I'm finally in "Africa"

Even though we've been here for three weeks and this is technically our fourth country visited, it wasn't until we got here to Zambia that I really sensed that I was in the heart of Africa, seeing a part of the true Africa.

South Africa could be somewhere in Europe or in the U.S. with a large black population. Everything is so westernized: roads, restaurants, shopping centers, you name it, it's so similar to home. True, 90% of the people are indigenous but it never really felt "African." It just felt South African. When explaining this to one of the camp guides who is South African, he depicted South Africa as "Africa for Beginners." It described perfectly what I was feeling. Swaziland gave a glimmer of Africa, but we never got off the main roads, and traveling down a four lane road at 85 miles an hour doesn't lend time to soak it up. Botswana is almost totally indigenous peoples, but we really zoomed to get to Cathy and Joe's place then spent time in the camps which were frequented by westerners, either by citizenship or by culture (South Africans), and in Zimbabwe we only saw Victoria Falls, so that was hardly a natural setting.

But enter Zambia, and immediately upon getting off the plane in Mfuwe, a place I've never even heard of with a population of 800,000 and you are smack dab in Africa. To get to the camp we traveled an hour and a half. The road was a narrow two-lane, at best, pot-holed ribbon of tarmac which is traveled at a speed of around 20-30 MPH. Anything faster would be to court disaster.
Zambian society is mainly divided into two classes the withs and the withouts. In the countryside, it is entirely the withouts. We passed hundreds of what are called "villages," clusters of houses each cluster containing five or more rondovals, loosely considered shelters. Normally they are made of a circular formation of one inch diameter branches tied together with twine and then plastered with a baked mud concoction to form a solid wall. The roof is a pointed affair made up of a combination of larger limbs used as rafters with a reed thatch for the actual covering. These structures form 90 percent of the houses in the villages. Most villages are formed of members of one family, parents, children, grandparents, and extended cousins, aunts, and uncles.
This basic family structure is what helps any given family survive. What is made by one is shared by all, food, money, clothing, and general facilities. There is no running water and hence as you pass down the road, you pass hundreds of people at any given point in the road, carrying the equivalent of 5 gallon buckets on their heads hauling water back to the house for general use. Many of the larger villages may have a well, but these can be, and usually are, so contaminated, that they are really health hazards. The safest, but often not the closest source of water are the public water pumps where people literally hand pump the water for their daily use.
Sanitation in the villages is extremely basic at best. People dig slit trench toilets which they cover up as each section is used and work their way down the trench until it is all covered up, then dig another one. All too often, however, they just use the bush literally walking to a point behind the hut and taking care of business.

We saw a lot of burning brush around the villages, and it was explained to us that now that the grass is getting dry, the people need to burn it so that the snakes don't have the cover of vegetation in which to hide. Puff adders and cobras will slither into the rondovals at nighttime looking for food or shelter and a lot of children die of snake bites.
People wash their clothes in the river, but rivers are infested with crocodiles, and again, there is a great loss of life from people just taking care of basic necessities.

The road is a continual stream of individuals walking or riding bicycles. There are thousands of them, literally. If you have any money at all, you have a bike, because it facilitates movement so much. A bike would cost $30-50 so certainly not many people can afford them. The majority of people just walk, and they walk great distances.
Traveling today as we did to a new camp, we passed many bikes with huge baskets on them. All going one way had chickens, melons, or other saleable items in them, all those coming back the other direction had the bins filled with sugar, salt, kerosene, cooking oil, and a myriad of other household items. That all seemed pretty ordinary in general terms, until we were told the specifics. They have a 180 mile four-day round-trip journey to sell/buy their goods. They can sell their items in Mfuwe because prices are higher there. But to buy, they must travel another 60 miles to a town called Chipata because prices are lower on the Malawi border. So they practice the old adage of sell high, buy low, but the incredible work required to do this is mind boggling. When you have no real work and so very little cash, time is less important than price, hence the odyssey. It just staggered the mind. Hell, my skinny butt got sore just riding the five miles to school when I biked to to my teaching job.

Everybody, it seems, has a baby. There are children everywhere. Standing by the side of the road in groups, riding on the bicycles either as passengers or far-too-young riders in dangerous traffic. Infants are slung on backs wrapped up in shawls of seemingly every female no matter the age. Young girls too young to bear children of their own are put in care of younger ones. Then girls that to my western mind are too young to have borne children although physically capable of having done so, also carry babies on their backs.
Clothing is a mixture of traditional African dress and western tee shirts/blouses, with everybody having either flip-flop sandals or being barefooted, the norm.

And yet, in spite of all this obvious poverty there is a genial spirit to the people. As we pass by in our safari vehicle, we are not scorned or cursed. We aren't met with hostile looks or turned backs. Instead we are greeted by hordes of children emerging from the villages to wave and say hello. The same people we weave our way around on the roads almost always wave and smile. Everybody says that Zambia has two things going for it, the weather and the people. I couldn't argue with either.
It would be easy to feel guilty as a high-roller gringo coming into town splashing money around by staying at the several-hundred-a-day per person safari lodges, but as we have been told over and over, it is tourism that provides even a modicum of support to the drastic situation. The lodges hire up to a hundred individuals who would otherwise have no employment, and many of the lodges do have a sense of community by supporting schools in the area, and establishing health clinics for the people. Still the disparity of what we think we need, and what these people actually have is a gulf which is difficult to fathom. They are poor in material goods, but rich in spirit, and I can only admire them for that.

We visited a school and village on our last day at the camps. Tafika Lodge is one of those sponsoring schools and trying to help do what they can. It had an incredible impact upon us all, and I think that it should be part of the program that everybody who comes to the camps see what life is like in the villages.
The school was not in session on this afternoon, but there were still hundreds of kids around the grounds. When we drove up they all shouted: "Mzunga, mzunga," white people. Excitedly, they followed the truck into school and were all shouting and talking and posing for pictures. These rag-tag kids mostly barefooted, with dirty, torn clothes on their backs still had the biggest smiles on their faces. We showed them the digital photos that we took, and played back the videos on the little window and they were simply the most excited bunch of kids we had ever seen. They crowded and pushed to be in the pictures, often getting so close to the video camera that I had to keep backing up just to get more than one face in the picture. Little kids as young as two wanted to be in the pictures.
Then came the reality check. In spite of the excitement, the smiles, the laughter, one of the teachers apologized for not having school in session, but they had just returned from the funeral for one of the teachers' children, an eight month old girl who had died of diarrhea (sp). I asked Isaac, our guide what the infant mortality rate was and he said that if the kids got to be five years old, they had a pretty good chance of making it, but between one in three and one in four didn't. That just jolted me. 25-33% of the little kids I was looking at wouldn't ever see their 5th birthday.
The school has no electricity, or toilets, they get by on donations like Tafika's but it is a continual struggle. For example, when the government pays for the teacher education they send the teachers to these village schools upon completion of the program. The problem is that nobody wants to teach in these schools. It's like teachers in the U.S. where people don't want to teach in inner-city schools. So the teachers bail out as soon as they can and head for the big cities. Of the ten teachers in the school we visited, five came from the government, but Tafika trained four individuals to teach, although they aren't "certified" teachers, and they pay the salaries of those four teachers. They also have programs whereby they get supplies to the school. And supplies are desperately needed. We all left donations at Tafika to help with the supplies.

The curriculum is a mixture of practical and academic. The day starts with the line-up. All children must come to school with clean clothes and clean bodies. Those who can afford it have school uniforms, but those are few in number. When they can, the school provides lunch for the students. One of the mandatory classes is AIDS/HIV awareness and prevention. History, without books is a problem, but I never had any sense of personal agendas on the part of the staff as they talked about their schools. They're just doing the best they can with what they've got. Or as the song says: "Makin the best of a bad situation."

At the village we saw, it was much of the same. There were kids everywhere. There must have been 4-5 kids for every adult we saw. Granted we didn't see many men, many of them were away working in the town 60 kms away or at the camps. But the conditions were primitive at best. Men can have as many wives as they can support (a euphemistic term at best), and may have as many as 15 children with their several wives. There were many young girls with babies hanging from their backs or in their arms. Whether they were just helping mom or were caring for their own is not something I want to think about. This village was only one of the 32 which make up the one school we visited. When you consider that there are literally thousands of schools like this in Zambia alone, then do the math, it truly blows the mind when you expand the equation to all of Africa and then look at it on the global scale.

I asked Isaac how many of the kids would eventually make it out of the village and go on to something better, and he said one in a hundred. One percent, it boggles the mind. With Tafika's help, the number triples to three, but even that is a strikingly small number.

I'll never read a headline or see a story on TV again about African poverty and look at it the same way. I won't go off on my usual tirade on spending hundreds of billions of dollars on wars when we ignore the reality of how poverty contributes to the conditions that bring war about in the first place. But Zambia has certainly had an impact. I don't leave here blasé or unaffected.

To try to leave this letter on a lighter note I'll relate this story. We saw several cars with middle- eastern individuals in them. When asked what that was all about, we were told that they were Muslims who had come to convert the Zambians to Islam, the new missionaries, I guess. The Muslims gave a lot of presents to the men to sweeten the deal and this worked for a while, but then the men learned that to be true Muslims they would have to be circumcised. They returned the presents. Faith can only take you so far.

love to all,
j and c