The Christmas Update

It's been an extraordinarily long time since I have posted here; it seems my posting patterns have diminished as I've moved ever away from the centre of the human world outwards to its furthest corners. There is so much to tell, and so little that I can say. So let's try the FAQ approach.

How cold is it up there?

The past couple of weeks have been a balmy –25°C; three weeks ago, it was –47°C with windchill, which is extraordinarily painful on the exposed skin. It is set to become much colder. The sundogs herald it well, though; the sky gives you 48 hours warning.

Of course, at –40°C the school closes. We have had a couple such days. Though compared to Ontario the cold isn't as chilling; the dryness of the air makes it tolerable.

Is there a lot of snow?

No. We got about a foot of snow in mid-October, and it hasn't left. The sky has been clear and blue since. It is too cold for water to evaporate to make the clouds to make snow, for the most part.

The snow itself is beautiful. There is no slush, even on well-worn tracks. Snow stays snowy and white. It does not even melt on your boots.

Is it dark all year round now?

Not quite. We're still south of the Arctic Circle, though we are close enough that we have been going to school in the dark at 8:35 and coming home in the dark at 16:00. The most disconcerting part is how at noon the sun always looks like it is about to set. When it does set, the process lasts for more than three hours.

When are you and Kirsten coming back to Ontario to visit?

We don't know. We are in Price Albert (called "Down South" where we come from) for Christmas and will be back on the reserve shortly. That is, after all, where our house is. It's a nice house. We like it. Flights back to Ontario are very expensive—even flights down to P.A. are very expensive. Now, in Europe, when we flew from Spain to the U.K., it cost 35 euros each, all-in. The flight from here to Ontario is no further, but it costs some thirty times more. It's not an insignificant trip.

 Is your reserve affected at all by the "Idle No More" movement?

Not directly. Folks are aware of it, and they are talking about it. Like all such movements, interest may increase over time, or it may decrease widely over time. But to anyone who is interested in the movement, pro or con, I'll say the same thing as I say to the students: read the Treaties. Start there. The debate is clearly about Treaty rights, and it's ridiculous that folks on any side of the issue are even opening their mouths until they know what those rights are.

Seriously, read the treaties. It will take you five minutes. Don't read some pundit's interpretations of the treaties. Read the treaties themselves. I don't know why anyone would inconvenience themselves with the debate if they haven't done that.

Have you had caribou yet?

Yes. It's very good.

The caribou are taken some hundreds of clicks north of our reserve. It is a major expedition. The master trappers will run lines there as well, sometimes making as much as $90K in a season. Packs of wolves, wolverine and marten abound.

What other wildlife is there?

Not much in town. It's a town, after all, with ATVs and snowmobiles and trucks zipping up and down the streets; wildlife stay away like they do in any busy town. There are also dozens upon dozens of semi-wild dogs that live out and about the town, further lessening the chances of many animals wandering close. But we have seen spruce grouse, ptarmigan, and many great flocks of snow bunting, which are a remarkable bird for their prescience and their telepathy.

We also had a very large pine marten clinging to the door frame of our house one evening. Stepping out accidentally two feet away from the gigantic weasel, it was ferocious with its hisses through its tiny sharp teeth. Très cool.

What's it like teaching on a northern reserve?

This is really the question to which everyone wants an answer, and you have to understand that it's also the one that is most difficult to put into writing, especially publicly. There are three things you should know. First, it is a positive experience. Second, there are challenges, but they're not, for the most part, anything like the ones that people say they are. Third, if it's fair to say that there are unquestionably problems (and it would be madness to pretend that there weren't), every party involved is at least partially complicit in those problems. There are feasible short-term solutions to the problems that would not only allow parity, but would also result in First Nations schools becoming a model for school systems around the world. But political will would need to be present among many, many players.

As always, I look forward to hearing from all of you.
—Vance

Craziest Thing

Kirsten and I have begun the process of settling into our beautiful three-bedroom house. I am sitting at my desk, beside a window that shows all midnight hues now but hours before filtered the shimmering Lake Athabasca through birchy yellow-green leaves.

If you ever have the opportunity to fly Transwest Air, you should do it. No lines, no question about cargo or baggage or luggage arriving safely, and as the plane is bording, the friendly attendant is likely to recognize you and make sure you get on the plane. Flying over Northern Saskatchewan is difficult to describe—in the early morning haze, perhaps like a felt fabric ocean speckled with pools of mercury. Here—spruce forest and rocky outcrops mottled by lakes stretching beyong the limits of human imagination.

In the short time we have been here, three people have acted as tour guides, each of them pointing out different features of the town. Though the community will be out of gasoline for some time, we had no trouble getting help driving our half-ton of supplies to our house.

Tomorrow, we will pick blueberries from the vast swaths of bushes that stretch for miles behind the school. A gentleman who was born and raised here has offered to take us fishing on Sunday.

If this is the craziest thing that we've done so far, then it's good to know that crazy people seldom know that they are.

Time to go see if we can see some Northern Lights.

Go Time

We are sitting in the living room of my uncle's house in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. We are further north now than most people on the planet will ever venture. And yet tomorrow, in about nine hours in fact, we will fly north further still, almost to 60° but not quite. That's exciting for a few reasons.

In the first place, crazy people who want to teach in remote areas always set the Territories as their goal. We've thought this way, too. But such dreamers are, of course, an entire demographic. We're excited to be among the handful of people who have ever set a Denesuline First Nation of Northern Saskatchewan as the ultimate destination.

Second, we are intrigued by the mystery. We went to ship our freight at the P.A. Airport today, and a worker there who had lived in FdL said to us, "Wow. That's West." What a conception. In P.A., already North, and P.A.'ns know that they're north, to fly three hours even further north is conceptualized as West. I won't interpret the words at this point—your ideas are as good as mine are.

As I write this brief entry, I am sipping my last alcohol for, perhaps, nearly a year. We are flying to a "dry reserve" and intend to follow the rules. I am worried that my poor liver will not get enough exercise, especially since I have worked so hard to train it vigorously, but I suspect it could use a vacation.

"This might be the craziest thing that we've done yet," Kirsten tells me. I'm inclined to agree, though neither of us quite know why.

Relocation

This story ends, and begins, with Kirsten and I in Canada.

We love Spain.  We love England.  We love Zambia, too.  And there is much of Europe left to explore.  Our work with VHS has been terrific, allowing us to truly work meaningfully from any of a number of places (albeit, some more successfully than others) and we proved to ourselves (if no one else) that living in such a fluid way was feasible and wonderful and something of a dream.

We had several concepts about the next stop after England, the "rest of Europe" being a big one, after we could get back in to the Schenegen Area.  But we also started talking about living in Québec for a while.  Both of us are "bilingual" from the point of view of facility in a language, but not "bilingual" from the point of view of fluency.  So we thought, perhaps we might relocate to Québec for a year or so to improve French.

This got us talking about a future course that we will be writing for VHS on Native Studies.  We realized that we could not really effectively research literature from Europe, making Canada all the more enticing.  And we discussed how we had thought, in the past, of teaching in a First Nation, and/or somewhere in the far north.  But our work with VHS has made us into big believers in Online Education—and specifically, asynchronisity.  We have come to believe that the classroom can be confining, especially in places where the outdoors and community have so much to offer.  Yet (and I think the discussion thread between David Armour and me a couple of weeks ago highlights this point) the classroom (or, more broadly, the community) is the only milieu for certain types of development. They're types of development that don't fit neatly into "standards" or "outcomes" or "expectations," but they are universally acknowledged as important.

On this basis, we noted a First Nation in the far north was looking for teachers, and we applied for these jobs, using these concepts as the basis of our letters and interviews.  And as it turns out, they not only agree, but have been moving in this direction for some time.

So Kirsten and I are back in Canada.  If you are in any of the places that we will be, you will see us until about the end of August, at which point we are going to fly northwards, and see another part of Canada that we haven't seen.

We do love every place that we have been so far—including, of course, Canada, always our home.

Such a Good Idea

I was in England for the first time when I was fifteen.  Besides two day-trips into the United States when I was in elementary school, it was my first experience in a foreign country.  I spent five days in England, four days in France and four days in Switzerland.  It was in connection with an essay contest that I had won, and I travelled with one other person from every province and territory in Canada and one from every state in the U.S.  It was easily the most formative single experience of my life.  In the wake of the Charlottetown Accord, the campaign for the second Québec sovereignty referendum, the Turbot War (Spanish Fishing Crisis) and the North American Free-Trade Agreement, I, like many Canadians, was brimming with thoughts of nation and patrimony.  Combine this with a fifteen-year-old masculine sense of honour and duty and pride, and I think my patriotism could have burst, blasting maple syrup all over any unsuspecting stander-by.  Though I didn't know it at the time, I went to Europe in search of Canada.  I caught glimpses of it in my conversations with Americans and Britons, with French and Swiss, with Québécois and Newfoundlanders.  I saw the differences, and came back understanding those routines I had mistaken for silences as something that a concept like "Canada" unexpectedly represented.  I came to see, I think, that if there is to be a nation at all, and if it is to be real and good and intelligent  and at peace in the world, then the very things that define it would be at all times invisible to its citizens.

In a similar way, I came to know myself by negative relief.  A small town can be something of a fishbowl and, for all that one might love it and honour what it is, one can and I think ought to wonder how one might change simply by virtue of not being watched.  Europe was also my first experience in the presence of many and the absence of any that I knew.  And, unfettered by perceived expectations, I discovered something very much like Vance.  Nothing surprising.  Just, likely a more comfortable version of Vance, Vance happier with himself and at peace with his choices.

The experience, then, of making the inverse trip, of living first in Zambia, and then Spain, and then England, is remarkably different.  Having seen something akin to extremes of difference from Canada, being in the U.K. makes me conscious of our similarities.  English Canadians got a lot from the British.  It is hard to articulate what, because it is not immediately obvious in language or culinary preferences or social habits.  It is more in subtle things, like the shapes of the knobs on guardrails, the tacit desire to label things, the belief that clothes cover the body rather than expressing the soul.  These phenomena are not universal.  Then, the use of flags as decoration, seen throughout the United States, pales in comparison to what is done in Britain.  And oddly, certain aspects of Zambia that seemed very foreign—the love of cakes, the clustering of like businesses, the predeliction to expressing enthusiasm or endorsement with "OK!"—turn out to be British, as well, like Britain was a plum pudding that was picked apart over centuries, raisins going to one colony, peel to another, dough to another.

Meantime, Kirsten and I are finishing up a Canadian history course.  I am writing about the Charlottetown Accord and the Turbot war and the Québec referendum and NAFTA for students who were not alive when these things happened.  Except now I have lived in Québec and I have lived in Spain and I have crossed truly open borders and I have politicked with the people who first tried to revamp Canada's Constitution.  All those things that got my patriotic adolescent heart pounding almost two decades ago, they're now integrated somewhere in something like Vance.

I've accidentally come into accord with John Ralston Saul, that Canada is an idea, or it is nothing at all.  And not only is it such a good idea, but finally, after looking for it for so long, I'm finally acquiring the language to describe what that idea is.

Canada's Really Big

We Canadians (or us Canadians, as we also sometimes call ourselves) do enjoy making fun of our non-Canadian friends for having no concept of how big Canada is.  We smile inwardly in a very self-congratulatory way whenever an American shows up to southern Ontario in July and wonders where the snow is, or when we meet a German biker on the Trans-Can who thought that he could cycle from sea to sea in a week flat.  The righteous among us say its sad, but no one thinks that it's sad.  We all absolutely love it.

Kirsten remarked to me the other day that the days here are extremely long--longer than either of us had ever known. Google Maps confirmed what we had suspected: being in the south of England as we are, we are at the same latitude as southern James Bay, indeed the furthest north that either of us have ever lived.  That's a weird for a Canadian to get his head around, but not too surprising.

But the part that jarred me was when I discovered that when we lived in the south of Spain, we were at the same latitude as Virginia Beach.  It seemed impossible that when we moved from Spain to England, we travelled the same distance as almost-Carolina to almost-Nunavut's southern isles.

Why was this so surprising? Was it because, as a Canadian, I tend to think of every country in Europe as a Huron-County-sized blip on the map, no matter how much I might know better intellectually? Perhaps the thought never occurred to me that any distance in Europe (which is still a little bigger than Canada, after all) could be that far.  Silly, yes.  I know better, yes.  And I'm willing to bet a lot of American skiers and German bikers know better, too.  They suddenly don't seem so ridiculous to me.

And a part of what is disturbing is realizing that you cannot take a two hour flight from southern Ontario to James Bay for $50, and even if you could, that's as far as you could go.  And you wouldn't even be a half of the way to the southern part of mainland Nunavut, neither would you be a quarter of the way to the northern-most point in Canada.  And that's not something that we think about a lot, because we don't really have any concept of how big Canada is, either.

Why? What? Where?

It has been more than three months since my last blog entry, and folks are getting angry. Admittedly, I had some things to get my head around. Kirsten and I left Zambia ("exiled from Eden" we like to say) and came to Spain. Now we are in England. And I freely confess that there was some part of me that suspected that the readers of this blog were a tad more interested in education in Africa than they were in what I was up to.

But there have been so many questions, that I thought I'd perhaps dedicate this re-entry blog to answering the main ones.

Why did you leave Zambia?

From the very beginning, the idea was to continue to teach and write whilst working on the Zambian school. While internet is accessible, and sufficient for emails, blog postings and the occasional grading of student work, it was not sufficient for the development and research that we needed to do. The message isn't so much "never again" as "not yet."

Perhaps, then, it was a tad inconvenient, or less comfortable than you had in mind?

Trust me, comfort had nothing to do with it. Two weeks before leaving, the first time that we came to the conclusion that we'd need to leave, we had something of a breakdown at the mud hut, our first home, on some of the richest and most beautiful land in the world. We profoundly did not want to leave. We determined to redouble our efforts to stay, coordinating time at cafés and hotels in Solwezi to get ahead. It was like spinning tires in mud, making it worse. Money was required to pay for internet space and time, and with frequent power-outs and internet downtime, we lost more than we made. We needed another plan before we ran out of money completely.

So it wasn't a matter that Zambia itself was a part of the problem?

If Zambia didn't have a host of challenges, we would not have been there in the first place. There is a lot of good work going on, and there is a lot of good work that is yet to be done. Of course Zambia's infrastructure was a part of the problem, but that wasn't directly why we left. We left because we could not afford to stay.

So why Spain?

One evening in Kitwe, at a YMCA internet café, we studied options for plane tickets. The goal was to find the cheapest ticket to a country with reliable internet. The winner: Lusaka to Barcelona by way of Johannesburg and Istanbul.

OK, but you ended up in Granada, half-way across Spain from Granada. How'd that happen?

The night before departure, we investigated cheap rental properties in Spain that would include internet. Most of them were at or near Costa del Sol. We rented a car in Barcelona (for very cheap) and drove there, attempting to call and email landlords along the way. The first person to return the call was Tim Shepstone, who had a beautiful and cheap place in Acequias. We took it without having even toured it. Who knew that we would wake up to see the splendour of the Sierra Nevada from our balcony? We were happy not to sleep in the car.

Right. So now you're in—England? Why?

The Canadian visa in the Schengen Area, which includes Spain, lasts for only 90 days, after which we were required by law to leave for another 90 days. Schengen encompasses Portugal, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and just about everywhere else except the UK and Ireland, so our options for a cheap next-stop were limited. Meantime, Tim, who has become a good friend, had just purchased a property right on the seaside at St. Leonard's-on-Sea, and offered to rent it out to us at a good rate.

Right. So what's next? When are you coming back to Canada?

Don't know, and don't know.

But you're coming back, right?

Yes, that's the plan. We just don't know when, exactly.

Have you concluded your work with Zambia?

There is still much to be done and there is work from away that we can do. However, we found ourselves in the unfortunate situation of needing to work like mad to get our heads back above water, which dampened the momentum we had with the project. More work is possible in the future.

Would you go back?

Definitely. But we have to be able to work, no matter where we are.

Hopefully this clears a few things up... I'll resume my travel musings shortly. It occurred to me to switch blogs to do so, but I don't think that I will. The work we are doing with Virtual High School is good work, and it is also "chance building" for many students all over the world. There is great potential for online learning to do even more. This blog's name has outlasted the plan it was intended to label, and has gone on to encompass something else. I cannot help but be happy about that.

—Vance

Change of Plans

This story ends, and begins I suppose, in the mountains of Andalucia.
The feasibility of relocating to Zambia to volunteer my services was always contingent upon reliable internet access, so that I could continue to teach online and write curriculum.  I did not fundraise in advance of going, and I am not sorry for that; it never occurred to me that anyone owed me the opportunity of living in Africa.  Rather, I planned my indefinite stay to be self-funded, and due to the flexibility of Virtual High School that has afforded so many students the chance for asynchronous and borderless education, I also had the ability to work meaningfully from abroad.

Except, as I have alluded to previously, the internet connection was not sufficient for what I was trying to do.

Kirsten and I were in Lusaka, the Zambian capital, a couple of weeks ago to sort out our visas.  During that time, internet was out all over the city, and after several days of being unable to work, we were told by immigration that my visa fee had been retroactively changed.  Being in Zambia would cost more, and it was increasingly obvious that we wouldn't be able to keep up with the expense.  We reluctantly searched for the cheapest flights available to a country with a decent internet history.

But back in the village, standing outside our first house, the hut made of bricks shaped by ants and human hands, viewing the perfectly fertile land that should have been by now tilled for our garden, through swollen eyes and throats we resolved to redouble our efforts for one more week.  We would go to Solwezi and stay at a lodge to ensure steady internet access and work as much as we could.  We had to try to stay.

The power failed.  The power came back and the internet failed.  The internet came back and the power failed again.  Both came back and the entire population of the lodge started to stream videos, slowing our access to glacial speed.  Like gunning the engine while stuck in mud, we spent more money and still were unable to work.

Mukimba, God bless him, went to extraordinary measures to help us to stay.  He arranged for a house at which we could stay, free of charge, so that we could work; but internet was not accessible there.  He used connections to find us a cheap-to-free internet access at a coffeeless-café; it was good, but simply not good enough for web development.  "You will have to decide what to do," he said as he left us to our lodge, eyes sunken, understanding the inevitable outcome.

But when we told him with certainty that we would be leaving, he was sad but philosophical.  "The disciples all wanted Jesus to stay after he had risen," he said, "but Jesus said, 'No!  I must go so that you can be strong,' and this is what is coming even now".

Kirsten and I left rather quickly.  I had students that needed assignments graded, after all.  Our journey out was eventful, a topic for another blog.

For now, you need to know that we are resettled to Spain.  We were sad to leave Africa, but we have seen Kibombomene now.  We know what we can do to help.  And ironically, we can likely help better from here, where we might research resources at leisure and not be constantly chasing after the internet.

This blog will continue.  There is much about my travels in Africa that I have not yet shared, and it will take some time for it all to unfold.  Already, the Spanish light casts strange shadows on that foray, shadows that reflect back to Canada and myself.  There is much to tell you yet.

Purpose

I wrote this post about a month ago, before Kirsten arrived, when the internet was down, but did not (as you know) post it at the time.  It is interesting to read it in retrospect.  One of the peculiar things about any sort of travel is how time plays tricks on you; for me, a month has been at once a lifetime and an instant.  — V
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My first financial transaction in this country was the purchase of an Airtel stick, a little USB job to connect my laptop to broadband internet.  The point of purchase was an Airtel outlet store in the second biggest mall in the capital city, the veritable flagship shop.  There were half a dozen service counters, none labelled, all with customers who stood in a cluster approximating a line, some near the front holding wads of kwacha disinterestedly as the service personel chatted and fiddled with boxes and joked with each other, seldom making eye contact with the customers.  After twenty minutes in line, and another five minutes waiting for the staff member to look up at me, I was told that I must stand in a different line.  I repeated the process.  When I asked for the stick, the staff member seemed to roll her eyes.  She took the order of the person behind me, then handed a box of something to the fellow who had been before me, then counted change for the man who had come before that.  She then got out the box containing my product.  Then, she opened her till, and counted all of the money in it, twice.  Next she received the money from the man who had been in line before me, and then my money at the same time and placed it in the till.  Without further acknowledgement, she sauntered into the back room and I could see her chatting with another staff member for five minutes.  When she returned, she turned the box around in her hands a couple of times, took another order, then produced another box from under the counter.  Finally, she printed a receipt for me, and sent me on my way.

Some two weeks later, I decided to stay the weekend at a lodge in Solwezi.  It offers affordable accommodation and, from my experience the weekend prior, reliable wireless internet.  I settled in for a weekend of work and dialogue with Kirsten.

Judy is the hostess of the lodge and she welcomed me without great surprise or enthusiasm.  I explained to her that I intended to work through the weekend on the internet.

“Yes, good,” she said.  I walked a mile down the street to the Shop-Rite, a chain supermarket in Zambia with the same layout and prices as a Canadian Price Chopper.  It is a store for the wealthy around here.  I bought the groceries that would allow me to bunker down for the weekend, and walked the mile back to the lodge.

Back in my room, I poured a drink and turned on my computer.  There was no internet.

“It is not working,” Judy said unapologetically when I asked.

“Will it be fixed soon?”

“I called the guy.  He is coming.”

“When?”

“He is coming now.”

I had been here long enough to know that “now” could mean literally that he is on his way, or it could be whenever he finishes work for the day, or possibly tomorrow, or by the end of next week.  Attempts at narrowing the timing down beyond this inevitably fall flat, like asking for an opinion on the politics of Bulgaria.  Confused smile, shrug, rapid change of subject.

But no matter — I still had my Airtel stick.  I plugged it in; full bars.  Very good connection.  Perfect.

Except the Airtel network wasn’t talking to the web.  The little red X on my diagnostic panel told me exactly where the problem lay.

I walked my laptop around the lodge, just in case it made any difference.  Once, for five seconds, it connected, then fell dead.

“Trying to get internet?” Judy asked from the lobby, wearing a bath towel and watching the soccer match.

“Yes.”

“Ah.  OK,” she said without taking her eyes from the screen.

Back in my room, the power failed.  The battery on my laptop only lasts for an hour, so I powered down.

When the power came back up two hours later, I powered up my computer and — what do you know — the lodge internet worked.  The server had just needed to be reset.  I started an email, went to send, but the connection had failed.  Judy had gone to bed, likely shutting off the server in the process.  I tried Airtel again.  Two minutes on, two minutes off, for an hour, and then no signal at all.

And I laid in my bed.  I stared up at the mosquito net for two hours, with nothing on my mind at all.

I have a history of depression, and this was not depression.  As this is the first time that I have written publicly about my struggles with depression, I’ll be careful and brief.  It is unimaginably horrible, but not in the way that people who have never battled it suppose.  I was not sad all the time, neither pessimistic, nor morose.  Depression is the feeling of lying in bed, anxious that any twitch of your body would hurt the world; that your worth is negative; that you are a terrible person; that it’s too late; that you are utterly alone; that nothing will ever change.  You don’t lie in bed because you are sad or tired or lazy.  You lie in bed because moving injures the universe and all of the people you love; because you are worthless.  The only productive imaginings that you have are creative ways to die to save the world further pain.  It can be like this for years beyond time. It’s all biochemical, of course, but those biochemicals do line up just so after long periods of stone-walled determination and labour. 

So for the sake of those of us one-in-ten that know exactly what this evil is, I need to be clear that my lying in bed and staring at the mosquito net was not that.

Rather, it was extinction.  In classical psychology, extinction is what happens when a behaviour produces no outcome at all — positive or negative — and eventually, the behaviour fades.

Then I had a terrible idea that I hoped wasn’t true.  But driving on the highways here, I see some people walking, some selling umbrella-sized mushrooms, some merry-making with others, some flagging a hitch.  But mostly, they are just there.  Alone or in groups, they wait for nothing to happen, fed yes, happy-enough yes, unspeaking.  Neither will anything happen differently for the Airtel employee if she completes work efficiently.  What if the laid-back-ness of this culture is just a healthy way of dealing with extinction — the realization that perhaps Western workers ought to adopt as well, that ultimately their labours are in vain, seldom recognized, for the sake of someone else, that nothing will change for them?

Today I had to print passport photos from a digital file for Kirsten.  I am in Kitwe, the third largest city in the land and, arguably, the most cosmopolitan.  I went to a nearby computer café to inquire about the printing.  When I arrived, forty-five minutes past opening time, it was not open yet.  So I asked if there was a place where I could get a coffee, and a friendly bystander drove me there.  I asked for an Americano, but the machine was broken.  So I asked for a filtered coffee to go, but there were no cups.  I realized then that I had been to this place a month prior, with the same results, but this time I stayed and drank coffee for half an hour, thinking of little else.  I walked back to the computer café.

Printing photos was not possible there, so I walked four kilometres to the shop where they had directed me.  It was to be closed for five days.

So I went to a nearby restaurant for a Pepsi.  I looked at the menu on the wall.

·         Nshima and Kapenta

·         Nshima and Chibwawa

·         Nshima and Bream

·         Nshima and Rape

·         Plain Nshima

·         Nshima and Ground Beef

·         Nshima and Tomato...

Spam Spam Spam Spam...

All six employees in that bedroom-sized restaurant found something terribly funny about me from the beginning.  They had no Pepsi.  Neither Coke.  I had a ginger beer.  I wished them Merry Christmas on my way out; peals of laughter.

I found another internet café and asked if they printed on photo paper.

“What are you saying?” asked the annoyed employee.

I showed her.

“Our printer doesn’t work.  Try...” she told me.

The next place printed in black and white only.

I began to wander.  I came to the bus depot and its lawless traffic.  A blue van charged me and I placed my hand on its hood, unmoved, and from the corner of my eye I could see that the driver had also not reacted.  Constant questions from random people, many at work, if I would buy them a Christmas present only now enter my consciousness.  I stand in line at a ticket booth to get a ticket to Lusaka for the 27^th.  I was there for half an hour, most of which was spent with the sole operator conferring with a bus driver at his bus.  I asked about booking the ticket, and was told that one can only book a day in advance.  I continued to wander.

I found a random building with a dozen hand-painted signs on the front, all with far too much information.  One advertised passport photographs.  I went into the complex and followed elaborate signs to the unmarked room.  Inside, three men were hanging out.  I described what I needed.

“Amos, what size are the Canadian photos?”

“41 x 30.  The American ones are the different ones.  They’re 50 x 50.”

“Do you have a flash drive?”

I actually started choking up to be in the presence of people who knew what I wanted.  Five minutes and two dollars later, I had four identical well-cropped photos.

“How did you ever find this place?” asked the man called Amos, speaking of the business which, from what I could tell, had no name, but only an elaborate description amongst many on a random side-street.

“I have no idea.”

My epilogue, then, if you want it, it that there are goals and determination and hard-work and other false prophets that inevitably lead to extinction, or worse, much worse.  But then there is purpose, which is the soundless beat by which we dance.  There are greater purposes and lesser purposes, and they both can be comfortably shunted to the back of consciousness while we wander in the world, moving roughly to their rhythm, watching always for their fulfillment.

And suddenly, absolutely everything makes more sense.

Security

I think that one of the first things that I noticed when I came to Zambia was the ubiquity of gates and gatekeepers.  Most of these men (they are all men) are uniformed; there are a few prominent security companies that seem to handle most security concerns.  Some wear military style berets; others, such as G4S, wear baseball caps.  Remember that security company, G4S.  They are seen at some gates, and also a lot of businesses.  At the Shoprite in Solwezi, for example, four G4S guards stand at the exit and put a small rip in your receipt on your way out the door.  I have never once seen one of these guards cross-reference the listing on the receipt with the contents of my grocery bags; but it is still the fact that one does not get out of the door without submitting the receipt.

The need for such services was demonstrated when Kirsten and I returned to our mud hut one day to find roughly half of our clothes stolen off of our clothesline.  The burglars were tasteful and clearly cultured, pilfering only those items that were expensive and easy to wash.  They kindly left us with several stretched t-shirts, most of which I acquired when I worked for the Army Cadets, and some permanently stained pants.  We have since browsed the Solwezi markets to see if we might be able to purchase any items that might be remarkably identical to the ones we lost, but so far to no avail.

Security is not so tight in all places.  Kirsten and I were in the capital last week to speak to Ministry of Education officials about secondary school standards.  We found the building, and asked the security guard for the Standards Office.  He told us to proceed to the second floor.  We asked if we were required to sign the register book in front of him; we were not.  We mistakenly went to what would be called the second floor in Canada, which is called the first floor here, like many Commonwealth countries.  We searched the entire floor for Standards, and didn't find it; however, we did walk right by the office of the Minister, the Deputy Minister and the Permanent Secretary without more than a listless glance from a janitor.

I should mention here that our eventual meeting with the Zambian Secondary School Standards Officer was very friendly and informative.  She was on her way out to lunch, but she put a halt to that and answered our questions for about an hour.

It was a slightly different matter when we wished to go to the Canadian High Council.  Kirsten had encountered some trouble (ahem... corruption) at the border, and we wished to seek the advice of a consular official before proceeding to Immigration to confront them with the issue.

The Canadian High Council, proudly waving the Canadian flag in the Longacres region of Lusaka, built firmly on de facto Canadian soil, providing services to Canadian ex-patriates:  We walked through the entrance, and were met by four G4S security guards, baseball caps and all.

"What is the purpose of your visit here?"

"We are Canadian citizens.  We wish to speak to a Canadian government official."

"For what purpose?"

Feeling simultaneous irritation and amusement that we were being kept from our embassy by the same folks who police receipts at the Shoprite, I explained briefly that we wished to register as Canadian expatriates and we sought advice on dealing with Zambian Immigration.  At this point, they called someone on a telephone and, after a brief exchange in Nyanja, the guard passed the phone over to me.

"Can you tell me what you want to do here?" asked the friendly but clearly Zambian voice on the line.

I explained the situation again.

The Zambian voice assured me that I would likely not need to speak to anyone from the Canadian government, and that they were all out for the rest of the day anyway.  But if we wanted to register, we could come in and do so.

During the time this phone conversation was going on, six Zambian workers, carrying grass slashers, pipe wrenches and tire irons, if I'm not mistaken, passed by the G4S guards, ignored the beeping metal detector, and disappeared somewhere in the halls of the true north strong and free.  Kirsten and I asked to be allowed to go in, but the guards declined our entry because our backpacks contained electronics.  We asked if we could leave our backpacks with them, and they politely declined to take them from us, either.

So we left the Canadian Embassy that same hour, confronted Immigration quite successfully on our own, and resolved that if any unforseen circumstance should arise in Zambia that would require our security or evacuation, we would find our way to the U.S. Embassy, where we would only have to navigate the security of the U.S. Marine Corps.

***
Speaking of security, the Zambian method of immigration control is interesting and bears consideration.  When I first arrived in Zambia, I applied for a work permit at a cost of 500 000 kwacha ($100).  I was told that my permit had been approved, but wasn't "ready" for pick-up, and I was given a Report Order to see Immigration again on or before 28-January-2012.

Last week in Lusaka, I was advised that the permit was now "ready"... and that it would cost another 500 000 to obtain it.  Seems that the government decided to retroactively change the fees.  I did not have this money on me, and asked to have my visa extended for another month.  I was told that this was not possible from Lusaka the capital, but it would be in Solwezi, the small mining town in the Northwest.

So Kirsten and I found Immigration in Solwezi this week.  This itself was a mission; of all of the various signs for government buildings in the provincial administrative capital, not a single one exists for the Ministry of Immigration, the one service for people who really don't know where they are.  We divined through some feat of interpreting gestures and unfamiliar references that we were to go to a large but unmarked building on the main street.  We were quickly directed to a certain room down a plastered hallway with dangling lights and random leaflets on the walls.

Finding the Immigration Officer, a man of no more than twenty years in civilian clothing behind a desk cluttered with passports and scads of memoranda, I explained that I was reporting, as ordered, before the 28th.  He took my passport and, without looking at the nationality, picture, my name, or asking any question, he stamped it with an order to report back on or before the 27-February-2012.  And thus I am legally entitled to be in Zambia for another month, at which time I will, I suppose, repeat the process.