“TWO KIDS FROM CHINGOLA”
NTRODUCTION FOR MY BOOK – one day ….
“TWO KIDS FROM CHINGOLA”
NOTE: I wrote this nine years ago and haven’t REALLY edited it or shared it or posted it. Today I decided despite its incompletion to just POST IT! Well, Gerald posts it – I don’t know how to! Thank you Darling Man.
Gerald Groom and I, Sandra Guthrie, the “Two Kids from Chingola” had adventure instilled in our hearts from an early age. Both sets of our parents have English backgrounds and my father in particular encouraged us to travel and discover ourselves and the world, and I did so. At seventeen, when my father refused us permission to marry, I reluctantly went to London feeling banished from my boyfriend and my family. Feeling banished soon changed to feeling very excited and very adventurous, and I spent eighteen months working in London and hitch hiking in what was then called “The Continent” for several months. I was a practically penniless secretary working in Piccadilly, feeling rather sophisticated for a 17 year old. That Adventure remains vivid; my sense of freedom, of meeting, appreciating and sometimes clashing with new cultures and new people from all over the world, homesickness, the challenge of making my own decisions, excitement and fear, the power of independence and making my own choices swiftly matured me, and I embraced this new way of life with gusto. A year and a half later, my trainee engineer boyfriend visited London on a programme with IBM. I was ready to be 'reclaimed' by my childhood sweetheart and enthusiastically welcomed him and showed him "My London". Shortly afterwards we returned to Africa. My Dad, somewhat relieved - and having begun to wonder if I would ever return - happily relented and we married five months later, at the ages of 19 and 21.
Gerald loved his job with IBM, an international computer company, and was frequently sent overseas to further his training, so we got to spend many months in Italy, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. There we met other IBM’rs, also being trained, and it fascinated us that of all the nations present, it was ‘the Poms’ who were determined to live an English life and eat an English diet, no matter which vibrant new country they happened to be in. Who wants to eat baked beans on toast in France? We were always thrilled to try to live like a local, and eat and drink and visit and dance and talk and get lost and make friends and see things we had never seen before. The only country Gerald disliked was India. He went once on his own at 23 years old, and he returned home vowing never to return. He screwed his face up in disgust, saying the poverty and ‘the filth’ were overwhelming.
I took his word for it. There were so many other countries in the world to discover and we could live without India. Life was always An Adventure, and at 23 and 25, we embarked on our Biggest Adventure Ever. In 1973, fifty three years ago, we left Zambia where life and politics were growing increasingly uncertain and often dangerous and emigrated to Australia. I cried every day for two years for my Mother but Australia and her people welcomed us with open arms and we fell in love with the mateship, the beauty, the safety, the certainty - and in 1977 we gave birth to our son Joshua James Groom - our LIttle Australian. Our lives have been rich and satisfying - and you should know this is not a fairy tale as we were separated twice, once for six years (that is another story) but still discovered and created happiness, productivity, and best of all, community. We are very proud to be dinky-di-Australians, something our childhood friends from Africa still cannot understand. For over twenty years my volunteer work with youth in an international charity took me to Nepal, Africa and Indonesia where Gerald and Joshua would sometimes join me.
So travel has always been an important part of our lives. Gerald travelled for many months of every year all over the world and enjoyed a stellar career with IBM. I especially enjoyed the times I was able to join him and discover a new, far off land. In the years prior to retirement he travelled overseas several times a year as his territory included India, Japan, China, Korea, New Zealand and Australia. He always returned home with wonderful stories about his experiences and the people he had met, and surprisingly, his favourite country was India. He spoke about it with such affection, his delight in the people and the food and the sights, and after each trip would say “I want to take you there. Let's go!” But Africa, the land of our birth - or Nepal where I had done so much work and had so many heart connections - always beckoned when a Big Family Adventure Holiday arose. India remained unexplored.
His retirement presented itself as another opportunity to have further Adventures. In the last years we have travelled to South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Namibia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Columbia, Vanuatu, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, several South Pacific Islands, England, Ireland, Scotland, Turkey, Japan, China, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Cambodia, Malaysia and to Africa, Bali, Nepal and the USA several times. We have had many road trips around Australia and through the Outback. But not India.
Incomprehensibly, I continued to resist India, but after seeing a TV documentary which filled me with delight, I called our young friend Cuan McLaren of African Ubuntu Travel, to ask his advice about India. He had arranged the Holiday of a Lifetime for us to Africa a couple of years previously, including four weeks on safari, where absolutely everything went right in eight weeks of travel. In a continent where absolutely everything can go very wrong, that was quite an accomplishment. He recommended Viv Craig, of Viv’s Travel, who runs her successful travel agency in Ulladulla on the South Coast, where we live. Like Cuan, Gerald and I, she too is an African from Zimbabwe, and she understood us and interpreted our brief with great skill. Not everything went absolutely right - India is like that – but this was our Second Holiday of a Lifetime
This is our story. I hope you enjoy it.
Edited and placed on my website 1st August 2026.
Sandra Groom