I've been a good parent - cooked dinner, washed clothes and supported the schools. But now my children have left for university, I feel that I don't have to be sensible anymore. This is my time, and I intend to enjoy it.

Friday 13 July 2007

Catch up

M. wants to know about the war on terrorism, while I’m keen to talk about Zambia and how women are faring on issues such as widows’ inheritance, marital rape laws and divorce settlements. I’d been reading up women’s issues on M’s legal website. We flit through topics like small girls move through Barbie’s closet.
M’s not changed – a little older naturally. But she still has an easy laugh.
We talk about a mutual friend – Vera – a beautiful Russian girl who had married a young Zambian doctor. On visits to Lusaka from my bush hospital, I’d meet with Vera and she’d tell me the latest saga in her marriage, the latest woman in her husband’s life. One day I’d told M. about Vera, and she’d stopped me mid-sentence. “I know this man – he is dating one of my friends.”
Vera and M. became friends, while I went home, had children, became busy with my new life and lost touch with the old.
I ask about Vera.
M. shakes her head. “Her husband was one of the first to go.”
I know she means AIDS.
“I think Vera went back to Russia.”
We both nod, happy to believe this – happy to think she escaped the disease.
I am tired but M. takes me out for a drive. On the streets, the cars look new and everyone is in smart clothes. I remember women wearing chitenges - African wraps around their waist – often with the President’s face woven into the pattern.
I ask M. about the two former presidents. When I lived here Kenneth Kaunda had declared a one party state. M. says he was forced into elections by peaceful protests and conceded defeat as soon as he saw the votes were against him. He still lives in Lusaka. His successor Frederick Chiluba was elected to two terms and tried to change the constitution to run for a third, but again peaceful protests forced him to change his mind. M. said they called the protests “Green Fridays”. Everyone wore green ribbons to work, and Dr Chiluba soon got the message that green was for go.
The city looks clean and rich. We pass shopping malls and fast food chains such as Subway. “The South Africa influence,” M. says. Dr Chiluba sold off state industries in the mid-1990s, and invited foreign investors to develop what they could.
The small Indian traders have been squeezed out, and the South African chains have imported televisions, mobile phones, furniture and oh so many clothes. When I was here, clothes were produced cookie-cutter style, the same styles from the same fabrics. The only distinctive clothes came from the tailors who took special orders and worked at sewing machines from the porch of an Indian shop.
M. drives home and we find her three girls watching the Nickelodeon and Disney channels on a big screen television.
I tell the girls that I’m impressed by their shops. “When I was last here Bata shoes sold only four models – mens, womens, childrens and flip-flops!”
They laugh unable to believe their country was ever so unsophisticated.
Friends of M. stop by. The husband was an Air Force pilot and on almost continual alert against the Rhodesians in the 1970s. When he could finally take off time owed he had several years due and used it to study for a law degree. M. refers to him as “The General”. He asks about Tony Blair and his unpopularity among the British electorate and the rise of homegrown terrorists. I ask about modern Africa, and AIDS. They say they are all paying for the upkeep of orphaned relatives – M. bought her sister’s children a house and pays for their education – the General calls it the African version of “Making Poverty History”.
For dinner, M makes Zambian traditional food with nshima, beans and kapenta. Nshima is the Zambian stable – maize flour cooked with a little oil and water to form a sticky high-carbohydrate mound. Kapenta is tiny sardine-like fish. The nearest lakes are hundreds of miles away and transport slow. So the fish are dried at the waterside and trucked without refrigeration to markets all over this vast country.
My stomach grows queasy as M. boils the beans and fish. Even though I’m hungry, the heavy smell isn’t appetizing,. M. says I should eat the nshima with my hands, in the traditional way. She brings a bowl of water so we can wash.
The girls throw disdainful looks at their mother. They hate nshima, M. says. Potatoes are better, says the oldest child.
The nshima sticks to my fingers and, although I try to bind it into a tight ball, it just doesn’t hold my bean sauce. M. scoops hers through the beans and kapenta easily clearing her plate. All I get is dry nshima. I’d forgotten how bland and tasteless this stuff could be. I eat the minimum to stave off hunger and hope my stomach will be fine in the morning.

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