Day 3 – Drive to Chipata

We left Lusaka at around 8:30am to make the 8 hour drive to Chipata. Chipata is 550 km northeast of Lusaka and 15m from the border with Malawi. The road to Chipata is a paved two lane road that takes you through a series of villages. The terrain is up and down, the bushes and small trees are green, but the land is dry. After seeing some of the modernization of Lusaka, the contrast of the villages is startling. It is hard to tell where one village starts and another ends. Most of the small thached roof huts – with nothing in them – are only a few meters off the road. There is still lots of land relative to the number of people, but the road seems to be the anchor to all the villages. Everyone walks alongside the shoulder of the road with fast moving cars, even very young children by themselves. We see a funeral procession in progress, several overturned trucks on the side of the road, children herding goats and cows. We stop in one of the villages to visit one of Moses’ and Bertha’s nephews in a private boarding school and stop for lunch.

Though the journey was long, it was an invaluable way to see how traditional African communities live. The sun goes down at around 5:30 which is proceeded by the amazing orange sunsets we think of in Africa, and the sky turns pitch dark almost immediately. We arrived at the hotel in Chipata at around 6:30pm. The hotel is new, and very comfortable, and seems totally out of place here. It was built recently as Zambia’s new President is from the Eastern province and to service tourism to a game park that is about 3 hours from here.

Tomorrow we are heading to Dwankhozi School to set up the clinic and meet the community so that we can start the clinic first thing Monday morning.