“Road” Trip

“If you have men who will only come if they know there is a good road, I don’t want them. I want men who will come if there is no road at all.” David Livingstone, missionary, explorer

LIVINGSTONE, ZAMBIA — The David Livingstone Safari Lodge and Spa, a wonderful place that is sensitive in every other way to its guests’ needs, shared this irritating thought from its namesake on a brochure I found in the room.

It may seem cute at first, the insight that you don’t wind up in a place as close to paradise as that pictured above without some work. But if you think about it, or better yet, experience it, the fact that a century and a half after Livingstone’s “discovery” of what is now Zambia’s No. 1 tourist attraction the last stretch of the land route from the capital to there is a rutted and rock strewn dirt path where blinding billows of dust obscure hazards from view, just doesn’t make sense. Then consider that this road is a well-travelled part of the north-south trucking route that carries goods and resources from the Democratic Republic of Congo, through Zambia, Botswana, South Africa, and you think maybe Livinstone’s preference isn’t more than a little anachronistic by now.

I got there from Choma, where I had travelled to from Lusaka a couple of days earlier to go see a remote rural malaria hospital, the road to which is a similar, but another story.

The trip to Choma had its own hazards, although it is called a Good Road because it is paved and what they call a “dual carriageway,” meaning you can overtake vehicles by driving into the oncoming traffic lane. This is even less fun than it sounds once it gets dark– slate black dark – which it did in the last twisting undulating stretch of road during the final hour of my drive from Lusaka to Choma.

From Choma to I got to familiarize myself with the art of driving on what locally they call a “bad road” — which I call “no road” — rather a stretch of cleared bush next to what will someday be a road that a foreign construction crew was working on.

This practice though was a dry run for the much more well-travelled road between Choma and Livingstone. The trip from Choma to Livingstone takes three hours — with the first two hours taking care of about 125 miles, on “good”road — passing trucks in the oncoming traffic lane, swerving around goats and cows — and the last hour spent on the  40 miles of dirt and rocks and holes and ditches and a sudden explosion of white powder from a truck we passed.

You get there tired, which is why I think the hotel should rethink the Livingstone quote.

The Zambian Tandem Element Clusterfuck

LUSAKA, ZAMBIA — There should be a term, a friend of mine said over lunch yesterday, for the thing that happens here when so many things stop working here that they keep you from fixing any of them.

She was talking about an experience she had just had over the weekend, when her DSTV stopped working, and her phone wasn’t working either, and her cell phone was out of talk time, and her Internet never works unless she parks in a friend’s driveway — so there everything stayed — not working.

That day I went back to find the Internet still wasn’t working at the office, the Zain modem  –  I had bought for my netbook (which I think was working, otherwise, but that had taken two weeks) wasn’t working either, so I came home to take a bath, but the hot water heater wasn’t working, and the Internet at home wasn’t either. I called the internet company but the phone there wasn’t working. Possibly that had something to do with another recent power outage . . . so I had a glass of wine, amazed by then that nothing prevented me from doing that.

A Zambian Clusterfuck, I told my friend, was the term. She agreed, saying only those who were here would get the notion of how all the elements working in tandem could clusterfuck you.

1000 Kwacha

LUSAKA, ZAMBIA — The two 1,000 Kwacha notes I passed on to my friend to give each of her young children seemed almost like a joke gift, as I suggested they not spend them all in one place.

They are, after all, worth 25 cents each.

Then I remembered the little boys, as small and eager-eyed as my American friend’s little boy, who offer to watch my car here in hopes of such a reward. They can spend it all in one place, and then it’s not nearly enough to fill the needs, let alone the little hopes of childhood.

While I recognize that not all children can be born to the same resources and advantages, I am reminded that when we ignore the human rights to basic health care, we also ignore the promise of children to deliver the best of what humanity has yet to offer.

Here, in the land of the donor dollar turned industry not just for the recipient but for the giver, programs that promise “PMTCT” (prevention of mother to child transmission of the virus that leads to AIDS), and VCT (voluntary counseling and testing for the virus that leads to AIDS), while ignoring the need to basic health services, including family planning and care, fall closer to lip service than reality.

Many Patterns, One World

LUSAKA, ZAMBIA — This is the woman who sells chitenges at the Northmead market. She knows quality and is fair, and I believe is the best person to buy chitenges from in Lusaka. And everyone should have five or six chitenges.

I have about 25, including presents for those at home.

We have an understanding that in addition to good patterns and colors, I am interested in chitenges with religious and political themes, and that I am collecting chitenges with “things” on them. I gave her my card and she has called me when she found ones decorated with locks, MP3 players, shoes, slippers, baskets.

She is The Chitenge Lady in my book. No reason to look further.

(If you are in Lusaka take Great East Road to a little west of Manda Hill Shopping Center, to the wonderful enclave you should visit anyway called the Northmead Market. You can get fresh vegetables and find out how to cook them there as well as hardware, photocopies, used clothes and shoes, and possibly the best deal on African crafts towards the back of the market.

The Chitenge Lady was showing me where to go for good used boots there recently on the day President Obama spoke in Ghana. His voice blared from every rickety stall — from radios, portable televisions — and I was proud. That’s my president, I told her.

“Yes,” she smiled. “Mine too.”

***

. . . And speaking of taking pride once again in being Americans, a friend sent this:

Dear Friend,

Newsweek reported Saturday that Attorney General Eric Holder is considering appointing a prosecutor to investigate whether the Bush administration illegally tortured terrorism suspects.

You can find a link to that article here:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/206300

A decision is expected in the next few weeks. Holder should investigate torture, and he should start with former Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal adviser, David Addington.

I just signed a petition to tell Attorney General Holder to assign a prosecutor to investigate torture. I hope you will, too. Please have a look and take action. http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/investigate_cheney/?r_by=-420805-fdgSH_x&rc=paste

Morphine

LUSAKA, ZAMBIA — A spring breeze sweeps over the bright grounds of the hospice off Kamloops Road, and patients sit in their wheelchairs or on the grass of the broad lawns that are vast enough to stay unshaded by the walls that surround the place.

You couldn’t ask for a nicer place to die, except that because of strict government controls on morphine, the stuff runs out and then the residents, all with cancer, AIDS or both, live with agony.

In a sun-filled quiet corner room, the still young woman they call Mulegwa rests, the television on, a visitor sitting on the other bed and she looks up to greet more visitors.

Mulegwa is pretty, with clear skin, bright eyes, an easy smile and she greets visitors with the quiet affability of someone who just likes people.

She is lounging under the covers on her elbow, the TV control in reach, a deck of cards splayed in front of her, the way people who have been in the hospital for a while and are getting better do. An earlier visitor did her nails that day and they shine shell pink against her slender brown hands.

She is doing well today, she says calmly, although the nun who brought the new visitors mutters they have rationed her morphine to stretch the supply, to just enough, but it wears off too soon, giving her a taste of what it will be like if it runs out altogether.

That reminds Mulegwa of why she’s here, and she pulls back the covers to show her new visitors. Her legs are blister-covered logs, her toes swollen clumps of festering yellow scabs.

it goes all the way up to her “privates,” the nun tells one of the visitors, while the other visitor chats with Mulegwa in Bemba.

They don’t know how it got that bad, the nun says. Mulegwa came there a month ago, diagnosed and put on anti-retroviral treatment several months earlier after her husband died of AIDS. The Kaposi’s sarcoma, the tell-tale blackened spots of skin cancer that marked AIDS patients in the early days of the US epidemic showed up after the treatment began. By the time she got here, it had turned into this, and she will never recover.

The smell of dying flesh fills the room and Mulegwa wrinkles her nose and pulls the covers back over the wire cage that holds them off her.

She’s okay now, she says, again, because she got her medicine that day.

Outside the air is fresh and warm. The nun points to a window across the path.

My office is over there, she says. On good days, I can hear her singing. On bad days she curls up under the covers and cries.

Workshop Nation

Here, where average life expectancy ends at 42, and a recent drop to a 14-percent prevalence of the virus that leads to AIDS is the good news, at least 20 workshops and conferences devoted to the epidemic pack ballrooms in every major hotel every day.

This story is about one that brought journalists to a slightly shabby business hotel on the outskirts of Lusaka for two days recently, to learn about the toll of the virus here.

We were asked to register by eight a.m., with an agenda extending from then to 6:30 in the evening ahead, rooms for us to spend the night, and not a minute to waste as the program stretched to the end of the following day.

We began about 9 a.m., when a man in a linen dashiki, one of a near dozen facilitators leading this two-day affair, herded us into the center of the room to stand in a circle and sing. This, as anyone who has attended any nonprofit workshop knows, was a minor demand as far as warm up exercises go, ones in my experience having included jumping up and down, hugging the stranger next to me, imitating animal noises, describing my dearest aspirations to the entire roomful of strangers and listening to them describe theirs.

So we gamely learned all four words of an African song with the inspiring translation “we can do it.” Then we learned a special way to clap to the song. Then we learned a dance to go with it. Then we learned another dance. Then it was time to get down to business — that is wander around the room until a signal, at which we were to start talking to the nearest person as if old, old friends. This hit a snag with my partner when he looked at my name tag mispronounced my name. No matter, at another signal we were circling the room again, and at another stopping to have a sign language conversation with the nearest person. Another signal, another new friend, this time to tell basic biographical details, as well as “something silly” to. Sharing what we had learned about each other, and learning a new way to clap after each presentation, occupied the remainder of the first active hour.

At ten we took our seats while another facilitator rose and in a funereal monotone read every single word of a powerpoint presentation that he projected on the wall for the next half hour. Not one word of the tome, which appeared to have been lifted directly from a grant proposal to raise money for the workshop, imparted a single fact about HIV.

We had a tea break and returned to green and yellow slips of paper and instructions write “something positive about dealing with researchers” on the yellow ones — because that is the brighter color — and “something negative about dealing with researchers” on the green ones. With the agenda now a good two hours behind, however, facilitators became concerned with how to do this efficiently. We were told to get into groups and talk about what to put on the cards. We picked up our chairs, carried them around the table, and looked at each other. “This is the same thing the questionnaire we got asked us,” one man said, “I told them, I don’t know what’s positive or negative about working with researchers — I’ve never worked with any.”

“Write that,” one of the facilitators drifting past suggested — “Why have you never worked with a researcher? Are they hard to reach?”

“They can be very hard to get ahold of,” the man wrote, because by now, the instructions had been reversed again, and participants were told to write the answers individually and stick the yellow ones on the wall next to the yellow highlighter-drawn picture of a smiling sun, and the negative ones next to the sketch of a demonic glowering face, drawn in black magic marker.
Then, after some confusion, one of the two people selected from each group to read the answers aloud, read the answers aloud while we crowded around the slips stuck to the walls.

Now it was time to talk about ethics — in general (i.e. Should journalists have ethics? why?) so herded back into our groups. The conversations that ensued there — should the photo of a five-year-old rape victim be published? should the name of an 11-year-old rapist be used? — touched on an array of horrors, but not TB and HIV. The answers, written crookedly on flip-chart paper were stuck to the walls and read aloud.

One of the facilitators went to check on lunch while the song and dance man read the agenda for the rest of the day aloud. The facilitator returned to say lunch was delayed enough for us to proceed with the next activity.

The song and dance man did his own version of counting off in threes to sort us into new groups — this one involved asking one woman to sing the national anthem, the man sitting next to her to sing a Zambian soccer song, and the man sitting next to him to sing a folk song. With those as our count-off, we stepped back in the middle of the room to stand in groups and sing the songs spiritedly. Then we learned a new way to applaud ourselves. Then another new way. And a dance.

Then each group was given a list of terms to define — all having something to do with HIV! We then left for lunch without learning if our answers were correct.

Over lunch I learned that at least two of the facilitators hold the job title of “anti-stigma trainer.” One said the Global Fund tightening up in the wake of the worldwide economic crunch was worrying to people at her workplace.

I got an Internet connection in the lobby and wrote home about the progress of the conference and about the fact that HIV hadn’t been mentioned until 1:40. Home told me to have fun. I decided to time my return for the next tea break when cookies would be served. I arrived a few minutes early to find everyone standing in the middle of the room learning a new dance. I backed out and had a cookie.

To make up the missing time journalists were asked to come at 8 the second morning instead of the scheduled 9. They ruefully agreed, but didn’t show up until 9. The song and dance man had gone, but his understudy greeted the group with a resentful mention that someone had complained about the amount of singing and dancing the day before.

A middleaged man raised his hand and said he wanted more information about the subject at hand. We were singing the national anthem when you handed out those pieces of paper asking us to define terms, but that’s what we came to find out from you, he said.

We were getting to that, a facilitator said, and introduced the first researcher. He went on too long – ten minutes past his allotted five, leading him to get the hook from one of the facilitators. The next trainer galloped through her presentation, on HIV and how “food insecurity” keeps sick people from taking their medicine, and cut herself off midsentence to avoid the indignity that her predecessor had met.

The understudy arose apologized for the amount of time the researchers had taken and told us to stand in a circle in the middle of the room.

I slipped out the door during that, returned to my room, packed and checked out. The lobby was now my home for the rest of the day, with visits to my friends in the room where HIV, and all the misery and money it has spawned was celebrated.

Bargaining in Lusaka and a Deal with the Devil

LUSAKA, ZAMBIA — One of the smaller inconveniences of life here comes from not knowing the real price for things.

“Offer something ridiculous — like a third of what they asked for and take it from there,” a friend told me as we walked through the craft market.

“Bargaining is expected, but remember this is people’s livlihood,” one guidebook scolds.

Vendors themselves seem divided along similar lines.

How much for the stone leopard book ends?

“I give you good price, a hundred and sixty thousand.” the man says, polishing it lovingly. That’s about 32 dollars.

I turn to walk away.

“One hundred,”

How about fifty thousand?

“Seventy,”

Fifty-five

“Sixty”

I walked away with two, for Seventy-thousand a few minutes later and was emboldened.

How much for the chitenge fabric?

“Twenty-thousand each.”

How about two for thirty?

“Two is forty, they are twenty-thousand each,” the woman responds frowning slightly. How could I have all this money if I can’t even do math, she is wondering.

The skirt?

“Fifty-thousand, but because its the end of the day, I give you discount, forty-five.”
the woman says in a rush.

How about thirty?

“Forty, please, please, please?”

Yes I felt bad. You said please, I said, as I took out the forty. If I had said please, would you have given me for thirty?

“Yes,” she said, “for thirty-five, but it’s too late now, you agreed to forty. God bless you.”

God bless you too.

It goes differently with speeding tickets I found out this week, when I had the honor of receiving my first one here. This was an honor, because it showed the progress I had made from the paralyzing fear that led me to inch down the roads, screaming curse words, lines of honking cars behind me.

Oh, no, I said, trying to bat my eyes to absolutely no effect. I didn’t even know I knew how to speed. What do I do now?

“You pull over there and pay 70,000 Kwacha,” the policeman said, pointing to a spot under a tree where several more policeman lounged.

This didn’t sound possible. Even the people who drive here can’t all walk around with 70,000 Kwacha — about 11 dollars.

What if I don’t have it?

“Then we book you,” he said smiling.

I have it.

I pulled over, while he roused one of the men under the tree, calling over “72,” — that’s how fast I was supposedly going — about 40 mph, I think.

The other cop came over.

“Okay, that’s one hundred and eighty thousand,” he said.

He said seventy.

“Yes you were going 72″

We did that two more times; who’s on first, and then I decided to clarify: He said seventy-thousand Kwacha.

“Oh, okay, we’ll give you the old rate.”

He wrote me a receipt for sixty-seven thousand.

That’s still not too bad, I said, when I recounted the incident to a British friend here. I told him about the time I got out of a speeding ticket back home by repeating, at the deputy’s request: “I’m a bad girl.”

The British friend winced, wounding me. When a British person thinks something is tasteless, that’s pretty bad.

Who would have done differently? I asked. At 20 miles over the speed limit, you do the math.

To Market, Part 2

LUSAKA, ZAMBIA — Another “ex-pat” (as we call ourselves) or “mozinga” (as they call us) remarked the other day that for all the aspects of life that can be difficult here — (the internet went on and off FIVE times while I was trying to send ONE email this morning, for example), not to mention the gargantuan amounts of suffering, deprivation, and basic needs on display that would be easily addressed if the whole world were a better place — a lot of life here is actually easier, and nicer than elsewhere.

The Northmead Market, two minutes by minibus from the center of town is my favorite place in Lusaka and is one example. Here, in one stop I can get photocopies made (FOR me — try that at Kinkos), buy two meters of colorfully printed cotton (for about $2), have a dress fitted to me made from it (about $10), get fresh flowers for my apartment ($1.50), and be advised on which healthful green leafy vegetable is which, which I can then buy for less than $1.

This is important because green leafy vegetables are the true staple of the diet here. People say it is nshima, a stiff maize porridge, but the fact is nshima has no redeeming nutritional value. My colleagues here have told me that comes from the pumpkin leaves you can add to it. But they made preparing pumpkin leaves sound so complicated (“peel them,” they start with — peel a leaf?) and the consequences so dire (“if you don’t do it right, you will get the running stomach”) that I have been afraid to try it unsupervised.

So I got the “Proudly Zambian” Zambian Cookbook. My favorite part of it is the “Game” section, as it includes “Roast Mice” (so help me), and “Caterpillar Crisps.”

More encouraging, however, are the vegetable recipes, which include:
Cassava Leaves Stew (Shombo)
Ingredients:
Cassava leaves
palm oil
curry
semi ripe tomato
onion
ginger
salt
water

1) Wash hands
2)Pluck the cassava leaves and put in a bucket
3) Add one cup of cold water to the boiled water (note: don’t know how much boiled water)
4) blanch cassava leaves for 10 minutes and strain
5) Rinse the vegetable in cold water and pound a bit
6)Put in a saucepan, add water and bring to the boil
7) cook for 1 hour or until it is tender and cyanide free (note: that’s what it says)
Add oil, curry, ginger, tomato, onion and salt
9) Cook for 20 minutes
Serve as an accompaniment or with nshima.

Shavuot no antidote to 4 in the morning

LUSAKA, ZAMBIA — Every single night around 4 in the morning I wake up to two thoughts, which then have the power to keep me awake.

I’m not home, is the first one.

Everything is different here, is the second one.

I both bore and enervate myself.

That I am not home should not be news by now, the end of my fourth month here. And, in fact, considering the ephemeral nature of home, I am in a home, having added two new African masks, chitenges draped over the upsholstery that came with this furnished flat, a fresh bunch of roses from the market each week, and my stuff.

Everything being strange here should be even less newsworthy to me, even at 4 in the morning, as everything being strange here is why I came.

But as F. Scott Fitzgerald said in the real dark night of the soul, it’s always 3 o’clock in the morning. For me it’s four. That is the hour when thoughts become inarguable, fear-inducing convictions.

So I went to a Shavuot celebration today, to get out of the house on a Sunday, and on the erroneous guess formed during daylight hours that that wouldn’t be strange.

This was based on thinking that between growing up in New York and living in South Florida, a Jewish holiday would be like old home week, although the only ones I’ve celebrated at home I was taken to, a stranger in a strange land.

But here, where people from Birmingham and people from New York greet each other as if they could be cousins, a Jewish holiday seemed to promise a little less strangeness than that which fills and frames each day here.

That turned out not to be the case.

For one thing it was an Israeli Jewish celebration and the hosts along with most of the guests spoke Hebrew. For another thing it turned out to be a tradition in the hostess’s family that people slide around in the water on Shavuot.

“Everyone will get wet,” she said firmly.

That’s what you think, I thought back, nodding and smiling.

After all how could they make that happen, short of pushing me onto the mat they had the sprinkler trained on, and that the host kept pouring liquid soap on?

Then the water balloons came out.

“He threw it over his shoulder with his back turned,” one of the guests who, like me, stayed determinedly dry. “It’s getting very tricky.”

The guest, one of a few Zambians there, became very good at dodging water balloon attacks. We huddled together, taking turns standing behind each other and they asked me if I knew Hebrew.

No, but I know some Yiddish, I said, just to look like I belonged somewhere, although that was completely irrelevant to this place. Yiddish seems a little like Nyanga, the language that goes unwritten here, pieced together from a trail of the several dozen other languages here.

They agreed it sounded very similar in principal and wanted to know some.

I taught them how to say “nishtihin, nishtiher,” as we ran from one end of the backyard to the other, dodging water balloons.

Bits and pieces

LUSAKA, ZAMBIA — “Sh’t, sh’t, sh’t, sh . . .” I said the other day while trying to make a right hand turn across two lanes of opposing traffic (a right-hand turn here being the equivalent of a left-hand turn at home, only complicated by no traffic light and minibuses driven by Hell’s Angels wannabees).
“I’m terribly sorry,” I added right away to my passengers. Zambians don’t use rough language. In fact the unpublishable words I’ve heard since here came out of my own mouth, almost all in the privacy of my home.
“It is all right,” my front-seat passenger said kindly. “We don’t mind at all.”
“It was rude, I know Zambians don’t curse,” I said.
“We understand that people are all different,” the front seat passenger said. “we don’t expect everyone to be like us. Besides, some Zambians do swear. We call them ‘yos’”
A new Bemba word for me to master the sublteties of its pronunciation and then remember, I thought.
“Yose?” I repeated.
“Yoze,” the front seat passenger hesitated while the back seat passenger giggled. “Their people who try to act like Americans — you know: ‘yo motherf’cker, sh’t, what’s happenin’”
Oh. Like Americans.
How embarrassing, once again.
Where grace and kindness are as woven into the cultural code as patterns in a chitenge cloth, one is going to be embarrassed, or at least in awe, now and then.
At the same time, the much-touted acceptance of diversity — and it is the quality you are likliest to hear Zambians express national pride in — has well-defended borders.
For example, there don’t seem to be very many sick people here. People seem to go from being alive to dead without spending much time in that transitory phase, which is recognized only fleetingly, posthumously.
The second president was in South Africa receiving specialized treatment for a heart condition this week when news broke that his 32-year-old son died here in a Lusaka hospital where he had been briefly admitted. This was especially sad, because he is the second of the president’s two sons to die young.
In general lately, the second former president has had a tough time of it. He is facing corruption charges; his wife has aleady been convicted and spent a couple of days in the pokey before being released while appealling.
We know all about this, the wife even having given a cheerful interview during her brief interrment.
We also know how many times both she and the former president cried on their way from the plane from South Africa to the funeral home, thanks to a play-by-play account in one of the newspapers this morning.
But we don’t know what illnesses took the life of either son.
While I will continue to enjoy kindly Zambian tolerance of my American ways and endeavor to deserve it this year, the sick, of whom there are many in this country, would likely enjoy it, and already do deserve it, even more.