Letters From An Island Son, Far From Home

Letter Ten: City of Light

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.

CITY OF LIGHT
Thursday, August 23rd, 2012
It all started with a subconscious desire for Guinness. My affinity for beer had taken quite the beating since I stepped off that plane in February and realized no one in this country has ever heard of IPA. In training, it was the domestic lagers Mosi and Castle - essentially Zambia's take on Budweiser - served at room temperature which brought us that much-needed catharsis after biking 20 kilometers roundtrip day in and day out. And people here don't drink that swill for the taste - that much is certain. In the villages, the locals brew maize beer called monkoyo in bathing tubs and cooking pots and empty fertilizer drums and any other large container they can get their hands on. Even if I did wake up one day with the fantastic notion of actually wanting to drink some of the resulting fermented liquid - which I can only say resembles low-viscosity Cream of Wheat - there is no way I could get far enough past the stale vomit smell emanating from the rooms in which it is brewed to actually bring a cup of it to my lips.

So, I have been out of luck in the beer-beverag  e department for many months now, and finding myself in Lusaka for the time being with all the variety this great country has to offer, I wanted nothing more than a cold pint of milk stout. After our session yesterday, I dabbled with the idea of organizing an expeditionary force to scour Lusaka for an Irish pub. A few queries with some veteran booze-hound volunteers saved us the search, and half an hour later four of us were in a taxi heading across town to a bar called O'Haggans.

The establishment's interior had plenty of Irish flair - I cannot deny that - but it was a little overdone. The trinkets and tapestries printed with old drinking songs on the wall came off as some clever Zambian businessman's attempt to fabricate what must come naturally in Dublin or Boston. It looked like a Hollywood set, as if there was a good chance that the coat of arms and glinting green shamrocks on the mantlepiece were made of plastic. But there was Guinness on tap and a live band was in the process of setting up their equipment when we arrived, so our suspicions of insincerity quickly melted away. It was an environment closer to home than I thought I could ever come up with in this country, despite the fact that I would be very hard pressed to find an Irishmen anywhere in the drunk mob fighting for seats at the bar. After we ordered the first round and waited outside for one of the larger tables to open up, the second half of the expeditionary force arrived and joined us in our nostalgia.

When we were finally seated, we took our time browsing the menus, and I found myself drifting out of conversations to stare longingly at the Fender Stratocaster and studio amp at the far end of the stage. It had been half a year since I played an electric guitar, and during long, exhausting cruiser rides I would listen to rock music through my headphones and my heart would ache remembering the countless days spent playing wild, booming electric sets with Guemes and Eugene bands. Just before the waiter came to take our order, several members of the band - keyboardist, drummer, conga player, bassist, saxophone player - took the stage and began to run through improvised jazz tunes. I was only familiar with "Take Five" by The Dave Brubeck Quartet, but I quickly got the feeling that these four black Zambian musicians had studied music for much of their lives and had been playing together for years, methodically refining their repertoire and honing their stage communication. Their transitions were tight and executed without any communication - verbal or physical - which during my brief foray into rock music I found was a product of countless hours practicing the same songs over and over until your respective parts become muscle memory.

After several songs and no guitar player in sight, I began to joke with my table mates about asking the sound technician working in the corner what it would take to let me get on stage and noodle around for a few tracks. We had a good laugh and the subject changed, but for some reason when the waiter came to take our dinner orders I pulled his ear toward me.

"Is there a guitar player in this band?" I asked.

He did not understand what I was getting at, so I asked him again and this time pointed at the vacant instrument.

"You want to play?" he asked me, his mouth breaking into a smile.

"Well, uhh, yeah, if that's okay, I guess," I said.

And, to my absolute amazement and partial horror, the man immediately stopped taking our orders and walked briskly over to the soundboard. My heart leapt into my throat at the idea that I might actually have to play in front of all of these people in a band of five black musicians who obviously knew what they were doing. I saw the waiter say a few quick words to the sound tech, who turned to look at me, smiled, and motioned for me to come to him. The other volunteers sitting at the table realized what was about to go down, and started cheering as I moped up to the stage expecting the worst.

The man from the audio booth slipped the guitar over my head, and the tug of the strap across my shoulder felt very odd at first. He switched the amplifier on and asked me if I knew how to use effects pedals. I said I did. By now, the other members of the band were looking at me quizzically; not in a challenging way, but with a look that said they did not know what to expect.

Somehow my mind was still lucid enough to realize I did not have a guitar pick, and I asked the sound tech if he had one to spare. After half a minute of rummaging around in the guitar case and in the back of the amp, he gave up and I figured I would just have to play with my less-than-ideal-length fingernails on my right hand. But the man's eyes lit up suddenly and I knew he had an idea. He whipped out his cell phone, removed the back cover, slipped out the Sim card and handed it to me. "Screw it," I thought, holding the tiny piece of rigid plastic between my thumb and pointer finger and trying to pick a few strings.

The conga player - a late-20s black man with long, natty dreadlocks - was the only member of the band who spoke to me;

"What is your name?" he asked in relatively smooth English over buzzing amplifiers.

"Stefan," I replied.

"Evan?" he attempted.

"No, Stefan. Steeefaann!" I said again.

"Oh, alright. Where are you from?" he asked.

"America. I am from America," I replied.

Then, the rasta-looking percussionist stepped up to the microphone and addressed the crowd.

"Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our guest guitarist for this evening, Stefan from America," he said, and the place went bonkers. Without even my playing of a single note, almost every pair of eyes in the bar was looking at me in awe, as if it was a miracle that a white kid would be brave or stupid enough to clamber on stage with a bunch of weathered black musicians.

The music started up again, seeming to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once. I was instantly lost, and looked over at the bass player for guidance as was my instinctual distress move while playing on stage back in the states. The man realized I was looking at his fingers trying to decipher a key, and he mouthed the words to me across the floor.

"D-minor!" his lips said, or at least I thought they did. "D-minor!"

My fingers found their place on the fretboard, I closed my eyes as I often do, and let the music's electricity creep through my spinal cord and out into my hands. I had no idea how long we played for, but I would come back to reality from time to time when the guitar's feedback became too overbearing or the volume knob on the amp demanded my attention. From time to time the crowd would scream, and I did not know whether it was directed at me or at the spectacle as a whole; to be honest, I didn't really care.

At the grinding finale of the fourth or fifth song, I noticed two more black musicians milling around backstage, and I assumed these were the band's straggling members. I took this opportunity to excuse myself from the ranks, shrugging off the guitar and placing it back in its rightful stage stand. The same dreadlocked hand drummer beckoned the crowd to once again give it up for the stand-in guitarist, and after a quick bow I freed myself from all of those penetrating eyes and lumbered back to my table. As I passed one of the tables, a gaggle of sharply dressed, highly intoxicated Zambian women reached out to grab my arm.

"You were FANTASTIC!" they screamed at me.

I did not take the compliment to heart. They could have been deaf for all I knew, and I figured the novelty of seeing a young white guy waltz around on stage with an all-black band had gotten the best of them, regardless of any degree of music prowess I may have exhibited.

I sat back down to a waiting plate of dinner; Zambia's idea of a quesadilla and a pile of french fries, or "chips." The number of diners at our table had grown, and all around me people were slapping my back and dishing out hollow compliments. I said nothing, trying to focus on dipping my "chips" in ketchup and bringing them to my mouth. My hands were shaking. It has been so long since I felt the endorphin-induced high which comes from standing in the spotlight. And by some strange twist of fate, I had now felt it in Africa.

Friday, August 24th, 2012
"Attention shoppers, we here at Spar would like to direct your attention to the take-away counter where right now you can get two pieces of chicken for only four thousand five hundred kwacha. That is two pieces of juicy, delicious chicken for only four thousand five hundred kwacha. But wait. If you make your purchase in the next hour, we will give you a bottle of Coke or Sprite at no extra cost to you. So, come and get your two pieces of fresh, hot, ready-to-eat chicken and free beverage at the take away counter now. Thank you for choosing Spar, and enjoy your shopping experience!"

Where the hell am I? Where is that elevator music coming from? I stand at the entrance to one massive aisle and my vision blurs as I try to make out each individual bottle of sweet chili sauce and teriyaki barbecue marinade and mango-pepper chutney adorning the shelves. They all stand in perfect formation in unbroken rows, their different sizes, colors and shapes creating two waves of choice flowing down both sides of the snow-white linoleum walkway leading to the wine and cheese display.
I need shampoo, so I walk by two or three more of these multicolored, geometrically intimidating runways and spot some bars of "luxury soap" and figure I must be getting warmer. Ten seconds later I am standing in front of a 2-meter high wall of hygiene products, and I must make a conscious effort to start breathing in through my mouth because the smorgasbord of fake lilac and strawberry fragrances is starting to make my head spin. The labels on the bottles run the gamut: "body wash, body lotion, liquid bathing soap, bath solution, skin conditioner, shower gel." Then the thought creeps into my head that perhaps the colonial English never passed down a word like "shampoo," and Zambians instead smear something called "hair suds" or "noggin cleanser" or something equally ridiculous on their matted afros while bathing. Finally, I find a bottle of what an American would call shampoo, and I plop it down into my plastic basket next to the bottle of Jameson Irish Whiskey, king-size chocolate bar and ready-to-eat loaf of pizza bread. For me - after living in the village for a quarter of a year - this is what the four pillars of civilization have become.

On the magazine rack leading up to the checkout counters, Seventeen Magazine advertises a front page article about Justin Bieber with a larger-than-life mugshot of the dolled up, corporately manufactured pop star smirking back at me as if he knows something I don't. I spend half a minute standing in the middle of the aisle not really knowing what to think. How pervasive and penetrating an influence America's glamorous, fabricated mainstream culture must have to make it to this corner of the world. Zambia's cities are bordered by an endless landscape of shoeless, broken-toothed subsistence maize farmers - millions of them - who at this very moment have been eating and sleeping in helter-skelter canvas bag tenements for weeks on end now, waiting for the Zambian government to give them their annual paycheck and vindicate an entire year of backbreaking labor.

But travel from the villages to the well-lit, bustling heart of this country's capital city, and you would never in your wildest dreams imagine these two places could exist along the same stretch of tarmac. The grubby faces of village children with their bloated bellies and tattered clothes are nowhere to be seen on the covers of any of these magazines. Instead, the tabloids are painted with clean, pretty young white faces of American pop musicians and movie stars. But why? That surely isn't the reality here. Lusaka is a tiny island of marble-floored nightclubs and monolithic shopping malls and never-ending parking lots illuminated with floodlights; an island in a rolling ocean of dirt and dust and sweat and disease and wrinkles and potholes and barefoot men walking their charcoal bag-burdened bikes along washed-out roads heading toward town - always heading toward town. All roads lead to Lusaka. All roads lead to this beacon of light and luxury that casts its beam just far enough to reach the city limits where this chimera ends and the real Africa begins. It is these glowing highways and neon storefronts which illuminate the first-world splendor awaiting those fortunate enough to escape from the all-consuming darkness.

Outside the store on a collapsable stage, a troupe of drummers clad in colorful tribal print fill the airspace with their rhythms. Pudgy white tourists sit sprawled out on fold-up chairs taking pictures and smiling that stupid smile of muzungus who, after twenty hours of flying, finally step off the plane onto African soil for the first time, catch a cab to Arcades Mall in Lusaka and say to themselves: "Oh well, honey, this doesn't seem so bad!"

Pretty, young black women in short, sequined evening gowns walk down an immaculate sidewalk, the "clip, clop, clip, clop" of their high heels slowly lost in the evening din. A well-dressed middle-aged couple stand side by side at the curb holding their respective melting ice cream cones, watching what is presumably their young son roll around in a plastic bubble floating atop a kiddie pool. His parents are laughing and smiling at him, but he does not seem to be enjoying himself, and the look on his face says he is making a desperate attempt to escape from this clear plastic enclosure resembling a giant hamster ball or one of those sterilized artificial living environments used by people with autoimmune disorders.

Further down the strip, I find what I need sunken into the storefront facade, soaking in a puddle of fluorescent blue light; an ATM. Three Zambian men with dress shirts tucked into their slacks wait in the queue looking like they have all the time in the world. No one cuts in front of me. For once, I am the most shabbily dressed person in line. With my back pocket feeling tighter, I head back into the supermarket with its unending shelves, and along the way I pass the mall's plaza and its bevy of ice cream parlors, internet cafes, electronics stores, swanky, overpriced restaurants and digital printing shops. And it dawns on me how far ahead of itself this country really has come. In America there is a class ladder, sure, but if any of those poor American souls clinging to a lowermost rung ever woke up one morning to find a giant wad of money under their pillow and were suddenly propelled into the middle class, they would know how to spend it. Just because they do not have the financial means to order chocolate sundaes, browse Google, buy the latest smartphone, eat fillet mignon or print glossy photos of their spoiled grandkids from their Nikon SLR, they nevertheless likely have some idea about what those things are. They know they should want these fruits of a higher income bracket, if only they "had the money." This perpetual disenfranchised material desire is accomplished through ruthless corporate marketing campaigns helped along by the dexterous tentacles of the American commercial media machine.

But what would a Zambian villager want with all of these things? He doesn't have a refrigerator, so he wouldn't know what to do with  ice cream, and odds are an icy lump of frozen milk, sugar and artificial flavoring inside a waffle cone would hardly seem edible to him. He has probably never seen a computer and may think the internet is some new invention for catching fish. The sumptuous spread of gourmet food offered by menus in windows would also seem ridiculous because he has been eating nshima with his hands for his entire life, and his simple, bland palate seems to have fared pretty well thus far. He may know what a camera is, but everything in his life worth photographing is preserved in carefully catalogued mental imagery.

So, there is nothing for him here. His pocket could be bursting with 50,000 kwacha bills but odds are he would quickly move on from this place, searching for a hardware store intent on buying tin roofing for his hut, a dozen bags of cement for the floor of his new insaka or spare parts for his bicycle. This place of lights was not built for villagers. They would feel no more at home here than a cocktail-toting, cigar-smoking muzungu would feel living in the stripped-down village environment. Rather, it was built for outsiders. It was built for wealthy suburban Zambians and jet-setting westerners on their way to Livingstone in search of giant waterfalls and Africa's majestic postcard animals. And now, after letting the village sink into my skin for a while, I, too, feel like an outsider in this place.



Tuesday, August 28th, 2012
Today a youthful professor from Michigan State University shed more rays of melancholy light on the plight of Zambian maize farmers. He spoke to our training group about his personal impressions developed while collecting agricultural data for an MSU research project, arguing that economic empowerment programs aimed at pulling farmer-led households out of despondency had actually plunged more Zambians into poverty, and that government appendages like the Food Reserve Agency (FRA) had far overstepped their purposes and, if left unchecked, would one day bankrupt the country.

His polemical presentation gave a brief history of the agency, which was originally formed to ensure the Zambian government had a three-month supply of national food reserves in case of drought or famine. Today, to meet this goal, the FRA would need to buy 300,000 tons of maize from private farmers every year. For this season alone, the agency is set to buy over 1 million tons from farmers like Ba Ernest and other Mansa District locals who have been living in temporary grain bag housing for close to a month now.

According to the professor, the Zambian government further tries to justify the FRA's existence with a political maneuver of claiming poverty reduction. In theory, if the government buys a 50-kilogram bag of maize from a subsistence farmer for 65,000 kwacha when it would instead sell for 45,000 kwacha on the free market, this would mean a larger profit margin for the farmer and thus a fast-track to a living income. But, like all too-good-to-be-true economic fantasies, the devil is in the details.

Half of the maize bought every year by the FRA is grown by 2 percent of the farmers in Zambia. Two-thirds of small-scale or subsistence farmers don't even sell maize to the FRA. So, the government is essentially taking valuable public resources and lining the pockets of commercial maize farmers who many would argue need or deserve no economic incentives from the government at all. So, the subsidized price of maize doesn't even benefit those who need federally sanctioned financial assistance the most.

Add on top of that the fact that after the FRA becomes the proud owner of 1 million tons of maize, the challenge of storing three times as much maize as its infrastructure allows leaves tens of thousands of bags subjected to the elements. The MSU professor showed us photos he had taken of an FRA "dump site" in Petauke district in Eastern Province where 8-meter high mounds of rotten grain lay scattered across the landscape like piles of black sawdust with empty grain bags interspersed - just to vanquish any doubt.

"This is food," the professor said with pain in his eyes.

For the 2010 growing season, independent sources have estimated that twenty-five percent of maize reserves at some FRA depots had been destroyed by mold. In a country where there is a codified time of year where people across the land are starving, how is this possible? How can the Zambian government kowtow to a handful of wealthy, large-scale Zambian farmers, spending tax money to make them richer still while the vast majority of maize growers lack the resources to compete at a production level where they could share in the subsidy's benefit?  How can the logistics in this country be so bad that even with three times the amount of maize needed to keep everyone fed at one point in the year, huge populations of people go hungry six months later? How can any government official in this country justify letting food rot under their supervision? If this was happening in the U.S. - if government money was going to purchase food reserves from wealthy farmers and, when people began starving, the food purchased on their behalf and with their money was found rotting in a field somewhere - then Washington, D.C. would be reduced to a smoldering ruin in no time flat.

 Wednesday, August 29th, 2012
Once more back into the breach we go.
In-Service Training (IST) officially ended today, wrapping up a solid week of workshops and discussions surrounding many different aspects of the three LIFE (Linking Income, Food and the Environment) Program goals; environment conservation, food security and income generation. Filling up most of the rooms at the Great East Hotel in Lusaka, our training group of thirty-three volunteers arose every day just after the break of dawn to attend nine-hour sessions about anything from rabbit and chicken rearing to solar food drying to fish pond construction. We were joined by representatives from each of our villages ("counterparts" in Peace Corps lingo) for two days at the end of last week, which pushed our ranks up to sixty-six strong, representing six provinces and seven indigenous languages.

At any given time in the hotel's crowded conference room during those two days, Bantu speakers would be shouting back and forth at the facilitator in their respective tongues. Every point needed to be translated from English into Bemba and back again, and then converted further still into lesser-known native dialects like Tumbuka or Kaonde. We took our meals in the hotel's dining room where muzungus and Zambian locals sat across from each other commingling and eating from enamel plates resting on immaculate white tablecloths. Needless to say, the villagers looked a bit out of place being waited on by young women in aprons who, after taking away the diners' soiled dinner plates, brought out sundae glasses heaping with scoops of neapolitan ice cream. The counterparts did not fail to eat nshima with their hands, though, rolling the sticky corn mash into little flat disks and then scooping up bits of beef stew and shredded chicken. During many of these "civilized" situations, the villagers wore the expressions of deer staring into oncoming traffic, which led me to hypothesize that many of these men - and perhaps the one woman - had never stayed in a hotel before in their lives. Some may have never known the luxury of hot running water or flush toilets.

During their time with us, the counterparts presented on LIFE Project topics in which they had prior experience, like harvesting caterpillars and making fuel-efficient cookstoves. They spoke mainly to the other Zambians in the room, often reverting back to their native languages and leaving the burgeoning muzungu Bantu speakers treading water in an ocean of misinterpreted hand gestures and false cognates. It made me happy to see the wonders speaking in front of a group did for the villagers' confidence, though, and one seasoned Zambian who had been working with volunteers for the better part of a decade opted to give the workshop's closing remarks. At the end of the second day, Peace Corps Zambia's country director paid us all a visit and presented to the counterparts certificates of participation - a token of appreciation for making the full-day journey to Lusaka to represent the myriad communities in which we work. For this workshop, I chose to invite Ba Derrick - a young man living in the village up the road from Mwanachama who I have worked with off and on at the community garden along Chofoshi Stream. In the photo below, Derrick is on the right looking dapper in his salmon dress shirt, while Country Director Tom Kennedy is standing to the left holding the manila envelope and LIFE Program Director Donald Phiri is dead center sporting the million-dollar smile.

After the counterparts' departure, our training group was alone again, and we spent an entire day discussing honey production with a presentation in the morning and - to the relief of many - a practical demonstration outside on the hotel's back lawn where we boiled honeycomb to extract beeswax. We used a honey press to crush the engorged combs, and then watched as the golden liquid drizzled down into a waiting bucket.

Earlier in the week, we welcomed a guest speaker who runs a Zambia-based packaged food company. She went into great detail about how to preserve garden produce, and let us dry several different types of leafy greens inside an industrial glass and steel solar drier used by her company.

This afternoon - during the last session before we all go our separate ways early tomorrow morning - we took a field trip to the house of a professor who teaches at Zambia's Natural Resources Development College and, in his spare time, propagates citrus trees by the hundreds. Our training group sat sprawled out on the lawn of his modest home in a Lusaka suburb, passing around a paper bag full of razor blades and tearing off individual pieces of clear plastic from a giant roll in preparation for some amateur budding and grafting. Earlier, we were given the whirlwind tour of his Franken-tree production scheme, complete with a crash-course in botany and the methodology of tricking a tree into producing fruit of a variety to which it clearly doesn't belong. Each of us chose two lemon saplings from the rows upon rows growing in black polyethylene pots and taking up an entire quadrant of the yard. Then, we walked over to a grove of orange trees belonging to a neighbor and harvested the bud stock. The professor talked us through this process and walked in circles criticizing our branch selections without apology, perhaps knowing that after our group of volunteers leaves, he will be the one left with dying lemon/orange trees if this delicate procedure is not done with the utmost discretion.

Returning to our patch of lawn and groupings of respective lemon trees, we were shown how to make a "capital 'T' incision" on the lemon stem and then slip the arrowhead-shaped orange bud into the fresh wound. Then we wrapped the areas of the stem above and below the new bud in plastic to keep the cut sterile yet still let what looked like a tiny green pimple - but would one day be a full-grown orange tree - respirate.

One of our trainers brought along a First-Aid kit, which in retrospect was a capital idea considering a group of lethargic, sleep-deprived muzungus would be fiddling with razor blades. Some people did cut themselves, but laughed nonetheless as the closely mowed lawn became speckled with bloody red dots. It was a sensational way to end a week of drooling and nodding off and breathing stale air in a hotel conference room; afternoon sunshine, a light breeze, green grass, sharp objects, blood, and the smell of fresh-squeezed lemons all around.

And now, fortunately, before we all get too comfortable and begin to recall how many luxuries we have been so long without, it is back to the village - back through that reality-hole; back into the breach.


- Stef


"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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