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.