Let's All Co-Operate!

After a confusing start, we’ve had a rather relaxed day today.

We had arranged yesterday to meet Kenneth at 9am at our guesthouse, and around 9am the receptionist knocked on the door to tell us that Kenneth had rung to ask us to meet him at the local bus station down the road. So we wandered down, but he was nowhere to be seen. No surprise there, we thought, but after waiting for a while we wondered whether the receptionist had got her wires crossed and meant the inter-city bus station. Just to check, we started walking back up the road, when we noticed a Zambian man shouting from a distance. Thinking it was just another person chasing us for a marriage proposal (this is no exaggeration - it happens every time we go out), we kept walking, until I suddenly realised (much to my embarrassment) as he began running after us that it was the leader of the drama group from the other day. It turned out that it was he whom we were supposed to be meeting – Kenneth was attending a funeral (how he didn’t know about that yesterday we may never be sure). 

Anyway, apparently seeing as Kenneth was otherwise occupied we were going to be taken around by the drama-leader (whose name I unfortunately cannot remember as it is rather complicatedly foreign to me). Apparently it was International Co-Operatives Day today – the co-operatives are groups of farmers who join together to support each other and to receive benefits from the government towards costs such as fertiliser and seeds. However they are currently threatened by corruption within the co-operative groups and by the drought this year – the theme of this day was to emphasise how important it is for farmers to stick together and to encourage them to vary their produce from purely maize, so that when the weather is different they might grow crops which are suited to the conditions (after all the maize-based products we’ve been subjected to, Eva and I were greatly in favour of variation).

After sitting around outside the government offices for a while, the drama-leader told us it was time to go to (what he seemed to call) the ‘march pass’. We had absolutely no idea what this was, but followed him as he walked up the road to the outskirts of town. We eventually figured out that several farmers were supposed to be meeting in order to march through town to raise awareness for the Co-Operative Day – except when we arrived at the meeting place, we were the only three people there. An hour later, people started turning up (Zambian time, as ever) and so with much singing of farming-related songs, we progressed through town.

the march beginning to form

there were quite a few people...

we had a motorbike squadron leading the way

the speakers' area when we arrived

the drama group performing the welcome dance

We didn’t stick around for much of the rest of the day, as we couldn’t figure out what any of the speakers were saying (drama-leader had to go and join his group as they had been roped in by the Minister of Agriculture to perform a play, so we lost our interpreter). The rest of the day we spent sunbathing and making plans to go to Lusaka tomorrow…

...about which we are very excited! REAL FOOD! We cannot explain how much we are looking forward to this.

So, with this in mind, we’ll sleep with sweet dreams. Hope you all do too.

bonus picture of the day: Eva caught me trying to eat a home-made toffee I bought from George's yesterday. Enjoy.