The air is buzzing with excitement about the Zambian presidential elections on October 30th. As we were lunching on nshima (a thick porridge made of maize or “mealie-meal”) and impala meat in the café opposite our partner Hodi’s offices in Kitwe, a lorry load of brightly dressed ladies singing the praises of the ruling MMD party’s Rupiah Banda, cruised by to the good humoured hoots and jeers of the opposition candidate Michael Sata supporters in the café. The ladies responded with more energetic singing, gestures and laughter.

I’ve been asking school children, trainee teachers, grandparents and teachers what advice they would give to the incoming president. Predictably, perhaps, the school children advise him to invest more in education, the teachers suggest better wages and conditions for teachers, and the grandmothers caring for their late children’s children urge him to look after widows and orphans and take care of the price of mealie-meal, the price of which is a barometer of poverty or wellbeing.
But the trainee teachers I met in COSETCO had more constructive advice; they advised expanding Zambia’s agricultural industry and investing more in tourism as well as making sure that Zambia gets a fairer share of the income from foreign investment in the copper mines on which the Zambian economy heavily relies. Linety, in her first year as a home economics teacher, pointed out that it’s poverty that drives the HIV epidemic, and improving the country’s economy would go along way to countering it. It was lovely to chat with these bright, engaged, committed young people who are soon going to go out and teach in schools all over Zambia. And hard to imagine that they came from the kind of homes I’ve been visiting where there is barely enough money for two meals a day, let alone school fees, uniforms and books. It really makes me feel proud to belong to the organization that’s helped them get there.
And to put the icing on the cake, today we got this email out of the blue; “I just want to express my sincere appreciation for the support you had provided to me and the entire family through CINDI* ZAMBIA. I was under your programme through my primary and secondary education as well as my tertiary education at Kitwe College of Education. I’m now a teacher at a private school and my life is now much easier. I just want to express my sincere appreciation for the support you had provided. You saw me through my academic life and am now a teacher. I thank you very much because you have given me something no one cannot take away from me. May God richly bless you as you continue helping others.
*Our original partners. We now work through Hodi to deliver our education programmes.
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