A Compilation of Travel Journalism Articles

While in Zambia we traveled to a rural area named Sinazongwe and then to Livingstone; it was our home for two weeks. Through our adventure in Zambia, as The Traveling School (TTS) we immersed ourselves in the culture and bonded with the people, gaining a better appreciation for our lives. Visiting the Sinazongwe village we walked on dirt roads, danced with the women and played with the children. The people wore torn clothing that did not fit, children walk miles to go to school and water is treated like gold because it does not flow freely through the faucets of their thatched roofed homes. (Amsara)

As the air conditioned truck bumped down the potholed road, I watched the Zambian countryside pass by. Among Baobab and Acacia trees, children with threadbare cloths hanging off their jutting shoulder blades chased after our truck, smiling and waving. Heat waves rose off the melting pavement ahead of us and I felt thankful for the cool air conditioning washing over my sweaty body. This gratefulness immediately turned to guilt as I saw a girl no older than seven trudge down the potholed road, a baby in one arm and basket bigger than she was balanced a top her head precariously. Here I was, air conditioned, fully clothed and being rushed to a clinic for nothing more than a few stitches. (Phoebe)

There is also a lack of transportation in Zambia. Driving down the street of a local village or even a paved main road, I see women, dressed with billowing colorful skirts and carrying some laden objects atop their head. Men walk too, with heaps of fire staring charcoal held in the crook of their arm. They walk barefoot head up with a smile and wave for our vehicle as we zoom past.

My mode of transportation is bus with a 45-minute ride to school, including several stops along the way. I take the same route every morning for nine and a half months out of the year and extremely dislike it. However I wouldn’t trade my bus, and its persistent jolts, any day to have to walk five to seven miles to the nearest school morning and night.

For Zambians this is the inconvenient truth. After talking with my Zimbabwean driver Ted I was informed that his kids travel a long distance on foot to reach and return from school every day. I imagine for this reason that students find some enjoyment in the classroom and from learning. (Kendall)

While in Sinazongwe we visited a school. Meeting the bright eyed children I paid close attention to their environment. The school consisted of cement one-roomed buildings. Stepping into the roomed I noticed the cracked glass windows, leaning desks and squeaky door. Through multiple questions and answers, a student told me something that stuck and smeared like maple on a tree. He told me, to us as U.S. citizens their lives were hard, but to them as Zambians in Sinazongwe it was a daily process. During school hours some teachers would not appear, leaving the children with nothing to do in the classrooms. They did not have running water in their homes; a grocery store to walk or drive to and some couldn’t afford education. Yet it was not something to complain over. Whereas if I were in that type of predicament I would feel like my life was losing its value and purpose, not able to handle it. (Amsara)

We arrived at the school that morning to the sound of the Zambian National Anthem bobbing through the open windows of our truck. We watched through the right side windows, quietly packing against each other, pressing ourselves against the glass and listened to the unfamiliar tune.

The children were standing shoulder to should in a circle much resembling a half deflated beach ball, around a lonely looking metal flag pole, unaccompanied by a flag. The teachers all stood together and gave warning looks to the smaller children who were curiously gawking at our big blue truck, abandoning all attempts at being discrete. The older kids did much better with hiding their wonder by staring blatantly at their feet or looking around without letting their eyes rest on anything at all. (Mariel)

Roughly fifty children smiled back at me as they sung happy birthday in attempted English. My birthday was different from any other average American girls birthday. I wasn't showered with presents or given a fancy cake but rather serenaded by a group of children who come from a population in which only 20% of all children are educated in secondary school. I am spending the fall semester of my sophomore year in high school traveling around Southern Africa with The Traveling School (TTS). We had spent the morning plastering the walls of a four-room schoolhouse belonging to a group of school children on the outskirts of Livingstone, Zambia.

We arrived in our big blue truck and were immediately rushed into work, with the job of mixing concrete. The rickety shovel squeaked as we hauled large mounds of concrete into a wheelbarrow. Leaving three TTS girls to keep mixing the concrete, the rest of us entered the school pushing the wheelbarrow that looked as if it would break at any moment. (Alice)

I was handed a shovel, the handle worn and the color faded. Around me a circle of traveling School girls dug in their shovels and mixed sand. We clumsily added water and continued with our strenuous work. Behind us, school children peered over windows and from behind corners, as we mixed the cement. Our teachers had informed us that we were helping to build a school on the outskirts of Livingstone, Zambia. We were working with a program called Happy Africa. The program went into local communities to see what would benefit them. Since only 20% of Zambian students attended secondary school, Happy Africa had decided that a school would be beneficial to the community.

We were greeted by a man in a suit that must have once been blue but was covered in a layer of dust, so I couldn’t be sure. By the end of the morning our shirts would look the same as his. Once the cement was mixed we were handed a trowel and a flat piece of metal with a handle. Staring down at the instrument I couldn’t name, my inexperience became tangible. I wondered how many people could name the tool in my hand? Or how many had used one? The numbers grew smaller in my head as the sad truth dawned. In our complex fast paced world little details were getting lost. (Allegra)

Although it was hard, the work we did, and similar projects done by others, are important in countries like Zambia, where, according to CultureGrams, 24% of all adult men, and 40% of women can not read. As a person who grew up in a nation where literacy is, for the most part expected, I find this statistic startling. Although, when comparing colorful classrooms where names are printed on the desks and the ABC’s line the walls, to musty, half-built schools with minimal windows, and teachers who may or may not be present, its easy to see how these numbers are so high. Unfortunately, in my experience, many of the people who sat behind labeled desks do not appreciate their ability to read as much as those who sat between windowless walls. Much of this, most likely, is due to the fact that the colorful schools are free and mandatory, and the possibility that the child who went to the school with no teachers was the only one of his siblings to attend because their family couldn’t afford to pay for more. Imagine going to school knowing that your younger brothers or sisters won’t have the chance. (Mariel)

Walking towards the school, kids small and large congregate. Their clean white shirts stand out against their dark complexions. Bright eyes and wide smiles welcome us; laughter and words of foreign languages reach my ears. All of my attention is drawn to the bustling, energetic school kids until, out of the corner of my eye, I spot her. Standing alone at the edge of the schoolyard her vibrantly colored dress and bare feet draw my attention. Her eyes penetrate mine – wiser and older than her overall physical appearance. Long bony arms and legs, her dress sits on her sharp shoulders like a bag draped over a stick. A few moments pass as my teen-aged eyes lock with hers. Eyes of a child who has experienced much more hardship than I might ever see. I will never be able to understand her life completely. Growing up in different environments it’s like I am wearing yellow tinted glasses and she is wearing ones tinted with blue. The best we can ever see of each other are through lenses tinted green. Before I can even smile she turns and starts to walk away, showing the weight she carries on her back. A small bundle strapped securely on with a single piece of fabric, a sleeping baby.

My childhood was focused around the number of stuffed animals I had and the play-dates I attended. From what I observed in visiting the first through eleventh grades school in this small town, on the edge of Lake Kariba, childhood involves a lot more than what I experienced.

“At five kids go out in the bush taking care of cattle, goats and other livestock. Girls by ten know how to cook sadza and run the household, laundry, cleaning, all of it.” Japhet our driver replies, with a laugh, when I ask him what his kids’ as well as his own childhood was like, “we do not spoil our kids like in the US.” How true, it’s almost a tradition to give your children all they want in the States. We talk more, exchanging laughs and wide grins. “We teach and work our kids young so that when they grow up they will be prepared and can handle anything.” (Laurel)

After we finished applying the rough plaster, we had a few moments to interact with the children who attended the school. At one point I found myself in a circle of girls who were fifteen – my peers. Physically, they all seemed so much younger than me, having the statures of twelve or thirteen year olds, but their dark chocolate eyes and rough calloused hands told stories of hardship and hunger far beyond our years. I did not have much more than enough time with them than to exchange names, but as the tires of our truck turned on the dusty road, away from the diminutive cement school, there were many different thoughts on the minds of my classmates. The one wandering through mine was “What if I had been one of those girls? Or rather, what if one of those girls, had been me?” (Mariel)