If I could summarize Lusaka in one word it would be fellowship. However, laughter, story telling, studying and resting are also good words. We travelled from Livingstone to Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, to visit three friends and their families. Two were Youth Ambassadors from Julia’s year: one from Zambia and one from Zimbabwe who lives in Zambia now. The third was a family friend who now works as a missionary by teaching at a theological school in Lusaka (his parents and Julia’s parents are really close so the families got together when they were kids and in fact, we stayed with his twin brother our very first night of the trip in Calgary!). We had just over a week there which gave us time to visit everyone but also time for the girls to do a bunch of school work.
We travelled by bus from Livingstone to Lusaka which was an interesting experience. We had nice seats looking out the front so we had a chance to see more of the countryside as we travelled. The driver was playing some music, though thankfully pretty quietly and it was interesting to recognize some praise and worship songs in his play list. Unfortunately the bus broken down and the driver and the attendant got us back up and running in about 45 minutes but about every 15 minutes after that the driver would stop, and take about 5 minutes to adjust or retighten something before continuing. Thankfully we were only about an hour and a half outside of Lusaka when that happened, but it did mean we arrived late. Compared to the Livingstone’s new bus terminal, the terminal in Lusaka didn’t really seem like a terminal and was in the middle of this big market which was busy and crowded as shown in the picture above. Our AirBnB host had scheduled a driver for us but he wasn’t there and we were unable to connect for him for about 45 minutes. Once we convinced the 20 or so taxi drivers that we were waiting for someone to pick us up and we didn’t need a ride they basically left us alone. We even had a local look after us, chasing away someone who was starting to get a little too close. Quite an experience but we eventually found our driver and made it to our AirBnB before it got too dark.
The next day we met at a coffee shop with the two YAs to reconnect and make plans for the families getting together. They settled on going to this nice park just outside the city to have a braai (BBQ). The Pa-Zuri Outdoor Park was down a few dirt paths but turned out to be part park, part swimming pools, part golf course and part animal park; so not what I had in mind when they said we would do a BBQ in the park!
Finding our picnic spot while waiting for the rest of the gang to arrive.
Restoring old friendships!
And creating new friendships! Even though the Zimbabwe YA had been in Lusaka for over a year, those two YAs hadn’t connected yet. They claimed they were waiting for Julia 
So it was new friendships all round for their families as well and lots of laughter.
Some things are cross-cultural: men standing around a fire with meat is one of them.
However, grilling meat with a giraffe walking by, that was a new experience.
Also a new experience was having to chase emus away from the food! One got a bag of buns off the picnic table and one even got a kebab right off the braai! Now I’ve had to chase away racoons from food in Canada/US as well as having to hang up food in trees to keep the food away from bears while camping, but emus!?! Thankfully once we got them some sticks, all the little kids started guard duty and would chase the emus out of the picnic area; quite comically at times.
An emu trying to sneak in from the back.
Sharing YA pictures and stories.
What a great day! We had so much fun and enjoyed wonderful company and great food in beautiful and unique surroundings.
On the two Sundays we were in Lusaka we went to church with the other family we had come to visit and once again felt blessed by fellowship and food.
The girls never pass up an opportunity to play games!
They also had an electronic piano and one of their girls was starting to learn the cello! So the girls had a chance to play a few instruments which was an unexpected surprise. Annika also practiced going through her slide show that she was going to do for her class back home which explained some of the highlights of the trip for her.
Some fun pictures: Julia’s family friend here in Lusaka is married to a cousin of one of Julia’s good friends back home so they sent a “wish you were here” picture and then Annika and their youngest daughter discovering they can both do the single eyebrow raise just like Phil from the Amazing Race
In driving around town with them, we had various occasions to stop for ice cream, one which had this fun sign. However, at another stop, the ice cream was so soft that in handing it off to Marika, the whole thing come off with a splat on the ground and she had to get another. Any parent with a young child who has lost their ice cream like that knows that the sign isn’t always true! Thankfully, our girls are old enough that this just elicited laughter!
During the week, one of their daughters took horseback riding lessons. After riding the camels in Jordan, Annika was wondering if she would also get to ride horses on this trip so when this opportunity arose, we jumped on it. They did take a tour through the woods, but these were real lessons. The more experienced kids started practicing jumping, but since it was her first time, Annika got to learn trotting.
With the trip starting to wind down, we felt we needed two more rest spots to help the girls finish things off for school. The little chalet we rented in Lusaka ended up having a very nice outdoor patio which we made use of for doing all our work.
Even after 10 months of travelling together and having to balance travel and school work, we still laugh together.
Science experiments like this put everyone in a good mood – making s’mores in a solar oven. We were unable to find graham crackers so the ginger snap cookies gave the s’mores an interesting twist.
Annika had finished her math already by this time. Her school back home sometimes used the online kids programming platform called Scratch as part of their curriculum. She had done a few projects already in previous years so we decided to dust that off and give her a project to do. After a bit of research she decided to create a Whack-a-Mole game (though the closest graphic she could find was a squirrel so it ended up being Whack-a-Squirrel). She put quite a bit of effort into it creating multiple levels that got progressively harder and she definitely advanced her programming skills in Scratch to take on this level of difficulty.
Looking over the pictures of our time in Lusaka for this blog, almost all the pictures are of people smiling or laughing which I think summarizes it pretty well. We felt part of a community, with being invited to a birthday party for one of the YAs and also out to lunch at a local brewery while the girls stayed with our missionary friends. We had such an enjoyable time meeting with these three families and will remember our time here with big smiles and full hearts.
PS – Even as we were leaving Zambia we still got a smile when we found this bag of coffee for sale in the Lusaka airport. Too bad she doesn’t like coffee