Quiet Riot

I am still very much trying to figure out what my routine is going to be while here. Of course, there are many things about life in Zambia that can often throw a wrench into your carefully laid plans. The most obvious of these is the unpredictable load shedding and not knowing when you will and won't have power. Today I encountered a second unpredictable factor: student riots.

It is my hope that I will be able to regularly work on the campus of the university where Henry is teaching. I was executing that plan today, working on my laptop in an unused lecture room, also populated by a handful of students. This was going swimmingly until someone came into the room and announced that it was getting hostile outside. I immediately left in the hopes of finding Henry to discover that, indeed, it was becoming hostile. Students were gathering in large groups, and there was a lot of yelling. Students were beginning to create a barricade across the road out of the university. I narrowly avoided being locked in the engineering building as the faculty and staff locked up and left (fire codes are a different beast here and locked in takes on a whole new meaning). I got in contact with Henry and we quickly left campus as well.

Of course, the road to our house goes by the other entrance to the university, and the police prevented us from taking this road. We can only assume this was due to the student riots.

When the university is evacuated and you can't go home, the only thing to do is go to the nearest British pub and work from there!

More grapetizer, please!