Sigrid Lofaldi on ‘The Experience’

We were back to the usual time on the Chanters Lodge Experience with the Milli Jam Ingredient featuring George da Soulchild Kaufela last week. ‘The Experience’ is our weekly Sunday night radio show, normally airing between 20.30 and 21.30 every Sunday on Zambezi 107.7 fm, Livingstone’s leading local radio station, broadcasting 24/7 to Livingstone and the surrounding areas, as well as streaming live on the internet! (Links are on the station’s site and on the Chanters Lodge site too!) The previous week the show had been broadcast at an earlier time so that it did not clash with the final of the African Nations Cup, which of course Zambia had won, sparking off week long celebrations across the country!

The guest on our latest show was Sigrid Lofaldi, pictured above, a maths and science teacher from Trondheim in Norway, staying at Chanters Lodge and spending some time in Livingstone checking on the progress of a group of student teachers from University College, Trondheim, currently doing practical teachers training at Linda West Basic School. She told listeners that her students were happy, doing very well and that she was pleased with their progress. Milli Jam wondered whether this was Sigrid’s first visit to Zambia and in replying “no”, she explained to listeners that she herself had been a student teacher in Livingstone back in 2007, and had also taken a holiday in Zambia in 2009, so this was in fact her third visit.

The music on the show was excellent as usual. We opened with Kelly Clarkson’s number one hit in the USA ‘Stronger’ back to back with a new offering from Nicki Minaj titled ‘Young Forever’. George chose Danny’s ‘Ku na Kwa’ coupled with B-Flow and JK with ‘Chitemene System’. Both excellent tracks, Danny’s focusing on electricity outages suffered in Zambia and JK’s on an agricultural system applied to love life!! Milli Jam chose Ne-Yo’s ‘In Love With You’ coupled with ‘Mysterious Girl’ from Peter Andre featuring Shaggy. My ‘oldie of the week’ was ‘We Are The Champions’ from Queen (for the Zambian national team). We give a weekly prize to the first person to text us telling us who’s singing our oldie of the week – if they can – and eventually we had a winner. For a moment I thought I’d won the weekly contest! Our ‘pick of the week’ was DJ Fresh and Rita Ora’s ‘Hot Right Now’, closing with Emile Sande’s ‘Next To Me’ – informing listeners that Emile has a Zambian dad! Our show is always informative about the local and international pop scene.

Milli Jam wondered what the differences were between schools in Norway and those in Zambia and Sigrid replied that the major difference was that classes in Zambia were much larger – in fact almost twice as many students per class as in Norway. Milli Jam also wanted to know how the Norwegian weather compared to that of Zambia and our guest told listeners that when she’d left Norway earlier in the week it was -10C, windy, cold and blowing a snow storm! She loved Zambia’s sunny warmth – which did not surprise us! She also told listeners she was single, that she enjoyed cross country skiing and that her favourite music genre was Indie. She was enjoying the peaceful relaxed atmosphere at Chanters Lodge and thought the staff (Chanters Girls) were very nice. She told listeners that the following week she would be visiting Mongu in Western Province where there were also some of her students doing their practicals.

In ten years’ time Sigrid hoped she would still be teaching as she loved her job, wherever in the world she happened to be! “Great”! We said.

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