Marcel & Julie Menard

Meet Marcel and Julie Menard (above), Guests on the most recent edition of the ‘Chanters Lodge Experience with the Milli Jam Ingredient featuring George da Soulchild Kaufela’, our regular Sunday night radio show airing from 20.30 to 21.30 hrs on Zambezi 107.7 fm, Livingstone’s leading local radio station. Marcel and Julie hail from Canada, although from different parts of that vast country, but are currently based in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates. Marcel is a health, safety and environmental engineer working for Adnoc on a rig in the Persian Gulf – an operation that churns out a mere 300,000 barrels of crude oil every day! Julie was a nurse for most of her working life but subsequently retrained as a teacher. She recently retired from her job in UAE teaching English as a second language.

The Menards were visiting Zambia by invitation of their friends the Bohling family who live in Kitwe on Zambia’s Copperbelt. They had originally met Jenna, Kyle, Sharon and Kevin in UAE and were delighted to come to Zambia to spend some time with them. During their visit to Kitwe Marcel had been taken 5220 feet down to the working surface of the Mopani copper mine – a trip he had found fascinating. The mine employs some 19,000 people. They had also spent time at Nsobe Game Camp 60 kilometres south of Ndola. They had been recommended to Chanters Lodge by the manager of Kafue Lodge in Ndola. Happy with their stay at Chanters? Yes they were. They described it as ‘cozy’ and ‘a great place to chill’.

The music on the show was up to standard despite the dearth of new releases common at this time of year in UK and USA. We opened with our theme tune for 2013 – ‘Feel The Love’ from Rudimental ft John Newman. We followed up with Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’ which Marcel and Julie dedicated to their friends the Bohlings. Other tracks were from PSquare, Magg44 ft Karen, Exile ft K’Millian, LMFAO and Pitbull. The oldie of the week was MJ’s ‘Rock My World’ and the weekly prize of a dinner for two at the lodge to the first person to text us the name of the artist on the track was quickly snapped up! Our pick of the week was Timbaland’s ‘White Wedding’ and we closed with One Republic’s haunting ‘If I Lose Myself’.

Marcel and Julie told listeners they had enjoyed lots of tourist activities while they’d been in Livingstone including the sunset cruise, a leopard, lion and cheetah encounter combo, linked with an elephant back safari, as well as a fabulous dinner on the steam train. Marcel had also taken a 15 minute helicopter flight over the Falls.The day of the show they had taken a one day safari to Chobe National Park in Botswana and had been lucky to see a pride of lions during the trip. They’d been amazed by the size and beauty of Victoria Falls which had surpassed all their expectations. Julie had described their steam train dinner activity as ‘very romantic’ and on being questioned this charming, happy couple revealed they had been married for 15 years. Julie has one son from a previous relationship.

During their visit Marcel and Julie made a very generous contribution of education materials to a school at Mukuni Village and commented on the fantastic progress they saw near Chanters Lodge on road repairs in Livingstone.

Asked where they would like to be and what they would like to be doing ten years’ from now, they said they had plans to retire to Malaysia when Marcel finished work in five years’ time, before eventually returning to Canada.

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