The move to Zambia is on

I really don’t have time for this but I need to mark this key point in the ColaLife story. I’m surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam of a major packing exercise and it’s hard to believe that in 24 hours we will be in Zambia to start the next phase of ColaLife – the preparation for the trial. For the next 2 years we will be based in Lusaka and visiting the UK, rather than the other way around. We’ll be arriving at the end of the dry season and Jacaranda trees will be in flower. It feels totally different to the time, 20+ years ago when we set off with three young children to live in Zambia for the first time not knowing is HIV/AIDS was transmitted by mosquitos or not. The world has got a lot smaller with email, Skype and so on. We’ll also be living in Lusaka this time so it will take us 40 minutes to get to the airport not 7 hours!

Lots of things have fallen in place over the last couple of weeks which means we are confident that we will actually get a trial underway – Memorandums of Understanding are either signed or in their final draft between the trial partners, we expect to collect the project vehicle in Lusaka on Monday, the first $350,000 of funding is confirmed and we are very hopeful that we will be able to announce the source of the last $1 million of funding very shortly.

To celebrate all of this I’m going to re-start the podcasts – you can listen to them here: https://audioboo.fm/tag/zambiadiary

See you on the other side!

[Image: Jakaranda trees on the outskirts of Lusaka, October 2010]