Letters From An Island Son, Far From Home

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.

And then there were two

-- Part II --

Two battery-powered lanterns hung from the rafters of the Catholic church, one barely illuminating the entrance and the very back row of the congregation, the other casting long shadows down from the pulpit. A spectrum of color came from what looked like a bank of stage lights in one corner, emitting neon blues, greens and oranges in sequence like a pulsating Christmas lawn decoration. The pastor came and went from his podium with bible in hand, an assistant standing behind him shining a flashlight over his shoulder so that he could rattle off verses unbroken by the din. Everything was in Bemba. Certain words came back to me for the first time since I spent three months bashing my head against a wall trying to memorize them in language class. “Yesu” meant “Jesus”; “Nalesa” meant “God”, “Tata” meant “father”. Pieces of the sermon were divided by songs of faith from the choir and accompanied by the congregation in general. Human forms were reduced to ebony blobs in the poorly lit mud-brick and tin-roof rectangular building, and the lilting voices seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once, as if the skies had indeed opened and angels themselves were singing to us. Parades of conservatively dressed young men and women would come flailing and shaking and singing in unison through the entrance and stomp down the aisle, only to disappear again two-by-two out one of the side doors. Musicians plucked and banged on homemade instruments; what sounded like a washtub bass, water buckets, maracas and cymbals.

My traveling companion and I sat in the back row next to Ba Ernest, who had agreed to be our chaperon for this Christmas Eve Mass. Though we surely would have been welcome had we arrived without a local escort, experience had taught me that it was better to come to these types of functions with the obvious blessings of a well-respected village man. We went through the motions of standing and sitting patiently, not understanding a word of the sermons or songs but nonetheless feeling the air grow thick with the holy spirit. At one point my American friend pulled my ear to her lips, asking if the choir was singing along to a stereo hidden somewhere beneath a pew. The thought made me chuckle. As if Zambians - with their almost superhuman ability to sing with perfect pitch and hold down a rhythm on just about any household item - needed canned music to keep them on time and in tune. That was simply their nature. And it makes sense. The children in this village start singing and dancing from the time they can walk, and attend church with their parents every Sunday as soon as they can understand the lessons being taught, however rudimentary. At times the singers would hit a particularly beautiful note, or the clanging of the makeshift orchestra would happen upon some catchy lick, and shivers would run up and down the length of my spine. Then some long-dormant neurochemical would be released in my brain, and I would experience the rapture. This is no doubt why people feel so close to God in church; the energy of so much concentrated prayer becomes something potent.

Before Ernest had come to lead us to the church that evening, he had told us that out of respect we should bring some small donation to make when it came time for the collection tin. We each had a 500 kwacha note in our pockets, and when the time came, our chaperone ushered us to come forward as people began to tiptoe up to the pulpit and give what they could afford to give. Every pair of eyes in the place seemed to follow us, giving way to whispers. Maybe it was because this was the first time Mwanachama’s muzungu had attended a church service. Maybe it was because we were the only ones who really contrasted with the darkened room. After the plates were removed, the band picked up again and we decided to get up and dance this time around. This set the place off. The villagers gave up on trying to be subtle about their curiosity regarding the strange guests, and resorted to pointing and laughing at us good-naturedly. But being the fish in the fish bowl did not phase us in the least because, in the end, we were attempting to imitate them; to bridge the cultural divide; to practice their own brand of worship. And we did it with humility. Every smirking, gaping, pointing onlooker was probably thinking to themselves: “Christ! Muzungus don’t know how to dance,” but we did it anyway. After all, we made it a night they would remember; a night they will still be talking about long after I have left this place; the night when Ba Steve took his American “wife” to church and danced like a jackass.

We were now in the land of rivers and lakes, Zambia’s idea of the State of Michigan. Stumbling over luggage one final time with Zampop Gospel still ringing in our ears, we disembarked that abominable night bus as the clock approached 4 a.m. in a very dark, very quiet downtown Mansa. Christmas was five days away.

We carried ourselves like the living dead, greeting taxi drivers with forced smiles and glassy eyes. My means of communication was reduced to grunting; “yes,” “no,” “turn right.” Outside the Peace Corps provincial house at long last and with luggage in hand, I opened my wallet to pay the driver and found only one 5-pin note tucked in between a stack of 50’s. It would be a long shot.

“Is five-pin okay?” I asked the young, tired-looking Zambian leaning impatiently on the trunk of the car.

“No, no that is not enough,” he said with a disgusted look on his face. “At this time in the morning, it is at least 15.”

To tell the truth, I would have paid the man whatever he wanted.  Fourteen hours ago we had been weaving our way through the downtown bus terminal in Lusaka and I had been counting down the minutes until this very moment when that big metal razor-wire-topped gate swung open and we would finally arrive at the closest thing I have to home in this country. Nevertheless, even with my brain engaging in emergency shut down from sensory overload (fake drum beats, screaming Bemba, dirty diapers, the stench of cassava and maize beer) and lack of sleep, some form of muzungu auto-defense picked up during pre-service training kicked in and made me keep haggling. The futility, of course, was that I could not have paid this man an exact amount no matter what price we ended up negotiating.

“How about 10-pin?” I tried, not realizing that it made little difference.

“No,” he said again, more resolutely this time. “It must be 15.”

Here I was 30 meters from my bed in a provincial capital which is, both literally and figuratively, the end of the line in this country, with the sun about to rise and the girl I love standing next to me wanting nothing more than to bury her head in a pile of pillows, and the only thing prolonging this nightmarish waltz was an argument over a dollar which I don’t have.

“Do you have change for 50?” I asked with a sigh, somehow knowing the answer before he opened his mouth in response.

He dug both hands in his pockets and shook his head. We stared at each other dumbly for the next 20 seconds, as if we were both waiting for the other one to blink and cave in and reluctantly pull a wad of change out from some hidden stash. I offered to give him the five thousand kwacha and call him tomorrow to get him the remaining 10. I gave him my phone number and he made me wait with him at the car while he dialed, wanting to hear the buzzing in my pocket as proof that I was not taking him for a sucker.

Satisfied that the muzungu would make good on his 3-dollar debt, the driver took off and after half a dozen bangs on the Peace Corps compound’s imposing, corrugated steel gate, our half-asleep guard mumbled a hello and let us in. I introduced my traveling companion with what remaining formality I could muster, and we slogged across the shadowy back lawn and into the house. Our one month in Mansa District had begun.

The next day we loaded up a borrowed house bike and my beat-up Trek with Shoprite food, clean clothes and sheets, and a few indispensable amenities and set off going north up Kawambwa Road towards my village. We took a backroad to avoid riding on tarmac more than we had to. I was still not comfortable traveling with another biker, so we stayed on bush paths until we connected with the dirt road coming from Mwanachama. Our detour was significantly more washed out than when I had biked it coming to Mansa in early-December. Rains had begun full-force in the area while I was away, and the landscape glistened with new green growth and the washing away of dry season’s dust. The bush paths had become little more than dry riverbeds, carved out by the occasional downpour and turned to mud pits by vehicle tires. Sharp, menacing rocks now protruded from the medians, as the sand and dirt surrounding them had been eroded away leaving only the largest, most immobile pieces of earth sticking out like poorly set teeth.

The bridge over Chofoshi Stream was still being renovated, so we walked our bikes along a precarious footpath formed in the top of a levee. In several places the trail turned into a platform of old mealie meal bags filled with sand and stacked on top of culverts to let the water drain from the ditch. Workers wearing hard hats and blue jumpsuits stood knee-deep in black water bailing out the hole in the ground where the foundation for the new bridge would be poured. A wheezing diesel pump was helping the effort, with its extensively patched outlet hose purging dirty water over the side of the levee in heaves. I greeted the workers as I always did with a “mwabombeni mukwai bonse?” (“how are you all working?”). More eyes than normal seemed to follow me along the road up the dambo bank, likely the beginning of a month of gossip around the borehole about who this strange-looking short, curly-haired white girl was. We passed a few familiar villagers along the road and I got to try out my rehearsed explanation in Bemba:

“Ishina llyabo ni ba Tara. Bali icibusa balefuma ku America. Batandala ine.” (“Her name is Ba Tara. She is a friend who came from America. She is visiting me”).

My house smelled like mold, but there was no sign of leaks in the roof even after a nearly 3-week absence. Two rats were lying on their backs dead and our water tasted like bleach for a day from letting it sit half a month in jerry cans to kill anything green and slimy that felt like growing while I was gone. The thatch roof of the icimbusu (pit latrine) had started caving in at one corner. It was dark. It was dirty. It was small.

But we made it livable for two. Despite the fact that I had just come off a bender of gourmet, overpriced food and beds with clean sheets and box springs in swanky, white-washed, well-lit Lusaka and Livingstone hotel rooms with high ceilings, I remained optimistic. It wasn’t luxury by any measure, but it was mine; my space, and it was something I had made with my own hands and felt entitled to share. I have been many places in this country and have slept in many strange beds, and for some reason I would prefer my own rectangle of foam built for two on a rainy afternoon in the ville any day.

We spent nearly every moment of every day in each other’s presence. We could not have gotten a moment alone if we tried. Chores were divvied up. She started out sweeping the floor and taking her turn in the kitchen and watched with curious eyes as I explained the technique behind dropping the well bucket so that it would fill under its own weight. She mastered this by the end of her stay, and in the early afternoons I would confidently bid her a temporary farewell as she set off down the path away from my house with 15 iwes trailing after her, snatching the buckets from her hands and screaming with joy. She learned to light the brazier in about a week. Some volunteers go through all three months of community entry without being able to do this reliably. The children of course were her teachers at first, just like they were mine when I first arrived. They hung around my hut with a newfound interest in the affairs of Ba Steve, and occasionally made themselves useful, especially during teaching moments. We would sleep in until 11 a.m. and play rock ‘n’ roll music late at night and use each other as cushions. This was primetime Muzungu T.V.

“Rosaria”, “Paul”, “Geoffrey”, “Michael”. She started connecting names to kids’ faces; to demeanors. She learned which ones were “troublemakers” and which could speak some English. Even in light of all of their shortcomings and nauseating annoyances, my fondest memories of hosting that girl in this country were slow mornings when just a few kids would be sitting quietly with us on the porch as we drank tea and gazed out at the misty sunshine, saying nothing because what was there to say? We were existing in the moment, we had no place to go, the scenery was quiet and organic; everything we needed to survive was stuffed in plastic food drums in the kitchen or floating in a shallow well two huts down the road or hanging off the mango trees in my back yard. There was no internet to constantly steer. There were no cell phones demanding our half-attention. “Here and now, boys!” as the old saying goes. Life suddenly became so simple: cook, eat, sleep, work, clean, fetch water, ride bikes. Each activity was undertaken with a very basic, obvious end in sight. We would wash with hot water every night in my half-baked indoor shower, 10 liters for each of us. We bathed using leftover sunshine, the string of lights overhead powered through an alternator and battery charged earlier that day. In the mornings we would wait our turns to scoop out globs from the peanut butter jar and smear them on green apple slices.
We developed a schedule to visit my demonstration garden, where the maize was starting to form cobs, and mustard greens, onions, beans, basil and cabbages were ready to be picked. The rainstorms had knocked over all of the weighted down tomato plants growing like weeds since late-September and the leaves were starting to die, but the fruit remained pristine on the vine. They were under-ripe, so we took to laying out 12-or-so at a time on the counter below the kitchen window to turn more red and less acidic. We made bruschetta with dinner whenever we had anything resembling bread. We made pasta sauce to keep ahead of fruit flies and bruising. Some evenings, when I would feel particularly pleased with my food-growing ability, I would hold a halved firm, red tomato up to my guest and exclaim: “I grew this!”

There is no quicker way to a hippie Italian girl’s heart than tomatoes, onions and basil grown using chicken manure. We dug down to the roots of the maize stalks and crumbled the pungent stuff in rings, replacing the soil and hoping it would act like the synthetic fertilizer top-dressing used by most farmers at the stage when cobs begin to form. If it arrived on time, anyway. Ernest invited us out to his 4-acre maize field to bemoan the sluggishness at which the Zambian government has transported and dispensed the secondary fertilizer during the growing season. He would lose a large part of this year’s crop if he did not receive the micronutrient-rich pellets soon, and he could not afford to buy the 100 kilograms needed to save the field at the unsubsidized price. So he was forced to consider taking out a 500-pin personal loan from one of the more “well-off” villagers who lived in the “rich neighborhood” (iron roof sheeting, solar panels, stereos, leather shoes and furniture) with a 60 percent interest rate, paying back 800-pin when he sells his bags to the FRA in August. And Ernest was more fortunate than most. Our mutual tomato crop did very well in the soil made acidic by 10 years of using D-Compound growing the same plants in the same beds, and he was already selling the green fruits to a vendor in Mansa, transporting them out of the village by bicycle. He had made enough to buy some of the top-dressing he needed, but still looked out onto his dense jungle of leaves and stalks with a furrow in his brow, worried that so much backbreaking work would be for naught.

The waterfall became a retreat again. We played checkers on a large flat rock as the sun beat overhead and water lapped at our feet and then crashed down one level in the earth. Not a soul bothered us there. Somedays after getting our hands dirty in the garden we would take that left turn at the bush path’s intersection on a whim and sit along the falls’ rocky outcrop and watch the sky begin to cycle through the colors of the rainbow. We would sit there in silence, listening to trickling water and swaying grass and the first sounds of night.

To get our American fix, we made trips to Mansa to hang out at the provincial house and stay in three-star guest houses where the shower, toilet and air conditioning worked, but never all at once. Her introduction to nshima was on the patio of our local “international food” restaurant. The icilemba (beans) and umusalu (cooked greens) were palatable, but, alas, the nshima still had to grow on her.

“This doesn’t taste like anything!” she would bemoan. If she only stayed in this country a while longer she would come to understand that the sticky lumps of cornmeal are not meant to taste like anything, but rather are supposed to serve as an easily-digestible source of carbohydrates to keep your body digging furrows or walking half the day or carrying buckets of water on your head. Nshima is not food, it is power. The act of eating it is just the catalyst.

I grabbed at my serving of nshima until the plate was clear, slurping down the lumps soaked in salty chicken grease, and then started on hers’. When your diet exists of nothing else for months on end, you really learn to put it away. Then we crossed the street to Mansa’s Shoprite and bought all of those things I had foolishly convinced myself I could endure without: fruit juice, white chocolate, fresh-baked buns, barbecue sauce, cheese, yogurt. We ate like a king and queen in the ville, dinner always complemented with a platter of wholegrain crackers and tomato, onion, and cheese slices and slivers of avocado from the tree fruiting in the backyard of the provincial house. Many a morning started with me milling around in my underwear stepping over piles of rotting mangoes in the back of my house looking for those still perfectly ripe to cut up in our bowls of oatmeal, complete with honey and raisins and powdered milk. How strange it was to look across the breakfast table and see a pretty girl smiling back at me after hundreds of mornings spent with the second stool always vacant.

We played with the children as much as we could stand, and then resorted to lending them a section of climbing rope I had been carting around with me in this country since I arrived so they could built a rope swing in one of the neighborhood mango trees. This ingenious solution was offered by my doe-eyed companion, settling eight months of harassment by maintaining the physical closeness to the muzungu which the children all thrived upon, and at the same time removing them from my immediate compound and giving them something to focus their energies on. Sure, they would still punch and scream at one another, but they were no longer kicking down my door when they did. Brilliant.

With only about a week left to go before our mini-excursion to Samfya and then another dreaded night bus back to Lusaka, a halfway intoxicated man of high regard in Mwanachama took shelter one evening under the roof of my porch during a downpour. Some of the children were visiting with us as well, and after assessing the situation the drunk man began to start complaining about the kids. He asked me questions about how their presence at my house was affecting my work and leisure, and I answered him honestly. What I did not expect was for him to start lecturing the children and scaring them off one by one, even at one point resorting to slapping a little girl for insolence. Though I knew I should stand up for them, the lesser part of me kept repeating that this had been a long time coming for these kids. Before he departed he told us he would be back later that evening with Mwanachama’s headwoman and headmen from the surrounding villages. I must admit this drunken vow seemed like so many others I had received during my time here, so I thought little of it. But, sure enough, half an hour later half a dozen people showed up to my door carrying flashlights and umbrellas. and to them I said my piece:

“I would like you to talk to the parents of the children living around me. Tell them I want to be left alone in the mornings and evenings, and to limit the number of children allowed to be here during the day. I have an American guest here, and more than anything we just want some privacy.” This was translated into Bemba by the same fiery drunk man who took up my cause earlier.

There was some scattered conversation and words of agreement in Bemba and I bid the group goodnight not really knowing what to expect. Apparently the mob wasted no time. An hour later the still evening air was broken by the sound of screaming and the high pitched snap of flesh hitting flesh. The cries of children came in waves from all directions. And suddenly that was that. That next morning and for every morning after there was no more banging on my door or little black hands trying to wiggle their way through the mosquito netting lining my windows. Children no longer stood in a semicircle around my porch gawking, begging for cups, water, “sweeties”, frisbees, radios. All the fighting, crying and begging was being done in someone else’s yard, and the sounds came through the trees as only a quiet rumble. They would pass us along the footpath and offer the sincerest of greetings, but would keep on walking. To my partial chagrin and partial elation, fear and pain had solved something in this world.

 

- 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."