The road system in Zambia is extremely simple. There are only a few major roads, and Lusaka on the road map is defined simply as a crossroads from which spring the 'Great North Road', the 'Great East Road', the 'Kafue Road' heading southerly, and the 'Mumbwa Road' heading West. I've followed the Great North Road almost as far as it reaches, straight up into the Northern Province, and turned off to the NorthWest reaching the town of Kasama. From here the road deteriorates markedly and is badly potholed. The last 250 km takes one to a T-junction. 5 km to the right is the town of Mbala. 25 km to the left however is my destination. Following this, the road drops quite swiftly through a thousand metres as you drop into the Rift Valley. Surrounded by the heights of the Zambian plateau is Lake Tanganyika. My road lies parallel to the valley and the lake and meets the shores at a small dusty down called Mpulungu, generally pronounced 'poolungoo', and we're 1140 km North of Lusaka at Zambia's only port.

It took me four years to get to Mpulungu - metaphorically of course. It's a one-day bus ride, and if you're in a car, I'd advise taking two days over it, breaking either at Kasama, or at the hot springs at the Africa House. Returning to Lusaka, I've usuallyThe road to Mpulungu - descending into the Rift Valley: This road just carries the port traffic from the once weekly ferry - the SS Liembe which you'll be familiar with if you saw the Hepburn/Bogart film 'African Queen'. Like most of the roads, its falling apart, though slightly better than the Kasama - Mbala managed the entire journey in one day. Mpulungu is the epitome of a Zambia that hasn't changed in 30 - 50 years. It will change, of course, but the changes that are brought here will not benefit it's people, and the tranquility of this as yet undeveloped shore will be lost forever. In recognizing both this and the futility of trying to maintain any status quo, that I endeavored to set up a field study camp here - at least to be able to bring my own students here - none of whom had ever seen Lake Tanganyika before. Another epitome of teaching in Zambia is the tremendous sense of lost opportunity - somehow everything gets lost in the 'making it happen'. Somehow there is always a resource gap between what could be made possible, and where we are now.

I'm moving away from the Option B: Medicines and Drugs of the IB Diploma Chemistry towards the Option D: Environmental Chemistry. The statistics show that students perform better on this option, and in discussions with colleagues, we've decided that aside from our own interests, we should offer options where the students are most likely to succeed. And our results are good - every year one or two (sometimes four) grade 7's, and last year I had no student below grade 4.

The Option D: Environmental Chemistry at first sight offers so many possibilities. I was set on planning a residential field trip to Kundalila Falls - a waterfall 450 km north of Lusaka (almost by the Great North Road) just after Serenje. With a long weekend, I had envisaged a combined calculator-based data acquisition workshop, together with water quality assessment. There are also opportunities for air quality assessment using lichen - much as I'd like to look at more automated and quantitative methods of air pollution. All these pollution markers could be compared to those measured in Lusaka. Lusaka is badly polluted, but I couldn't say beyond the qualitative - there is no measurement of pollution here. As was put to me when I first came to Lusaka, "Here in Zambia people die of many common diseases before we can even consider the effects of pollution or asbestos". Perhaps that's why leaded petrol is still in use - although unleaded fuel was introduced as a more expensive alternative a few years ago - I haven't seen much take-up. Most of the lorries are very old and belch out large street-wide fogs of black smoke. So there are no environmental controls in evidence here. However, this had been an exceptionally bad year for the Science Department - our main Physics teacher had to take his wife back home to India when she developed cancer, and we've been without him most of the year. I've taken on a number of IB Physics classes, and I've realised also our vulnerability in the event of losing even temporarily just one main teacher of a subject. Its also brought home how lucky we've been to have him as a teacher - something you notice especially in a prolonged absence. We've also been going through our school reaccreditation - which has been time consuming. I subscribe fully to the idea that if the effort does not go directly into enhancing student learning, then the effort is wasted. I also subscribe to the idea of school accreditation as a limited but important means of ensuring quality of learning meets international standards. Somehow the amount of paper chasing we've done over the last 15 months suggests the pendulum has swung the wrong way. At any rate I feel like Bilbo Baggins when he describes himself as feeling like butter that's been spread over too much bread. With such handicaps, the residential field trip has remained in my mind only. Perhaps with so many mishaps this year, I've just lost my sense of perspective.

Field trips in Zambia have an added unpredictability about them. Our long serving Mutsubishi Rosa bus broke down in the middle of the Kafue National Park earlier this year on a Primary field trip, with a failed fuel pump. It was as well that the trip was being led by a really talented teacher, who has spent most of his life in Africa, who used a jerry can of fuel strapped to the roof rack of the bus and a homespun gravity feed system for the diesel that managed to bring the bus back to Lusaka (a 6 - 8 hour journey, half of it off tarred roads). In 2004 I ran a ToK Weekend for the Theory of Knowledge students, also to the Kafue National Park. In the heart of the park you are surrounded by the sense of wilderness and 'middle of nowhere'. For teachers responsible for students, the fear of what could go wrong, and how to deal with these possibilities is always lurking. That said, in the years we've run trips to the KNP since 1996, we've not yet had any problems - but perhaps we've been lucky. Our lifeline is taking a 4WD car as well as the bus, so in the event of an emergency, we can take a patient back to Lusaka, and have them in a hospital inside six hours.