Introduction
Lusaka is the capital city of Zambia. It’s located in central south Zambia. I was not doing the project by myself anymore because Jorrit and Justine joined the forces. We were now with 3 instead of just me. This means we could handle much more students at the same time and give more students the opportunity to participate in the project. We also received help from a local Zambian lady, Theresa. She helps us finding schools and to get us around Lusaka. She can also reach the children in Nyanja when some can’t understand English too well.
Monday
On the first day, we started looking and contacting community schools. Community schools are schools that are mostly established by parents in the local area. You’ll mostly find poor children and orphans there. We have contacted a school in Chawama called Bwafwano community school. We agreed to meet the next day at 9 am. We also went to see a school in Garden. The school was called Garden Community School and is relatively close to where we are staying.
Tuesday
The next morning at 07:00 we went to see the Garden community school and we’ve introduced ourselves and explained the project. We were most welcome to start right away. We agreed that we would come back Friday to start the project. We moved on to our next appointment on 09:00 and met the staff of Bwafwano community school. The welcome was warm and the student sang a welcoming song for us: “God gives double double”. The students here really seem to appreciate what they have. This school has only one small classroom with around 50 students. We agreed that we would start the project on Thursday with this school.
Many people may think that the schools in the capital have it quite good. This is not always the case. Bwafwano school is seems to be really poor with only one classroom with around 50 children. You really have to crop in there. Also, there is nothing in the class itself. There are a few papers with ABC on the wall and they have one crayon board.
Wednesday
On Wednesday, we went to purchase material to work with. We went to town and purchased A4 papers, Pencils, Colors, Erasers, Rice, paint and even more because the schools we work with cant manage to purchase these materials on their own cost.
Thursday
Thursday was the day the project started with Bwafwano. We got a warm welcome again and started explaining what we were going to do now. We found out that there were a lot more students than we had expected. But we didn’t want 
to select students right away. Let’s give everyone a chance and we’ll select artworks of the students we will work with later. Most students knew how to speak English pretty well but some had small problems understanding us. It was good to have Theresa who explained everything in their local language, Nyanja. We then handed out papers and pencils but found out we didn’t get pencils for roughly 50 students.. We didn’t count on so many students wanting to participate. Luckily, Justine came up with a great idea to break the pencils in half. We showed them the drawings we had from Parins school in Livingstone and hung them up to refresh their minds. The drawings started coming in around 1,5 hours later. After we collected all the drawings, we thanked everyone for their input. We told them that we would come back on Monday with the drawings that we would select. Shortly after saying goodbye, the students walked from their chair and started giving us hugs and saying thank you. We didn’t expect that to happen but it was really nice. Once we reached home, we started selecting drawings. There were a lot of them, roughly 50. Ps. We’ve decided to let everyone participate in the project. When we select drawings, the other children would feel left out and miserable. The project means a lot for them and we don’t want to break their hearts. That’s why we decided to give everyone a chance and let them work in groups!
Friday
Friday was the day we started the project with Garden community school. This school looks a bit nicer than the other community schools because it’s funded by a catholic church. The class was slightly different than the class from Bwafwano. Bwafwano had mostly young students but we found older students in this class. There were around 20 students, which was a nice because now we didn’t have to select drawings and disappoint someone. The students made really nice drawings. At the end of the day, we said thank you and our goodbyes. We are meeting them on Tuesday again.