First days at Chishawasha!

Mauka Bwanji!  We’ve arrived at Chishawasha Children’s Home, the main destination of our journey (and apparently, the toughest to locate!). It’s a wonderful place with incredibly friendly people and about eighty curious, enthusiastic, motivated, happy, and sometimes a bit shy kids who have already begun to steal our hearts completely.

First off, as seems to be standard procedure when we venture away from the help of friends, the journey here was quite an adventure. Risina ensured that we embarked safely upon the most comfortable bus available to Lusaka, which was an 8-hour journey. There was no bathroom available except at the border between Zam and Zim, and we were each able to fit one of our butt cheeks on the seats. We shared the bus ride with a horde of very enthusiastic and friendly Zambian football fans and a stowaway rat (imagine the scene when a wave of women jump up, scream, and begin alerting each other in Nyanja, while the only two foreigners on the bus keep looking around and going, “what? What?” in alarm). We made it, finally, having lost half of our body weights in sweat, only to find that we were completely unable to reach our contact at Chishawasha to come pick us up. Over the course of the night many of Lusaka’s finest tried their best to help us find Chishawasha - about 10 taxi drivers conferenced together over the matter as we ate subway (a surprising but welcome comfort after the long day we had), followed by three very friendly nuns at ‘cheshire house’ – the best solution the taxi drivers could come up with – followed by a few drivers and fransiscan monks via cell phone. In the end we spent that night at a great hostel in Lusaka. We made it to the centre the next morning, and things have been fantastic ever since!

Chishawasha is beautiful – deep red soil remeniscent of PEI dotted by surprisingly lush grass and trees and gardens (especially given it’s the end of the dry season). Free-range chickens and lizards dart about between the seven houses that are home to 80 some-odd children and eight house-mothers. The grounds also consist of a main office which currently doubles as our temporary home, a chicken coop, a newly constructed building that will soon host some skills-builidng and workshop space, and the school.

Philip is our boss here, and he’s put us to work painting rooms in the skills centre that will become sewing classes and wood shops – fantastic for the kids to develop skills that will really help them be employable later. He’s also got a ton of projects in the works for us, such as some teambuilding and training for the teachers and house mothers, some leadership development and skill-building workshops for the kids, and maybe some counselling and music and art lessons.  We're beyond excited and brimming with ideas and plans.  It looks like we’ll have some amazing opportunities to share our skills and experience here.

So far, the highlights of our time here have been the evenings. The kids all live in houses of about 10 with a house mother to look after them, and each night, one of the houses invites us for dinner. We usually spend a few hours with the kids doing whatever they like to do – read, play games, do homework, play music, tell them stories about people who live in ice houses in Canada (just doing our part to perpetuate any stereotypes we can!)... and just generally get to know them. They tend to be a bit shy at first (probably because they’ve never seen a man with as much hair as Jimi), but once they get used to us, they really seem to enjoy having us there. And we’re absolutely thrilled for every chance we get to spend time with them!

We’ve really only scratched the surface of what we’ll be doing here, but it’s already been an amazing learning experience. Everything we see is raising more questions, and we’re really looking forward to discovering the answers. Each morning we sit over breakfast at 7am and marvel at where we are and what we are doing. We are just so unbelievably privileged and thankful to be here.

Well, it’s late and our days are long so we should get to sleep. More updates and reflections soon. Thanks for tuning in and be well.

- Much Love, Jimi and Jenny