LUSAKA, ZAMBIA — The place I’m trying rent is in the Villa Elizabetha neighborhood, a place of shady streets and high walls topped with broken glass and barbed wire. It is a good enough neighborhood, I’m told, to make electric wire on top of the fences strictly optional.
I asked the real estate agent if I could, as the map indicated, walk to work from there, and she nodded dubiously. Only during the day, she said. After 19oo hours, you really shouldn’t. Why? Because you have to cross a bridge over the train tracks, and street children live under the bridge.
That’s what we’ve done to ourselves. Children living under bridges and turning into our worst fears.
Helen Highwater 