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2007 News

A Typical Day in Zambia

In the mornings we wake up in our very nicely appointed cottage.  It’s sort of embarrassing.  We are living in the lap of luxury (comparatively speaking) with our host family, the Kellogs, two Americans working for the Department of the Treasury.  Our house is surrounded by a brick wall with both razor and shock wire at the top, and is guarded 24 hours per day 7 days per week.  The four of us sleep in a one bedroom apartment off to the side of the house.

After morning rituals, we jump into the truck that Linda Wilkinson-the director of Chikumbuso-loaned to us while on her summer vacation.  Rick got his international drivers license before coming to Zambia and has now mastered driving on the wrong side of the road, wrong side of the car, while in a standard stick-shift down the streets of the capital city.  He pretty much qualifies for super-hero status at this point.

When we leave our house, we go into a completely different world.  First, we drive across town into the city center (down the infamous Cairo Road-known for muggings, crime rings and other forms of violence), past the shopping center that someone burned down 2 weeks ago and on to Lumumba Road-the start of the industrial area.  On Lumumba, we stop and pick up our 5 volunteers from Lumumba Secondary School.  We actually have 10 volunteers, but we take 5 on Tuesdays to the Kibbutz School and 5 on Wednesdays to the Chikumbuso School.  The volunteers jump into the truck, and we drive another 20 minutes to either to Lusaka’s poorest shanty-town, N’Gombe or to a rural area that makes N’Gombe look like the Ritz known as Chamba Valley.

You know a bit about Chamba Valley from what I’ve written above, but here is what it looks like.  We drive down a paved road until the road ends.  It looks like you can’t go much further, because there are scorched corn fields on either side, but we continue on down the slice of dust that separates one corn field from the other.  Only a few cars venture down this way because the terrain is fairly difficult for anything but a truck.  Before we had use of Linda’s truck, we used to taxi to the end of the paved road, and then walk 45 minutes, dust up to our ankles, down the road.  The dust is red and paints all of the sparse bushes on either side this nice coppery golden red color.  It also paints you pants, shoes and feet the same color.  A few bends down the road and we turn left, at a point that looks like we are turning left into a bush.  Hidden behind that bush is a path about 1.5 meters wide that leads us into the Gripis area of Chamba Valley.

As soon as we turn into Gripis, the children all look up from their cars made of milk cartons or watching their siblings and scream, “MIZUNGU!!”  By the time we have taken a right at the town latrine, and passed the shack selling popcorn and tomatoes, we have a small following of children yelling, “MIZUNGU, MIZUNGU” and trying to grab on to the back of the truck.  The volunteers in the back shout at them in Nyanja, “Don’t grab the car!  Be careful!  You will hurt yourself!” to little avail.

The Kibbutz school in Chamba Valley could easily be mistaken for any other 3 mud shacks in the village.  Only about 60 students attend Kibbutz, but the village children gather and play in the field near by and listen to the lessons that go from 7:30 am to 3:00pm.  When we first arrive, we take a casual assessment of the children that run to us as we exit the car.  “Joseph Zulu still has that ear infection,” Kelley might say, pointing out the puss dripping down from Joseph’s ears.  These children do not have the public health card (a cost of 2 dollars) that would afford them clinic care.  Even if they did, the closest clinic is many miles away.  Even as we did our formal health assessments, there was little hope for even the smallest ailment until we began our partnership with Tiny Tim and Friends and Dr. Tim Meade-an American doctor that happens to live in Chamba Valley.

At 1pm, the children go off to eat.  Nshima-essentially grits-and some vegetables are prepared by a group of mothers and are served to the children waiting eagerly under a tree.  The children squat in the dust, grouped six to a plate, and scarf down the meager meal.  Some children depend on the school for their only meal of the day.

After lunch we begin our learning enrichment.  We split one class at a time into small groups lead by our Lumumba Road volunteers and ourselves.  The children at Kibbutz are painfully behind in their lessons and, before we arrived, had never had one on one time.  Some were not able to afford paper and pencils and have only written a handful of times.  With paper and pencils we provide, we begin the painstaking process of reviewing the alphabet.  Some are more behind than others and are unable to even scratch out the first few letters of their names.  However, the children are bright and eager to learn.  Through weeks of this process, children who were previously unable to recite the alphabet, can now proudly write their names and sound out small words.  Our Lumumba Road volunteers are born teachers, and the children love to interact with them.  The secondary school volunteers have never been to this part of Lusaka, and are consistently amazed and proud at the end of the day.

During learning enrichment time, our nurse, Sabrina Mikan, picks out children to assess.  With the help of one of our Lumumba Road volunteers (Mwansa, who wants to be a nurse), she checks the children’s heart rates, weight, skin and overall health, and notes any illnesses, infections or ailments.  Many children have minor infections, such as ear infections, which, if not treated could lead to more serious complications.  Notes are given to the headmistress of the school if a child needs medical attention, and those notes are passed on to Dr. Tim.  At Chikumbuso, the same processes is done, except that, because the Chikumbuso children have health cards, notes in Nyanja and English are given to the teachers and the guardian and the child is advised to go to the clinic for medications.
At 3:00pm, we and our volunteers jump back into the truck.  We lurch down the dusty road, back into the city center and drop the highschoolers off at Lumumba Secondary.  We go home exhausted and dirty, and try to reflect on our activities during the day.

Chikumbuso

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we go to Chikumbuso.  Our mornings are the same as Tuesdays and Thursdays, except that Rick knows he has less of a drive ahead of him.  We drive down Cairo Road and to Lumumba to pick up our second set of volunteers.  At a stop light, I might buy a paper and discuss the days politics with the students in the truck.  With the Chiluba trials underway, there is much to discuss.  We also talk about American pop culture, or what this or that word means in Nyanja, or why people from Eastern Province eat fried rats, but Bembas think that is disgusting.

We drive through a particularly nice suburb of Lusaka, passing gated houses like our own and the Lusaka International Community School where many children of diplomats attend class.  Two lefts down this nice road and then we take right.  That simple right might as well be a wormhole into a different universe.  Shops with signs “donated” by Zambia’s cellphone giant Celtel line the streets.  Nothing more than cement boxes, the shops overflow with patrons buying day old bread, eggs that have been left in the sun, bruised tomatoes and other necessities which the folks just up the street wouldn’t dream of purchasing.  We pass the “Landlover’s Guest House” and signs declaring “I will show you respect,” advertising the scourge of the compound, Shake Shake, a beer delivered in milk cartons on the backs of trucks.  When the Shake Shake trucks come rumbling down the alleyway at 4:00pm, we know it’s time to leave the compound.  The party lasts until about 4:45pm, and then you only hear the screams of the women being beaten by their drunk husbands until the next morning.  After the Shake Shake signs, we take one last left down the alley, where the paved road ends and gives way to dust and rubble.  Mizungus don’t come into the compound often, and again we are chased by children, and stared at by dumbfounded adults.

Unlike Kibbutz, the Chikumbuso School and Women’s Center has a gate protecting the premises.  We honk our horn and one of the 150 students rushes to open the gate for our truck.  Chikumbuso is made up of 4 concrete buildings, 2 of which have electricity.  They have hopes to build a 5th building, but the pile of unused concrete dust in the middle of the grounds shows how slow construction can go in Zambia.  After months of “King of the Mountain” games, most of the concrete pile has mixed with the dust that makes up the playground, and is mostly unusable.  Zesco, the Zambian electric company, has deftly made its mark on Chikumbuso.  The electrical wires that criss-cross the playground were once live.  When the power was cut to the wires, so that the children wouldn’t electrocute themselves, so was all the power to the school.  Without power for months, the Zesco employees finally found the time to come into the compound.  They fixed the problem by “borrowing” 5 meters of copper cable from Chikumbuso, and then attaching that cable with paper masking tape that the children were using the paint the buildings.  Although we spend much of our days calling the higher-ups at Zesco, this fire hazard has yet to be fixed.  Our options are to cut the power again by removing the paper tape, or hoping against hope the whole place doesn’t burn to the ground.

Our day at Chikumbuso is much like our days at Kibbutz, except that there are about 150 students and they all have health cards.  On Wednesdays, after school, the Chikumbuso Widow’s Group comes in for their micro-enterprise meeting.  Forty or so women, widowed and left with no income, devised an enterprise that takes little start up money, and costs almost nothing but time.  They have begun crocheting handbags out of plastic shopping sacks.  The sacks are donated, or collected, and the widows sit for hours weaving, talking, singing and praying.  Sometimes we sit with the women after a day of teaching and knot the bags to make long strings of plastic yarn.  If you ask them to, the women will jump up and start singing songs about having come up in the world after being so low.  One woman said that weaving the bags gives her the pride and respect that she lost after her husband died.  If anything, the bags give some of the women an income, something that they never had before coming to Chikumbuso.

On Fridays we teach the women’s literacy class.  Before leaving for Zambia, Rick, Kelley and I were all trained in the Pro-Literacy Worldwide curriculum.  Some women in this class are totally illiterate.  Roda Banda, a woman of 55 if she is a day, wrote her name for the first time last week.  Then she kept copying it and copying it and left class holding her paper and showing everyone in the compound.  Some people laughed, but Roda was proud.
At the end of the day, we go home and hope that the water isn’t cut, and the electricity is still on and that we haven’t been robbed.
 
By Sabrina Mikan, Graduate Student at the UT School of Nursing