Pipe cleaner spectacles & cabbage trucks!!

Another cold week in Livingstone but the necessity to wear all our clothes at once in the mornings and evenings doesn’t stop us having a great time at the schools or in our free time. Apparently this is the coldest it has been for years! This week there have been 2 public holidays, Monday, Heroes day and Tuesday, Unity day, so it meant our timetable was slightly disrupted. The previous Monday we had asked the teachers at Linda school to tell the pupils that we would still be bringing the bus on the holiday Monday and that any kids who wanted to, could still come to school.

(Full story and images after the jump)

In the UK I guess the attendance would be pretty low, who would give up a day off school to read?? But here over 50 children turned up! We ran a Bookbus library for the day, (operated by Kate and Sophie, complete with librarian spectacles made from pipe cleaners, and a list of library rules!) This was a HUGE success and something we want to think about replicating elsewhere. It attracted a lot of interest from passing locals, most of who wanted to borrow books too!! We got lots of hugs off the children when we packed up for the day and were ready to leave. Then a whole herd of them accompanied us into the market where we were buying vegetables for our dinner!

Tuesday we took the opportunity to attend a traditional Zambian ceremony. The Toka-Leya people celebrate Liwindi in order to pray for rains in the coming wet season. The festival was amazing, full of colours, sounds and sights. There were thousands of people and very very few M’zungos (the local friendly word for white people). There were different tribes from all over the country, each with their own costumes, style of dancing and unique instruments! One of the most memorable parts of the day was getting from the village to the remote area the ceremony was taking place, this involved an impromptu ride of the back of a truck full of cabbages and singing cooks!! True Zambian style transport! The same evening we witnessed the spectacular lunar rainbow at the falls. Overall a day full of unique African experiences!

At Cowboy Cliffs on Friday we made an enormous village collage using the children’s ideas and lots of fabric, tissue paper and messy glue! This week glitter didn’t make an appearance, after the glitter riots of last Friday! The finished article was extremely colourful and now adorns the reception classroom. In the other schools we are continuing to encourage the children to write their own stories in the weeks between our visits. At Libala we have had some excellent stories, complete with illustrations, the most imaginative being about a hippo going on a tour of Africa and eating people’s houses! The boy who wrote that told us it was the first time he had ever written a story, he was 15 years old.

The children turning up on their day off to read with us and the kids writing stories in their own time to show us, just highlights the fact that this project is really bringing something worthwhile to the schools in Livingstone and seeing the mats full of engaged children, every day, week after week, makes you realise how much they really want to learn.

Kelly Geoghegan, Book Bus Leader