Month: June 2016

Camped outside Lusaka at Eureka Camp site with Toy and Michael for a last evening together. We headed north the next day towards Luanshya while they spent the day working with farmers in the area who are investigating the possibilities of planting various fruit tree varieties, before they headed back home to SA.

Spent the following morning visiting with Dominic and Margaret Phiri, outside Lusaka. They pioneered very challenging work with orphan care under Hands at Work in the DRC in previous years and now work with YWAM doing mainly peer education, as HIV is still a major challenge in Zambia with unacceptable high levels of infections.

Zambia is showing signs of much developmnet especially around Lusaka area with new malls popping up all over. Mainly SA shops supplying same goods as found in SA at very similar prices.It is sad to hear about ongoing corruption and some are hopeful that the next elections might bring about some changes. When chatting with local Zambians about the evidence of self enrichment of the present President they just smile and say, “but he is the president”, implying that it is the way it should be. When we ask about the inordinate amount of giant billboards with his face on at every major inersection in the country, they reply that some people might be paying for them as a favour to him…and that is also perfectly fine in their eyes.

There are reports of escalating violence between the government forces and opposition supporters in the pre-election campaigns. When we ask about the details of the violence they speak about hitting each other with sticks! The people are generally peace loving and have never been involved in any internal conflicts, although there are 72 different ethnic groups wth 9 main tribes, making up 90% of the population.

We did however experience a number of attempts to blatently bribe us. Traffic and border officials being particularly guilty. We just smile and exercise extreme patience until they give up on us and decide to rather look for the next victim.

Zambia is an amazing country with the potential to prosper and to experience good economic growth once again.

[photogrid ids=”74,72,71,73,154″ captions=”yes” columns=”two” fullwidth=”yes” ]

Camped on the  Zambian side of the Zambezi  river and met interesting people whose families have been in Zambia for many years.

[photogrid ids=”70,69″ captions=”yes” columns=”two” fullwidth=”yes” ]

Met up with some of Michael’s Zimbabwean family at Mana Pools National Park where we camped for next 3 nights.

The park is stunning with beautiful big trees and amazing scenery on the banks of the great Zambezi River. It is the largest River from Africa that flows into the Indian Ocean, discharging 120 100 cubic feet of water per second.

Had most of the camp site to ourselves except for monkeys( who kept Michael  busy in a constant battle with his “ketti”)  and various wild visitors who joined us sporadically.

On the 1st evening, Marc accompanied me to check the donkey fire behind the ablution block. He wondered which animal had the yellow eyes he saw a few metres (literally!) behind us…only to find out a few minutes later as 3 female lions, out hunting, walked past where we all sat (about 10 metres away). We followed them with our torches (sounds crazy, but we were 11 people and I guess had a sense of safety in numbers, although I was told that I most resembled a “bokkie”). We  watched in horror as a couple merrily made their way towards the ablution block from the other direction, directly into the path of the lions. We shouted out ”lions!” as loud as we could and they turned around.  All very exciting!

We saw great game…many hippo families, elephant up close, a herd of buffalo, jackel and many beautiful Rooibok, Waterbok, Kudu and Eland.  Also a number of lion sightings, including a group of 13 lion. ( We were clearly blessed by our Father as He brought out His creation for us to admire because the campers who left the day after we arrived had seen very little game the whole week that they were there).

On the last evening we had a real bunch of animals troop through the camp…including a hyena sniffing for our supper bones around our tent and a leopard who walked through, as well as an elephant and a herd of Rooibok.

[photogrid ids=”68,67,66,65,64,63,54,53,52,51,50,49,48,142,143,144,146,147,148,150,152″ captions=”yes” columns=”three” fullwidth=”yes” ]