Who knew a cell phone company could get it right (Mukinge, Part II)

Ok, so…I love it here. Africa, generally; Mukinge, specifically. I love the people, I love the landscape, I love the language (so far, I prefer Kaonde, which is what is spoken here in Mukinge, to Bemba, which is what is spoken at Chilonga)… I mean, the bugs suck, the house we’re staying in still smells funky and gives me the creepy-crawlies from time to time, and it still takes an astonishingly long time to accomplish any “real” (ie, stuff at the hospital) work, but I otherwise totally absolutely frigging love it. I don’t know, maybe I just love the fact that I’m getting to have this experience at all, or maybe it’s because I know there’s an end in sight (at least theoretically – I have a return ticket anyway) and I figure I can do anything for at least a little while. I’m not sure. I’m afraid my vocabulary is failing me at the moment, but I guess I mean to say that, although life is often really, really hard here in the bush - for reasons I’ve mentioned and for others I don’t yet know how to express – life is also really, really good.

It suits me, I guess, though I could hardly tell you why. I mean, I like to think I’m someone who does a pretty good job “stopping and smelling the roses”, as it were, but the pace at which life is lived here – and, more often, the effort required for it – means stopping and smelling the roses (or at least slowing down for a sniff) is inevitable; required, even. And in slowing down, I am finding – to my surprise and my delight – that the kinds of things that would typically be considered inconveniences, or challenges, or even downright pains-in-the-ass at home, are pure joys here. It sounds absurd, I’m sure, but I actually love the fact that a single load of laundry (which I’m doing for us instead of the housekeeper we’ve hired) takes three hours and that I have to hoist a big-ass basket on my hip and lug it up the hill to the Kitchens’ house to use the machine there (maybe before I leave I’ll figure out how to balance it on my head like a true Zambian woman), then lug it back down to use the dryer at ours (there’s actually a washer at ours, too, but it is seriously straight out of 1952, with a manual agitator and crank wringer, and I would have used it – just for kicks – except that the wringer seems to be broken). I love that I have to walk (woo, a whole three minutes) to the hospital – and pretty much everywhere else, for that matter – any time I want to have a conversation with someone, walk home when I can’t find them, and then turn around and walk back 30 minutes later to try again; I love the way news and messages travel primarily by word of mouth – and that this is often faster than by land line or cell phone; I love the planning and creativity it takes to make a meal with a fast-dwindling food supply (there is no market nearby, as there was in Chilonga, so there are no quickie-quick “bun runs” or “veggie runs” or “milk runs”); and I love walking two hours to Steve and Heather’s village hut, taking a full four hours to prepare, cook (over coals, one pot at a time) and enjoy a meal, bathing outside under their bucket-rigged-with-a-soup-can-with-holes-poked-in-it “shower”, and then walking two hours back the next day.

I know it probably sounds trite. Or, at the very least, incredibly boring. But the ass-kicker is…it’s kind of the opposite. Even something as mundane as washing the dinner dishes feels like another opportunity to live richly, live fully (last night, at Tamar’s, the Canadian pharmacist who’s at Mukinge for a year-long mission, we had a regular assembly line going – Tamar scraped, Matt washed, I rinsed, and David dried – and we laughed and we talked and we laughed some more; it was almost more fun than dinner). I am channeling my inner commune-dwelling hippie, I suppose. But I kind of dig it.

It's funny. There are these goofy, pretentious cell phone service billboard ads all over the place here (even in the bush, where service is spotty at best) by this company call CelTel, and they’re always two words, like: “Experience. Freedom.” or “Exceed. Expectations.” or “Accomplish. Goals.” (there are a few where they - how dare they! - break the two-word paradigm and say something even more ridiculous, like: “Listen. With your soul.” and “Inspired. By you.” which for some reason send us in to peals of juvenile laughter every time we see them). Anyhoo, Amy and I were poking well-deserved fun at them recently, but then I saw one today that said “Enjoy. Life.” and, y'know? - I actually kinda got it. I mean, the “hard” that I’ve experienced here doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the “hard” that the people in these bush villages experience every day. And yet – at least at Mukinge, anyway – people seem to enjoy life. Life is hard here, yes. And simple, too, but (I feel like a broken record here) it is also vibrant and rich and full and I find I am astounded every day by the things that bring me joy.

I have a Buddhist friend who always talks about living with intention (actually, I also had a pastor who said that everything we do – from our work, to our play, to our enjoyment of a meal, even – could, and even should, be an act of worship of the God who has made it all possible), and I guess I sort of understand in a new way what that means. Maybe it’s because there’s really nothing else to do here (there are very few distractions). You live, and the living is hard, and you work, and the working is hard. So you find yourself – if you’ll indulge me for a moment, I’m going to use the word “blessed” – blessed with the time to appreciate the sweet, slightly fermented smell of mangos on your walk up the hill to the Kitchens’ house to use their washer, and grateful for the opportunity to bask in the intermittent rainy -season sun on your way to the hospital, and thoroughly enjoying the tangy, earthy smell of dirt and potatoes that lingers on your fingers after you’ve peeled and sliced them for dinner. And you rejoice when, after hours and hours of training over days and days and days, the OPD (Outpatient Department) clerk successfully completes a task as simple as closing down the Excel document you’ve been working in and properly shuts down the computer. (I am not kidding, by the way – hours and hours over days and days. to close an Excel document and shut down a computer). And then you cry – but only a little, and later, when he can’t see you – after you tell him “Mwauba bulongo” (“You have done well”) and he bows his head and says, upon your parting – in his charming and limited-but-oddly-formal English: “In fact, when you go, I will very much be missing you. Because you have, in fact, taught me very much.” And you bloom with pride when Beenzu, one of the clinical officers (akin to a PA in America) tells your brother: “We love it when you come here to Mukinge. You know how to work with us. You are not like those other doctors that come – you make us feel good, because you know how to treat an African.”

And then you sit in front of your computer and try to write about it and find, for the umpteenth time, that you can’t. I actually began this post several days ago, while I was still at Mukinge, and now that I am back in Lusaka – we arrived just a couple hours ago – and I feel that familiar ache, that void that comes with leaving, I find that I am, once again, stuck. And I am frustrated, because I want very much to tell the story of my life here, but I am finding that the things I wish to communicate are the things I cannot write. I can only feel. And what I feel (among so many other things right now) is blessed and deeply, deeply grateful. And I hope that, each day, my living will reflect that; and that my work will be an act of worship.

Anyhoo, it's late, and we – as they would say here – “started off at six hours” this morning, so I’m tired. And I think I should get some sleep. Tomorrow will be a busy day of unpacking and laundry and checking emails and then beginning to pack again – we head out to Mwandi, in the Southern (I think, but it may be Western – although it’s kind of near Victoria Falls) province to activate a site. We think we will be gone for only a week this time, but it may be 10 days. And after that, it looks like I may have to spend some time in Lusaka, which actually kinda bums me out, so keep your fingers crossed that more opportunities for me to serve out in the bush will present themselves!

Love and peace to you all...

Picture 1: Walking to Kasempa, the boma nearest Mukinge Hospital
Picture 2: A young village girl, holding court with her friends
Picture 3: Steve and Heather's bucket-rigged-with-a-soup-can-with-holes-poked-in-it “shower”
Picture 4: Lunda, 4 year-old son of one of the hospital's clinical officers
Picture 5: Me, photographed by 4 year-old Lunda
Picture 6: My office-cum-dental room-cum-clincial exam room

Picture 7: Young village woman and her baby

Nope, I lied. It’s totally the bugs. (Mukinge, Part I)

Yeah, so…‘member all that hoo-hah about how the “hardest part” about being here was not so much the living conditions but was more the idea of “learning to let go” and “surrendering your expectations” and “being patient” and blahdee-blahdee-blah? Yeah, no – it’s the bugs. The cockroaches, specifically. And the ants. And the mudwasps, and the termites, and – HO-lee To-LEE-do! – the swarmsandswarmsandswarms of black flies which hover and float – in the grasses, at your feet, around your head – and then attach themselves with hold-on-for-dear-life commitment to as much of your backside as your breathable cotton clothing will allow and hitch a ride to wherever you’ll take them. Seriously, we’re like black fly taxis.

We’re at Mukinge now, in the Northwest province (incidentally, I re-read one of my earlier posts and it appears I initially put Chilonga and Mukinge on opposite sides of the country than where they really are so, to clarify, Chilonga is in the Northern province, though it is also sort of east-ish; Mukinge is in the Northwest province), and I’ve sworn (again) that I’m going to try write at least every couple of days – even if it ends up being crap, or a silly story without a context, or I radically amend my observations (as I have found I am doing almost daily) and contradict myself - and post it when I get back. This is my first crack.

Anyhoo, so Mukinge. We got here January 21st, after a two-day, 11-hour journey (there are no road lamps here, and night comes quickly, so we do our driving in daylight hours only). We stopped off in Kitwe, a relatively large town in the Copper Belt (copper is the country’s main export, so this part of the country is generally more economically developed than the rest), where we stayed for one restful and rejuvenating night at the delightful Mukwa Lodge, a sort of guest house/bed and breakfast type place. We slept in, enjoyed a leisurely breakfast in the restaurant and, after re-stocking our food stores at the Kitwe ShopRite, set out on our way.

We got here in pretty good time, particularly considering the condition of the roads; the number of people, pigs and goats out on them; and our pathetically ineffective Little-Miss-Sunshine horn which, after one bleating, prepubescent howl, pretty much crapped out on us completely. Had we a working horn to blast our way through, though, we might have missed the hours-old baby goat incubating itself beside its mom on the warm tarmac (umbilical cord still attached); or the towering, phallic termite mounds thrusting through the rich green brush at haphazard intervals; or the pasty, panting muzungu (probably a Peace Corps volunteer) huffing her way God-knows-how-many kilometers on her bike to the next bright press of civilization; or (my favorite) the quintessential picture of the social structure here: the strong, straight-backed village woman walking with a ginormous tub of water balanced on her head and a baby on her hip, while her husband trails idly behind carrying nothing but – I swear to God – her purse.

When we arrived at the hospital complex, we stopped off first at Nurse Lynn’s, the hospital’s head nurse (or matron, as she is called here). Lynn is a career missionary (Mukinge is a Protestant mission hospital and is staffed largely by American, European, and Kiwi Christian medical professionals) and her warm, cozy home looked like it’d been Wizard-of-Ozzed right from the States and plopped down in the middle of Mukinge’s tropical paradise. I frowned inwardly – I’d expected bush living to be all thatched-roof-huts-and-pit-latrines – because this was twice now: first at Chilonga, where we stayed in the lap of luxury at the doctor’s house (she was away on holiday). There, I not only had a bed, but my own room (mosquito net included); there was a gorgeous sitting room with a wicker chair, leather sofa and beautiful, if minimalist, African art; a huge, private garden; and the best set of kitchen knives I’ve ever used (I had no idea how much I’d learn to appreciate kitchen knives). So maybe the water filter didn’t work and we occasionally had to bathe in a bucket. And, yeah, the concrete floors were always covered with at least an inch of dirt, the screens were pretty much nonexistent, and the dogs (there were two) and the rains conspired to cloud the air with a sour, moldy smell that attached itself permanently to our clothes, our towels (which never dried out), and our skin. Still, though, it was hard to complain. So after that, and then Lynn’s house, I started to feel embarrassed. I imagined you folks back home were all thatched-roof-huts-and-pit-latrines right with me, so how could I admit this cushy living to you? I mean, aren’t I supposed to be “roughing it”?

Welp, I needn’t have worried. A thatched-roof hut it is not, but our accommodations here at Mukinge have been a trifle less…comfortable. We have not had a water or power issue since we’ve been here, and I do (again) have my own room, but I sort of feel like a thatched-roof hut would be nice right now. In fact, since I first started writing this entry, I’ve gone and stayed in the village with Chris and Amy’s Peace Corp friends, Steve and Heather, and their mud-walled, concrete-floored, no-running-water-or-electricity-and-they-do-have-a-pit-latrine hut is infinitely more habitable than the house where we’re staying here in the hospital complex. I guess maybe because that was mostly just dirt. This…this is mold. And mildew. And years of grimy, filmy cooking grease trapping generations of tiny insects in corners, on shelves, and in cabinets; it’s cobwebs and insect egg sacs; and the yeasty, curdled smell of old garbage. The stove doesn’t work (we cook on the countertop with an electric double-burner); my pillow is a sour-milk-smelling, crater-shaped foam mold thingy (I think, from the shape, it’s meant to be orthopedic) that I’m quite sure plays host to a number of tiny microbacteria; and I have not seen – cumulatively, over the course of my entire life – more cockroaches than I saw in just the kitchen cabinets the first night we arrived. Or ants, for that matter: big ones, little ones, biting ones. I thought at first a potted plant had tipped and spilled its dirt but, nope, it was just the ants. Oh, and we have a mouse, too (although he’s tiny, and kind of cute), and mud wasps which, though apparently harmless, nest in corners and doorjambs and air vents in these small mountains of, well, mud but which look – if you can forgive my vulgarity – rather like tiny piles of sh*t.

I am aghast when the short-term assistants’ housing coordinator shows us the place and decide to forego the evening chapel service to stay at home and clean. I sweep, I scrub, I dust, I cover the mystery-stained, mildewed couch with a spare chitenge (the ubiquitous, multipurpose rectangles of fabric that serve as everything from baby slings to wrap skirts to wall art and furniture coverings here), and soak the bug-infested cutting board in bleach.

I am sticky, and exhausted, but I feel a tiny bloom of triumph in my chest. I smile. Mukinge will be different than Chilonga, I figure. But I cannot wait to see what else it will bring.

Picture 1: Breezeway at the Mukwa Lodge in Kitwe
Picture 2: An oxcart on the way to the hospital
Picture 3: Steve and Heather in front of their mud hut

“Leave your brain with me” (Chilonga, Part II)

So now I understand why Chris and Amy never update their blog (intermittent internet connection notwithstanding). At first I judged them for their negligence; I sniffed at them with an air of superiority. After all, I thought, I’d managed to upload more posts in my first three days here than they did in eleven months. But that was, of course, before I actually “got” to Africa. I mean, my body was here (in Lusaka, specifically) when I wrote them, but my heart and my head were still in the States – with my family in New England, with my friends in Colorado.

I had grand plans for the writing I was going to do here in Africa. I was going to record it all, every day, and just post entries whenever we happened upon an internet café or made our way back to Lusaka.

But that was before I witnessed the peculiar paradox of starving women refusing to claim an errant 1,000 kwacha note that could buy them food for days; before the water quit working and then came back spluttering out of the faucets in muddy, tubercular bursts; before I learned just how glorious a meal is when you make it entirely with your own hands, from scratch (even the tortillas!); before the rains, the violent African rains, battered the swollen red earth and made a river of the road in front of our house; before I heard a funeral dirge, sung with vacant detachment by the village women, still manage to haunt and ring like the holiest of hallelujah choruses. Before the chickens and the dogs. Before Dorica. Before the stinging, bitter-smoke smell of sweat and sickness.

There’s just… it’s too much. Not to perseverate (by the way, totally my new favorite word) about the enormity of it all, but it really is overwhelming. There is too much to say and, so, nothing at all. Because, if you know me – as some of you do quite well – you know that if I can’t write it exactly, if I can’t write it perfectly, I usually don’t write it at all. So I sit, day after day, fingers hovering optimistically over my keyboard, and stare at a blank screen. There are stories to tell and observations to make – too many, in fact – but they seem silly without a context. And, well, I don’t mean to disappoint but, so far, the work (my work anyway) has not been particularly exciting. I’m not exactly saving lives or building schools or planting sustainable farms or anything like that. Don’t get me wrong – the work I am doing is rewarding (there are broader, if less tangible, programmatic implications for it), and I am, frankly, over the moon that I have a skill that can actually be utilized here (although the coronation to demigod and the attendant expectations that result when I am introduced as a – this is a good one - “computer expert” are a trifle unsettling). But it’s just, well, it’s just not very sexy.

Incidentally, the “work I am doing” has turned out to be a wee more complex than what we’d initially thought I’d be doing. In fact, it is essentially the same sort of work I was doing in Denver before I was a (ahem) “full-time actor”: poking around in large, relational databases and trying to extract data in meaningful ways so that it can be measured and analyzed. The short version of what that means at Chilonga is that I have had to figure out what questions to ask of their HIV patient tracking system (called CareWare) so that the reports I develop will answer them. Then, in order to actually build those reports, I’ve had to teach myself how to use the system, how to understand its basic architecture, and how to identify the relevant data variables. Finally, I have had to figure out how to train the data entry clerk – a delightful Zambian woman who, although she has an astonishing native intellect (particularly given her limited schooling) and a memory like a steel trap, is still trying to conceptualize “File, Save As…” – to run those reports herself. This all, of course, with no guidance from the folks who are purportedly requesting the data, no training on the CareWare software, and no access to the database developer or even a typically-useless-but-I’d-give-my-left-booby-for-one-right-now User Guide. And all in less than two weeks.

Suffice it to say I did not get much sleep the latter half of the Chilonga trip. I was up most nights until midnight, 1am, even 3am, writing and testing over 30 different reports (I’d have sacrificed my right booby for a SQL for Dummies book). I did catch a break when Herbie (remember Herbie? the current Chief of I-Forget-What-His-Title-Is-But-He’s-the-Big-Boss-In-Charge-of-Everyone-at-CRS? well, he’s also one of the former members of the FUTURES group, the company that originally built the database) passed by Chilonga on his way to another site early the second week and spent about 30-40 minutes giving me a crash course on CareWare’s basic reporting principles. Herbie, by the way, is a gigantically imposing, thickly-French-accented Haitian man and he kept saying things like: “Ok, so, dee CareWare ees not een-too-ah-teeve, so let me show you dees one ting how you can do dees”; and “Yes, ahk-choo-uh-lee, you haff to put dee dates in dee Ah-merry-can date format but nowhere ees dat written so you would not have known dat” (everything here is in the European dd/mm/yyyy format, including – confusingly enough – all of the date fields in the rest of the database); and “Ahk-choo-uh-lee, dee CareWare ees an Ah-merry-can program, and dey haff not fee-neeshed to making dee euh… dee euhm - ”

“The customizations?” I pipe in.

“Yes! Ouì!” he brightens. “Dee cost-om-eye-zay-shons! Dey haff not fee-neeshed to making dee cost-om-eye-zay-shons for dee African version.”

“Awesome,” I say, my task looming ever larger before me. My sarcasm is not lost on Herbie. He smiles apologetically, knowingly.

But Herbie, it turns out, is a godsend, and in our half hour together he shares a couple of tricks that were not, as he rightly maintained, even on the same planet as intuitive. But they are enough to get me started and so I am off. Er, well, sorta… Because this is Zambia and things never quite go the way you plan. In fact, if I had to name the biggest challenge I have faced thus far, it would not be the bugs or the water outages or the humidity or the physical hardship or the ripe, rank smells – these were the things I expected. In fact, I kind of counted on them. And they were, of course, everything and nothing like I imagined at the same time. No, if I had to name the biggest challenge we face (and all of us, by the way: Chris, Amy, me… IHV and the entire AIDSRelief team…), I think it would be learning to let go – to surrender whatever plans or expectations we have for the way things should or will go; and to be patient. Because even when you know (according to your plan) you can do something faster, or better, or more efficiently, or more effectively…you can’t. And not because you don’t want to. In fact, you are desperate to, because you know it would not only make your life easier but it would make theirs easier, too. You know how much more you could accomplish.

“But,” as my brother pointed out after one particularly maddening meeting during which a room full of medical professionals sat for more than an hour and a half (the first forty-five minutes were spent – I sh*t you not – in total silence simply waiting for everyone to show up) to discuss whether to increase next year’s target goal for number of HIV treatment enrollees over this year’s, or leave it the same, only to then turn around and decide to actually decrease (!) it for some to-this-day-unknown-to-me reason, “this is the way things go here. And, truth be told, it is their program. Amy and I are technical advisors only. We can make suggestions, which we did, and ask leading questions, which we did, in an attempt to get them to think about things – like setting goals and creating new programs – in different ways, but we cannot think for them. We cannot decide for them.”

He’s right, I know. But this offends my very American sense of efficiency, of accomplishment. I mean, if I can get something done faster and better, why can’t I just go do it? Zambians, though, value consensus over efficiency, and relationships over accomplishments – even if that means making decisions that will set their program back a step. And for Zambia to triumph over HIV, Zambians have to lead the charge, however ineffectively. So you sit there, in helpless, tortured silence, and watch them do it, because allowing them this freedom is how you earn their respect. And you sit with the data entry clerk, for hour after constantly-interrupted hour, on a data validation task you know you could have completed in 15 minutes by yourself, because sitting with the data entry clerk for hour after constantly-interrupted hour is how you earn her trust.

This sitting-with-the-data-entry-clerk meant, of course, that most of my report developing was done at night, on my laptop, in to the wee hours of the morning. It was impossible to do it at the clinic, what with Dorica (the data entry clerk) constantly being pulled away to attend to one of the myriad tasks outside her job description but which, by necessity, she was required to perform. I’d stalk home at the end of the day (ok, so not visibly, but in my mind - I stalked) and mutter to Chris and Amy about “what a waste of time” the day was, “how much more I could have done” if I’d just worked at home and how “annoying” Dorica’s lack of focus was. “I know she wants me at the clinic with her,” I whined, “but it doesn’t really make sense for me to be there if she’s going to be hopping up and down the whole time. Not only can I not teach her anything, but I can’t get any of my work done either. All this stuff I’m trying to do is going to be a waste. I’m not going to end up being able to help her at all.” In other words: Wah. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

And maybe that’s all true. Maybe if I’d had more hours to myself I could have built sleeker, more efficient reports instead of the clunky, this-is-what-we-have-to-do-to-work-around-CareWare’s-limits reports. But, truth be told, nobody expected that there’d be any reports finished before I left, least of all reports that Dorica could be trained to run on her own. But like everything else here, I’m learning, things have a way of working themselves out when you’re willing to let go.

So, on the Thursday night before we left – with reports still to complete and a full clinic day ahead of us on Friday, during which I knew Dorica would be unavailable for the three-hour training I’d developed for her – I let it go. We invited Ireen over for a lesson in making the traditional Zambian meal of nshima (it’s dreadful, but more on that some other time), fetched Dorica from the clinic, and spent our penultimate night in the company of our Zambian friends. And wouldn’t you know? I somehow managed to complete the final reports on Friday morning, load them on to Dorica’s machine and – miracle of miracles – spend the unexpectedly slow afternoon training her, with no interruptions, in her office at the clinic. And I got to see her not only get what I was teaching her (remember, Dorica was the one still grappling with the concept of “File, Save As…”), but reason through the complexities and light up when she discovered – on her own! – how the reports would make her work both easier and more accurate.

“Aiy!” she squealed, and clumsily high-fived me. Then her face clouded over. “You cannot go on Saturday,” she said. “You must remain behind when Chris and Amy proceed.”

“Ah, but I must go to Mukinge,” I tell her.

“Then you must leave your brain with me,” she says.

“Told ya,” Chris smart-alecked at dinner that night. “Things always work out. I have no idea how it happens or how to explain it. All I know is: you can plan, and plan, andplanandplan. You can do aaaall the planning you want, but you might as well not bother because nothing will ever go according to that plan. But I’m tellin’ ya - things always always works out.”

And that, my friends, is that.


Picture 1: Approaching rain cloud seen from the top of hill at Chilonga Mission
Picture 2: Dorica
Picture 3: Mrs. Banda (l) and Mrs. Phiri (r), midwives at the hospital
Picture 4: Dorica laughing at me making nshima

“Just let me keep it” (Chilonga, Part I)

We have gone to the market, my brother and me, to retrieve my umbrella – one of the many personal belongings I seem to be shedding with alarming regularity since I arrived in Africa – from the shop where I’ve inadvertently left it on an earlier “bun run.” My umbrella, my fleece, my raincoat… I know I’m just being spacey – and I’d like to think I could come up with a more compelling and more permanent way than this anyway – but I think I must be desperate to leave my mark on this place, to be remembered. After only twelve days – many more by the time I will have a chance to post this – it has already begun to leave its mark on me.

But I am lucky. As with the raincoat (which I left behind in Dorica’s office late last week and got back from her today), the shopkeeper was glad to return my umbrella (my fleece – my Old Navy fleece which I got for $7 and which I loved and which would have come in handy during the unexpected cold snap in Chilonga – I fear is lost forever). Not that Dorica couldn’t use a raincoat, or the shopkeeper an umbrella. It is, after all, the rainy season, and Chilonga is in the Northern province (not, as I erroneously reported in an earlier post, in the Northeastern province – there’s actually no such province - though it is technically both north and east) and gets a boatload of rain. But this is not, from what I’ve observed, the way Zambians operate. So we cup our hands, one over the other like trapping a firefly, clap twice and, with a slight nod of our heads, express our thanks.

We have gone no further than fifteen feet when my brother spots a crisp, 1-pin note (1,000 kwacha) fluttering in the red dirt at his feet.

“Ah! Whose is this?” my brother asks the women in the market as he crouches to rescue it.

The women glance furtively around and shake their heads. “It is not mine,” they murmur, as much to each other as to us. They look away – none of them wants to be the one to admit their poverty, but hungry eyes and taught skin over sharp bones belie their feigned indifference. One thousand kwacha is equivalent to only 25 U.S. cents but, at this market, could buy someone a dozen tomatoes for nshima relish, or two buns, or a small sack of onions, or a heap of mangos. I am stunned at their reluctance to claim it.

“Is it yours?” my brother asks the small woman seated in front of the shop to our left. She shakes her head, chews her fingers. “Yours?” he says to the two women on our right. The Bemba, at least here at Chilonga, are not given to fits of laughter or grand expressions of mirth, but these women cackle and slap their knees, as if he is asking the world’s most ridiculous question.

“Not mine,” they say, waving him off, still chortling.

“Ah, but it is not mine so maybe it is one of yours?” he persists, looking from his left to his right. In truth, it probably is his (or mine), having doubtless escaped a loosely-zipped pocket on our earlier visit, because the people in these villages don’t often carry denominations of this size – they are used to dealing in 50 (roughly 1 cent) or 100 (2 cents) or 500 (you get the idea) kwacha notes – but we’d pretty much rather set ourselves on fire than flaunt our white privilege.

We stand for a moment, a now-familiar feeling of helplessness settling in. We know we can’t keep it; we know they won’t accept it. But we must wait – until the need becomes greater than the fear – because this is the way things work in Zambia: You wait. And wait and wait and wait.

By now a small crowd has gathered, and they watch us curiously. “Who will take it?” my brother asks. There is an uncomfortable, scratchy silence. I hang back, mirroring his pleading left-to-right looks – though with decidedly more desperation than he - and shift my weight. I feel my face flush with unexpected judgment. “Please, somebody, just take it!” I shout inside my head, as much to assuage the terrible ache of my own impotence as I would their palpable need. “It’s just a thousand kwacha!!”

But the rules of the game don’t allow this. And so the women continue to regard each other suspiciously, a double-dog dare flashing briefly in their faces. Who will confess their need? Who will flirt with (gasp!) greed?

“Who will take it?” my brother asks again, and there is movement to our right. All eyes go to the tall-ish, wrinkled bun-seller (one of at least two bun-sellers who, like the rest in this baffling and frankly ineffective model of commerce, sit right beside one another, in competition, selling the exact same buns for the exact same price) as she steps towards Chris, her left arm outstretched and beckoning vaguely, noncommittally, in his general direction.

“Ah,” she says with affected authority as she plucks the note from his fingers. “Just let me keep it.”

There is an eruption of laughter from the crowd – one of those atypical fits of grand expression – and a chorus of who-knows-what-they’re-actually-saying in Bemba that relieves the tension (mine especially) and paints the women in their shared judgment of the bun-seller’s scandalous lack of shame, their shock at her audacity, and their flapping, conspicuous envy.


Picture 1: Fish-seller at Mpika market