The Dynamic Stars Academy

The Dynamic Stars Academy lads watching the ball, wherever it goes

Central to this whole thing is football and I don't want to drift to far away from that. Football is what took me to the pitch in Chainda and it's what takes the children and the people of the compound there. It's how I met the coach, Mukuka, and  many others. It's how I got to know people and it's through football they have asked for help and I want to provide what I can whilst the fun lasts. In sometimes overwhelming poverty, football is often the most important thing in people's lives after their homes and families. Football is like the opposite of the poverty they are in. It gives dreams that can come true when the goals go in and at anytime of the day on the pitch you can here the sound of laughter and singing, feel the anguish of open goals missed and watch the goal scorers dancing. In a country and community rife with Aids, Malaria and other diseases, where the everyday adversary death is often more familiar than the means and medicines to stop it, football is life. It may be all make believe, but it does give people something to believe in and through it people feel alive. They live on the football pitch whereas off it they often have to find food for their families to eat each week. For the people of Chainda, football is fun and this fun can help them to survive. Goal Zambia's overriding objective, in short, is to have a lot of fun wherever possible and see what good can come from it.

The pitch

The Dynamic Stars are the first academy that I got to know and worked with in Lusaka and I hope that this partnership will continue develop. What appealed to me was the ideas and aspirations the organisation have for the future and the way that they use football  to allow the children and young adults a chance to live more healthily and avoid some of the specific dangers inherent in the environment, communities and society in which they exist.

One of the first tasks I undertook on my return to the UK from Zambia after my first visit was to translate and edit the academies governing document and produce this, with the help of some friends, into an accessible leaflet form including some photographs I had taken whilst out there. This was then shipped over to Lusaka to be distributed in the city. The text below is taken from the leaflet and illustrates, in the academies own words, the work they do, the motivation for it and the aspirations and objectives they have as a organisation for the, hopefully near, future.

About the Academy

We are a sporting academy, formed in May 2012, and named the Dynamic Stars Academy by a committee of ten local responsible adults. The academy is based in the Chainda compound of Lusaka and currently train and play on the football pitch in the Avondale area. We provide a safe environment with experienced coaches and responsible adult supervision for local children and young people from all backgrounds to participate in organised football activities. Many of the children, with little else to occupy them, find themselves missing school and becoming involved in anti-social and self-harmful behaviour.

The Dynamic Stars Academy is committed towards helping children fulfill their potential by attending school and expressing themselves positively through sport outside of school hours.

The committee discussed and agreed that football was an ideal activity to unite children and young people socially and develop their self-worth, promoting achievement through teamwork and hardwork.

Our Objectives   

• To provide a safe meeting place outside school hours for boys and girls
• To educate boys and girls on the dangers of HIV and Aids by inviting relevent experts to give talks, provide information and discuss issues with them
• To encourage boys and girls to attend school and sit end of grade tests
• To educate boys and girls in the dangers of early marraige
• To make young people aware of the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse
• To give young people access to well equipped training facilities and skilled coaching, and to encourage participation in sports at all leavels of skill and different age groups
• As role models, to encourage children to adopt and develop good behaviour and discipline in all areas of their lives
• To enable children to fulfill their sporting potential at personal, local national and international levels
• To promote Christian values by teaching the word of God everyday 

Warm up song and dance

We need your help

We need your help. We have a lot of children registered for and many more interested in the football teams but as a result we have a chronic shortage of equipment and space to train. We currently share the single football pitch at Chainda playing fields, in the Avondale area, with many other groups and children from the local schools and area. We need urgent help with transport costs, financial support and to provide basic training equipment and playing kit.

We are still growing and learning as an academy but in the future we hope to have our own building and land. We are also trying to raise money for our own team minibus.

As an academy we are dedicated to the future lives of the children in our area and were not formed for our own self-interest or gain. We appeal to you as individuals or organisations to help in any  way you feel you can, financially or otherwise. Whatever is given or donated will be accounted for in full because evrtything is naked in the eyes of God. 

Dynamic Stars in action - friendly match

Fancy a beer?

Shake Shake Maize beer

 The above is a discarded carton of maize beer, the local traditional brew of many of the Bantu tribes of southern Africa, this one called Shake Shake and colloquially known as that throughout Zambia.You see hundreds of discarded cartons in the storm ditches and drains lining the roads of Lusaka and anywhere else that rubbish accumulates. It is the cheapest and most accessible alcoholic drink for the poor and is sold by children at the side of the road and in the most basic of drinking establishments alongside a choice of maize or cane spirits in little plastic bottles made to look like classier glass ones.They can't be bought from supermarkets. Both taste, to  my palette, vile. Imagine if you are 16 again and are sick onto your clothes through your hands as the room the party is in spins around about you. You then wake up on the kitchen floor in the morning with the stale alcohol vomit odour of the night before. This is what it's like and the nearest to how I can describe the smell of warm Shake Shake. It is not, in my opinion, the nectar, of the gods. It remind me of an image I retain of a starving lone desert wolf turning his nose up and scampering off unfulfilled after sniffing the carcass of a long time dead, dried and rotting camel in the Sahara desert Libya. An acquired taste would be another description. and acquired it certainly is by a huge number of people.

If you were to visit a bar with say 4 of your pals, you would each buy one of these one litre cartons at about thirty pence each. After the first one was finished by passing it around the group, the bottom of the carton would be torn off to create a little beaker. This would subsequently be filled and passed round then refilled until all four were finished. The act is social and people talk a lot and laugh whilst drinking it. They tell each other stories, catch up on news of family and friends and reorganise the national football side into a thousand different formations. Women are often frowned upon for drinking this in a social situation dominated by men. The drink varies from 3%-5% proof with the stronger not necessarily the dearest. It shares a  gooey consistency and opaque appearance with vomit. I bought my first carton from a shack near Kampala market and sat down in the shade to drink it with my friend, Ben, outside the railway station, leaning on the council offices wall. He shook it in preparation more than I have ever seen anybody shake a drink ever and like someone who had done it before, until I had to ask him how long he was going to keep shaking it for. He said for a little bit more. I gave the significant rest to a man stood unloading things off the back of an articulated lorry, my friend explaining how, being a muzungu (white person), I hadn't yet acquired the taste. He looked right pleased and sat down, smiling, with his feet dangling over the side, to have a break. I also tried  cane spirit, tempered with pineapple to make it bearable. It didn't and had the opposite effect to the one intended. It tasted like something pineapple flavoured that you shouldn't drink and smelt the same, reminding me of sticking model planes together with Airfix glue. Students and drink shake shake and play pool out of the sun under makeshift roofs all round the city. The shake shake bars have crates and benches in shaded shacks behind scraps of hanging curtains and a bloke in charge of the crates. You have to drink them quickly otherwise they start to leak and if you've got one in your rucksack, you have to find a spot to sit it quickly before your bag  fills up with sick.

I don't know that much about the drinking habits of Zambians but it seems that a lot of people have the drinking habit or abstain totally and in line with the religious principles dominant in the country, particularly in the compounds.My friend, Kelly, will discuss the dangers of alcohol abuse with the academy children and doesn't drink at all. To many, drinking comes from the devil. There is not really the culture of social drinking. Zambians tend to go home in the evening and stay there. They rarely go out to meet in bars or go dancing. Their is only one nightclub and i haven't been to it yet. Most people in the compounds cannot afford to drink and eat so they avoid it or drinking quite quickly causes problems. People are known in the village, by whether they drink or not. I have been doing some preliminary work in Lusaka, with the blessing of FASAwareUk, a UK charity promoting information regarding Foetal Alcohol Syndrome. Through this I have learnt that, as with many things in Zambia, problem drinking of alcohol is likely to be higher than is officially recognised. Pregnant women, especially in rural areas are encouraged to drink in order to give their babies lighter skin and the problem in urban areas is certainly underrepresented. As with Aids, a blind eye is possibly turned, by those counting. Not everybody gets counted and in a way nobody really knows how many there are to count, unless, of course, it involves some commodity for the tourist or western world to see, like mating pairs of Black Rhinos or elephants.

Annie's Bar

If you have more money you can opt for a 60p bottle of Castle or deliciously cold in the heat of the summer, Mosi. They're more like the lagers you get here and all over the world. There is a little bar, without a name I can remember,  halfway along the main road to the village, with a tele' showing football or speakers blaring African chart music out on the radio or the apparently globally loved Daft Punk and high tables made of crates of beers, covered with easy wipe clean canvas cloths advertising Castle lager and dodgy bar stools, the seat bits of which are broken and just balance there on the welded frames. I used to stop off at this bar to get out of the heat, nurse an ice cold beer after rolling it around on my forehead for a while and write things down in my notebook both to the amusement of the locals who don't really do either. I met a lot of people here and spoke to them. They spoke to me. I learnt a lot of Nyanja in here, talked a lot of football, took a lot of phone numbers, arranged meetings and misunderstood a lot of English. It was a good simple bar and I felt welcome there quickly and look forward to going back. I got to know the owner, a woman of about my own age. The bar was managed by one of her sons, a kind man with a friendly face; hard drinkers at work, locals, China, the opportunist hard drinking young barber from the barbers shop outside the door and his cool kid friends and those, like me I suppose, just passing through - the clientele. She lived on a farm further away from the city and I visited there one day and ate cooked salted belly pork made by her daughter in some sort of sauce. I have photographs of it somewhere and of her impala hunting trophies up there on the wall of her porch.

For the camera...

Goal Zambia: Dynamic Stars Girls team training, Chainda pitch, Lusaka

News from the Bench

I've just heard from Kelly, the coach of the Dynamic Stars Academy. This is a great thing. Lusaka is a long way away, about 6000 miles and communication is difficult with those in the compound. Very few have access to the internet and even less their own computers or laptops. To send an email, money would need to be found to visit the village internet shop, a shack with a man and a computer. About 2 months ago I managed to arrange delivery of a laptop, bought with donated monies in England, to the academy. Since then Kelly has been attempting to raise the money towards an internet pay-as-you-go dongle thing - the only way to get online in the compound - and a month ago he contacted me to say he had raised half the K300 (£35) needed. Goal Zambia supplied the other half. I got an email from him yesterday on his new laptop through his new internet dongle and it was a great. we will work towards regular news bulletins about the academy and teams and see what happens and I hope that this will lead to some of the players contributing to their part of this blog thing.

There are about 130 children in the Dynamic Stars academy, maybe more,  who regularly meet and train on Chainda pitch. They are not the only academy and the space has to be shared with the whole community. This takes a lot of Zambian time and Zambian organisation, on top of the training sessions and time spent talking to the children about social and health issues. Kelly does enlist the help of three coaches from within other academies for adults but finds it difficult to find time to email me. Access to the internet is unreliable and the electricity supply, where it exists, erratic. Many households live without electricity or share supplies with neighbours when needed. At 35, Kelly passed his Grade 12 exams earlier this year but communicating in this language is challenging for him. English is taught in all schools and spoken in "formal" settings across most of urban Zambia, where people have been able to attend school. However, it is always a second language behind the vast number of Bantu tribal tongues and whilst we communicate in English, I am learning Nyanja but I have some way to go before I reach the level Kelly is at in English. Learning Nyanja is exciting and there is a whole new language evolving in the city of Lusaka that is a mishmash of English words, pure Nyanja, Bemba, urban Bantu slang seasoned with all the other tribal languages that people in the city and country speak. It's known colloquially as Urban Nyanja and the first phrasebook came out this year. I go it and it's good. I've written all over it. The only problem with a new language being made up is that everybody makes it up differently so that the word you learnt from a bloke at one end of the street is different for the person you first use it with at the other. It's fun though. Written English is more difficult for Kelly to undertake and every email is a tremendous effort. Nyanja, the prominent tribal Bantu language in central south Zambia,  without a widely known standard written form, is rarely taught, and even frowned upon in schools so I hope that Kelly's contributions to this blog are of benefit to him too and perhaps the players who are unable to attend school. One academy member, Eric, loves writing and I want him to write some match reports if he can find the time in between playing football and writing about how to chat up the lasses. We will see.

Anyway, here's the latest news from the team bench of the Dynamic Stars Academy...

 

The Team bench

 

"hi steven am happy to see yo email u sent us on 8 th december it is nice to hear from u mate we have francis the top scorer in the previous cup games he was out standng amoung the big players even chainda bombers players they failed defeat us.am in town today from here il spik to erick,andrew  has scored in chrismas cup already and junior each 1goal mubita as well scored.tomorrow we are playing a big team at chainda  we must the game.all games are being played at chainda ground.tomorrow il send u email after game giving u the result.girls played last week a cup game organised by the americans we won books pens and soft balls for girls with calculaters i gave them to thoze who go to school.thank u for email."  (Kelly Mukuka - DSA Coach)

 

 Joel Simwanza in action against the Future Stars

The Zambian Flag

The Zambian Flag

So this is the Zambian flag then, for those readers who are at all interested, and as far as flags go, I quite like it. It's cheerful and it's colours seem to match the country. Some flags strike me as a bit crap although it does seem to fit in and seems evocative for the people of Zambia. You might like it or not, it doesn't really matter and i suppose I could have written about it before but I didn't and that probably doesn't matter either. Things are in no chronological order. This seems a good a point as ever. The first time i visited the country i was embarking on a new career in primary school teaching and had arranged, for experience, to work in two Lusaka primary schools. It was during teaching a class in the first, a school for children with, or orphaned through HIV/ Aids, that I learnt about the colours of the Zambian flag. I possibly learnt more at the school than the children I was supposed to be teaching, and i'll expand on that some other time. I taught them about slightly unimpressive wildlife in England and inadvertently, how to say words like "boat" in a Yorkshire accent. I overheard them arguing at play time about it and they were adamant that I didn't speak English; they did.  They taught me games and what to do when you find a poisonous toad, of which there are many  found. The Zambian tribes are suspicious of reptiles; they harbour bad spirits. 
Anyway, the flag, or the colours of it are as above seen fluttering down some street somewhere and the reasons for each are something like as follows:

• Green: Prety obvious really when you get there. A lot of plants grow very quickly in Zambia, during the rainy season, and they need them to, quite badly. If the rains fail, and they did in recent memory, a year in the 90's I think, and the country was a bit buggered. There is a fine and fragile line here. There is a lot of  wild bush where the elephants live. Giraffes and literally tonnes of hippos. There are literally about two and very precious as a result, balck rhinos. All their mates and ancestors have been wiped out someway or another.

• Orange: is for the seams of natural copper that are found in the north central and resulting main industrial  area of the country, the Copperbelt This, I believe, and all future rights to any more ever found has been sold to the Chinese. Copper ore also contains all the silver and gold in the country too and this was like a free gift with the copper. I'n no business man but the move doesn't strike me as the shrewdest.

• Black: this represents the Bantu people of southern Africa.

• Red: is the colour of the blood of the Bantu people that has been bled here and there in history, notably in the case of the Zambian flag, during the move towards independence in the second half of the last century. It wasn't the bloodiest of transitions but there were riots and people died. I don't know that much about it.

• Eagle: the Sea Eagle is the national bird of Zambia. Although there is no sea there are loads of Sea Eagles in the branches of the trees that line the Zambezi. That's where I've seen them. They sit up there looking like the national bird. I don't know anything more about the sea eagle and neither did anybody else in the class that I asked apart from them being brown feathers on the body with a white neck and head. People don't seem to get as excited as we do in this country about wildlife. It's not that they take it for granted, it's more like they just coexist peacefully with it. It's almost just there with them, or down the road. The regular victims of crocodile attacks don't though. Saying that, there is a zoo in Lusaka that I haven't been too, don't know who does and can't really get my head round but then there's a few things like that. It's true though.

A walk through Chainda Compound, Lusaka

Counterfeit Shirt Land

Street Sellers on Independence Avenue

Everywhere you go there are the green home shirts of the Zambian national Football team,  also known as the Chipolopolo, meaning "Copper bullets" You can pick them out in front of you, behind your back and out there in your peripheral vision. People will drop what they are doing to talk about the latest result or news, ditches stop being dug and buses are delayed; the Chipolopolo boys come first. The most popular shirt, by some margin, is the quite stylish green shirt with the vertical strip made an almost cult accessory by the success of the Chiopolopolo against the Ivory Coast in the 2013 Africa Cup of Nations, added significance being that it was the anniversary of a tragic air disaster that killed the whole team of the coast of Gabon in 1993. The country, it would not be inaccurate to state, are still in the throes of mourning and celebration at the same time now and a lot of different people get in on the act.

Zambia is counterfeit shirt land. Walking through the city centre one day I counted 13 different versions of the Zambian national football team in a half a mile stretch. Quality, from poor to slightly better but not that good at all and prices, from £2-£10, vary. What they certainly share is the market demand and the speed they fall apart in the wash although there is an element of luck involved. Fortune in Zambia, as elsewhere maybe, evidently scatters her gifts more with abundance than discretion. Everybody it seems wants the Zambian colours, and this gives them the chance. It gives the counterfeiters and sellers the chance to make a living too, so everybody is happy. The group of sellers at the junction of the Great East Road and Independence Avenue a mile east of the city patrol the queues of cars at the traffic lights. If you don't want a shirt, or have one already, they have puppies to, but real ones, not counterfeit. There are so many different copies that whilst I was last there and the new official Nike team jersey was unveiled, even the government, or Football Association to be precise, in a proclaimed attempt to combat the counterfeiters, released their own official counterfeit shirt. They claimed it wasn't a "counterfeit" but an "unbranded product" or something like that, begging the obvious question, I know. It gets to the point that if you want a replica Chipolopolo shirt like the cool kids, then the counterfeit is almost the more genuine article and if you have the official one you stand out like a sore thumb. It's all a bit topsy-turvy. Incidentally, an official Nike football shirt in Zambia costs around £40 or thereabouts, the same as here. The people from the compound, living on £1 a day, go for the counterfeits.

Kelly's House

Kelly's home

This is Kelly in the garden outside his house with the shirts of the Dynamic Stars hanging on the line and Gloria braiding her mam's, Kelly's aunt's, hair. Her name's Beauty. When she's finished, Gloria that is, she will sweep the yard. It needs it and she always seemed to be doing it whenever I called round. She wouldn't be happy with this photograph being included here. Oh well, i'll risk it. Kelly is the Head Coach of the Dynamic Stars, I think I mentioned somewhere before and here he looks pretty smart in his suit. It may have been a Sunday, just after church, or after a trip to the FAZ headquarters in town to register the teams fixtures, I can't recall. Anyway, they've got their own page on this blog dedicated to them and all things football. They are one of the greatest football teams in the world even though they have to wash their own shirts. All things begin somewhere, I suppose. Kelly lives here temporarily, he's looking for a new place, somewhere with a bit more room. He needs it for the football kit he has to store. The room behind him is small and he shares the single bed in there with Emmanual, his 17 year old cousin. They have a little black and white tele on the table at the end and that's all. Beauty and Gloria live in another building, out of view, with the rest of their family but don't ask me to name them all here, I can't. There are two very beautiful two year old twins that stick in my memory. They're are always loads of other children and friends and neighbours hanging around in the yard where there is a water tap. All the cooking and washing is done outside, in fact you can see the tin bath and the charcoal there burning. The house is on the dirt track on the edge of the compound and the yard is good because it offers a degree of privacy. This can be desirable, not least because it gives you somewhere to hang your laundry. The cost of housing varies considerably in the compound. At the lower end of the market a single breeze block room with a door and nothing else would cost in the region of £30-40 a month to rent. Some people, who make some money by whatever means, build their own houses and these can even have flush toilets and running water. Many people who get out of the poverty trap are proud of the village and want to remain near their relatives and friends despite the challenges and problems. It is their home.

Lollipops

Right, so here we go then, these are bubblegum lollipops and are particularly nice, apart from the disappointing middle. A lot of people like them, especially if they're yours and you offer them out. One of them, bought from Bhalya's little shop down the dirt track, lasts for the duration of the walk from home, through the local primary school playground and the maize fields, with the outcrops of rock waiting to be quarried and hammered into little pieces, through the houses of the compound, to the football pitch. You can find them in all the village shops. You can take your pick of colours and flavours because they all taste the same and the tongue changes to the colour of the one you have got. Slightly more bitter than the average English equivalent, there is more to them then meets the eye, or the tongue. The bubblegum in the middle of the hard boiled outer is more annoying than anything else. Kids tend to like it in a slightly rebellious way and mothers don't like it that the kids do. They are a way to meet people and if you head down to the pitch with a load of these in a bag it's best to keep them pretty well concealed. They cost half a kwacha, a tad over 5 pence each, but in real terms, handing one to somebody is like handing out a can of coke, a little beer, a friendly gesture.

Bhalya's  big bag of lollipops

 I first tried one when Fernando handed me one watching the semi-final of the Christmas tournament. It was his way of introducing himself and since then they, both the lollipops and Fernando, have played a significant part in my life in southern Africa. Fernando is a friend of mine and embarrasses me at Scrabble over and over again. He thinks I must let him win and sometimes I think I should have gone along with him. He plays football for the Chainda Bombers and pronounces the team name phonetically. So do I now. The Bombers (pronounced Bombers) are affiliated to the Dynamic Stars.

Things happen between Bantu people differently. Communication is not the same as here and I certainly don't understand it. There are cultural and tribal references, semantics and subtle cultural idiosyncrasies that leave me bewildered and it's in this area, more than any other, that the more I see the less I get it. It's sort of fantastic and makes the day fun packed and intriguing. Being alive, like the lollipops, is not quite the same in Zambia, meanings can change, although some things, like the bubble gum, remain the same. This is something I want to illustrate on this blog as it progresses because cultural differences and what remain when they are all stripped away cannot be over emphasised in the work we are trying to do together. I don't know how I am going to show that or if I am going to show it very well but I will give it a try and see what happens. At the moment I have a feeling that it has something to do with fun.

Where's Lusaka?

Lusaka

The city to the right, from the railway line

I Didn't know much about Lusaka and Zambia before I first went there early in 2013 and now I feel i know even less. I had to get the atlas out from behind the chair to have a look and could only find books to read by authors with very English sounding names and published by departments for "African Affairs".

If you consider that Africa is cut in two by the equator, then Zambia is in the middle of the bottom bit. It's about 6000 miles away from the UK or something like that and consists of two big bulges of land, east and west with a narrower strip joining them and 13 million people living there. Lusaka lies toward the south of this central strip about 100 miles north of the old capital, Livingstone, the location of the Kariba Lake and notorious dam. The Victoria falls might ring a bell and is found at the border with Zimbabwe. That's the place that tourists head for, if venturing to the country, aside from visits to the game reserves of the nearby Kafue National Park and Luangwa Valley in the north eastern bulge of Zambia, where they shoot the wildlife with cameras or guns. Other nieghbouring countries, clockwise from Zimbabwe, are Botswana, a interesting thin strip of Namibia, Angola, The Congo or whatever it's called now, Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique. The nearest thing Zambians get to the sea is Lake Tanganyika in the extreme north west of the country and this may explain the fact that I have never met a Zambia who can swim or could ever see the point in learning. Much of the country, outside the cities, is grassland and "bush", often consisting of medium sized trees. That's where the elephants and all their mates live. There is a high and urban and traditional rural population and strong tribal and family links between the two. Apart from Lusaka, the other major urban concentration is in the north of the central bit of the country, an industrial area rich in mineral resources, belonging to other countries, and known as the Copperbelt. A lot of people live and work up there. There are 76 different first languages in Zambia and an similar number of Bantu tribes. These come together in the cities where new languages and cultures evolve. The main tribal languages in Lusaka province and Chainda are Nyanja and Bember but both in an increasingly diluted form. More on that later.

Lusaka is a sprawling city with a population of around 3 million. It actually lies on a vast northern plateau at the same altitude as Snowdon in Wales. I use this to account for game being slightly off the pace when playing football with the 17 year old's. If you were to stroll around the centre for a day you would notice several things. There are two main parallel city centre streets, Cairo Road and Freedom Way. The former, named by some colonial bloke who dreamt of a road to Egypt, was where the colonial whites bought colonial white things from colonial white shops and the latter, where the blacks went shopping. Aside from the distinct absence of white people, they maintain there differences, both in appearance, background noise and the goods they deal in to this day. The banks, money lenders and children begging are on Cairo road and the builders merchants and cheap clothes shops on the other. Starting at the southern end of these roads and spanning the parallel railway tracks, after the single train a day has departed for Livingstone, lies Kampala Market where you can pick up anything from Kapenta (little salted fish in small, medium and large sizes), bones and potions used in traditional healing, the most delicious Nshima porridge with Lusaka beans at a little cafe shack, as well as the obligatory rubbish global AA batteries that you can squeeze together between two fingers, and all that crap. Backpacking tourists may show their faces here on the way to the nearby bus station. Most white Zambians will shop at the slightly out of town shopping arcades, more of which later, and pretty much the same as out of town shopping centres all the world over. The two main ones in Lusaka are found along the route of the other great landmark i'll mention here, the Great East Road, a behemothic dual-carriageway of a road that runs at right angles from the north of the city centre streets for miles towards the airport. I found it to be a gigantic blessing in disguise. If wandering aimlessly and eventually lost, you sigh in relief when you come across it and, if you can't find it from where you are lost, the first person you ask will invariably know where it is.

Freedom Way

Great East Road

I hope this serves as an introduction to the city of Lusaka and the country it sits in, but like I said, it feels that I know less now than when I started. Wandering around the city, I came across far more questions than answers. I'll try to remember to include some of what I came across another day. It is a vast, smelly, exciting and noisy city with a multitude of people in green Zambian football shirts with time on their hands, little blue buses and lives.

Chainda Compound

Chainda Market

Chainda is a compound, one of twenty-seven, on the periphery of Lusaka. Compounds are unplanned settlements or shanty towns. I don't know why, but I don't like the term "shanty town". The settlement was created in the late 1960's, when the people, from many different Bantu tribes were moved here from nearby land in order that the city airport could be constructed and now covers an area of maybe just less than one square mile. Officially 26,000 people live here although the real figure could be twice as high. It is difficult to count people in Lusaka, there are so many, and those counting tend to be selective. There are a lot of children in the compound and extended families of up to 10 children and adults are normal. 

There is a main tarmac road that pops the footballs and runs along the north and eastern edge of the settlement, and from that road a bustling cramped market, selling things markets sell, takes you into the heart of the village. Another tarmac road leads around the back of the village. The main hub of the village in enclosed within these routes, although there is increasing over spill as space runs out and new land is sought. Plots are bought officially, but then people can build what they want. The houses are are anything from shacks made from tarpaulins on timber frames, to larger breeze block properties, interspersed with stalls and shops selling little bags of mealie

meal and lollipops, toilets and bars and are connected with dirt tracks, dry and dusty in the dry season but a quagmire in the rains. Some of the bars are more respectable than others and have tele's showing football, whilst others are simply  local maize brew drinking dens with one bench and a pile of crates, hidden behind tarpaulin drapes. Any space in the village, aside from the footy pitch, is taken up with the small scale subsistence cultivation of maize and geological outcrops of rock that the women and children hammer into little pieces all day long, to sell on the roadside. In the dry season, the only moisture is that around the communal taps where the people get their water from. It took me a month to find a familiar route across it and my strategy when lost was just to follow my nose and hope to hit the tarmac at some point. It usually worked in the daylight but at night I needed a guide. The electricity is dodgy and there are few lights.

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Officially, there are two types of compounds in the city. Government compounds, as in the case of Chainda, have a police presence and and infrastructure such as schools and clinics. Non-government ones don't. Whilst they differ in amenities, they have in common extreme poverty. Unemployment is unimaginable high, many children work who cannot go to school and those that work do do for as little as £15 a month. A bag of mealie meal that would last an adult a month costs roughly £10.

The rainy season

I am not familiar with all the compounds in Lusaka but the atmosphere in Chainda is one of friendliness and in the morning I would look forward to walking along the tarmac road to it. I knew, without doubt that i would meet new people along the way and talk with them. I spent a lot of time there exploring. It is a village with a lot of people living their lives, going shopping, arguing about the price of second hand Little Princess rucksacks, cursing crap batteries they have for sale in the market and getting their hair cut. There are millions of things, more than that, to say about the place and I hope to write more about more of it in the future...the markets, the noise and the schools, the buses and the little shops that you go to to get your phone topped up and the best eggs I have ever tasted.

This, I hope, will serve as an introduction.

Live on the Radio

And so I went on BBC Radio Leicester to talk about all this. I've just got back. It was good and relaxed enough for the time to pass too quickly and leave me with a thousand things I had thought of saying, unsaid. If you're interested or like Dire Straits, here it is: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01ksjq8

Oh well. I thought of checking the iplayer but the program was unavailable so soon. I checked this blog thing to check how many thousands of people had viewed my last post, or hadn't, as it turned out and then checked my emails.

There was an email from a man, a stranger I had met on a train back in the early June summer and had talked with and about Zambia too. I left him with my email address and he contacted me to say that he has a laptop, surplus to his requirements and could I make use of it for the academy. It was fantastic and almost like magic. I like it when things like that happen.

Communication is tricky across the 6000 miles between here and there and my colleagues and coach cannot afford many emails and have to go to an internet shack to send me an email on their solitary computer. The laptop will be a giant step forward towards where ever we are going. I have a way of getting it there and from the donations I have so far raised we can afford to buy an internet dongle to get the academy online. Brilliant.

The like has happened before. I met a women and her friend on another train whilst reading Herman Hesse's Fairy Tales. I can't remember when it was but it was dark and you couldn't see out of the windows. She was interested in the book, one that, although being familiar with Hesse, she hadn't read and one thing led to another and I told her a bit about my life and she told a little about hers. She contacted me several months later, like in a fairy tale and donated some money. With it we bought the first nets the football pitch in Chainda compound, Lusaka, had ever had. Nets can make scoring a goal somehow different, somehow better and it was the first thing we wanted.

This is a photograph of the Chainda pitch just before twilight. Twilight is around the same time all the year through. The pitch is a very important place and I spent many hours on it. It is the only open space in the compound and many things happen there, not just the football. People meet and get to know each other there and the kids make kites and fly them. The road running behind the goal is the main tarmac road running through the village and to the city of Lusaka. A lot of balls meet their end on it.

Welcome to Goal Zambia!

This photograph was taken in Chainda compound, Lusaka, Zambia, in the English summer of 2013. It is the girls football team of the Dynamic Stars Academy, with their coach and my friend, Kelly Mukuka. They call him Coach Mukuka and everybody in Chainda knows him as such. If he's not at the pitch when you get there, somebody will know where he is and one of the children of the village will run off between the houses to find him. He will invariably come.

This is a new blog. It's about Zambia but I haven't got enough time right now to tell you much more. I have to go on the radio tomorrow and i'm a little nervous. I should perhaps give it some thought. The radio girl told me on the phone that the radio man would just have a chat with me about the work I was doing in Zambia. It would be just like a conversation and may have already been and gone by the time you read this. It should be fun so we will see what happens.

This blog is exciting but I don't know what form it will take or what rules it will follow. We will see what happens here to. I want it to give the viewer an idea of what we doing, where and with whom, in Zambia and what we want to achieve and what i am doing now in the UK as a part of that.
I imagine that it will contain more photographs and stories. It may have a song and some films, I don't know. At present it is a work in progress and in a way it would be good if it sort of stays that way, I suppose, in that the blog will evolve as time passes. I hope to depict the children and young adults of the academy, the community of Chainda and the place itself.

I had a significant email today from my friend Kelly. I managed to send him a laptop for the academy and he has raised some money to buy an internet dongle. This was the first email he has sent with the new computer and the email made me smile.

At present it is a work in progress and in a way it would be good if it sort of stays that way, I suppose, in that it will evolve as time passes. I hope to depict the people and the place.

All this blog stuff is new to me. I haven't done anything like this before. I'm not sure if there is an etiquette to follow or tricks of the trade to learn. There could be endless possibilities to do this and that so I will play around with it and find out. It's exciting. This is the first real Post and I considered changing the picture, although on immediate reflection I  won't because i've just written about the one above of the lasses in the team shot. I have a lot of pictures to choose from so i'll save that for another day.