Kineshis, Annel, me and Salim on a Saturday at work
Okay, so it has definitely been awhile.
Since my Livingstone update, things have been pretty hectic but good at the same time.
Over the past few weeks I have begun a new placement as a journalism lecturer at a college called the Golden Gates Institute - I am currently co-teaching the Feature Writing and Freelance class with a great prof named (well, nick-named...I don't remember his full last name!) Mr. Hacks. I have around 15 students and last week, gave them their first exam. So far the correcting process has been going well, but slow. Their handwriting is unfortunately basically illegible, so guessing games have taken me to predicting the marks I should be giving (for all you teachers out there, what do you do when you honestly cannot figure out the word and therefore the context of the sentence is not understandable?)
Work at The Monitor last week was incredibly busy - I was attending a press briefing nearly every day and managed to get in to the MMD campaign launch with Acting President Rupiah Banda (and of course this was also the one day I forgot my camera. Darn.). I have never been to such an intense, riotous and spirited rally. People were adorning RB chitenge, yelling, chanting and dancing support songs. He gave his speech and warned people to look in to the other candidates as he is the one who is not corrupt (yeah, right, that's what they all say...) and that he is the best leader for Zambia since he is already in a privileged place.
Prior to that I went to a delicious press breakfast at the Pamodzi Hotel, the "5-star hotel" in Lusaka. It was for a Parmalat milk launch for some new form of lactose product. Gross looking, really, but hey, the free fancy food was welcomed. It was a buffet style set up with someone frying eggs, tons of different kinds of meat, fruit, veggies, croissants...I'm not going to lie I sometimes love my job. Too bad the briefing was boring, but I have a new friend Wams who works at Q FM and we just made potential drinking plans for the weekend instead.
Saturday night was most likely the second best night out I have had in Lusaka. K and I went to a show with two guys from work called the Super Shine Festival - an all night concert with dozens of huge Zed artists like Mampi, Slap Dee, Mozegata, Ozzy and many more. We joined th throngs of drunken revellers and stayed til 5 a.m. It was great to see so much of what Zed has to offer; the music scene is seriously impressive here with loads of talented artists that I can't wait to tell the world about.
Last week I also had my first front page story in The Monitor about the MMD launch and wrote a story on a reggae festival (very rare here) that will be taking place on Saturday.
If you want to read some of my work, head over the the JHR foreign correspondence site at http://www.jhr.ca/fieldnotes/
