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.

Russians in Lusaka

One week alone. No one here knows me as a mother or a wife – it’s oddly disengaging – like being cast adrift with no flag of identity.
I could be anyone with a history created by my imagination – my wanabee me! But I’m happy with the history I have – growing up poor in Glasgow, cast adrift by tumultuous parents, raised by a strict grandmother and being desperate to travel overseas.
And I did. Now I’m alone and vaguely at ease in a hotel in downtown Lusaka. I’m able to be friendly even though the waiter may think I’m flirting. I’ve traveled far – but I do know who I am.
I go to the hotel pool to sit in the sun and read some notes. A blond woman, heavily pregnant approachs me as I read home-grown guides to living with HIV.
“Excuse me!” She says in an accent stilted toward Russia. “Have you heard about our facial and massage service at the hotel?”
I try not to peer at her spots but doubt I would trust her to give me any cosmetic treatment. “I know there is a spa, but I don’t know any details.”
“We asked the hotel to put cards – blue cards – in the hotel rooms.” She holds her hands in a five inch by five inch square to indicate the size of the cards.
I shake my head. “No, I don’t remember seeing them.”
She casts her eyes to the dull gray concrete path, and I feel sorry for her – pregnant, overseas and touting for beauty business.
“How long have you been here?” I ask.
“One year!”
“Do you like Africa?”
She looks up. “Well, I miss my homeland.”
I want to know more – why, who, what had brought her here. But her eyes are sad.
“I knew a Russian woman in Lusaka once – a long time ago.”
The pregnant woman smiles. “What was her name?”
“Vera – Vera Maguswi. She was married to a Zambian doctor – but he had affairs, many of them and was one of the first to die of AIDS. She went home about 20 years ago.”
It is too long ago to be of interest to this young woman. The story of the beautiful Vera – the fairy book princess who married a dog of a man.

Lusaka market

City market west of Freedom Way is where the grassroots Zambian goes to shop. Roadside blankets spread with dried fish, fruit, green beg, corn and secondhand clothes. Behind the squatting women who sell these wares are decrepit mini vans that act as local buses. They stream through shoppers and stop, it seems at random spots. But commuters seem to know exactly where to get their bus, and they bustle with their wares through the narrow gaps between vehicles where young men hiss, whistle and whisper in my ear; “Take me to your country.”
This is the city market where narrow stalls tail off in long tight lanes. The stall I want is in the pink section. A newspaper ad seeks to help nurses and midwives wanting to work overseas. I want to talk to those behind the ad about the brain drain of nurses here.
I peer down the lane of stalls, tightly packed with shoppers, tradesmen and those with no jobs and nothing to do. A few people watch me as I head into the lane – I can’t see the end – the area where the yellow zone ends and the pink zone, where I am headed, begins. I look back out to the bus zone and can’t see the road beyond. A young man hisses sharply in my ear and I move fast, back out toward the buses, the roadside and the shop traders of Freedom Way. I thought I was brave enough to visit Yanos Foundation Homes in person, but suddenly their mobile phone number sounds apt – it’s not what Michael Palin would have done, but he had a camera crew.
I chicken out, but this market doesn’t seem like the type of place that would house a reputable agency truly taking young Zambian nurses overseas. I call their mobile number and a man answers. I say I have a young friend interested in their service. He said they organize visas and jobs and charge 100,000 Kwacha for the forms, 25,000 Kwacha for regulations and they will post out a package within three weeks of receiving the money. I ask what is in the package? Why? I have a friend, she wants to go to UK, but she wants to know what she is paying for. The telephone line goes dead.

AIDS meeting

There are nine mormons at breakfast – all at the table in their black suits, white shirts, ties and badges – at first I thought they were a conference of waiters – I almost asked one for coffee!
But what are they doing here? Going door to door at the home so of the Zambian upper and middle classes will be hard with all the high walls and fences. The only people to greet them with be gardeners or maids. And the poorer folks whose homes are more accessible, surely the Mormon Church won’t expect tithes – that would be 10 percent of their income! Out of the mouths of the poor!
But I watch the young men in their black suits and, even in the air-conditioned restaurant, they look sweltered. The two oldest men – Elders, I guess – have lost their jackets and look cool in short shirt sleeves. Maybe they have served their time, brought in some disciples and no longer have to suffer the heat.
I watch as an elder’s wife goes back for her third serving at the breakfast buffet – all that converting must be hungry work.
I take a taxi to the VSO office, I’d made email contact with the office before leaving home, and I’ve brought chocolates as a gift. The office is in a posher building than before, but it’s still a network of small, badly painted rooms cooled with desktop fans. But there are changes. When I was with VSO we were all young white kids with idealism but no experience. Well, today the volunteers come from Uganda, Kenya, India, Phillipines, Holland, Canada and Australia – along with a few Brits, this makes a veritable UN.
I am talking with two Indian VSO’s when a young woman from the Phillipines comes in. She complains of diarrhea and blames the drinking water. But the young Indian men tell her it isn’t the water – just Zambia belly.
The VSO office is run by Zambians who seem tuned to the country’s needs. Unlike my time when the field director was an expat wife, a Scottish teacher, who had never lived in the bush or worked in the field. A lovely guy arrived as her assistant. Paul Hitchen had spent three years in Sri Lanka as an agricuttural volunteer, but he learned about Zambia at much the same pace as we did.
Like other developing countries, Zambia has grown into a land where charities – Non Governmental Organizations – are a major employer perhaps employing more people than tourism. The charities all seem to own at least one 4x4 vehicle and a driver. I imagine that getting a foot in NGO employment door can be a great career path.
But it is also an amazing quagmire of bureaucracy that could send Kafka carazy with its alphabet soup of acronyms. A Canadian agriculturalist I meet says he could create whole sentences out of acronyms, and colleagues would know exactly what he was talking about – I wish I’d written some down.
The VSO director has arranged for me to visit some HIV projects, and I go out with an Australian volunteer who facilitates action for a number of self-help groups.
Sitting in a room full of people who are HIV positive challenges your knowledge of the disease.
It’s so easy to mock those who fear the AIDS virus – the she school board in Midwest America who sent home a child who contracted the disease through a blood transfusion, the relative who refuses to shake an AIDS sufferer’s hand. But when you yourself sit in a room, you find yourself challenged. These people harbour a deadly disease that kills more than 3 million people worldwide each year. Its minute cells seep via blood, semen, tears, breast milk and saliva to invade the next victim – could that be me? It’s totally irrational thinking, I know. I am, in reality, sitting in a room with people who have a treatable but incurable disease while they talk about petitioning the government for more help. There is no way I am in danger. But in our instinct for survival – logic isn’t always applied.
The Zambian government has begun providing free Anti-Retroviral treatment to all those testing positive for HIV. This group are all urban, professional and seeking more in support – perhaps even recognition.
The meeting breaks up and I talk to Musondah. She is a young mother who found she had the disease after her husband became sick. When he found out he was positive, she got depressed. “I told my husband ‘You got this disease, you brought it here.” But I myself was ignorant. I was very fat and thought maybe only those who are thin have the disease.”
But when her own test came back positive, Musondah knew she had much to learn. She said she was advised to eat well but wasn’t put on Anti-Retroviral treatment because her CD4 count was high.
I wonder what a CD4 count is as Musondah tells me that her son tested negative – and that was her biggest boost.
I ask about sex with her husband, and she says they know they must always use condoms or they risk reinfecting each other with differing strains of HIV.
Despite a better diet, she said she became weak and needed to begin drug therapy. Musondah is plump and has beautiful shiny skin. No one need ever know she is HIV positive. Because of the therapy, her husband is now back at work and supporting his family. “AIDS is like diabetes or TB,” she says. “You can’t cure it, but you can treat it.”
Clementine is single and older, 43. She’s a bright spark in the group – the chair who said she wants free medical care for those who are HIV positive. She was infected by an old boyfriend but only discovered she had the virus after repeated bouts of TB. “I’d been aware that a number of boyfriends had died, but love is blind – at times you forget to use condoms. Plus, you think you are in a monogamous relationship.”
Her diagnosis came before free treatment, and the cost of Anti-Retrovirals was 5million kwacha a month – more than $100 – her salary couldn’t sustain that cost. She sold a huge amount from her house until there was nothing else to sell. Her doctor told her she couldn’t stop therapy but, “I couldn’t afford it anymore.”
When the government announced free ARV therapy, she said she called up to God, “Free at last!”
But stopping the earlier therapy means she is now resistant to some of the medicines and must take a more complex, and costly, cocktail of drugs.
I ask her about dating. “I date – I go out for dinner, we drink – I want to be happy and want men to get to know me before I tell them – I want for him to say what he thinks about us before I tell him my status.” She frowns. “I’ve had two – but now they’re gone.”
I touch her arm, and she reaches out with a hug.
Guess what – I hugged back.

Alone in Lusaka

M. left for a conference in South Africa, and I moved to hotel. She said I could stay, her sister was moving in to take care of the girls. But I’m ready to step out on my own. Although now I’m in the hotel I feel like I’ve left Zambian life and entered the world of the expat where Zambians become receptionists and waiters rather than friends and acquaintances.
I sit in the lobby listening to groups of NGOs discuss the country’s problems while the waiter brings them coffee. I watch one group – an EU male, two Asian women and two Zambian women. The four women listen while the man talks. “I don’t think they’ve analysed….” “I talked with the minister…” The Asian women eventually enter the conversation, but the Zambian women stay silent. This feels like the old country, not the Zambia I visited at the weekend. But we are less than five miles from where M.’s friends discussed Darfur, Muslim extremism and the crime rates of South Africa, and I listened while they debated the solution to Zambia’s problems and came up with solutions such as no 4x4, stabilise business tax so that companies aren’t afraid of investment, make it easier to have contract staff rather than casual labour, and paying farmers early and giving them the same rate paid for imported maize so they can invest in the next year. It all made so much sense, and it was Zambian – all home grown.
Up in the hotel room there are British and American television programmes, but I watch the Zambian channel. There are great some great African soaps – A young Malawian man regrets bringing his sister to the city when she goes astray – a Nigerian comedy about four young bachelors living together – and a Burkino Faso film that focuses on religious parents who realize they must talk to their teens about HIV.
The Zambian news has a single camera and poor echoing sound, but I love watching its rawness. There is no teleprompter, and the anchor has to read and look at the viewer.
Down at the restaurant, I have my first Mosi beer since ’82 – tastes great, but is clear, no sediment and the bottle has a label. When I was here before, Mosi was the only beer available and it didn’t need a label. We bought it by the crateload – usually a crate a week. And then there were the weekends at our bush parties. Professional Zambians and whites all had an account at the IRDP clubhouse – but there was only one drink to buy – Mosi – it was warm, but we didn’t care.
Mosi left us with a lot of hangovers and occasionally worse – a bad batch of beer that came from the bottom of a dirty barrel and you’d feel the gastric effects for several days.
The Pamodzi Hotel is such a different world from M.’s house, and I suddenly feel lonely. There is no one to talk other than the waiters and I worry that they think I’m flirting with them – I’m not – I’m just social.
I could talk to the other whites but, as I listen to them drone on about their trips – “We had great showers, not just a barrel but a good flow of water.” “The animal just wanted water.”
Who wants to listen to this? They almost sound like the happy Valley Crew.

Zambia home life

Back at the house, M.’s kids watch TV from am until bed – Disney channel, Nickalodean. It’s all American teen comedies and cartoons – far more than I had expected and I wonder how M.’s kids view the world.
The last time I was in Zambia, the only TV I saw was at the Yugoslav camp. They had a TV showing videos so they could watch reruns of Yugoslavian variety shows. Jasko and his friends would talk with pride about the singers who came from their region. Tito was dead, but belief in the council of that ran the country was strong. Patriotism swelled, especially around the Yugoslav basketball team. This was only ten years before Yugoslav factions were at war raping each other’s mothers and sisters.
Occasionally, a film reel would arrive at Mpika and huge gatherings would throng at the British agricultural compound. Chairs, chitenges and cushions were laid out while electrical extension cords were lined between a wall plug and the outdoor sheet that acted as a screen.
The first film was Halloween – the African kids watched a plastic faced creature scare white teens in the dead of night. Their laughter resounded alongside screams of fear.
The second film was The Posiedon Adventure – which created confusion in a landlocked country where few people have seen a ship never mind an ocean. But everyone held their breath when Shelley Winter dived between walls, and cheered when a connection was made through the upturned hull.
But this new generation of Zambian kids is so much more sophisticated. We arrived home while the girls were watching The Incredibles. ‘Have you seen it before?’ I asked.
‘Many times,’ said Luse.
This is the modern Zambia.
No one walks up to a house and knocks on the door – everyone, at least in middle and upper class neighbourhoods, live behind high walls. Visits are announced with a heavy toot on a car horn, and the gardener, guard or maid hurries to unlock the gate or check with the home owner that a visitor may enter.
Mornings are a cocophany of honking horns as people pick colleagues up for work. You lie in bed wondering is that a visitor or next door’s driver picking him up for work.
Zambian women seem to be doing well – but maybe that’s just my impression – which has been coloured by M. In her office, women work at desks while the men sit waiting to drive them to the next appointment or pick at the weeds in the garden and plant in a way that will please the women of the office.
But in her work, M. sees the other side – the men as powerful cheats, forcing female staff to oral sex, giving wives HIV, raping female children in a futile attempt to rid themselves of AIDS.
“Zambian men as so bad,” M. says.
Maybe she is right.

Zambian Buddhism

The fast chant vibrates the air, while all eyes are on the gilded temple.
Vertical blinds flop in the mild breeze, and the yellow walls feel clean and clinical. As the metal foldaway chair digs deep into my bottom I am reminded of long-winded PTA meetings at my children’s school.
This is so different from the last time I was in Zambian Church. Then a spontaneous a’cappella choir filled the church. The high notes rose through the air while the lower voices stayed earthbound. There were no musical instruments, just uninhibited voices escaping through the thatch roof.
But now the voices beat out a toneless chant, while on stage the director leads the chant with a large drum.
M. is now Buddhist. She believes it gives her energy and self-help – she makes no prayers to an unknown god and instead gains the wisdom to solve or accept her own problems. Compared to Christianity, which relies on prayer to another being, she believes Buddhism make her more self reliant.
M. says Buddhism has helped her cope with work and family, and that the chanting provides relaxation while the philosophy helps ease the stress of her high-powered job.
All around me middle class Zambians are escaping the stresses of their own lives.
The director halts the drumming suddenly and turns to his congregation. A few women pull out pens and notebooks. As the director begins his sermon, I watch as M. scribbles down his wisdom:
Accept suffering in your heart.
Charity is acting with courage – attain enlightenment from within not from without – we can summon faith
A young boy slips out to play in the sun. Other children, catching his flight, look appealingly to their parents and then follow.
Ask what I can do to make sure each child is raised in happiness.
The director is a genteel Bemba man who studied at Birmingham University and found Buddhism in Glasgow in 1976. He brought its philosophy to Zambia the very next year and says the congregation is somewhere in the hundreds, although he refuses to be specific.
Praise is the Buddha that is yourself – suffer what there is to suffer – enjoy what there is to enjoy.
The women scribble his phrases like they are dictates on wisdom itself. But the midday heat is growing oppressive. A young man brings out two electric fans and aims one to the male side of the room, and points the other at the women. The breeze makes the heavy lady in front draw in a deep breath.
The director pulls forward a large screen television and announces a film. The children hurry inside, and we watch a black and white video on Shintoism in Japan
I long for some movement, some singing and dancing – the jovial abandon of the churches I remember. If this is development, then I want to go back to the past.
A Japanese woman in a chitenge dress with ‘Africa’ printed across her tiny busom stands up to give a sermon. She speaks English, but I understand not a word and wonder how the Zambians around me are coping.
Finally there is a song, and the director is joined by four other men, but the musical lilts are carefully measured, as though too much would be a bad thing and self-control the one true aim.
On the way back to M.’s house the road is blocked by police. M. thinks President Levy Mwanawasa might be ready to pass. We have to detour, but M worries that she doesn’t know which way to go. We take a right toward Kalingalinga, a poor township on outskirts of Lusaka. Along the roadside huge signs announce churches with labels as diverse as Jesus Christ Baptist, Divine, Jehovah – even Messianic which appeals to Christians and Jews who love Israel. There is so much room for belief here and I have to wonder why??
The road through Kalingalinga is lined by market stalls selling everything from potatoes to charcoal. Children in tattered clothes hold out their goods as we drive past. This is the Africa I knew, the Africa I haven’t seen at M.’s house.
We stop at Manda Hill for groceries and enter Shoprite, a South African supermarket. It sells everything, even fruit wrapped in cling film – none of the torn off sheets of newspaper that shopkeepers used to use. At the back of the store, in a cold room behind the refrigerated meat counter, young people hack at meat for packaging. A line of people stand at the door hoping for special cuts. M. wants a bone for the dog – but everyone is turned away.
The toy aisle is tightly packed with bright playthings – four shelves are given over to dolls and all of them are white or pink. In this African nation, not a black or brown or doll is for sale. No wonder M.’s daughter loved her black Barbie-lookalike.
I try to pay for M.’s groceries, but the shop assistant thinks I’m a fool when I a 5,000 kwacha note for a 23,000 bill. I thought it was 50,000 – just so many zeros. I feel like an idiot, but M. laughs.

A surprise visit

M. meets me at the Intercontinental, and says an aunt, would like to meet us. I imagine we’ll have coffee in the hotel, and we sit in the foyer watching cars approach the curved entrance. Finally, a white Mercedes pulls up with two passengers.
“That’s her,” M. says and hurries out.
I follow, surprised when she climbs into the back seat. There is nothing else to do but climb in after her. After quick introductions I shake hands with her Aunt Loveness, Uncle Lovelace, and her cousin whose name I missed.
As the car drives off, I listen to them talk in a mixture of English and Tonga about family and one of Matrine’s relatives, who heads a political opposition party. Uncle Lovelace drives to Kabulonga, a smart part of town and I imagine we’re going to the aunt’s house for tea – maybe she doesn’t like hotel tea.
We turn into an avenue of large walls, and I know that the houses must be large and plush to be so well hidden. But the walls here aren’t topped in broken glass like in M.’s neighbourhood. Here, the walls have lush bougainvillea, and security comes from guards who stand outside.
We pull up outside one of the gates.
“Maybe we won’t get in,” says Uncle Lovelace.
The aunt lets out a deep “tsssh!” and gives him a wary look.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
Uncle Lovelace laughs. “You have not been briefed!”
“We are going to see the next President,” Aunt Loveness says.
“Kaunda lives there!” Uncle Lovelace points next door, and I realize this must be the home of the first Zambian president. “Chiluba!” he says, referring to the second Zambian president, “lives up there.” I look up the road seeing only high walls and guards while a security man takes our names.
“Will they let me in?” I ask.
Aunt Loveness turns from the front seat. “Of course, you are family,”
When the gate opens we drive slowly down a paved driveway between lush landscape that suggests water enough for floral gardening. A swimming pool lies to the rear, while white fake storks decorate the garden to the front.
I’m still holding a plastic bag that contain the roughly hewn pots I’d bought at Kabwata earlier. If I take them with me, they’ll be misconstrued as gifts and probably disdained in this grand house.
“Can I leave my pots?” I ask Uncle Lovelace.
He laughs with his nod. “I think it would be best.”
As we step from the car we are met by a tiny fluffy dog that is clearly not for protection.
HH is a handsome man, and his tiny wife looks exotic in a long red robe with a slight metallic sheen. My brown t-shirt and H & M skirt had been fine for Kabwata Cultural Market, but not for visiting a future president and his wife.
The furniture is gilt edged. We sit as HH’s daughters bring us soft drinks. Uncle Lovelace asks about work, and HH launches into a speech on how much money could be saved if members of parliament changed from having four-wheel drive vehicles to regular cars.
“They don’t need 4 by 4’s” he says. “They never go out into the country.” He says that savings in this change alone could provide sewage pipes for all the townships around Lusaka. As he talks about improving water supply to the townships, he uses words and phrases my husband would use and I realize he must be an engineer.
Aunt Loveness asks about the family farm.
Again HH sits upright, keen to talk about plans to ship, what is expected to be a record harvest, to the government depots for sale and distribution.
I sit back feeling privileged to be hear informed debate about this country and happy to hear positive talk about Zambia – and by Zambians.