Zambia World Wide

One incident I remember well was England Playing West Germany in a World Cup qualifier. During our stay in Mombasa this match took place. We had become friendly with an English couple staying at the same hotel, there were also a large number of German tourists at the hotel. Before the evening of the match there had been some good natured banter between us and the Germans. The evening of the match arrived and we decided to form a group, we went to the hotel lounge to watch the match (praying that England would win). It was a tough match and kept swinging each way, then the Germans started to cheer, Germany were in front and the match was nearly over. Suddenly they went quiet, England came from behind and took the match at the last minute. It was a great evening, we all had a good time and when the match ended the Germans came over and congratulated us on winning the game.

Our holiday in Mombasa was nearly over, and we are once again looking forward to reaching England and meeting our families again. We flew from Mombasa to Nairobi were we would have an overnight stop before flying to England early the following morning. The airline had booked us into the Hilton Hotel for the night which we were looking forward to, it’s not often a family such as our’s would have the opportunity to stay in such luxury even though it was only for one night. Unfortunately it went wrong from the start, when we landed at Nairobi airport the hotel was not there to meet us as had been arranged. We were standing outside the airport when a university professor arrived, he had just brought a friend to the airport. He asked us why we were waiting, he then said he would give us a lift to the hotel. He did explain that they would not be happy about us arriving in a beat-up land-rover. He was of course right, when we arrived at the hotel they made their views known. Talk about attitude after all it was their fault that we had arrived in the manner we did. However things went from bad to worse, the rooms were hot and airless, sleep was impossible and the food not of the kind of quality we would expect from a hotel of this class. In all honesty we would rather have spent the night in the bush with a tarp, a good fire and food cooked on a braai. It was a relief to leave for the airport the next morning. The drive to the airport was very interesting, the driver was knowledgeable and proud of his City and since we had time to spare took us on a tour of Nairobi on the way to the airport.

We had booked our flight from Nairobi to London with Lufthansa and when we went to the airport check-in to confirm our booking, were amazed to find we had been allocated seats in the first class cabin. I asked the clerk to check our booking as we had booked tourist class. He checked and said there was no mistake, that we would be flying first class to Heathrow. He then explained that the tourist class had been fully booked by package tour companies and therefore all full fare paying tourist class passengers had been transferred to first class. Although we were travelling first class we did not expect to receive the service provided to first class passengers, however we were wrong as we were treated in the same way as all other first class travellers. We all enjoyed the flight and never in the past had we had the service and luxury that we had on this flight. We had contacted our parents before leaving Zambia to give them our travel itinery. After arriving at Heathrow we would have had to travel to Great Yarmouth by train. Our parents had other ideas and decided to drive to Heathrow and meet us there on our arrival. We had quite a re-union at the airport and then set off on the drive to Great Yarmouth. Our parents had hired a mini-bus as they felt it would be more practical than driving to the airport in two cars. By the time we arrived in Great Yarmouth we were worn out we had been travelling for about 17 hours.

Once again my memory has temporarily let me down, Gary was attending a crèche in Kitwe and one day we received a letter from the owner of the crèche asking us to attend a meeting at the local school. When we arrived for the meeting we found that other parents who had children at the crèche were also there. It was only then that we realised something was wrong. The woman who ran the crèche had a cat which had died suddenly and no reason for the sudden death could be explained by the vet. Since there was a slight possibility that the cat might have died from rabies, it was decided by the health authorities to hold a meeting and explain the implications to us the parents. They explained that although the cat had been sent to the research laboratory for tests to be carried out, the results of the tests would not be known for about 3 weeks. That was too long as inoculation against rabies had to start within 10 days after being in contact with the animal, otherwise it would not be effective. We were then told that although the injections could begin immediately, there could be possible side effects which we needed to know about before giving our consent. Although it rarely happened, there had been the odd occasion when a patient had re-acted badly to the drug. If that happened then brain damage could occur and the patient would spend the rest of their life, like a cabbage. It was a difficult decision to make, do you subject your child to the slight risk of rejecting the drug or do you sit back and wait for the test results by which time if the tests came back positive it would be too late to start the treatment. There was a lot to discuss but we had little time for discussion, so the decision was made. The children would have to have the injections. The side effects were minimal to most people, whereas if the cat had died of rabies then anyone who had been in contact with the animal would die.