roadtripping.
A summer in Africa!
Just to be different, this summer we decided to escape the Canadian heat by going to Africa.
Photos here - more to come later!
I can't believe it's a week later already.
TG and Jennifer are out on the verandah, taking photos of a chameleon who is concealed among the vines. I'll try to get some of these pics up here soon.
I am bothered by some minor side-effects of Mefloquine, the anti-malarial drug I am taking - but thankfully it's just a bit of inner-ear bother and insomnia, not the hallucinations and nightmares that a rare few suffer. It's probably the reason why Harry isn't sleeping well either, now that I think about it. We've only seen a few mosquitoes so far, thank goodness. I've always reacted badly to mosquito bites - and mosquitos do like biting me - but here, of course, their threat is multiplied exponentially.
We are currently planning a trip to Livingstone and Victoria Falls for Monday of next week. It will be great to see more of the country! Meanwhile we have been exploring our more immediate surroundings. Jennifer and I have been going walking - much to the consternation of Patricia and Isaac! I think it's a combination of fearing we'll get lost, not considering walking to be a recreational pastime since it is the only mode of transportation for many people here, and perhaps concern that Moma would scold them for letting us go.
After getting to know the neighbourhood by going for a stroll with Isaac, we took a reconnaissance wander up to the edge of Chalala where the paved roads begin, just to assure ourselves that we knew where we were going, and then walked all the way up to Woodlands to the markets. Some people were bemused to see two mazungu out walking, and some were quite impressed to see a mazungu with a bapu. As I was readjusting Harry on my back after changing him and feeding him, a woman called out to congratulate me for learning how to do it. "It's the best way to carry a baby!" she said - too right!
We also went for a wander around central Lusaka after taking a taxi to the Barclay's Bank at Longacres. The only way to get money here seems to be to get a cash advance on Visa. There was an ATM with the "Plus" symbol at Longacres (but on no other bank machine we saw), but we didn't try it out. We walked over to the Hotel Intercontinental in hopes that they would have WiFi in the lobby - they do, but it doesn't actually work. After a wasting a frustrating hour, I got my money back (10 American dollars - they didn't take Kwacha, the local currency) and we headed on. We stopped in at the Holiday Inn, but there WiFi wasn't working either. At that point we abandoned any faith in the big western hotels, and just headed towards Cairo Road, the commercial centre of Lusaka.
While the big hotels were surrounded by elaborate and lushly watered gardens, the roads beside them are still bumpy, the sidewalks mere dirt tracks for the most part even in the centre of town. The roads are lined with stalls selling baskets, roasted groundnuts, sweet potatoes, pop, chips, and top-up cards for pay-as-you-go mobile phones. Everyone has mobile here - it is the cheapest and most reliable phone service available. We stopped in a few shops, to try out local snacks, get a chitenge (the traditional fabric worn as everything from a bapu to a skirt to a headscarf). We saw only one other family of white people, and just a handful of "coloured" people, the local term for those who are neither white nor black (including biracial people like TG and others such as South Asians). There is no pretending to blend in here.
On Monday, DHB arrived from Barcelona to see Johnny, and of course meet little Harry! Johnny is improving in small steps - his sugars are still very up and down - going form 5 to 30+ - but he was moved out of ICU and into a ward. This news was greeted with mixed reactions - on the one hand, it means his condition is improving; on the other, the quality of care on the wards of the University Teaching Hospital is very low. They are unheated, and it is up to family members to provide food, drink, blankets and pillows for the patient. The hospital also asks that family members stay the night with the patient, as they are understaffed, and those nurses that do work overnight tend to lock themselves in to their nursing station, not even doing hourly rounds to check on the patients. The only way for a patient who is in distress in the night to get medical help is to have a relative bang on the door of the nurses' station and demand it. Moma spent the first night on the ward with Johnny, and then TG took a turn. There were over 20 people in the ward, most of them extremely ill, several with HIV/AIDS, several with what he thought might be TB. "I've never seen so many dead people," was his comment the next day. We forget how lucky we are in Canada to have access to good quality health care - it is shocking to see how the rest of the world lives. Another telling aspect of current Zambian society - while in North America we might be coy about two-tiered services - calling them "public" and "private" - the UTH has a private ward which is bluntly called "high cost." After two days suffering on the general wards, Johnny has been moved to the high cost ward, which has only 8 or 9 beds to a room, and will soon move to a semi-private room with only 2 beds. Family members are still requested to spend the night. As soon as he is stable, we will see about bringing him back to Canada for proper care. It is hard to think about the fate of those who do not have such options - and do not even have the luxury of a determined Moma with medical expertise to advocate for them here.
It is quite a change from when the UTH was built in the heady early days of independence, an era of wealth when the country built and supported hospitals and schools, and era that came to an end when the copper markets collapsed in 1974. Now the price of copper is climbing, but the copper mines are mainly owned by foreign interests.
Small World Department
I don't think we were expecting to hear any Canadian news in Zambia, so one of the headlines in the Post was a surprise: "Don't call it fusion, says Susur Lee." Of all the wire stories to choose from, why pick that one? Who knows.
During an evening veg-out session in front of the TV, we found episodes of "Ciao Bella," featuring my old theatre school classmate Jessica Heafey Leclaire, as well as other CanCon shows like "Naked Josh" and "Falcon Beach." You know you're in a developing nation when all there is to watch is Canadian TV.
What's next? An appearance by Anne Murray?
A tour through a selection of Lusaka neighbourhoods.
Around the world, there is a tradition of building planned low-income neighbourhoods and giving them happy-sounding names, like Desire in Louisiana, US; Sunshine in Victoria, Australia; and outside of Lusaka there is Mutundere which means "peace." Roads were built and paved, and water pipes laid, and sewers, but as more and more moved into the area, the buildings encroached upon the services until two-lane roads became one lane (or even dead ends), and the water lines were built over so they couldn't be serviced, and the sewer lines were no longer serviced by the city. Now it is a tightly-packed underserviced area with houses close upon shops selling food and mobile top-up cards and cassettes of local music, with buses and taxis going forwards and backwards on both sides of the roads, with people walking in every direction at every hour. I thought the tricky part of driving in Africa would be remembering to drive on the left, but here everyone drives wherever they can.
From there we pass by Kalingalinga, a word which means "loitering" or "temporary place," because it was never intended as the permanent settlement it has become. Here houses mix with workshops, and people sell what they have made along the roadside: furniture made of wood and wicker, bricks, charcoal, gravel.
Even in Chalala, the middle-class neighbourhood where we are staying, there is the constant smell of woodsmoke and the production of gravel. Where there are empty lots between the houses, lots which are waiting to be built up with the large comfortable houses which populate the area, people dig away the red earth to reveal huge rocks of quartz and limestone. Bonfires are built upon the rocks to crack them, and then people - men, women, and children - sit on the rocks and break them apart into gravel to sell to the brickmakers or to mix with concrete. In some places, there are great holes in the middle of the roads where people have dug out rocks to sell. It makes driving quite an adventure. Of course, those few roads that are paved and don't have huge holes in them have speed bumps instead.
We drove through all of these neighbourhoods to get from Moma's house in Chalala to Kalaki's house in Vilawonga in Chelston. In between Chalala and Kalingalinga is an expensive area where the diplomats and foreign workers with the NGOs live, and also the old Lusaka City Airport, where DHB first touched down in Africa in 1964, and Moma landed on her first flight, home from Harare (then Salisbury). The land is being divided into chunks and given away to friends of the current corrupt government. Of course the rich people need to be given land for free, how else would they stay rich?
Kalaki had some interesting stories on that topic, his own estrangement and attempted deportation by past governments, and his beginnings as a columnist eleven years ago. After writing a few letters to the editor of the Times and the Post - letters he described as "destructive, vicious, but humourous," the Times offered him a weekly column. His letters to the Times (a government-owned newspaper) had been critical of private interests and NGOs, so they thought he would be an ally. But Kalaki does not take sides - he spares no one! After a month, he submitted a column highly critical of the government, which the Times ended up choosing not to print. He shopped it around to the Post and has been there ever since.
Vilawonga is a more established neighbourhood than Chalala. Sarah and Kalaki had trouble with water access for a number of years when they first moved in 18 years ago, but after over a decade of perseverance have enough water for a lush lawn and garden. The roads, of course, are the same red earth as in Chalala.
updated 22 july 2007.
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