Letters From An Island Son, Far From Home

Letter Eight: Bukka

Stefan Verbano grew up on Guemes Island, the son of Chris Damarjian and Larry Verbano. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in Jornalism from the University of Oregon and is currently serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia, Africa.

His home base is a small rural village near Mansa, Zambia where he is working with the local population to establish rural aquaculture and agricultural sufficiency. Through his writings you get a sense of the joy and frustration at trying to make a difference. Stefan has agreed to share his letters with his home community.



June 25th, 2012

A wrinkled old woman wrapped in a chitenge dress sits cross-legged along a footpath beating the dust off her array of pink tomatoes with the snap of a rag. She works quickly, mindful of the mid-day crowd of feet ambling up beside the medians of produce lining the walkway. But her rushing to preserve the merchandise is futile because the faces of the pedestrians to which those feet belong are beset with expressions suggesting their minds are somewhere else. They are not customers; they are just taking in the scenery. And the tomato vendors are many today. Down the dirt embankment and across the open sewer making up the road's shoulder, a camouflaged army truck carrying camouflaged, yawning soldiers and oil barrels roars past, kicking up another wave of dust and setting the woman into motion again.

Further up the road from Mansa's city center, the buildings get smaller and dirtier and more eyes follow exploring foreigners. On one particular block, a row of brick buildings is interrupted by a break in the storefront facade. What can only be described by virgin eyes as a bombed out building fills this space. Far from the ambiguity of a pile of bricks and garbage, this square of land still has its former shape; standing walls which slant off in different jagged directions, a semi-discernible floor plan of where doors and windows are supposed to be. Pieces of lumber are strewn about the ground with boards propped up against the wall diagonally like buttresses, presumably keeping the crumbling bricks from caving in completely. Men in grubby clothes are using the building as a makeshift metal shop, the showers of brilliant sparks from their welding equipment sprinkling the drab floor. And it makes sense. When the welders were looking for a place to set up shop, one probably turned to the other and said: "Why don't we use someplace that couldn't possibly get any more destroyed?" The roofless structure looks like all that is needed to seal its fate is for a drunk, toothless old man to trip through one of the walls - an event which, given its location, might happen sooner rather than later.

And then it dawns on me. Two world wars roll through Europe in the same half-century and your average agog Lonely Planet tourist is none the wiser as he trips the light fantastic in Paris or Berlin. But in a country which has never had its skies full of bombs and parachutes or its lands criss-crossed with trenches and barbed wire, the calendar turns to 2012 and there stands buildings in a provincial capital that might as well be remnants of the uglier side of Dresden. How is this possible? In the nearly half year since I stepped off that plane in Lusaka, I have become convinced that Zambians could never fight in a war. It is simply not in them to be so wastefully destructive. They understand how valuable and delicate life can be, and how civil infrastructure can break down all on its own without the help of land mines and mortar shells.

What I saw today must be a product of a much more well-hidden form of violence; one that is not televised and cannot be stopped with peace treaties or UN sanctions. It is the violence of poverty; the violence of fear and doubt. And in trying to help these people share the weight of their burdens, I am inevitably doing the work of a peacekeeper, as trifling as it may be.

While in Mansa, I met with a chapter of an international aid organization, and was able to delve a little deeper into this society of people who live and work where money, development agendas and busy-yet-well-intentioned "first-worlders" all intersect. I plan to work with members of this NGO in whatever capacity I feel fit, hopefully taking some notes on how they have refined their efforts to build community groups and teach people technical skills in the years of experience they hold over me. I was glad to learn that much of the work I will be doing falls under the purview of one of the organization's projects, like teaching innovative farming practices or starting poultry co-ops. It is great to be reassured that there is already an infrastructure in place here made up of people - local people - who have spent their working lives doing what I try to do every day. They will be a valuable resource in the months ahead when digging holes will come as a welcome relief to hefty grant applications and curriculum planning.

The stale air of do-gooder propaganda came across a couple of times, though, mainly from the glossy PR reading materials handed out to us in a fan right as we stepped in the door; the ones depicting barefoot, raggedy dark-skinned kids holding hands in a circle or having the times of their lives on a merry-go-round, their smiles frozen forever as a testament to a better life. One pamphlet outlined several groupings of statistics about Zambia, one of which showed the country's population broken down by age group. This page in particular only stuck in my mind because the text accompanying the data started off with: "Zambia is a very youthful country."

Now, I am certain the public relations director or whoever approved this message was not trying to say that Zambia as a nation expresses the qualities of youth. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a not-so-transparent attempt at trying to supplant a harsh truth with a euphemism. Zambia is "youthful" because a staggering number of people are HIV-positive and the average life expectancy is half that of the "developed world." Fifty-percent of the people in this country are children, yes, and the reasons for this are far too burdensome for donors to stomach. So these harsh truths are watered down and spun in a way which keeps the hope alive and the money pouring in, which may in the end be necessary - to sanitize the truth in order to do the most good in the world; to fight off fatalism.

We met with the woman in charge of "sponsorship," and she described in detail how the families of needy children and the sponsors themselves get involved, and how the organization serves as the liaison between the two, acting as a broker for things like school fees and food for proper nutrition. The woman repeatedly used the word "advertise" when talking about the process of identifying children available for sponsorship to the donors. This made me a little uncomfortable, imagining a retired flabby white hotel chain owner sunken into his Los Angeles easy chair on a Sunday afternoon flipping through the pages of this organization's menu of distressed, grubby faces, reading a few short, easy-to-digest tearjerker biographies and then choosing to which far-flung part of the world he will send his conscience's back taxes this year.

Admittedly, I have no idea how these programs are run, how much say donors have spent on whom they sponsor, or any of that. But as this woman kept unconsciously hinting at the marketing scheme behind all of this, I couldn't help but imagine this booklet of glossy young faces sitting beside the J.C. Penny Summer Catalog in a mountain of other non-urgent mail on a coffee table in some middle-class American home, its Costco-frequenting inhabitants browsing the pages of one, then the other, with the mindset of someone who is shopping for things they do not need.

I cannot fault the philanthropic organizations for the work they do, simply because it is in the end doing some good in the world. To run any kind of organization like this, I imagine business skills and planning must be applied to even the framework of international aid and "philanthropy." If they do not "advertise," their revenue stream will decline; if they are brutally honest about the extent to which the odds are stacked against those they are trying to help, their messages would fall on apathetic ears. I am convinced that it is a necessary evil.


June 29, 2012

Today I watched a girl with real fear in her eyes wrestle to free four of her fingers trapped inside of a tin can. Amazingly, the spectacle lasted for over a minute while I tried to make very clear my intention of helping the poor child as she countered by keeping her distance, looking at me like I was going to ignore her protests and just start pulling recklessly on the bottom of the can until something came loose. She began to cry and dart her eyes to their peripheries looking for someone to come to her aid who spoke the same language. My mind raced through auditory fragments of language lessons and mental images of pages from my Bemba Pocket Dictionary searching for something remotely suitable for this situation.
"Ndefwaya ukupeela akafwilisho," I said, or rather tried to say. "I want to give help."

The girl shook her head wildly as more tears clouded her eyes. Her fingers were caught in the space between the sidewall of the can and the sharp-edged, sunken lid hanging on by a few millimeters of metal. As she pulled harder and harder, the lid closed tighter and tighter on her trapped fingers, and I could not for the life of me even pantomime how simple her escape could be if she only listened to me. My frustration led to a momentary lapse of reason and all of the sudden I started yelling at her in English.
"You have to push! Push the lid down first, then slide your hand out! You are only making it worse!"
Her terrified expression did not change with my ill-chosen words of encouragement. Neither did she stop pulling with all of her might, even as her fingers started to bleed. Since she would not let me come any closer, I had to wait until her hand was finally yanked free to approach. But before I could examine the damage,  she threw the can to the ground as if it was going to bite her and bolted down the footpath away from my hut clutching her wound.

I had left the empty tin with its dangling lid on the outdoor washing rack in late-morning, feeling lazy and telling myself that I would take my sweet time getting around to the day's helping of dishwashing. Though I had been through a spell or two of kids playing with utensils or stealing sponges from off  the table, in this particular instance I did not think twice about leaving the soiled pile there unattended until I got around to it. I had given no mind thus far to child-proofing my living quarters. This must be how new parents feel when they realize that their drooling, curious infant can turn even the most seemingly benign object into something lethal. And the obvious rule of thumb in this and all cases involving children who think the world is their playground is: nothing sharp! Come to think of it, beside the tin can today was a kitchen knife with a 20 centimeter blade still with its factory edge which I use for chopping vegetables. If even one of the more squat little iwes stood on their tippy toes they could have knocked the knife off of the table and spilled their own blood or someone else's. So, for all those of you out there who might find yourselves in rural Africa anytime soon living in a village with a population majority of hyperactive young children not keen on listening to muzungu advice, for Christ’s sake, pack some Band-Aids in your suitcase.





Stefan is the second person from the left.

Thursday, July 5th

What a strange conglomeration of pilgrims. An anthropology master's degree candidate could write a 100-page thesis about how there are places in sub-Saharan Africa with entire sub-populations of white-skinned foreigners from all walks of life who, from time to time, journey far and wide to be with their own kind. They speak languages from four different continents and are here to do all sorts of things; teach English, study primates, stop HIV and AIDS, conserve natural resources, grow vegetables, save souls, dig boreholes. Some of them get paid for what they do but many do not. You can tell the veterans by their tanned and weathered features acquired while living and working in a snow globe of dust and sun and dirty water. For them, most of Zambia's rough-around-the-edges idiosyncrasies have lost their terrifying luster. These people have become assimilated to the point where they stand up for themselves, and walk with the determined gait of someone who knows they belong here; that they have earned a place here. Needless to say, these are good people to have on your team.

For the Fourth of July, a large contingent of volunteers converged in Samfya at a beach along the meandering shores of Lake Bengwelu. They came to celebrate the independence of a country worlds away in their minds, and to use that misplaced patriotism as an excuse to blow off some steam. I will not go into detail about how homesick, isolated, deprived young Americans who survived the blitzkrieg of college parties only to find themselves living in mud huts choose to go about doing this, but just know that they don't exactly knit sweaters. At the height of the festivities, close to three dozen volunteers from at least four different provinces were sprawled out in tent cities all along the beach's flatter planes. There were bluegrass mandolin harmonies at night and bleary-eyed, Night-of-the-Living-Dead morning migrations into civilization to bask in the rejuvenating power of overpriced English breakfasts; two pieces of stale bread, two oily, overcooked fried eggs, a few scraps of bacon which look like they had just momentarily kissed the pan and a spoonful of cold beans from a can.

The beach and campgrounds are down the road from a handsome waterfront bar and motel where a giant flat-screen television babbles long into the night on the far wall of the lodge's outside patio. Campers were constantly back and forth to this place of small comforts, sneaking off to order cocktails or use the lodge's five-star bathroom facilities - by Zambian standards, of course, which give extra points for anything more luxurious than a hole in the ground. The campgrounds are rented out per night to anyone willing to pay 15-pin (15,000 kwacha, or just under three dollars) for a little plot of dirt to sleep on. Taking into consideration that minimum wage in this country (per diem) is less than 15-pin, many a villager would probably have a hard time accepting that an entire day of making mud bricks or sawing tree trunks into boards earns them barely enough money to go to sleep that night. But muzungus, of course, think they are getting a deal, as they recall memories of grumbling while stuffing twenty dollar bills into U.S. Forest Service envelopes and dropping them into unattended lock-boxes.

The camping fee included a complementary wheelbarrow-full of dry tree roots caked with dirt. The firewood was delivered mid-afternoon by a black man in an auto-mechanic-blue jumpsuit, who wandered in circles around the property for the rest of the day trying to look busy. I do not want to speculate on what the Zambians in the background must have thought of our muzungu antics, but if the night watchman had decided to leave his post at midnight and check on the party, he may have been able to spot gaggles of pale, white bodies skinny-dipping in the lake and howling at the full moon with all the energy their lungs had left. During the day, pretty young women in bikinis and shirtless, brawny young men sunbathed, read, swam and played beach games in the sand. For brief moments in the soft sunshine of Zambia's winter, this idyllic gathering of carefree American youth clad in sun dresses and tie-dye headbands living in a sea of tents brought to mind scenes from Woodstock. Of course, there was no face-melting Star-Spangled Banner; just out-of-tune guitar strumming and harmonica riffs lost in the evening breeze.

And just as quickly as the party built up with increasing electricity flowing through the air, the morning sun started to peek over the horizon on a sleeping tent city and the sounds of zippers zipping and taxi doors slamming were not far behind. By 9 A.M. the beach was nearly deserted except for a handful of volunteers bent on staying another night. As those remaining went off each on their respective searches for something or other - sunglasses, wallets, cellphones, water bottles, underwear - a different Zambian in a blue jumpsuit approached the camp shyly and began to sort through the mounds of garbage that served as the testament to the night before. He went with bottles first, some of which can be returned for a deposit. I first happened upon him while he was busy carrying eight beer bottles between the fingers of both hands from the outskirts of the aftermath to a more central location. I offered to help him with a quickly growing guilt, and his response will be one of those lucid expressions of Zambian nonchalance which will be the title of a chapter in a book someday.

"No, that is fine. You do not need to. This is...this is my job," said the man with beer bottles for fingers and the smile of someone who holds no grudges.

He had accepted that this is simply the nature of things; the muzungus come in, they spend wads of money on liquor and pricy meals, they have a blast, they make a royal mess of their environment, and then they skip out early with clean slates, leaving the black African groundskeeper to clean up. And worst of all is that he accepts his "job," and might even look forward to the festivities because it means a fatter paycheck in exchange for a couple of hours of playing garbage man. Well, I ended up helping this guy consolidate the byproducts of a night of chemically-induced bliss: food wrappers, toilet paper, half-full bottles of vodka and rum, articles of clothing, more than a dozen empty cigarette packs, spent fireworks, innumerable plastic water bottles and a pile of beer bottles half a meter tall. The man left for a minute and returned with the same wheelbarrow his coworker used to drop off the fuel for this madness the night before. We stacked the bottles in the bucket to a precarious height, and then he took off down the road back to the lodge with a spring in his step. When he came back again, he asked me what he should do with the not-quite-empty liquor bottles, and I had to think for a minute. Though it might have displeased the owners of the bottles if they ever were to return, I told the man that he should take some of them home with him as payment for a task that, in my opinion, he should not have been charged with in the first place. And the fact that he did it with a smile on his face, seeing the material gains and ignoring the principle, I think earned him the right to capitalize on our wastefulness.

I was by no means proud to be essentially paying this guy with leftover booze, but I knew some sort of justice was in order, and that was the best I could come up with on the spot. Though being white in this country comes with the distrusting stares and the racial epithets, Zambians are amazing in their humility to wait on muzungus hand and foot and never to compromise their friendly demeanor.

Early in the afternoon of the 4th, I met a man who deserves mention. Pulling up to the camp in a beat-up white Rabbit-looking compact car, a scruffy, mid-30s South African white man stepped out and introduced himself in an English accent heavily diluted with Dutch. He drove up that morning with a volunteer from my intake, giving him a 300 kilometer ride up to the shore of the lake. The Dutchman worked as a "ranger" - an occupation for which I was not able to glean a reliable definition - at a national park north of Serenje in Central Province. He had befriended my fellow trainee at the park, and soon after came an invitation to come hang out with a bunch of rowdy Americans for a holiday which must mean absolutely nothing to South Africans. His second passenger was a slender, early-30s dirty-blonde primatologist from Utah conducting research at the same park on a particular species of baboons for her P.h.D. dissertation. In the end, I could not tell whether being with her fellow countrymen offered her a shard of comfort or a dose of stress.

The park ranger sported a short ponytail and wore a sleeveless shirt with tattoos in several different languages running down his biceps like sleeves. I recognized one set as Arabic, and, with my prompting, the young man embarked on a story of trekking across some isolated stretch of Sudanese desert where he met a man who had been stranded without water for too many days. Of the many words our storyteller shared with this vagabond, an old adage managed to stick in his mind long enough for him to get to a tattoo artist and have it preserved forever in ink under his skin.

"There is no freedom like knowledge, nor any slavery like ignorance," his right arm read.

In the hours to come as the sun sank into Bengwelu's expansive waters, the Dutchman blew the dust off of many stories of Africa, suggesting that he had been all over the continent and was in his element here. One of the first things I noticed about him was the small chip missing from one of his front teeth and, sure enough, in due time he began rattling off the tale of how he has been punched in the face by a mugger in Cape Town while stumbling home from a momentous night of bar hopping, speaking about it like it was just one installment in a long list of similar life experiences.

 He asked me if I was interested in trekking through the park on a group hike for a few days at the end of July, and I told him I would set the plans in motion. From the first hour of being in his company, I knew this man had a valuable set of skills obtained from years of being beaten down by African inefficiency and hardship and picking himself up again battered and smarter than before. And so if I am ever to find myself in a tight spot in an African game park full of hungry, carnivorous macro fauna, I will be glad to have this guy on my side.

At some point I learned that the Dutchman planned to drive the 90k from Samfya to Mansa the day after the 4th, so, rather than paying an arm and a leg for a taxi (90 kilometers for 6 dollars, go figure) or spending an exhausting day hitchhiking, I claimed a seat in the back of the tiny, overpacked car. On the morning of our departure, the tattoo-clad driver opened the hatchback to load up his sleeping gear and out fell a piece of a mannequin's arm that looked like it had been painted by Jackson Pollack. Picking up the white lithe piece of plastic, he chuckled to himself and hinted at some outlandish-sounding experience from his past which failed entirely to change the confused looks on the faces of those standing around the car.

As for the interior, there was a plastic action figure of Steve Irwin wrestling a crocodile dangling from the rear-view mirror. His inspiration, I assumed.

As the four of us puttered down the road away from the campgrounds on bulging tires, we came upon a marketplace and had to slow to a stop. What must have been 50 secondary school students in white and crimson uniforms were standing in the middle of the road and only glanced at the car long enough to throw dismissive, uninterested looks our way and then turn back to their conversations. Well, perhaps your fidgety, fresh-off-the-boat Peace Corps volunteer would have idled quietly until the seas decided to part, but the Dutchman had been here too long to take this type of insolence lying down.

"Are you foking retaahhted!? Are you!?" He screamed at the throng blocking his path. "Get out of the god damn road! No wonder why you live in a third world country!"




Sunday, July 8th.

The kids in the village have started calling me "bukka" - five letters to which I would like to dedicate the next few paragraphs.

I have heard conflicting stories as to what this word actually means, though I can safely say at this point that it is a racial epithet directed at white people. When I first arrived in this province, a fellow volunteer told me the word carries the weight of "white nigger," and that I should never let anyone say it to me without getting in their face about it. However, this particular volunteer gave me the impression that he had a rather short fuse and Zambians in particular knew how to push his buttons. Running contrary to this in my mind was the word muzungu - in a literal sense meaning "Englishman" - regardless of the fact I was once told by a Zambian in Eastern Province that the word also equated to "the n-word for white people." After being here for this long, however, my novice study of semantics has led me to believe that "muzungu" is far less vulgar or offensive. Even the way Zambians say "muzungu" lacks the snarl more often reserved to propel the word "bukka."

Due to the uneven phonetic collision between English and Bemba, the iwes in Mwanachama actually say "boo-gah," which, needless to say left me confused for the first few days as I thought they were likening me to something gooey they pick out of their noses from time to time. In retrospect, I wish their harassments had been that innocuous. In an etymological sense, the word apparently refers to a type of white fish with puckered lips. How exactly this connection was made is still a mystery to me, but all I can say is that it took one sidelong, preoccupied glance in the canned foods aisle of Shoprite for me to figure out what exactly a "bukka" was.

And even though I try to rise above the spite burning like acid in my throat when I am riding my bike into Mansa and some drunk-at-noon local comes staggering out of a bar screaming the word at me, I cannot ignore it. Taking into account my upbringing and my privileged, whitewashed middle-class fate, never in my life did I think that I would be the target of racism. Sure, there may be the isolated instance of being called a "cracker" or "white boy" while walking through the wrong part the city at night, but never could I have imagined that at some point in my young life I would be living in a place where I was in the racial minority - the racial super-minority in fact - and would catch heat for it. I finally know in a small way what so many other people with darker skin or differing beliefs than the majority in their community feel every day. It is something unspoken. It is in the blank stares from passers-by who hold my gaze a little longer than normal. It is in the cashier working behind the lunch counter who turns to take the order of the black man standing next to me despite the fact that I was clearly next in line. It is in the taxi driver who charges me 10-pin more than all of the other passengers going to the same destination, just because I am white.

But I tell myself time and again that I cannot act on this anger. Even when the crowd of iwes standing on my porch at 8 A.M. are screaming the nasty word through the door of my hut, I can't justify hitting them. Admittedly, I keep a short, skinny bamboo pole propped against the wall just inside the threshold for disciplinary purposes, but this is only to intimidate the little monsters and send them running home when their behavior begins to take a toll on my sanity. I have been here nearly three months and I have not once had to level the stick on even a less-sensitive patch of young black skin. In my mind, physical force runs contrary to my purpose here. I need to set an example for these people that there is a better, more pacifistic way of interacting with these children which does not fill the village airspace with high-pitched sobbing for 12 hours every day. When it comes to disrespectful, disobedient African children, I am learning to turn the other cheek.

A few weeks ago one of the cute little girls who lives in the hut closest to me waddled over to sit on my porch in the early evening. She cannot be any older than five or six and stares up at me through beautiful ebony eyes when she comes over to say "muli shani" on an almost daily basis. For a few minutes that night she sat in silence, watching me with undivided attention as I took a pot of rice off of the brazier and started frying soya pieces - my non-nshima staple. Then, from the nearly dark hut next door came the projecting voice of the little girl's mother, calling her home in Bemba to presumably eat dinner. At first I thought the girl did not hear the commands, but by the third or fourth iteration I realized that she was ignoring her mother altogether. I spit out some garbled Bemba in an attempt to help the situation, but the girl just smiled at me and stood her ground.

In a stellar performance of maintaining her composure, the mother appeared in my front yard without a sound and greeted me with the utmost politeness. Then, she called again for her daughter to come back home, still keeping her voice at a conversational volume. When the girl again resisted, sliding on her bottom across my porch and farther away from her mother, the woman smiled at me with the embarrassed look of a parent whose control of their child has been compromised publicly. The ya mayo approached slowly, still calm, and grabbed the girl’s arm before she could shy away. The two walked back together to their respective hut, the girl whining in protest and looking back at me with foreboding eyes. When the mother and daughter went inside their house I thought that was that, and turned back to preparing my dinner. In retrospect, I should have understood what that last fleeting look from those two pretty black eyes really meant.

Less than a minute later, voices from the hut next door began to increase in exasperation until I heard the unmistakable sounds of what I knew would inevitably come next. Across the compound came the "thwap! thwap! thwap!" of skin on skin and the bloodcurdling screams of their effect. It made me sick to imagine such a cute, innocent bubbly little girl who runs around the village barefoot in soiled sundresses and eats sweeties one lick at a time being beaten with such force that the sounds of impact could be heard far off into the night. The disciplining of children by means of corporal punishment was one of those cultural phenomena that I was warned about before coming here. And it is a hard thing to witness for someone who believes beating children sends a clear message to their fragile little minds that violence is acceptable. We must exhibit the strength to rise above.


July 17, 2012

I saw the second dead body of my young life today. A middle-aged man from a town 60 kilometers north of Mansa had been visiting his sister in a village up the road from Mwanachama called Mutepuka for the past five days when, yesterday, he suddenly keeled over and died. The man was the uncle of my newfound counterpart, Ba Ernest, who shuffled over to my hut this afternoon to tell me the unpleasant news. I came outside to greet him with the usual smile, and it only took one look at his solemn face to know something was wrong.

I could not ascertain a straight explanation of what illness had claimed the man's life, but in what little English he could muster, Ba Ernest said his uncle died of "wasting" yesterday when he suddenly collapsed and started bleeding from the mouth. Trying to be as gentle as possible with my prodding, I asked Ernest about the man's family. His wife apparently was also very sickly, and as I learned more and more about his family a little voice in my head kept butting in suggesting he may have succumbed to complications associated with HIV. Besides the group of HIV-positive people who came to speak with us about the disease during training, I have not met anyone in this country who I have confirmed to be positive. At the same time, I am not so ignorant as to think that in a country where more than one in every ten people is infected, I have not stood in line with or toured the garden of someone who is living with the virus in their body. As for Ernest's uncle, I will likely never know.

The man's body was displayed publicly in the front yard of a hut in Mutepuka as part of a funeral procession. He was wrapped in a mosquito net and lay on a thin mattress on a bed frame that had been drug out into the center of the compound. There must have been more than 100 people in attendance, all sitting quietly and somber in the shade of trees, divided into their respective genders. The women's group encircled the body, weeping openly and singing sorrowful hymns in voices worlds apart from the lively, angelic chanting which drifts through the trees to my doorstep every Sunday morning. The men's group sat in chairs and on the ground in another congregation across the yard, looking more composed but still melancholy.

I could hear the wails of friends and relatives long before I could see them as I walked up the road with Ernest. When I had been invited to pay my respects, I felt a little uneasy considering I would undoubtedly be the only white person there and would catch more than a few awkward, questioning glances. Well, I was right. An entire yard-full of heads turned toward me as I approached. My heart sunk like a ton of bricks, and I had to make a conscious effort to come closer, my feet feeling like they were wearing lead socks. Ernest told me to sit on the outskirts of the yard, farther from the body than anyone else in attendance, which I guessed was a sign of respect; to show that I understood I was a foreigner and knew my place in the community.

We sat near the grouping of men, and Ernest sat beside me speaking to me in whispers. Some of the men near us at first looked at me with daggers in their eyes and asked Ernest short, sharp questions in Bemba while pointing at me. Whatever my counterpart said, it appeased the men, and they turned their gazes back to the prostrate body. Mourners brought their young children with them, and at one point a little girl with beaded dreadlocks ambled over to the bed frame on which the body was displayed and began swinging from one of the bars attached to the headboard, giggling to herself and totally oblivious to the gravity of the situation surrounding her. Her mother quietly yet firmly scolded her, and the girl took her seat again at the woman's side, still smiling and looking bored. On the other side of the yard, a hen and her half-dozen newborn baby chicks scuttled across patches of grass and sand, pecking away at unseen morsels and looking equally out of place as the contented toddler.

A woman in the middle of the circle of ya mayos never stopped wailing for the entire time I was sitting there. Tears streamed down her face as she screamed "mayo! mayo! mayo!" ("mother! mother! mother!") interspersing the calls with throaty sobs. Her voice became more and more hoarse until finally her screams came out as little more than dry heaves. Another older woman wrapped in a chitenge sat on the stoop of the hut wringing her hands and staring off into the bush with bleary eyes. I assumed these women were relatives of the deceased man and had perhaps spent almost a week living with him in the hut before he passed away.

From farther up the road came a man carrying an empty cooking oil bucket full of well water, which he plopped down with a sigh in front of the group of men. From his pocket, he produced a dented metal cup which he set down next to the bucket. Refreshments.

Ten minutes or so after I arrived, two men walking their bicycles came up the road and propped the rusty machines against a tree nearby. They approached the body slowly, and the sea of women parted to let them through. Suddenly, the men fell to their knees in front of the bed frame and began weeping loudly, their bodies convulsing with some of the most forceful displays of sorrow I have ever seen. They were the dead man's brothers. Their cries opened the flood gates for the rest of the gathering, as both men and women shed tears for the deceased and his loved ones now left behind.

Ernest explained to me that the brothers had departed on their bikes at 8 A.M. this morning headed south, and had arrived at the funeral just after me around 3 P.M. Another group of the dead man's family was walking the two-full-day trip to the funeral site, stopping along the road at night to sleep. The man's wife would not be coming, Ernest said, because she was too ill to make the journey. Before he enlightened me, I asked Ernest stupidly if the traveling family members would be taking a minibus to Mansa, and he returned my stare with an expression which I read to politely say: "Are you serious?"

"They will ride the injinga (bicycle), or they will walk," he said tersely.

Then it became clear to me. These people do not have the money to take buses or taxis across Luapula Province. I live in a place where, on the day of a loved one's funeral, the next of kin cannot afford any means of transportation faster than beat-up bicycles or shabby shoes. And for those not healthy enough to make the exhausting trek, they will never see their loved one's body again for the rest of their days. Death is afforded no holiday in this place, considering that where I come from dead bodies are buried wearing three-piece suits in varnished pine coffins. But, on the other side of the world, this man lying on his deathbed before me would be buried in a shallow grave wearing the raggedy clothes that he had on when he died. There would be no roses. There would be no golden crucifixes.



July 20, 2012

It's not so depressing until you do the math.

I took a tour of Ernest's family farm today and saw the other - and more complex - side of his food production scheme. The plot lies on the backside of a ridge overlooking Chofoshi Stream, about one kilometer farther down the road from the turnoff leading to our mutual garden space. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my counterpart was referring to his "family" in the Zambian sense of the word; neither his parents nor any other member of his nuclear family lives there, but rather the farm is run by his cousins, uncles and their respective kin from the longer branches of his family tree.

I arrived alone, heeding Ernest's warning that he would be leaving from Mwanachama to begin shucking today's portion of dried maize cobs at the crack of dawn. Not wanting to commit to something the day before only to renege in the morning because the magnetic attraction of my comfy, warm bed was too powerful, I decided to come lend a hand in the afternoon once I had my wits about me. I called Ernest from the road and he guided me to the conglomeration of family members who were all busying themselves at one station or another in an assembly line of processing corn by hand. As usual, I let Ernest do the talking on my behalf, and only spoke in Bemba when someone spoke to me directly. I met Ernest's mother and brother who, like him, had come early in the morning to begin the day's work.

The farm was basically a cluster of mud huts all in their respective stages of construction or decay. Then there were the outbuildings, the "icimbusus" (pit latrines), the "insakas" (outdoor kitchens) and various shelters housing the standard issue assortment of village livestock. There were also a handful of wells sprinkled throughout the property with their raised concrete rectangular drainage ditches snaking through yards. A building at the heart of the property I took for the homestead, with its sagging roof once held up by concrete columns but now supported by little more than tree trunks wedged between the floor and ceiling at awkward angles.

To aid in processing the maize, the inhabitants had built what looked like giant 4-meter-high bathing shelters out of grass thatch and poles with raised floors. These structures held the maize cobs after harvest, facilitating the drying process and keeping the growing season's bounty away from all sorts of opportunistic ground-dwelling critters in search of easy calories. After the maize is dry, it is stockpiled as such until the kernels can be separated from the cobs. For this latter step, the family built similar thatch structures but with one wall open and a platform of skinny poles at chest-height. This was where several of the farming progeny were working today, lining up the dried cobs on the platform and beating them with a heavy wooden club. The kernels, once whacked loose from the cob, would fall through the cracks in the plank platform and land on the sheet of wrinkled black plastic spread out below.

Then, yet another family member would gather up the corners of the plastic sheet and funnel the kernels into buckets. At the next station, Ernest was working to separate out any unseemly bits of grass or cob pieces from the otherwise unadulterated golden stream of kernels. He did this by pouring the full buckets from an elevated position into other buckets lying on the ground, letting the gentle breeze carry away anything lighter than a dense, mealy chunk of carbohydrates.

Once Ernest decided that the golden stream of grain was of acceptable purity, he carried two bucketsful at a time over the threshold of a side room connected to the central building and poured the kernels into waiting 50-kilogram grain bags. Considering that I managed to show up at the end of the day, the room had 24 of these bags full already, and my newfound friend was putting the finishing touches on the last two bags. As I watched the buckets' contents disappear into the deep recesses of white plastic, I fired off a few photos and asked Ernest how much maize he planned to sell this year.

In Zambia, maize farmers get a "deal" from the government, which guarantees set prices at the end of harvest season and subsidized seed and fertilizer in the months leading up to planting. The agency responsible for all of these transactions is called the Zambian Food Reserve Agency, or FRA. The agency works to keep the cost of food in Zambia artificially low, helping to fight famine and making up the difference with government funds, which is essentially the same direction in which U.S. agriculture policy has taken its own corn farmers, but with less emphasis on the whole famine bit.

This year, Ernest will sell 20 fifty-kilogram bags of maize to the FRA in mid-August, at what I assume is the desirable rate of 65,000 Kwacha (roughly 13 U.S. dollars) per bag. However, to transport his processed, bagged maize to a "dee-pott," he will have to shell out 5,000 Kwacha ($1) per bag to a truck driver willing to make the precarious trip up Mwanachama's washed-out sand trap of a road.

So, Ernest will in the end be cut a check from the FRA at 60,000 Kwacha ($12) per bag. Here is where the depression sets in. Twenty bags of maize multiplied by 60,000 Kwacha per bag nets Ernest 1.2 million Kwacha for an entire year's maize harvest and the countless hours associated with land preparation, planting, fertilizing, weeding, harvesting, processing, etc. For those of you who are not rummaging through your desk drawers looking for that antiquated calculator or trying to carry zeroes in your head, that's a dismal $240. There are six figure incomes; there are five figure incomes; then, there are three figure incomes.

Working fresh out of college at a small-town newspaper for a smidgeon above minimum wage, I made in three days what Ernest earns in an entire year of growing maize. Combine that income with what he makes from the produce grown at the garden we have been working at together - in ten cent increments for Chinese cabbage, mind you - and we are left with a rough economic profile of the average African village farmer. In light of all of this number crunching, I understand now why some volunteers return to the states and have mental breakdowns. In my short life I have spent $240 on a host of stupid shit, like a night in a lavish bed and breakfast room, or half a month's rent at a campus-area house at which I barely slept, or enough partying to help me forget about all of the stupid shit I am buying for $240.

When I finally return home, I am going to have to resist strangling the man standing in line next to me at the grocery store boasting into his Blackberry about how he is getting a deal on the leopard-skin seat covers for his Mercedes-Benz, and I am going to have to hold off pushing down a flight of stairs the teenybopper pleading with his parents to buy him the new X-Box 720, and surely I am going to have to abstain from throwing a patio chair through the window of the fancy Italian restaurant at the husband who is shelling out 60 dollars per plate for pasta and tomato sauce and 12 dollars per martini of middle-shelf vodka and Costco olives just so that he doesn't have to come home to another Friday night of "you never take me anywhere nice anymore!"

So, for the love of God, the next time you sigh while manually filling up ice cube trays because you can't afford the FridgeAir 4000, or bemoan the absence of a jacuzzi tub in your master bathroom with its radiant-heated tile floor, or lament the vacancy in your garage between the BMW and the LandRover, think of Ernest and his 20 goddamned bags of maize. Count your blessings.


July 24, 2012

Muzungu TV has been put on indefinite hiatus for the time being. Perhaps I have just been in the village for too many consecutive weeks, or perhaps the iwes' behavior has been slowly plummeting into the realm of impudent hellions due to my lack of discipline, but I have instigated a much-needed sea change around my house. And what was the catalyst behind this programming slump, you ask? Read on, my friend, read on.

One night during this past weekend, I came home from watering my garden just as the sun was sinking into the trees. I had been wrestling with a bout of the common cold for the past few days, and on this particular evening I wanted nothing more than to make a simple dinner with what was left of the month's allocation of rations - beans and rice, to be honest - and crawl into bed. My nightly cooking tradition began without incident; I filled a pot with water and rice and went outside to light the brazier. Once I had an acceptable bed of glowing coals, I placed the brazier at the edge of my porch and went back inside to fetch the rice. When I came back, several iwes were in my yard yelling at each other and running in circles, as is the typical scene when nightfall comes in this place and the children need to expend all of their built-up nshima-derived energy before bedtime. I did not pay the frolicking tots much mind, setting the pot on the coals with a yawn and going back inside to simply sit in silence for a a few minutes gathering my thoughts while the water came to a boil.



When I came back outside the kids were still playing in my yard. I lifted the pot's lid to check on the progress of the rice and, initially confused, I spotted a dark patch of floating particles at the edge of the rice mound. At first I thought this mysterious mass was some leftover seasoning or burnt-on residue that I had failed to scrub off earlier in the day while washing dishes. From back inside my house I fetched a spoon and scooped up a bit of the obscure sediment and brought it to my lips.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. It was sand and dirt. I stared down at the soiled pot of rice and then peered out into the fading light toward the children milling around and completely unaware of the rage building inside my throat. I began to see in tunnel vision. I saw the kids through a red filter, similar to what an enraged bull must feel after too many taunting swings of the matador's cape. They had entered into a world of pain.

Looking beyond the pot, I suddenly noticed a small dusting of the same dirt on the rim of the brazier, and there was no longer any doubt in my mind. I come halfway around the world and leave everyone I have ever known and loved to move into a mud hut in a rural, dirty African village in an attempt to improve the lives of those I am expected to struggle with every day, and this is how I am repaid: dirt in my goddam food. At that moment, I dropped everything, locked my door, mounted my bike and started off down the road. As I was leaving, the children asked "mwaya kwisa?" ("where are you going?") and I did not have the self-control to say anything without screaming at them. For a few brief moments as I was leaving, I considered hopping off the bike, wrestling one of the kids to the ground and beating them until I could no longer lift my arms. Of course, I rose above these feelings of pugilism, reminding myself that I cannot vanquish meanness with more meanness, and continued on my way.

I came to the house of the official village ombudsman, Ba Benedict, who was engaged in a lively conversation with a group of villagers and asked me to wait on his porch for a few minutes until he was free. I took my place on the cement slab and felt my heart pounding in my ears. At that moment in the near darkness of central Mwanachama with the symphony of night sounds starting to play, I came the closest to completely breaking down in the entire three months I have been here. I had to stifle tears of frustration from running down my cheeks.

Ba Benedict finally came over to me and gave me his ear. In a raspy and exhausted tone, still trying to keep my composure, I told him what had happened. He did not seem surprised at first, and rightly so because he went on to explain how the iwes had pulled the exact same stunt more than once during the two-year term of Mwanachama's previous volunteer.

"Well, at least the little bastards are consistent," I thought to myself.

To Benedict's credit, he offered me some soothing words of solace and told me that the next day he would make the rounds to all of the families with young children living around me and tell the parents to keep their kids away from my hut. I brought up the fact that the volunteer before me had eventually succumbed to beating the children for their misbehavior, and reemphasized that it is simply not in me to hit a child.

"Ba Steve, you must use the stick," Benedict said, as if all I needed to override my hippie peace-monger principle was for an older and wiser man to tell me there is no other way.

I quietly but firmly disagreed, saying again that I refused to physically reprimand the children, and that we as a community will have to work out some other solution. Having nothing else to discuss, an awkward silence crept up around us, and I figured I should go home and face the children one more time. Before I left, I apologized for having to bring this issue to his attention in such a way; to make him fight my battles for me, but at that moment of blinding rage, I did not know who else I could turn to for help. When a I finally walked back up the path leading into my moonlit yard, the children were still there screaming and crying and tackling each other to the ground. I shut my door with a long sigh, leaving the brazier with its perfectly good bed of coals outside to burn out. There would be no dinner tonight. Then, with what strength I had left, I undressed, crawled into bed, tucked in my mosquito net and lay there with my eyes closed counting down the minutes until sleep overtook me and put an end to this traumatic day.

- Stefan


"The opinions and impressions expressed herein in no way represent the official stances or policies of the United States Government, the United States Peace Corps, Peace Corps Zambia or any appendage of the Zambian Government. These writings are intended for a small, select audience comprised of the author's friends, family members and associated parties back home, and are written in the capacity of a private U.S. citizen abroad and not officially as a Peace Corps Volunteer or U.S. Government employee."

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