My name is Muamba Phiri

I find it quite hard to process everything I have experienced in the last ten days to write down here in short. I have realised my strength in integration, and felt like I bonded with people of a totally different culture rather successfully. I learnt a lot of their language in a short amount of time, and they even gave me a Bemba name!

Zambia is a country of 72 languages, due to so many tribes. I was staying in a region called Samfya where they speak Ichi Bemba. I was making a series of short films for a charity called Camfed. Founded in 1993, it is the only charity of its kind to raise funding to educate girls in most need of an education when the ratio is 1 girl for every 10 boys that manage to go to school. Camfed was designed to help those girls who were most in need. A year ago a group of girls from a rural village were randomly selected to be trained to make documentaries about their community within their community, and I was there to monitor their progress. Their reconstruction of the life of Penelop was filmed and edited a year ago and they have been showing it to villages in the region, where most people are far too poor to even have televisions. It fundamentally raises AIDS awareness and the many social problems that stem from it. One advert read 'If you are not infected with AIDS, you are effected. Do not live in ignorance.'

I met some incredible women, and girls, who on first meeting were a kind and happy people. But what I found so hard to digest was the unbelievable amount of suffering most had gone through, and survived due to amazing strength of character. And to know that their experiences were commonly found not just around Samfya, or soley Zambia, but many African countries.

In the picture above I am with Penelop (middle) and Cindy. Cindy is 13yrs old. She is an attractive, intelligent and gregarious young lady. Her parents died when she was 3. Her uncle as is tradition took care of her and her brother, but did not care for them like he did his own children. He did not buy them school books, nor supply them with decent school uniforms. He would often beat them. When they arrived home they would have to eat the left overs his children had left on the table. By the time she reached the age of 11 she decided to leave with her brother and walk 15 miles to the nearest town where her aunty lived. Her uncle found her there and asked why she had left. She was not afraid of him, and said she would never return to his house again. Camfed found out about her and has been funding her secondary school education since. The producer I filmed with has already edited a short story of Cindy's experience that you can find if you click here. If you listen you'll notice she doesn't mention her uncle, she goes straight to her aunty and skips the first 8 years of her life. I didn't film it, but it's very similar to the stuff I did out there.