What's in a nose?

I saw a striking looking woman recently and wondered about her nose - it was divinely slim. I mean, your nose gets bigger with age, and this woman was well into her fifties. How could she have such a beautifully slim nose with nostrils so, so tiny, I wondered. But now I'm noticing many super slim noses - so slim, that surely they plug up at the mere hint of a cold. My own nose is a Celtic red colour that distends when I get excited or upset. I decided these women were descendents of some elite gene pool that specialised in slim probiscus.
Finally, today, I made a discovery. It was at the handbag counter at John Lewis. I reached for a small red purse that wouldn't be lost in my handbag, but it was snatched up by another hand. The hand was small but with large knuckles prone to arthritis. I looked up to see breasts too large for their frame, and lips curled into a babyfied pout. But it was the nose that really got my attention - it was no more than half an inch wide - too, too slim for nature!
It was plastic!

When "Mummy, daddy" becomes too much!

I was at a festival yesterday. It was busy and hot. I leaned against a wall to shut my eyes for a moment, and a child screeched through the din, "Mummy, daddy, mummy, daddy..." Again and again. "Mummy, daddy!"
"For God's sake, take that child home!" I called out.
A friend looked at me in horror. "How could you!" She said.
"The child is screaming, and I have a hangover."
Now, before you hang me, I should say that my kids have bellowed in public, but it is a question of how long you let them go on. Two or three hollers for your attention are fine, but not so that it persists and all around are begging for you to look into your little offspring's eyes and say, "What dear?"

A step into the bush and the good life

Kaingu Lodge amazing. Took a long walk this am with long stretches of nothing, a few herd of impala, puku and then – four bull elephants. We trailed them for a little while, keeping well back. On way back in Landrover, saw two more elephants – and one gave a mock charge.
The other guests are friendly, but very Guildford – afraid of expressing too much for fear of showing a personality that might offend, all the while showing disdain for emotions. I feel sorry for them. They are on such a great expedition traveling for 3 months through east and southern Africa. The are accompanied by someone I thought was an old friend, turns out he is their guide – a Norfolk lad who now lives in Lusaka. He shares a chalet with their son and acts as his companion – plays scrabble etc. with him. Lovely man but I felt sorry for him – however, they must be paying him well. But after taking the child out of boarding school you would think they would want to be companions to their son.
Right now I’m out on the deck, watching the river and hoping to see a crocodile. I swear I saw a snout yesterday, but it sank quickly into the water before I could get a good look.
Esnath, one of the maids, came along with drinking water. She stopped for a chat telling me she is a widow caring for a child of six and four orphans. They’re all at home in Mongu as there are no schools or clinics in Kaingu. I tell her she is a brave lady and she tells me the date of her husband’s death – 19 April 1999. Then she tells me that Anna – a guest last month – gave her clothes and money for the children’s school. “She was very nice,” Esnath said.
Suddenly I feel like a commodity. I had thought we were having a conversation – the spontaneous kind, but I now feel I am being pumped like a well and we both lose some dignity.

Global arrogance

At the hotel it is ‘Indian Food Night’, and the Zambian staff are dressed in Indian clothes. Beautiful African girls in saris – is this globalization? My entertainment while I eat this amazing Indian food in this beautiful African hotel is listening to the conversation at the next table. Three young experts from the Middle East and the United States talk about how much they know – it’s amazing.
The reason we got the project, which I worked on, was because I built up a perfect relationship with the client.
Directors don’t have any sense of anything
I was the defacto deputy even though I never wanted that position
Ah, the wisdom of youth - I want to do a Woody Allen and interrupt with some wisdom of my own: Learn what you don’t know.
I feel a little odd sitting in a 5 star hotel with a great meal, a glass of wine and writing in a child’s exercise book, but I ran out of spiral notebooks and this is all I could find at Shoprite.
Doyle arrives tomorrow, and it will be holiday time – a safari, a trip up to my old hospital in the north and then a flight down to Livingstone and Victoria Falls. Doyle really didn’t want to come here – Africa’s never had appeal, he says, but I think he will like Zambia.

A VSO Evening

VSO volunteers may be older and more cosmopolitan, but they don’t really change – they are driven by idealism that spins between striving to help and respect the locals to telling bizarre stories of ‘those crazy natives’.
An Australian volunteer invited me to dinner with other VSOs tonight. Mel’s kitchen reminded me so much of my old house in Chilonga – cockroaches and bugs of ever colour. Mel knocked a cockroach into the sink and I looked at it horrified, wondering whether the water was hot enough to kill germs from the dishes and where the rest of these creatures lived.
But I used to live like this. At Chilonga we had cockroaches in the toaster – in the morning we would bang it once and watch them scatter before we popped in our bread to make toast. Heaven knows where else they had been – coffee percolator, pots, they definitely lived behind the fridge.
Anyway, Mel asked me to make a salad. I washed it at the tap but, given that we’re not supposed to drink the water, I didn’t eat it. I hope no one got sick the next day. I stuck to eating Mel’s pasta – it was cooked, but I hope I’m okay.
The conversation was rather old colonial. One of the volunteers has been here 3 years, one year working with a charity as an expert. She would consider herself sophisticated and enlightened. But tonight she told tales of the Lusaka fire brigade and how water drips out of their truck on the way to fire. I’m sure the Zambian firemen know about the leaks, they probably want them repaired. But this woman presented the story as a sign of local ineptitude and her presentation would cheer many a white South African.
A Ugandan doctor was at dinner. George is in his fifties and volunteered for VSO because, he said, he wanted a change. He’s working on HIV prevention. When he traveled to Zambia, he redeemed his air ticket for cash and traveled from Uganda to Zambia by bus. He is now using the rest of that cash to bring his family on holiday to Zambia – again by bus. His wife is visiting at the moment. I asked about the bus trip. I’ve traveled London to Athens by bus, but Uganda to Zambia! George laughed and said it is a great trip – Kampala to Nairobi – stay overnight – and then you reach the Tanzanian border at sunrise, with Mount Kilimanjaro as a backdrop – and you meet so many people, he said. I had to confess – it does have its appeal.
Someone asked why I had left midwifery. I hate the question – it requires telling too much about myself. But I gave my spiel – I grew up desperate to travel – a speaker to a school group talked about her experiences as a midwife in Papua New Guinea with VSO – and I thought it had the perfect blend of travel, adventure and benevolence. I was never great at nursing, or midwifery, but I worked hard – loved what I did. But after two years in Zambia - I don’t mean to sound dramatic - but I never wanted anyone’s life in my hands again.
The room fell silent, and I felt the need to explain more – five stillbirths in a weekend! You know it’s not your fault. You know that it’s the rainy season, which brings on malaria, which brings on premature labour. But you still blame yourself.
No one said a word, but George nodded his head. “I understand,” he said. “I have experience this which is why I now work in medical administration.” He talked about not being able to save premature newborns.
I wanted to cry out – “So it wasn’t just me.” I had thought I was weak, stupid, incapable of coping in a tough world and a failure. 25 years ago I left Chilonga feeling as though I hadn’t made the grade. Now this Ugandan doctor who has lived through countless civil wars says the responsibility you feel when someone dies – no matter how irrational – is real.
I wanted to hug him – but tears pricked my eyes.

A humbling visit

The UN office is cool and clean. I’m here to talk about maternal fistula – a dreadful consequence of childbirth going wrong. Sometimes the infant is too big to pass through the birth canal and, if there is no emergency C. section or forceps delivery, the mother can die in labour. Or, if she’s lucky, be left with dribbling from her bladder and bowel. I saw this problem when I worked at Chilonga and well remember the consequences. The UNFPA is now putting money into training doctors to treat the problem and increasing awareness among women that treatment is available - that they no longer have to live with incontinence. The UN executives I meet are kindly and knowledgable but somehow appear distant from the problem.
And, as I sit in the cool clean air of the UN office, I can't help but think of Garden township with its dried dusty earth, no rain for six months, a few plants struggle through but when you have to carry water from a communal tap that is often shut off during daytime hours, gardening is hard.
A few market stalls, run by those with entrepreneurial spirit sell small packs of mealy meal, charcoal, tomatoes, oils, greens – and even popcorn from a machine plugged into a small generator.
When I return to the hotel I have a beer, still thinking about the VK project and Elsie and Peter. I want to cry for them but how can I feel sorry for people who don’t feel sorry for themselves – it’s irrational. Then there is Inonge with her elfin face that was almost angelic, and her movement that disturbed little but was decisive. She came close to crying while telling her story, and my own throat swelled with tears. But I knew I couldn’t cry. If she could keep back tears, then I had no right to them.
But I care, I can’t help it. While Elsie talked of the debts and the work they do, I should have been planning my story. Instead, I was thinking about what I could do to help VK. I offered to sell the greetings cards they make. I’d take home at least a hundred – but who to sell them to, how to transfer the money back – maybe via VSO- not very journalistic, I know.

Garden Township and the amazing volunteers

Garden Township sits in Northeast Lusaka, self-built brick homes on government land, a few communal water taps, drainage ditches fed by nearby sewage works. I wanted a story on Zambians helping Zambians, and VSO showed me that today. Elsie is a young nurse with three children, a single parent, but she runs a clinic in Garden township. She started the clinic after her sister was diagnosed with AIDS and she realized that caring for her at home was far better than sending her to an overstretched hospital. Others were interested in caring for their relatives, so Elsie taught them basic nursing care. She started up the clinic and now trains volunteers to care for their neighbours.
Elsie takes no salary but gets support from her ex-husband. Her assistant Peter has a family with grown up children and worked with a German charity for 25 years. But when his son was diagnosed with AIDS he knew he had to do more. Peter coordinates who needs help with finding a good source of assistance. Like Elsie, he takes no salary, and is supported by his wife, who works in a lab.
What really impressed me about Elsie and Peter are their devotion – volunteers both of them and not a word about God. They are helping because they feel they must – they have to – they are called! So many reasons that sound too clichéd to describe the notion of not earning an income because you are helping your fellow man.
The west is full of images of poor Africans with their hands out. But Elsie and Peter are too busy helping people to have their hands out. Yes, they would like an income, but they would probably use it to buy a fridge to store medicines, or for tools to help the youth they’ve trained in carpentry. But their hands aren’t out, they are much too busy.
I’m realizing that the HIV story is not about sex and condoms – it’s about the human spirt’s ability to rise to meet a massive challenge. There are big international conferences that branch into continental, national, regional discussions where a huge amount of money is spent in hosting delegates who wring their hands in as they use terminology such as consortiums and stakeholders. But at the end of the day it is the work of people like Elsie and Peter that really affects people’s lives. The only time Peter grew angry was when he talked of big charities and their 4X4 vehicles.
Peter and Elsie were both originally motivated by HIV in their families, but their work hasn’t stopped there.
They now want to help the teenage orphans of AIDS. They don’t want to live in orphanages but, like teenagers around the world, without supervision they are at risk of falling into destructive habits. Elsie and Peter have a young woman staying at the centre. Inonge was 14 when her parents died of AIDS. She was sent to stay with an aunt, but her uncle raped her. When she told the aunt, she didn’t believe Inonge and sent the girl to other relatives. They treated her like a slave and, knowing food was an issue, Inonge ate as little as possible. Finally she ran away and was taken in by Elsie. She has been trained in tailoring and now makes clothes. She has earned enough to buy herself an electric sewing machine. The clothes she makes have beautifully cut swirls and are firmly African.
Peter takes me out for a tour of Garden township. We stop and visit Lomance, a widow with seven children and five orphans under her guardianship. Mrs Phiri sells what she grows in her dusty garden, takes in sewing and does whatever she can to feed the children in her care. But everyday Lomance visits five AIDS sufferers and feeds and bathes them.
“I nursed my husband when he died of TB and wanted to learn to give that care to others,” she said.
Next we visit Justina, a widow with two children. She lives in a one room home which she shares with her mother and eight orphans that were left with her after relatives died of AIDS. Justina takes in laundry from middle class Zambians, and she sells whatever she can grow from her garden. But like Lomance, Justina steps away from her difficult life and volunteers to care for three neighbors suffering from AIDS. She bathes, feeds and ensures they take their medicines.
I feel overwhelmed at the generosity of these people and fight back tears. But I also have to leave. I have an appointment at the UNFPA office to talk about maternal mortality.
Elsie walks me out to find a taxi. A few young men with cars offer to drive me for a fee, but I tell Elsie I would like to take an official taxi. We wait in the dusty heat as blue minibuses screech past. I promise Elsie she will hear from me again, and I feel her sense that she would like support from the outside world.