Saturday was a good day, the morning main activity was to head into town with the kids and spend 10 000 kwacha on them each! Sounds like a lot of money, like enough to at least put down a deposit on a BMW right? Unfortunately not, but enough to buy some drinks and snacks and show them a good time. Each group went their separate ways and found creative ways to spend their money. One group headed to the markets and bought their kids some clothes, another group bought their kids 'tropicals' (what we call thongs. to Jenny the American's disgust!) my group paid to go to the local park and had a drink and biscuits. So all in all a great time. In the afternoon we did face painting and made balloon animals before heading out to a traditional village to see how they lived. Very interesting, good family, but the part where she said they just go into the bush for a toiletkind of lost the gloss from the rustic experience I was imagining they had! The bonus for the village is that every tour ends in the market (kind of like an African gift shop) where they forcefully cajoled us into buying their hand made crafts. We started to learn how to barter, but were all exhausted from the experience! That night we had dinner watching a slide show of photos from the week on camp which the kids all loved. Then watchedthe Jesus video in the local language (bemba). The kids all cheered when Jesus first came onto screen, such a good moment!
Our last day on camp started with a flurry of activity, all the guys had to vacate the main church hall so that church could go on! After the packing away of bags, blankets and mattresses I was amazed to see how efficiently the kids got into the clean up, it was like they went to autopilot sweeping out the hall then they kind of polished in this red stuff into the concrete to clean the floors with. Girls were lining up to get rags to polish thefloor with! We attended church and even sang our newfound favourite song 'double double'. Although I felt as though the kids weren't as keen on singing for an audience as they were in our own worship times.
In the afternoon we played some group games with the kids, 2 worked and the middle game I tried to get them to do included squeezing each other's hands and passing a signal down the line in each team. Needless to say this was far too complicated to explain through an interpreter, especially with boys who just really liked the idea of squeezing the life out of each other's hands! Later in the afternoon we came to the best part. The end of the Jesus video followed by going into our small groups and sharing with themhow to give their lives to God! And amazingly, all 40 responded to the gospel message and asked to become Christians and have a personal relationship with God!
That was the best part of the whole camp! That night we had hot dogs and soft drink for tea, shared stories from camp and packed the trailer's for the long journey back up to Ndola. We were in bed early and then woke up at 3pm to get the busses away as soon as possible. For the remaining 13 westerners, the Monday was filled with going to Chobe National Park in Botswana. It was such an amazing day after sleeping on the floor and feeling dirty, to go to an all you can eatrestaurant for lunch, really nice toilets and an amazing tour down the Chobe river seeing incredible sights like elephants, hippo's, deer, giraffe's, water buffalo's and monkeys. That night when we got back, we had the worst pizza that Africa could muster! But nothing could spoil our amazing experience.
Our last day included some shopping followed by the trip to the air port. Lots of waiting around and sad goodbye's and long plane trips. Got back to Aus late Wednesday night and now all we have are those wonderful memories and a mountain of pictures to go through and share with our friends!
Matt
