Industry

This week has been a bit more mundane.

At work I have spent a lot of time on the telephone trying to agree the terms of the savings voucher for farmers. This has led to a couple of interesting meetings at the Soviet sounding Industrial Area of Lusaka.

It’s about as picturesque as it sounds. A maze of un-named undulating dirt tracks littered with car carcasses link up scrap yards, breweries and a Parmalat. Most of the traffic is from enormous trucks and brave taxis with soon to be broken suspensions. Finding a particular office is nearly impossible and for that reason I was almost an hour late for my meetings at Battery Express, Zambian Educational Publishing and Export Fertilisers. (It didn’t help that I thought that the former place was actually called “Patrick’s Place.”)

At the publishers I met some Zambian civil servants from the Education department and discovered that Zambia has Permanent Secretaries too. Whilst the building itself was dilapidated, the boardroom table was regal. To the table’s credit, by the end of the meeting it was pretty much agreed that vouchers for discounted school books would help to solve poor attainment in rural areas. Excellent.

The week’s exhausting conversations made me very glad of the opportunity to get out into the outskirts of Lusaka on Saturday to join the HASH House Harriers. HASH is a running (and drinking) club that seems to be a relic of ex-pat life. Everyone is given an odd pseudonym after attending a few times – this week “Bo Peep” was christened. We ran around a farm, watched by nonplussed Zebras and Donkeys, occasionally stopping to relocate the trail – part of the fun is apparently to attempt to throw you off track. When the run finishes there is a strange sunset ceremony where rugby club esque drinking songs are sung and various indiscretions punished with beer related fines. If this sounds strange, the reality was possibly a bit stranger.