Christ's Mass

It seems that nearly everyone wants to know what happens in Zambia for Christmas.  And I'm afraid that the folks who really want to know are likely to be really disappointed with the answer.

A little context may help.

One afternoon, Mukimba stopped by the project house's cooking shelter and reclined on one of the chairs.  He looked at me sideways, long arms lanking behind his head, and asked, "Why do you celebrate Christmas?"

I assumed that this question was to try to trip me up into betraying some sort of Western materialist philosophy, so knowing his devotion, I answered quickly, "It is the celebration of the birth of Christ."

"But how do we know that it is December 25th?"

"We don't.  It likely wasn't.  We just picked a day and went with it."

"So it comes from man, not from God."

"Of course."

"That is why we in the Seventh Day Church do not celebrate Christmas."

There are many Christian demoninations in Zambia, or the parts of it that I've seen, but it is true that Seventh Day Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses are very prominent — and none of these denominations recognize Christmas as anything but a secular celebration more concerned with business than the Bible.  This, in fact, is precisely Mukimba's argument; that we shouldn't observe any religious rite not specifically sanctioned in the Bible.  I asked him about the Festival of Booths, and he responded in that delightfully brilliant way that some people have of deflecting the question leaving you uncaring that you never got an answer.

There is Christmas, though, and in the high churches (Roman, Anglican) there is a sense of it really being Christ's Mass — that there are feast days for saints and other occasions, and the birth of Christ is one of them; not nearly so important as the Resurrection, of course, but a good excuse for incense and candles and music.

As for the secular world; every now and again you might see a sparsely decorated Christmas tree, usually in establishments that cater to the out-of-country crowd.  Christmas music is occasionally heard in some shops the week of Christmas, but it's by no means universal.  There is some reference on television to Christmas gifts, but you get the sense that this is not at all an important element of the season for most Zambians (besides the fact that, for the past week, the call from the street has changed from "Mzungu! I'm poor.  Give me money," to "Mzungu! Christmas! Give me a present.")

The day of Christmas was a fairly typical Sunday.  Some shops were closed, others were open; the traffic in Kitwe died down, but not appreciably; the Christmas-keeping churches were not, as far as I could tell, any more or less busy than on any other Sunday.  Occasionally someone lit off fire crackers; and there were advertisements about parties at various night clubs on the Eve.

People who have known me for a while know that none of this is especially disappointing to me.  For if the outward signs of Christmas were sparse, so was the inward turmoil.  No one was stressed out about preparations, at least none that I encountered.  No one was worried about how they would afford gifts; in fact, the entire notion of gift-giving seems to be lost in a culture where families and friends share every material element so liberally.  Likewise, the notion of family time is lost in a culture that celebrates family and friends every day.  And I don't know for sure, but I think the notion of a "Blue Christmas" would be lost, too, in a land where tragedy and disease and poverty are so common that there is no Norman Rockwell normal against which to juxtapose.

It gives rise to a purity of intention, or something that looks like it.  People who believe that there was a Saviour born for their sake get to celebrate that birth if they wish, or they choose not to, and those who do not so believe continue hence.

Hitch

Don't ride with someone who is driving in the snow.  Don't ice-skate without a helmet.  Don't start the gas barbecue unless someone is watching you at least ten metres back.  Don't get into any boat unless you're wearing a CSA-approved life preserver.  Don't walk the streets of Toronto after dark.

What might a person in Zambia tell a friend who is going to spend a year in Canada?  I have no idea.  But I suppose that a well-researched list of warnings might just do the trick to keep the person safe.  All good advice, perhaps, if you're not living in Canada.

Don't wash your clothes with river water.  Don't eat food from the street.  Don't drink the tap water.  Don't go outside without bug spray.

Splendid advice that I heard again and again, mostly from well-read people who had never spent a minute in Zambia.

Don't take rides from strangers.

Hitch-hiking is not only common practice in Zambia, but truly the only consistently affordable and reliable means of transportation.  The thumbs-up sign is fairly rare to see; usually, people flap their wrists at on-coming traffic.  Everyone's got their own thing, though.  For me, I usually hold my hand out and partly bow, making eye-contact with the driver; it works as well as any other method I have seen.

I have ridden with a variety of drivers, all men.  About half were driving transports to or from the mine.  One was a family vehicle; they charged double the typical rate.  Once was a businessman in an otherwise empty SUV; he charged nothing.

One truck driver, referring to his wife in the back seat (unspeaking, likely unsure of English), said to me, "You see, I travel with my wife; you think this is OK?"

"Yes, absolutely."

"But you, I see, you do not travel with your wife."

I laughed, "I know."

"You are perhaps jealous of me?"

"Yes I AM," I said, and assured him that when Kirsten arrives, there would be nothing that would take us apart ever again.

"Yes, I think that is good," he said, taking a long drink of Savanna, a locally brewed cider.

"You have the right idea," I said.

"Yes, I do."

The most frequent question: "How many languages are there in Canada?"

Followed by the very similar question: "How many tribes are there in Canada?"

I answer this question honestly.  I say that there are many languages, perhaps as many or more than Zambia.  But many of them are hardly spoken anymore.  The English also colonized Canada, but never really left.  And even today, languages and tribes are being lost.  I also tell them that within Canada, people speak languages from every country in the world.

It is an elaborate answer, but not only is it truer than saying "English and French", but it is also very easily understood by the people here.  The idea of only English and French existing in Canada is inconceivable to a people for whom even the uneducated classes speak nine languages fluently.  But the idea that the European hegemon managed to assimilate or repress the Canadian languages is very plausible.  Most of what I describe about Western culture seems rather terrible to most rural folks that I have spoken to here; but describing various First Nations cultures seems to resonate, to the point of not particularly impressing them.

Early on, I tried writing during the hour-long trip to Solwezi.  This was an epic fail.  The road is so bumpy and full of cracks and potholes that it is impossible to make out anything that was written, and anything that was was a stream of consciousness being disturbed.  With the countryside now becoming my norm, however, I have sometimes taken to reading on the trip when it is clear that there is a language barrier and conversation is neither feasible nor really welcome.  This too can be challenging, but a mere matter of getting used to new parameters.

I don't have the name of a single person from whom I've hitched a ride; it's not something that seems to happen.  All are but brief exchanges, signs of generousity or mutual benefit, all a part of the rhythm.  I don't suppose it's any more ridiculous than driving in the snow, after all, with the same desired effect, and with greater possibility of something meaningful along the way.

Mzungu

In less than a month, the word causes my skin to bristle.  It is usually used harmlessly enough, I need to emphasize, but I hate it anyway.  It creeps out of the cattails on the exuberant mouths of innocent children, it is announced in the alleys of the markets as I pass through, it is said under the breaths of women to one another as I pass by.

White person.

English person.

Person with money in a poor land.

Does not belong here.

I am an unabashed liberal, and I have worked hard to eliminate racism from my lexicon and prejudice from my behaviour.  Such a task is not easy for any person in the world, for we are all born with the intrinsic sense of “other”.  But working on it can be done and it has been done by many, many people.  And I have stated great pride in how Canada and Canadians have shown similar resolve in their purging of discriminatory elements.  Of course there is a long way to go, of course it isn’t perfect yet, but aren’t things so much better than they ever have been?

To which some of my friends have told me, to my great frustration, that I will never truly know what it is like until I am the only visible minority in a place.

Now, the other SWSC volunteers are home for Christmas, and so are most ex-pats from Canada, the United States, Australia and South Africa.

Here is what it’s like.

I have experienced no patent, malicious racism in Zambia, ever.  But everyone is constantly conscious of what I am.

To taxi drivers, I can afford extra fare.

To waiters in higher-end restaurants, I deserve extra attention and care.

To the staff of venues serving cheap local food like deep fried mystery fritters and Fantas, I am eyed with suspicion; as though it was only by mistake that I walked in there.

To beggars I have money to share.

To random men, I must work for the mines and make ten times what their brothers and cousins are making for the toil they bear.

One said, “Welcome to our land, you there,”

                until I told him that I taught in a Kaonde village, after which he decided that I was a friendly and harmless enough novelty, and we talked about the road graters that he drove that were like those that were made in the town where I grew up.

The women pounding rocks on the side of the road just stare;

until I put my hand to my chest and call “Moi-nay” in the traditional Kaonde greeting, and then they chatter amongst themselves about my quaintness.

I have learned how to greet and ask questions and provide answers until the folks I meet in Solwezi believe that I’m one of the good ones.  A good mzungu.  Not here to exploit the wealth under the rich soils of Zambia, but here to help its children seize their own power.

One of the good white people.

One of the good rich people in a poor land.

And of course, they’re at least partially correct.

But I am still mzungu.

And I find my lips wanting spontaneously to form those words that seem so cliché in the West: “If only people could see past the colour of each others’ skin!”

The people have been wonderful; this post is not a complaint.  It is a statement that I get it, in a way that I never did before.  Racism is everywhere, when it’s not really there.  Even when it’s systemically eliminated in all of its overt forms, it lurks in the shadows.  Visible minorities must be afforded special care if only to compensate for an undeniable and quite forgivable element of human nature, the archetypal sense of “other” that we share as brothers and sisters in humanity.

Before I wrote this post, I read that mzungu is a word in a number of Bantu languages meaning, literally, “one who wanders aimlessly”.  At least in the village, in contrast to the city, when people label me mzungu, this seems to be what they mean.  I can live with that.

Of Monitors and Malaria

Under the straw dining shelter, watching an unboiling pot over a slow brazier, sawdust falling like light snow sent by termite sprites, I told Keith that I saw something very large and reptilian on the road that same day.

                “Its head was on one side of the road, and its tail touched the other side,” I said, “Could it have been a monitor lizard?”

                “Oh no,” said Keith, “It was a charm”.

                “A what?”

                “A charm.  It is a sign,” he said wide-eyed.

                “A good sign, right?”

                “No, it is not a good sign,” Keith said flatly.

                “Are you sure it wasn’t a monitor lizard?”

                “Did it have a man’s face?”

                “No.  It had a lizard’s face.”

                “Did it say anything to you?”

                “Well, I wasn’t close enough to hear...” I shook my head quickly to exorcise the spell, “No.”

                “Maybe it was just a monitor lizard.”

                “I see.”

                A couple of nights later, I asked Keith about monitor lizards.  “Are there many around here?”

                “Here?  No.  You will not see them,” he said, and before I could protest with my own experience, he explained, “but by the Basic School,” referring to the school less than five kilometres away, “yes, even there are many.”

                “Are they dangerous?”

                “No, they are not hurting you.  Maybe it will knock you down with its tail; it is very powerful.  But that’s it.  And they taste like fish,” he smirked.

                “You’ve eaten them?” I smiled.

                “Yes, but I did not know what it was.  If I had known, I would not have eaten.”

                Keith is a volunteer with Same World Same Chance who hails from Kitwe.  He has been with the project for about eight months, but you would swear that he grew up in the village.  Though he comes from the city, he perfectly knows the ways of the people of Kibombomene.  He is also genius with technical matters.  He once constructed a set of speakers for an iPod out of a couple of cardboard boxes and various other materials he found kicking around the project headquarters.  At twenty-one, he has designs to go to university to become a pathologist, but he has to pass the Zambian government Grade 12 leaving exams for science first.  I have seen them.  I wouldn’t be able to pass them; they are so full of spelling mistakes, technical errors on diagrams, improper nomenclature and misleading questions that I think one would need a profound misunderstanding of science in order to pass.  There is no question in my mind that he would be university-bound on scholarship if he had grown up in the West.  Ironically though, and sadly, I fear that if he had, he wouldn’t make nearly so good a pathologist as he might having grown up here, needing to be so resourceful.

                I have been here for three weeks now, and I (wisely, I think) took all of that time to try to get to know the day-to-day of this place before starting into the classroom.  After all, how could I help the children to name their worlds if I didn’t have a sense of what those worlds were?  The ESL books don’t come with lessons on the English words for the steps of starting a brazier fire or cooking nshima or laying mud mortar.  And I won’t allow English to be some mysterious language used to describe only mysterious things.  It will start as merely another way to talk about what the children already know.  It will, I hope, culminate with students being able to describe and give instructions for some of the tasks that interest them.

                Yes, grand schemes, and I was going to start today.  I had the plan.  I had the teaching aids.  I had the cues all mapped out in my head.  And then...

                “Vance, I think I am having malaria.”

                Keith does not look well.  It would be impossible ever to describe him as lethargic, but he is missing the exuberance that he normally exudes.

                In the West, the word “malaria” is grouped with words like “plague” and “polio”.  But here, malaria happens.  There is a pill for it.  Of course, the nearby medical clinic has not stocked this particular pill for months; we need to go fifty-five kilometres to Solwezi.

                Bushimbe and Katamfya, two of the SWSC teachers, come with a posse of children at about that time to gather the food for the breakfast program.  They greet me warmly.  I explain to them that I need to accompany Keith to the hospital in Solwezi, and I cannot start teaching today.  “It is not a problem,” they smile.

                “I need to make sure Keith is safe.  He might have malaria.”

                “Oh malaria.  Heh heh,” says Katamfya.  Then Keith and the teachers have a brief exchange in Kaonde.

                It is a two kilometre walk to the highway, were we will hitch-hike into Solwezi.  Not five-hundred metres from the house, a worker comes to Keith.  I don’t understand Kaonde, but I hear Keith explain that he has malaria.  The exchange continues.

                “Vance, I am just going back to the house to get this man a slasher.”

                “Keith — we need to get you to the hospital.”

                “OK, I will hurry,” he says, and before I can protest, he is running, head throbbing, muscles aching from the blood parasite, backpack which he won’t let me carry weighing on his spine.  A few minutes later, he is back with the slasher, looking no worse than he had done before.  It is humbling.  I have a caffeine withdrawal headache that keeps me from wanting to open my eyes.

                A hundred metres later, Katamfya approaches Keith about money for the breakfast program for tomorrow.  I can tell that the very act of taking out his wallet is a chore.  We move on.

                Near the highway, one of the women of the village hails Keith and asks him, so he told me, about purchasing a goat.  Keith explains that he has malaria.

                Switching to English, perhaps for my benefit, or perhaps to bridge the Kaonde-Bemba language barrier between her and Keith, she says, “No, even you are not a doctor; you cannot say you have malaria.  You say you are sick.”

                “I know it is malaria,” says Keith.  Keith could tell me how many times he has had malaria; more than he can count.  But the argument ensues.

                I am not accustomed to all of the social graces of Kibombomene yet, and some I may never adopt.  I can perceive a nameless root in this collective consciousness from which shoots both notions that I can take the day off without notice, and that Keith has a lethal illness, and neither bear any fruit of concern.  I know well that I should be involved in the conversation with this woman, but I am at the road trying to flag down a vehicle.

                Keith is now safely at the hospital and I am at a nearby lodge drinking coffee and writing this post.  He’ll get his meds, he’ll come and collect me, and we’ll return to the village together later this afternoon.  Hopefully it will be Roger who takes us back again — by extremely good fortune, he, the profusely generous South African businessman who was my host in Kitwe, was passing by Kibombomene and took us into Solwezi.

                For me so far, the most significant adjustment in this place is learning to trust its rhythm.  Things happen, gently coaxed but unforced by human imagination.  There are many ways in which this culture is more advanced than my own; Western culture operates on the simple principle of fear of stagnation.  Nothing is stagnant here, but every action is a part of a story ten-thousand years long.  Every single man, woman and child whom I have met understands something that they know fully that I can never fully know, they smile sympathetically at my muzungu impatience, they permit and even facilitate it, and I am learning to smile back in polite acknowledgment of my own limitations.

Basic School

In Kibombomene, there is a Basic School, which is a government-run elementary school that goes up to Grade 9 (the extent of elementary education here).  Grades 10, 11 and 12 are usually user-pay in Zambia, and one must pass the Grade 9 government board exams to qualify for entrance to them.  The Same World Same Chance school exists in part to provide that secondary school program that would otherwise be completely unavailable to the sustenance agriculturalists living in this village, and in part to ensure that students are able to pass the exams to begin with.  As such, we have a strong relationship and partnership with the state-run counterpart.  So after more than two weeks here, learning the rhythm, making plans for the ways in which I can best help, I decided it was time to meet the Headmaster of the Kibombomene Basic School.

I walked through dense grasses and trees, past thrity foot ant hills and sprawling cassava plantations, along the too-narrow baking highway until after four kilometres I reached the Headmaster's house.  From the highway, there is a red mud structure with an unglassed window, like an abandoned shop, and a fence made of reeds with a splendid grass archway leading to the yard.

"Welcome!  Welcome, my friend," came the jovial voice and smile before I was blinded by the yellow corporate T-shirt for MTN, a local cell phone company.  I barely noticed half a dozen or so dusty clothed men camouflaged against the russet dried mud, sitting in the shade.  The man in yellow practically ran to shake my hand in the complex way that is done here, "I am Wilson.  I am happy to have you here.  Please, sit."

I sat on a wooden bench with some of the other men who may have been in audience with him.  In front of us was a table-top nailed onto a stump, and upon it, three or four plastic glasses with a milky-looking brown liquid that was poured from a red plastic facsimile of a tea pot.  Wilson wasted no time in explaining, "Here we sell this Zambian Brew," I could hear the capitalization, "It is a fundraiser for the school.  My family and I, even we brew this ourselves from corn and sorghum.  We sell it for a thousand kwatcha," about twenty cents.

"If I purchased one, would you have one with me?"

"Mm.mmm," a tonal Zambian response that translates roughly into "Uh-huh".

The brew is very difficult to describe, but I will try.  Suppose that someone poured a pitcher of stale beer and left it in the sun all day until it was flat and warmer than the air.  Then someone threw in a little corn meal and let it soak; and perhaps stirred in a little bit of wood glue.  "It's excellent," I said, "I love it".  When men talk business together for the first time, it is always best for the initiate to match the patron drink-for-drink.

It took no time for the conversation to switch to education.  We laughed at the similarities of the public school systems in Zambia and Ontario — new initiatives like new socks, changed well before the effectiveness of the older systems can be demonstrated; difficulties in implementing truly good new ideas (or truly good old ideas that were never popular with the faculty); perennial lack of funding for programs, but seemingly infinite funding for non-classroom infrastructure.  And, of course, the stinging sense that while the public can agree in principle that education is a good thing, no one seems able to come to consensus about its ultimate aims.  Parents who like the idea of their kids being educated but have no ambition to be a part of that process.

So the chief challenge in Zambia, if what emerged from the conversation between Wilson and me is any indication, can be reduced to the fact that students need to write these board exams.  I've seen them.  In the first place, they're only in English, and the English level of children at Kibombomene is very low.  Secondly, the tests themselves are not constructed well; one must understand English at a very nuanced level to have a hope of knowing what some of the questions are asking.  I doubt many Ontario students could pass them.

The result of the conversation was a very cordial mutual invitation to work together to develop and coordinate our programs so that they were complementing each other.

What is the ultimate goal of education?  Capital worth?  Understanding of the world?  Striving for peace?

All true, but none true enough.  The goal is, or ought to be, emancipation.  Providing a choice.  Allow people to name their worlds and move within them freely, and let them make up their own minds.

Call me an optimist, but five Zambian Brews later and I think we're closer to that ideal for the people of Kibombomene.

Constellations

Clear night in Africa, and Kibombomene is washed in the gentleness of the illumination of ten-thousand stars.  Something surreal when I slide my foot through slippery mud to the side of the house; it is Orion, sure enough, but here he is not the sentinel of darkness and bitter winds.  There seems to be a little asterism, like a row of medals, on his chest that I have never seen before, and then something in my stomach wretches when I see that he is upside-down.

In two heartbeats I see him as I always have, but with his legs in the air, doing an awkward hand-stand or cartwheel on the Zambian treeline, his dagger about to fall out of its sheath.  I suck air through my nose and shut my eyes, searching for the nerve to look for the first time at what is beyond his feet, past that point where his toes point, the point where my own toes once pointed in the New World night.

But I don't decide to open my eyes; it is done for me by some power outside of myself, and I see the whole alien sky, new shapes and connect-the-dot rhythms playing out in some dance a million years long.  Unlike Orion, they can be connected in any way that I choose.  My mind is not drawn to any truth that my legends have told me that they convey.  And I am left in sudden damp post-rain chill wondering if I should connect those dots, or if I should learn what the people here see when they look in their formless direction, or if I should just let them dance.

Mikimba

Mikimba is one of the elders in the village, and an important ally to the Same World Same Chance project.  He has been with it from the beginning; its present incarnation is his brainchild, and he believes strongly in its ability to build capacity for Kibombomene and all of Solwezi East.  I met him as he preached at the front of the church, wearing a black three-piece suit and a sharp silver tie that would have easily given him fashion currency on King West.  His face is severe as he speaks and dangerous when he laughs, but it melts into a kind of dusty dusk as he kneels and claps twice to greet villagers with the respect that is culturally afforded to him.

I went to Mikimba’s house on Sunday to introduce myself more casually to him, to discuss ideas and to better understand the culture to which I had come.  In the fifty metres from the highway I was greeted along the rusty mud path by no fewer than four or five of his sons or nephews.  I passed the little shed where wood was being cut, and waved at the women cooking in the straw shelter behind the house before going inside.

Bricks in Kibombomene are made locally; red clay is quarried from the gargantuan ant hills and kiln-fired until hardened.  Houses made of brick and cement mortar, with cement floors, are owned by the wealthiest people in the village, of which there are not many.  Mikimba is one; he has made a decent living cutting a local tree, whose name eludes me, that is made into splendid hardwood doors and furniture.  In this part of Zambia, forestry could never be considered intensive; Mikimba cut this wood and ferried it to vendors on a bicycle until he became too old to do so.  At about fifty-five years of age, Mikimba has exceeded Zambian life expectancy by nearly fifteen years.

The inside of Mikimba’s house is an extraordinary kind of dark; he has solar panels that power LED lights, which seem to only light themselves and little of the inside.  Past the dining space which seats six at a hand-made table, he has a living alcove cluttered with plush furniture, a television, dozens of unidentifiable electrical apparatuses, and a small coffee table; the walls are adorned with doily-like curtains. Above the door to the rest of the house there is a shelf that supports a large wet cell battery, always connected to the solar panels.  This battery is how I charge my computer.

When Mikimba emerged from the darkness beyond that door, he was wearing a black T-shirt with some sort of flashy corporate logo; I struggled to decide if it suited him better or worse than the three-piece.  He invited me to sit, and he did the same, veritably draped over the arm of his chair, forearms supporting his head as he spoke.

Mikimba is a paleoconservative if there ever was one, and as I sat in dialogue with him about the future of the village I couldn’t help but think that this must be a common paradox; hyper-liberal Westerners coming to work in hyper-traditional settings.  Of course, when it comes to the will of the people of the village, I have no desire to impose any unwelcome foreign ideas.  But it occurs to me that the ideas of the village are, by definition, the ideas of Mikimba.

And on the way home from a very pleasant evening and conversation, and all cordialities extended and accepted on both sides, I couldn’t help but wonder what it is, exactly, that afford an elder respect and deference.  Is it just a way of congratulating someone for getting old?

As Mikimba and I walked, I felt very sharply (though I had known it intellectually before, I hadn’t felt it), that there was not a single person that I had seen in the village who was older than Mikimba; few were older than I.  And then it occurred to me: Mikimba had a long life because he abstained from extramarital sex and excessive drink and excessive leisure and other such sins that are deadly in this society and economy.  Villagers don’t articulate it this way, of course; they simply remind me that in Zambia there is a “culture of respect”, which is simply a way of describing how younger people defer to older people as a matter of principle.  But of course they do.

Welcome

Apparently, it is rare for the internet network to go down in the village, much less for two days.  But my first two days in the village were network-free.  And here is where my values betray me; for all that I am ready to surrender many of the comforts of Canada for the opportunity to do something valuable and for the opportunity to experience a new freedom of self-sufficiency, I have on Achilles' Heel, and it is more tender than I knew; I still require that connection.  I hope that I am not deluded when I say that it is not an addiction; it is, however, a weakness in some respects.  But is it any weakness to wish more than anything to communicate with people that I love, when I should theoretically be able to but cannot?  There is also a lot of work that I am doing that affords me the opportunity to be here; that cannot be neglected.  To serve is a privilege, one that I pay for through labour that is sold in the West.  It is important work.  Do I sound like an addict justifying my addiction?

But to the village.  Yesterday, I attended a service of the Seventh Day Baptist church (as a matter of culture rather than faith, I should mention; my faith is complex and seems to be best expressed in the Anglican church; Baptist is a little distant from where I'm at), where the main preacher is also a chief sponsor and director of the Same World Same Chance project; his name is Mikimba.  The church is in Kibombomene proper, and to get there I walked five kilometres through an open area that seems to be an old riverbed, now overgrown; through cassava plantations; through old maize crops; and along the Solwezi-Chingola highway.  At the highway, children and women, and the occasional cluster of men, were there.  They are Goderich-friendly; if you have been to Goderich from out of town, you will know what I mean; at first I am eyed suspiciously, but then greeted widely when I greet first.  The only difference is that in Goderich, one is not greeted with such teeth.  The colours here are in stark contrast to one another and seem to taste like rich food, like barbecue with thick sauce.

The church is a russet building of one room, perhaps the size of a classroom.  I sit with Kennedy on a hard wooden bench; Marissa sits on the other side with the women, wisely choosing a seat at the very back so that she can lean backward.  Mikimba acknowledges me, and asks Kennedy to come up and translate his sermon (he speaks it in Luvale).  It is about the dead man who was thrown into Elisha's tomb and immediately came to life; not through any power of Elisha, as he was just a man, but through the power of God; just as, indeed, through the power of God, people no longer have to fear "we whites", but that we might actually sit together in the same church.  Then the people sang; their sound was improbable and did not seem at all to be connected to the small bodies with mouths hardly opened that was producing it.  The sound of an African choir in Canada that practices for months is there in this church, untrained, unrehearsed, spontaneous.

Then, a choir from a neighbouring church processed to ours, in something like a uniform.  Their sound is more impressive again.  They also bring a "guitar", which is an instrument about nine feet in length with three strings; the base is big enough that it can be sat on while the instrument is played.

I am asked to the front to be welcomed.  I do not understand the welcome; it is mostly in Luvale.  But then the choir erupts again and so do the people in song; I am asked to dance with them and I do.  We all dance together, and everyone comes up and welcomes me one by one, grasping their forearm, shaking my hand and bowing, or hugging me on one side, then the other.  The sound is cacaphonous and impossible, the smell is rich but not unpleasant and reminds me of dust and work, the callouses are softer than office skin.  Mikimba grabs my hand and we dance together as drums and bass guitar play, low to the ground, a move I learned at a Congolese club in Montréal, and he seems impressed.

The service continues; it is four hours altogether.  I go back to Mikimba's house and have a lunch of nshima, rape (it is a vegetable here with a terrible name but terrific flavour), eggs and fresh chicken.  Wonderful.  My laptop has finished charging using Mikimba's solar system; but alas, no internet, and I am getting very anxious.  No one knows, at this point, that I have arrived safely and that all is well.  I think to hitch to Solwezi right then, but Mikimba wisely points out that by the time I get there everything would be closed; best to wait until morning.  I agree.

Marissa lets me use her phone with little time left to call my parents and ask them to spread the message that I am well.  We walk back to the house; we eat popcorn and I drink a cider, and then I am in bed by eight o'clock.

The mud hut will cost about $40 to build, and another $2 to clear enough land for a 25 m by 50 m garden.  The soil here is rich and wonderful; anything can grow, and if it is watered, it can grow all year round.  The people are wonderful; news spread about the church and my dancing, and now there are no more suspicious looks; the wide and deep greatings happen immediately.

There is so much potential in this land where survival is easy and there are no distractions and few preconceived ideas.  The future of education may well come from Africa.

But there is a lot to do.

Nshima

I wrote this two evenings ago, but had to wait until now to post it. Much is new since I have written it, but I have left it intact. -- V

Riding on a luxury coach, six hours for what amounts to fifteen dollars, past fifteen foot ant hills and mud huts and open fires and forest that has the surreal property of being thick but letting you see for miles, flat russet save for the occasional mountain, and suddenly I am in Africa.  Butterflies that look like swallowtails, but they are electric blue; trees that look like locusts, but their flowers are red; birds the likes of which I have never seen; I recognize no species save for the cattails (which may, indeed, not be a species at all, but a genus or family; I have no idea).

We took the coach to Kitwe, stopping about half way for a snack (in my case, a Hunter’s cider.  The patron, however, did not take the lid off for me, so I had to jury-rig a bottle opener using one suitcase lock cantilevered off of another suitcase lock; I haven’t had beer on a bus since teachers’ college).  At Kitwe, Roger, an affable South African ex-pat, picked us up at the station, and brought us to the Mona Lisa.  He and his colleague, another South African named Leon, ate a last “city” dinner with us, which we tried to make involve meat and cheese.  Roger works for a successful company that supplies mines and oil operations with machinery; we stayed at his home which was luxurious, even by Canadian standards.

The next morning we purchased a few groceries — I had my first Zambian banana — and I tried to purchase a coffee at a café.

“Our coffee machine is broken,” the keeper offered a non-apology, “All we have is filtered coffee”.

Café filtre.  Right.  That’s not normal most places, I remind myself, even in Québec.  “Perfect.  Can I get that to take out please?”

“We are out of take-out cups”.

Something about this land makes sense to me; that a coffee shop could have neither its main product nor the vessels in which to put it, and no one is panicking.  No one is frantically calling this place or that place; no one is having a bad day at work.  The experience was worth the withdrawal headache.

Anton, a friend of Roger’s, dropped us at the West exit of town, on the road towards Chingola.  There I hitched my first ride (on my first attempt, and after Candace and Marissa had no luck... beginner’s luck, as they say).  Two business men in a pickup truck took us as far as Chingola, at the road that heads west towards Solwezi.  There, a husband-wife-child sedan gathered us and took us, quite crowded, the rest of the way.  Along the way there were sporadic vendors selling deep brown eggs, potatoes, and mushrooms the size of umbrellas.

The drop-off for the house is actually “Kibombomene 2”; the main village is another kilometre down the road.  We stopped off at a suburb of Kibo, about a dozen mud huts right on the highway.  From there, Sean and Keith, two local volunteers, helped us carry luggage for about a mile into the thick subtropical bush, towering trees on all sides, ant hills ranging in size from two to twenty feet, conical snails the size of your fist on the muddy path; I immediately noticed the lack of mosquitoes — apparently they only come out at night.

In the evening, I had my first truly Zambian meal: nshima, with two "relishes" (relish is anything that is not nshima or rice, basically).  The first relish was made with a cabbage that we grow here, eggplant, onions and garlic; the second was made with tofu, tomato, onion and salt.  Tomatoes and onions are two quintessential Zambian foods; they go in everything.  Nshima is a corn flour that is boiled until so thick that it forms a dough in your hands.  It is served in lumps the size of your fist, or, I suppose, the size of a Zambian snail.  One washes one’s hands in a bowl of water first.  Nshima is eaten by forming a small piece into your palm and concaving it, then using the thumb to scoop up relish into it; it is dipped in a sprinkle of salt on the plate and put into the mouth all at once.

Nshima is delicious and filling.  It seems to expand in the stomach; one does not need much of it.  I had two lumps two hours ago, and am full.

I am feeling deeply at peace.  To grow a garden and build a small house here is very cheap; it is possible to be completely self-sufficient.  I have seen the garden, and everything grows lush and green and very big.  I am also, conversely, feeling very anxious.  My internet is not working here (I am writing this on Word to transfer later); all indications are that internet will work soon, but it doesn’t work now.  I want to tell everyone that I’m OK.  I want to share this story.

But I am incomplete right now and feeling very lost.  In the future I will share all that is meant by that.  For now, suffice to say that there is a greater adventure that awaits me than coming to the wilds of Africa and beginning a new life.

Meantime, I have met one of the local teachers, who has already tried to teach me some Kaonde.  It hasn’t exactly taken; I look forward to everything about the challenge that is my very existence in this extraordinary land.

Lusaka

They say that you cannot judge Zambia by Lusaka; they are not the same thing at all.  And I suppose that this is true in many places, for neither can you judge Newfoundland by St. John’s, nor Ontario by Toronto, nor the United States by New York, nor Scotland by Edinburgh.

But go to St. John’s, or Toronto, or new York, or Edinburgh, and I defy you to deny that these places are situated in precisely the part of the world in which they ought to be.  The spirits of those cities may not be identical to the land that bore them, but they are clearly emergent from them.

So on the eve of my long and, I am certain, arduous foray north for Kibombomene, I hope that you might forgive me for forming my first impressions of Zambia by moving through her capital.

Colour is the first revelation.  Think about a television set, after someone has pressed the “reset” button on the picture menu, and everything looks a little grey.  I did not realize that I had spent most of my life in that grey, with a few moments of extraordinary colour.  Here, the colour is brilliant all the time, like someone has readjusted the television to maximum colour and contrast.  I don’t know how else to describe it, rather than to say perhaps that here it is like the paint has not yet dried, much less faded.

The heat is somehow not oppressive.  The tree frogs, however, are as noisy as a busy city highway, and their song pulsates, cresting like whitecaps periodically before retreating to the still-deep drone.  The crickets are ubiquitous and anxious.  Lizards scamper to and fro like mice, with that same periodicity as you might find on a walk on a country road.

Lusaka is perhaps, if not a world-class city, more culturally diverse than many of our own.  The Indian food is comparable to the food in India (with the coriander seeds not-quite powder-fine), the Thai food is nicely balanced, and there is even fast food (but no American chains, except for Subway).  But I have already endeavoured to go after local cuisine, and this morning had a dish made of salted, dehydrated fish about an inch long (eyes, bones and everything intact), fried with tomato and onion in butter and served over rice.  It was exactly how you might imagine it which, from my perspective, was wonderful.

I have spent the past couple of days catching up on work, reading and discussing ideas, and staying in touch with loved ones at home.

Here is a riddle for you: If you have the choice between all things being possible, albeit so slowly that you may never see them, or to have large dreams curtailed but smaller ones granted with great haste, which would you choose?  Or, if you had to work five times as hard for five times less money for the privilege of not needing money, would you take it?  If you could stand on the shoulders of giants, or start at the beginning for folks centuries hence to grow just as tall but in a different shape, what would you do?

I have made my choices.  I am not afraid of them being wrong, or right, or misguided.

Tomorrow, I embark on the bus for many long hours north, to Kibombomene, my final destination.

Terra Incognita

Unknown land.  Internal arrangement undetermined.  Here there be dragons.

The Dark Continent.

What is it about one enormous mass of land, supporting countless hundreds of legacies and ethnicities and cultures, that has created such singular grotesque intrigue in the imaginations of those progenitors of the modern West?

Eden.  Land of Lucy.  Where it all began.

There is another side of the same coin, equally obscured by mystery, but this time the obfuscation is accomplished by elevation rather than fog.  Somewhere deep in our collective unconscious, we all seem to have a sense that we have a genealogical home on Earth.

Football and rugby.  Rand and kwatcha.  God and zebras and endless music.

The day to day of a billion souls under solid ground and a blue sky.

Eighty hours prior to my departure, I sit in this coolish room damp from Huron and pre-winter winds, wondering if it is possible or desirable to tease apart the stereotype, and the archetype, and the reality that is Africa.  Like the awkward man in the Toto song, I have these images and legends and they're all from books, because the folks who have been there all seem to have the same look in their eyes; none of them can quite tell me what it is that I will come to know.

And I'm acutely aware that it doesn't really matter, because in a week, God willing, I will be on African soil.  As I am going to a village that is home to fifty-thousand, I cannot discover anything but shrouded shadows of myself; and yet, somewhere in the depths of the spirit of that land, I suspect that there could be discovery in a fashion that I cannot presently imagine.  All my life I have suspected that there may be answers for which there are no questions, and right now I have a naive feeling that some of those answers might well be in the rains of Africa.

I'll find out next week, and I'll try to let you know.

Prophecy

Occasionally if you're lucky as I have been, time coalesces, eddies and through the eye of the vortex that forms as if off a canoe paddle, you can see a little flash of eternity.  Even more rare is when a languageless voice describes to you in that instant what must be on the other side.  For me, this happened most recently at the Candian Festival of Spoken Word.  Kirsten and I attended the final poetry slam at the Metropolitan United Church there on Queen Street, and much of that evening was transcendent.  Slam teams from Ottawa and Kingston and Toronto and elsewhere laid down phrases that reverberate now.  But the voice from beyond was d'bi young.

We were warned.

The inevitable consequence of that warning was the elimination of any second thought about Africa.  We have to go and participate in the dialogue.  Any hesitation is tantamount to plugging back into the hegemon and contributing what little half-dead triple-A battery power we can to it.  We are not going to save anyone but ourselves, but in doing so we will, God willing, take back our small personal powers and cast them towards the cause of emancipation.

It has been nearly a month since my last post.  I am nervous about logistics.  There is paperwork that has not cleared, there are phone calls unreturned, and while these would be minor abberations on the ground, the fact of the matter is that planes take off and leave with Western linear precision.  Unexpected expenses are limiting some elements of control that I would otherwise have.

Fewer than three weeks remain.  I will need to apologize in advance to all of you whom I will not get to see before I go; you know how much I love you.

Praxis

"This is one of those readings," I said to Kirsten the other day as she sat under the very maple that I described in an earlier post, "that plays with your mind.  It's thick — it's good but it's thick — it's changing everything for me".

Kirsten knew exactly what I was talking about.  It was delightful, but no great surprise, that the rich journey I was undertaking through great mental effort in my graduate school readings had been an inspiring text to her as well.  She had, of course, read the same text for leisure back in undergrad, had known about it all along and had integrated it into her own professional practice.  I will resist the temptation to try to describe being in love with a person that I admire so deeply, partly because I don't suspect that I could.

But that was the moment that we began the dialogue of the dialogue, the discussion of the implications of the work of Paulo Freire and his seminal Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed is thick and challenging for a reason, and as such it defies straight-forward explanation.  Instead, here's a little re-tooling of my thinking with an eye on Freire's ideas.

I have always felt that it would be a mistake to try to promote a Western curriculum in Zambia — indeed, the people of Kibombomene don't want that — the education must be Zambian and run by Zambians if it is to be effective.

But one of our challenges is that the Zambian system itself is mired in Western inspiration (heavy English usage, content with little local context) which does not always translate into easy implementation into rural areas, like Kibo.

But to encourage the people, or the government, to de-Westernize their own work and develop their own truly Zambian curriculum is still tantamount to the Westerner stepping in and declaring "I Know The Right Way!" — the very idea has at its root an implicit hegemony.

So what, then, is my role?

Freire's work suggests that all of these ideas are the wrong focus.  All of these ideas are rooted in the notion that I could stroll into town with some model or another that is going to be the "solution", if only it's implemented.  And that will never work.  Neither will doing nothing.

The solution lies in dialogue.  Yes, I understand Western education systems well and yes, I believe based upon my research that the more Zambians direct their own education, the better off the school experience will be, and I know how to implement technology in education to great effect.  Those are my experiences and my biases.  And the people of Kibo have their own experiences and biases, and it will be of no service to guess or prejudge what these are until I can dialogue with them directly (Freire also insists, helpfully, that no person can truly speak on behalf of another).  Together we will dialogue, not making an argument or promoting a world-view or striving for a "goal" or "solution", but rather for the sake of the human fulfillment that comes from dialogue.  And if Freire is right, and we share true words rooted in both reflection and action, we will create; the school will come of it.

This isn't about dialectic.  This isn't about a resolution of tensions.  Intersection of differing world-views need not be tense, and there is no expectation of static resolution.  But a dynamic school and curriculum and community can grow out of the dialogue.

It is important to understand that Freire wasn't just a theorist; his ideas were put into practice effectively in Brazil in the 1970s.  I need to know more.  Kirsten, my graduate program and my own research are facilitating this.

So after all, I don't need to have the "right" model or the right idea — that should never be my role.  All I can do is know my ideas and models the best that I can, and bring them to the dialogue, and others will bring their ideas and models, and development will occur as it will.  This essential idea of capacity development drives fundraisers and sponsors nuts because it defies all possibilities of establishing clear goals, timelines and methods of assessment; but even that tension doesn't need to be either-or if those values are also respected in the dialogue.

This project never was about me; but reading Freire shows me how the self-importance of saying "it's not about me" as an inflexible self-righteous philosophy still focusses the attention back to me; he shows me how to make sure that it's not about me.  It's about the people of SWSC and the people of Kibombomene exploring "school" in a reflection/action based dialogue that is mediated by the world and realities that touch us.

And I'll tell you what that looks like when I get there.  That is, in the final analysis, the only fair and true thing that I can do.

Comments are most welcome on this.  I could use every idea and feeling that I can get my hands on right now.

Suppose...

Suppose that, being in love with the sun, you lost the light.  The world in all its splendour is still accessible, and you can perceive its beauty in spite of the ubiquitous shadow.  Perhaps you would rededicate your life to exploring that beauty more deeply than you had ever considered possible; perhaps you would use every sense you never knew you had or that you had taken for granted since your first days beyond infancy to re-engage and re-define your universe.  In doing so, suppose that you found yourself upon a path that was to lead you on a great quest.  Not a quest for fire or light, but rather a quest whose nature was based upon the communication of beauty in a dark world.

Now, suppose that, barely embarked upon that path, the Sun returned, except brighter and more splendid than you had ever known, a Sun that cast no shadows, that lit from all directions and yet radiated even the most distant and most obscure items into perfect relief and clarity.  Suppose it warmed you and nourished you and eliminated every need.

There are two possible responses to the ascension of the light.  One would be, I suppose, to sit down cross-legged on the path, or perhaps to begin to wander aimlessly in the brightness of the world.

The other action would be to consider that the quest has gained not only value, but also potential and clarity by the return of the light.  It would be to follow the path with greater enthusiasm and confidence, excited by the possibility of being able to finally see, and to see in ways that you never imagined before.

Now, suppose that the light is not some soul-less artifact of the universe, but a spirit akin to your own.  Suppose that all of this is just an impoverished metaphor to try to describe the feeling of falling deeply in love in the very weeks preceding your departure for the other side of the planet.  Does this change your reaction to the path or the quest that lies in wait for you upon it?

And now let me stop being coy and answer directly; to be in love is to cherish all of the paths and quests on which a lover embarks, confident of convergence.  I have written before that it is not about sacrifice, but rather the deep and perennial desire to make every moment of another's life perfect.  And I will add one more thing: it is also about the profound, unrestrained, unapologetic and unequivocal desire to see your love succeed in every quest, and walk every path, all the while waiting with great anticipation for the frequent mutual returns to Home.

There is a traditional Scottish song wherein the chorus is a bellicose "tha tighin fodham", which means, depending on the translation, "The wish was mine" or "It comes upon me".  Two disparate concepts in English parlance are, in fact, unified as a single phrase, and a single idea: that moment, or mission, or quest, or path that at once smacks of destiny and desire.  Love understands and celebrates this sacred idea.

And having been enlightened to the truth and possibility of this, I feel infinitely, divinely fortunate.

Implications

My brother hosts what is (and I don't wish to be told otherwise even in the face of evidence) the biggest and best private Robbie Burns Day party in the City of Windsor.  He has done this for the better part of a decade.  Without elaborating on details that should stay snobbishly exclusive to those of us fortunate enough to be invited, the plan involves preparing a haggis from scratch, watching Scottish film, playing Scottish trivia, singing Scottish folk songs, and drinking just an extraordinary amount and variety of fine single malt.

I mention it because I will not be there for Robbie Burns Day this year.

There is an expectation, I think, that I will lament not being near my family for Christmas, being in Zambia instead, where there is not even a remote chance for a white Christmas.  That expectation has allowed me to focus on Christmas as a sort-of gold standard: if I can get my head around not being here for Christmas, then anything else should be easy.

But the thing is, I don't particularly enjoy Christmas in the same way as others do.  I suspect that I will again in the future, but western notions of Christmas (if this is news) are singularly antithetical (or at least taunting) to umarried independent adult childless men.  It may be an arguable point, but that doesn't change the fact that the Christmas experience for me is no grave loss.
Burns Day is something different.  It is an important tradition, and I will miss it deeply.

Such revelations in no way diminish my anticipation of boarding the plane, my anticipation of meeting the people of Kibombomene, my anticipation of helping the good work of Same World Same Chance to progress, my anticipation of mango time, my anticipation of all that I cannot possibly anticipate at this point.  It is a simple and pure acknowledgement of something that is true about me, that I will miss Robbie Burns Day this year.

And perhaps the greater truth in this statement is that it is important for me to talk about whatever feelings and apprehensions I have, even when there is absolutely no reason to change them or fix them or alter circumstances surrounding them.

And I wonder if that's something that can be generalized.

Under a Tree

One of the goals of this blog is to make a record of my impressions and thoughts, no matter how naive they may be.  Of course, I greatly welcome your impressions of how naive I am in saying what I am saying.  I welcome you telling me that what I am writing is right out to lunch.  One of the fascinating things to me about Connectivist Education is how deeply it invites us all to fail and unlearn.

For example, a couple of days ago I got to sit in the shade under a large maple tree in my yard for about a half an hour.  I don't come from a culture that particularly prizes time spent meditating (napping?) under trees.  But there is something about the shade and trunk and life-line of a tree that gives you crazy ideas, if you just listen.

One of my greatest fears, as I have already written about, is that I will inadvertently be a part of introducing some infrastructure to Kibombomene that is not sustainable in the long-run; or that I will introduce something that will irreparably alter their culture and make it more like mine.  I don't want that.  The maple reminded me of the maples that stood in impossibly sprawling groves near Kitigan Zibi of the Algonquins.  And I was thinking about how the Awazibi syrup folks use modern techniques to harvest the maple syrup, but they're still harvesting syrup, as they've done since, roughly, the last ice age.  And though I never talked to any of the company's workers, I think they're likely just as happy that they have rubber hoses and electric pumps.  And it validated for me a little bit the notion of using technology and modern techniques to bring a world of information to this village that wants accessible education so badly.

The second meditation that I had was about greetings.  Kim told me that the greeting customs in Kibo are something to get used to — that every greeting is a long one, and nuanced, and heart-felt, and that one needs to clear an hour to walk for five minutes in case there are people about.  For the past week, Goderich has been like that; it has been wonderful.  For us, it took the devastation of an f3 tornado (I love my FU f3 T-shirt, you can order some if you want, by the way) to shake people into this sort of momentary awareness of each other.  I hope it sticks in some small way.  And I think it was good training, from what Kim says, for what I am going to see in Kibo.

Tempest

A short post here.  Inasmuch as I want to focus this journal on the impending trip to Kibombomene, it is still my journal and I cannot possibly write right now without mentioning my hometown.  I am from Goderich.  Perhaps you've heard of it.

I get lost when I walk in my hometown at night; much of it I cannot recognize.  Other parts are more like a dream, where I can identify everything but something is off-colour.  I used to do historical architectural walking tours in this town, and many of my way-points are gone.

The relevance to the Kibo project is that I had hoped to rally support for the cause (moral or otherwise) from folks locally in the coming weeks, but all of the local efforts will now necessarily be put into disaster relief.  This is as it should be, and I'm not complaining.  Friends of mine lost their houses; some lost their businesses.  Many people are out of work, their work having been utterly destroyed.  To have my ideas fade to the background in advance of my departure is such a small thing to have lost.

Now I am trying to do what I can, as we all are, and the rallying has been terrific.  So many of my Goderich friends live elsewhere now and wish they were back, but there is really nothing to be done at this point.  Electrical wires and busted gas mains are everywhere, and many of the old buildings could be on the verge of collapse.

All of it makes me feel like this is a strange time to be leaving Goderich.  We will not be rebuilt by the time I go; we may never be fully rebuilt.  I have not changed my plans, and I am not questioning them.  But I thought that it was important for the sake of posterity to note that though I go across the world unattached to commitments that require me as an individual, I am not coming without a strong sense of original place.  My hometown, of which I have always been so proud, is forever changed.

Note my last entry ("When?") on impermanence and my mistrust of plans.  One more reason why I believe as I do, and I'd really challenge anyone to defy me.

Forgive me if this is not the most eloquent entry — like everyone in this town, I am in shock and very tired.

When?

Late November, God willing.

Two things about that.

Late November

Which is about as spontaneous as one can really be for a trip like this.  I have to send paperwork to Zambia, which must be processed and sent back to me, so I can apply to the Zambian consulate for a visa, which then needs to be sent back to me before I can go.  Then there is the non-trivial matter of intersecting the right plane ticket with the right amount of money in the bank...

But importantly, I am leaving behind a job that suits me very well — curriculum coordinator at Virtual High School.  I've very much made this job my own, and have endeavoured these past two years to shape our teaching and writing to reflect excellent research and state of the art pedagogical best practices.  Steve, my boss and good friend, and I agreed that we would be able to make the transition into new staff as smooth as possible if I stayed for long enough to help with training folks to replace me over a couple of months.  I believe strongly in what we are doing at Virtual High School, and I want to be able to provide this service.

The implications of deciding to leave my niche job, and the way in which it is viewed by people who love me, is the subject of further reflection.  Stay tuned.

God Willing

I learned along time ago that it is a dangerous folly for one to define oneself by hopes and plans and ideas about the future.  I didn't need to have that proposition violently reinforced these past years.  The lesson was quite lost on me.  All that happened was a stoking of my indignant belief that whatever else may or may not be true of God, or whatever it is that orders and disorders the universe, planning makes that force furious.  I suspect that there is nothing more evil and assured of retribution that we can do in this life than to set our hopes on someday, and there is nothing more good and right and true than now, and every experience in my life backs me up.

So the end of November, yes, God willing, and I acknowledge that I would go tomorrow if I could and if it wouldn't negatively affect others, but I am resisting all temptation to look forward to the journey.  It will happen.  Or, due to an unimaginable circumstance, it won't.  I have no ambition to be either disillusioned or disappointed, so I am doing what I do best, which is focussing on today.  A part of today involves getting the paperwork in order, and it involves doing a little writing and reflecting so that folks know what I am up to.  It involves leaving VHS in good shape for my departure.  It involves making sure I see as many of the people that I want to see as I can do.  It involves saving money at every turn, which is a new trick for me.  Those are all things that I can do today, but they are in service of today, because this preparation exercise itself is interesting and fulfilling and amusing.  The today I have spent, which I shaped as I did because I was inspired by something I saw on the horizon, was still itself fully today.  I am not living and will not live for the future.

Having said all that, I will licentiously contradict myself by restating something that I told a good friend earlier this evening.  If you consider it deeply, though, you will see that it is no true contradiction, and it is this: that I am more relaxed than I have been in a while because I see an end in sight; and it's making me panic a little bit, and it's making me scared a little bit, and it's making me grieve a little bit, and I'm just a little bit lost without those sick muses urging me on.

Where?

Blogs have evolved into splendidly crafted works of literature.  They tend to be reputable primary or secondary sources used by scholars, industrialists, plutocrats and politicians to stay on top of things.  They are what the New York Times was fifty years ago.

And I'll try, I really will. But the fact of the matter is that the beauty of writing a journal that chronicles a journey is in re-reading it, and watching the evolution.  I want to read this post in a year and think to myself, "but how naive I was back then!"

I know very little about where I am going.  More information than what I will tell you is likely available, but the thing is, I don't feel the need to know much more than what follows.  I will tell you more when I am there.

Kibombomene is about fifty kilometres east of Solwezi, which is a city of about 60 000 people within a two days' walk of the border with DR Congo.  Kibo is in the Northwest Province, and about a six hour drive from Lusaka; or so I hear.

Sustenance agriculture is the name of the game in that part of the world.  The people have food and a lot of it, but that is the limit of what they have, really.  They are poor by most standards because there is no economy.  Other areas of the world are rich but the people starve.  This is a small slice of the insanity that I hope to wrap my head around in the next couple of years.

The area is heavily forested, with some land cleared for agriculture.  The food crops have been named for me, but they are mostly not names that I recognize, and I have forgotten all of them.  I suspect I will learn them quickly enough.

Zambia itself is a relatively stable country, even though it is one of the world's poorest.  SWSC has had an excellent working relationship with the Zambian government and all indicators are that this relationship will continue.  Zambia is also a member of SACMEQ, an education consortium for southern and eastern African nations; its government is serious about helping its people and ensuring that they have access to resources.

Beyond that, I know very little about the geography of where I will be heading.  I'm at peace with that.

Over the past month, I have lost track of the number of people who have asked me if I would be near any civil violence, or near the drought.  I have quickly forgotten that a year ago, I would have asked similar questions.  We might intellectually know that Africa is a very enormous continent, but it is so often described as one homogeneous political entity, isn't it?

One of the great appeals of this project is that, because the Zambian government and people are supportive in many ways, we will be able to help the people of Kibombomene achieve forward momentum as they see fit.  It does decrease the prospects for a cool story later on about my life being in some sort of danger, which is unfortunate, but for the sake of the project, the location is perfect.

Why?

Stop trying to 'save' Africa, wrote Uzodinma Iweala in the Washington Post in 2007, to headline a deeply rational and at once impassioned plea to notice how "Africans... are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself". He points out that condescending headlines like "Can Blair save Africa from poverty?" smack of the heyday of colonialism, when European powers decided that Africa would benefit from their take on "civilization".

I bring this up because whenever I tell someone that I'm going to Africa, I seldom so much as take a breath before adding, "This isn't a 'Save Africa' project. The people of Kibombomene do not need to be saved. They certainly don't need to be saved by me".

Upon telling people of my impending journey, I get a range of responses, but none so wise as a question from my Great Aunt Jan: "Do they want you over there?"

This is the question that everyone should be asking first.

Why African Charity?

There is a phenomenon called "Western Guilt" that I am altogether lacking. There were grave injustices carried out through Africa during the colonial periods, but I didn't perpetrate them. I feel no connection to them, and I take no responsibility for them. I have a clear conscience.

However, it is true that decisions that some people have made, without my consent, have detrimentally affected other people, and it just so happens by cosmic accident that those decisions have resulted in more opportunities for me and fewer opportunities others. I'm not guilty, but I'm not thankful. I'm going to try to take whatever extra opportunity I have through no fault of my own, and share it with people who don't have it through no fault of their own. And ironically enough, because of Western privilege (I call this a "Western opportunity surplus"), I can.

Why Same World Same Chance?

The founders of SWSC, Kim Hurley and Marissa Izma, are geniuses. Fresh out of university, they showed up in Africa, motivated by a strong passion for service. The long story short is that the people of Kibombomene, a small village about fifty clicks from Solwezi, contacted them with a problem. The nearest high school was inaccessible to most of them. Some of their youth wanted the opportunity to have a secondary level education. Could they help? And they said, "Yeah, I think we can totally do this".

And they helped Kibo to do it, but what's remarkable is how cleverly they did it. In particular, the elements of the project that impressed me the most were:

• The Zambian Board calls the shots. The Canadian Board is instrumental in planning, execution, publicity and fundraising, but at the end of the day this project starts and ends with the people of Kibombomene. They wanted the school, they built it, and they are developing their own infrastructure to maintain it, with a little help from Western opportunity surplus. This is a Zambian project.
• The project is organic. As Western opportunity surpluses have found their way to SWSC, the people of Kimbombomene have been able to build a health clinic, install solar panels for electricity, and start up a cash crop operation. The work evolves as it needs to. Some governments and NGOs are so focussed on targets and timelines and rubrics and goals and success indicators that projects continue in directions long after they have ceased to make sense.
• The infrastructure is sustainable. SWSC isn't setting up cycles of dependency (which are always colonialism in charity clothing); we work to ensure that we are building nothing that will crumble and create a liability someday. Everything is created smartly and purposefully, in a way that is sustainable in the medium and long term. As things get more expensive to maintain, the capacity to grow the economy is augmented. As the school program is expanded, Zambian teachers are recruited to teach.

I see SWSC as a true capacity development project, and I find that to be very exciting.

Why Me?

My experience is in multi-jurisdictional accreditation, connectivist learning, instructional design and curriculum implementation. I have the ability, by teaching and writing with Virtual High School, to live on my own dime in Zambia to help develop the school program in any way that I can. I have no wife, I have no child, I have no house, and all of these 'have nots' are at my phase of life a tremendous opportunity, a great uncommon 'have'. I don't pretend exclusive wisdom or knowledge, and I expect to learn more than I teach, but I can do something, and it would be irresponsible of me not to move on it.

Iweala finished his article by saying that "Africa wants the world to acknowledge that through fair partnerships with other members of the global community, we ourselves are capable of unprecedented growth." I truly believe that SWSC is such a partnership, and I unreservedly offer my service, for what it is worth, to them.