Compound Shops

Corner shop

These are some of the shops in the compound, away from the main market areas, the one's your mam might send you to to get something forgotten quickly or if an extra guest turns up for dinner after church on Sunday or Saturday or whatever day you go to church, whatever domination you are. It's where the kids get there lollipops and they are often open before the market stores have opened and after they have shut. They are the compound convenience stores, the corner shops.

 Many families supplement the food they can afford to buy with what they have room to grow around their houses. Some have small areas of land around the compound on which to grow maize or larger family plot further out into the bush away from the urban settlements. Other have familiy plots further afield or in their tribal rural villages and they will go their as families as and when needed to collect provisions or harvest the crops. Any surplus food can be sold or shared with neighbours, hence the shops, small family stalls and tables selling little bags of mealie meal, tomatoes or rape outside people's garden gates.

If you have maize you can cook it at the side of the road and sell it from there to passing trade in motorists or foot commuters. To turn the maize into mealie meal you need a grinder, an relatively expensive piece of equipment and a good source of income itself if you have one. I've discussed with Kelly the possibility of obtaining one for the academy. It remains a possibility. Other shop sell airtel minutes. There are no land lines in the compound and mobile communication is solely through pay as you go. Many shops sell this from k2 (25pence) upwards and the stubs of the voucher litter the ground with the beer cartons and plastic bags. Popcorn making machines are popular and relatively cheap and it's an ingenius marketing ploy to add pink food colouring to it - a real selling point for the kids. Try it at home, it works and it's sort of more fun. Chips, fried at the roadside shack are readily available and always eaten cold with the obligatory salt, loads of it, but no vinegar.

Blaya proud outside his family shop that magically turned up overnight over the road

Chickens are commonly kept and commonly lay eggs, these being sold at the shops. I've never tasted a tastier egg than those laid by Zambian poultry. I have no idea what they eat but you see them wandering the tracks of the compound pecking at it.  The chickens themselves are saved for special occasions or as gifts when popping round to somebody else's house for dinner. Caution needs to be excercised in offering this gift as you can end up waiting three hours for the bird to be cooked or having live chickens running around, waiting to be killed, after inviting guests to eat at your house.

One-man inconvenience shop closed

Children work in shops or help on their family's stalls or selling popcorn, corn, beer or fritters along the side of the road. Child labour is common in the country, especially if unable to attend school, something that Goal Zambia hopes to work towards addressing for the members of the academy. Wages if any are minimal and sometimes just in food. A friend of mine, having recently completed his grade 12 (loosely comparable with GCSE level) only declined the offer of a job with one of the market shops after long discussions with his family, who really need an extra source of income in order to send his younger sister and brother to school. The wages on offer were £15 a month. A bag of mealie meal, sufficient to nourish a grown man for one month, costs £7. The wage on offer was just, only just, too low. The cost of food in Zambia is not much different to the UK, in fact many commodities, un-dreamt of luxuries for the compound communities, and only available from the supermarkets and shopping centres, are noticeably dearer.