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.