9 mins
Changed by Africa
“I’LL never forget it. Watching children mixing sand into this dirty water and drinking it, just so they’d have something in their stomach. Even using bits of burst balloons as chewing gum.”
Jody is one of the volunteers who works at the Grassmarket Project, a social enterprise attached to Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh.
She’s talking about a recent trip six people from the project took into a remote area of Zambia to help the locals build a school for girls there.
“It was traumatic,” she says. “All these kids with no shoes, ragged clothes. You see it on adverts but it’s so different when you are there. When we gave them a hug they had no idea what we were doing. They live on their own, just the kids together in huts. They don’t interact with adults at all. There’s no hugs, they don’t even get fed daily - just a few times a week, no education. We’d play games, sing. They’d be clustered round our hut in the early morning wanting us to play with them. It was heartbreaking - but also the highlight. In spite of everything, they were happy and loving and welcoming”
Tommy Steel, senior manager of the Grassmarket Community Project, was inspired to organise the trip by a visit to Greyfriars Church by the Rev Jackson Katete from Zambia. Minister the Rev Richard Frazer suggested that Jackson and Tommy might be able to help each other out and the seed was sown.
Tommy spent the following year raising money for the trip, helped by the other five chosen to go. They had a sponsored walk and a sponsored sleep-out.
“It was really hard to get accurate costings,” Tommy said. “Their currency isn’t easily converted so dollars had to be a go-between and communication on the internet was, shall we say, intermittent!
“The risk assessment was something else. There can’t be many where you have to factor in being attacked by a lion!”
Finally, last September, the small group boarded a plane for Dubai - the first of many flights they would take that month.
We left Edinburgh on the Monday and spent the whole week travelling. Once we got to Zambia, we spent three days in a van driving towards the village of Tembwe in the district of Chama,” Tommy explains.
The drive was awful but the scenery was spectacular. We were really in Africa!
We were there to help build a school and sanctuary for young girls in the area to try to help protect them from child marriages and pregnancies from which they are at real risk.
“The school is still at a fairly basic level - the foundations are almost complete but the walls are not built. There were however several other buildings like dorms, the headmaster’s house and the toilet block that were in the process of being built in the compound and we were able to get mucked in and build doors, put frames in windows and helped finish off the main school foundations.
“The young folk from Edinburgh slept on the floor of a shed with a mosquito net draped around them at night. It was real jungle around us. In the time we were there a man was killed in the area by an elephant, another was bitten by a crocodile and a young baby passed away.
The old well
Some of the Zambian children met on the trip
“It was mind-blowing - and incredibly moving for us all. During the day we could see a steady stream of women - some of them hardly more than children - walking towards the huge muddy hole in the ground where the water was fetched from every day. It was filthy
“I had managed to send some money on ahead of our arrival to help with other local projects and we were delighted to find, when we got there, that a new bore hole well with a pump was being installed and fresh water was available for the first time. It was great to see the women begin to fill their buckets from the well instead of the dirty hole.”
One of the most beautiful and memorable moments of their time there was going to ‘church’. Church was a beautiful spreading tree that everyone gathered under to sing, pray and listen to the gospel.
“We were able to make some bench-like pews for people to sit on while they were under the tree,” Tommy said. “At one point we were taken to meet the village chief and presented him with some gifts. It was an amazing experience. I wasn’t sure what to expect but he was a very smart looking man in a business suit.”
“The children in the village were a real eye-opener,” he said. “There were so many of them around. They looked after each other. The local traditions there seemed to be that once the child was up and able to feed themselves, they were moved out of the family hut and into huts put aside where the village kids lived together. It was very strange. Some of them just craved interaction, cuddles. We were given some football strips and other football related things from Rangers and some balls and things from Hearts and the kids loved it. They were running around in their Rangers strips having the best fun. That night there was a lot of noise outside, but as the kids would normally run around in the jungle all night, we never thought anything of it. In the morning we discovered that they had cleared a section of bush and had created a huge football field. All without adult help. It broke my heart a bit that they had so much enthusiasm and were so inspired by a bunch of footballs and people willing to play with them
The Grassmarket team at Victoria falls.
“They were fascinated by the mobile phones and were all desperate to get their pictures taken. We thought it was funny until we realised there wasn’t a single mirror in the village. They wanted their picture taken because they genuinely had no idea what they looked like. I think we were the first white people to have been there. When we arrived, some of them were frightened because they hadn’t seen white skin before. But their natural curiosity and generous nature overcame any hesitancy and we became great pals very quickly. It was a bit of a wrench to leave them at the end of our stay. I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to do about that, because I have the distinct feeling I want to do something, and that my work there, in that little village, is not finished yet….” Tommy smiles.
It wasn’t all hard work though. The Grassmarket team were also taken on some safari excursions and some overnight stays in ‘bush camp’
“That was really wild,” said Tommy. “It took hours to get there in a madly bumping van and I think the towbar sheared off and the headlight fell out at one point because of the terrain….
“But the camp was right down by the banks of the Luangwa river. We got there in the dark but the morning was stunning.
“We had to have an armed ranger with us at all times, because it really was in the jungle.
One night there was a hippo walked round the back of the camp and another night there was a lot of noise from some of the animals nearby. The ranger told us to stay in the huts because there was a predator around somewhere. I was allowed to go with him to investigate. He seemed to be interested in a nearby bush - and I mean a NEARBY bush - maybe 20 yards from the camp. He started throwing stones at the bush. He told me there was something in there and that if he raised his rifle I had to run for the huts. Whatever was in there was obviously frightened off by the interest we were showing and the danger passed. In the morning we found that a hyena had been killed by a lion nearby. The ranger said it had probably been trying to steal the lion’s kill and the lion had had enough of the interference.
The tree that is ‘church’
“It was a real once-in-a-lifetime experience. Thank goodness!”
As they started the journey home to Scotland, the Grassmarket folk had one last treat in store. A proper bed!
“We stayed in a ‘glamping’ camp near the Victoria Falls - we felt like millionaires in the comfy beds - the first we’d had in weeks,” Tommy laughed.
“We were right beside the river and could watch hippos and elephants from the hotel as we ate breakfast.
We had a sunset cruise on the river, which just had the most fantastic scenery. No one had ever seen anything like it before.”
The month-long journey took the young travellers through Botswana, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Namibia. A safari trip in Botswana brought them sightings of just about everything except giraffes.
“We crossed the border into Zimbabwe to see the Victoria Falls. They were just immense - and we were told that, as this was the ‘dry’ season, they were about half the size they would be when the rains were falling.
“As we posed for pictures in the photo point near the Falls the spray was so heavy it was like it was raining on us. It was so wet it was ‘just like Scotland’ at one point!”
had managed to send some money on ahead of our arrival to help with other local projects and we were delighted to find, when we got there, that a new bore hole well with a pump was being installed and fresh water was available for the first time. It was great to see the women begin to fill their buckets from the well instead of the dirty hole.
Buckets being filled with fresh water top: The new water pump
The Grassmarket team were changed by their African experience. They were glad they had a home to return to. Clean running water on tap. Toilets. A roof over their heads and a front door instead of a piece of ragged cloth.
“It was tough emotionally,” says Tommy. “Sometimes they would just have to take themselves away for a bit of quiet just to process what they’d seen and how it had affected them. It was hard physically too, but I think it’s something they will never forget. They’ve all come home with an appreciation of just how much we have in comparison and how lucky they are.
“The villagers were happy - don’t get me wrong,” says Tommy. “The children were happy. But it left me thinking that I wish we could take a small drop in our standard of living in order to raise theirs a bit. I know life doesn’t work that way, but it would be a worthwhile trade-off.”
This article appears in the March 2020 Issue of Life and Work
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