On our way out to a long day of errands we ran into a young man, Elvis, whom we had met on the street a few days before. He came to us barefoot and beaten up asking if we remembered him. Showing us his paperwork from the hospital, he explained he had been attacked by street kids who had taken his shoes. A teenage orphan in Grade 10, he is raising his three younger siblings alone, finding odd jobs to pay the rent and buy food while going to school. We gave him a pair of shoes and socks but he didn’t want to put on the new socks with dirty feet so he came into the guesthouse to wash up. We realized the shoes themselves have an interesting story. They belonged to one of the Monks who wore them to Africa last year and after finding them too small, put them in Monk donations. We brought them here and they came in very handy for the retreatant whose luggage did not arrive with her. When her bags arrived a week later the shoes went once again into donations in perfect time for Elvis.
Elvis in his new shoes
We stopped by the District Commissioner’s office to see if the statistic documents and a map of Ndola had been prepared. Alas, they weren’t.
We then spent the next three hours valiantly attempting to send out the blog.
(Our first blog attempt) Alas, we couldn’t.
We were starting to feel sorry for ourselves until we heard from the Monks that they are having the same experience back at the Monastery.
We decided to give up temporarily on the internet and take care of our chores, so we split into teams. One team went to Shoprite for groceries while the other headed off for the chitenge shop. After much looking, we finally found a Zambian-owned chitenge shop that sells only Zambian produced fabric. At the same store we found locally made pants that we bought for our upcoming work day in Kantolomba.
Our new work pants
After all errands were completed a few blog warriors went back to the Savoy to try again.
Back at the Savoy
It took us 2 hours to send the photos after which we headed home, had a delicious dinner, and called it a night.