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.