Zambia: Hanging around in Livingstone

After visiting Victoria Falls we still had a few nights at the backpackers so we decided we would spend it exploring Livingstone.  We actually hit the town on Labor Day so there was a big parade down the center of the streets we got to watch that for a while, then we spent part of the day relaxing and hanging out at the backpackers. In the afternoon we decided we wanted to do a village stay-where you go and spend the night in a hut of a local village and that sounded super intriguing to me so we went to this village who has a tourism "village stay" set up but too bad for us, the lady that ran it died like a year ago and sadly for them, she has not been replaced yet which meant we were allowed to go on a day tour but we couldn't spend the night.  Our guide was a local guy from the village who I ended up getting into a pretty deep conversation about how people in these sort of communities are stuck there because of the lack of educational options.  They have a primary school in their village but there is an exam you have to pass to get to secondary school, which many of the kids don't pass so they don't get to do to secondary school and then they have to bus to their school which many of the kids cannot afford resulting in a very small percentage of the kids in the village actually get the opportunity to go to secondary school and an impossible few get the opportunity to go to college after secondary school.  Most people remain stuck in that community, living as substance farmers with no regular source of income and no way to get further educated or trained.  Then he talked about how all of the good teachers go to private schools and many of the teachers that teach in local primary schools could honestly care less about the education that the children are receiving.  It was a very interesting conversation.  Anyways, about 5 minutes into the tour the entire village of children started to follow us and they were all taking turns holding our hands...Gregory Mortenson, in the book Three Cups of Tea says something about how after walking through the village he ended up with a comets tail following behind him, I love that and that is exactly what happened.  We got to go inside a house, saw and started to understand family compounds, got a tour of the school and met one of the school teachers.  Also I finally got to play soccer with some little local kids which was something I had been wanting to do since I got to Africa.

I met one older girl named Rosemary who was in grade 5 and spoke excellent english, she told me about what she was studying in school, about her life and how she like to play soccer and net ball.  She tried to corn-row my hair but realized that it wouldn't stay very well.  At one point while she was braiding, and I had about 15 different kids crawling around me, I caught sight of a little girl standing next to me who had what looked like burns all the way up one of her arms, and a brace/wrap around her wrist.  I asked Rosemary what happened and it turns out this little 10 year old girl got bit by a cobra and the venom from the snake has pretty much eaten away her skin so they did a skin graft from her thigh to try and help her arm.  So of course I looked at her thigh only to find a pussing and severely infected square where the skin had been grafted.  I thought I might cry because there was absolutely nothing I could do and it did not look good at all.  This community had no education and no health care which are basic necessities of life.

That was a great day though, it was eye opening and wonderful.  Those kids were so kind and loving and gentle.

After we got back from our village tour, we ate dinner and met up with this guy from Holland who was living and working there- he and a few of his friends took us to the river for sunset and it was absolutely gorgeous- the sky was this crazy combination of orange and pink and reflected over the water.  We hung out there for a while until it got dark and we went back to our hostel.  We found a Bow game board to I taught Anna how to play and ended up attracting a couple of Danish backpackers over to see what we were doing.  Then Anna got tired and went to bed and I spent the next three hours hanging out with these super interesting guys from Denmark that were traveling Souther Africa.  Danish is such a strange language and I have a soft spot for it since my dad speaks Danish but they were way into old music- they made me sit and listen to "The Wall" Pink Floyd album for an hour and a half non-stop.  But they were cool and it was fun to meet them.

The next morning we got up early and did a little bit of shopping at a local market- I got tons of really beautiful fabrics that I want to make pillow cases with and we indulged in every type of scone and muffin from a small local market before we headed back to the Victoria Falls bridge to cross the border and head to the Zimbabwe side- easy border, you just walk across the bridge.