To celebrate the Bicentenary anniversary since Blessed Edmund Rice founded the first Christian Brothers’ School, seven students and three teachers from the Abbey Grammar C.B.S, Newry, embarked on a two-week mission to Livingstone, Zambia.
We were greeted in Lusaka by John McCourt, a Christian Brother doing excellent and benevolent work at an orphanage there. Brother Mick Doyle was our chief contact in Livingstone. We divided up into groups and were based in three locations – Linda and Libuyu Community Schools, and Maramba Youth Training College. The community schools were extremely deprived, with all six classes being squashed into a small hall and often having no desks or chairs for most students. Yet, it struck me on my first visit how happy the children seemed. Throughout the two weeks as we taught the children we were all given full attention. The enthusiasm for education was phenomenal considering their situation. The home medical visits and hospital visit were in sharp contrast. We found the hospital in excellent condition with plenty of space and beds, but very few medical resources to help the patients. The medical system seemed to be a two-tiered system – fee-paying and free. But most people in Livingstone could not even afford the taxi fare to the hospital. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom – our experiences at Maramba Centre were often more joyous. On our first day we were joyously received and the students performed some drama for us, along with some beautiful rhythmic songs. We spent a day in Maramba helping with construction of one of the school buildings. It was exhausting in the stifling heat, but the cheerful community aura of working with the students and their parents was an amazing experience. The day after there was an organised sports day at Maramba, and finally, after a thrilling penalty shoot-out, the Abbey C.B.S. Newry can boast that we won an International Soccer Tournament! St. Raphael’s C.B.S. was another key visit on our travels since it was the reason we were situated in Livingstone. The standard of education there was more comparable to our own rather than the community schools. We toured the classrooms and talked to students, and every single one of them seemed exuberantly happy and privileged to be there. They welcomed us heartily and were inquisitive about Ireland: they particularly seemed puzzled about our descriptions of the ‘lovely’ weather we have here! You can’t travel for 3,000 miles to the tourist capital of Zambia and not visit one of the natural wonders of the world: the Victoria Falls, or ‘Mosi-ao-Tunya’ (‘The Smoke That Thunders’) as it is locally known. It was a breathtaking sight, and the irony that there was so much water there but a few miles away from a city where water was a scarce commodity. All too soon our time was up, and we allocated our donation funds mainly to the community schools to help pay for teacher salaries, teacher training and student scholarships. We also gave money to the hospital, specifying that it be used for the purchase of medicines. Perhaps the most beneficial lesson we learned from our trip was an appreciation of how complex life in Zambia is. Hard work, time, effort, money and most important of all, a spirit of generosity would help towards solving problems in Zambia. The best advice I could offer anyone is to go out and experience it yourself. Seeing it in reality is very different from watching it on television. Back