Zambia World Wide

At the risk of boring all and sundry with a continuation of my childhood memories...., here we go again!

While living in Mwinilunga as a child, I recall waking up one morning and looking out the window in amazement at all the cars that were outside our house. During the night the Belgians had evacuated the Congo and crossing whatever border was nearest to them, arrived in Northern Rhodesia. I think in our case the Belgians must have crossed from Muchacha into Northern Rhodesia and driven directly to Mwinilunga, I don't recall exactly which towns that they would have come from in the Congo.

The cars were parked in every conceivable space in our garden and our our road, the little town of Mwinilunga suddenly had 400 to 500 vehicles parked around it compared to the normal 5 to 10 cars that comprised the normal vehicle population of the town. No food was available for these new arrivals, my uncle, my father and another very close friend had to run relays in their one 7 ton truck to the Copperbelt in order to collect enough food and fuel to sustain these people until help arrived.

I recall the little airstrip outside town being used by UN Dakota's to drop food parcels and to land and take away the women and children, presumeably to the Copperbelt. Our family ended up with so many UN food parcels that when we eventually moved to Lusaka we still had plenty of these food parcels which came with us, they were tinned chicken stew with peas! My sandwiches for break at Woodlands Primary always seemed to be some variant of chicken stew on bread for what seemed like ever afterwards.

For some reason which still escapes me, my brothers and I along with our ever patient dog Touser, would often take to swimming in the rich guys swimming pools in our neigborhood at night. This whole operation required great stealth which would involve scaling a fence or wall and daring each other to silently swim the whole length of the pool before quietly slipping away over the fence into the neighbors house and back onto the street. Our dog, normally so obediant and quiet, this one time decided to bark with excitment while one of us was still in the pool; in a mad panic we had to exit the pool and climb the neighbors fence dragging the dog over with us running like demented idiots through the gardens and undergrowth. The owners of the house had young teenagers who came looking for us around the neighborhood but we were able to escape home without difficulty having had many occasions to practise for such expediencies, besides we outnumbered them so we cared little!