Another letter we sent to our Swansea friends but thought you'd be interested too

Dear Swansea friends and family!

As we near the end of our Zambian phase and prepare to go our separate ways in a week and a half (sob sob!) we wanted to give you a flavour of some of the things we’ve been up to over here.

There’s been so much going on it’s hard to know where to begin! Firstly you’d be impressed to see how our host parents have us trained – sticking to 6 or 7pm curfew and doing our fair share of chores and (for the girls) cooking. In good old Swansea tradition we had a BBQ with host families a couple of weeks ago.

For this phase we decided to do three big Community Action Days, instead of lots of smaller ones as we did in Swansea. The first was our community welcome, held in a square in the town centre. This brought together lots of local people and organisations, allowing us to provide information on key local issues such as water and sanitation, HIV/AIDS and gender based violence, as well as GX providing lots of fun and entertainment of course.

Our second CAD was a ‘Smile Day’ at Mwagwero School for the deaf. We thoroughly enjoyed putting on a day of activities including drama, sport, jewelry and banner making for the lovely pupils.

Last Saturday we all became actors for our final CAD. The team prepared a variety of sketches to sensitise on HIV/AIDS, water and sanitation, sustainable farming methods, gender based violence and children’s rights.

Our Global Citizenship Days have been a great success and we've taught eachother loads about topics ranging from child headed households to witchcraft. During the GCDs we've also engaged the community through surveys, sensitising on the topics we've learned about and running a games session for children in a community school. We've also had weekly local radio interviews on our GCD topics and other key issues, so we're now famous in Chipata!

We’ve been lucky enough to be invited to a few weddings and Luchembe and ‘Zikalo’ (Dom now has a Zambian name!) impressed us by being part of amazingly choreographed and performed ‘line ups’ - eight young people performing Zambian style dances during the ceremonies and reception.

We’ve celebrated a few birthdays and also Ngawa’s engagement! All a good excuse for us to give the local nightclub some of our best Zambian dance moves.

The GX netball and football teams have been out challenging local teams at the weekends (we’d be lying if we said we’ve won every match!) and the UK volunteers have been getting used to Sunday mornings being spent in church.

We enjoyed our Mid Phase Review at a lodge just outside Chipata. As well as the weekend being packed full of sessions, we had a mini sports day and even managed some swimming and boating in the damn beside. Next week some of our debrief will take place at Mfuwe National Park, so we hope to catch a glimpse of lions and elephants.

All in all the team is having a wonderful time together and we’re going to be devastated to say goodbye to Chipata and eachother. We miss you loads, hope all is well in Swansea and look forward to hearing from you. Don’t forget to have a look at our blog www.swanseazambiateam94.blogspot.com where there’s much more detail about stuff we’ve been up to and even some pretty fine poems from the team!

Lots of love,

GX Team 94 xxx