Category: people

A prayer for Youth Day

Bless the Children of Earth
may they have the blessings of food and health
may their homes be peaceful, their world safe
may we adults, work to make these blessings real
by our actions, attention, and giving, we make it so.

Bless the Children of the earth
with the abundance of a happy, secure life
may they have a life with education and opportunity
each child deserves no less, each child is precious
they are the future, the living legacy of our ancestors.
Bless the Children of the Earth.

(Abby Willowroot)

Tires and avos

When you’re travelling, not everything always goes according to plan. So we had a flat tire, and what we do best in such a case is look helpless…

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Luckily, we were in an area with many plantations and farms.

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The workers and manager of one of these farms helped us a lot, providing us with a jack, filling up the spare tire and fitting it on our car. Unfortunately, the spare tire did not fit our car (don’t know how that is even possible…). In a complex switch, the manager gave us two of his tires to fit on our car, so that we could continue our travels. So good to meet kind strangers!

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The farm was an avocado plantation.

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We were invited to visit the harvest.

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The avocados are harvested once a week, from February to November. This day the manager had hired about 100 extra workers to help out.

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When we arrived they had just finished. The workers were heading off. They walked to the office, where they would receive their pay.

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And the boxes with avocados were lifted into a waiting truck. According to the manager, the avocados are then sorted according to size – large, medium and small. Apparently, people in Germany only want large avocados, in the UK they prefer medium, and in China small is popular. Spain takes any size. Learnt some great new things, and we were given some avocados to take home with us – what an experience!

Winter is coming

The sun shines brightly, but in the mornings and evenings it gets chilly. No wonder that Zambians are stocking up on their winter’s clothes. In this roadside stall the main item for sale are gloves. Who would have thought that there is a thriving market for gloves in Zambia?

Road works

Road maintenance in Zambia happens less frequently than one might wish for. Especially the road from Lusaka to Livingstone has spectacularly bad stretches. In an attempt to let the users of the road pay for their maintenance a system of tolls has been implemented. Let’s hope that the revenues find their way to the potholes!

The Other?

I love this picture, taken during a play about witchdoctors. This is dr. Koko, and he is eating a snake while the audience scampers away in fear. The purpose of the play was to show how witchdoctors play on fears of their audience, and how they use props such as chemical reactions and rubber snakes to do that. But if you don’t know that background, what you see might well be the image of dark Africa: superstition, backwardness, scary occultism. That’s not the image of Africa that I want to spread. So… lovely picture, but it cannot be used?

Sunday afternoon

Speeding on the bicycle over the sandy lanes, with two bottles of juice on the bike rack – do you remember those Sunday afternoons?

(Btw I love the outfit: Millennium Falcon meets Pixie Pals…)

Photo taken in Choma, Zambia