The WaterAfrica Travel Team arrived in Lusaka on two different itineraries and we overlapped briefly with the Lake Grove Presbyterian Church group, which was just completing their trip to World Vision’s Sinazongwe ADP in southern Zambia.
We began our trip agenda officially with a meeting at World Vision Zambia’s National Office on Friday morning. It was a privilege to meet with National Director Mike Veitenhans and his staff. They presented an overview of their WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) work in Zambia and explained how it is shaping their work across southern Africa as they develop a “toolbox” of WASH “best practices.”
It was in this meeting that we first began to hear about what was to become a dominant theme in our conversations and observations: Partnership. The staff described a variety of contexts and ways they are engaging the Zambian government to share resources and expertise as they pursue community development work together.
Another important topic we heard about was World Vision’s increasing engagement of the Zambian urban communities about the needs of rural Zambians. The Staff seemed to enjoy hearing about our annual Walk4Water and commented that they might even explore an activity like that as they raise awareness and money for Zambians to help their fellow Zambians. We offered to return and consult with them!!!
When our meeting concluded we gave up our seats to a group of government officials who were meeting with World Vision right after us (it was good punctuation for our conversation about government partnership!!), and we took a quick detour over to Mike Veitenhan’s office so we could see one of our Walk4Water WaterAfrica Day proclamations hanging outside his door!!!
After that we walked over to the Child Sponsorship Office for a brief tour and overview of their work. This is the child sponsorship communication hub for World Vision Zambia and what an impressive operation to document and deliver every communication and child sponsorship gift! Child sponsorship is an excellent way to connect with one specific child and family and through this lens it allows a sponsor to see World Vision’s development work in action. Several of our team members are sponsoring children in the area we would be visiting, and these meetings with our children raised a number of interesting conversations and questions as the week progressed.
We had lunch and did a bit of shopping in the afternoon.
