Negotiations

Two days of intensive meeting with 16 of Eastern Province's most entrepreneurial retailers over. The Righteous 5am bus has delivered me to Lusaka. So what did I learn?

Firstly, that going to alone without Alex and Kenan would have been pretty much impossible. They, like all the other Zambians I've met to date, bent over backwards to help me out.

Shops in Katete and Chipata are painted concrete rectangles with painted on signs, set about 10 meters of orange dust and gravel away from the road. Some are treasure troves of pots and pans, toasted sandwich makers and watering cans, hand labelled with prices. Others contain very little at all, perhaps a big stack of fertiliser or a few pots of chemicals and seeds.

The people who own the shops fall largely into two categories; (a) quiet men, teens or early twenties, understandably tentative at diminishing their seemingly already tiny margins (they often had seemingly very little stock) and (b) assertive, bearded, second generation Zambian chaps of Indian origin who seemed established and successful.

My pitch seemed to go down relatively well and most seemed keen to be involved in the voucher scheme. I'll call them back on Thursday, which given my language barrier could be tricky. If this was a task on the Apprentice I might have been fired for not pushing hard enough for the deal by now, but somehow that didn't seem right in rural Zambia.

I visited a School to ask whether the voucher could also be used to cover fees and the idea received a relatively warm reception. The inner playground was piled high well yellow sweetcorn drying out in the sun - surely the kids get sick of eating that after a couple of weeks? Still, the well dressed children at the school seemed better off than those I saw rolling tyres barefoot down a rocky hill in one part of Chipata. I still can't work out why, but it seemed pretty purposeful. Maybe it was for the buses.

My own culinary experience was a bit better as I had my first taste of nshima, Zambians' staple dish. It's a white, 'stodgy' (is that a word? if so is that how it's spelt?) rice-like oatmeal and it comes with chicken, pumpkin leaves and various gravies. You eat with your hands, which for me turned into a bit of a shambolic mess on my plate but it was welcome after trooping around shop after shop.