Read about how your placement and money contributes to helping an extremely poor community school in Zambia and to paying for the education of the poorest children

Matt Riddell / Teaching - Zambia / British

Christine Rabbetts / Teaching - Zambia / British

I think most people would love the placement, especially if you like children and working in challenging environments which lack valuable resources. But most of all for people who would like to see a very welcoming country in Africa and help make a bit of difference in an amazing setting, only a few minutes from the stunning Victoria Falls

Can you describe a typical day? We would generally be picked up at 7.15am by our driver Watson. Watson drove us the 17km out of Livingstone to Tongabezi school, which involved driving through the local game park, so giraffe sightings were a regular occurrence. The school was next to Tongabezi Lodge and the Zambezi River. The children had to be in school at 7.30am, although teachers didn't arrive until 8am as the children would read with the assistants till 8am. If we arrived in time I would go to the classroom and help with the reading. The duties varied between the different grades but were mainly assisting the teacher. I was asked to take a lot of the English lessons for grade 6, as well as marking and working with the slower learners.

All of the lessons were planned and used text books so we didn't have to do any planning. Lessons would sometimes take place outside in the morning as it was too cold in the classrooms. We would have break at 10.30am for 30 minutes where we sat in the library/staffroom with the teachers and had bread and tea. Lessons would then continue until 1pm. Everyday grade 6 would have English and Maths, then a mixture of French, Tonga, Science, Religious Studies and PE.

At 1pm we had lunch for 1 hour in the lodge canteen. At 2pm the children were meant to come back to school for afternoon activities, although not all of them did! The activities ranged from sport, although this was mainly clearing the field and marking out a track, art, poetry and performing arts. We set up an art club and a music club where we taught recorders and keyboard. It was great teaching the kids something new and seeing them develop from your teaching. We also did cricket and football with the older kids, and games with the younger children. Afternoon activities ended at 3.30pm.

Lindsay Black / Teaching - Zambia / British

Verity, Shona, Harriette, and Wanda / Teaching - Zambia / British

Joe Sladen / Teaching - Zambia / British

Janice Imrie / Teaching - Zambia / British

After a holiday in South Africa with a friend I had just 2 weeks additional holiday from work to devote to a voluntary project so I was very happy to discover the Travellers website and the possibility of being able to teach in a community school in Livingstone, Zambia. Travellers provided the infrastructure, safe accommodation and very friendly UK and local staff that made the difference, especially to someone like myself travelling on their own. I particularly wanted to visit Zambia, where I had lived as a child and teenager but had not returned for 30 years, but it was too personal a journey just to go there as an ordinary tourist so carrying out voluntary work in the community seemed the ideal solution. Despite my long absence from Zambia, after 30 years it all still seemed very familiar when I stepped off the plane at Livingstone airport. I think this familiarity with the country, the culture and the customs made my short project time much more productive and meaningful as I did not have to spend a long time adapting.

Livingstone is a small town with a colonial feel due to its main street of single storey buildings dating from the early 1900s and the Victoria Falls and surrounding area with all the activities on offer, makes it an ideal place for discovering Zambia and its people. Fawlty Towers backpackers hostel offered a great central situation - safe, comfortable, good food and welcoming and an ideal place for meeting other tourists and volunteers, as well as having its own centre on-site for organising trips and activities.

During my 2 week stay, I took the opportunity to visit the capital city Lusaka (where I had lived with my family) for the weekend for a trip down memory lane and also managed to do a few activities and tours in my free time in the Livingstone area. Lameck (the local friendly face of Travellers in Livingstone) provided an excellent walk-about induction tour of Livingstone on my first day, pointing out places of local interest, providing essential information and advice and, as a retired headmaster of a school in Livingstone, seemed to be known by everyone as we walked about. Having such a wise and knowledgeable person on hand to help made integration into the local community so much easier.

I carried out my project at the Community School which, just before my arrival, had been undergoing some renovation and building works as it had previously been a community centre and now was being used as a school. This work had been made possible by a combination of local funding and donations from a Norwegian aid organisation and an Irish school. I did not see any photos of the hall and rooms before renovation but I understand they had been in a pretty poor and basic state and that the roof had needed replacing. I learned that the community schools in Zambia play a vital role in providing education to those children that are excluded from attending government schools because their parents or guardians cannot afford to pay the fees or buy them school books or uniforms, or because they are orphans, many of their parents having died of Aids-related illnesses. Some of the children had missed years of schooling, for example to look after younger brothers or sisters, and so this meant that many teenagers had not had the opportunity to complete primary education. At this School, according to the head teacher Cathy, the only compulsory requirement (apart from there being enough places) was that the children had to wear clothes to school! The Zambian government does provide some funding to the school but they are never sure how much they will have for each school year, and when I was there for the beginning of the school year the only staff member that was currently being paid was the head teacher. The other teachers are all local Zambian volunteers who are very keen and dedicated but also suffering personal hardships due to not receiving a salary. I believe that the time I spent discussing issues, supporting and encouraging the teachers at the school was as useful, rewarding and appreciated as the time I spent with the pupils. 

After a few days’ delay due to the finishing of the renovation works and the official handing over ceremony of the school to the community by the Deputy Mayor of Livingstone, the new term and school year started. The school covers the primary classes of grades 1 to 7 and also has a nursery class, but due to some children having missed out on some of their schooling, the actual ages of the pupils ranged from 5 to 17. 

 When it is possible for the children and voluntary teachers to return in the afternoon, sports are organised. Most of the children are keen to do sport - football and netball being the most popular - and there are tournaments organised between the different schools in the area. This was my first experience of teaching in a school and although I was a bit apprehensive, in fact everything went fine and I enjoyed the challenge of being creative and innovative in a classroom and school with limited resources. The children have generally a good level of English but do not have the opportunity to practice speaking with native speakers. I found patience and lots of encouragement worked, especially if some fun elements were added to the lesson. I told them about my British culture, my home and work in France, Europe and the other continents I’d visited, and invited them to share their country and culture with me. They were very interested in the fact that I had lived in Zambia as a child and gone to primary school in Lusaka.

As I live and work in France, the head teacher Cathy asked me if I would be prepared to teach some basic French to the older children and also to some of the teachers that were interested so I gave a few lessons and was very impressed how quickly some of them picked up the basic greetings, numbers etc.  I was happy to be greeted in the morning by some of my students with a cheerful “Bonjour, comment ça va ?”!  I said I would try to find a beginners French language textbook and CD/cassette to send to them so that they could continue learning after I’d left. Singing was very popular with the children (I had quite a few occasions to listen to them performing), so when I noticed the French lesson was getting a bit too difficult for some of them to follow, I taught them the English and French versions of Frère Jacques which seemed to go down well and they could all join in.

The children were very enthusiastic about learning and obtaining an education which was refreshing to see, coming from Europe where we take our right to education for granted. They also had a long and sometimes difficult walk just to get to school every day – I had walked with the head teacher one day to the village where most of them lived just to see the conditions they were living in and to give me an idea of their situation and how it might affect their performance in the classroom. It took us about 45 minutes to walk to the village along dirt roads, and after a heavy rainstorm on the way back it took us an extra half an hour squelching through mud!  Sometimes, in the rainy season if the water is too high in the river, the children cannot get to school because the one small bridge they have to use is covered over.

Most of the families are living in small one room mud huts, with parents if they’re lucky, maybe with a grandmother looking after several grandchildren whose parents have died. The school sometimes has boy orphans staying in the hall if there is no one to look after them in their village. The living conditions for many in the village are very basic - one poor woman we visited was surviving with her children under a plastic sheet shelter that had been hastily put up because her mud hut had just collapsed. Even under all these very difficult conditions, we received such a warm and hospitable welcome and thanks for the work we were doing to educate the children. The Community School does in fact do more than educate the children, there is a wide social work aspect that the head teacher and teachers have taken upon themselves to carry out, to make sure that the vulnerable children have basic food, security and shelter, and it is very humbling to see this, coming as a foreign volunteer who has access to so many opportunities in my own country. The steady reliable funding is not there however from the government, and one extremely vital project they hope will happen soon is to have chemical latrines built as at present they only have 2 toilets for all the pupils and staff and they have to carry water in buckets to flush the toilets and for hand washing as they do not have the funds for connecting to the mains supply and paying the water bills. Given the campaigns the government were running about prevention of cholera when I was there, there was no monetary support given to the community schools to allow them to implement the procedures so the teachers were doing their best with disinfectant, buckets, soap and water.

During the two weeks I was in Livingstone, two funerals were held in the community, one for a pupil of the school who I understand had died of an aids-related illness, and one for two local boys from another school who had been tragically killed after being out on a bicycle in a thunderstorm and struck by lightning near the railway line. These tragedies brought home to me the reality of the life of many people in Africa and the fact that at present the average life expectancy in many African countries is less than 40 years old. It did make me reflect on my own attitude to my 50^th birthday coming up at the beginning of next year and I think I will adopt the African positive attitude of appreciating and enjoying each day and on my 50^th birthday celebrating that I have had the good fortune to reach such a “wise” old age and had such a fantastic journey on the way!

I would like to return to Zambia and the Community School in the not too distant future when I am able to take some unpaid leave from my work in France and possibly go there for a whole school term. To start to prepare for this I have decided to enroll on the TEFL weekend course in London through TEFL time, followed by the distance learning course with the aim of finishing the qualification by the end of this year. I will then look forward to putting those teaching skills into practice

Can you describe a typical day?

► 6.00am – Get up, shower and have breakfast.
► 7.15 am – Robert, the driver, picks up myself and the other volunteer Hamish (coaching sports at another Livingstone school) to drop us off at our respective schools.
► 8.00 am – The pupils who’ve arrived early have cleaned and tidied the classrooms and the hall and Assembly is then held.  The children line up by class in the hall, the national anthem and usually a hymn or gospel song is sung, followed by a motivational talk from the head teacher or one of the other teachers.
► 8.15 am – The children split into their different classes, 3 classes have to be held in the hall, as there are only 4 classrooms, so it is quite a challenge concentrating with 3 different lessons going on at the same time.
► 10.00 am – 10.15 am Break.  When they have sufficient funding the school also provides porridge for the children who may not have had anything to eat before coming to school and may have very little to eat the rest of the day.
► 1.00 pm approximately - Classes finish for the day.

Roniel Tessler / Teaching - Zambia / American

Adrian Miles / Coaching Sports - Zambia / British

The idea for the trip came about from my current college course, Fdsc Sports Science. Part of the course is to find a Work Based Learning project. A lot of students look at locally based work related situations but as I am an older and have experience in the business environment I wanted to test myself in a completely different situation. Having coached tennis at a local school I felt that a good idea would be to coach a different sport.

 I had looked at volunteer projects before in different parts of the world so when I was informed that I had to do my 2 week WBL project this academic year I killed two birds with one stone. I chose Africa for a variety of reasons but the main one being is the lack of opportunities available to them for sports. On the trip and in my spare time at weekends I rode an elephant, walked and stroked lions and went white water rafting down the Zambezi and went to Botswana on Safari, so quite busy!

The children achieved a great deal thanks to the donation of the balls. When I arrived they were playing with rolled up newspaper with sticky tape holding it together so they could at least get to play. Some of the children were playing football for the first time, not surprising when you realise that the average cost of a football is $60 and a monthly wage would be around $40. They learnt skills and drills and the director and owner of the school, Mrs  Q Chansa, was impressed with how keen the whole school was to take part in one of my lessons, so much so that on the last day of coaching we headed up to the new school plot where a full size football pitch was being marked out with shovels. The goal posts were made from tree branches and the lines were filled with lime so they stood out. A problem was the presence of green and black mamba snakes, highly dangerous as the pitch was in the middle of a wood, these snakes were regular visitors so we had some volunteers to beat the ground with sticks to scare them off prior to the children arriving, thankfully none were seen!

On a personal level I achieved a lot. You could say that 2 weeks is such a short time to achieve anything but I have left a piece of me in Africa as I arranged for a local football coach to come with me on the last day and take part in the training, his name is Hillary and he runs teams for his local church. I have his commitment that he will continue to coach the children at the school and keep in regular contact with me to let me know how things are progressing so the balls will be used very regularly indeed!!

 This experience has un-doubtly changed the way I think, hopefully forever. When you see children laughing and joking and yet at the same time missing one shoe lace which makes sports difficult it makes you realise how very lucky our children are. In these days of "I want I want" our children don’t experience the same amount of hardship and yet these children are very happy. One could argue that they know no different, but I do, that’s the difference and if they had half of the opportunities that our children get then I am sure Africa would strive forwards in education. I mean when was the last time a blackboard and chalk was used in this country?

 I can’t thank the donating company enough. They have made a huge, huge difference to the children in Zambia. This school couldn’t afford equipment of any description and as such the children did not have sport as part of their school week, thanks to the donating company, the school are now including sports in the timetable, specifically football and from what I have seen they have some talented youngsters. Even after the lesson had finished, these children wanted to continue to play after school such was their delight. If only everyone was as kind as this company and could see first hand the difference it has made

Jasmine Thompson / Orphanage Care - Zambia / British

Sahra-Luis Kerle / Medical Work Experience - Zambia / British

I cannot really pinpoint what has been the best bit of my placement, as everything has been really good. I had a warm welcome by the clinic and everyone has been friendly and helpful, so it has made the whole experience excellent! I feel I am gaining more knowledge towards my nursing course. I am able to experience a wide variety of opportunities to do with the clinic. This has ranged from working with the different staff members, meeting different aged patients, seeing different problems/issues, taking part in the diagnosis and treatment, assisting with wound dressing, lab tests, helping inpatients and being able to go out to the villages with the clinic.

I would definitely recommend this placement to other health professionals, as you get a real insight into health care and you receive such a large variety of experiences. This placement would definitely suit health professionals or those that are training to do something involving healing/helping people. The clinic is a worthwhile placement, being able to connect with the village people is amazing. The clinic is extremely beneficial if you’re in the health profession. I cannot think of anything else at present, it has been a great experience so far

Can you describe a typical day? I would get picked up from the backpackers at around 8am and usually arrive at the clinic before 9am. I would be assigned to a member of staff to work with throughout the day. The duties would vary depending on who I worked with, but no matter who it was, I received the full benefit of their tasks and job. You get to experience everything and anything possible, you can also ask what you would like to do and see and they put you in that environment. I usually get picked back up around 4pm. The day goes pretty quickly and there is always something going on in the clinic.