Dear Diary

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!

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

Ok, NOW it’s (kind of) like Colorado

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)

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

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