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.
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