Food - Ground Nut

Groundnut and leaf

Get 5 tablespoons of ground nut, one of soda and a pinch of salt, one tomato, half an onion and leaves from a Chinese lettuce, spinach or best of all, rape. Put one glass of water in the pan and boil it. Add the salt and soda and then the leaves of whichever kind they had down the road at the market. Add tomato, coarsely chopped with onion and then the groundnuts. Dampen fire down and simmer, stirring whenever you think about it but think about it a lot until you feel there's something just right with the consistency.

Serve with nshima.

It has a beautiful verdant green and earthy taste, like the look of the countryside around the village when the sun glistens on the maize plants growing and in the puddles on the dark red earth in the rainy season, and smells, when hungry, in a sort of heavenly rather than bucolic way. A English spring-like dish perhaps or one from the last days of a wet English summer, I don't know and it doesn't really matter. It went well with a sausage. It feels like you are eating something mildly salty, tasting of nuts, that looks good for you in a stewed eternal life-giving sort of way. The mixture prepared carefully is thick and creamy, think cauliflower cheese sauce done right, and stringy in a good way, in that subconsciously, that's how you need it so that it sticks to your ball of nshima perfectly, just the way you end up liking it, if you do.

Versatile, there are enough subtle variations in this reliably delicious dish to give a chance, at good odds, of testing anyone's idea of perfection being met without it feeling like a test. It's a small but happy surprise when the taste attains these heights and that can't be a bad thing. Cleaning from your plate the last smears of the sauce becomes a small memory at the end of a meal, with your last ball of nshima and departing pangs of hunger; like half a roast potato with a crumb of stuffing and your gravy tipped up to form a pool in your plate waiting, during the final throes of a Sunday dinner main course, as the little men who you can sometimes hear if you listen hard enough, operate the doors to the stomach issuing the order to heave them too. It leaves you in a state free to wonder what to do next. Something else like that anyway. The dynamics are fun and the flavour is in no discernible way impaired by a plastic bowl or being heated up in a microwave. It is a fine and welcome food, but not suitable for those with a nut allergy.

Ground nut is relatively cheap and you can get it from loads of Chainda market stalls or shops along the road.

Food - Nshima

Nshima at Packachele Orphanage School 

This is nshima and it looks like mashed potato. It's stodgier though and doesn't taste like it.. If people eat in the compound they eat eat nshima. It is made from mealie-meal or ground maize mixed with water, cooked outside upon charcoal fires and constitutes the staple food in Zambia and much of sub-Saharan Africa.

Zambian women cook it and discuss it, criticising each other's behind backs, or praising it to the face in the same way as Yorkshire puddings here. It is the subject of a thousand chit-chats and complements and an anchor of time, the eating of it a reference point for the day, each day. "What time do you eat nshima?" - can be asked of anyone and it's usually eaten around midday meal or later in the evening. The day is often structured around it. It is eaten sociably or alone.

Each maker, my self included, has a particular method of preparation and many proudly possess a traditional and secret mixing and kneading technique with a requisite level of salt an all important ingredient. You can buy little bags or  big sacks of it and the more lumps you can manage, the more of a man you sometimes are. It fills you up quickly, it does the job, but it's of little or no nutritional value and has only a suggestion of taste, depending on the quantity of salt used. What it lacks in goodness it makes up for in carbohydrates and Zambians, it could be said, like their carbohydrates. Cake is very popular, welcome at any time, those times supported by the frailest excuse.

I know what to look for, what is required, from nshima and can now tell the difference between good and bad. I have made good nshima, judged by trusted Zambians to be so and critisised my sisters attempts. To comment on the quality of a person's nshima is usually the main entrance into their good books. It should congeal and roll into a ball but not stick to the hands and be hot, steaming hot. It retains it's heat for ages once cooked, by being covered with a metal container until time to serve.

There are political issues surrounding mealie-meal and the subsistence farmers growing it although I am not au fait with the issues. They have to produce a certain amount and sell to the government at a certain price. To turn maize into mealie meal you need access to a grinder. People in the compound don't have grinders or the finances to obtain one and neither do a lot of the subsistence farmers. The mealie-meal end product often has to be bought back by the people who grew it in the first place at a price they struggle to afford. This leads to hunger.

Kelly, the Dynamic Stars Academy coach lives on one Kw70 (£7.50) bag of mealie meal a month with which to make nshima daily. He eats nshima with his family, auntie, cousins and nieces in the evening around seven o'clock. It is eaten with side portions of vegetables - Lusaka beans (the best beans in the whole of Zambia, apparently), rape leaves, groundnut or spinach - and is rolled into a ball in one hand and dipped into the accompanying dish. There are no knives and forks. Three varying sizes of Kapenta (little whole dried fish) are prepared as a treat and more occasionally, perhaps once a week, on special occasions like somebody's birthday, or when receiving visitors, meat, usually chicken, or high in protein caterpillars will be served, both of which are quite expensive.

There are loads of chickens in the compound, almost as many chickens as children. The eggs they lay are delicious at least the ones I've eaten. I never knew an egg could be that delicious and one evening I had double eggs on toast twice, straight after one another and the taste sensation overrode any guilt from gluttony. I don't know what the chickens eat and seeing them wandering around the paths of the compound pecking, I'm not sure they do either.

Perhaps the finest example of nshima that springs to mind is that prepared by the cooks at Packachele Orphanage School, N'gombe, Lusaka. It was so good the first time that I would unashamedly plan my subsequent visits there to coincide with school meal times. As with many places in Zambia and traditionally as part of the Bantu culture, meals and food is always shared with visitors or strangers or those needing refreshment and sustenance. This is one of the main reasons why the people living in extreme poverty in the compounds of Lusaka and else where in Zambia do not starve to death. Hunger is frequent and malnutrition a  widespread and common concern but tribal and family networks are such that if you are short of food or hungry you can approach to your neighbour and ask for food, a request that is unlikely to be questioned, let alone declined. In the compound food is shared.

Shika somewhat reluctantly sharing some culinary secrets

News from the Bench

Dynamic Stars Report 

Christmas tournament has already started and next week we are going into the knockout stages but we are waiting for draws of the knockout stages which will be made this week. The tournament in very competitive and it will be more tough in the knockout stages where [there] are big teams like Real Stars, Chainda Bombers and the defending champions, Allstars, just to mention a few and the Dynamic Stars are the only team that are using the under-17's.

Christmas Tournament

Teams line up

The academy is growing big and the players are training very well and the people of Chainda are happy with the team. About 100 children are members of Dynamic Stars, others they do go to school but others they don't. For now we don't know the real number of those who go to school and those who don't. After we know the number, we will feed you back.

Francis Musonda

Junior Tembo

After we know the number, we will feed you back. About the injuries we are lucky that we have only one player who is injured (Eric Mweemba). The team played well and the Man of the Match of the three games we played was Francis, our captain. Mubita scored 2 goals, Francis 1 goal, Junior 1 goal, Michael 1 goal and Jacob 1 goal. So far we have scored 9 goals in the tournament and now we are waiting for the draws of the knockout stages.

Eric Mweemba 01-01-2014

 

Toys and Games

There are no toys as I think of them in the compound but there are games and maybe more than 10,000 children for them to go around. Santa doesn't really count in that part of the world. The children, as they invariably do, play their own games and if they want a toy, generally make it. There are no Lego kits. This is a far from comprehensive account of what children make, what I saw made, what it's made of and how they go about it. None of it is copyright.





Boys, all knowing best, with kites



•  Kites - these are popular and the open space of the village football pitch is windy and a favourite place to fly them. You can make a kite from two sticks, readily available in the bush,  plastic sheeting or food sacks, found in rubbish dumps or lying about at the side of the road. Tear to the size and shape of a triangular sail and attach to the frame by some vegetation or dried grass for cord. Job done! There is more than enough rubbish lying about and it's the boys that usually make and fly the kites. It's a popular spectator sport too and gets the kids together, both successful flights and failed attempts.



 

Jerry, with me supervising construction modification Type I to Type II

• Toy Cars - if you want to take the next step along from pushing a stone with imaginary wheels through the fine sand dust, whilst imagining skids and making sounds of engines revving, then you can find an old plastic bottle, as in the case of  11 year old Jerry's ingenius car in the photograph. He made it after school one day where he shares a bookless classroom and one teacher with 98 other children. The plastic bottle top wheels are held in place on axles made from old nails and the whole thing pulled over 2 miles each day to and fro his Grandma's and mam's  house down the side of the really busy main road. The wind, unwanted now, caused a thousand small accidents on the road with Type I but this was solved by my penknife and the addition of stones as ballast to the bottle. If you are lucky enough to get hold of some purpose built toy wheels or an old settee castor, you can always find or fashion a stick and push the wheels around before you. You will be the envy of some of your friends. More elaborate contraptions from budding engineers are cars made from old wire twisted together but this involves more know how, practice and skill and maybe a dad, brother or uncle with access to the materials. I wouldn't know where to start.

Jerry's car, Type II, test drive



 Lad with toy wheel

• Footballs - are the essential accessory, a good one to share and the homemade ones last much longer than any other. Simply find an empty woven nylon sack of mealie-meal or handfuls of dried grass and stuff either/or into a normal disposable plastic shopping bag. Compress firmly to improve bouncibility and form into a ball shape as best you can, before tying off in a knot. Repeat with several, perhaps six or seven, more bags ensuring the outer knot on the outer surface of the ball goes into the next one first - it will improve the roundness and weight distribution of the ball (easier to get what I'm on about here by actually doing than it is explaining here). Before adding subsequent bags, with matches nicked from your mam or on the charcoal fire, burn or singe the outer one lightly and evenly onto the previous one - bags can be added in this way as the ball gets worn out and it will last for longer and you can kick it around, sort of forever probably.  

• Dolls (bebi) - I saw a young girl, of 3-4 years of age, walking along the side of the football pitch towards the team bench one day. I don't know who she was or where she was going. She wore a chintenga, usually worn by women to carry babies, use as aprons, table clothes, hammocks or supports to carry things, food or shopping balanced on their heads, or just in case, or because that's what they wear. They are colourful and bright. You get one with the Chipopolo football team printed on them. I hadn't seen one though, on a girl so young before. As she approached  I had my camera ready to take a picture but as she passed and I saw what she had on her back I didn't. I don't know why. I turned the camera off. Into the top of the chintenga she had carefully placed a dirty empty and crushed plastic water bottle and into the open neck, a clump of dried grass, left sticking out as hair. I don't know who she was or where she was going but she was taking her baby with her and as she walked away there and I watched her, instead of wanting to take a photograph I had a feeling that was like the feeling you get when you want to cry but keep it inside but like I said, you don't know why. 

• Tyres - tyres lie around here and there when no longer on the wheels of cars and they last a long time. Rubbish, assorted in nature, can make a surprising variety of toys. Running around chasing a tyre with your pals can, it seems, create a lot of fun. A lot of children do it and then, when it's time for something else, another game or nshima to eat, leave the tyre for someone else, where they've finished playing it. They sort of make sense.



Dispute during Chiato being played at Packachele School for orphans and those with HIV

• Games - on empty market stalls and at the side of the roads, in the dust outside houses and scratched onto the concrete around school buildings, you can often come across drawn circles and little piles of associated small stones. These are the remnant scenes of a game played after the children have gone. It's Nyanja name is Chiato. It's a fun and satisfying game and I can now compete with and sometimes beat the best of them at it. A game for two or more people, each has 6 small stones or rocks typically 20-50mm diameter, shape unimportant. A circle is drawn on a flat surface. The idea of the game is to retreive, by flicking out of the circle, stones from within and the winner is the one with the most stones when the cirle is empty. The catch is that this must be done by each player in turn in between the throwing of the single stone they retain in their hands into the air and the catching of it. It's all in hand to eye coordination; it feels like trying to rub your belly whilst patting your head. To begin with a player throws one stone in the air and pushes his other 5 stones into the cirle whilst the thrown stone is airbourne, then catchs that stone, all in one movement and with the same hand.. On subsequent and orderly turns clockwise, whilst the thrown stone is airbourne, the player attempts to flick any one stone from the circle before catching the falling stone, again with one hand. The player contiues until he, or if it's a girl, she, 1) fails to catch the thrown stone, 2) the stone flicked from the circle fails to leave its perimeter, 3) moves more than one stone within the circle with one flick. It's easier to play than to explain and pleasing to be succeed at, even for one successful throw, neat flick and cool catch. It has the feeling of the children's national game. Adults don't really play it, they play draughts.

Chiato game being played

Many of the compounds children have to work and finding time to play can be harder work than work for some. They mend clothes, wash them, and, with the devastation caused by aids, are often the principal carers for younger siblings or other members of their immediate and extended familes. They may beg or break rocks into smaller rocks to sell as hardcore. They work on market stalls, selling cartons of beer, corn on the cob or fritters at the side of the road. Or on farms harvesting the maize and working the fields. They can be very busy. Their labour can save families money and bring more food in. Zambians are trying hard to lesson the incidences of child labour and part of the work of the academy helps to safegaurd and provide an alternative future and present for young children.

A girl watching the football unravels a cardigan or jumper for the wool and another at the pitch with a little brother or sister in tow.

Under 17's DSA team training

Under 14's Dynamic Stars Academy, pre-match warm up

The under-14 boys team warm up with a quick song and shuffle before a match against the Chainda Bombers, a team they hadn't ever beaten before. The red shirts and shorts, a donation by the Oadby Owls Football Club in Leicester, were the first full kit the Zambian lads had ever worn (socks were donated too but the chronic shortage of footwear to go with them is an issue). They have had shirts before but never in sizes that fitted them and as with all over the world, it's the bigger boys that usually get first refusal. I watched and laughed at a lot of 17 year old's trying, sort of like Cinderella's kid sisters but without the ugliness, to squeeze without success, into these jerseys. They won the game 4-1 and the shirts helped - you could see it in their faces as they passed the ball around. Little things like this make a massive difference to kids lives over there - it makes their day!