13 January 2006

After Clinton and I got up today, we headed over to the internet café and supermarket to buy some groceries for next week since we were awaiting to hear back about the status of the external hard drive. We bought lunch (breakfast for Clinton who seems to have been “eating” Fanta for the past few breakfast) and when we got back to the apartment, we found Raja waiting for us. He told us that Aaron had tried to fix the external hard drive yesterday but with no success. He even took it out of the external casing and tried to access the content on the drive by setting up the drive as a slave on one of his computers. Unfortunately, the controller in the drive had fired, so he was unable to retrieve any of the content. Raja, Clinton, and I headed back to the internet café and emailed Farnaz and Kirky updating them of the new developments. Raja then dropped us back off the apartment and Clinton and I decided to go to UNZA to confirm the rooms and times for all of our presentations for next week (we figured it couldn’t hurt to double check).

We first headed over to Mr. Zulu’s office. Unfortunately, he was unavailable but his secretary took us downstairs to the lecture theatre where we would have the presentations on Monday for the school of engineering. The presentations would start at 9 a.m., as originally planned. She asked us if we would need a computer laboratory as well, but since the OCW materials weren’t ready, we told her it wasn’t likely. We then headed off to the department of natural sciences in hopes of running into Mr. Kalebwe. He wasn’t available either so we headed down to the see the head of physics. He kindly offered to show us where our presentations on Tuesday would be held (it would be in a similar sort of lecture theatre to the one we had just seen at the school of engineering). These presentations would start at 10 a.m., also as originally planned. Before finishing up at the university for the day, Clinton and I asked Mr. Chanda for access to the server room, so that we could ensure that iLabs was all set to go and get a few snapshots and other materials for our presentations. The iLabs server was in good working condition. The domain name, however, had not yet been updated so that icampus.unza.net/ilab wasn’t working. Mr. Chanda assured us that this would be taken care of on Saturday.

Since it was still early in the day, Clinton and I decided to head back to Kabwata, the crafts village where Raja had briefly taken us earlier in the week, to buy some gifts for our family and friends. There are little huts set up all over the village with crafts located either within the hut or right outside of it. Most of these huts are owned by men. However, on your left as you walk in, there’s a big hut which is solely run by women. These women decided to combine all of their crafts and work as a team, splitting the profits evenly among themselves. Of course, you still have to haggle with the merchants, all of whom promise to give you a good price but will rip you off if you give them the chance. I felt somewhat obligated to purchase wares from the women’s hut and support their establishment, though I must say that their crafts were of a high quality and they had much more of a variety than any of the other huts. I only bargained a little bit, mainly because after a while I just started feeling bad. The few dollars difference in the price in reality didn’t make much of a difference to me (I spend almost $4 each time I take out money from an ATM here) and I knew that the crafts were worth much more than the few dollars in the U.S., so I knowingly let myself get ripped off. I only hope that the money is put to good use.

After Clinton and I got back to our apartment, it was still pretty early but we decided to head off for dinner. Raja had mentioned that we might need to get to the Lusaka bus station by 5 a.m. the next morning in order to catch a bus to Livingstone so going to bed early seemed like a good idea. We walked over to an Indian place down Bishops Rd. that Raja recommended to us. There were about three guarded gates that seemed good candidates for the entrance to the restaurant. We tried each one in turn with no success, and then it started raining. We were ready to give up when we saw some people going through one of the three gates. As it turns out, this gate led into a local compound but luckily for us, one of the employees of the restaurant happened to be walking by and overhead our conversation. He explained to us that the restaurant closes daily from about 3 to 6 p.m. and as it was only a little after 5 p.m., they had not yet opened. He decide to let us come in and wait outside of the restaurant (protected from the rain) until they were ready to open (this was most likely because we were an extra source of income as opposed to the fact that we were hungry, but we appreciated it in either case).

The restaurant was very nice and the food was really good, and not surprisingly, both of these aspects were reflected in the prices. We were however, rather surprised by the almost 30% service and other taxes that were added onto our bill. It seems that in restaurants like this one, all of the tips are split relatively evenly among the waiters and other restaurant staff.

After dinner, we headed back to the apartment. I packed for the weekend and was planning on getting some work done, but soon fell asleep. Raja woke me up and gave me all the details for the Livingstone trip. He said we needed to be at the bus station b 5 a.m. (which I wasn’t too happy about) and gave me the name and contact info for the hotel where we would be staying. I spoke to him for a little while longer, told him to relate the information to Clinton and went back to sleep.