In Lusaka, Zambia.

Thursday 28 February 2008

I want to try and give you, the reader, an on the ground taste of what living, and training, is like in Lusaka, Zambia.

Morning is cool and full of cock-a-doodle-dos from the roosters next door. I grab a shirt, shorts and socks from the clothesline on the porch out front, slip on my runners, and start my morning run. By 6:15 AM the streets are already lined with Zambians going to work, or to school.

At the hostel there is a clean, well-tiled shower waiting for me when I return hot and sweaty. Breakfast is usually buns bought from a vendor nearby. To these we add mango jam and groundnut (peanut) butter, and order tea from the hostel kitchen. Breakfast is ate on the porch underneath the clothesline.

Our first session of the day is a language lesson from Brett Stevenson, co-Director of Southern Africa programs. She speaks functional Chichewa, and I don’t, so I pay close attention.

By noon we’ll have been through a session on value-chain analysis, or cross-cultural communication, and have received our marching orders for the afternoon. To give you an idea, today we were sent out on orders to gather information on the Zambian maize value chain, understand the key value chain interconnections, and return in time to draft a pair of interventions to improve the livelihoods of the maize market sellers of downtown Lusaka. It’s not a nice, neat assignment, but today we struck on a pair of good Zambian leads and had constructed a plan for a maize commodity exchange by suppertime.

Supper is nshima. It’s the staple food of Zambia: maize, milled to become “mealie-meal,” mixed with boiled water into a paste thicker and hotter than Thanksgiving mash potatoes. It’s served with a “relish,” which is a sauce and your choice of chicken, fish, beans, or anything else that might be on the menu. Grab it with your right hand, roll it in a ball, dip it in your relish, and dig in. Zambians eat it for breakfast, lunch and supper, but for this muzungu (white person), one meal of nshima fills me up for the entire day.

Once the sun sets, the mosquitoes come out, so spray profusely. We talk development, write blog entries, watch a football match over a beer at the bar, or just pack it in early.

At the end of the day, lying in bed under just a sheet, the question in my head is “just what on earth are we doing here?” But here is where we are, working side-by-side people we trust and admire, trying to solve tough problems, in a culture that’s full of warmth and hope. So instead I ask myself “why would we want to be anywhere else?”

It’s a pretty wonderful thing to live and work in south Africa. Even with the morning roosters.

Toronto-Amsterdam-Nairobi-Lusaka

We all made it just fine, and all in one piece.

(Ok, five different, human-sized and shaped pieces.)

Late on Friday night, packed into a van cab that still contained a dozen balloons from an earlier birthday party drop off, the five of us—Ashley, Hans, Mark, Megan, and I—made our way to Pearson airport. We stopped just before check-in to unpack and repack mosquito nets, strong sunscreen, and malaria meds to meet luggage weight restrictions and security fluid rules. No one lost a Swiss Army knife, or a canister of bug spray going through security (though I did receive the extra attention of a random search—ah, those friendly airport folks).

Twelve hours later (six for the time change, six for the flight) we were out roaming the bicycled streets of Amsterdam. Yes, we checked out a few coffee shops. No, Mom, I didn’t light up (though, that’s not to say the ambient smoke didn’t have an effect). Through no fault of our own, we found ourselves in the red light district. (My inkling is that every street originating from the train station we arrived at eventually funnels into it.) We took our time finding our way out. After lunch, we found a coffee shop that sold actual coffee, where we found an incomplete set of Jenga blocks and played a couple of intense rounds before making our way back to the airport to be early for our connection.

It was on Kenya Airways that we arrived in Nairobi. It was likely the point at which things became noticeably different: Hans pointing out Mt. Kenya, an all-African flight crew, African patterned upholstery, and a continuously updated on-screen map of our plane passing over the Mediterranean, then Tunisia, then the Sahara desert and even further on south. (Could it really be? Was that pixilated airplane really us?) We touched down (not so smoothly), taxied, and then sat in a humid, but not too hot, terminal waiting a little over an hour for our final connection.

After leaving Toronto late Friday night, we arrive mid-morning Sunday in Lusaka, Zambia: our final destination. The five of us ask a passing Kiwi to document our successful arrival on the tarmac of Zambian International Airport. Next is the visa line. I realized then why the passengers were in such a rush to exit the plane: the line, even divided into fourths (one each for Zambians, government and VIPs, some NGO with a particular four-letter acronym, and visitors—us) is excruciatingly long. After successfully attaining semi-legitimate holiday visas, we found the luggage carousel to hold all of our bags, save one: Ashley’s jam-packed, navy backpack. And so, finally, after notifying the airport baggage claim, we found our welcoming party, Monica Rucki, still so patiently waiting to pick us up, loaded our bags into a pair of taxis, and we drove, past the parking gate, past maize fields, past people on foot and on bike, farther and farther away from anything we had known before.