“We Have Wasted Our Time Very Well”

That is how one of the Zambians (our cook Herald) described our trip to Northern Zambia. And though what was meant as a compliment does not translate quite the same to us, it made me smile when he said it. I want to forewarn whoever has started reading this that it was a packed week, and thus will be a lengthy post...

Wednesday (the 6th) we left bright and early, piling on to the old US-imported yellow school bus. We shoved our bags under the seat and squished together, since our food supply and sleeping bags took up the last several rows. The beginning of the ride was fairly pleasant with the cool breeze, but by our first stop just after 10 a.m. we knew it was going to be a hot week. Everyone was sweating, and all tailbones were sore from bouncing up and down on the hard seats across the bumpy road. Buster, our bus driver, produced a couple of severely bent forks, which he said were the “window tools” to force several of the broken bus windows down. That helped some with the air flow at least. At the first stop they paid for us to use the pit toilets (though I’m not sure one should ever owe anything for using a pit toilet) and we assembled our sack lunches on an old picnic table. The remainder of the 8 hour drive was unremarkable except for the increasing heat and the dust that swirled in the open windows and between the crack in the door, forming a fine layer over every person and item inside the bus. We reached Fringilla, our stop for the night, just before dark. Linda (a missionary who just moved back to the US from Zambia in March), Ba Janice and I shared a little trailer/shed/house called Little Tim’s Abode with two rooms and two bathrooms. It was simple, but very neat and clean. The highlight? I took my first stand-up legitimate shower since we got to Zambia in August! Fringilla is a little farm oasis in the middle of the hot, dry bush with green everywhere. The trees and flowers were beautiful, and there was even a yard area with in-ground trampolines where we spent most of the daylight time we had left. Dinner was a little buffet with some questionable food and cold water (!), and we had a devo afterwards in the courtyard. I think I was in bed by 9 that night after a collective 8 hours of sleep from the three preceding nights of baby feedings.

Thursday morning after an early breakfast buffet of fried eggplant, tomatoes, and toast (yes, I agree it was an interesting combination) we trudged back up the bus steps and “settled” in for an 11 hour drive to our destination, Mumena. We had compiled our lunch sacks (peanut butter packets, a roll, fruit, and a power bar) at Fringilla, so we got by with only two stops the whole day-that was rough. We would get off and line up for the pay toilets while Buster got fuel ($7-$8 per gallon) and pass a roll of toilet paper down the line until everyone was done and we piled back on the bus. We reached Mumena shortly before 6 p.m. and pulled up in front of the “dorms” where we were greeted by some Zambians in the community and the missionaries who are working there. There are three American families (ACU and Harding grads) who have just reached the 5 year mark in Mumena. Brian and Sondra with their two kids, Sondra’s parents, and Rick and Karen with their three kids and one on the way. Rick and Karen’s four-year-old curly blond-haired girl was as energetic as could be around the Zambians, but scared of any white person not in her family, which we found amusing. We ate soup for dinner with everyone who had come to greet us in the fenced yard of Rick and Karen’s house in plastic chairs by lantern light. It is far enough into the bush there that there is only electricity during the day at the missionaries’ houses from the solar panels, so it was thoroughly and utterly dark at night. After dinner we walked back to the dorms by flashlight and tried to settle in.

What they refer to as the dorms are two rows of rooms connected by brick walls on two sides to form a square around a courtyard. Each room was about the size of a typical foyer or house entryway, and comprised of three reed mats on the cement floor, mosquito nets strung from the ceiling, and a candle on a plate with a box of matches. The first order of business was to light the candle and drip enough wax onto the plate that the candle would stick in the hot wax and stand up. The second order of business was to keep the candle far enough from the insecticide-doused mosquito net that it did not go up in flames like some did last year! The last room in either row of dorms was a “shower room”-basically the same-size room with a hole at one corner for water to drain from. There was no running water so we used our bottled water to brush our teeth with, standing in the courtyard. Behind the dorm were buckets and two drums of water to dip from. One drum was set over a fire to warm it, and the other was cold water to temper the hot water with. Unfortunately while we were there, the man whose job it was to keep the fire going under the drum “forgot” and we ended up with two drums of cold water for bathing. We would fill a bucket up, carry it back to the “shower room” and pretty much splash the water over us (quickly because it was so cold) as best we could to at least streak all the dirt and dust we were caked in. The bush pit toilet was in a small grass round hut behind the dorm. At night, in the pitch black, we would lay on our backs in the courtyard and watch shooting stars from the African sky. We all really appreciated our four night experience in the dorms, even if every moment was not particularly fun or convenient. That is how so many people in the world live from day to day, and we often do not give it a second thought.

Friday we spent some time touring the land with Rick and learning about his development projects. He is experimenting with various things so that he can best know how to teach sustainable methods to the Zambians. We saw the bike well he built using string and pedals to pull water up from the well more efficiently, walked through his garden and banana and pineapple grove, tested his tree-made wheelbarrows, and hiked up a towering abandoned termite mound to see the hollow he had dug out and lined with plastic to form a reservoir for catching rainfall. After lunch we had a couple of interesting lectures from Brian on the demonic influences of the Zambian culture and how to combat that world view from a biblical perspective. After dinner, we grabbed our flashlights and walked about 45 minutes deeper into the bush to the first area church plant at Konkwa. The people there had made a circle of wooden benches around a huge bonfire. Imagine sitting close to a raging fire on the hottest summer day in the heart of the South-even the Zambian sitting next to me said we were like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace. The tribe around Mumena is primarily KiKundi, so our Tonga was useless, but we took turns singing songs to each other, and translated a lesson, all the time moving back further and further from the fire. A long time later we shook their hands and walked back to the dorms for bed.

Saturday was one of my favorite days in Zambia thus far. We loaded our reed mats onto the bus and drove an hour or so to the Meheba Refugee Camp. It is protected by the UN, so we had to carry our passports with us and stop at a checkpoint just inside the compound. It is a sprawling camp with hundreds of acres full of refugees from the Congo and Angola. Each family unit is given a plot of land to farm, two years worth of seed, and a tent for temporary shelter until they can afford to build more permanent huts. The idea is to eventually repatriate the refugees to their homeland, but for some that is not possible, and since they cannot leave the camp, there is a clinic, several schools, and various churches throughout. We drove to Road 68 inside the camp for a church meeting with the people there. They were French/Swahili speaking, and I loved being able to greet them and have small conversations in Swahili. We spread our reed mats out under a large tree for shade, in front of a small table they had brought outside to use as the “preaching podium” surrounded by termite mounds. The meeting was translated into a string of languages, and we would sit for the lessons (6 in all) and stand for the songs (they randomly prompted our group to sing three separate times) and dances. Kids where everywhere! Every time we stood, more children would squeeze onto the mats, until there was hardly any visible mat left. They sat quietly in their torn clothes and bare feet, playing with the bracelets we passed out to them. The only outburst was when we heard the tree rustling and then a thud, and we all scattered as something fell out of the tree onto our mat. It turned out to only be a chameleon. We broke after a few hours for the lunch they had prepared us-nshima, rice and curry, rape, kapenta (fish heads), and goat. It is polite to eat whatever is given you, but the portions were huge, so we turned to the guys in our group, challenging them to finish our nshima to prove their manhood-they looked green after it was all over, but no nshima remained on any plate. After a couple more hours of worship (totaling 6 hours), we got back on the bus and waved to the hoards of children running after us as we drove away. That night we celebrated Halloween with the missionary kids, dressing up creatively with whatever we could find in our bags. They trick-or-treated at the dorms by candlelight and we handed out candy that Linda brought from the States. Their costumes were pretty creative as well, and we all had fun with it. Rick had even constructed a haunted house in his barn that we took the kids through. We sat around a campfire afterwards (still in costume) and sang until we were tired enough to sleep.

Sunday our group divided up with the missionary families to visit various congregations in the area. Six of us accompanied Brian and Sondra back to Meheba Road 6 (a lot closer to the camp entrance) who met in a school room. We were welcomed very warmly, and were asked to introduce ourselves and “give a few songs”. We had been hoping to get out of singing (which is pretty much constantly asked of our group on Sundays) since we were a small group with one guy, but no such luck. It ended up being a sort of three-person chorus while the other three mouthed along. For the hour-long ride back to Mumena, I ended up in the enclosed bed of the truck with two other students. We would open the window and cover our mouths and noses to keep from inhaling dust until we came to the police checkpoints and had to pull it shut, cutting off our air circulation. We had to crouch over to keep from hitting our heads on the roof with the constant ruts in the road, and we bunched up the material from our skirts underneath us to keep the metal from burning our skin-what a ride!
Monday morning we packed up early, told our hosts goodbye, and drove a few hours to Chimfunchi Wildlife Trust in Chingola, a world-renowned chimpanzee refuge. Chimps are rescued from zoos, vets, and attempted domestication by humans and brought to the refuge from all over the world. It now houses over 100 chimps in five different compounds, and we toured the property learning about the chimps and watching them being fed. The lady who began the orphanage even has rescued Billy, a hippo when it was a baby, who now weighs 2 tons and still comes up from the river every morning for two bottles of milk. They fed us lunch and dinner on a little porch and we stayed in dorms at the front of the refuge. It was an interesting day, but many of us wrestled with the fact that it costs $16,000 per month to feed all the chimps (who will never be released to the wild) when so many children are starving all over the world. Tuesday was an all-day driving affair again back to Fringilla, where I stayed in an even nicer house with a tile shower and a real flush toilet :). We had to stop once on the way and divide the girls and guys onto separate sides of the road for a bathroom stop because we had gone so long without seeing any kind of civilization.

Wednesday we drove two hours towards the metropolis of Lusaka and stopped for the morning at Zambikes. Zambikes is a company founded by two now 25-year-old guys who originally came up with the idea for a marketing class in college. They had spent a few weeks in Zambia with a business course through school, and saw a need for better transportation. They went back to the States, graduated, and raised enough money to build a warehouse, employ some Zambians, and start making and putting bikes together by hand. Now, three years later, they are running an efficient business that is also building bridges in the community. They developed a bike-pulled cart complete with mattress they call the Zambulance, and donated many of them to provinces across Zambia for use in the clinics and hospitals to collect patients too sick to walk there. They have even begun manufacturing bamboo bikes to lower the cost of transportation. Their website is www.zambikes.org. A few of the women cooked lunch for us, if you can guess what that consisted of...nshima, rice, rape, beans, and a boiled egg. One look at the plate the lady handed me and I rounded up two other girls to split it with me. I sat in the middle of them in the dirt against the building and we ate with our hands (as always) until we were bursting with nshima and convinced one of the guys to finish what was on our plate. We left after lunch and drove the rest of the way into the city to the “mall”, an unairconditioned indoor expanse with several clothing stores, a supermarket, Game (the closest version of WalMart), and the Kilimanjaro Cafe, where we got milkshakes and ice water-delicious. For dinner we went to a Mexican (no, I could not believe it either) restaurant, which was another endeavor by one of the Zambike owners fueled by what he missed most from the States. We ate out at tables under a massive tree that was wrapped in white lights and watched the orange ball of Sun set while we ate homemade chips and fresh salsa. If I were to ever live in Zambia I would have to be within driving distance of that restaurant! We stayed in the Eureka campsite that night in little grass huts big enough for three twin beds squished together, and a bath house a few yards down the trail. We had to stop in the road long enough to let the herd of zebra pass; much more exciting to watch than cows.

Thursday we drove the remaining six hours back to Namwianga, and were elated to be back (and especially to be off that bus). I skipped lunch to head straight for the Haven with my stethoscope around my neck, and was relieved to find Trey sleeping in his bed with the feeding tube gone and back up to his original weight. Sadly, Janice, one of the babies I signed up to pay special attention to, died the Sunday we were gone. She was a Down’s syndrome baby who probably had undetected issues and was too young to be tested for HIV, but it is hard to know what might have been prevented if she had been taken in before her clinic diagnosis of “severe wasting, dehydration, fever, seizures, and unresponsiveness”. Two new babies were there, Heath (a 32 wk baby whose mother died in childbirth) and Dorcas (a 2 month old whose mom died of what was most likely AIDS). I started medicine on a few babies with pink eye and one with fever and coarse-sounding lungs, but otherwise everyone was seemingly healthy. We returned to no electricity or running water in the house, but nonetheless it was good to be back.

Classes and clinic rotations resumed on Friday, and here we are back in the swing of things again. Today has been a free day, and I went with a few other girls into town this morning to walk around the market. We took a taxi back to the mission since it is way too hot now to walk the 5ish miles back to the house, and it was work the $4 ride for the air-conditioning alone! Everyone says October is the hottest month here, and I believe them. How wonderful to have “enjoyed” the hottest summer months for both Texas and Africa this year. We are hoping the rains will start early this year. Tonight we are looking forward to having dinner at another orphanage a few kilometers away run by a South African couple. Tomorrow afternoon is the wedding of the girl whose kitchen party we attended last month, which will undoubtedly be a true cultural experience. If you did not heed my warning at the beginning and are still reading this, I wish you a wonderful weekend!