SAPEP Headquarters

Hello! Apologies for not communicating in a couple of days – last night we were struck by a double misfortune. Firstly the power went off (again), and then, to add insult to injury, our internet dongle ran out of money. It was a long evening.

Today we have the day off, so there won’t be much to talk about. Yesterday we went for a meeting in the larger town of Mazabuka, about 60km away, where we will be relocating to next week and where the SAPEP headquarters are situated. The attendees of the meeting were Eva and myself, Wilson, Oliver, Kenneth (who is the Mazabuka ‘version’ of Oliver in terms of job title) and Bernadette (the accountant). After the meeting, where we went over our plans for the remainder of our time here and where other issues to do with the charity were raised, we went to check out the guesthouse we’ll be staying in when we move. We weren’t particularly impressed. The room we’re in at the moment in Monze is alright – the room itself is large, and we have a bed each and a sofa; all that’s lacking is a shower you can stand under (we have to sit in the bath – when there’s hot water, that is) and there is the slight problem in that the kitchen, which basically consists only of an ancient electric cooker, is crawling with small cockroaches (hence our reluctance to self-cater). In Mazabuka however, our room is tiny and it looks like we’ll be sharing a double bed. The upside is that the kitchen looks a little better equipped.

a picture of our current room, as requested (although we don't have any pictures of the bathroom or kitchen)

We were looking forward to staying in Mazabuka – we figured that because it was a much larger town, people would be more used to seeing white people and we wouldn’t receive quite so many random marriage proposals or be followed around by children laughing and shouting ‘mzungu’ (which translates as ‘white person’ – we’re never quite sure whether or not it has offensive connotations). Although it was quite nice originally to be cheerfully greeted by everyone we met, after a while it becomes quite tiring automatically being the centre of attention and having assumptions made about your wealth purely because of the colour of your skin. Whether Mazabuka will bring us some respite remains to be seen.

What Mazabuka will bring us is a supermarket! We decided to drop in and buy ourselves some food, although as it turned out, the supermarket still didn’t have all the basics one might expect from its English counterpart. Eva was craving salad, but unfortunately they didn’t do a ready made one, and our kitchen doesn’t exactly lend itself to food preparation. She was also disappointed to find they don’t do multipacks of chocolate bars, and so an individual Kit-Kat had to suffice. I found a large bar of Dairy Milk to satisfy my chocolate habit, but it came at the price of 16 Kwacha – although this only works out at about £2, it’s about the most expensive food item I’ve seen in Zambia!

We drove back to Monze later in the afternoon, dropping by at Nina’s farm on SAPEP business: we were reminded just how idyllic it is. We only stayed long enough to drink a cup of tea and make an inordinate fuss of the dogs, but we were reminded of the offer to stay again. I have a feeling we might be taking her up on that after the next camp…

That’s about all for now – off for pizza later (we had a bran-flake day yesterday). Hope everyone has a lovely Saturday, and lots of love from us.