The adventures of Bupe and Mapalo...in Italy!

Hi everyone, Marje and Kevin here again.

If you haven’t yet, check out our experience in Zambia, where we were for 6 months, working in the National Headquarters of DAPP. You can also read our complete report for the entire project period.

Anyway, to get back on track. We recently travelled to Italy for the first part of our journal period a.k.a, bringing it to the public.

During the journal period your aim is to take your experience at the projects to as many interested people as possible.

To do that we decided to travel to Italy and hold 3 presentations in different towns. Our presentation was called “The Adventures of Bupe and Mapalo”. Marje being Mapalo and Kevin being Bupe. They are our Bemba names. Bemba is the most spoken language is Zambia, and we learned some of it during our time there. The names were given to us by some lovely ladies we had the pleasure of working with. Mapalo means “blessings” and Bupe stands for “gift”.

After each presentation there was also a DJ set by Kevin a.k.a. Dj MaKe, to offer everyone a great time.

We held our first presentation on the 30th of July in Kevin’s home town Tossignano. We were hosted by Proloco Tossignano and the youth club Giovani Tossignanesi. The previous day was spent on preparations together with the local youth organisation. There were some difficulties with the organisation and the technical side of things but we managed in the end.

On the day of the presentation we started to prepare in the afternoon. We put up the screen, connected the sound system and got ready to wow the crowd.

The presentation was held at the main square of the little town and had quite a good turnout.

Our second presentation took place on the 1st of August at a centre where like minded and enthusiastic young people welcomed us with open arms.

We were hosted by Mani Tese Faenza, an italian non profit organization that works through out the country with intercultural activities and recycling.

On the 31st of July we travelled to the centre to see what we needed to prepare for the next day.

We also found out the people there were holding an educational games afternoon that day, which focused on the lives of the poor in India, so we decided to join in and had a great time.

Then came the day of the presentation which started with shopping, food shopping to be exact. We had agreed to cook traditional Zambian food for the people coming to see our presentation. The menu consisted of nshima (thick maize porridge), beans and meat with a tomato-onion base and a cooked salad, made from pumpkin leaves.
To finish we also offered refreshing watermelon.

The food was a hit! People came back for seconds and even thirds!

After the dinner, we started our second presentation. We were more comfortable this time, as we knew the content a bit better and the audience there was on the same wavelength as us.

The amount of people that came to see this presentation was certainly the biggest out of all the three events.

The third and last presentation took place in a town called Imola, at a youth centre called Ca' Vaina on the 3rd of August. They wrote a very nice article about our bio and shared with many local media. They already had most of the technical equipment so we didn’t need to worry much, that in mind we decided to split up and multi task, one of us setting up the tech and the other leafleting in the town centre.

The turnout was less than we expected, but gave our best despite the circumstances.

A slight difficulty for the presentations was that not many people in Italy speak English. Because of that, after Marje spoke during the presentation, Kevin had to translate it to Italian so that the audience could understand what was being said, and he did it great!.

The 4th of August saw us on our way back to the college, tired but very satisfied with the results of the trip and the food.