If it’s not ok, it’s not the end

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…

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.

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 (thank you, Julia Glass) 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)

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!

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love and peace to you all...

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

Picture 7: Young village woman and her baby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The customizations?” I pipe in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that, my friends, is that.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Picture 1: Fish-seller at Mpika market