Friday 14 March 2014

Toilet Trouble and the Pied Piper of Kasama

When negotiating my placement details I wasn't majorly enthused about the idea of Kasama, it being a provincial town 840 clicks north of Lusaka the capital.  I was leaning towards the idea of being based in Lusaka.  That was more than likely borne out of an insecurity of mine more than anything.  Its natural to, in some ways, cling to your comfort zone and Lusaka certainly offered me that.  Much less of an adaptation and the security of a life that’s in some way familiar.  A large foreign population and many of the western creature comforts were in plentiful supply there.

But the experience that I was likely to get in Lusaka was gonna be pretty half-arsed and if I was to spend one year of my life living in Africa, I really should do it properly, immerse myself fully in Zambian life rather than that of an ‘expat’ (that word makes me feel quesy).  The other factor was that Irish Aid were the donors for the Kasama project and they were keen that this was where I’d be involved.  The Irish Government have had a long presence in the Northern Province (and Zambia generally) which I’ll go into at a later date.

We took off on the 10 hour journey north towards Kasama in our Toyota Hilux 4x4 that we’d been given for the year.  Us being Paul, a 28 year old Ugandan (doing Monitoring and Evaluation), Laia (Auditor) also 28 a dutchie from Haarlem, Andrew (Socio-Economic Planner) a 60 odd year old from Zimbabwe and Simon, the driver from Kasama.  The four of us are working together for the year and Simon driving us about.  He’s a pretty cool guy, a Gooner who lived in London for 7 years and a good guy to have around.  The fact that he lived in Europe means that he appreciates the cultural difference that exists for foreigners like myself.

Paul is also an Arsenal fan. In fact half of Zambia appears to be! Easily, twice as many Arsenal jerseys about compared to any other team.  Many say it’s the playing style, could also be the strong African connection over the years (Kanu especially is an African icon who transcends national boundaries) but others have said that it just appears this way as the United fans have their jerseys well and truly hidden away! We’ll see…

Eventually we arrived in Kasama and sought out Laia’s joint (she’s got her own place and the three buckos were stuffed in together. Equality me hoop!).  Her house is quality, a nice old colonial brick building with a massive garden (like 1200m2), with all sorts of fruit trees, a small swimming pool and out-buildings for her 4 dogs to sleep in.

This was the third house I’d seen now where they’d housed people so it was with a fair bit of optimism that I awaiting our arrival at my home for the year.  3km later from Laia’s place (which is close to the middle of town) we arrived at our gaff.

Optimism misplaced – fuckin shit pit it was !! Cos it was Kasama they hadn’t actually come all the way up here to pick it but relied on some other schmo’s to do it.  It reminded me of one of these really bog standard 80’s holiday bungalows in the west of Ireland that are empty for 10 months of the year.  The joint was massive – 4 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms but a dining room with no windows into it, a kitchen with a sink and a 1m2 workspace and no storage and a sitting room the size of a warehouse which made our couch and two chairs look like furniture from a dolls house!

The last 1km of the road was something I’d only experienced twice before: the road from Siem Riep to the Thai border (in 2002) and La Paz to Uyuni (2004) ie a lunar-like topography that requires every bit of the 4x4’s manoeuvrability to negotiate.  Ok I admit, these were all first impressions and much has changed since.  I got onto HQ in Lusaka a few days later and let them know the score.  They were pretty apologetic and said there was no issue with changing if we found somewhere else.  Grand job, I’d get onto it.


The Road to Perdition
Next obstacle, Paul and Andrew said that unless I could guarantee them en-suite bathrooms in the new place they weren’t prepared to move.  “Eh wha ??” I’d never had a fuckin en-suite in my goddam life and these two goons weren’t prepared to share a jacks!  Paul confided that on his last placement in Rwanda, he had lived with a Danish guy whose toilet habits had left him so traumatised that he was close to quitting the job.  Now Jesper the Dane must have been a nightly guest at the only curry house in Kigali or I was dealing with one very precious Ugandan !!

There was no convincing either of them. Out voted: Uganda-Zimbabwe Alliance 2-1 Daly !!

I took it on the chin and got to work on the landlord.  In fairness they’ve been good about it giving us extra furniture and putting in a full kitchen which has been a major help in making the joint habitable.  I’ve put my interior design skills to good use with my bedroom which is pretty decent at this stage and I’m getting some extra furniture made to deck the place out.  It must be said that the area we live in is very nice and leafy with a pleasant feel to the place and lots of sociable friendly heads about.

As Zambian towns go Kasama in generally charming place to be.  It has a population north of 200k but like most developing countries (maybe due to their dense living environments) it feels like a town of about 50k (but I’m pretty sure that it’ll bore the shite out of me after a while).  The centre was well designed back in the day by the Anglo colonisers, it is easy to get about and it’s full of life.  Well when it’s bright that is.  Even though we’ve got our own driver, I generally walk home from work and it really is a pleasant experience.  Maybe it’s due to the big blue sky, the lushness of the greenery around or maybe it’s the warmth in the evening air but it really brings me back to my teens and the summer evenings in Ballyferriter in West Kerry strolling home after a day in Irish College.


The Stretch
Apart from the fresh air, the exercise and the nice scenery, my walks home generally leave me grinning from ear to ear from the reactions and interactions I have with people on the way.  It varies from situation to situation and the degree to which this occurs will diminish over time as they get used to seeing me about.

A very common scenario is one in which I’m about to walk past a group of kids who are all jabbering away together.  All of a sudden one of them will see me and a blankness will pass over him, his face will lengthen and silence will slowly descend over the group (purely based on this kids reaction).  The group will then slowly turn to see the apparition that this one kid has witnessed and then I will look over to see a gang of children just staring wide-eyed at me with a ‘what the FUCK is that thing’ look plastered across their mugs.  One of them will have muttered Muzungu (whitey/honky etc) by this point.

To break the awkwardness of the situation I will (while struggling to keep a straight face) wave at them.  Another 4 or 5 seconds will pass without even the blink of an eye, then one of them will wave back.  Then tension generally eases at this point and by the time I’m well passed them they’ll individually begin to shout at me “ow aaaah yoooooo, ow aaaah yoooooo” while jumping up and down and laughing hysterically like I’m the funniest thing they’ve ever laid eyes on.  One evening this happened when I was out jogging and a group of kids started legging it after me laughing and shrieking uncontrollably (like ‘whats this guy running away from’).  I eventually stopped to say “hello, whats your name?” etc.  They also stopped 20m back, but wouldn’t come near me.  This happened 3 or 4 more times until they decided to stop running after me and went home.

The reaction I get completely depends on the audience.  Usually parents of these kids will smile warmly at me as their children have epileptic fits.  Generally teenage guys will initially stare at me in surprise then just play it completely cool and maybe muster a nod towards me.  But it’s always pleasant - Zambians are very placid and warm people.

If I go for a jog there’s one decent route that I’m now kinda reluctant to use.  The last time two times I went there I had a gang of kids join me and run along with me (12 the last time) for about 10 minutes absolutely pissing with laughter.  They react to me to in a way that reminds me of my reaction when I’d see an ice-cream van turn slowly turn down our street as a kid.  It’s hilarious for me too but I half feel like Mohammed Ali in When We Were Kings training in Kinshasa (“Ali kum-bia, Ali kum-bia”) and half like a complete tool!

I’m kinda hoping that if there’s some Zambian fella living in Cork going out for jogs he doesn’t get 12 lads chasing him down the road.  A man could get the wrong impression from something like that !

The other thing that completely gets them is if I say a few words in their local language.  English is the official language nationally but up here not everyone can speak it and mostly they speak Bemba to each other.  Mulishani basically means “hows the form” (or “faaks it gaan kaaant” or “spiffing day old boy” to the Australians and English among you).  They’re amazed at it and start laughing their asses off again, who’s this honky and whats he doing speaking Bemba.  Then they start yabbering at me, asking me all sorts, at which point I smile blankly understanding none of it and leg it….


Shtory Zambia

After spending a fantastic month at home for Christmas Operation Zambia was upon me.  A 3 day pre-departure training course in England was my warm up.  I’d already done a goddam three week online course and I was to have completed another 10 hour online preparation course for this one that I was frantically trying to wrap up as the train pulled into Cambridge Station.  Time had gotten the better of me in the days leading up to my departure.  My arrival at the venue was a bit fraught being 5 minutes late and thinking I was underprepared for an intensive 3 days.

Turned out the whole set up was a nicely relaxed affair and I spend three wonderful days getting a crash course in life as a development worker and the peculiarities and challenges that Africa may present me with.  There were about 20 of us there and it was an incredibly enjoyable and rewarding experience spending time with others who were in the same boat as myself, facing a step into the veritable unknown.  The average age is 41, which was kinda surprising cos it’s usually something you associate doing when you’re young but they prefer using people who’ve got good work and life experiences behind them as they’re more likely to have a greater impact.  The whole weekend was great craic, really informative and focused the minds towards what lay ahead.  Most people were heading off to various parts of Africa and a few to Asia over the next 3 months.  I, on the other hand, was due to fly out the very day the course finished.  This seemed to be far more alarming to others than it was to me!  In a way the more time to think over things the more fretting people seem to do.

I met my fellow Zambia departee, Greg, who I was to travel out with, and we got on straight away.  It’d be difficult not to get on with this guy – a sound fella from Dublin in his 60’s.  He’d recently retired after working as an economist for years and had done quite a lot of work for the Department of Foreign Affairs.  We ended up rooming together in Lusaka for our first 10 days or so.
Myself and Greg Boy
We arrived in Lusaka via Nairobi and Harare and checked into the Lusaka Hotel, our temporary home for our stay in Lusaka.

I was pretty excited in the run-up, never having been to Africa before.  And really, I’d never planned on visiting here either in the foreseeable future, always something I thought I might do later in life.  But when I’d made the decision to do developing work and Zambia came up, I’d slowly begun to get pretty excited by the idea.

A little on that, and how I found myself swapping the comforts of Melbourne living for the dirt roads and mud huts of Africa; international development was something I’d been heavily interested in during my college days.  Put a fair bit of thought to pursuing it workwise but couldn’t really see a tangible long term outcome that appealed to me, so instead I went down the planning route.  But I’d always told myself I’d do it sometime and it kind of annoyed me that I hadn’t.  I absolutely hate saying I’ll do something and not do it so it was gnawing away at me a little.

I had also shied away from doing one of these general volunteering missions, eg I didn’t see the point in me spending three weeks teaching Russian to blind orphaned lepers or something.  Essentially I’d be the main beneficiary.  It wouldn’t be an enabling process.

Then after about 6 years working in Town Planning and Urban Design, I ended up living with Amy and Nis in Melbourne who were both studying International Development and essentially that re-triggered a latent interest in pursuing the idea of working in a development context.  By this stage I’d actually developed some proper experience and skills to make a meaningful contribution.  I was also eyeing up the departure lounge of Melbourne Airport and the chance to pursue this before returning to Europe was spot on.

My initial idea was to get something in Asia but there were fuck all opportunities to get involved in Urban Design or Planning in a development context.  I was initially luke warm about the idea of Africa but fuck it if I was gonna work in a developing country I may as well go all out.  It ended up being the hardest job I’d ever gotten, I’d three pretty challenging interviews and a multiple choice exam, everything based on personality behavioural traits and life experiences with zero on any technical topics.  Placing people in an expensive task I suppose and they need to know you can hack it.  Because Irish Aid were funding the placement, they were keen on me from the start, which helped!

Anyway, where was I. Yeah, it wasn’t quite at the same level as the giddy anticipation I’d experienced before embarking on my trips to South-East Asia in 2002 and South America in 2004 but nevertheless my excitement had been piqued and I was extremely eager to discover what lay in store for me.  Like those other trips I enjoyed not having a strong picture in my head about what Africa and Zambia looked, smelled, felt like.
Ole Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti from the window seat of my Kenyan Airlines flight
Our time in Lusaka was spent mainly between our hotel, the office and Levy Junction, one of the recently arrived god-awful South African built shopping malls.  Lusaka is an odd enough city.  The centre is predominantly a financial area which straddles Cairo Road (built with the idea of Cecil Rhodes of linking Capetown and Cairo), a wide boulevard that has large 1960’s modernist buildings peppered along it.

After 6 the centre is eerily silent and not a majorly pleasant environment to be in.  In a ring surrounding the city is where all the rich Zambians and foreigners live, in these leafy suburbs that also contain these shopping malls that seem to engender so much excitement, as in any developing country I’ve been in.  Out beyond these areas is where the majority live, in the cramped shanty towns of grime and squalor.

While it probably gave me the gradual introduction to life here I needed, I was frustrated by the lack of any Africa-ness to my experience.  It was essentially like any other characterless faux western city I’d been to.  But with black people in it.  Only when I went out wandering about at night (against the advice we’d been given) in the streets behind the hotel that I finally felt I was in Africa.

There I found real life, full of people selling their wares, all sorts of bizarre new and second hand goods, the streets teeming with activity.  At this time people were packing up for the day and loading onto dozens of mini-buses with their full stalls wrapped up in blankets and stuffed into bags, all destined for the slums they lived in.  Not having any possessions on me I didn’t feel in anyway insecure.  Really, any warning I’d received was about getting pick-pocketed rather than being jumped but with practically every second guy I walked past their eyes quickly dropped to look at my pockets.  But the one consistent thing that met me were the massive grins and rows of shiny teeth.  It was seriously infectious and a real rush, the interactions, the greetings, all pleasing, warm and relaxing.  Positive vibes abounded.

People of all ages from aul grannies to young girls working away with their babies strapped to their backs, it was the first true sense of Africa that I’d felt and the buzz and excitement that to my frustration evaded me on arrival had finally, belatedly kicked in.