It’s hard to believe I’ve been here less than 2 weeks. It seems like much longer. I guess the pace of life is much slower here anyway, but the heat makes the days quite tiring at times. So it was good to have a bit of a break on Saturday and visit a chimpanzee orphanage close to Chingola. (Well around 90 minutes drive – The place isn’t that far away, but the roads are pretty bad, so it takes that long). As well as the chimps, there was a fully grown female hippo called Billy, who is allowed to walk around the reserve, and was actually brought up by the owners living in their house when she was younger, however now she’s not allowed in the house, mainly as too big to fit through the door, and also no doubt because of the damage she’d cause. Hippos are actually the most dangerous animals in Zambia, killing more people than any other animal, despite hippos being vegetarians, so we didn’t get too close however tame Billy may seem!
This morning we were invited to Barry’s wife Freda’s church (she’s been going along to give support), and Mark preached, while I talked a bit about how I came to give up my job, and being in Zambia and Ruth played her guitar and sang a song (Blessed be your name) which was quite different to the Zambian worship style, but they seemed to still enjoy it and join in.
We’ve also been learning some Bemba (the local language here), and had a lesson from Freda on Friday. Having tried to study Hungarian over the past few years (and if you don’t know Hungarian, it is quite a hard language to get to grips with), I have found another language which appears equally perplexing to the English speaker. Some of it reflects the culture. In the Zambian culture it is important to greet everyone all the time, so it’s no surprise I suppose that there are the usual different greetings for the time of day as we have good morning (Mwashubukeni mukwai!) good afternoon etc, but also a greeting to people if they are sitting down when you enter a room, another greeting for if they are eating when you enter a room, another if they are working, another if they are studying…. I think you get the picture. Somehow part of the verb for each activity get’s added on to a stem greeting, plus it also changes depending who you’re speaking to. Do you follow? You can see how we got a bit lost!
Tomorrow we'll be heading out into the bush again, but this time to camp overnight for 4 nights, which I'm sure will be an interesting experience!
Please pray for: Safety; Team morale - both within our team and the Zambians that we're working with; Acceptance by the villagers; that people from a wide area will come to the events being put on.
Next time.....what happened in the bush!
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