suckley School near Worcester. Both schools will have video updates about each other, so that the schools and the pupils can form a real lasting relationship with one another. This is the first video we have created for Cecilia’s school – the pupils wanted to introduce themselves so that their partner school would know who they were! It was a brilliant day – the kids never failed to make me laugh, and they just LOVED shouting their names and ages at the camera.

Enjoy!

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Tags: Cecilia’s School of Good Hope, HIV/AIDS, orphans and vulnerable children, Peer Education Programme Against AIDS, PEPAIDS, SAPEP, Schools of Good Hope programme, Suckley School, Zambian community Schools
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15:58 on November 7th 2010

Post | Our First Video About the Schools of Good Hope Programme!

After lots of blood, sweat and tears, we have finally managed to upload our first video for our Schools of Good Hope programme! Hooray! Now at least we know that it is possible. So here it is – this video is about Chisila Community School in Monze, that is linked with Chorlton High School in Manchester!

Enjoy!

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12:45 on November 5th 2010

Post | Our Schools of Good Hope programme is off to a flying start!

I spent a short period back in England during October and much of this time was spent drumming up some more interest for our Schools of Good Hope programme. My first stop was Abraham Moss High School in Cheetham Hill who we wanted to link with Mujika West Community School in Monze. So, I arranged a meeting with Lucy Tasker, who coordinates all the global citizenship activities in the school, and we discussed the possibility of setting up this project with the school.

Abraham Moss High School's logo - it just had something 'global' about it so I hoped they'd go for our project...

Ideally, we want the project to be run predominantly by a group of pupils in the school who have formed a fundraising club that is dedicated to raising money and material donations for their Zambian partner school. In my former role as a youth worker, I was really aware that these types of initiatives work best when the activities are ‘youth led’, i.e. young people take most of the responsibility for planning, organising and running their fundraising activities. Therefore, we wanted to ensure that this would be the case for our Schools of Good Hope programme, as this way, the pupils involved will have a much greater sense of ownership over their project. To make this possible, we suggested that the pupils in the fundraising club can run a range of small but regular fundraising activities that can be organised in form time or during lunch times – such as selling raffle tickets, guessing the number of sweets in a jar, or the excitingly named Penny Warfare. The fact that these kinds of activities take so little time to organise means that the teachers in the school – who are already pretty strapped for time – can then simply oversee the project and help to coordinate larger activities that might need senior management approval, such as school discos or ‘own clothes’ day.

Importantly, we also want to make sure that the pupils and the school will gain something from getting involved in our project, and whilst PEPAIDS’ cannot provide formal accreditation, we explained that the hours put towards fundraising and planning events can count towards the volunteering section of the Duke of Edinburgh award. Furthermore, we can also provide pupils with PEPAIDS’ branded certificates which can go in their Record of Achievement files. Meanwhile, getting involved in this time of programme can help UK schools to achieve or maintain their International Schools Award and also helps to integrate citizenship into all aspects of the curriculum. Everyone is a winner!

For us, it is also vitally important that schools and pupils involved in the programme feel supported, and so we provide each UK school with a booklet of fundraising ideas, updates via photos and video and a regular newsletter that details the progress that has been made. The UK school can also send us photos and video updates which we will show to the Zambian partner school. In 2011, we are also offering teachers from our UK schools the exciting opportunity to get involved in a teacher exchange programme, where they can visit their partner school in Zambia and take part in a skills sharing and capacity building training session with their Zambian counterparts!

Lucy gave me a really positive response and said that literally hundreds of pupils would definitely be up for getting involved in this project! Abraham Moss High School now plans to organise two large scale fundraising events and a series of smaller ones over the course of the academic year. The first large event will be a shoe box appeal to coincide with Christmas and World AIDS day on the 1st of December: pupils will fundraise in order to buy 60 pairs of shoes for the pupils at Mujika School! Helen Allen from PEPAIDS is also going to be running an assembly at the school in mid November so that everyone in the school is aware of the project.

My next stop was Chorlton High School, to meet with Clare Morgan, the Assistant Headteacher at the school. I hoped to link Chorlton with Chisila Community School in Monze and for me this was a ‘dream’ meeting: Clare emphasised how she wanted to make PEPAIDS and our schools project an integral part of the PSHE curriculum for Year 7s!

Chorlton High School

PSHE lessons are divided into different themes for each half term e.g. Community/Charity, Dreams and Visions, Fit for Life, Staying Safe and Survival, and Clare would like us to support these lessons by providing relevant information, materials, and even case studies about particular pupils from their partner school. PSHE staff and all tutors would also be involved in the programme, as Clare would ensure that PEPAIDS would have a PSHE curriculum link in all the form activity that takes place in the school. If this wasn’t enough, updates about PEPAIDS and the progress of the project will be included on Chorlton TV every term! Clare is also in charge of Pupil Voice – a forum for the pupils to get their voices heard on different issues – and some of the young people involved in this will become our Charity Ambassadors. They will be responsible for mapping out a series of fundraising events over the course of the year that the whole school can get involved in.

Some of the Year 7 pupils from Chorlton HS who our getting involved in our project!

It was as though our project came along at the perfect time for Chorlton High School, and I was absolutely ecstatic! Having PEPAIDS and the schools programme linked into all different elements of Chorlton’s school life means that the pupils will gain an in depth understanding about their Zambian partner school, and the issues that they face. It will also help to cement a lasting relationship between the two schools.

And some more Year 7s! Love the wave!

Chorlton are also hoping to do a shoe box appeal for Christmas, where a range of items will be sent out to their partner school in decorated boxes. Additionally, the school has invited Helen to their Extended Learning day on the 13th December which focuses on Culture and Community: the pupils will be making a variety of things to send over to Chisila school, such as artwork and personalised T-shirts for the Chisila pupils. PEPAIDS is also going to be involved in Chorlton’s Sound Out Conference in January, where 12 feeder primary schools visit Chorlton High School to take part in a range of pupil voice activities. We’re hoping that one of the activities can be on the Schools of Good Hope programme as it enables us to reach a whole new range of schools!

As you can see the programme is off to a flying start! Initially, we were going to pilot the whole project next year, but I am so glad that we decided to take advantage of this academic year. Just before I left, Chorlton High School donated 100 pencil cases to Chisila school, and also sent out a range of their prospectuses and some photos of the Year 7 pupils who are involved in the project. It was an amazing donation as Chisila pupils really lack resources like pens, pencils and rulers and there was also enough for every pupil in the school to have a pencil case.

Consequently, during my first week back in Zambia, myself and Vincent taught an interactive lesson at Chisila school – focussing on their UK partner school. We used a globe to teach the pupils where Zambia and the UK are in relation to one another and then covered topics from the colour of Chorlton’s school uniform to the number of pupils that attend the school. Finally, the pupils played a guessing game with facts about Chorlton to see who remembered the most information!

Running the lesson about Chorlton High School

Morris, one of only two teachers at Chisila school (he used to be the only one), also commented that he enjoyed the lessons and said that he had never seen games used to engage pupils before, and that this was a technique he would like to try in the future. Many of the teachers in our community schools lack formal training, so now we are in the process of developing some teacher training sessions for teachers in our community schools!

The pupils looking at the highschool prospectus

Chisila pupils looking at the photos of pupils from their partner school

We also gave the pencil cases out to the pupils and from their smiling faces in these photos you can see what an impact it had! Furthermore, the parents were absolutely overwhelmed on the day and many gave testimonies on what a difference this partnership project was making to their children’s lives.

A very pleased pupil!

Me getting excited about the fact that they're all wearing Chorlton High School badges!

We have now created two videos about our Schools of Good Hope programme but unfortunately we are having a few technological issues and trying to upload videos to YouTube is like pulling teeth at the minute. But fingers crossed, I hope that they will be up on this blog soon!

Next time I’ll be telling you all about creating training sessions for our theatre groups, and the hilarity involved in playing Human Knot and thumb grab!!!

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Tags: AIDS, Cecilia's School of Good Hope, Chisila Community School, community schools, education, HIV, Mujika West Community School, orphans and vulnerable children, Peer Education Programme Against AIDS, PEPAIDS, teacher training, vodafone world of difference, world of difference, Zambia
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18:23 on October 20th 2010

Post | Back to School!

It has almost been a month since I last updated my blog and since then there have been a lot of exciting developments. During my last week in Zambia and just before I flew back to England, I revisited the Munali building project site to take a look at the development of our office building. It was exciting to see a new shiny corrugated metal roof being added to our building and the electrical wiring was also being completed. Plastering and painting were next and after that the building would be complete. It was amazing to see the transformation!

The roof being added to our new offices

Soon we will be able to stop paying rent on our current offices – a huge step towards reducing our donor dependancy and a great money saver! During my visit to the site, Emanuel, one of the construction workers overseeing the project, asked whether I would like to climb up on to the roof and hammer in some of the metal sheets myself. Although it looked exciting to balance precariously on some thin wooden beams and hammer huge nails into the metal (you also had to haul yourself up onto the roof as there was no ladder), I realised that I didn’t have the expertise (or the upper body strength for that matter) to help out and so I had to decline.

It was during this last week that I re-visited Cecilia’s School of Good Hope – I had visited the school in March 2010 and it was the initial inspiration for our brand new Schools of Good Hope Programme. In Zambia, everyone has to pay a fee for their children to be able to attend school, but in reality, the majority of the population live on 1.5 dollars per day, and so most people cannot afford to do this. As a result, many parents cannot send all, or even any of their children to school. Most families also have to carry the burden of AIDS’ orphans, and when a family is already struggling to make ends meet, these most vulnerable children are the very last in a long line to receive a paid for education. Consequently, these children grow up without an education, and desperate to survive, end up resorting to risky behaviour – such as transactional sexual relationships – in order to get money to feed themselves.

In a typical township in Zambia most parents cannot afford to send their children to school.

Lack of access to education also causes other problems: if parents cannot afford to send their children to school they invariably end up taking care of them at home, which prevents them looking for work and traps them in a vicious cycle of poverty. Ultimately, this results in some parents resorting to desperate measures to provide for their family: one community group I spoke to explained how a mother might purposely send her daughter to collect food from an older man knowing full well that this would come at a price – usually a sexual favour - but unaware of any other way in which to get food for her family. The impact of these ‘transactional relationships’ are reflected in the HIV prevalence statistics: females aged 15-19 are around six times more likely to be infected with HIV than their male counterparts.

Cecilia had recognised that education is key in breaking the vicious cycle of poverty that exists in Zambia: if a child is being educated, parents are free to go and look for work so that they can receive an income that can sustain their family. An educated child is also much more aware of HIV/AIDS issues and is more likely to get work and be able to care for their parents as they get older.

Cecilia's School of Good Hope in March 2010

When I met her, Cecilia had 43 children in her school – many of whose parents could not afford to pay the school any fees. Recognising that education is a lifeline out of poverty for her community Cecilia was determined to make her school as accessible as possible, even to those who couldn’t afford to pay. She had therefore taken it upon herself to pay for 18 of the children’s school fees – out of her own household income. She also provided many of them with a free lunch and had extended her school by building a small classroom attached to her house, so that more pupils could be educated. Unbelievably, Cecilia was doing all of this and yet she wasn’t receiving a salary from running the school. Meeting Cecilia and hearing her story really inspired us: she was one woman who was determined to make a difference to her community, something that really fitted in with the PEPAIDS ethos which is ‘Everyone can do something to make a difference!’. However, we realised that what Cecilia is currently doing isn’t sustainable and so we created our Schools of Good Hope linking programme, which links Zambian and UK schools, and is aimed at giving the most vulnerable children access to a free education that is also well resourced.

One of the classrooms in the school

Cecilia’s school is now linked with Suckley Primary School near Worcester who are keen to provide fundraising support and send donated items that help to improve Cecilia’s school. We are really keen to forge strong relationships between our linked schools in this programme and make donating to charity really tangible for the pupils involved. Suckley School thought that a good way to do this would be to create a ‘video link’ between the schools, where all the pupils and teachers from the Zambian school could introduce themselves on film and vice versa.

So, we visited Cecilia’s school and we took some great video footage of the pupils in their classes. Many of them were really eager to get on film, and shouted their names and ages as loudly as they could in front of the camera. They also did a lot of cheering, which was fantastic! In the younger classes we had a bit of blank staring into the camera, as many children were too shy to say their names and ages. We had been asking the pupils to speak after we showed them a signal – a finger pointing in the air - that indicated that we were now recording. This worked for the older classes, but in the Baby and Middle Class we got a lot of footage of children looking at the camera holding one of their fingers in the air with no explanation! During the day the stark reminders of the effects of HIV/AIDS were however, never far away: Cecilia explained that a pupil who I had met in March had died of AIDS in April. She also had an increased number of AIDS orphans attending her school – there were at least 6 in just one class. Vitally, I was later informed by Wilson that the term ‘orphan’ didn’t even exist in the Zambian vocabulary prior to the AIDS crisis – it had to be created in order to describe the huge number of children left behind by a generation of parents who were wiped out by the disease. These little reminders really emphasised to me how important it is that orphans and vulnerable children receive an education: hopefully it will prevent the loss of another generation in the future.

All in all it was a brilliant day and Cecilia’s school pupils are now looking forward to seeing a video of Suckley School. Eventually, I’m hoping to be able to put the video of Cecilia’s school on this blog for you to see, and since it was such a great idea, we are going to create a video link for the other schools involved in the programme – you’ll be hearing all about them in my next blog post!

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17:31 on September 23rd 2010

Photos | Education, Education, Education! (And lots more Chibuantu)

The following day after seeing George, we went to visit Mujika West Community School which is situated outside of Monze. This is one of the schools that I hope to involve in our Schools of Good Hope linking project with UK schools, and for me this was an exciting opportunity to speak to the community members who had created the school and ensure their support for the project. Driving through an area that simply looked like a desert, myself, Wilson, Oliver – a peer educator responsible for the Monze area and our volunteer teacher Vincent, arrived at the school at around 10am. The children were being taught outside under a tree due to the heat, and very soon, the teachers, village headmen, school committee (similar to our school governors) and members of the community assembled for a meeting with us. It is a very strange experience having quite a formal meeting in what is essentially the middle of nowhere but for me, this was also my very first experience of having to build the benches that we needed to sit down on before the meeting commenced! True to form, everyone got stuck in, with all the children carrying bricks from near their school building to the meeting place.

A very strong child

Wilson testing out the bench

The meeting began with one of the village headmen giving a vote of thanks to everyone attending and then he gave us a history of how this particular community school was created. The school was started in September 2006 – originally there had been two different pre schools in separate communities, but eventually with the support of one of our peer educators, they decided to join together to form one school and asked the village headman for land upon which they could build. A year later they started to build their new community school and peer educators supported them to buy cement from a local NGO – however this wasn’t enough to complete the building. Two years later they were again supported by PEPAIDS’ partner NGO, SAPEP, to apply for 45million zmk (around £5800) to complete the project and were successful in getting the funds. SAPEP also provided the school with resources such as chalk and educational materials. The school building is clearly an ongoing project and currently they have two classrooms and an office but they would like to expand it to include lodging quarters for the teachers. The inspiration for the whole project came from the fact that many of the children who now attend this school are very young, and before it was created, they had a very dangerous long walk to other schools that were far away from their village. Also, because of their age, these children often couldn’t access the local government schools which begin at Grade 1 and when they could, it was likely that there weren’t enough places for all of them.

During the meeting, both men and women gave testimonies about how important the school and the education of their children was for them: some commented on how important it was to educate their children within their own community and how their children will be far better equipped to take care of them during old age if they have completed their education. Others spoke of how they carried bricks from almost 50km away using an ox-drawn cart, and put all their effort into molding the bricks themselves and transporting them. At first they even thought that their project was going nowhere but now they are incredibly proud of what they have achieved.

Where the pupils currently have their lessons

Most of all, even in its early days, this new community school – which now has 60 pupils and 3 teachers - has already started to make a lasting impression: it has provided many children with a strong educational foundation and once they move onto the government run basic school the performance of these children is far better in Grade 1 than pupils with no pre-school education.

The new school building

It was great to sit and listen to the stories of how the school developed and be able to clearly see how peer educators had helped and supported these community members to achieve a longstanding dream to improve the education of their children. It was absolutely overwhelming to hear one woman stand up and say: “Our minds were idle and we were blind but through the peer educators our eyes were opened” – if I needed any proof that peer education was working in Zambia, here it was! In the future, many people in the community wish to see the school extended into a high school so that all their children can be completely trained and taught in the community.

For now though, they are all focusing on trying to solve some of the problems they are currently facing in relation to the school – something I am hoping that our Schools of Good Hope project can help out with. Mujika West Community School is, in the hot season, set in the middle of a desert and as there is no borehole near the school the pupils have to travel to a nearby village to get water. This understandably disrupts their education and poses a major problem as the community do not have the resources or the funds to be able to create access to water. As I said in my previous post – if there is anyone out there who might have skills in engineering and wants to volunteer to help a community in a situation like this, please do get in touch with me through this blog! Furthermore, the school is still desperately lacking resources – from desks, toys and games to pencils, crayons and exercise books for the children. Hopeful that we could help out, Vincent and I gave a presentation (assisted by Oliver who translated everything we said into Tonga) to everyone present at the meeting and explained the idea of the Schools of Good Hope project and how we intended to help them by linking them up with a UK partner school who could not only donate resources to them but could also fundraise on their behalf.

Our presentation to the community at Mujika School

We explained that the project is very much about the schools and the pupils having a close relationship and knowing who each other are, so that it becomes a partnership that is sustainable for many years to come. Eventually, we’d want teachers and pupils from the UK to come on exchange visits to Zambia where they could all share their skills and experiment with different teaching styles – a suggestion that was applauded by all whom were listening.

The community responded fantastically and thanked us for our support – I also emphasised how inspired we were by their initiative and hardwork. The school is evidence of real sustainable development that has been generated by the community themselves and it is brilliant to see how far they have come with hardly any money and so few resources. I really feel like the whole world should know about their project and throughout this year, I intend to make sure that this becomes a reality!

Me and Vincent with the Mujika-West Community School committee members and teachers.

We visited Chisala Community School the very next day, which is another school that we are hoping to involve in our project. The school committee gave us a tour around the site where they are in the midst of building their school and already we could see that they had very ambitious plans – compared to Mujika school, the new Chisala school will be huge, with 3 classrooms, one office and a teachers house.

The beginning of Chisala Community School's new building

It also became clear early on that the community contribution towards the building of this school has been immense and without them the project would have simply been an idea. Everyone had become involved in any area that they could: bringing stones and river sand to the site, building a kiln to fire bricks, drawing water from the river…the community had done absolutely everything themselves and only needed money for cement! The inspiration for Chisala Community School was very similar to what inspired Mujika school: the nearest government school to the village was 4.5km away and much too far for the young children to walk to. The community had also been in close contact with our peer educators who had delivered many sessions with them, sensitising them to common issues around HIV and AIDS. The community felt that the information was so rich and useful that they wanted it to be integrated into their children’s lessons as well and so decided that they should create a community school for themselves. With the help of a headmaster at a local basic school, the community applied to the government for 30million zmk (around £3800) and were successful, so they could start digging the foundations and they currently estimate that with these funds, they will able to build up to the level of the windows. Peer educators also helped and encouraged the community to persevere with the project and SAPEP provided money for the teaching materials used in the school. As with many schools in the rural areas however, resources are still seriously lacking.

I visited the building where the children were currently being taught and I was surprised to find so many pupils crammed into one small classroom like sardines in a tin. The room was incredibly hot and the pupils hardly had space to sit down on their benches. In the heat it must have been very hard to concentrate but despite this, the children all gave us great smiles and then proceeded to sing a lovely song for us with lots of energy and enthusiasm!

The pupils at Chisala Community School

Altogether the school has 64 Grade 1 pupils who are divided into two classes and who attend separately in the morning and the afternoon, and they also have 20 pre school pupils. With that many pupils it is clear why they need a much bigger school building. The teacher explained that the pupils would really benefit from desks in their new classrooms and that teaching and writing materials , as well as toys and games, were also desperately needed. Once again, Vincent and I delivered a presentation about the Schools of Good Hope project and received a tremendous reception – the community members in the meeting gave us applause after practically everything that we said! Many of them then proceeded to give thanks to us and I felt truly humbled – we had explained that the project might be slow to start, and that it would build up gradually over the course of the year, however they just seemed happy that we were interested in what they were doing and wanted to help.

Lessons on HIV and AIDS

What I realised from my visits to both schools is that educating children, especially in the rural areas of Zambia, isn’t simply just a legal requirement. It is a privilege that unfortunately not everyone can afford. When children are denied an education, they are already on the back foot when it comes to dealing with some of the struggles they face in their lives and so for this community, education means that they can give their children at least a fighting chance at building a better future for themselves. The school is clearly a real asset to the community: many families view it as a long term investment that not only helps their children acquire skills and knowledge that will help them in the future but that they will also all reap the benefits from this school for many generations to come.

Me and Vincent with the school committee and community at Chisala Community School

Between listening to testimonies from this community and doing my own presentation, I also had several glasses of Chibuantu and have to say that it was actually quite refreshing – it must have been about 35C outside and I didn’t feel parched. The chewing and drinking experience was still a little strange for me though – perhaps over the course of the year it’s something I’ll get used to. The community were also generous enough to serve us a lunch of nshima with a side dish of Kapenta, which is something that I had not tried yet. Kapenta are tiny dried fish and they were fried and mixed in with a tomato sauce – it was great to try something new although after I had eaten I was worried that I smelled a bit fishy because their taste was so strong!

As out visit came to an end, we walked back to the car and waited while Wilson bought a goat. He then put on some loud Zambian music and all of a sudden there was a party atmosphere. The women started dancing and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to get my groove on and so I joined in. It must have been infectious as I suddenly saw Oliver and Vincent join in too! It was a great laugh dancing with the women, some of whom were almost 70 years old, but moved like they were about 18. It must be true that eating nshima 3 times a day gives you strength!

Getting my groove on!

My trips to visit these community schools were absolutely unforgettable – the initiative of the communities and their drive to provide their children with an education is something that really deserves support, and I hope that through my project, I’ll be able to do just that.

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Tags: AIDS, Chisila Community School, community schools, education, fundraising, HIV, income generation projects, Mujika Community School, orphans and vulnerable children, Peer Education Programme Against AIDS, PEPAIDS, SAPEP, school linking programmes, Zambia
Posted in Photos, Post

16:32 on September 23rd 2010

Photos | A Spot of Gardening and Some Local Beer

My second week in Zambia was mainly located in one place – the bush. When I say ‘bush’, I need you to imagine vast, completely empty expanses of land that seem to reach the horizon, dried out grasses, shrubs and trees and earth that is the colour of burnt gold. All of this without David Attenborough’s whispery voice in the background and no huge animals chasing or eating each other. Although you do see a few goats, cows and the odd chicken, but it’s hardly like you’re on safari. In the bush you can stand and turn 360 degrees and see absolutely nothing in every direction. Zambia is the size of the UK, Ireland and France combined, yet only has a population of 12 million people who are mostly concentrated around its urban areas, so it is easy to see why the rural areas feel so empty.

For several days I spent time travelling to some of the most rural villages situated outside of Mazabuka and Monze, on my visits to different communities and village schools. My first day out in the bush started with the wonderful Wilson picking me up from the office in our project vehicle. We were going out to visit George, who is one of our peer educators and who lives in a rural village outside of Monze. Getting there was quite a task - Wilson explained that there were several ways to travel to George’s place, but some roads had been rendered unusable after the rainy season and so before turning off the tarmac we stopped and asked about a shortcut from a passer by. We were told that the road was definitely in use and so we turned on to the dirt track that would eventually lead us to George’s village. It was after this point that I became completely and utterly confused. I consider myself to be pretty good at navigating – I can read maps, get my bearings in a place even if it’s new to me and I usually don’t get lost. However, out here, driving through the bush, the concept of navigation and directions became a whole different ball game when there isn’t a signpost for your entire trip. Wilson drove down the road, turned right after a while, then turned left, then right again, then straight on for a while…sometimes he turned down ‘roads’ where I could see only trees! Everywhere looked exactly the same to me and with all the dips, bumps and getting thrown about from side to side in my seat, I had no idea where I was. When I asked Wilson how he knew where to go, he let out a roaring laugh and then said ‘I navigate by the sun!’ a comment that was followed by a few more chuckles. I concluded that he was a) just guessing his route b) he had been plenty of times before or c) that he was actually telling me the truth. As we got closer to George’s village, Wilson asked me whether I recognised where we were. I had visited George in March this year but I had to be completely honest and tell Wilson that we could have been on the moon as far as I was concerned as I did not recognise a single thing! He kept on asking me as we got closer and closer and it was only when we turned into a clearing with a series of huts and I saw George and his wife that I recognised where we were. So yes, I was a bit rubbish really.

George and his whole community had come out to greet us. After exchanging a traditional Zambian handshake with everyone – which involves a usual handshake followed by a ‘thumb grip’ and then another handshake – we sat down for a meeting. Wilson, speaking in Tonga, apologised for us arriving a little late and then thanked everyone for inviting us to their community. I then presented George with a photograph album including pictures of himself and his community from my last visit and after this it was time for an important introductory ritual – we went back to George’s house to drink Chibuantu. Chibuantu is a non alcoholic beer that is brewed in many homes throughout Zambia and is made from fermented grains of maize. I have to admit that I am still unsure about it – mainly because I am not sure whether it is food or drink. It’s more like a drink that you can chew, which obviously takes a bit of getting used to! Often what happens is that you drink the liquid bit that is at the top and then you are left with all the grains that have sunk to the bottom which you can then eat. I tried to take my cue and perfect my Chibuantu drinking from the newly crowned ‘Chibuantu King’ aka Wilson, who managed to drink/chew about 2 glasses of Chibuantu in about 5 minutes and all without getting a single grain stuck in his substantial goatee. Simply amazing.

Chibuantu

Wilson - The Chibuantu King!

After we had finished our Chibuantu, we had a tour around George’s garden. Our Zambian partner NGO had sent George to Zimbabwe to be trained in herbal medicine and off the back of this training he had come back to his village and created a garden containing herbs, fruit and vegetables that could be used to sustain his family and his whole community. In fact, George’s garden had become such a success that he had inspired several other communities to create their own gardens, so that they could not only feed themselves but they could also generate an income. As we walked around the garden, I was once again surprised at the variety of things that were being grown here: banana, papaya, lemons, rosemary, turmeric, cow pea…the list was endless. As were the different things they could be used for – George had meticulously labeled each plant with all its different uses which ranged from curing STIs and healing burns, to easing the symptoms of asthma. George’s community also includes a Positive Living Club, of which all the members are HIV positive and are cared for and supported by the rest of the community. Having access to nutritious fruits and vegetables and also to herbal medicine means that these community members can ensure that they keep themselves healthy. Some of the plants could even be used to make glue or fertilisers whilst others are used by the women to make baskets that they then sell at the local markets! I even tried some of the produce – a fruit called Grenadilla, which is a bit like passion fruit but slightly tarter. I managed to get the pips and juice all over my face and hands much to the amusement of Wilson and the other community members!

Trying to eat Grenadilla...

Doing a spot of gardening

Importantly, George explained that some of his plants had died during the hot season because he doesn’t have access to water for his garden throughout the year. A neighbour, whose garden is much closer to a borehole for water and therefore has access to it all the time, can grow his plants all year round. Water is a big concern for George and his community – they don’t have the expertise or the resources to get water to their garden, but if they did, it would make an immense difference to them. This made me wonder whether there are any volunteer engineers out there, who might be able to come up with a cheapish solution to this kind of problem as access to water is an issue that effects several of our communities. If you think you could help, please get in touch!

George and his community also make things that they can then sell to other villages and towns. After our tour was complete he showed us a new ‘tincture’ that was boiling away in a saucepan and which cured no less than 30 different diseases. I gave it a try and it certainly took away my sniffles, however, it tasted very like highly concentrated alcohol and it burned a bit on the way down. Deciding that ending my visit lying horizontally on the ground was possibly not the best idea, I refrained from having any more than a spoonful.

An extremely powerful tincture

George sampling the tincture

The women had also made some delicious scones out of lemons and the Mulinga flowers which grow in their garden – I tried not to eat all of them, and was pleased to discover that the scones themselves could treat at least 7 different ailments.

The delicious scones - I have borrowed the recipe!

I only wish that going to the doctor in England could be half as much fun: ‘So you’re feeling ill and you’ve got a cough? Okay, I’ll prescribe you a large slice of chocolate cake.’ Well, I guess I can dream. Our visit ended with a delicious lunch in George’s hut which was accompanied by the sounds of Zambian music on his stereo – the electricity used to power this and other equipment that he has in his house is produced by solar panels that he has put on his roof. Peer education has clearly empowered George and his community to build much better lives for themselves – whether it is by creating a garden through which they can feed themselves or gaining the knowledge to access electricity despite being in a rural area.

Before we left, Wilson took a picture of the whole community and me, which would have been a terribly cheesy photo were it not for the very glamorous lady in pink, who gave me her baby to hold just before the photo was about to be taken. The baby was not at all pleased at being separated from her mother and so started crying and kicking. Me being me, I started to panic and then ‘CLICK’ the photo was taken. Oh well, maybe there will be an opportunity for a cheese-fest photo next time.

George and his community...and me

Coming up next – it’s all about education!!!

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Tags: AIDS, HIV, peer education, sustainable development, Tonga, Zambia
Posted in Photos, Post

10:50 on September 21st 2010

Photos | Some Dramatic Developments!

Since my last blog, so much more has happened! Every day has been a whirlwind of activity and I am amazed at how much I have been able to squeeze into such a short amount of time. Towards the end of my first week in my new hometown of Mazabuka, I was involved in ‘compacting the foundations’ around our new office structure on our building project. As my involvement in the project developed over the first week, I realised that there were quite a few things I had learned to do. Carry big mounds of earth in a wheel barrow? Check. Shovel earth around a septic tank? Check. Compact the foundations? EPIC FAIL. The compacter, which was a huge block fitted to a big metal pole and was so heasvy I could barely lift it off the ground! The other option was to use a breeze block, but that was also a no go area for me. Naturally, everyone laughed and I was told that me and my spindly arms should sit this one out – but I tried valiantly to carry on. You can see my effort in the picture below!

Nope...it really is too heavy!

I eventually did lift it off the ground, but by that point I couldn’t throw any more strength behind it to actually compact anything. Despite my lack of compacting skills, the building project is progressing really nicely and the building is now at roofing level – I hope to update you with more photos soon!

Before I carry on I have a confession to make. The title of this blog was my feeble attempt at trying to make a pun and refer to the fact that towards the end of my first week I had the brilliant opportunity to visit two amazing drama groups who use Theatre for Development, drama and peer education with communities and schools in Mazabuka and also in rural areas outside of the town. In my previous visit to Zambia I had the pleasure of visiting The MARS Theatre group which had been set up by a peer educator called Pennias. The group focuses on sensitising communities to the issues surrounding HIV and AIDS through drama and use their plays to also reduce the stigma surrounding the illness. I had the opportunity to travel with the group to visit a rural community in Magoye, where they were going to perform a play about HIV and TB. When we arrived there was no audience to greet us- the area where the performance was going to take place was just near a barren football field and apart from about three children, there was no one else around. But the MARS group have a secret - they don’t need to go and find an audience because they know how to get the audience to come to them! From the back of their minibus they took out some large drums and three of the group started drumming rhythmically, whilst the other members sang and danced. Their voices singing in harmony created such a beautiful sound and I was amazed at how energetic the whole group were, dancing constantly to the rhythms whilst the sun beat down on them. Not long after they started, a steady stream of people started to arrive: men, women, children from the local school, even people just cycling past had their curiosity aroused and stopped to join the audience to see what was going on. Teenagers came and climbed a nearby tree and sat in its branches to watch the group whilst school children pushed and cajoled one another to try and get into the last spots of shade.

Before...

...and after!

Once there was a good audience, the performance began. The play was about a woman whose brother was diagnosed with having HIV and TB. The diagnosis had led to a negative reaction from the woman’s husband who had said that her brother could no longer live in the house with them and would have to eat with the cattle because he did not want to catch these diseases. The play featured two sexual health counsellors, who highlighted that the husband was in fact stigmatising his brother-in-law, due to serious misconceptions about how TB and HIV are spread and they sought to educate him. Finally, the performance ended with the husband getting on his knees and apologising profusely for his behaviour to his brother-in-law who was now over the moon that he could continue to live in their house! The play was fantastically funny, with a lot of fun being poked at the misinformed husband and the session was followed by a facilitated question and answer session with the audience about how TB and HIV can be spread and why it was imported not to stigmatise people with these diseases. They also spoke to the community about where they could go for voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) and why this was important. The power of these dramatic performances which utilise peer education was clear during this part of the session – many of the audience members were very well informed and also took part in an in-depth discussion about the meaning of the play. In areas where information about sexual health cannot be distributed amongst communities via television or the internet, the MARS theatre group’s performances are a vital lifeline of knowledge. As part of my year working for PEPAIDS, I hope to create a volunteering programme for drama and film practitioners and students to come out to Zambia and use their skills to support and capacity build theatre groups such as MARS and to encourage the development of brand new groups within our AIDS Action Clubs, so that they can reach even wider audiences through their performances. I also hope to enable these groups to become sustainable through the fundraising provided by volunteers but by also being able to create income generating activities for themselves – for instance by getting volunteers to script or film their plays, which could then be sold to generate an income. To get the ball rolling, I presented the group with a photo album put together by PEPAIDS’ founder Helen Allen that features photos of the group in action that were taken during our last visit. Hopefully, the group can use the album to start to market themselves as they can now show others some evidence of their work.

Presenting the photos to the MARS Theatre Group

Every time I see the performances of the MARS theatre group, I am reminded about how great drama is as an educational tool and how important it is that we can continue to support these kinds of activities.

The power of peer education and the initiative it creates within communities was also emphasised when I visited the Galaxy Film production group a couple of days later. The group had initially formed as an offshoot from the MARS theatre group (there were members involved in both groups) but also included a wide age range with members starting off as young as 8 and going all the way up to 25. The group has about 25 members in total and is keen to make films that have a powerful message. As a former youth worker, I was also excited to discover that the group’s focus is on young people living in Ndeke township, with the aim of getting them off the street and involved in positive activities, whilst using films to highlight the problems faced by certain sections of society – such as amongst orphans and vulnerable children. Walking through Ndeke compound on my way to visit the Galaxy group on a Sunday, it was abundantly clear why such activity is necessary: this community is desperately poor and amongst makeshift churches and houses made out of a mishmash of materials from corrugated iron sheets to pieces of plastic and cardboard, there are bars that are open from morning till night. Risky sexual behaviour, drug and alcohol consumption are common place. Some members of the Galaxy group, who all live within Ndeke compound, went out into their community and asked them to identify what they felt the major problems were. The answer that came back was that young people did not have enough to do, which often resulted in anti social behaviour, drinking, robbery and violence. Out of this community consultation, Galaxy theatre group was formed! The group, which has appointed some of members as the Chair, Treasurer and Secretary, are now producing a film – ‘Angels Joy’ – for a local TV company who approached them and asked them to create a film for television after seeing the group in action at a local event. During my visit, the group performed a variety of scenes from their film which focuses on the life choices of a troubled criminal who eventually seeks to turn his life around.

Importantly the group have also used their initiative to start fundraising to provide themselves with initial capital for their project and with the view to eventually being able to afford the young people involved in the project – many of whom are unemployed – with an income. Having asked permission from Mazabuka council, the group have started a door-to-door campaign in their community, collecting money from their friends, family and neighbours to fund their activities. I was so impressed with the group’s initiative, especially as most of them are so young, and I would again love to have UK volunteers support and nurture this kind of work. Despite the challenges and hardships they face in life, this group are striving towards establishing a project that they really believe in.

One of Galaxy's fundraising forms

The Galaxy Film Production group

After the performance was over, I walked back through Ndeke compound and saw a sight that really reminded me of home. Manchester really never is that far away!

Manchester United really are everywhere

So, another action packed week comes to an end, but there is much more on the horizon! Up next: being in the bush, visits to schools and sampling the local beverages!

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Tags: AIDS Action Clubs, Applied Theatre, drama, MARS Theatre group, Peer Education Programme Against AIDS, PEPAIDS, SAPEP, theatre, theatre for development, vodafone world of difference
Posted in Photos, Post

14:59 on September 8th 2010

Photos | The Adventure Begins…and So Does the Hard Work!

The run up to me leaving for this first trip back to Zambia was absolutely hectic! I had a wedding to attend, my birthday, a trip to London to see my family before I flew off, then I was back in Manchester packing up my flat and moving out. I gave back the keys to my flat literally two days before my flight to Zambia and spent those days running about like a headless chicken buying everything that I thought I might need. When I finally came to getting on the plane, I slept pretty much all the way through the 10 hour flight to Lusaka! This was a good thing too, because now that I am here, the hard work begins.

Wilson, the director our partner NGO the Simalelo AIDS Peer Education Programme (SAPEP) picked me up at the airport and during the 2 hour journey from Lusaka to the town of Mazabuka in the Southern Province, told me about the different things I would have to get used to. One of the things he explained, and that has stuck in my memory, is that I am going to have to be flexible. VERY flexible. Everything is done in ‘Zambian time’ as Wilson put it – which generally means that everyone is a lot more relaxed about everything, from time keeping to walking! This means that usually things won’t be done as fast as we’d expect them to be done in the UK, but they will eventually get done. There’s no point getting frustrated about it – you just have to go with it! As Wilson so eloquently put it: “You have the watches, but we have the time!” I can definitely see this as something that I am going to have to get used to.

During my year in Zambia with the Peer Education Programme Against AIDS (PEPAIDS), I am hoping to set up our Engage volunteering strategy, which aims to expand our current volunteering scheme in Healthcare to other fields which relate to the work we do on the ground in Zambia, namely: Building for Independance, Income Generation, Schools of Good Hope, Theatre for Development, Sports and Office Systems. What I am aiming to do is create volunteering opportunities under each of these areas for UK volunteers to visit Zambia and assist us, whilst also bringing in much needed fundraising. Ultimately, this will go someway to helping us to reach out to more Zambian communities and make our programmes much more sustainable!

After two days of rest over the weekend, work started bright and early on Monday morning. I went to visit the site of our new office headquarters with Kenneth Bbweluuma our Mazabuka District Manager. 5 months previously, this had simply been a piece of land in the middle of the bush! How things have changed in such a short period! Now, we have three office buildings up, and they look amazing! I had a good look around the building and Kenneth explained the process of building the offices and what the next stages of the project would be. Having our own offices increases our organisation’s sustainability and reduces our donor dependancy as we no longer have to worry about things like rent. Kenneth also explained that eventually they hope to build a conference centre and office space that we can rent out so that we can start generating an income. Kenneth also informed me of the hard work I would be doing over the next few days which involved a lot of digging and shovelling! So, on Tuesday morning I arrived at the building site at 7.30am, ready to put in some hard work! Myself and one of PEPAIDS’ volunteers, Vincent Heselwood, were given the task of shovelling earth around the septic tank and packing it into a 3 metre hole. We were helped by the engineers and construction workers although they laughed at us for quite some time as our digging skills were clearly not up to scratch! They made the digging look so easily – but there is a real technique to it you know! It was a really good laugh and we eventually did finish off our task (admittedly with a lot of help!)

Digging away at our new office site!

Being here only 5 days, I have already started to experience some off the challenges that you can face living in Africa. Coming back from the building site to my new ‘home’ at our current offices I found that the water had been turned off. It was the same story all over town, and noone knew when it was going to be back on again! So I continued my working day and errands in the same clothes, covered in red dust from head to toe, and got quite a few strange looks! Later on that evening, whilst Bernadette our lovely office manager and host was making us a delicious dinner of vegetables and nshima, there was a power cut. For an hour or so, we chatted by candlelight, entertained Bernadette’s children – Danny, Miso and Abigail – with shadow puppets and silly photos and waited until the power came back on. Funnily enough, when the power cut out the water came back on!

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be visiting community schools in Monze to set up or Schools of Good Hope linking programme, working with our Zambian staff team, AIDS Action Clubs and peer educators to find out how volunteers could effectively fit in with the fieldwork programme and working hard on our office building project. I’ll keep you updated about how this goes – I suspect I’ll have lots to tell you!

The office building crew - from left to right: Emanuel Chanda, Me, Vincent Heselwood, Kenneth Bbweluuma, Dominic Mwaba. Photo taken by Gavin Kapolobwe, also part of the crew.

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Posted in Photos, Post

Sasha Kasthuriarachchi

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