MCZ Copperbelt launch

Micah Challenge Zambia is now embarking on a series of provincial launches across the country, and this week saw the Copperbelt provincial launch take place in Kitwe. We were joined by Joel Edwards of the EA UK and Andy Clasper of Micah Challenge UK, as well as the District Commissioner for Kitwe representing the Minister for the Copperbelt. The national media covered the story, but dwelt more on what the Minister ’said’ even though he wasn’t even there in person… but any coverage is better than none!

We’ve uploaded a few photo’s that you can see on our flickr pages.

Cultural viewing?

Now we don’t own a TV – but plenty of people (especially in urban areas) do, and so Zambia has just as many TV-addicts as elsewhere in the world. So in a spirit of cultural exchange I thought that you may be wondering what most Zambians like watching? We’ve talked about the perils of ‘exporting the empire’ a few times on this blog and TV schedules in Zambia are far from immune, but even bearing that in mind it may still be a bit of a surprise to know that some of the most popular TV programmes in Zambia are from World Wrestling Entertainment (what used to be known as WWF). We are pretty sure that the afternoon service at the church we go to was rescheduled so it wouldn’t interfere with the Sunday afternoon wrestling programme… if you have broadband and want to get a glimpse of what you may or may not be missing out on click here.

MCZ launch

Just over a week ago we were in Lusaka organising the national launch of Micah Challenge Zambia. It was a lot of hard work over a month or so, with us up and down to Lusaka and running round delivering invites and press releases. There was a conference for church leaders and then a launch event the following day. Unfortunately neither events were very well attended – Lusaka people are difficult to mobilise! - which left us all feeling disappointed after so much hard work. But hey that is the way it goes sometimes – despite the disappointments it was covered on the main national TV news and radio stations, and it officially launched the campaign, whilst also seeing a new Steering Committee elected, which in the longer term could prove to be more important than people on the day!

Lawrence Temfwe, National Facilitator of MCZ, being interviewed by the media

Newly elected Steering Committee of MCZ

How to get your own website

I’ve been thinking of writing a post about how to set-up your own WordPress.com website for a while (that is the software and hosting we use for this site) – it is so easy, free and whilst being simple also has some fairly advanced stuff too. It is also Opensource which makes it even better in my view. However, I no longer need to write a post about it as Dave Walker has – more specifically he explains how to set up a church website, but it’d work for a personal blog, family website or any website! Here is the guide and here is the example ‘church website’.