Saturday morning -- far too early!!

On Friday night after a lot of hassle and half the family being involved I eventually managed to book a taxi for 6.30 am on Saturdayto get me to the bus station. This did however highlight my need to buy a Zambian sim card as it must have cost me a fortune between texts and calls to explain to the taxi guy what I wanted and when!


I thought I was having to get up at silly o’clock as it was on Saturday to get to town but I was up even earlier than that with Gideon banging on my door at 4.00 am (much to my confusion as I thought I must have slept in). Jedone had taken a turn for the worse and they had phoned Gideon to take him to the hospital. They wanted to know if I had k300,000 which I think was needed just to get him in the door of the hospital. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much and needed to keep my bus fare as well so could only give them K100,000.

Anyway didn’t get back to sleep after that. Much to my surprise though, they actually turned up back at the house again about 6 am. I had thought they would have kept Jedone in but he was apparently not ill enough - by Zambian standards - for that. He looked awful to me and it was obvious turning up for the donor meeting had been too much for him. This is his third bout of Malaria in the last two months, and if he had been in the UK I am pretty sure he would not have been sent home. After all you can die from it!! I did ask if there was anything I could do and if they wanted me to stay. Fairly futile really given my nursing skills are pretty poor and I am sure Jedone doesn’t really want a stranger fussing round him!

Not surprisingly they said no so out I went to wait for my taxi, and wait and wait and.....Eventually it turned up at about 6.50 – after Clemet had to go and try and find them as they were lost. Not flipping surprising though with these streets. And just to make matters worse after turning up 20 minutes late they stopped for petrol on the way. Argh! I would have said something but felt there was no point and I didn’t want to run the risk of having to get out and push the taxi, as I know they only tend to fill up in small amounts!

Off course we were meant to be going for the 7 am bus, but unbeknown to me at this point I was fretting over nothing having thought I was going to make us miss it. Reason one was because Vivian works to Zambian time and turned up at 7.40 am. Reason two was a bus had just filled up and was leaving so we had to get on the next one – and they don’t go until they are full. So we sat on the darned thing for a full hour before we even left the bus station!! Can you imagine the chaos if the buses and trains did that back home. Trust me, next time your bus or train is delayed by 10 minutes or so just be glad it turned up at all! [Which maybe doesn’t go for Debbie whose trains sometime don’t turn up. :-)]

So if you consider that I was ready to leave at 6.30 am and didn’t get to Lusaka until about 2 pm that was a heck of a lot of travelling time for a weekend. It didn’t take much longer than that to fly from London!! We also had to get our 30 minutes of preaching on the bus before we left the station – preaching in a very loud voice I may add, such that my iPod could not drown it out! Most of it I didn’t catch although there was some mention of dying, which I thought was most encouraging when I was just about to travel 450km on dodgy roads in dodgy public transport!!

But we made it to Lusaka and to Vivian’s family, who were all very nice and welcoming and a whole range of brothers seemed to keep turning up to shuttle us around Lusaka – but I still had to wash in a bucket!!