Wash My Bikini Edinburgh Launch

Blackwell Bookshop
South Bridge, Edinburgh
6.30pm
Free but ticketed

At the age of sixty, Anne applied to join the Voluntary Service Overseas as a mature volunteer, bringing her skills as a bank administrator and accountant. She was allocated a two year assignment in The Prison Fellowship of Zambia and travelled to Lusaka to begin work in the Ndola prison office.

What follows in Wash my Bikini is a remarkable diary of living and working in a community in one of the poorest countries of the world. Culture and climate were very different to the author’s home in Edinburgh and VSO members have to adapt quickly to the basic living conditions, where everything is in short supply or unobtainable. The Author’s detailed account, not only of the difficulties in dealing with officialdom, but also of passing on her skills to those in great need of support, underlines the raison d’etre of the Volunteer Service.

Jonathan Dimbleby writes in his foreword "Anne writes not as a critical outsider but as a friend, sharing the daily struggles of the lives of colleagues in the Prison Fellowship of Zambia of prisoners and their families. It is a story we are all the richer for reading."

Wash my Bikini will be an inspiration to all those contemplating joining the VSO and others wishing to impart their skills through the many charities working overseas. It conveys a picture of life in an African developing country written from the inside.

For more information please contact Claire Leach on 0131 622 8206 or events.edinburgh@blackwell.co.uk

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  Wash My Bikini - Anne Thomson - Paperback
  Anne Thomson spent two-and-a-half years in Zambia working for Prison Fellowship Zambia with Voluntary Service Overseas. In 'Wash My Bikini', she recalls her experiences of her time in the African nation.