Market

Petauke has many several shops run by Indians, where you can get most things that you will need.  They sell dry goods, and things for around the house.  No one shop sells everything, though, so sometimes you have to visit several in order to collect all the items on your shopping list.  The Indians give us good service because we are Westerners and they respect us – or at least, they respect our money.  We give them good business, so they like us. I have found only one shop in Petauke where I can buy real butter (not margarine) and 100% fruit juice.  These are very difficult to find anywhere else.  Things like chocolate and icecream are absolute luxury items.

The market is a busy place with many stalls.  The main foods you will find in the market are cabbage, tomatoes, rape, and onions.  I can sometimes (but not always) find green beans and green peppers as well.  The food is very cheap to us, and yet every little bit we buy helps support the Zambians who are farming it.  To give you an idea of how much things cost. . . Zambian currency is kwacha, and there are approximately 7,000 kwacha to the GBP.  I can buy a heap of potatoes for 4000K, 5-6 tomatoes for 1000K, a small bag of green beans for 1000K. . . nothing on my list costs more than 7,000K.  You can buy apples (which are expensive) and bananas but mangos and other fruits are only available a couple months out of the year, so fruit is very limited.  You can buy potatoes but sweet potatoes are very hard to find. You can buy groundnuts (peanuts) and different kinds of beans.  You can buy dried fish!   But there are lots of vegetables which it is nearly impossible to find in Petauke.

At the Zambeef shop you can buy meat (but often it is not very nice), and milk, and yoghurt, and yoghurt drink.  Sometimes I have heard that they have cheese, but I have not found any cheese yet.  What they have is always dependent on what the truck has brought.   The truck normally comes on Tuesdays and Fridays but you never know when it will actually come.

The bread in Petauke is not nice at all.  It is crumbly and impossible to make a sandwich or to butter properly.  The only nice bread I have found is the fresh buns which the women sell in the market, but that is not proper sandwich bread.

Here at the College farm, I can buy fresh eggs.  24,000K for 30 free-range eggs (approximately 3 GBP).  Sometimes I can also get fresh produce depending on how much they have available.  Feeding the students is the main responsibility of the farm, and I can always shop in the Petauke market instead.