Irish Sporting Colonialism and Some of the Perils of Charity

Initially the sight of a Zambian guy walking down the road in an Irish club gaa jersey used to send me into an absolute tizzy of excitement and deliria.  As it happened more frequently I managed to deal to deal with the situation with a bit more composure and decorum.  Although not enough to stop me approaching the guy to announce the relevance of his sporting regalia to my life.  Utterly bemused, they listen to me spit my words out, gasping for breath with the excitement of it all.  They look down at the jersey that they had plucked from their pile of clothes that morning, unknowing that it would cause such a reaction from this strange white boy.  They treat the whole situation with a few smiles and shakes of their head, as they deal with most things in life and accept my request for a photo.  I walk away like a child clutching the autograph of their favourite sportsperson.

The less spurious and humourous side to this is story and impact of how these guys came to wear this stuff.  90% of Zambians wear western clothing.  All of it comes as charitable donations from rich countries in Europe and North America.  I myself have donated shitloads of my old clothes like this, thinking of the benefit that it was bringing.  I didn’t realise that I was contributing to the destruction of the textile industries of these countries.  They have all collapsed over the past few decades, unable to survive the arrival of these donations which are sold cheaply in every town in Zambia (I imagine it’s the same situation in most African countries).  

One place it doesn’t happen is South Africa. They don’t accept this wonderful charity.  They see it as a threat to their own industry.  This protectionism is highly discouraged as it is seen as distorting ‘free trade’ (more on the fallacy of that in later posts).  I would stress though the difference between donations to countries recovering from humanitarian crises, who are in desperate need of any provisions they can avail of.

The other countries, like Zambia, don’t need free clothes sent to them. They need jobs.  They need their own industries. 

Cultural Learnings

*this was actually written in March, I just never got around to posting it.... 

I’m 7 weeks into my year in Zambia and thus far it has been a wholly pleasant experience, however, I’m fully expecting a dip to come where I’m thinking “fuck am I doing here”. In our pre-departure training they told us there’s usually a three month period of elation, followed by a two month low, once the initial buzz has worn off.  I’m pretty much expecting to develop bi-polarity in my time here.  Organising trips away will be remedy/preventative measure.  Nothing quite like a bit of escapism to avoid having to deal with life’s issues !

The following are a few of the peculiarities of Zambia life that I’ve picked up on without necessarily having to scratch beneath the surface, and a few other early observations about life here so far:

Food

The staple food here is a thing called Nshima.  It’s a mixture of pulped maize and water and kinda tastes like really stodgy porridge.  It’s pretty ordinary and comes with EVERY meal.  On rare occasions (mainly in the one or two ‘upmarket’ joints) you can be very lucky and get rice or potatoes but basically I eat this crap 5-6 days a week.

Every restaurant has pretty much the same offering (to varying standards) as accompaniments (or relishes as they are strangely called here) to Nshima: fried bream, t-bone steak (in a way that makes me think its cooked in a volcano – medium rare is not comprehendible), beef stew, chicken, liver and offals.  These come with one helping of vegetable, usually rape but sometimes pumpkin/sweet potato leaves or a yellow aubergine thing that’s mank.

Typical Meal

I have my lunch in a restaurant every day. What’s really strange is this country produces some of the most fantastic vegetables I’ve ever eaten but no one are EVER on offer in a restaurant.  For the first time in my life I now officially like tomatoes.  The onions ooze juice when you cut them.  The avocado trees in our garden (I nearly wept when I saw them) produce the finest I’ve ever eaten.

The mangoes: Jaaaaaysus! Immense. My devouring of the things is not dissimilar to the way the foxes in The Fantastic Mr Fox eat their food.  I then sit there with bits of mango smeared all over my face like a 2 year old child after nailing an ice-cream.

There are pineapples too which are phenomenally good.  All these fruit and vegetables grown on small holder farms and peoples gardens and taste like the purest things nature has created.

Eating Habits

Before your food arrives you wash your hands at one of the water stations available (basically a big tankard of water with a tap at the bottom and a basin with soap).  Reason being, there ain’t no cutlery.  Eating is done with your paws.

You grab a handful nshima, ball it up and roll it with your right hand, then get some meat to accompany it and into your gob it goes.  As you can imagine I’m fucking appalling at this and the shit goes everywhere.  Apart from Palawan in the Philippines, I’d never eaten with my hands before.  A work in progress let us say.

Hand Holding

When greeting someone its practice to shake hands with them.  It’s a three staged thing: hand grab; thumb grab; hand again – gangsta style.  African influence in the US extends much further than I’d imagined.  What happens then is the delayed release – “Eh why are you still holding my hand man?”. You could be standing there for 20 seconds with some fella you just met still with a grab of your hand.  At first it was fairly fuckin awkward, slowly I’m getting used to it.  Kinda like holding your breath under the water, I try to go longer each time before eventually retrieving my hand from the embrace.

It’s pretty common to see guys holding hands in public.  Like many African countries being gay is illegal in Zambia so men holding hands is perfectly normal because homosexuality is only for demonised and sick people and therefore doesn’t exist, obviously !

Getting used to kissing my male friends on the cheek took a bit of getting used to with living in Argentina but became perfectly normal after a few weeks so this should become more natural after a while.

Listening Noises

Varying from person to person, a whole range of noises can be expected to be hummed from your listener in a conversation.  Kinda like what you’d hear from the congregation of a Baptist Church in some American movie.  You could be talking about something as banal as how often it rains in October and the fucker you’re talking with sounds as though he’s about to self-combust or even take-off like a shuttle being launched into space !

Saying Sorry

People here say sorry for things they’ve got absolutely zero responsibility for.  It really confused the shite out of me the first few times but again getting used to it slowly.  You could drop your cup of tea on yourself and someone sitting on the other side of the room will say sorry – wha?!

Country and Western Music

Yup, they love the shit! And I’m not talking about Johnny Cash now or some cool bluegrass stuff but some of the most god awful tripe you could find on Country Music TV. Kind ironic because the very artists they listen to, you could imagine in full on Klan regalia!  Another love of their’s is reggae, on the bus the other day I heard a reggae/country band, basically some girl whining on about how here sweetheart left here, on top of a the chink chink of reggae guitar. Innovation wha !

Class Orientated Society

Probably a legacy of colonial times and probably to do with the mantra of “the bullied bully” but Zambia appears to be quite a class-based society, most especially noticeable in Lusaka. It’s very common for the middle-classes to have gardeners and maids in their houses and generally treat those unskilled people very very differently to their ‘peers’.

The Coloniser and the Slave

In our pre-departure training they’d talked about the possibility of us hiring local people to act as night guards, cleaners, gardeners etc.  I felt instantly repulsed by the idea of me being a white guy living in Africa having some Zambian person as my ‘staff’.  To me the next step on from this would be me spending my spare time on the veranda of the Hunting Club sipping pimms every weekend.

What I saw as the retrenching of colonial norms was something I felt pretty uncomfortable about.  I would be providing a local person with a job they said. “Na”. “A night guard perhaps?” “It’s not South Africa I’m going to. Na” “A gardener maybe?” “Sure we can do that ourselves. Na”. “A cleaner?” “No chance” “What about washing your clothes?” “You kidding me, sure I can do that myself, I’ve done it for years. Nope.” “You’re going to wash them all yourself?” “Course I am. Sure I’ll just them in the washing machiiii……..ooooh, there’s no washing machine is there? Sooo how do I …….handing washing?? Faaaak that. A cleaner it is then!”

So I get my clothes washed every week or so, that is all except for my jocks.  Having someone wash your underwear is completely unacceptable in Zambia.  So that I do myself.

Public Displays of Breastage

What IS culturally acceptable in Zambia is breast feeding in public. As it should rightly be.  I don’t understand people who get squeamish about it, it’s the most natural thing for a mother and child to do.  That being said, the actual act of covering up after feeding time is something very casually practised in Zambia.  You could be trying to negotiate the price of fruit and yer would have her udders hanging out (!!), the kid would probably be asleep AND strapped to her back, far away from any possible feeding!

Gender Matters

In seriousness though the main reason these situations occur is that women do most of the work here.  They are Trojans.  For example, at any market the majority of the women will have a child strapped to her back (they make a sling from a chitenge – similar to a sarong) for the full day of work and often will have also have another one in the oven.  They can be ridiculously young too, probably back to work a few weeks after the birth too I’m guessing.

And it’s not like they do just ‘women’s’ work, women do most of the farming too.  Very common to see a group of women tilling a field, again with baby on back.  Where men do seem to play a major role is in cushy well-paid government jobs.  Among unskilled men there’s a serious alcohol problem.  Absolute drunks they are. And they like to kick off early.  I usually rock up to the market at about 11-12 at weekends and a load of them would be plastered by that stage.  It is likely that their wives are the ones selling fruit+veg at the markets and the lads just pissing away the funds.  Women in Zambia most certainly got it tough.

Water Issues

In rural areas women may have to walk an hour to get fresh water.  In my area we have water piped to the house.  In order to drink, it needs to be boiled, cooled and then put through a filter.  You could be in for a bad dose of the gallops otherwise!

Seriously though, diarrhoea is a major health issue here and there are plenty of other water borne diseases on offer from drinking contaminated water or simply not washing hands properly.  Guy I know in the Irish Embassy got sent home recently after contracting typhoid.  Awful dose of a thing.  Spent three weeks recovering.

We have running water most days, well, until about 6pm that is.  Then it often stops. Water pressure apparently. So teeth brushing and dish washing become a problem.  Showering is done using a bucket of water and an empty butter container which I use to scoop the water over myself.  I have a shower but when the pressure goes (3 weeks with no water was the worst it got, have to fill from the neighbours well).  All cold water obviously.  On the rare occasions the hot water works and the shower has enough pressure, well those are to be relished.  The simple pleasures…

Speech

A few peculiarities here too.  The 24 hour clock is strictly enforced.  Even verbally.  Six o clock is ‘18 hours’ or in the morning ‘Zero Six’.  Takes a bit of getting used to.

‘R’ and ‘l’ are swapped.  They don’t fly their lice here but a prate of lice is a nice change from nshima.  Really confused me when a guy started referring to the Tanzanian city of Dar Es Salaam as Dal Es Saraam.

When I heard Mulenga (the girl I share an office with) pronounce 60 I thought she’d some real bad speech impediment but then I realised everyone else says ‘sistecky’ as well.  Still baffled by that one, it’s kind of endearing though.

Time

Time. Jaysus. Even after what I’d heard before I certainly wasn’t prepared for Africa Time.  Someone here explained to me that ‘time is made in Europe and spent in Africa’.  As far as I can make out there’s only three times in Zambia: Sunrise, Sunset and Going Home Time. Seconds, minutes and hours are all merely means of describing what happens between dawn and dusk.  Time here is elastic; you can stretch it and squeeze it to your heart’s content.  Absolutely nobody is in a rush.  That phrase about having no concept of time, I’m certain was referring to Africa.  They really don’t actually think about it.  For example if I ask someone how long it would take to get from A to B, they wouldn’t have a notion.  Then they’d think about it say ‘well if you leave at 06 you’ll get there about 14 hours’. ‘So 8 hours yeah?’, they think about it and go ‘eh ya’.

Also, speeding things up can be taken as being quite rude here.  If you meet someone they’ll ask you about 14 questions about yourself, your family, how you slept, whether you’ve eaten etc before the subject of the day can be discussed.  It’s how it’s done here.  I wasn’t long getting used to it, it certainly makes for more endearing encounters but if you were in a rush, well, you just can’t be in a rush in Africa !

The Dominic Effect

There’s a few other foreigners living in Kasama, some oldies who’ve been here for years, some Chinese guys who (depressingly) run a few of the new productive shops here but who wouldn’t say hello to you if you were the last person living on the earth, a few Indian guys who work as engineers contracted to the electricity companies and the like and the Powell family who came here in the late 60’s teaching and are still here having raised their family here and now run the very nice Thorntree guesthouse and still teach.

I’m one of three Irish people living in Kasama. The other two being Brother Dominic, a 70 year old Christian Brother from Dublin and Sister Maura a nun from Limerick with the Celesian Order who I’d say (from the look of her) is about 147 years of age and a very pleasant person.

The first development workers in Africa were mainly missionaries. In Zambia many of these were Irish and there are still about 200 of them here. Ireland and Zambia have a very long and strong connection of which I really wasn’t aware of before I’d decided to come here. There are 5 nationalities in the world that don’t need entry visas to Zambia and Irish is one of them. I’ve met quite a few well educated Zambians who’ve told me they were taught by Irish missionaries. In a country with a very very weak education system missionaries established some of the better schools in the country.

I’d heard of Brother Dominic before I’d arrived up here and I’d first started seeing him cycling by my office every day on his bike. Zambians cycle very slowly so it was slightly startling to see this 70 year old powering up the hill every day. Got to know him over the past few months and he’s pure quality, great company and fit as a fiddle. Great musician, reciter of poetry, raconteur, the works. He’s been in Zambia forty odd years and the last ten in Kasama.

I was in his house last week and he said he’d something I might want to watch. He came back into the sitting room with Season 4 of Love/Hate! (This is a pretty decent Irish series about a drug gang in Dublin). He said he loves ‘a bit of violence’ !

I’ve started him on the Wire now.

I only managed to get down to see his school last week for the first time. Built it himself (with his team of fella’s he trains in construction), and is still doing more building now. It’s a technical school that has two different subject areas – 1. Tailoring and Design that teaches adults who never went to school and 2. Computer skills for teenagers who are hoping to go to university.

He built the classrooms, procured all the machinery, set up the courses and put in place the teachers (most of whom graduated from the courses) but refuses to put any funding towards the running of the courses. He basically has coached them to develop a system of management that makes them financially self-sufficient. So students pay a very basic amount to do the courses.

The Computer Classroom

He tells them if they come near him for money he’ll close them down!

Before even constructing the school he built 6 houses.  The rental income from these pays for the maintenance and upkeep of the school buildings.

The Rental Houses

With the Tailoring and Design, they’ve a second room that houses what they call the Social Business, where they produce (mainly) school uniforms that they sell to schools around the town/region, (they’re currently making cushions and a shirt for me). They’re more expensive than some of the other tailors around but the quality is pretty decent so they’re in high demand.  Of the sales 20% goes to the school, 40% they spend on materials and another 40% they pocket themselves. There's also quite a few deaf women in the tailoring section.

I spoke to quite a few of the students in the training part, mainly women in their 30’s, and they all said that when the course was finished they were going to open their own little stall where they’d make clothes/curtains/whatever.

The Classrooms

Very inspiring stuff really. He gets some help from St Declan’s CBS in Dublin in terms of old computers and the like and he gathered up loads of (pretty retro funky looking) Singer sewing machines from Ireland too. He's hoping to start an auto-mechanics course and possibly one training electricians, both industries are very weak in Zambia. 

                                    

Overall it’s amazing how resourceful (and hardworking) he’s been and the approach to providing these people with skills and the knowledge to make sustainable income for themselves is just fantastic. 

All done with little support from NGO’s or foreign governments.

Interesting Comparative Infographic on Zambia

If Ireland were your home instead of Zambia you would...

consume 33.3 times more oil

make 28.1 times more money

spend 39.3 times more money on health care

use 8.1 times more electricity

live 39.55 years longer

be 98.68% less likely to have HIV/AIDS

have 95.03% less chance of dying in infancy

have 76% more chance at being employed

have 64.69% less babies

experience 39.57% less of a class divide

http://www.ifitweremyhome.com/compare/ZM/IE

Working Ups and Downs

Three and a half months into my stint here in Kasama is probably a good time to provide a low-down on what I'm actually doing here work-wise.

The focus is around “capacity building” (development worker jargon for training) of 'physical planners' at district council level. A physical planner is essentially a combination of what are specialised fields in the Anglophone world including strategic/forward planning, urban design, assessment of planning applications, surveying and planning enforcement, all done very badly if at all. This is happening during a large national process of decentralisation, where the responsibilities are being devolved from Provincial Government level (where I am based) to district Council level. Over the past few governments the local Councils have been left to their own devices and are pretty much a shambles in most things they do. In relation to here, the standard of service delivery of government that you complain about in whatever country you are in is probably like trying to make a comparison between an aged gruyere and easy singles.

        Until a few years ago practically none of them had qualified planners in their staff. Luckily 6 out of 9 Councils in my province now have university graduates employed which is major progress. When I say that I mean they have 1 each and they’re practically a clone of each other. All fresh out of college, maybe with a year’s works experience under their belt, most are relatively enthusiastic and some are quite bright. This is major progress. But these guys are expected (on their own) to take on the responsibilities of an entire planning department (if and) when the decentralisation process kicks in. Currently they have little or no formal responsibilities. So my job in theory is to help these guys make that step.

Andrew, Laia and Paul in Mbala

        Because Irish Aid have funded 4 of our placements (the overall aim of the project is to improve Governance in Zambia (!) the other three placements being in Financial Management, Socio-Economic Planning and Monitoring & Evaluation) and are also funding our project costs (fuel, accommodation and meals for our trips out to the district councils) I have to work with the group on everything and follow all the ridiculous government protocols and bureaucracy (of which I’ll moan about in detail at a further point). Of the districts in Northern Province we had decided to focus on 5 of these rather than spread ourselves too widely. This involved traveling to each district, carry out assessments on each council and eventually come to a decision on which ones to select. An example of some of the challenges involved in this: Kaputa is probably the most distant district from here at around 390km, reasonable you will say. We couldn’t make this journey for the first 2 months due to the rains which last for 5 months. When we did, it took us over 9 hours in a 4x4 through crazy conditions.

One of many road blocks, truck here skidded off the Kaputa road

        In the end we only made it to 8 of the districts because one of them is on an island and the weather was so bad that the ‘ferry’ wasn’t operating for months so we ditched it from our study. Harsh!

      

        That was a time, finance and patience consuming process but eventually we were at a position where we could finalise our 5 districts. All the way through, we had to do it through the government channels so we were essentially being used by provincial government to show how much they are doing to help their local counterparts etc. African customs/culture means it needs to be approached with the right degree of delicacy so I kept my trap shut and endured it !

       (The following is technical planning talk so feel free to skip over it….)

      

       First, a bit of background to the major issues that exist here in terms of town planning and urban design.

      

       80% of Zambia is what is known as Customary Land, that is, it is under the control of tribal chiefs. This area is essentially comprised of mud or brick huts. Only 20% is on State Land. Only State Land is subject to the planning system.  It’s a huge country that’s very sparsely populated (14m in a country 10 times the size of Ireland and 3.5 times the size of Britain), so infrastructure here is very difficult to provide. Saying that it’s one of the most urbanised countries in Africa at 40% (Australia is 80%). Outside of cities less than 5% of houses have legal title, that is to say they have little or no property rights in the eyes of the law other than as squatters. This has serious ramifications for wealth generation as credit cannot be obtained using property as a form of collateral and Councils cannot gather rates from the majority of the properties in their jurisdiction which is theoretically one of their major revenue streams. A vicious circle.

        As the chiefs control 80% of the land, in order for towns to meet the demand for housing land the Councils need to go cap-in-hand to the chiefs to get land off him (all sorts of shenanigans go on here I’m told). But basically they’re at the mercy of a chief in terms of securing land for housing. A major issue I see is that the land given to them is usually in a ridiculous location for the proper expansion of these towns and really creates for major problems down the line.

        75-80% of housing in Zambia is contained within ‘informal settlements’, unplanned (I mean with little or no thought put to it) and unserviced. In other African countries this takes the shape of shanty towns but in Zambia (Lusaka apart) its more shacks than the atrocious images you’d see in Johannesburg or Nairobi. Nevertheless, these shacks are just thrown up and often there’s little or no space for roads (major problem if a fire breaks out or an ambulances needs access), there’s no piped water, majorly prone to flooding, no electricity, no sewerage system etc. 5 or 6 families might share a ‘latrine’ which is an open pit toilet which you would only experience at a music festival or a national park in our world (this effluent can sometimes seep into the shallow wells where the community draw water from). Whatever about how mank these living conditions are, the health ramifications can be pretty severe and where water borne illnesses thrive (among others).

       When the bureaucratic blockages ceased the actual work could begin in earnest. The bulk of my work is essentially training and guiding these planners in 5 Councils and also working directly with them on certain projects. Although I try to limit the amount of hands on work I do as enabling them to do the work is more valuable in the long term than me getting the projects done myself, even though the need is pretty acute at times. We focus mainly on the following topics:

   

        Geo-spatial Database: 

        Most councils have seriously out of date maps, talking decades here and none of them are digital so we’re trying to digitise any of the raggedy things we can find, get out on the ground to update what’s actually been built using a GPS machine and map it on GIS (I’d never used GIS before I came here so I had to train myself up on it fairly lively in order to pretend I was an expert in it!)  Because there are no digital records, serious chaos has taken place. Land being sold by the Council to two different parties, land not having planning permission, land not having legal title etc.  

        So we are trying to compile this information and input it onto this GIS based mapping system that I am creating. It’s not going to have much of an immediate impact on the quality of the environment as it currently stands but I’m pretty sure it will go a long way to cleaning up the mess that has been created in the past and avoid such chaos occurring in the future when the problems are really likely to come. The population of Zambia is going to double in the next 25 years. Jaysus.

       Computer Software: 

       Mainly GIS, AutoCAD and SketchUp and maybe some Photoshop down the line. They’re relatively computer literate in fairness to them and do a bit of it in college. They’re pretty keen on this side of things so we should make a degree of progress.

      

       Upgrading of Informal Settlements: 

       As I mentioned above, many of these settlements are of very poor quality (they’d be called slums in our world) and completely lacking in the most basic services – clean water (not even talking of drinking quality here, just clean). Even toilets are probably too ambitious in these situations. I haven’t yet started on an upgrading project but they’ll probably require a much more collaborative approach with local community workshops as often more contentious initiatives may be required to bring about improvements in the living environment and provision of these basic services. Eg Often rehousing a few families is the only solution to create space for access roads.

       Encouraging the local community to embrace the legalisation and titling process is central to the successful upgrading of these settlements.

Wouldn't have fancied being in this latrine when it collapsed

       Introducing Evidence Based Planning:

       There’s very little data contained in Councils but it’s possible to plan areas here based on solid facts. So this involves introducing methods of calculating socio-economic services required in a given area based on spatial location and population/housing information. Eg. for every 100 houses this means X number of extra primary school pupils, church go-ers, medical patients, market stalls needed etc.

       Town Strategies: 

       There is a programme of Integrated Development Plans and Local Area Plans that commenced a few years ago. The idea is that every Council area will have at least one of these done. In reality this could take years. Currently none of the Councils in my province have been given budget for any of these to occur and if any of them have actually had development plans done in the past, they’re more than likely over 15 years old and of no practical use.

       What myself and the planner are aiming to do in each Council is to create an in-house strategy that identifies a future vision for the future development of the main town over the next 10-20. It allows the Council to adopt a pro-active approach to the inevitable development pressures that it will face in the coming years. Using this document they can go to the chiefs with requests for the release of land in actual suitable locations for the future expansion of the town. 

       While this document will have no legal or policy standing, it will allow the Council to dictate where development happens and what form it should take, ensuring some semblance of sustainable future development.  It should incorporate issues such as the appropriate location for future growth, design standards for new housing areas and for development in town centres (among others). Ambitious definitely but worth aiming at.

  

      Updating of Housing Layout Plans: 

       This is currently the domain of my office in the Provincial Government but it is in ridiculously costly for them to do it [incredibly they actually charge the Councils to do it which (legally) goes into staff pockets] which I will explain in some later rant. It involves updating the plans as to what has actually been built since they did the initial plan (usually 5-10 years ago). This needs doing because often due to incredible administrative incompetence or neglect, houses get built in completely wrong places, often straddling multiple lots or even on the land where roads are meant to go. So what needs doing is redesign these places to accommodate the shambolic scenario that has been built, find new space for access roads (and limit the amount of inevitable cul-de-sacs that have been caused), refit new plots into left over spaces etc. I’m expecting some resistance down the line from the Provincial Office but we’ll carry on until that happens.

       Recently I accompanied my office on one of these jollies to see how things are carried out. After walking about doing the assessment for about an hour we reached a ridge in the land and beyond it we were greeted by the sight of a reasonably sized lake (probably 500 sq m). 

       This surprised me as I hadn’t noticed any lake in this housing development when I’d briefly perused the plans earlier.

        -       “Lads whats the story with the lake?”

        -       “hmmm yeaaaah”

                 (a bit of head scratching commenced)

        -       “Gis a look at the plan there again Tryson willya”

                (I then survey the plan)

        -       “Lads, there’s meant to be 3 rows of houses right here”

        -       “Oooh…… hmmmm …… ahhh … well yeah that’s the problem with doing the plans from  the office”

                (everyone erupts laughing)

The Phantom Lake

       Basically nobody had even been out to the site to notice this massive fucking lake in the middle of this piece of land! Initially I felt like Roy in Saipan but after a few seconds I just had to smile. Hilariously farcical. 

      

       Only Africa could make an Irishman feel Swiss.

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.