Af-ree-kaaah!

Abram

2008-07-12T13:01:00.005+02:00

It’s Monday now, and we have a full day planned. Ashley is leaving on Tuesday and there are errands to run, special order necklaces to pick up, and goodbyes to say. There are also three sick babies to visit. Julie tells me that Rachel, one of the Suubi women, has 10-month old triplets that have been at the local children’s hospital for weeks and that they’re not getting any better. She says she’s not convinced they’re getting the care they need, and wants to pass by later to see if she can get them transferred to a different clinic.

We run the first few errands, drop Ashley at home to pack, then head down the street to the hospital with Betty, whom we’ve asked to serve as our translator (Rachel speaks only limited English), in tow. When we get there, Rachel has one frail and listless baby boy in each of her arms. Her older daughter Beth is holding a third baby, a girl, whose fat cheeks and bright eyes only bring her brothers’ illness into sharper relief (Beth, by the way, is nine, and has been taken out of school to help her mother with the triplets). Rachel lays the boys in a crib so she can change Abram, the littlest and sickest of the three. John, the other one, begins whimpering feebly. I look at Betty.

“Can you ask her if it’s ok if I hold him while she changes the other one?” I ask. Betty translates and Rachel nods. I gently slide my hands under John’s little body and hold him close to my chest. I hum a lullaby, the only one I can remember (“Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird…”) and soon he is quiet, his small head tucked under my chin, his breathing shallow but steady.

Julie begins, through Betty, to explain to Rachel why we are here and how we want to help. All eyes are on us and soon a small crowd has formed. Two men (social workers, I learn) are there, asking questions about who we are and what organization we are with and where we will take the babies. Julie, who has since scooped up baby Abram, is trying to clarify our relationship with Rachel, when I suddenly realize that they think we want to take them from her.

“No, no,” I say. “We don’t want to take the babies from Rachel. We are just wanting to take them from here, to transfer them to another facility. We are concerned that, after being here so long, they are still so sick. We’d like to move them to another clinic, so they can see another doctor.”

The social workers nod their understanding, but by now the small crowd has grown. Now, there are nurses all around, and a large, sturdy woman descends upon us. I can tell right away that she’s pissed. She is the matron, I’m sure, the nurse-in-charge, and she is scowling with more than just her face – she is scowling with her entire dump-truck of a body. And I know that somehow, despite our best, most well-meaning intentions, we have managed to offend her and her entire staff.

Several people are talking at once: the social workers to the nurses; the nurses to Rachel; Rachel to the social workers; Betty to us; us to each other. We are told that we can’t remove the babies without the mother’s permission. In my meekest, most conciliatory tone, I assure everyone that we don’t intend to do anything without the mother’s permission, and that we are only here to help. We are then told that if we do remove them, it will be against medical advice.

I look at Julie, still holding Abram, with John in my own arms, and stammer something unintelligible. I feel helpless and completely in-over-my-head. We are causing a scene (just by virtue of being there and being white), angering the staff, and I’m concerned that Rachel is feeling pressured to do something she doesn’t really want to do. Julie says she doesn’t trust the medical advice or treatment they are being given here and she just wants to get the babies out, she doesn’t care who we offend in the process. The Mighty Mouse theme thrums a sardonic tune inside my head: “Here I come, to save the dayyy!!”

Suddenly, we are ushered out of the ward and into a small room across the hall, the matron insisting that the babies must be tested. “For what?” we ask. “HIV,” they tell us. We explain that the babies have already been tested and are negative, even show them where it says so in their books. We know that they know this, and that they are just stalling, but we don’t know why – other than to assert their authority. I do my best to smooth ruffled feathers, affecting a soothing, almost obsequious tone when I speak and engaging in lengthy greetings with each new nurse we meet, but it’s getting us nowhere. I want to call my brother; I am certain he’ll know what to do.

There’s more talking in languages I don’t understand and then someone else comes in (actually, I’m pretty sure it’s the matron again), asking us why we are wasting their time having the babies tested for HIV. Julie and I share an exasperated look. Finally, the matron dismisses us with a perfunctory wave.

We hustle out before she changes her mind and clamber up into the Mystery Machine, Rachel holding Abram, Beth holding Eva (who by the way has been sucking on the first two fingers of her right hand the entire time and it is the freaking most adorable thing I have ever seen) and me still holding John; Betty climbs in with Kymbi. Rachel’s husband, whose name I have forgotten (it’s something lyrical and multi-syllabic, like Sulongalonga), stays behind to wait for her mom. We pull out and head for Rippon Medical Center. It’s private, so it costs more money, but Julie’s mom has deposited money in her account to cover whatever medical expenses they incur.

At Rippon, we are seen almost immediately by the doctor. Dr. Christine is large, like Nurse Ratchet, but soft and round where the nurse was hard and square, and she is smiling a kind smile. I feel better already.

Julie leaves to check on her sister so I am left to explain how it is we’ve come to be here. Dr. Christine listens quietly, then examines each baby. She tells me malnutrition is the primary presenting condition, but orders a full blood work-up on all three to be safe.

The lab, however, is closed. And this is where I am reminded that, in Africa, time is not your own. Here, you are at the mercy of God or the Universe or that one lab tech who will take every second of his well-deserved afternoon break, by George, no matter how many desperately ill and hungry babies are waiting for him to stick them, again and again, rooting around for their tiny, atrophied veins in search of the blood that will tell the story of their sickness. And so we wait, on benches in the hot sun. It feels like forever before he returns. I want to scream.

He does return, though, and by then Julie is back with Ashley, so she takes Abram and follows the tech inside while I check messages on my cell. I hear Abram start to cry, and rush in after him. And there is Julie, seated into a corner, holding Abram while the techs (there is a second one now) hover over him and search fruitlessly for a vein. He is wailing – an agonizingly insistent, if faint, howl – and would flail his free arm in protest if he could but he is too weak to do much more than flap. He’s got a stent in his arm already, from the IV drip he was on at the other hospital, and we ask if it’s possible to draw from that one but the techs shake their heads. I watch, crying, my own fists clenched to keep from flailing, until I can’t stand it any longer. I run outside and cry some more.

When I come back, Julie is standing with Abram; the techs have given up. She looks at me. “Do you want to hold – ”

“Yes,” I say, and scoop his tiny, birdlike body into my arms, rocking him gently and cooing in his ear. At ten months, he weighs even less than my niece, herself a preemie, did at five. He has no hair on his head, but his long lashes are tinged with orange, the tell-tale sign of malnutrition. His head fits neatly in the palm of my hand and I can feel each of his vertebrae through his thin onesie, like a row of skittles beneath his skin. I hold him close and hum a lullaby, then a hymn.

I wait in the office with Abram while the techs repeat their torture on John and Eva. Julie sticks her head in and asks if I mind staying. She still has a long list of things to help Ashley with before she leaves and they are running out of time. “Of course,” I assure her.

When they finish with Eva, I stand to leave, but now another doctor is there, and he is saying they must try again with Abram. “We didn’t get enough,” they say. They need more blood to conduct their tests. I sit back down and hold Abram tightly while the doctor ties a rubber glove around his pencil-thin arm; this seems to pain him even more than the needle. I close my eyes and press my lips to his forehead. I don’t think I can watch him endure this again.

The doctor leans over and spies my own veins, swollen from the heat of the sun and pulsing with my anxious heartbeat. “Ah, but yours,” he says, pointing at my arm. I smile wryly. “Yes,” I say, and wish I could offer my own veins instead, a vial of my own blood.

The doctor sticks Abram again and he keens. I pull him closer, and begin humming again. I look at the doctor. “Do you think maybe he could rest?” I ask. “Do you think maybe we could try again tomorrow? He is just so dehydrated and – ”

“Yes,” the doctor says, straightening. “His veins are very tired. I think maybe we will try again tomorrow.”

“But … he can stay here tonight, yes?” I ask, but he is not listening. He is looking outside, at Dr. Christine. They consult through the window and agree that Abram can stay the night. I hurry outside and confirm with Dr. Christine. She tells me that they will keep him overnight so they can re-hydrate him and start him on treatment, then try again to draw blood tomorrow.

“And the others,” I say. “They can stay, too?”

“Yes,” she says. “I think we can manage.” I thank her profusely and ask her if she will explain to Rachel and her husband what is happening. She does, and promises to also explain to her how to prepare a rice porridge that will be better for the babies than milk (milk, it turns out, only exacerbates the diarrhea). Then we follow the other doctor to a private room where a nurse is putting clean sheets on the bed and another is readying the IV drip.

I stay with the family until they are settled. I notice John and Eva’s wet bottoms, and gesture to Rachel. She shakes her head – she has no more diapers. I tell her I am going and ask if there’s anything I can bring her. She asks for milk. I promise to be back soon.

I walk home and pack a bag with new cloth diapers that someone had donated a while back, then set off for the market in town. Back at Rippon, I present Rachel with the milk and clean diapers, then collect the pile of soiled ones she’s wadded in a ball and stuff them in my bag. I will wash them myself. I kiss each of the babies, and Beth, shake Rachel’s hand and head home. I am drained, but I feel lighter. I know that everything will be ok.

At the house, I boil water so I can soak the soiled diapers, only two of which are actual diapers, by the way. The rest: a faded onesie, an old toddler’s t-shirt, a piece of a bed sheet, a threadbare dishtowel that Rachel ties around her children’s tiny middles. They reek of vomit and diarrhea, a sickly sweet, almost yeasty smell. I scrub until my fingers are red, boil more water, and scrub them again.

On Tuesday morning, Julie and I share a piki (a scooter) to Rippon – I straddle the seat behind the driver and Julie perches, sidesaddle in her skirt, behind me. The diapers I’ve washed aren’t dry yet – we’ll have to bring them by later – but we want to get over there first thing. We are anxious to see how the babies are improving.

When we get there, we are met by the two doctors from yesterday, Dr. Christine and Dr. Needle Stick; they inform us that the family is no longer there. They were transported, we are told, back to the children’s hospital from whence we removed them, in the middle of the night. Abram’s treatment was failing, we are told, and the night duty staff thought it best to send him to a facility that had more experience dealing exclusively with children.

“But … they weren’t giving him the right treatment there!” Julie splutters in protest. “We took him out of that place, and brought him here so he could get the treatment he needs!” She shakes her head, exasperated. “I am afraid that if he stays there, he will die,” she says. The doctors have nothing to say to that. Then, after an awkward silence, Christine says she will make a call and inquire after Abram for us.

Julie and I thank her, but we are seething. And though I can’t speak for Julie on this, I am also scared. I know how much we angered the matron and her nurses yesterday and I am worried that Abram will be punished for it. We stand on the corner and debate our next move. She wants to go over and remove him, to transfer him Al Shafa, the last best clinic in Jinja. I am certain that removing him will only make things worse. “For whom?” she asks, and says again she’s not worried about who we might offend. “If he stays there, he’ll die,” she repeats. I know she’s probably right, but I can’t help but think that swooping in again will have other larger and less immediate, but more lasting consequences – for Rachel and her other children, for any other woman we might want to help at that hospital – even if I can’t seem to articulate why I believe that.

I feel, if it’s possible, even more helpless than I did yesterday. In a fit of desperation, I text my brother and ask him to call me. Scarcely a minute has passed when a matatu pulls up to the curb and Rachel and her husband spill out. I am relieved, and greet her warmly, but her face is impassive.

“Where is Abram?” Julie asks.

“He is dead,” she says, and flicks her hand, a vague, faraway gesture, her eyes squinting into the morning sun. I am speechless, and feel very suddenly and very violently ill.

“We are so sorry, Rachel,” we both finally say. “So very, very sorry.”

*****

I walk home from Rippon in stunned silence, weeping. I am irrationally angry – at Rippon, for failing him; at the matron, for being such a bitch; at Rachel, even, for not understanding that milk was only making him worse; at myself for knowing it and being stupid enough to buy her more; at Julie, for thinking we had any right; at myself, again, for not agreeing with her.

And then I am ashamed – ashamed that I could have wasted a millisecond worrying about how I might spare someone offense when a life hung in the balance. Not that it would have made a difference – he was dead already when we had that argument.

I am ashamed, too, for thinking we could fix it in the first place and then ashamed that we didn’t, that we failed. And I wonder if Rachel is angry, if she blames us.

And I think, still, of that fucking nurse.

And then I am just sad, wishing I could have held him one more time, hummed him one more hymn, felt the tiny weight of him.

And then I am gripped, suddenly, with a terrible fear, wondering crazily if the last time I held him, I held him too tight; if in holding him still for that last, fruitless needle prick, I squeezed an indispensable breath from him, a breath that might have made the difference.

And then I am home, and the day must begin. There are Suubi women to visit, and flights to catch, and diapers to press and deliver, and two other babies that still need us.

We pile into the Mystery Machine and head out.

Suubi (or, Hope)

2008-07-12T12:21:00.002+02:00

You have got to be kidding me, I think, when I awake Sunday morning at 4am. The muezzin isn’t even up yet! I take half an Ambien and crawl back to bed. Four more blessed hours of sleep and I am feeling much better. I even manage some dry toast for breakfast, and two more slices for lunch.

I am glad to be feeling better, not only because I am a big fat giant baby when I’m sick, but because it’s Sunday and Sundays are Suubi days, when all of the women come together. Today we will be buying the necklaces that they have made with the clasps they were given last week (the women buy their own paper for rolling the beads, and their own varnish, and the plastic thread they string with, but Suubi provides the clasps).

We head out around 2pm, the lumbering Mystery Machine bouncing along the pockmarked roads on the way to Walukuba. We pull up in front of Santa’s house, and a handful of women pile in, wrapped in brightly colored fabrics and mismatched skirts and t-shirts, laughing and chattering excitedly in their native tongue (or tongues, as the case may be – with over 40 tribal languages spoken in Uganda, it is not unusual for one to be multilingual). Most of the Suubi women are Acholi, from the north, refugees of a lengthy civil war. The documentary, Invisible Children, helped to bring international attention to that war’s most innocent victims: children kidnapped and forced into marriage or service as child soldiers.

At the meeting place, I sit beside Gertrude, who teaches me some basic Luo (the language of the Acholi): ningo (hello), kop ango (how are you), kop pe (I am fine), apwoyo (thank you) … Gertrude has five children, aged twelve (er, I think…) to twenty-two; she lost her husband in 1999 and has not remarried. “It is difficult,” she says. To find someone who will help care for children that are not his own, that is. We form a small assembly line: Julie takes the necklaces and pays the women, Ashley inspects them for length and tension, and Gertrude and I re-fasten the clasps.

When business is finished, I help Santa serve water to the women who want it, narrowly avoid giving a speech (although Daisy warns me I should have one prepared for next Sunday), and load the Mystery Machine with the bags of completed necklaces. We pick up a couple more women for the ride home, squeezing fourteen into a vehicle built for seven. There is more laughter and more chattering, and I am struck, for the millionth time, at how these people who have so little seem so much happier than most people I know who have so much.

I think of Gertrude, raising her five children on her own after her husband’s death; and Betty, whose baby’s father took off when he learned of her pregnancy; and Agnes and Mary and Scovia and Margaret and Joyce and Sumini and Pross. I think of their wide smiles, and the light in their eyes, and their laughter like wind chimes.

I think of all these things and hope only that their smiles get bigger, the light in their eyes brighter, and their laughter never ceases.

The First Few Days

2008-07-12T12:14:00.001+02:00

Uganda is a predominantly Christian nation, but (especially in towns) there is a sizable Muslim population, and I wake early Thursday morning to the muezzin’s call to prayer, echoing solemnly in the darkness. I think of Zanzibar, and the TAZARA train, and fall back to sleep. When I rise, I shower, straighten my room, and forage through my bag for breakfast – I’ve got an emergency stash of Clif bars that should tide me over until I have a chance to go to market.

I join Ashley and Julie, who are sipping coffee and reading, in the living room. Betty is bustling about, boiling water for drinking, sweeping floors, washing dishes and tidying rooms. I am mid-sentence when I hear her behind me.

“Auntie!” she tsks. “You didn’t have to do that!” I turn to her, confused. She is shaking her head. I turn back to Julie.

“Oh,” Julie says, nodding knowingly. “You made your bed.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Betty admonishes again.

“But…I like to,” I offer feebly. She shakes her head and sighs, then disappears behind the door.

Soon after, Ashley, Julie and I pile into the Mystery Machine (seriously, this thing is straight out of Scooby Doo) and head out to run errands. We get me money and a cell phone charger (I’ve got a phone that I used in Zambia, but it’s dead), and then drive to Walukaba, a nearby village where several of the Suubi women live. We meet Nora, ancient and stooped, her tiny eyes filmy and nearly sightless, and place a special order of necklaces for Ashley. Then it’s to Santa’s, and Scovia’s; after that, Emily’s.

We bounce along a rutted dirt road lined with maize and matooke trees, and pantless children (I don’t know why it’s shirts they wear, and not shorts) chase us, waving dirty hands, their dimpled bottoms caked with mud. “Howahyooou! Howahyooou! Howahyooou!” they shout, gleeful. I wave and smile back.

Santa and Scovia live in what I’ll loosely term an apartment, or tenement, building. It is long and low, and made of cinderblock; maybe four units each, with one or two tiny rooms per unit only. We crowd into one of Santa’s rooms, Scovia joining us, and learn how to roll beads. I can untwine fishing wire for hours, so the fine motor skills and focus required appeal to me. Still, though, my bead is loose, and lopsided. Julie’s is worse.

“Santa,” she says. “Mine is all uneven.”

“Just make it straight!” Santa says, as if saying it will make it so. We laugh and roll our eyes.

Emily’s house is in a different part of the village, but pretty much the same as Santa’s and Scovia’s. She emerges from the tall grass dressed to the nines, in a long red sheath dress, with white-beaded jewelry hanging from her lobes and around her neck; the toes of her bare feet are painted a shimmery pink. We visit for a minute in her small, dark room, place Ashley’s order, then head for the markets: the Indian-run supermarket (which is really more like a corner convenience store) for things like cereal and peanut butter and pasta, and the outdoor market, for tomatoes and onions and carrots and garlic.

After shopping, we head to Bukaya, another village just outside town. There is a sort of girls’ group home there, where Julie had been living until she moved into the LGH house five days ago, and where she still goes twice a week to visit and play with the girls. Seven live there, all under age twelve: Agnes, Mary, Scovia, Margaret, Joyce, Sumini and Pross (said like “rose”, but with a soft “s”). Betty’s sister Christine lives with them, a kind of house mother. The girls are not orphaned, but their families are either unable or unwilling to care for them.

They came to live in the house when a young American volunteer first met three of the girls (sisters Agnes, Mary and Scovia) on a visit last year. Dirty, hungry, and abandoned, one of them injured from the collapse of the hut where they were living, she took them in, got them food and medical attention, then set about finding them a place to stay.

She’d come to volunteer for an education project, but quickly decided to start her own nonprofit. Since Ugandan law requires that all nonprofits have a Ugandan address, she decided to kill two birds with one stone: she rented the house, made it her nonprofit base, and moved them all in. Margaret, Joyce, Sumini and Pross soon followed.

We go there this Thursday bearing supplies for an art project, spend an hour watching them giggle and create, then head home to make dinner. I boil pasta and sauté garlic, onions, tomatoes and carrots for a marinara sauce. It is, I’m afraid to say, a resounding disappointment. Ah, well.

By 8pm, I’m doing the jello-necked head bob. I fight to stay awake until 10pm and then give up.

*****

On Friday, I am up again at 4.30am, the adhan rousing me and the neighborhood dogs, who howl in protest. I feel like howling, too, when George (the night guard who is seated right outside my door) turns on Ugandan talk radio at a volume I am certain you all can hear in America. I toss and turn until 6.30am, then huff out of bed and go for a run.

It’s a dismal, gray day, and there are no Suubi activities scheduled, so we spend much of it curled on the sofa and in arm chairs, talking and reading our books. We plan a little 4th of July celebration and head to the market for burgers and balloons. I bake fresh rolls (like the marinara, kind of a disaster. boo.) and Ashley makes sugary sweet layer bars and Betty fries the potatoes and Julie cuts the pineapple.

We find one of those “Happy Birthday” streamers in the bookcase (except ours says “Happy rthday”), the kind with the shiny red and blue and yellow and green letters hinged together with grommets, and Ashley hangs it on nearby hooks. We were going to add “...America” to it, but we get lazy and forget.

We drink wine and tell stories and laugh about the random text messages I have suddenly started receiving from strangers in foreign languages. By 10pm, we are plumb tuckered, and so call it a day.

*****

It is Saturday, and I am awake early again – only this time I have aches and chills and knifelike cramps in my muscles. By midmorning, I’m battling waves of nausea and I’m starting to worry. I text my brother: How early can malaria present? He tells me it’s unlikely that I would have contracted it while on prophylaxis, but says I should get tested. We call the American doctor in town to schedule the test, but she is in Kampala. She confirms that malaria is unlikely, especially this early, prescribes a course of ciproflaxin (which I happen to have from my last trip, thank you Denver Health Travel Clinic), and tells us to call her in twelve hours.

Several hours and two naps later, I am no better. In addition to the aches and chills, I am now vomiting and – well, anyway. You can figure it out. Julie and Ashley go for dinner at a local Indian restaurant, and bring me back a ginger ale. I sip it slowly, swallow another cipro, and go to bed, praying that I will be better in the morning.

Kulika Yo (Or, Welcome to Uganda)

2008-07-12T12:05:00.000+02:00

I arrive in Entebbe at just after 7am on Wednesday, bleary-eyed with exhaustion, move easily through customs and claim my bags. Outside, a stout, square-faced man is holding a brightly-colored sign bearing my name. I smile broadly and wave. “Hi! That’s me! I am Kate!” I say, pointing at the sign, and then at myself. The man smiles back, shakes my hand, and takes one of my bags. We load the car and set off.

Lake Victoria looms before us, flat and sparkling, a giant silver dollar glinting in the hazy morning light. We drive east, through a lush, hilly countryside, a palette of rich, earthy colors – deep terra cottas and dark reds and muddy browns set against velvety greens – shimmering vibrantly beneath an expansive blue sky. We zoom past acres of maize and banana trees and palms and hundreds of other plants and trees for which I have no names. The road is paved, but riddled with potholes, and scored on either side by the familiar, constantly-moving lines of heavy-laden Africans on their ways to and fro.

Abdullah (that’s the driver who met me) is a kind, quiet man, with three children. I’d like to learn more about him, and about this new place, and I try (at first), asking lots of questions, but now I’m fighting to stay awake. “I think you are very tired,” he says, after several minutes of silence. I smile. “A bit,” I tell him.

Just outside Kampala, Abdullah hands me off to William, who will take me the rest of the way to Jinja. We arrive at the LGH volunteer house at just after 10.30am local time. A tall, lithe, bushy-haired African woman opens the heavy blue security gate for us. Her dark skin is stretched over exquisitely high cheekbones, her waist and hips narrow, her limbs impossibly, elegantly long. She pokes her head into the car. “She is the one?” she asks William. He nods.

Julie, the in-country director for LGH, comes out to meet me and introduces me officially to the African woman (her name is Betty and she’s the housekeeper; she is also, I quickly learn, a total freakin’ riot). Inside, I meet Julie’s sister Ashley, who has been visiting for three weeks, and Betty’s seven-month-old son, Kymbi, bouncing happily in a swing.

The house (brick exterior, with a long cement porch) is wide and airy, with spare but comfortable furnishings, brown-tiled floors, and dark woodwork set against white walls. My room is in the back. I deposit my bags and join Julie and Ashley in the living room for a little meet and greet and howdy-do before I (glory hallelujah!) disappear to the bathroom for a shower.

Kneeling in the tub, rinsing soap with a faint trickle of warm-ish water from the handheld showerhead, I don’t notice my swollen legs. Yeah, so … ‘member that one episode of Friends? The One Where Ross Tells Rachel She Has Cankles? It isn’t until I’ve patted myself dry and am smoothing on lotion that I notice I have … thankles. Seriously. My calves and ankles have swollen to – I swear – the same circumference as my thighs, the left one sporting what looks like a giant, slug-like welt on the outside of my shin. I panic. Oh my God, I think. I have a blood clot! From sitting too long on the plane! I am totally gonna DIE! I dress quickly. If I’m going to collapse at any moment, I don’t want to be found sprawled naked. I’ve only just met these people.

We consult Julie’s medical book and determine that my death is not, in fact, imminent, and that some ibuprofen and elevation should restore me to normalcy. Betty has made matooke (a thick porridge made from what looks like bananas but what tastes like potatoes, and a staple of the Ugandan diet) with peanut sauce. It’s not my favorite, but it kicks the crap out of nshima.

Showered and sated, I pop a couple ibuprofen and stretch out on my bed “just for a minute.” Three hours later, I wake to an empty house. Julie and Ashley have gone to meet some of the Suubi women who will be adding t-shirt bags to their creative repertoire, and then to teach the weekly English class. I am bummed to have missed it, but grateful for the rest. When they return, we go to dinner at a local Chinese restaurant and chat until it’s time for bed.

London

2008-07-12T11:50:00.000+02:00

So I left Denver at 8.15pm on Monday, June 30. My itinerary, which ends with my arrival in Entebbe, Uganda on Wednesday morning, includes a lengthy layover in London – nine hours, to be exact. I’ve heard conflicting reports about whether nine hours is enough time to scoot out and see a bit of the city, but I’d rather eat glass than be stuck in Heathrow all bleedin’ day, so I decide to chance it.

I follow a motley crew of rock-climbing teenagers (they’re headed to France to climb – how cool is that!) and their fearless leaders – one of whom looks astonishingly like my new boyfriend, Michael Stipe – to customs, get my stamp, ask a few directions, and head for the Tube.

I’m without a guidebook, but all I really want is some good Indian food which, for all its rap about bad domestic cuisine, London has in spades. I hop the Piccadilly line towards Leicester Square and Covent Garden (the theatre district! wee!) – a good 50-60 minute ride from Heathrow – and notice a slight, withered woman to my left, talking to herself. I think that whatever the subject is, it must be grave, for she is sagging under some great, invisible weight. Her thin, papery skin hangs in loose jowls; her long aquiline nose slopes downward and her hunched shoulders curve around her breasts, which hang from her bony frame like two small but heavy sandbags. I hope she works it out before she sinks into the floor beneath her.

Dappled sunlight dances across the faces of the other passengers and warms my skin. The wind and the wheels roar in my ears. I close my eyes and smell the sweet, spicy scent of men’s aftershave. Two young Polish guys have boarded and sit across from me, one bony and angular, the other sporting an oxford whose buttons stretch optimistically across what I am certain is his recently-amassed, still-unacknowledged new girth. I think perhaps the shirt fit at the start of the school year, but that the end has brought with it the proverbial Freshman Fifteen and he’s just not ready to admit it, despite the evidence. They are earnest in conversation, sharing a laugh at something in the magazine they read together. Each shift in position, each full-body chortle, sends a cloud of their clean, masculine scent my way. Neither is particularly handsome, but they sure do smell good. I bite the inside of my cheek; I think I feel a tingle.

At Leicester Square, I hoist my backpack on my shoulder and head out to enjoy the few hours of my London nano-vacation. I spy Maharaja Restaurant and know immediately where I’ll have lunch. It’s too early yet, so I poke my head in and inquire about the hours. Alom tells me they will be serving until 11pm. I thank him and say I’ll be back at 4pm.

I wander to Trafalgar Square, where hundreds bedecked in red and white mill about celebrating Canada Day, and park my tired ass on the lawn in front of the National Portrait Gallery. I try to nap, but the sun is too hot; I try to read, but I’m too tired. I decide instead that I will just sit and simply enjoy the fact that I’m lucky enough to be lounging on the grass in front of the National Portrait Gallery in London on a glorious Tuesday afternoon. With nothing else to do but catch a flight to Africa (Africa! where I’ll be for five weeks!) in six hours. Awww yeah!

It’s nearing 4pm, so I make my way back to Covent Garden and duck into a gourmet Italian cheese shop. I reminisce for a moment about my week in Bore last summer before I stumble into a narrow alleyway lined with tiny used and rare book shops. I see a bright yellow, circus-like sign: David Drummond – Theatrical Bookseller & Ephemerist. Are you kidding me? It’s a square, stuffy, musty-smelling old shop lined floor to ceiling with books about magic, opera, dance, and the theatre, and old playbills and marquee one-sheets (and post-card-sized replicas of said one-sheets) from long-since-shuttered West End Theatres. It’s fabulous. Mr. Drummond obliges my questions politely but grudgingly. He’s doing his books, see. By hand. As he has for the last 41 years (that’s how long he’s been open), I’m sure. He needs to concentrate.

I leave Mr. Drummond to his bookkeeping and head for Maharaja. Alom grins sheepishly, surprised to see me. He didn’t think I meant it when I said I’d be back and, well, the chef has gone on break. But after a brief conversation (with the manager? the owner? the maitre d’?) in what I later learn is Bangli, I am ushered to a seat and handed a menu. “It’s ok,” Alom says, so I order chicken curry and pilau rice (with saffron and butter and cardamom, oh my!) and chat with Abdul while I wait. I savor each bite when it comes. It’s not quite Muskaan (my most favorite Indian restaurant in the world, where I’m hoping we’ll go at least once when I get to Lusaka, Chris and Amy, hint hint), but it hits the spot.

The customs official told me to be back two hours before my scheduled flight departure, so I pay my bill and start off for the Tube. I get back to Heathrow with more than enough time to spare. In fact, I’m so early, they haven’t even posted my gate information yet. I find a corner table in a Food Court and read, fatigue buzzing in slow-moving waves through my body. Soon, I think. Soon I will sleep.

At my gate, I strike a few yoga poses to loosen my stiffening limbs … and spot a pigeon waddling under the seats.

Yep. I’m on my way to Africa.

Here I Go Again

2008-07-12T11:48:00.001+02:00

Of all the people I have ever met who have been to Africa – who have spent any significant amount of time there, anyway – I have never met one who hasn’t wanted to go back. Maybe it’s because Africa is a mysterious, almost mythical, place; the stuff of legends. It is, after all, the Dark Continent, The Dark Star, The Place Where Time Began (or, at least, Man). Or maybe it’s because the whole place is such a surprising and unsettling paradox, like some exotic, black-eyed beauty that bears the jagged, angry scars of a scorned lover’s knife – you see her glory and her heartbreak both.

I imagine the reasons are as varied and as numerous as the visitors. For me, Africa is, quite simply, a place where I lived for seven months in 2007; a place to which I ran when my oft-broken heart, broken once more, could not (I believed) mend itself again.

I am asked frequently what the impetus was for my trip last year. And my answer, which some of you have heard me give a time or two, is roughly this: I needed Africa. I had struggled for some years with an often paralyzing depression and the attendant self-loathing that came when I couldn’t “snap out of it.” When I looked at my life objectively (er, as objectively as one can look at one’s own life), I felt that a person with a life as richly blessed as mine had no business feeling as sorry for herself as I did. Yet I couldn’t dispel the sorrow that had tamped its way into my chest; I couldn’t seem to move beyond my own self-indulgent misery – or maybe I just didn’t know how to. I don’t know. I just knew that I was stuck and I didn’t want to be anymore. So I ran. I thought that maybe if I went someplace where there was real need and real heartbreak, I wouldn’t focus so much on my own. I had grand expectations for how Africa would fix me, heal me, change me – and a very narrow idea of the ways in which I wanted it to.

For those of you that have kept up with this blog, you know that my trip last year was pretty much nothing like I expected it would be but that – in the end – it was exactly what it was supposed to be. And it did change me. I couldn’t say how different I was when I first came back, if at all, but I know that I am different now. But maybe that’s how change happens. Maybe the most significant and enduring shifts happen at the cellular level, unseen to the naked eye, and measured only by comparing the point at which you began to the point at which you are now. Whatever the case, I believe I am seeing the world with new eyes now and that I have Africa, at least in part, to thank (and Europe a little bit, too). So I want to go back. And, thanks to a fortuitous confluence of events, I am.

I’m going to Uganda first, to volunteer with an organization called Light Gives Heat (www.lightgivesheat.org). They run a project in Jinja, Uganda (about two and a half hours east of Kampala, the capital city) called Suubi. Suubi is a beading project, one of several in Uganda (you may have heard of Bead for Life or Thread of Life). Suubi women roll beads from long, thin slices of paper (posters, magazines, brochures), which they then varnish and string into necklaces. The LGH folks buy the necklaces from the women, sell them in the West, then use the proceeds to buy more necklaces. I’ll be doing, well, I don’t know, exactly. For sure I will help with the buying. But I’m told I should also expect to do anything from assisting with the weekly English and literacy classes LGH holds to boiling water for the women to playing with the children while the women roll the beads – in other words, whatever the need is. I’ll be in Uganda for just over two weeks. Then it’s off to Zambia to visit the fam.

I’ve been asked if I’m nervous this time. If I think about that bungee jump I plan on repeating when I get to Zambia, the answer is, um, YES (since, y’know, I actually know what there is to fear now). But mostly, I’m just excited. To see my niece, of course. And my brother and my sister-in-law. And to work with the Suubi and LGH folks. But to go, too, without the burden of my own need, without the weight of my impossibly narrow expectations, and just see what happens.

I’m not bringing my computer this time, so I don’t know how much I’ll get to blog. But if I do, it’ll be posted here. I hope you’ll check it out. And leave a comment, if you like. Those are nice. :-)

The Last Word

2007-09-08T02:40:00.000+02:00

It's happening again.

This time, I am at Logan Airport in Boston, about to embark on the penultimate leg of my journey home. I'm going to Vegas to hang out with my Auntie Beth for a couple of days and to pick up my car for the road-trip back to Denver. I've purchased a snack and a bottle of water and have settled in to a chair with my book, since – as it turns out – I actually have lots of time to kill (we were worried for a while, Lisa and me, that I wouldn't make it; we'd lost track of time, as we often do, when a cursory glance at my mother's kitchen clock had us scurrying to her car, hurling all 60 kilos of my stuff into the back seat, and white-knuckling it down the Mass Pike all the way to the airport shuttle drop-off). Soon enough, though, the gate attendant's voice is crackling over the PA and it's my turn to board, so I hoist my backpack onto my shoulder, tuck my bottle of water under my arm, and fall in with the other weary travelers shuffling towards the gate.

I am rifling through the pages of my book (it's called Gilead, incidentally – and it's fabulous; you should all read it) for my bookmark-slash-boarding pass when I feel it – a faint but urgent ache, swelling and pressing against my throat like a small but steadily growing tumor. My eyes sting, and the pretty, artificially cheerful gate attendant – her blond hair a golden helmet framing her bright face - blurs in front of me. I blink furiously – I can't believe I'm crying again, and I'm not even sure yet why I am – and I swallow. And then text Lisa. "I'm crying," I type. "I'm getting on the plane and I'm crying. This is it. It's all over now. I'm finally going home."

I take a breath and clutch my backpack closer. I am suddenly tempted to turn around, to hop back onto the shuttle, and retrace the steps I've taken – to go back to New York, back to London, back to Venice and Bore and Paris and London again; back to Joburg and Lusaka, then Saint Francis and Mwandi; back to Zanzibar, Vic Falls, Mukinge, and Chilonga. I could go back, I think, just for a little while, and live it all over again – just so I don't forget.

*****

Except that that's been the point of this blog, I guess. To write it all down so I don't forget. To chart the course of my grand adventure and leave you, now, with a final thought. But where to begin? I mean, the truth is, nothing about the last eight months went as I expected it would – or, frankly, as I thought it should. And I spent a lot of time while I was over there – indeed, too much time – lamenting this fact. I was embarrassed, even, that I didn't have better stories to tell, or more tales from the trenches. But now that it's over, none of that seems to matter very much.

There were challenges, to be sure, and frustrations and disappointments. And there were times, I will tell you, when I felt more lost and more alone than I have ever felt in my entire life. But when I think back on these last eight months, it is not feeling frustrated that I remember; it is not feeling embarrassed or lost or alone.

When I think back on these last eight months, I think of Victoria Falls, and of soaring – weightless and free – for four gloriously insane seconds; or of the Tanzanian countryside, the dappled sunlight reflecting off acres of sunflowers and shining black faces smiling up at me as the train blurs past; or of Maggie, and her Irish husband who-loves-her-so-much, and the 40,000 kwacha she collected to buy two tired and hungry muzungu strangers lunch. I think of Robb and Sanjiv and the rest of the IHV team; the missionaries at Mwandi; and the med students at St Francis.

I think of Dorica, clapping and screeching with joy when comprehension dawns on her face; and of Jonathan bowing his head and saying thank you; and of Thomas and Temba and Jakob and Stan; and the way dawn and dusk always came on so quickly it was like God just flipped a switch.

And then I think of Kondwani and her perfect pink lips, her mocha skin, and her tiny fingers clutching at the neckline of my shirt; and of the way my brother – who has always been my rock, the one on whom I've counted to carry me and help me find my way – finally allowed himself to need me, and dared to trust me, for even a little while, with the care of his most treasured gift.

I think of all these things – and so many, many more – and I know that I am blessed. And I am deeply, profoundly grateful – and I haven't even started talking about Europe yet. :-)

"Do you even realize what you've gotten to experience these last eight months?" my father asked me last week, shaking his head and squinting at my computer monitor. We were looking at some of the pictures I'd taken while I'd been gone. Do I realize what I've gotten to experience?? I'm almost offended that he's even asked. Does he really think I don't?

I bungee-jumped off the second highest bungee-jump in the world. I saw more of Zambia than most Zambians do; stared a lion straight in his limpid, amber eyes (from the safety of a Jeep, of course, with a trained game driver at the wheel); and lived for two weeks in Tanzania and Zanzibar on less than $15 US a day.

I watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace; stood where Anne Boleyn was beheaded; took a train through the French Alps; and stumbled into Sacre Coeur – completely and totally by accident, I should point out (I'd gotten lost on my way to dinner) – and was so overcome by the beauty of it, I literally sat down and wept. I saw Notre Dame, Doge's Palace, the Musée D'Orsay, and the Tate Modern. I watched a show at the Old Vic and a concert in the Palazzo di San Marco. I saw the Paris Opera, London Bridge, the Eiffel Tower and Saint Chappelle.

I drank homemade wine with every meal in Bore; kissed a Frenchman on the streets of Montmartre; danced with an Italian under a starlit sky at San Rocco; and got drunk with a bunch of Aussies, a couple Germans, two Canadians, and a Dane in London.

I had the time of my friggin' life.

But now it's over. And I'm boarding the plane for Vegas, where I'll pick up my car and head home. And just as it did when I left Lusaka, London, Bore and Paris, the ache presses against my throat and I falter. I look behind me. I could go back, I think, just for a little while, and live it all over again – just so I don't forget…

*****

To all of you who sent emails or comments while I was away, or who simply stood beside me and labored through the reading of this blog as I labored through the writing of it – from the bottom of my full-to-bursting heart, I thank you.

Uishi salama.

Picture: Me and Stan

Dear Diary, Part 3

2007-08-06T19:10:00.000+02:00

Day 15 – Monday

Ugh. So I was leaving the hospital late last night and saw a man, dead as a doornail, lying in a pool of his own blood in the back of a truck. Just lying there, with about a half a dozen people milling about like he was no more than a sack of potatoes. Gave me the willies.

I found out today he’d been one of two casualties from a horrific traffic accident. There were four guys involved: one was killed instantly (the guy in the back of the truck); two others were rushed to the hospital and saved by the doctors on call; the fourth was left to die in his car because they couldn’t get him out. Can you imagine? They literally had to look this guy in the eye and be like “Sorry, mate. You’re just gonna have to lie there all twisted and trapped and bleed to death while we take these other two to the hospital.” Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. Seems so senseless to me. But then they don’t exactly have the jaws of life here. Ugh.

Day 16 – Tuesday

It was another long day today. Spent most of it with Thomas in the main store room trying to make headway on an actual physical count of the entire store room inventory. Somebody had the grand idea that we needed to import the entire formulary with stock counts, which frankly doesn’t make sense to me since those counts are going to change (several times) before anybody knows how to modify the data in the system. But this is what I’ve been asked to do so I’m doing it. At the rate we’re going, though, we’ll be counting well into next week. Only I’m meant to leave on Friday and I’ve got a good three days worth of stuff to do after we’ve finished the physical count. On the plus side, I did get to hang with Thomas (he’s a close second to my other favorite, Stan), which was cool. He’s a totally sharp guy (confounding devotion to Benny Hinn notwithstanding) and a blast to be around. In addition to pursuing scholarship opportunities for further study in Canada, he’s going to school right now for psychosocial counseling so that he can be more effective when dispensing ARVs to HIV patients (pharmacy folks spend a really long time with each patient explaining the oft-mentioned complicated regimens that require strict adherence and he thought taking a course in counseling would help him). He also shows real enthusiasm for this new system I’m trying to implement and seems to be grasping the big picture business process concepts better than any of the other guys. I think I’m going to recommend that he gets added as one of the project leaders.

Oh, and just because this made me giggle: I was leaving the hospital last night after checking email for word from mSupply and there was the hospital guard, bundled within an inch of his life (Zambians hate to be cold and will wear turtlenecks in 80-degree weather) in a giant poofy ski parka, a scarf, two pairs of gloves…and a Santa hat. :-P And me without my camera.

Day 17 – Wednesday

It’s hard to express the gratitude I’m feeling today. I mean, we lost power again and two days before I’m meant to leave I’ve had to throw out the whole plan for the next phase of the implementation and start on a new one which is going to accelerate the timetable and the things I’ve got to do before I go, but – I don’t know…I’ve just – I’ve got that Wes-Bentley-and-the-plastic-bag-from-American-Beauty thing going on right now.

Maybe it’s as simple as feeling like I’ve got a purpose here; or the fact that I was recently the beneficiary of the proverbial “kindness of strangers”. Maybe it’s because I managed to squeeze in a run before dinner tonight or because I’m figuring out this mSupply thing and I’m enjoying the satisfaction that comes with learning something new. Or maybe it’s just because the weather has been really nice. I don’t know. But it’s there, and it’s kind of overwhelming, which means I haven’t the first clue how to write about it.

Day 18 – Thursday

Lost power again today. Water, too.

Watched a toddler splash happily (and obliviously) in a puddle of her own pee while she waited to be seen by the doctor.

Ate lunch with blood-splattered mid-wives who looked (and sounded, frankly) as though they were fresh from battle.

And I found out that someone in the pharmacy’s been pilfering drugs. I don’t know who, but I have a sinking feeling I might.

Day 19 – Friday

So it was my last official day at Saint Francis today. I was supposed to have left this morning but I ended up staying an extra day to wrap up a few things, so I’ll leave tomorrow – bright and early on the 5.45am bus.

I feel good, I guess – I accomplished what I came to do and then some: I turned in a project plan; I left the guys with detailed next steps; I even managed to get the formulary imported and got the guys trained and starting to do a few of the more basic tasks in the system, which was more than I ever dreamed – but I feel sad, too.

I dug it here. For all of its frustrations and for all of the setbacks, I totally dug it. I dug the people, I dug the work, I even dug taking a bath with a bucket (although I’ll be thrilled to finally shave my legs…). I don’t know. I’m a sentimental mush, so it should surprise no one that my leaving feels so bittersweet.

Oh, and I found out who’s been pilfering the drugs from the store room. It was not, as I had suspected, Stanislas. I’m both relieved that it’s not and embarrassed that I jumped so quickly to that conclusion.

He was sweet today, Stanislas. It was the end of the day and everyone was knocking off but Thomas and me. Stan came in to the office where we were working. “So I’ll see you on Monday,” he said, grinning and extending his hand.

“Monday!” I said, taking it and giving him the traditional three-part handshake. “But I will not be here. I am leaving tomorrow, Stanislas. You know that.”

“Ok,” he said and nodded, his hand still firmly grasping mine. “So I will just see you on Monday then.”

“Stanislas! What do you mean, ‘See you on Monday,’” Jeremiah laughs. “But she cannot be here on Monday if she is leaving tomorrow!”

“I am just saying she can’t go,” Stan says.

“Ah, but I must,” I tell him.

“Ok, then you will just have to come back,” he says. Then, “You will come back?”

“I hope so,” I say.

“When,” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I tell him truthfully. “Soon, I hope. But we will see.”

Anyway, so that’s that. I’ve got one week left in Lusaka to pack and ship stuff home and write thank you notes and get ready for my Europe trip, and then my little adventure will come to an end. I feel in some ways like I’ve been here for years, in others like I just got here yesterday. Either way, though, I can’t believe it’s over.

…

Yeah, I’m kinda really sad. :-(

Dear Diary, Part 2

2007-07-29T01:19:00.000+02:00

Day 9 – Tuesday

I cannot believe I’ve been here a week already – more than a week, actually! Man, time is fuh-lyin’ here. Or at least it seems that way, I’m so stinkin’ busy. But, better busy than bored, I always say.

I spent most of today holed up in my house on the computer, further fleshing out the project plan and analyzing the mSupply system in the context of the pharmacy’s business processes. Although I did pop by the dispensary for a couple hours in the morning to help pack pills and whatnot. Stan was missing again (he went to Chipata yesterday) and I found out he’s been admitted to the hospital. Apparently, he was on quite a bender over the weekend and got himself into a fight at a bar; split his face open pretty good.

“In Chipata?” I asked Temba.

“No, in Katete stores,” he told me, spreading the latest batch of scrips on the counter. Katete is the boma, or main town, closest to Saint Francis; it’s maybe 8 – 10 kilometers from the hospital, but there is a modest “shopping district” just about 2 or 3 kilometers away called Katete stores. There are some small groceries carrying only non-perishables, a couple bars, a few small take-away restaurants serving mainly nshima and chicken, a petrol station, and other “general dealers” carrying basic household items.

“But I thought he was in Chipata yesterday,” I say. “Was this last night then?”

“Yes,” nods Temba, counting pills.

“But he will be ok?” I ask.

“He will be fine,” Temba says.

“Poor Stanislas,” I say, shaking my head. “That is not good.”

Temba laughs. “Ah, but don’t worry. Stanislas – he will be fine. He just sometimes likes too much to enjoy – to, to have a drink. And then he gets very…talkative.”

“Talkative?”

“Yes, talkative.”

“Ah, gotcha,” I nod. “But…he will be ok?” I ask.

“He will be fine,” Temba says.

I wonder to myself if I should go visit him and ultimately decide against it – I tell myself it’s because I’m afraid my showing up might embarrass him, but I think the truth is I’m still slightly uncomfortable about our encounter on Saturday. Maybe I will go tomorrow.

Day 10 – Wednesday

So…kind of a weird day today. I spent part of the morning at pharmacy (where I learned that Stan is on the mend and will be discharged soon), and then a few hours back at my house modifying the ARV dispensing tool that I built back in February (I’ve managed to convince the guys that they should start using it again - at least until mSupply is fully implemented - but there’s a drug regimen that needs to be added to it and, consequently, the formulas for all of the related cells across all 72 worksheets need to be updated). Anyhoo, so I was back at my house working on that but, for some reason, I couldn’t focus. So I did this really silly thing where I started reading through old (I mean really old – years old) journal entries and suddenly found myself wrestling some old ghosts – ones I thought I’d long since vanquished – and it kinda threw me. Funny how that stuff can just come up out of nowhere and bite you in the ass.

Anyway, so I wrestled. And, of course, prayed – which for me, most of the time, is just another form of wrestling. But, as a pastor once told me, that is pretty much the way it should be. “Do you know,” he asked, “that Israel, the name God gave his people, literally means struggles with God?” I looked at him. “Yeah, y’know – Jacob and the angel and the hip socket?” I nodded. “‘You shall no longer be called Jacob but Israel, because you have struggled with God,’” he quoted. “So go on and struggle, Katie. As a Christian, it’s kind of your job – your birthright, even. And anyway, God’s big enough.”

So I struggled with God today. Quite a bit, I might add. Even did a little fist-shaking. And I cried, too – big snotty, wailing tears. But it was good.

Except that now I’m behind on my work.

Day 11 – Thursday

Stan was discharged today. He popped by pharmacy for a bit and seemed in good spirits. He’ll be back on the clock tomorrow.

I did another brief tour in the dispensary in the morning and added at least three more Chinyanja phrases to my repertoire: Tubili ngat vamvela kupweteka for “Take two whenever you feel pain”; Mumwe yonse for “Take all of these at once”; and Kupanga, which apparently means “Mix this packet of oral rehydration salts with one liter of water and drink.” Yeah, no, that can’t be right.

“Kupanga?” I ask Temba, holding out the packet of salts.

He nods. “Kupanga.”

“And they know what that means?” I ask, scratching the word into my notebook.

“Yes, it means make, to make,” he assures me.

“And that’s all you say? Kupanga?”

“Koo-PAIN-ga,” Jacob pipes in from the counter.

“Koo-PAIN-ga,” I repeat to myself, reading from the notebook.

Temba looks at me as I recite. “I think now you can even dispense without the notebook,” he says, then gestures at the new pile of completed scrips by the dispensing window.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I protest. “I think I probably still need the notebook.”

“Ah, but you can do it!” he insists.

“No, seriously, Temba. I don’t want to mess it up. I need the notebook.”

“No, no! You can even – ”

“She needs the notebook,” Jacob says from the counter. They laugh.

*****

I spent the afternoon at home studying the user manual and working on the project plan and tonight I got the email reply I’d been waiting for from the mSupply developers in Nepal.

Oof.

Yeah, it’s gonna be a reeeaally busy weekend. And not just for me, incidentally – the hospital lost two more doctors today. And by “lost” I mean that two of the volunteers finished their tour. I swear, this place is hemorrhaging personnel. But then, they depend mostly on volunteers to staff the place and no volunteer can stay on indefinitely. That makes eight that have gone in just the last week, though (there were a bunch of Irish medical students who left last week), and no replacements have arrived - nor do there appear to be any on the horizon. Plus another one of the doctors has been in Lusaka at a training workshop so the burden has shifted to the three remaining docs (all but one of whom are volunteers) and a handful of medical students. These guys are exhausted – I am awed by their commitment and, frankly, their stamina. I really don’t know how they do it.

Day 12 – Friday

So there was a chicken in the hospital post today. Moffat’s dinner, I suspect (Moffat is the sweet elderly man who mans the post office). I was in the office emailing my reply back to mSupply when Moffat came in with the thing, its feet bound with string, and placed it in a shallow cardboard box in the corner whence it began squawking in protest and flapping its wings, hopping and stumbling in a vain attempt to escape. I must have looked stricken, because Moffat laughed and chided me “You can just keep working! It will not harm you!” Pshaw. As if I thought it would.

And Stan was officially back to work today – and still in good spirits – although he tried to tell me that the wounds on his face were the result of a bike accident. I was glad to see him smiling, though.

Oh, and Chris and Amy are back in the States now. Er, they left yesterday, so they should have arrived by now. I talked to them a couple days ago. Apparently Kondwani is developing at lightening speed – she’s making new sounds and is more engaged than ever. And a Fatty McCheeks now, too! Chris says she’s up to – oh, shoot I forget how many kilos he said… Seven, maybe? I don’t know. I can’t believe it’s been almost two weeks since I’ve seen her. Feels like it’s been months.

Aw, man – now I’m all mushy. :-(

Day 13 – Saturday

Had an unexpectedly productive day today. I love when that happens! I spent most of last night trying (unsuccessfully) to reason my way through a concept that I couldn’t wrap my brain around – an incredibly simple concept, I should add, to do with units and pack sizes of drug products, but one that is critical because the whole mSupply system sort of hinges on it (units and pack sizes are what the system uses to calculate the total stock of a particular drug item). Anyways, I was trying to figure it out so I could put the data in the right format for the import file but I kept getting stuck. I finally gave up about midnight and decided I’d just wander over to pharmacy in the morning and see if looking at the actual stock and having a visual representation would help me grasp it.

Well, I got lucky, because Jeremiah (who doesn’t typically work on weekends) just happened to be at the hospital casting out a demon that was troubling a patient who’d been admitted to the wards (yep, you read that right) and popped by the pharmacy when he was through. I spent a couple hours with him picking his brain and made serious headway on the import file; even managed, based on some of the things we discussed, to finally reason my way to understanding the concept that had been eluding me. Weee! Anyways, I got so much more done in the morning than I expected that I decided to take the afternoon off and go for a gorgeous hike up a nearby escarpment with some of the other volunteers. It was a bit overcast so the pics I took didn’t really come out, but it was fantastic!

After the hike, though, it was back to the salt mines and another late night on the computer. I am in bed now, scribbling this entry in my notebook by the light of my headlamp and I am, I must say, plumb tuckered.

Dear Diary

2007-07-23T22:59:00.000+02:00

Day 1 (er, 2…) – Tuesday

So I’m at Saint Francis now. Got here yesterday after saying my goodbyes to Chris, Amy and Kondwani (they were headed to Katondwe for a week and will leave for the US while I’m here) and hopping a bus for the torturous seven-hour ride to Katete. I’d have slept (I’d only gotten about two hours the night before) but I managed to find myself on the only bus you’re supposed to avoid when traveling to Katete and I was too busy hanging on for dear life.

Anyhoo, but I made it. And I’m not staying with Shelagh this time. This time, I’m like a real, honest-to-goodness volunteer (weee!), which means I’m staying in one of the short-term volunteer houses (got a roommate, even – an older Canadian mid-wifery teacher who’s here for a couple weeks with her students) and taking meals at the mess. The house is small and spare, but it’s got running water (although not hot), power (although not all the time), a stove (although it doesn’t turn off unless you unplug it and then sometimes it won’t turn back on) and even a fridge. We could cook, if we were so inclined, except that the closest grocery store is nearly two hours away. And there’s no shower, so we boil water (when there’s power, which there wasn’t tonight, which also meant there was no dinner) and “take a bucket”, crouching, in the tub. It’s a total pain in the ass, but I kinda friggin’ love it (although ask me again in three weeks how I feel…).

This morning, I attended the weekly Tuesday morning clinician’s meeting where I met Jeremiah, the head pharmacist (and my new best friend), and then spent the day in the dispensary; my sole aim was to begin building relationships with the guys and to start to understand the general workflow process. But they were short-staffed (no surprise there) so I got a crash course in pharmacy tech and was soon counting pills, fetching stock, and even dispensing scrips to patients (Tubili tubili katatu pa tsiku, if you’re interested, is Chinyanja for “Take two pills three times a day”). It wasn’t terribly complicated (although I have to say, I suck at doing math in my head), but it was terribly chaotic. Open pill bottles scattered randomly across the counter, half-filled prescriptions strewn about, pharmacy assistants running around, stock movement sheets sliding out of the three-ring binders where they're kept… So far, it seems, the only system in pharmacy is that there is no system. But given the number of patients to be seen and the number of pharmacy staff to see them, I’m just amazed that anyone walks away with a scrip filled at all.

From managing the stock to moving the stock to dispensing the stock, every single process is done manually – and only if there’s time – which generally means that, with the exception of the last part (dispensing to patients), it doesn’t get done at all (or at least not with any accuracy or timeliness). One could argue, I suppose, that they’re at least attending to the most important piece, and one would be right…sorta. Except that now there is an even bigger issue – drug shortages. When you don’t have time to manage your stock, you don’t always know how much you’re using or realize when it’s time to order more. And if you don’t order more, you can’t (duh) get more, which means – ultimately – neither can the patients. This is an especially critical matter when it comes to ARVs, which require strict adherence not only to work effectively but to reduce the chances that a patient will develop resistance. At Saint Francis, they’re having particular trouble managing their stock of Truvada, the drug that is the government-recommended first-line therapy for all HIV patients. They ran out of it a few months ago, so they stopped prescribing it, which meant that their reported consumption of it was artificially low and, since future drug orders are typically based on historical consumption, they haven’t been able to order as much of it as they really need so they keep falling deeper into the hole – all of which means that the folks who really need it, the patients, aren’t getting it.

Which is where this new software that I’m meant to implement comes in. Shelagh and Ian (her husband, who is also the hospital administrator) are hoping that if we can put something in place that will help to automate some of the processes, we might more effectively manage them. My plan, then, is to spend the rest of this week working alongside the guys and learning more about the way it all works so that I can evaluate whether or not mSupply is indeed the best solution and, if it is, begin developing the implementation plan for it and banging out the tasks.

Day 3 – Wednesday

Spent the day in pharmacy again. Met with Jeremiah briefly in the morning, and then the sh*t hit the fan and they were still short-staffed so I got to literally get my hands dirty again (I was covered, head to foot, in the bitter, powdery residue of the pills) helping to fill and dispense scrips. Then the truck came from medical stores (the government supplier) with the monthly delivery (although no Nevirapine, another important ARV; and still no Truvada). I helped unload and pack the storeroom and by the time we finished I was a complete mess. It was fantastic! My shoulders ache and my feet are killing me, but I finally feel like I’m doing something. Something tangible anyway, something I can see and measure.

I also met the hospital’s purchasing officer and learned about how they procure the drugs (and other medical supplies) that are not provided by the government or donor countries and how they receive and track those (manually, of course, in triplicate, in a carbon copy Goods Received notebook which frequently disappears, along with the invoices that are meant to be entered into it). mSupply, in addition to being a general stock management tool, also tracks supplier quotes, purchase orders and invoices, so this is another area where we could improve processes.

Oh, and I think I’ve solved the Truvada crisis for the hospital. Nothing particularly imaginative or creative – I just made a phone call. Called Robb (my brother’s boss at AIDSRelief) and asked him if he knew where we could get our hands on some. He said that AIDSRelief was sitting on so much that they were afraid it was going to expire and that he’d email Lameck (the procurement officer for AR) that night and authorize the immediate release of 1000 bottles (roughly a three-month supply) for SF. J Given the number of patients already on it and how many more are being enrolled in therapy every day, they will more than likely burn through this supply in little more than a month. But – the good news is that this increased consumption will be reflected in their reports, which means they’ll be able to order more, which means that (at least theoretically) they’ll get more and they’ll be back on track.

Day 4 – Thursday

Started today counting pills for pre-packs in the OPD (outpatient) dispensary, then got bumped to the ART dispensary working with Stanislas. He dispensed the ARVS and I recorded each scrip in the computer (in the spreadsheet I built for them when I was here last February – their interim solution until mSupply is up and running – but which apparently they haven’t been using. Sigh…). I dig Stanislaus, although I am a little worried about him. He’s kind of crotchety (totally atypical for a Zambian, as they are generally a really happy people) and he always smells vaguely of alcohol. And today I noticed a tremor in his leg when he was dispensing to a patient and saw him try to cover it. I don’t know – maybe it’s nothing. There’s just something about him that makes me sad, though, so it’s kind of my sole aim to make him laugh as much as I can every day.

We were slammed, though (again) and worked straight through lunch. I spent the day swinging wildly between feeling frustrated by the way things (don’t) get done here and being totally awed that they do at all. It never stops being overwhelming, the stuff these people have to deal with. And it’s always the sh*t you take for granted, too. Like having a reliable power or water supply; or a car to get you where you need to go; or, I don’t know, tech support. I mean, if your cell phone breaks you have to take an entire day off work so you can ride the nearly two hours to Chipata to get it fixed (or buy a new one). If your computer crashes or your internet goes down, it’s literally weeks before anyone can take a look at it. If the patient information system that the really nice Dutch (wait, is it Dutch?) volunteer built for you bugs out, well, you’re pretty much SOL – even if you really need the reports it’s meant to generate – because he’s back in Holland now and not exactly available to provide ongoing system maintenance and so you’ll just have to manually generate them now.

Not to mention what the patients themselves face. Most of them can’t speak, never mind read, English and yet they’re expected to strictly adhere to complicated treatment regimens with only written instructions in English to guide them. And then there are the meds that require refrigeration to keep from spoiling, except – oh wait – the average villager doesn’t even have electricity, never mind a fridge (the pharmacists don’t even bother telling them that they need to be refrigerated which initially pissed me off – until I realized how pointless telling them would be). Or how ‘bout something as simple as the mother who’s expected to split a tiny 5mg pill into quarters for her child. Do you think she owns a pill cutter? The pharmacy doesn’t even have a pill cutter. I almost cried when I was filling a scrip for this one kid and I realized that we didn’t have the dose the doc had prescribed. He was supposed to get 100mg but the caps only come in these tiny 200mg rounded tabs (in other words, not the flat, pre-scored tabs that are conducive to splitting). “How will this mother give her child his medicine?” I asked Stan.

“Ah, but I think the mother knows how to break in half,” he told me.

“Right. Of course,” I said, nodding. “Sooo…can you do it?” I asked, holding out the pill. I didn’t mean to be cheeky, and I know it was “just” ibuprofen and not, say, life-saving ARVs or anti-malarials, but it wasn’t the first time I’d seen a patient handed a scrip with a dose they were essentially going to have to figure out on their own and it was starting to frustrate me.

He took it from my hand and tried to break the rounded pill to no avail. “Ah, but she will just use a knife,” he said, then set it aside and went back to counting the pills for the fifty other scrips he was trying to fill at the same time.

“But…will she have a knife sharp enough to cut it without smashing it?” I persisted. He looked at me for a second then disappeared, then was back a minute later with a surgical blade he’d scavenged from the storeroom. “This’ll do,” I said, and then sliced every single one of those pills as close to in half as I could manage.

It’s maddening. And I imagine if Stan thought he had time to cut every single pill for every mother that needed him to he would; or that Temba would explain, to each patient that needed to know, how they might create a small refrigerator out of a clay pot, sand, and water. But there’s no time for that here. Or anywhere, for that matter. Every hospital I’ve visited since I’ve come here has been wildly understaffed and stretched almost to the breaking point, although Saint Francis is among the worst (if only for how huge it is – their catchment area is ginormous). I honestly don’t know how it’s still functioning – except that there really is always someone who puts forth some Herculean effort to get you over the hump, to get you through to the next day. Because, I mean, who wants to be the guy that tells the patient who was brought to the hospital in the middle of the night in the back of a pick-up truck, bleeding from the head, “Yeah, sorry. I’m just too tired – I’ve already been on call three nights this week” – even if you have? Who wants to tell the patient who just walked seven hours just to get their next three-month supply of meds, “Sorry, my friend. Pharmacy’s closed now – come back tomorrow” – even if you have been on the clock for almost ten hours already and you still have however many kilometers to walk back to your own house?

There’s a quote that I’ve read before, which has been attributed to a million different people, that I keep thinking about: “Do all you can with what you have in the time you have in the place that you are.”

That really is as much as you can hope for.

Day 5 – Friday

Ok, I’m pooped. Spent almost the entire day helping Thomas move and shelve the stock that we unloaded on Wednesday. Scarcely had time to break for lunch or even pee. I loved it, though. I feel like I’m finally, I don’t know, “earning my keep”; like I’m finally doing what I came to do. But I’m pooped.

Oh, and my roommate left today, so now I’ve got the house all to myself.

Day 6 – Saturday

So it was just Thomas and me in pharmacy today. It was the weekend, and it was slow, so we spent much of the day cleaning and organizing and pre-packing meds for the coming week. And Stan came by, drunk as a skunk, and wanted to “talk.” About what, I couldn’t determine. “America,” he said, leading me out into the hospital courtyard. “I want to ask you questions about America.”

“Ok…” I said, slightly apprehensive. It was not yet 10 o’clock in the morning and he was blitzed. “What would you like to know?” I asked. But he couldn’t really say, or if he did, I couldn’t understand him through his slurred speech. “But I must get back to work, Stanislas. Maybe we can talk on Monday when we are working together?” I suggested.

“Or maybe we can talk some other time, when you are not working, and I can ask you some questions,” he fumbled.

“Ah, but I’m afraid I will be working every day,” I said. “And I really must get back now. I’ve left Thomas all alone. I will see you on Monday?”

“Yah, ok, I will see you on Monday.”

“Be careful,” I said, then wagged my finger. “Don’t get into any trouble.”

“No trouble!” he grinned, and staggered away.

Sigh… poor Stanislas. Sometimes I hate when I’m right.

****

I worked until five, then went for a run before dinner; then worked until about 11pm on the mSupply project plan. Now that I’ve spent a week packing pills and dispensing scrips and shelving stock and whatnot, I feel like I’ve got a fairly good handle on the way things work. Now I’ll start digging more deeply into the actual software and figuring out the nuts and bolts of how each of the processes it manages works, what modules we’ll employ, what import files I’ll need to prep, and blah blah blah.

Day 7 – Sunday

Kind of a frustrating day today. Worked the morning at pharmacy, with Thomas again, which was cool, then met with Shelagh, which is always a hoot, because you never just “meet with Shelagh” when you go over there – you meet with Shelagh and Chiko and Jim and Josh, and play “What’s Your Favorite Movie” and “Can You Fix My Leggo Gun” while Love Actually plays on loop in the background (yep, aGAIN – or no wait, maybe that was yesterday…). Anyway, so I met with Shelagh to update her on where I am with the project and then spent the rest of the afternoon and the whole of the evening doing battle with the friggin’ internet. It’s only dial-up here (and at 500 kwacha a minute, friggin’ highway robbery), and I had to re-download the nearly 10MB user manual for the mSupply software because the one I had downloaded back in Lusaka disappeared off my laptop. Or expired or something, I don’t know. All I know is I clicked on the link for it on my desktop only to get a message that said “Sorry, this is not the user manual... To download a copy, visit our website” and blah blah blah. Anyway, so I needed the internet and it took me, I sh*t you not, no fewer than three hours to track down the key for the room, find a power adaptor (I managed to lose mine somewhere in the 50 yards between my house and the hospital), and configure my laptop for the connection. When I finally got it all set up, it took almost 25 minutes to load the first web page and then nearly five hours to download the damn manual and by then it was too late to do any work.

Tomorrow I meet with Shelagh, Ian and Jeremiah to review the workflow process as I’ve understood it and fill in any gaps, suss out the priorities for the next two weeks (I think I will end up staying for three total, instead of two – there’s just too much to do), and talk the issues/potential obstacles I’ve identified and brainstorm possible solutions. I’d hoped to have more prepared for them, but I’ll have to work it out in the morning, I guess.

Day 8 – Monday

Ok, it’s friggin’ cold here. I mean really friggin’ cold. Have I mentioned the cold yet? It’s freezing! I know it’s winter (and didn’t I say once that we’re at about 4,000 feet here?) but it’s sub-Saharan Africa, man – it’s not supposed to be this cold.

Anyhoo, so I met with Shelagh, Ian and Jeremiah and it went really well. I also managed to connect to the internet and shoot off the draft project plan to the mSupply developers in Nepal to get their feedback and their input on the best next steps to take, so it looks like we’re on our way. I’ll spend less time in the pharmacy this week and more time holed up at my house banging away at the plan. Weee!

Ooh, and I’ll also, when time allows, be doing some writing work for a small, newly-incorporated independent record label in New York – West Avenue Records. Their first artist is set to release his album at the end of July and I’ve been hired to help with copywriting and PR and whatnot. Check him out at http://www.michaelnappi.com/!

Lions, and hippos, and zebras! Oh my!

2007-07-08T22:57:00.000+02:00

A few pics from my safari in South Luangwa National Park... :-)

Ok, NOW it’s (kind of) like Colorado

2007-06-13T23:29:00.000+02:00

So it’s the dry season now, which means the rich, red earth has turned a dusty, terra-cotta brown. The grasses are turning too. And some of the trees. And the air is different – sharper, crisper, more acrid (the dry season is also the burning season); the wind more insistent and less predictable. These days, whenever I go on one of my walks (or, more recently, runs – the all-carbs-all-the-time diet is doing, as our housekeeper was good enough to point out last week, quite a number on my already ample behind, so I thought maybe I oughtta step it up a bit), I return, eyes stinging, with the bitter smell of charred wood (which smells curiously like burnt coffee to me) clinging to my clothes. But I’m enjoying the cool, crisp evenings and the warm, bright days which – excepting the smoke – do remind me of Colorado. Oh, and the flowers! Goodness, they are extraordinary. There are new ones every day, it seems. There’re bougainvillea trees and geraniums (gerania?) and these amazing orange droopy lily-looking things that I can’t for my life find the name of and - get this! - poinsettia bushes (I know! Poinsettia bushes!)! Our street is awash in color: vibrant purples, brilliant fuscias, velvety reds, golden yellows, dazzling pinks, bright oranges, stunning peaches... Kondwani and I take walks sometimes just to look at them. Although usually, within a few minutes, she is fast asleep – perfect pink lips forming a perfect pink heart, her tiny head snuggled against my chest, her little fingers grasping the neckline of my shirt, like she’s afraid if she let’s go, I will too. Oh, if she only knew...

A few of you have sent emails or MySpace messages recently (bless you, by the way – I’m desperately homesick and I miss you all madly so your messages, even if I can’t always reply, do my lonely little heart good) wondering what’s up. The truth is – not much, actually. Most of the time, I’m helping Chris and Amy with the baby (who, I have to say, is pretty much the coolest effing thing EVER) so they can work. And while I worship the hallowed ground the wee one does not yet walk (or even crawl) on, and would happily give a dissertation on her every developmental milestone (she found her hands recently, and we are endlessly fascinated – as is she – by this discovery, and will watch her for hours as she clasps and unclasps them; but then, we watch her sleep, too), her pooping and burping proclivities (for someone so tiny she sure does manage some earth-rattlers), and how her smile is, hands down, the most awe-inspiring wonder in the history of planet earth, I scarcely think that’s what you guys are interested in when you’re asking how it’s going in Africa – even if it is my favorite part.

When I’m not helping to take care of Kondwani, I spend my time (still) trying (unsuccessfully) to secure myself more volunteer work. And writing – although obviously not (insert sheepish grin) my blog. Short stories, though. And film scenes and descriptive paragraphs and whatnot – y’know, “creative” stuff. In fact, I’m supposed to be writing right now (I’m behind on my weekly self-imposed deadline) but, like any good procrastinator, I’ve decided what I really need to be doing right now is something else – so I’m writing my blog!

Anyhoo, so yeah – “how it’s going in Africa.” Much like it’s going for many of you back home, I imagine – there are good days (like any day spent with the baby or driving through the Zambian countryside, for example) and there are not so good days (like when I learn about the unexpected death of an AIDSRelief employee’s young daughter or encounter the bureaucratic obstacles to doing work here – or just miss home). I did get my visa issues worked out (the doctor at St. Francis Mission Hospital got the head of the Zambian Anglican Council – the priest I mentioned in my last blog – to secure me a work permit) so I was able to (finally!) meet up with Chris and Amy in Macha for a quick spell then turn around and travel with them to Mwandi a couple days later. Oh, and we almost died on our way home from Mwandi when BAV’s back right wheel broke off – and I mean literally broke off – and went zooming off into the ditch across the road. I watched it, too, for a good prolly ten or fifteen seconds before I realized it was actually our wheel bouncing merrily along beside us. I mean, I heard the thump and the attendant shrill screech of metal on asphalt, felt the car jerk, and saw Chris’s hands tighten around the steering wheel as he Formula-Oned us safely to a stop on the side of the road; while we were skidding, I even did one of those “Wait, is that…?” trail-off things, my finger pointing limply towards the skipping rubber wheel. But somehow, while it was happening, it never really registered. The really freaky thing, though? It happened at the exact same spot where we’d come upon a fatal accident on our way to Mwandi (a flat-bed lorry had lost the container load it was carrying, careened out of control, flipped over the container and landed upside down in the ditch on the side of the road, completely crushing the cab; unfortunately, by the time we got there, it was too late for the driver, who’d been thrown from the cab and killed instantly). Amy was literally mid-sentence saying, “Y’know, I can see why this is such a dangerous stretch of - ” when our tire flew off. In other words, we were very, very lucky.

Besides that, though, there’s not too much to report. I am, if you can believe it, already halfway through my sixth month here, which has prompted a couple of you to ask if I’m ready to come home. I mentioned the homesick thing, so a part of me wishes I were there already. But I also mentioned my continuing frustration with being unable to secure consistent volunteer work (my visa issues put the kibosh on my trip to Mozambique with Sam, I haven’t been able to coordinate my return to St. Francis with Shelagh, and despite repeated visits to the Lusaka Teachers’ Association and a letter expressing my intent to help out, there seems to be no end to the hoops I must jump through before I can actually do any work for them), so I often feel like I’ve not yet done what I came to Africa to do. Consequently, I’m not quite ready to go (that, and I’m gonna really really reeaally miss Kondwani…).

But then, as a purported person of faith, I should know that the plans we have for ourselves don’t always shake out the way we hope they will or think they ought. And I imagine that, in due time, I’ll come to learn that no matter what I expected I would learn or experience over here, no matter what it was that I had hoped to do, whatever God’s purpose was in bringing me here was perfectly fulfilled.

Oh, and we’re going on safari this weekend! It’s my birthday present from Chris & Amy, which we didn’t get to celebrate in May since we were at Mwandi, and I’m really looking forward to it. Hopefully, I’ll have some cool new pictures to post next week! Until then, lots of love to you all…

PS Some of you have asked about the baby’s name. Kondwani is a Nyanja name (Nyanja is one of the over 70 tribal languages spoken in Zambia - it is also one of the most common). It was given to her by the social workers who picked her up from the hospital where she was abandoned. It means “happiness.” :-)

Picture 1: Bougainvillea and poinsettia bushes on our street
Picture 2: The amazing orange droopy lily-looking things that I can’t for my life find the name of
Picture 3: Me and the wee one at Mwandi
Picture 4: The wee one
Picture 5: BAVs, post-wheel-pop-off; if you look closely you can see how close to a couple inches of steel were sanded off the brake drum during our perilous, wheel-less descent
Picture 6: More bougainvillea (er, I think...)

Kondwani (or, You can’t even get a work permit this fast)

2007-05-06T23:19:00.000+02:00

So this one, I'll admit, I didn't see coming.

I mean, I’ve known for a while that Chris and Amy want to have a family. And I’ve known that, in the wake of their struggle to conceive, they’ve been exploring other options. I also know that, two weeks ago, they made an impromptu visit to an orphanage here in Lusaka – I even went with them on a follow-up visit a week later and of course fell immediately and helplessly in love with every single precious little bundle there. I mean, these kids… I know I’m a mush but, man… They are so desperate to be held that your shadow has only to darken their tiny faces before their little hands are reaching out for you to pick them up. And then, once in your arms, they're literally climbing up your body, hanging on to you with these desperate, don't-let-go death grips, burrowing their tiny faces in to your chest, your neck. All I could think when I looked around was, “Man, how do you choose?”

But then, maybe it’s like my friend Marcelle says – maybe they choose you.

I don’t know. All I know is that this place never ceases to surprise me. You can’t get a work permit (15 months and counting and Amy still hasn’t gotten hers) or a driver’s license (the waiting list has over 10,000 people on it) but a kid? Oh, hey, no – here you go! Seriously. When Chris and Amy decided a few days after visiting the orphanage that they'd swing by social services to register and at least "get the ball rolling" they expected that they'd only be, well, getting the ball rolling. Instead, they were pretty much told that - if they wanted - they could take the baby that day. That day! Chris was like, "Um, yeah – most people get nine months to prepare for this – I need more than nine hours!”

In the end, it took them less than nine days to decide and now – drum roll please – I’M AN AUNTIE!!!! Er, well, technically a “foster auntie” as Chris has asked me to point out. Her name is Kondwani Middle-Name-Yet-to-Be-Determined Bositis. She’s 19 inches long, 7.5 pounds, and approximately 10 weeks old (she was abandoned, so they don't know her exact date of birth, but they believe she was at least a couple months premature). She is also, if I may say so, absolutely positively exquisite. See?

The plan right now is to foster her for a roughly three-month period, after which – if they, in the words of the Zambian social worker, “decide they can love her” (“Decide they can love her??” Seriously, have they met us?) – the adoption will become final. She’s with them now at Macha Mission Hospital, a rural hospital in Southern Province where they’re currently providing medical technical support, and she’ll travel with them to Mwandi Mission Hospital after that. If I get my visa issues worked out (oh yeah, I forgot to mention: I’ve got a whole new set of visa issues and I might actually have to leave the country for really reals this time – and for good. on saturday. unless, of course, our mwa-ha-ha evil plan, which – God forgive me – involves lying to a priest, works out.) I’ll be joining them sometime in the next couple days to serve as their full-time nanny while they're out at the sites for the next few weeks.

I am still hoping to go to Mozambique with my Tanzanian adventure pal, Sam (we’re gonna go to the coast for a couple weeks to rebuild houses destroyed by a storm), and volunteer at the Lusaka Teachers’ Resource Center (a new gig I lined up for myself last week), and go on safari, but the clock is ticking on my little adventure so we shall see!

If it’s not ok, it’s not the end

2007-04-22T22:08:00.000+02:00

It is dusk. The train is moving at a solid clip, its steel wheels beating a steady snare beneath us as we peer out into the grayish green light, our tired eyes alight with new excitement. We are passing through the Selous Game reserve and we’ve been told by The Sylvias (the two Zambian women with whom we are sharing our compartment) that we might catch a glimpse of some animals.
We are crowded closely around the small table bolted to the floor next to the window between us, our chins resting in our hands and our eyes raking the fast-darkening brush. It is not long before we spy a herd of impala, who regard the passing train with vague disinterest, and we point and giggle and squeal like schoolgirls. Sylvia 2 laughs and rolls her eyes, then heads for the lounge car – she’s over the whole wild animal thing – but moments later, Sylvia 1 spots an elephant through the opposite window and we scramble to our feet, stumbling over our bags and each other in our haste to catch it. Sam sees it – a flash, and then we are past it – but I am not fast enough. So I settle myself on a fold-down chair at the far end of our coach and keep my fingers crossed that another will venture out, but too soon it is night and the sky black as pitch so I return to our compartment and my seat across the table from Sam. She is quiet, idly trailing the fingers of her left hand out the window.

“Dude,” she says, after a few minutes, and turns to me. “Does it ever just…hit you, from time to time, the fact that we’re in Africa?”

I laugh. “Only about every 37 seconds,” I want to say. Instead I smile, take a long, slow breath and tuck in for the rest of the ride.

*****

This was, I should mention, somewhere around Hour 58 of our journey to Tanzania (or Tan-ZAHN-ya, as the locals here call it). We’d been traveling for nearly three days at that point (four for Sam, who’d ridden six hours from Katete to meet me in Lusaka the day before we left), having first taken a bus to Kapiri Mposhi (three hours) then a cab (three minutes) to the TAZARA train station where we waited (for five hours) to board the train and set off.

At the advice of more seasoned travelers – and despite our very tiny budget – we sprung for first class tickets. As delays are common and theft frequent, the extra $5 US for a secure sleeper compartment that we’d share with just two other travelers seemed worth it. Not that this is a luxury car by any stretch – the quarters are tight, the vinyl benches double as unforgiving beds, and we wage an ongoing battle with the army of cockroaches that marches steadily across our table, over our floor, and up our compartment walls. But when the immigration officer bangs on our door at 4am (I swear to God, I thought I was being arrested) to stamp our passports, I am grateful that I can snuggle back under the blankets and fall back to sleep; and when my back aches from hunching over our umpteenth game of Sh*thead, I know I can lock my bag in the room and wander around to stretch my legs; there’s even a shower (a very cold, very tiny shower, but a shower) under which – well, when there’s water – we can cool our hot, sticky skin.

We snake, herky-jerky like (the locomotive powering our train is beset with mechanical troubles and is the reason for our frequent, jarring stops and interminable delays) through miles of high green plateaus and endless acres of maize; over muddy brown rivers and hilly prairies dotted with enormous sunflowers and fragrant groves of fruit and flat-topped acacia trees; and past tiny villages nestled in tall grasses from which children emerge running, hands outstretched, yelling “Mzungu! Mzungu! Gimme sahm-ting!” laughing and waving, pink tongues licking out from the wide smiles creasing their shining black faces.

We arrive in Dar Es Salaam at 12.30am Monday morning, fully twelve hours later than we are supposed to (and 65 hours after we leave Lusaka), and hop into the first cab we see. The driver quotes us a ridiculously high fare and we half-heartedly counter with a marginally lower one before agreeing to something somewhere in the middle. We know we’re being swindled, but we’re so exhausted we don’t care. We just want to get to the youth hostel where we’ve planned to stay for the next two nights and make sure they’ll still let us in. They do, but the reservation I made the week before is in none of the three books the guard rustles up from the office. We look at him helplessly and tell him again, and very politely, that we are sure that we called last week and even, for good measure, offer the price we were quoted. He shrugs and hands us a key.

“Try this one,” he says. “Flat #3.”

“Asante,” we say, expressing our gratitude with the Swahili we crammed on the train, then trudge slowly up the stairs to the dorms and do battle with the lock on our door for a good five minutes before we realize that this is actually Room #3 and not Flat #3 and apologize profusely to the poor unsuspecting fellow we’ve startled from slumber and whose thumping heart we can almost hear through the thin walls. “This is fanTAStic!” I think. “Now I can add B&E to my growing list of criminal offenses!”

We wander aimlessly for a bit, clumsily slamming the door with the big-ass PLEASE DON'T SLAM THE DOORS sign behind us (yeah, we’re AWEsome) and wake the rest of the hostel, before we manage to find Flat #3. For a minute we are certain we’ve broken in to another room and half expect someone to come leaping out of the wardrobe brandishing a bat: the sheets on both beds are rumpled from someone else’s sleep, the trash cans are full, and there’s a tub of half-eaten margarine on the table and a used bar of soap in the bathroom. I look at Sam and shrug. “Well, it’s a good thing we brought our own sheets!”

Despite our exhaustion, we sleep fitfully and awake shortly after dawn when work begins on the construction site next to the hostel. And we’re grateful, really. I mean, we wouldn’t want to miss the hostel’s free breakfast (one stale bun and all the watery coffee or tea you can drink). And who’s to say the alarm clock we set would have even gone off those two hours later anyway? Yeah, no – this is good. Really.

After breakfast we set out to run errands – we switch to a new, clean (and cheaper!) room at the hostel (and find out from the desk clerk that our reservation was indeed recorded but mistakenly given away to another Katie who’d arrived earlier, ostensibly by more reliable transportation than the TAZARA train), buy a local map for Dar and Zanzibar, check email, change our kwacha to shilling, stock up on snacks for the next week, and purchase a SIM card for my cell phone which is then promptly stolen by a slippery little pick-pocketer scarcely an hour later. Weeeeee!

By the time we collapse into bed that night we’re pretty much over Dar – despite the fact that we never got to any of the beaches or made our way to Bagamoyo, a small town northwest of the city steeped in the country’s rich history that we’d tentatively planned to visit – and anxious to get to Zanzibar.

We awake the next morning, after another fitful night of sleep, to more construction and another meager but – this is important – free breakfast (still all the watery coffee or tea we want, but this time two – count ‘em, two! – slices of stale bread and a piece of watermelon), then pack up our stuff and start off for the port to catch the ferry. We are summarily accosted by a hostile tout attempting to sell us bogus tickets, whose harassment begins as mildly annoying but shifts suddenly and rather alarmingly to borderline abusive, and then rescued by a kindly guard who swoops in and ushers us, all back-alley-drug-deal like, into the side entrance of the ferry office where we purchase the tickets for $5 less than we’d expected. Given the six hours we’d spent the night before agonizing over the allotment of every last shilling in our possession (do we really need taxi fare, or would we maybe rather eat today…?), this is no minor victory. I’d celebrate but I’m still shaking from my encounter with Captain Aggressive.

It’s hot as Hades and by the time we board, Sam’s fair skin is pink from the heat and I have sweat pooling behind my knees. But the ferry ride is gorgeous. We purchased first-class tickets (as “foreigners”, they won’t sell us anything else), which buy us each a seat in an overstuffed armchair in a moldy, musty-smelling-but-air-conditioned cabin, but we opt instead for a hard plastic chair on the deck in the open air. I’m nervous about the ride as historically I haven’t managed very well on the high seas, but the water is like glass, a deep cerulean blue, and we glide smoothly the whole way there, the salt air blowing our hair. We play cards (Sh*thead again), learn more Swahili from our new pal Roja, and ooh and ah when a school of dolphin appear – leaping and diving, singly and in perfectly-synchronized pairs – in the ferry’s foamy wake.

*****

We spend a week in Zanzibar (six days, actually), at the Annex of Abdullah, a small guesthouse in the heart of Stone Town (the island’s capital) nestled among dilapidated buildings with crumbling stone facades that stand in stark contrast to their ornate, intricately-carved brass-studded doors. There’s no hot water and we share the bathroom with the staff but our room has a fan, mosquito nets and a TV, and the free breakfast – infinitely superior to the hostel breakfast in Dar – is so generous that it is often also our lunch. Not bad for roughly $7.50 a night.

Our guidebook tells us that “no single attraction can beat an afternoon strolling through the narrow streets and winding alleys” of Stone Town, so we spend a couple, wandering from shop to tiny shop, playfully bargaining with Arab, Indian and African shopkeepers as much for the fun of it as for the trinkets themselves.

“Jambo!” they sing, as we stroll idly by.

“Sijambo!” we chorus back.

“Habari?” they ask.

“Nzuri. Mambo?” we counter.

“Poa, poa. Karibuni,” they reply, delighted at our command of the informal greeting ritual.

“Asante,” we thank them.

“Asante sana. You ah most well-come. Come and take a look, sista. Just a look, looking is flee. I give you good plice. Jambo, jambo!”

And so it begins, at every stall, in every shop. In the end, though, we buy only two things the whole week (not including the bad-ass henna tattoos I got on our last day) – a traditional beaded Masai anklet for Sam and toe rings for me.

We get lost more than a few times, tripping our way over ancient beveled cobblestones, past chattering Muslim women wrapped head to foot in black bui-buis or brightly-colored kangas, past barefoot children and countless mosques with men lying prostrate in prayer. We keep our eyes out for Jaw’s Corner, the only landmark we can ever remember – where the men gather nightly for conversation over a game of checkers or bao or to crowd around the tiny television and cheer on their favorite European League football team – and when we stumble upon it, almost always by accident, we know we are almost home.

On our third day, we schedule a Spice Tour (these are, after all, the “Spice Islands”) and take a mini-bus to a local plantation where we rub fragrant cinnamon bark, ginger root, lemon grass, and clove leaves between our fingers; learn about nutmeg as both a painkiller and an aphrodisiac (hmmm….); and savor freshly-made coconut curried kingfish over sweet pilau rice on straw mats with twenty strangers. We visit the ruined baths of a sultana called, poetically, Scheherazade, and then walk the slave caves at Mwangapani beach where Arab traders hid illegal slaves after abolition before dipping our toes in the jeweled, turquoise water. On our fourth day, we take a rickety dalla-dalla (think pick-up truck) two hours to Jambiani, a sleepy fishing village on the east coast of the island, nearly 40 of us crammed on benches that might comfortably (if I’m being generous) seat 25, sand pelting our sunburned skin and bundles of rolled straw mats, precariously stacked cartons of eggs and a TV (!) crowding our feet. At Jambiani, we watch stooped, wrinkled women gather seaweed to sell and small, wiry men cast fishing nets from creaking boats. And then we sit for a lazy hour and a half – just because we can – with a dozen local village children who giggle and dance and play and pose for my pictures, screaming with delight when I show them their likeness on the tiny LCD.

We wake every morning, just before dawn, to the muezzin’s lyrical adhan, echoing solemnly over the nearby mosque’s PA, intruding in our dreams and calling the faithful to prayer. We attend Easter Mass in Swahili; wander through an art exhibit at the cultural center; visit the site of the old slave market; and eat like kings on a pauper’s budget – Indian thali and spiced pilau rice and toasted coconut bread and endless plates of tender, freshly-grilled fish from the Forodhani Gardens Fish Market (me! eating fish! and enjoying it!) – although one night after splurging for a special meal at a fancy rooftop restaurant I become so suddenly and so violently ill that I nearly collapse, staggering blindly (literally, actually; I couldn’t see), tripping and scraping both knees on a bench or a planter or who-knows-what, stumbling behind Sam as she sprints ahead for the nearest restroom, pleading “Please! My friend, she’s really sick!” It’s only later that I consider that, for perhaps the only time in my life, everyone that saw me was probably thinking, “Wow – that girl’s reeeaallly drunk.”

It’s an extraordinary place, Zanzibar. We are assaulted, wherever we go, by bright colors and pungent smells and squawking vendors and persistent locals who follow us incessantly, pushing tours and tickets and taxi-rides but claim only to covet our friendship (“Wheeyah ah you flom, sista? Ah, Austlalia?? Hahaha! Austlalia!! Kangaloo!! Hahaha!!”). I am struck, more than once, at how like life this place is – messy and beautiful, smelly and colorful, beset with its own set of troubles but full of wonder and countless joys, it is scarred by its history but moving on – as I should learn to do. Our histories shape us, to be sure, but they don’t need to define us. Like Zanzibar’s white sand beaches endlessly chafed by rolling blue waves, we are new every morning, and wouldn’t life be different if we lived it that way?

*****

And now, finally, we are on our way home. The air is crisp and cool and a faint, early morning breeze ruffles the pages of our open Africa on a Shoestring guidebook. The train has stopped again and I am curled under the fleece blanket, my head pounding, my belly hollow with hunger and my body shivering with fever.

We’d left Zanzibar four days earlier – after one final, glorious, dirt-cheap meal at the fish market – on the overnight ferry back to Dar. It was actually the same one we rode on the way out but this time it docked for a few hours while its passengers slept – in chairs, on mattresses, in corners and on countertops – before trundling on to the mainland at dawn. We weren’t allowed to sit on the deck so the moldy, mildewed, air-conditioned cabin with the over-stuffed armchairs it was. Ordinarily, I don’t suffer from allergies, but within ten minutes of boarding I was sneezing uncontrollably and my throat had swollen shut. By the time we reached Dar I had a full-on head cold. Or a sinus infection. Or maybe the flu.

Now, on the stalled train, I have had it. I haven’t slept in days, I ache from head to foot, and I’m starving – we’d only brought enough food to last us for a two-day train ride, not four. We could buy meals on the train, but our funds have dwindled and we’re saving every last penny for the visas we’re expecting to purchase for re-entry to Zambia and the bus ride from Kapiri to Lusaka. I suppose we should have known better – I mean, the train is not exactly known for its strict adherence to schedule – but we’d been assured that the excessive delays we’d experienced on the way out were an anomaly and we, in a fit of new traveler’s naiveté, well, believed it.

“This is ridiculous,” I whine to Sam. “What is the hold-up now?” It’s a rhetorical question, really. There’s no one around to answer it and, even if there were, we’d get a different response from every person we asked. But I pull myself up out of bed and shuffle to our neighbor’s compartment to take a chance with them anyway.

“Good morning,” I say, tentatively knocking on the open door. Three Zambian women take in my bed-head hair, my chapped red nose, my labored gait. “How are you all today?”

We murmur the ritual pleasantries necessary for beginning any conversation in Africa before I ask, “I am wondering…do any of you know why the train has stopped again?”

The women say that a goods train had derailed the night before – which I knew – but that it had taken so long to clear the accident that the rest of the rail system got backed up and we now had to wait for another train to pass before we could move on ourselves.

“Do they know what time we will reach Kapiri, then? I am not feeling well and I am anxious to get home.”

“Ah, maybe 23:00? Maybe 24:00?” one of the women hazards. “If we start off in the next hour…” she trails off. In other words, her guess is as good as mine. I grimace.

“How have you enjoyed the food?” another one of them asks.

“I’m – the food? Oh, on the train. We actually, um – we’re not…well, I bought dinner last night, but we’re not really eating on the train. Er, we hadn’t planned on it.”

“You are not eating?” she asks, surprised.

“No. Well, yes. Er, I mean, we brought our own food,” I fumble. “See we didn’t – well, we don’t really have enough money to purchase meals so we brought some snacks but now that we’ve been so delayed, we’ve run out. We just – well, we had expected we would be home by now…” I laugh self-consciously then, vaguely aware of the desperation in my voice, and feel my face color. “It’s ok,” I say quickly. “We will just be glad when we finally arrive home.”

“Ah, yes,” she says kindly. “Well, I think we will be starting off soon.”

I shuffle back to my own compartment, and flop down on to the bed.

“We have to wait for another train to pass?” asks Sam, who’s been eavesdropping. I nod forlornly and Sam exhales. “Yeah, dude,” she offers. “This sucks.”

Less than an hour has passed when there is a knock at our door. I am half asleep and before I can even ask who it is, a round, smiling black woman walks in and sits, uninvited, on the edge of Sam’s bed. Sam and I share a confused, mildly annoyed look. We hadn’t exactly asked her in.

“So we have gotten an update,” she says, and then points at me. “You are the one, yes? That we were talking to earlier?”

“Yes…” I say, struggling to sit up. I think I remember her from the neighboring compartment but my head is thumping and so congested that everything looks fuzzy.

“They have come and told us we will be starting off in one hour, and that from here it is four hours to Kasama – that is my stop – and then maybe ten hours to Kapiri after that.”

We are about to thank her for the update – it’s not good news, but it’s news, which is hard to come by on this train – when she stands and unfolds two bills.

“Also,” she says, “I wanted to tell you – we have been talking, me and the others, and we know that traveling is difficult and that sometimes you cannot always plan and so you don’t always bring enough money with you, but we think you should eat lunch. So we have collected some money for you. And maybe also you can have dinner as well.”

Sam and I are speechless. We look at each other and both begin to cry, a fruitless protest forming on our lips. We don’t want to take it – partly because we know they probably need it more than we do and partly because we do have enough, if we are that desperate, to buy at least one meal each (I have forgotten about the kwacha Sam tucked away for the journey home and the shilling I have yet to change and am mortified that I’ve painted such a picture of our state) – but we know we risk committing an unforgivable cultural gaffe if we refuse it. I snuffle through my tears and my blocked up, snotty nose but Maggie – that’s her name, we soon learn – will have none of it. And without further ceremony, she tucks the money under the guidebook on the table, then sits back down and begins to tell us about her life.

When she leaves an hour and a half later, we sit in humbled silence, marveling at this extraordinary woman. At 17, she married a Ghanaian man and bore him five children before losing one of them and then, after 18 years of marriage, him. “Oh, he loved me, my husband! He loved me so much! And I was bitt-ah – oh I was so bitt-ah! – and so angry with God for taking him ay-way.” Her life has been marked by profound loss but she lives as one redeemed by hope. “God has blessed me,” she says, more than once. “And I want to share that with you. I am so happy now! You know, I have just gotten married!” she beams and proudly displays the tiny diamond on her left hand. “I never knew I could be happy again. My husband, he is Irish, and I first met him ten years ago. We were just friends then – I never knew I could capture his heart – but God has blessed me. My husband, he cherishes me. He says, ‘Maggie, I love you! I love you so much!’ And I am so happy! I want everyone to know – God can bless you! God has blessed me.”

We decide right then, that even if it means we go hungry, we will not spend the 40,000 kwacha she has given us on ourselves and we will donate it instead to a couple I know from Mukinge Mission Hospital who are building an orphanage. We also, since returning the money is not an option, forage through our bags, desperate for some token of appreciation – a gift of our own – to give to Maggie and her companions. Outside of our clothes, we have nothing except my toe rings and Sam’s anklet – and three small bags of loose spiced tea I purchased on our spice tour for Chris and Amy.

“It is not much,” I say bowing my head and extending the bags to Maggie, “but we are profoundly grateful for your generosity and we want to give you even just this small token of our appreciation. They are from Zanzibar. We know your honeymoon to Zanzibar was cut short, so we hope you will enjoy this. And please,” I add, turning to the two other women, “share it with your friends who were also so generous.” We thank them again and then bolt from the compartment before we lose it completely.

*****

And in the end, of course, it all worked out. We polished off the last of our peanut butter for lunch and then bought ourselves dinner (although we’d have probably been better off without it – it was dreadful) using Sam’s “trip home” stash and my leftover shilling that I finally changed on the train. And we didn’t end up having to pay for the re-entry visas or even the bus back to Lusaka (when we finally arrived at Kapiri Mposhi at 3am, fully 17 hours later than scheduled, we hitched a ride with a lovely South African family we’d befriended on our journey – they were on the train with us both ways – whose driver met them at the station and took us all safely home).

I’ve lost count how many times this sort of thing has happened here. Because it happens all the time. And not just here. “It will all be ok in the end,” the saying goes. “If it’s not ok, it’s not the end.”

You’d think that, by now, I’d remember that.

Picture 1: Sunset reflected on the train
Picture 2: The Tan-ZAHN-yan countryside
Picture 3: Village children at one of the train stops
Picture 4: Pulling in to Zanzibar port
Picture 5: Brass-studded door
Picture 6: Stone Town
Picture 7: Fisherman at Jambiani beach
Picture 8: Children playing in Jambiani village
Picture 9: St. Joseph's Cathedral, where we attended Mass
Picture 10: The beach near town
Picture 11: Sunset from the train

I may have a future as a career – oh wait…

2007-03-19T14:15:00.001+02:00

Well, it’s official: I am now a bona fide fugitive of the law.

Yeah, ‘member the little palm-greasing stunt we pulled at the airport to secure me my three-year visa? ‘Member our winking we-just-worked-the-system glee? Well, turns out our elation was a bit premature. Actually, it turns out we’re just a bunch of idiots. Because – it turns out – my “three-year, multiple entry visa” requires revalidation/renewal every 30 days. Says so, right there on the blinkin’ stamp: V30D.

As if any of us knew what “V30D” meant.

As if any of us even looked.

Anyhoo, yeah. So I’m now here in Zambia illegally, which means – at the advice of the American consulate – I’m “laying low” for the moment and waiting for a letter from AIDSRelief vouching for my status as a volunteer and keeping my fingers crossed that the emissary they send to Immigration on my behalf is successful. I can’t go myself because, as the nice lady behind the plate glass window at the consulate said, “Yeah, I’m not saying for sure this would happen? But if you show up to pay the fine yourself, there’s a really good chance they’ll throw you in jail and send you home.”

Awesome.

Ooh, but on the plus side, I got braids!

I want to be a kid again. Or maybe I just want to be Irish.

2007-03-19T14:11:00.000+02:00

I rarely lament the passing of birthdays – which is not to say that I don’t vigilantly (vainly?) catalog every odd gray hair that sprouts unbidden from my crown – but I’ve never been one consumed with dreams of revisiting a halcyon youth. Not that I had an unhappy childhood – I’d be an a**hole to suggest I did – but I did have a lonely one. An (unwittingly) self-imposed lonely one, to be sure, but a lonely one – borne of a purely-intended but ultimately misguided self-righteousness and shallow piety that I believed might spare me the potential dreaded burden of disappointing God or my family or my church but which only served to make me the proverbial, pinched killjoy, an unlikely candidate for friendship. So a tourist, I was. A visitor. But never an inhabitant of the insular worlds orbiting around me. I hovered on the fringes, desperate to belong, but fear (and back then, too often, judgment) kept me hostage to my own isolation. (I am still plagued, to a certain extent, with the vestiges of this interior covenant, for I often find that even my most cherished friends belong already to their own, well-established communities – their own, insular worlds – and by their grace I trespass from time to time, but never quite find my home among them; no self-righteous judgment now, but the fear remains…of rejection? of revealing my true self? I don’t know…). Anyhoo, so yeah – I’ve always been quite determined to leave that particular ghost behind and will routinely dispense with any affiliated memories with eager, if sometimes wanton, abandon (in my haste to cast off my most forlorn recollections, I’m sure I’ve misplaced a few of the good ones as well, else how do I explain finding, in an otherwise pretty good life, such grist for the poor-me mill?).

But then I met the “Irish” (what they’re affectionately called here at St. Francis), a family of short-term volunteers at the hospital, and I was startled by an unexpected envy and a sharp, if unfamiliar, longing for youth. As a family, they utterly captivated me. Both the parents - aging hippy-type doctors afflicted with an incurable wanderlust - but especially the children. First seven year-old V, a round-faced, smiling Thai boy the family adopted a few years ago, who spent most of his days at the house where I’m staying in happy collusion with Shelagh’s three youngest kids; and ten year-old Lili, a bold, feisty, fearless, slip of a girl (a “pistol”, my dad would call her), whip-smart and bright with spirit. Then Freya – elegant, willowy, lovely, grounded Freya – who, at twelve years old, already possesses more grace and poise than I could hope to in my lifetime. And, finally, eldest son Patrick. I’ve yet to meet the rakish doctor that all my friends are convinced I will on my little adventure – and for whom I keep my fingers firmly and optimistically crossed – but if I can wait 15 or 20 years, I think I might know where to find him. Youthful swagger, mischievous grin, disarming Irish charm, way too smart for his own good… Oh to be sixteen again, with the world quite literally my playground and no years of accumulated sorrows to shed.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m romanticizing these kids. Maybe they roll their eyes and harbor secret resentment at the announcement of each new family adventure; maybe, in true shortsighted adolescent fashion, they have no idea how lucky they are – shuttled periodically as they are from one exotic country to another – and instead find that their peripatetic life leaves them feeling as hopelessly unanchored and unmoored as I do (I wonder if, when you make the world your home, you might sometimes feel as though you have no home at all…?). Maybe this constant motion has made them miserable outcasts in Dublin and they suffer the same loneliness I do, the same yearning to belong – somewhere, anywhere. I don’t know - I didn’t ask - but I doubt it. These kids are too bold, too self-assured, too together. In short, they’re way too cool. And I can’t help but find myself wishing for a chance at life the way they know it.

*****

So I’m at St. Francis now. Er, well, I was when I started writing this entry (man, I suck at blogging!). Anxious to get back out to the rural areas, I jumped at Shelagh’s invitation to accompany her family back to Katete and piled myself in to the Land Cruiser alongside the three remaining children, Shelagh, Sam, Ian, two new VSO (the British equivalent to the Peace Corps) volunteers, and all of the family’s accumulated chattel. Chiko and Jim slept on stacked foam mattresses for most of the ride, a tangle of bony elbows and knees and Calvin-and-Hobbes feet, their pale English skin – remarkably untouched by the harsh African sun – peeking out from beneath sundresses and shorts. Josh, poor wee one, sat in mum’s lap for the ride, projectile vomiting when he wasn’t crying out in pain (he did, in the end, get himself in to quite a fix with all his exploring – climbed up in to the bidet in the master bathroom while mom was in the shower and turned on the hot tap, sustaining second-degree burns when he couldn’t get himself out and she couldn’t get to him fast enough).

There were no vacancies at any of the guest houses so I’m staying with Shelagh and the family, amidst all the organized chaos, working at the dining room table or on the bed under the mosquito net in eldest daughter Amy’s room, analyzing the multiple data capture systems the hospital has and trying to figure out if there’s a way to get them all talking to each other. It’s fun. Er, mostly... As much fun as one can have with three (sometimes four, when V comes around) screaming children running around and Love Actually playing on continuous loop, at full volume, over and over and over. (Seriously – we watched it three times in a row on Friday. In a row.) Not that I don’t enjoy Love Actually - it is, in fact, one of my favorite films - but you try watching it that many times and see if you still like it.

Besides which, it mocks me, this film (why couldn’t they have watched, say, The Lord of the Rings or Bob the Builder on repeat? oh wait a minute, no – they did…). Mocks my lamentable, perpetual singleness. If only because, for the moment (a very long moment, it feels like), I long for nothing so much as someone who will set my own heart aflame and turn up on my doorstep on Christmas (or Easter or Flag Day or, I don’t know, yesterday) with placards vowing that he’ll love me until I’m long past dead and gone.

Not that that’s why I came to Africa. In fact, I came to Africa - among a few other, ostensibly nobler reasons - for precisely the opposite. I came, at least in part, to put to rest the interminable post-heartbreak navel-gazing at which I’m so masterfully, distressingly practiced; to start living life instead of waiting for it to happen to me; to look outward instead of in; to – if I may be so bold – get the f*ck out of my own way. I expected I’d be too busy, too knee-deeply buried in the proverbial salt-mines to worry about such frivolity. But, as my last post pointed out, if there’s one thing I (unexpectedly) seem to have here, it’s heaps and heaps of time. So – apparently – here I go again.

I suppose, though, when there is one thing for which you long, one fundamental ache that gnaws at you, some itch you need scratched – whether it’s for love or friendship or community or to collect the complete set of first edition Marvel Comics – and you can’t quite seem wrap your fingers around it, it doesn’t matter how far or fast you run because – what’s that saying? – wherever you go, there you are. And every film you watch, every song you hear, every book you read will remind you of its absence.

Which brings me to Three Junes. I have never – if you can indulge my hyperbole for a moment – had a book so precisely write the landscape of my own bruised heart, its certain fingers deftly, gently pressing those bruises and bringing in to painfully tender relief my own accumulated sorrows (if not specifically in deed than certainly in sentiment). Exquisitely crafted, delicately but unflinchingly honest, it haunts the hollows of my heart, sparks new motivation, resurrects old longings – in short, it is the book I have always wanted to write. I cried for most of the last third (the final, eponymous June), and then for a good 45 minutes after I finally turned the last page and hucked it across the room in a fit of childish self-pity.

And so it goes, my journey. Expected and unexpected, high and low, everything new and old and new again.

Picture 1: V
Picture 2: Chiko (and parts of Jim) in the Land Cruiser
Picture 3: The "Irish" (sans V, who's hiding behind Lili) and friends
Picture 4: Herd of oxen near the St. Francis market

The bloom is off the rose (or, Lusaka Sucks)

2007-03-19T14:08:00.000+02:00

I am in the kitchen, kneading dough for bread, and dodging baby Joshua as he totters determinedly from corner to corner, exploring every perilous-for-two-year-olds inch of his new playground. It’s been raining for most of the day and I’ve spent it holed up in the IHV house waiting for our houseguests, whom I expected around two but who did not arrive until half past six. The house, abruptly silent in the wake of Sanjiv’s mid-morning departure (he was the last of the IHV team to depart for the US for CROI, an annual international HIV/AIDS conference, leaving me to fend for myself for two weeks in Lusaka) now echoes with the busy chatter of the nine people who’ve descended upon it: mom Shelagh (executive director of St. Francis Mission Hospital in Katete), dad Ian, six (six!) kids, and cousin Sam from Australia. They’ve come to Lusaka to shuttle the eldest three off to boarding school and attend to the various hospital and personal business that they are unable to while out in the rural village they call home.

A cheerful if weary bunch, they file in singly, flushed and sticky from the long, bumpy ride up from Katete, matted hair pressed to damp cheeks. First four-year-old Chiko (her place in this familial queue just the first evidence of who’s running this show); then Jim; then Kate, Jack, and Amy; then Ian and Sam; and, finally, Shelagh – bright cornflower eyes twinkling behind small wire frames, worn, dirt-smudged cargo pants hanging loosely on her hips (FUBU, funnily enough, but don’t mistake this brand choice for a finger-on-the-pulse-of-urban-fashion sentiment; these were likely scavenged from some mission donation box) – juggling Joshua and a bottle of wine in her arms. “Well, then. Thanks for havin’ us,” she says in a thin, bird-like English cockney. She thrusts the bottle of wine unceremoniously into my hands and moves past me in to the kitchen to corral her brood.

“Sure, it’s…” no problem, I finish in my head, trailing after her. Already the TV is on and tuned to the Cartoon Network, Chiko has changed from her sundress into her princess gown and scattered her toys, and Josh has begun his exploring, tiny fingers searching, opening, shutting, narrowly escaping certain mangling. Clearly, we are dispensing with any further formalities, so I head over to the counter, sink my fingers back in to the soft yeasty ball and continue kneading.

“S’how long have you been in Zambia?” Shelagh asks me, as she deftly – and simultaneously – unwraps a candy bar for Joshua, pours six-year-old Jim juice and enthusiastically lauds Chiko’s assembly of a jigsaw puzzle like it’s a newly discovered Klimt.

“I, um - ,” I stammer, swiping flour from my nose and blowing an errant tendril of hair from my face. Shelagh could successfully launch the next space shuttle mission whilst simultaneously reading her children Alice in Wonderland and performing a cesarean, but I apparently still struggle to master tasks of the chew-gum-and-walk ilk. “Six, er, I mean – uh, actually, about two months now,” I say and nearly trample Josh underfoot.

“Right. Yeah, ok,” she nods. “And what sort of work have you been doin’ since you got here?”

“Well, I was lucky enough to spend my first month out at a couple rural sites, doing some work with the data capture folks at each place,” I tell her. “We were at Chilonga and Mukinge for two weeks each. And I’ve been to Mwandi as well, but that was a couple weeks ago and only for three days. Unfortunately,” and here an involuntary sigh, “I’ve been stuck in Lusaka for pretty much the last month.”

“Ech,” Shelagh spits, her blue eyes darkening. “Lusaka’s a dump.”

Well. I’m just glad she said it.

Not that she’s exactly right. And not that I blame the capital city entirely, but my second month in Zambia has been markedly different from my first. With the exception, as I mentioned to Shelagh, of one three-day foray to Mwandi Mission Hospital to aid with a follow-up site assessment (formerly an independently-supported mission hospital, Mwandi will now be under the purview of the AIDSRelief consortium; consequently, it will both benefit from its considerable resources – AIDSRelief is supported by a multi-kajillion dollar PEPFAR grant – and suffer from the maddening red tape and bureaucracy that bind it; eh, you gotta give a little to get a little, I guess), I’ve been here in Lusaka. As the title for this entry intimates, I don’t so much care for it.

I recently tried, quite unsuccessfully, to describe for my mother what Lusaka was “like.” In some ways, it feels much like any American city – except of course that everyone is black and poor. A study in contradictions, it is highly developed – there’s public transportation, strip malls, satellite TV, and wireless communication towers soar above the flush, rainy-season-green flora – but (it seems) it’s been so rapidly developed that it lacks the sort of stable infrastructure necessary to keep such developments running smoothly – or often even running at all (like, for one tiny example, our wireless internet, which has been quite temperamental as of late). But then, when you foist the latest technological advancements on a people disinclined to change – and do it without providing for a more measured, gradual evolution – you might expect a certain stumbling, cart-before-the-horse condition.

And it’s difficult to reconcile the image of a sleek black Beemer or Mercedes rolling down Sable Road (our street) past the young shirtless boy in tattered, mud-spattered Bermudas and sneakers with no laces and soles worn so thin you wonder why he even bothers with shoes. Especially when you know the Mercedes will no doubt turn in to one of the gated, guarded drives on Sable, the yawning black tarmac neatly rending lush, manicured lawns and rich gardens, while the little boy will proceed, scarcely another 300 meters, to the crowded cinderblock shantytown up ahead – rutted, garbage-strewn dirt pathways a map to a decidedly less felicitous life. His mother will likely own a cell phone, though, and his family’s tiny, rectangular hut might even boast a giant satellite dish, looming like a watchful eye. But those shoes are probably his only pair and, outside of his school uniform, the shorts may be as well. It’s especially difficult when you realize that these disparate conditions are drawn – with exceptions, to be sure, but alarmingly few – almost exclusively along racial lines, evidence for a not-so-thinly disguised neo-colonialism.

I don’t know. Such observations tell only part of the story: only part of Lusaka’s, because I know I haven’t been here long enough, haven’t witnessed enough, to truly understand or speak with any authority (real or of my own invention) on the economic, cultural and social ideologies and practices that form the city; and only part of mine, because – as with any craven impulse to complain – my feelings about Lusaka have very little to do with external factors and infinitely more to do with me, and the expectations I had for what I thought it would be like here. And what I expected was, well, I don’t know exactly… I guess I assumed I’d swoop in all eager and enthusiastic like, welcomed with open, grateful arms by the small corps of development workers stretched thin by all their do-gooder-ness and be put to immediate, fulfilling, tangible-results work.

How naïve. How (wince) vain.

There’s just – ok, here’s where I surrender to the craven impulse – there’s nothing to do in Lusaka. It may offer all of the conveniences of a developed city but, without work – and, at the moment, there’s none for me here – there's little else to fill the time that those conveniences save. And there, my friends, is the rub. (I swear, I don’t suffer this angst, this ennui, when I am out at the sites – out there, there’s not only plenty of work, but – as earlier posts attest – there’s plenty of living). There are no parks or theatres or museums (actually, I think there might be one small museum) and the Kabwata “cultural village”, billed as a carefully preserved slice of authentic Zambian cultural life, is really more a scaled-down street bazaar, a place to buy curios and trinkets ostensibly hand-crafted by local artisans but which are, in reality, largely mass-produced and shipped in from Tanzania or Kenya. There’s not even the distraction of a three-hour load of laundry to occupy me because Virginia (the housekeeper we’ve been told we should hire because it’s good for the economy because hiring house-help creates jobs but who, consequently, honestly believes that white people don’t know how to launder clothes or wash dishes or scrub floors) does it for us.

In other words, I’m bored. Bored as a board, my best friend might say. (Hi La!) A discomfiting feeling because, after all, I came here to be of use; because – I told everyone – I came here to serve. I never expected I’d feel so unpurposed, so…aimless. I never expected I’d feel so dependent, or so like a captive to the demands life and work have placed on those who might otherwise free me: Chris and Amy (who might take me with them to another site) are back in the States (or they were when I started writing this); Nawa (who might give me a job) has a meeting with his U.S.-based team in Tanzania; Megan (who might show me around town) has a kid…

So (don’t laugh) I started baking bread. A lot of bread. And I started experimenting with dinner recipes. And I went to the cultural village at Kabwata anyway, and browsed the “authentic” curios (and found that, actually, many of them are - the copper pieces, amatite, and Mukwa carvings at least…), and visited the agricultural fairgrounds. I started taking the minibuses around (the public transportation “system”, though I use the term loosely); learned how to drive on the left side of the road with BAVs (Chris and Amy’s Big Ass Vehicle); and did a game ride on horseback at Lilayi, a small game farm about 25 minutes outside of the city, where I saw wildebeest and impala and zebra and a tiny baby giraffe out for a walk with its whole family. Alas, none of my pics came out, but did I mention I was on horseback when I saw them?!?!

And I walk. All around the city. For hours at a time. And though my walks often leave me feeling vaguely queasy (air pollution is a huge problem in Lusaka) they always lift my spirits. Zambians are, without question, the warmest, friendliest people I’ve ever encountered. No matter the burdens they may be carrying, no matter the baggage (literal or figurative), no matter how tired they might be or how focused on getting home, whoever I meet on my walks always greets me with a wide, easy smile and a kind word. They are also, for reasons unknown to me, endlessly amused by the sight of a muzungu exercising. Especially the children, who – giggling madly – will ape my swinging arms, my wiggling hips, in comic exaggeration of my walk; or race me when I’m jogging. Although, I should point out, the racing is not exclusive to children. Once, while running through Kalingalinga, a sort of shantytown bordering my neighborhood, a man fell in step with me, cigarette in his hand, house slippers flapping on his feet.

“Mah-dahm!” he shouts, gamely trotting alongside me. “You are exercising?”

“I am,” I say, stifling a giggle.

“I will go with you!” he yells and the people on the street begin cheering us on, clapping and waving their arms. “You are going a long time?” he asks, after about a quarter of a mile.

“Oh, a bit longer,” I say, and gesture distantly towards the end of the road. “Maybe another thirty minutes. Maybe forty-five.”

“Ah. Ok,” he huffs and slows. “I will just go with you tomorrow.”

I also accepted Shelagh’s invitation to accompany her family back to St. Francis for a week, or ten days, or however long it will take me to assess their data issues and determine whether or not I can help. I have no idea if I’ll even be able to but, for the moment, I am glad for the opportunity to escape.

Picture 1: Kabwata Cultural village
Picture 2: The Gardens at the agricultural fairgrounds
Picture 3: A (dead, poor thing) butterfly I encountered on one of my walks

Holy Coolest-Thing-I've-Ever-Done, Batman!

2007-02-06T21:47:00.000+02:00

I BUNGEE-JUMPED OFF OF VICTORIA FALLS TODAY!

Which, at 111 meters (or roughly 364 feet), is not only one of the highest bungee jumps in the world, but also one of the world's Seven Natural Wonders.

:-)

(yeah, they really don't make a smiley-face emoticon big enough for this one...)

Here's the bridge (from this angle, the falls are just to the left and behind. You can see the spray...)

I'm so excited!!

Here's me getting strapped in...

Here's me going "I can't believe I'm actually frigging doing this!!"

Here's me having a moment, just me and God.

5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1...

If you had to choose one superpower...

...what would it be?

My post-jump victory jog-leap-dance. :-)

I FRIGGING LOVE AFRICA!!!!!!

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

2007-02-02T23:32:00.000+02:00

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)

2007-02-02T21:04:00.000+02:00

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)

2007-02-02T20:51:00.000+02:00

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)

2007-02-02T20:46:00.000+02:00

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

Well, so much for recovering from jet lag

2007-01-06T05:56:00.000+02:00

I can’t sleep. It’s – actually, I have no idea what time it is. For years now I’ve had this goofy rule where, once it gets past 11.30 or midnight wherever I am, I won’t look at a clock. I even turn my alarm clock away from me as I’m climbing in to bed every night just on the chance that at some point I’ll roll over and accidentally catch a glimpse of some ungodly hour flashing. I used to do that thing where I’d lie there twitching, my breath coming in long, determined sighs, calculating the hours I’d get if I fell asleep rightnow. But now, I don’t want to know how much sleep it is I’m not getting. I just want to pretend it’s as much as I need. I’m very serious about this. And very disciplined. So disciplined that even tho’ that little blinking digital clock in the bottom right-hand corner of my computer’s sys tray is rightnowatthisveryminute taunting me, daring me to take a peek, I am not looking at it. It could be 2.30 in the morning; it could be 4 - I have no idea.

I’m anxious, obviously. (Duh.) We went to the CRS (Catholic Relief Services) headquarters today so that I could meet some of the other folks with whom Chris and Amy and the rest of the IHV team work. They all knew who I was before I was even introduced. “Ah! Yes! You are Kay-tee,” they say, smiling warmly, shaking my hand with both of theirs. “You are Chris’s sister! We have been waiting for you.”

Waiting for me? No, that can’t be right. And yet it is. Seems word of my data analysis/database development experience has gotten around and not only does Chilonga have a job for me, but so does Mukinge. (They think they want me to build them a database. From scratch. In two weeks.) And after I come back, Herbie (the Chief of I-Forget-What-His-Title-Is-But-He’s-the-Big-Boss-In-Charge-of-Everyone-at-CRS) already has a plan for me. “You will go to Chilonga and then to Mukinge with Chris and Amy and then, after that,” he says authoritatively, “you will separate from them probably, yes? And you will help us with the monitoring and evaluations?” He smiles then. I think he must be laughing. I think it’s the look of abject terror on my face he finds so funny. “Yes. After that, you will separate from them and work here, maybe?”

Monitoring and evaluations (or M&E) is essentially the same as QA/QI work, or program evaluation, which (as I understand it) is measuring the efficacy or success of a program by analyzing data. It’s basically statistics. I sort of kind of have a limited, self-taught (read: huge-gaping-holes-in-my-knowledge-base) understanding of statistics from my time at the CU Foundation. Which, in Africa, of course means I’m an expert on the subject.

So that gnawing ache in my belly that’s keeping me from sleep tonight? Well, maybe it’s hunger (although I just went and made myself a sandwich which I think violates all the rules for overcoming jetlag because I probably – remember, I don’t look at the clock – was feeding myself right around East Coast dinner time), but I have a sneaking suspicion it’s this sudden fear of meeting the expectations that have been set for me. What if I’ve somehow misrepresented myself and the skills I have to offer? What if I can’t do what they’ve asked me? What if I not only can’t help them where they most need help but end up slowing down their work? What if, what if, what if…

I don’t know. And now I’m too tired to think much more about it. And it’s light outside now, which means it was probably closer to 4am when I started this than it was to 2. So I probably should try to get some sleep.

I think I may have a future as a career criminal

2007-01-04T23:14:00.000+02:00

Well, I’m here. Finally. After nearly five months of anticipation and 26 hours of travel on three connecting flights over two days, we arrived in Lusaka around 8pm local time on Wednesday, January 3. I have to keep asking Chris and Amy what time it is, what day it is, because the last three have just sort of dissolved into one another. But we arrived in one piece, with all of our luggage, and – to our great astonishment – secured me a visitor’s visa good for three years, and all in less time than it takes ride the shuttle to concourse B at DIA. I should mention: Chris was here 8 months, as a resident and official employee of a governmentally-recognized relief organization, before securing his work permit. It’s now been over ten months, and Amy still hasn’t been granted hers (she’s on Chris’s as simply “wife” which, if you know Amy, is no small offense).

This is how things work in Africa, which is to say – sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t (but usually they don’t, I’m told). Maybe the immigration official was having a particularly good day that day. Or maybe they’ve changed the application process, or loosened the restrictions. Or maybe (insert conspiratorial nod here) it was the two crisp fifties I threw down. We’d heard from everyone that a visa (valid for 30 days) would cost $100, so – y’know - we just assumed.

So we got in line and when it came my turn and they asked me the purpose and length of my stay, we told them. “She must pay?” the agent said to my brother, who until this point was doing all my talking for me. She wasn’t really asking, but this is the way one makes a statement in Zambia.

“Oh! Right!” I say and hand her my $100.

She takes my money and, as she’s stamping my passport, says, “Ok. Three years.”

“Excuse me?” I ask, unsure of my ears. “I – three years?” I probe, over Chris and Amy’s murmured, sides-of-their-mouths pleas of “Take it! Just take it!”

“I give you three years visa,” she says again.

“I – um…ok,” I say uncertainly, taking my passport from her. I feel that strange mix of guilt and giddiness that comes with getting away with something you know you shouldn’t.

We round the corner to baggage claim and Chris and Amy are atwitter. “I don’t believe it!” Amy breathes. “That never happens!”

And my brother, shaking his head: “No. It really doesn’t.” And then: “Unless…” he says, theorizing. “Maybe it was the hundred bucks. Y’know, I never actually asked how much it costs. And she never said...” He shakes his head, waffles. “Nah, I’m sure it’s not -” (beat) “But, well, then again...” He shrugs. “Yeah, you might have just bribed your way in to Zambia, Kate.”

I am giddy and guilty all over again.

*****

I’m doing my best to soak it all up here – and by that I don’t just mean the humidity (did I mention it’s rainy season?), I mean the experience of this new, strange place I now inhabit – but it’s a trifle overwhelming. I want to take note of everything - every smell, every sound, every trick of this new, African light. But I have to keep reminding myself to be patient, that I don’t have to “get it” all today. Besides, I’m so frakkin’ pooped that everything just kind of blurs before me anyway. Literally. I’ve been struggling a bit with dizzy spells, doing that hips-low-feet-apart-to-keep-myself-from-swaying thing. And blinking. Like I’ve got a speck in my eye. Like maybe I can blink away the blur the way I do a fine piece of dust.

So far, though, this is what I’ve noticed: the glut of foot traffic on all of the roads, and the slow, purposeful walk of the thin-boned Africans; how much more at home Chris and Amy seem here than in America, even after only ten months; the way my drinking glass sweats – a fine, beady mist - the instant it’s filled (my drinking glasses never sweat in Colorado); the way my flippies fart on the rust-brown-colored parquet floors upstairs in the IHV house where we’re staying (it’s charcoal tile downstairs, but my flippies don’t fart downstairs); the ubiquitous uniformed guards at the gates of all the homes in the wealthy Lusaka neighborhood where the IHV house is; and the quiet, gentle way all Zambians seem to talk, so low you have to bend forward, shortening the distance between you - relinquishing the “personal space” we Americans covet so jealously - just to hear them. I feel awkward saying “what” and "excuse me" so many times; it seems impolite.

We went shopping today, for food for the weekend (we’ll shop again in a couple days for the food we’ll bring out to the bush). It was a little like being in an alternate universe, where the basic paradigm is the same (shopping center with a discount store, grocery store, cell phone store, coffee shop, etc…) but the details are different (instead of Target, it’s called Game; instead of Safeway it’s Spar or Shop-rite; instead of a Starbucks, there’s a Vasilis – or Vasillis, depending on which sign you read – Patisserie; instead of Verizon, it’s CellCity). Inside the Game store I felt like I did when I was at the dollar store I used to frequent in New Haven when I was in college. Not because of the prices (9 US dollars for a bottle of mouthwash??) but because you know how when you’re at the dollar store you know that what you’re looking at is still glass cleaner or a sponge or a bag of potato chips, but it’s not called Windex® or Scotch-Brite® or Lays®? It’s called, like, GlassoSpectaculo or Soak-‘Em-Ups or Chippy Crisps? It’s kind of like that. At Game (or at Spar or Shop-rite), you can still find many of the name brands familiar to us in America but, for the most part, it’s the Zambian (or, more accurately, South African – which is where most of what stocks the shelves comes from) version of soap or potato chips or orange juice that you see.

This, of course, is only in the city. In the bush, I imagine it will feel less like an “alternate” universe and more like a completely different world. We head out on Monday, incidentally. We go first to Chilonga, to the Chilonga Mission Hospital (also known as Our Lady’s Hospital), in the northwest province of Zambia; it’s about a seven-hour drive from Lusaka. We plan to be there about two weeks, which is about how long we plan to be at each of the bush hospitals we’ll be visiting for the first couple months we’re here. It’s still unclear exactly what it is we’ll be doing – Chris and Amy especially aren’t sure what each site will most need from them when they get there, but they figure they’ll be working in the clinics, evaluating the efficacy of the programs they helped to establish over the last year, and doing more teaching – but it looks like I may have my first assignment! Apparently, the folks at Chilonga have a new system for capturing patient data but as they’re still getting used to the idea of computers in general, they’re not sure how exactly this program works (or even how to do basic data entry). They’re hoping I’ll be able to make sense of it and then to train the user(s) in a way that allows them to maximize the use of it. Of course, this is all contingent on the hospital getting the computers, with the software installed, which we still haven't actually confirmed.

After Chilonga, it’s to Mukinge, which is on the opposite side of the country, in the Northeast province (a roughly 10-hour drive from Lusaka but about 15 from Chilonga). We have even less of an idea what we’ll be doing there, but Amy says it’s a site that employs many foreign nationals, so they’re accustomed to finding work for us. I may be cleaning out closets or organizing medical supplies in Mukinge, but – as with everything in Africa – we’ll figure it out when we get there.

Until then, I’ll be doing my best to recover from jet lag and take note of all that’s new around me. We won’t have any internet access in the bush, so unless I write again before we go, this maybe my last post for a while.

Picture 1: The driveway in to the complex where the IHV house is

Picture 2: Outside the IHV house

Picture 3: Foot traffic on Bishop Road, the nearest cross street to Sable, the road on which we live

Picture 4: Behind a lorry on Great North Road, heading out of the city

“Well. You’re gonna wanna rethink your shoe wardrobe.”

2007-01-02T08:21:00.000+02:00

This was my brother’s advice when I first asked him what I should do to prepare for my impending six-month sojourn to Africa. Not that there’s all that much one can say that could actually “prepare” one for Africa, but I confess I was expecting something more along the lines of, say, a discourse on the geo-political ramifications of the tribal social construct and the attendant challenges facing white, middle-class Americans as they work to stem the tide of the African AIDS pandemic. After all, this has been his work for the last almost-year and, well, he went to Dartmouth.

But I’m sitting in my parents’ living room in Massachusetts, where I’ve spent the last nearly two weeks with my family, and though it’s been months since that conversation - and we’ve by now talked about more than just replacing my Manolos with Merrells (yeah, like I really have Manolo’s…or Merrells) - the fact that I’m leaving for Africa tomorrow - and for six months! – still hasn’t really sunk in.

For starters, it’s cold as f**k here. Not that we don’t get cold in Colorado. But Colorado cold is bright, sharp, quick; it stings and sets you in motion. Massachusetts cold is much more insidious. It’s damp and heavy and settles in your bones so permanently that even when it’s warm – as it actually was for a few days here – it still feels cold. This is not weather conducive to managing fibromyalgia - that goofy, annoying pain disorder I live with that some of you have heard me talk about (and look! now you know how to spell it!). I haven’t slept the night through since I got here twelve days ago and I ache from the top of my head to the tips of my toes; the joints in my shoulders and hips swell, my knees stiffen, my skin even hurts. I always forget how hard it is to come back here. I mean, there’s always the challenge of returning to your childhood home no longer a child and having to relate to your family (your-family-that-you-love-and-cherish-more-than-frigging-life-itself-and-for-whom-you-would-lie-down-in-traffic-just-watch-me-but-that-every-now-and-then-you-wonder-if-you-could-trade-in-but-only-for-a-little-while-i-swear) as the familiar strangers you now are. But the weather, man! Jeeminy Christmas! It will be worse in Africa, I’m sure. But at least – I tell myself – at least there it will be warm.

Anyhoo, so off I go to Africa. Tomorrow. (or, y’know, last week by the time most of you read this). And it still doesn’t seem real. I’ve gotten all of my shots, sublet my apartment, and purchased and packed my six-month supply of tampons (oh you laugh…), but I still can’t say that I feel ready. I never watched the films my brother ended up suggesting or made it through any of the books (although I am now finally reading Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and it’s friggin’ brilliant). But, shortly before I left Colorado, I did have a minor panic attack where I started to worry that IHV was going to administer some kind of entrance exam before they let me de-plane, so I printed off the MSN Encarta online encyclopedic entry for Zambia and did a little cramming: Location: South Central Africa; Capital City: Lusaka; Official Language: English (though collectively there are more than 70 African languages spoken); Currency: the kwacha; Government: Republic, with an elected president limited to two five-year terms; Climate: “Ummm…kind of like Colorado… (beat) Uh…I think,” I told someone in an exhausted delirium a couple days before I left (and then nodded my head vigorously in an attempt to demonstrate my authority on the subject). “Kind of like Colorado…?!” While I had a vague recollection of a cursory mention of high elevation in the Encarta entry (most of Zambia is high plateau with elevations between 3,500 and 4,500 feet), I was - clearly - talking out my ass. (Incidentally, the climate - for those of you interested - is considered “pleasantly subtropical.” The high elevation moderates the otherwise more extreme temperatures endured by other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Chris and Amy said the temperature hovered pretty consistently at 95-105 degrees in October and November - even at night - which they say are generally the hottest months; but Encarta claims January is the hottest month, so who knows what I should expect when I get there – oh, except rain. November to April is the rainy season, so there’ll definitely be a lot of rain).

I’ve been asked more than a few times if I’m scared. My answer, of course, is “Um, have you met me?” I’m terrified. But not of Africa. I don’t know enough to be scared of Africa. Outside of those few superficial facts detailed above (the currency, the climate, the capital city…), it remains a complete, dark mystery to me. Neither have I any clue what it is I’ll be doing when I get there (hopping from bush hospital to bush hospital with Chris and Amy? working for IHV in Lusaka as the in-country admin? training the office administrator in Malawi? some combination of the above?). Accordingly, I have no idea what it is I should fear. Sure, I worry a little about getting sick; and I worry a lot about violating social mores and inadvertently offending the people (and, consequently, embarrassing my brother and IHV). But most of what I fear has nothing to do with Africa and everything to do with me - I worry about the community I’m leaving behind, what I’ll miss out on by going, whether or not I’ll even be missed. And my biggest fear of all? My biggest fear is that I’ll return in six months (or seven, or however long I end up staying) unchanged. So, of course, I’ve tried to anticipate the ways in which I will – or at least hope to.

“Ah, don’t do that to yourself!” my friend Tory told me. “You’ll go, and it will change you – how can it not? – but never in the ways you’d imagine. And more than likely in ways you won’t see for months or even years after you come back. So don’t put that kind of pressure on yourself.” I laughed, then. Because Tory’s a new friend. He has no idea yet the kind of pressure I can put on myself.

It sounds silly, I’m sure. It is impossible to know what to expect and therefore impossible to plan for it. But I’ve never been good at operating without a plan. I’ve never been comfortable making choices or taking action where the outcome is unknown. Historically, I’ve been what they call in the investment industry “risk averse” - I may dream big, but I often “do” small (or at least safe); more often I don’t do at all – I get paralyzed by indecision, by my fear of the unknown. I try to anticipate the outcome and usually can’t so I remain stuck. But, like my good, noble, kind, wise dad always says, “You gotta sh*t or get off the pot.”

So, tomorrow (in a few scant hours, actually) when I board the plane for Africa, I will – metaphorically speaking – for once in my life, "get off the pot." I can't promise that I'll be diligent about it, but I hope to document as much as I can using this web page. Please feel free to leave comments here or email me directly. And keep me in your thoughts. I may think I don't know enough to be scared about anything in Africa, but I'm sure by day three I'll be curled in a fetal ball begging Chris and Amy to send me home!