We are all fine except we have two funerals

PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA — It was Saturday when I opened my email to find this greeting from a colleague in Lusaka, which then named two colleagues who both had died Christmas day.

One was a 39-year-old mother of four, who had just recently returned to work from a maternity leave. She had a quiet wry humor that I enjoyed, and a courteous kindly way. The other was a man of 50, greatly liked, who had seized an array of opportunities over the years to add to his knowledge and who shared his experiences with the young ones at the office. “Let me give you some fatherly advice,” he said to a colleague in his 30s, once, before laughing, and amending it to, “rather some brotherly advice . . . ” because he didn’t seem that old.

I have yet to learn the cause of death for either of them. It wasn’t mentioned in the email, or in the facebook postings I found later, or in the obituaries. That both had recently been ill was mentioned at work to explain their abscences.

Death has the run of the place, tolerated and ignored, like a vendor whose goods no one happens to want, but who, apparently, no one thinks it his or her particular place to turn out. To discuss the presence of this shadow that lingers in the corners, occassionally flitting across a hall as colleagues turn out for another funeral, remark on another person lost young — a famous singer, the son of a former president, several government officials — in the last few months alone, would, perhaps be to acknowledge responsibility for questioning this intruder, it seems.

Others explain it differently, saying that to talk about death is to invite its notice. And a couple have suggested that my colleagues simply don’t have the same morbid fascination with lurid details that prompts American media to pry in to the privacy of the prominent departed.

So I don’t know what happened to this mother of four at 39, or this man who had spent the last 30 years gathering knowledge that he suddenly ran out of time to share. All I know is that everyone is fine, except they have two funerals.

There Goes a Hero

LUSAKA, ZAMBIA — “He is my hero,”  my Zambian colleague said. ” That was indecorous behavior, but Bush was so irritating.”

We are watching the news report on the release of the Iraq

I would have done the same. I am not endorsing such behavior, but sometimes you have no choice when someone is so over the top. Bush!”

She leaves the room, but comes back just as the shoe thrower finishes his press conference.
“There goes a hero!” she adds. “If he had done it to Bill Clinton, I don’t think I would forgive him.”

All present then agree that if he had thrown shoes at Clinton, he should still be in jail.
She goes on to explain: “Bill Clinton is a charismatic man. I would support him no matter what he did. Even if he were to repeat the Monica saga, I would still support him.”

You are kindly advised to remain calm . . .

LUSAKA, ZAMBIA — As the favorite niece of a Teamster local president, as an American newspaper refugee, and as a fan of subversive language, I just love this poster, which went up over the long-empty water cooler here today.

The subtext of “remain calm” as a veteran reporter noted, was to inspire just the opposite among staff, who don’t have a host of perks to begin with here.

Still, at least they don’t herd, sheep-like, into meetings where they are told that half of them are going to have to find some other way to send their kids to college, pay their mortgages, plan for infirmity and old age — other than the career they gave up holidays, birthdays, graduations, softball games, and some measure of sanity to serve.

Christmas! Some quietly murmured, back where I came from, when taxes were taken out of their bonuses. By the time bonuses vanished they were long since silenced by fear for their livelihoods and the work they still thought could be done nowhere else.

Come here, but you are kindly advised to remain calm.

As simple as A, B, C . . .

LUSAKA, ZAMBIA — A friend told me a mean joke shortly before I came here that I was reminded of the other night.

The joke goes like this: At a concert for famine relief, Bono claps his hands together, and then does it again, and again — once every second.

Do you realize, he says, every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies.

So someone yells out from the audience: Well then stop clapping your hands.

The other night I was at dressed up event promoting a movie to raise awareness about AIDS here.

A woman from an international relief agency stood up to speak. You know, she said, we can win this fight. It’s as simple as A, B, C. But people aren’t doing it . . .

She was talking about the “ABC approach” to educating people how to not catch AIDS: Abstain from sex, if you do have sex Be faithful, and if you can’t do either of those, use a Condom.

Well as it happens most people can’t do either one of the first — for a number of reasons that include that the first runs contrary to certain instincts that have kept the human race going since it got here, that some people don’t get to have a choice of whether they have sex or not, and that some people rely on it for survival  . . . The “Be faithful” part is similarly complicated, including that it doesn’t work if your partner isn’t, and then the only part that Could work, “use Condoms” is last in the message.

For all the reasons above, perhaps, the approach has been well documented to not work. And the woman from the international aid agency admitted so herself.

Then why don’t you quit saying it then? Someone, including me, should have asked her.

“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.