We’re coach-bound to Livingstone, 3 hours in and setting off from a services break where the sun is setting over the Golden Pillow Lodge. Although our visit ends on a romantic note, the majority of it was spent waiting in line for my turn to use a urinal, apparently be...

Anna here..

The past couple of days have been packed full of teaching, and have held, for me, one of the most rewarding personal experiences of the trip so far. Several days ago, Catherine (one of the piano teachers) had a rather difficult pupil, who decided she was not...

Hi all! A message from Steven…

It’s been hard getting my head around being in Africa. As a child I used to pour over atlases, comparing the sizes and populations of the countries and trying to imagine what these places were really like. The political boundaries imposed...

Hi, Alex writing here, on mine and Steven’s first night in Zambia! At the end of such a colossal journey, it was great to be picked up by Max and Anna in ‘the beast’, the vehicle truly living up to its name. This exhilarating (and bouncy) journey capped off the quite o...

Day 2, and the real work began!

Having had a relatively relaxed start yesterday, and not too many pupils due to the fact that all the local schools had just ‘opened’, as the locals say, today was a stark contrast. Starting at 9 in the morning, both Max and I wer...

I’m already being told what to write on what should be my blog and I haven’t even written a sentence…

Today we were up for a 9 o’clock start. A twenty-five minute walk from our accommodation to the academy woke us up and by the time we arrived we were raring to go. W...

Today was our first full day in Zambia and the start of our programme of teaching. After a rather long, much needed, lie-in following a day of travelling (only one spider attack on Anna so far!) we were driven to the academy. There we were introduced to two of the teac...

Hi, Max here.

It’s departure day for Anna and I. We arrive in Lusaka, Zambia, at 14:30 local time. Until then, we sit in Heathrow Terminal 3 twiddling our thumbs and staring forlornly at the roof. We met for the first time about an hour ago and have now turned to w...

Following independence and the end of colonial rule by the Bristish in 1964, Zambia was subject to an economic boom bolstered by its copper-mining industry. It boasted the 2nd highest GDP in Africa, and its government began to allocate funds to cultural development, wi...