Sunday, July 8, 2012

Sundays in Zambia - Chipata Village


This post originally appeared in January 2010


In May we took a trip to the South Luangwa National Park in the Eastern Province. Luangwa is a game preserve – next week I'll post a handful of pictures from my experience there – you will note that my camera left a LOT to be desired. So mostly there are pictures of bush & trees where there may or may not be animals – except for the elephants – they showed up quite well!

Anyway, on our way to the park we stopped in a village near Chipata. This is the kind of Africa that all my friends were expecting. I kept telling them "I live in a city!" but this is what they wanted to see. Huts, dirt…



People carrying things on their heads…




What I saw were smiles. And lots of hard work. See the little girl pounding the grain? Hard work.



They let me try. It wasn't pretty. At all. Embarrassing, really.



I should never, ever complain about typing a letter at work. Or cooking a meal. Or shopping for groceries. At least I gave them something to laugh at.

4 comments:

  1. You look at home pounding that grain. Quite a picture.

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  2. I know what you mean. I just wrote a post about my air conditioner going on the blink and although I was really going for humor, I can't help but think how lucky I am if the AC is the biggest problem of the moment. You know?

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  3. Your Zambia posts always bring back so many memories of our time in Uganda! I was always amazed at what the women could carry on their head. I never saw men doing that though. But I did see plenty of men carrying a multitude of objects on their bicycles. Sometimes you couldn't see the rider for all the stuff. hahaha

    Yeah, just the act of getting water was an ordeal for the Africans. We had a bore hole well pretty close to where we lived, and it supplied quite a large area so women would walk a long ways (several kilometers) to get water in big 5 gallon jerry cans -- which they'd then carry on their heads of course.

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