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.