New Year’s Eve (Somewhere Over the Atlantic)
I watched a bunch of mildy entertaining movies on the plane from Washington to Johannesburg, and then I fell asleep. I remember waking up to the pilot turning on the cabin lights and the subsequent countdown. I had some champagne, in a plastic cup. I didn’t make any resolutions this year. When we arrived in Johannesburg, I realized that the pilot had called the New Year on Johannesburg time, but I’m pretty sure that we were somewhere over the Atlantic at the time.
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24-Hour Layover in Johannesburg
From my plane window, Johannesburg seemed to consist of only slums and ritzy suburbs – there is nothing in between. It seems like people in South Africa are either very well off or really poor. There were even shacks next to the Lexus dealership down the road from the airport. Not seeing anything I wanted to explore on my own, I went straight to the hotel and tried to sleep off my jetlag.
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Cholera Outbreak and ‘Cheap Coffins’
Flying into Lusaka, I saw suburbs and slums again, but the suburbs seemed more modest and the slums seemed a little less rundown. Most of the suburbs have dirt roads (from the sky, the roads are bright red). Instead of shacks, the slums in Lusaka seem to have solid homes.
Denis, the POL manager who is originally from France, picked me up from the airport. For the next day and a half, Denis and his wife Leela, who is Singaporean Indian, showed me around Lusaka and helped me pick up groceries, adapters, water purifier, etc. I was amazed to find an entire aisle of one of my favorite teas at the store (usually Trader Joe’s only carries a few boxes of African Rooibos).
As Derrick, the POL driver, shuttled us around town, we passed the UNZA teaching hospital and morgue. The morgue was full of people – Derrick said there had been a cholera outbreak in Lusaka a few days earlier and 47 people died.
I kept noticing hand-painted signs for ‘cheap coffins’ on cinderblock walls, billboards, and shops. There are billboards everywhere encouraging people to get tested for HIV and get treated for STDs. Denis says that something like 1.1 million people in Zambia are HIV positive. There are only about 11 million people in the entire country. Some estimate that as many as 18% percent of Zambians are positive.
I met a few of the other POL members when we went to visit a hospice that POL is building in Matero. The care center will be for children, and when finished, it will hold about 10 beds. When we were visiting the care center, we took a detour to take medicine to one of the POL workers, who had malaria.
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Lusaka
Lusaka looks like many cities in India – only less crowded, less pollution, less trash on the streets, and fewer street children and beggars. The climate seems about the same. Since it’s the rainy season right now, I’m reminded of the monsoons.
Overall, Lusaka is pretty small. There are a few high-rise buildings and three or four bus stations in the city. There are markets at many street corners. There, you can buy bright mangoes, dark purple alphoos (sp?), guava, orange mushrooms, cassava root and leaves, pumpkin leaves, white eggplant, onions, tomatoes, small dried fish, rape leaves, sweet potatoes, red potatoes, and yellow or white maize. At the larger markets, you can buy tofu by the kilo from a Chinese man. Vendors selling moong daal, gram flour, karella, doothi, and other Indian vegetables always call out to me at these markets.
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Zambians!
There are black Zambians, Indian Zambians, and white Zambians.
Black Zambians are really friendly. Most of the women I’ve walked past on the streets or sat next to on the bus have been very nice and open, though I always have to initiate the conversation. Men here are also very nice, but there’s a definite machismo culture here. Some of my students actually wink at me after class. After 7 pm many men are drunk or high, so I usually try to be back at the hospice by then. Oh yeah, whenever I’m in a crowded area, they call me something that sounds like ‘Musungu’ (literally: ‘one with weird hair’).
Apparently most of the Indians here are Gujarati, and most of those Gujaratis are Muslim. In Zambia, I’ve heard that there are many churches, many mosques, and one Hindu temple. The Indians have been here for a long time, and those that I see are probably third or fourth generation. Whenever I’m at Manda Hill or Arcades, I see a bunch of gundas (literally: ‘no good Indian hoodlum guy’) sitting around in their cars in the parking lots. They talk about me as I walk past ("Is she Indian?") or yell "Desi" at me. I get the feeling that Indians control a lot of the wealth here. My first clue was that the largest bank in Zambia is called the "Indo-Zambian Bank." So far, I haven’t gotten the impression that Indians are helping much with the social problems here. I think Melissa told me that the Indian Ladies club had donated to POL, but that’s the only instance I’ve heard of.
White people here are the minority. I’m still not sure where most come from, maybe mostly the UK? I’m not sure when they moved here. I know that Zambia won its independence from England in the 60s.
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House of Moses Orphanage
Denis and Leela took me to the House of Moses orphanage the first day I arrived in Zambia. It’s very close to the POL house in Chelston, so we just walked there. An American lady runs the place, and the babies and toddlers are looked after very well. There are about 20 babies and about 15 toddlers. Most are HIV positive but it’s very hard to tell. A few of the toddlers had scars from sores on their arms or legs. When we first walked in, we saw a row of toddlers in cribs standing up with their hands held out. They really, really like being picked up, sitting in laps, or just being held.
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Mother Teresan Orphanage
The next day, Denis and Leela took me to an orphanage and hospice run by the nuns of the Mother Teresan order. It’s one of the largest in Lusaka, and the hospice holds 100 men and 100 women. The orphanage holds babies, toddlers, and children. When the kids get older they are sent to another orphanage.
When we visited, we played with toddlers and some of the older children, who were no older than six or seven. They really liked my camera!
It was easier to tell that these kids are sick. Some children have white rashes or red bumps on their faces and scalps, and some have lost small patches of their hair to rashes. Many have lots of pronounced scars from sores on their faces, arms, and legs. In general, the children are very thin and frail. They also cough frequently, perhaps an indication of tuberculosis. A few of the children seem to suffer quietly, sitting by themselves in the back. These kids don’t play with visitors and the other children, and they’re completely expressionless.
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Orphans Everywhere
Here in Zambia, HIV and AIDS are so widespread, it almost seems like there are positive orphans everywhere. Some children contract the HIV virus from their mothers during childbirth or from breastfeeding. If the father and mother have AIDS and die, as is commonly the case, the child will be looked after by aunts, uncles, brothers, or sisters. Because Zambian families are so large (7 children is average, 11 or 12 isn’t unheard of), nearly every family has members that are positive or have died from AIDS. Most families take care of one or more orphaned children.
If a child isn’t taken in by extended family, he or she will become a resident at one of Zambia’s crowded orphanages.
Some kids aren’t even that lucky. Many of the homeless kids on the street are orphans, and many are positive.
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Mother of Mercy Hospice, Run by Nuns with Men’s Names
Mother of Mercy has been my home for the last three weeks. It’s located in Chilanga, a tiny little town about sixteen miles, or thirty minutes by minibus, to the south of Lusaka. It seems like most people here are farmers, though many work at the Chilanga Cement Company’s factory across the street from the hospice. I can see the factory towers from my living room window.
The Mother of Mercy compound holds a hospice for AIDS and TB patients, a new physical therapy center, a small morgue, offices for a home based care group the hospice runs, a community school for orphans, and a guesthouse. The sisters are planning to build offices for an ARV distribution center next to the guesthouse. When they build the center, it will be the only place outside of Lusaka where people can get free ARVs provided by the government. The whole compound is surrounded by a 10-foot-tall cinderblock wall, which is capped by bits of brown broken glass. The hospice gates are locked at 6 pm, so if I arrive later than I that I knock on the gate until the night guard lets me in.
The Mother of Mercy compound is connected to a Catholic church and a convent. Three of the sisters who live in the convent run the hospice and school. They’re Polish, and their names are Sister Stanislawa (goes by Sister Stan), Sister Michelle (everyone calls her Sister Michael), and Sister Magdalene. Sister Stan is a nurse, Sister Michelle is a lab tech, and Sister Magdalene runs the school.
All of the sisters have been very nice to me. They send me a huge Polish lunch everyday. I’ve grown fond of the sweet cream that they put in their salads. The sisters like potatoes, fish, chicken, fried eggplant, and eggs. They also eat Zambian vegetables, such as rape, though I’m not sure if they prepare them with Zambian or Polish spices.
The guesthouse is very nice. It has two bedrooms, a bathroom, a huge living room, and a kitchen. We don’t have running water at the hospice right now, so I haul buckets of water from the convent to cook and bathe with. I think I’m sort of getting muscles from it! I boil my water and then add chlorine before drinking so that I don’t get cholera. I warm up a little water on the stove and add it to my bath water. When I do my laundry, I heat up a bucket of water, add detergent, and then try to simulate a spin cycle with my arm. My method has been more or less successful so far. I haven’t been drying my clothes outside on the clothesline, because apparently there is some kind of fly that lays eggs in your clothes if you leave them out. So it takes about two days for my jeans to dry. I seem to be fighting a miniature war with these insane African ants, who are trying to eat all of the wood in the house. I’m winning, temporarily, since I’ve discovered that black fly/tick spray keeps them away. I haven’t had much of a mosquito problem, even though this is the summer/rainy season, since I use a mosquito net and spray.
At first, I was a little creeped out by living alone, since I’m used to living with thirty other people. I’m fine now; the guesthouse is very comfortable. Sister Stan lent me her radio, and I listen to the BBC or Zambian radio while I look out a window at people working on the farm next door. It’s…kind of like watching TV.
The hospice itself is a one story building with a kitchen, a laundry room, a new blood lab (where Sister Michelle will work), an office for the hospice social worker, an examination room where new patients are admitted and the ARVs for each patient are prepared, a staff restroom, restrooms for the patients, a children’s ward, a women’s ward, and a men’s ward. The children’s ward contains three beds and two cribs. The men’s and women’s wards contain nine beds each.
Patients are allowed to come to the hospice only if they are extremely sick. Most of the patients suffer from AIDS, but some are negative and just have very bad TB. If a patient gets better, he or she is discharged, and they continue to receive ARVs from a government distribution center in town. Many of the patients are extremely sick, and they don’t recover. When a patient is discharged or dies, their bed is usually occupied quickly by a new patient.
After walking through the men’s and women’s wards during the first week of my visit, I was pretty overwhelmed. It was worse than I had thought it would be. Many of the patients are literally wasting away. Some have open sores on their faces, arms, legs; others have scars from open sores. Some of the patients have very bad rashes. A lot of patients have swollen legs, and many have swollen bellies, from liver failure, I think. The older patients are suffering from heart failure, and you can see their jugular veins throbbing, way too quickly. The patients that have tuberculosis cough all the time, and they each have containers for their sputum. Some of them, especially the very sick ones, are affected by meningitis and dementia, and you can tell that their mind isn’t really there. Many have oral thrush in their mouths and on their lips. It’s easy to see that all of the patients are in a lot of pain.
I didn’t go back to the women’s and men’s wards until the end of my second week at the hospice, and I’ll add more entries about those visits later. So, in the evenings of my first and second weeks, I visited the two patients in the children’s ward, Alice and Peter.
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Freedom and Linda Communities
Poverty and HIV/AIDS go hand in hand in Zambia, so I wanted to see how people live to get an idea of why the disease is so bad here. The hospice social worker, Leonard, keeps an eye on children in two of the poorest communities in Lusaka (and therefore all of Zambia). Freedom is about a mile away from the hospice, and there are about 2,000 residents in the community. Linda is about 3 miles from the hospice, and there are about 4,000 residents there. Linda is the poorest community in Zambia, and it is followed by Freedom. Not surprisingly, these are the two places where most of Zambia’s HIV/AIDS cases live.
Leonard took me to Freedom on Saturday the 14th, and we visited Linda yesterday, Saturday the 21st. People here are really, really poor (and sick). These are definitely the poorest places I’ve ever been to. I’ve seen very poor slums in Mumbai, but I’ve never actually walked around in them. Leonard looks after about twenty HIV positive children in Freedom and six children in Linda. The hospice keeps records on the children and their progress, and it occasionally sends water purifier. I’m not sure if they send maize and cooking oil to these families, like they do for the kids who attend the community school.
The living conditions in Freedom seemed a lot better, overall. The whole community is situated on a hill, and all of the houses are crammed together. The houses are made of cinderblock and other random materials. There were tons of kids playing everywhere, and I knew many of the kids from school. They kept calling out to me, "Good morning, teacher!" Though people were poor, they seemed to be doing alright, and they returned my hello’s.
Linda was another scene entirely. The community is situated on flat land, and the houses are spread out. Maybe it was the heat and the relentless sun yesterday, but the whole place seemed stifling, very oppressed. This is the poorest place I’ve ever been to. Just like everywhere else in Zambia, you have huge families living together. If the parents have died, then the children all live together, with their children. The houses are very small, and I’m pretty sure they don’t have running water. We passed the community center, where there is a small market and tiny shop fronts that serve as tailoring shops, general stores, etc. There was a ‘cinema’ that was a small cinderblock building the size of the 2nd West lounge that had a TV inside. Most people grow some maize and a few other vegetables in their yards. Just like in the Freedom community, the roads aren’t paved. When I greeted people on the streets, I felt a lot of resentment, and some people just ignored me. I definitely would never, never come here on my own.
I think that if the sisters at the Mother of Mercy hospice are able to build the ARV distribution clinic, people living in Linda and Freedom will really benefit. These two communities have the highest HIV/AIDS rates in all of Zambia, and the nearest governmental ARV distribution center is in Lusaka. Even taking a minibus into town is very expensive for them. The hospice is just a few miles away (we walked to both communities).
I hope to write more about these two communities (I have so much to say!) and post a few pictures of the kids we saw.
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Munda Wanga?
Munda Wanga is a zoo which features lions, giraffes, impala, and other wild Zambian animals. If I walk, it’s about fifteen minutes away, and I’ve seen some of the lions from outside. It also has a large botanical garden. I’ve been trying to take some of the kids in level 2 to the zoo, since we’re painting/drawing/writing books about Zambian animals and going to the zoo. So far, every time I rally all the kids together after school, it’s always looked like it was going to rain. Even though I’ve had to cancel, the kids don’t mind and they don’t sulk at all. They’re such good kids!
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Seeing Victoria Falls, Rafting on the Zambezi River, and Going on a Mini-Safari!
I will be going to Livingstone with Carol, Wombah, and their group of friends on Friday the 27th (my last weekend in Zambia). We’ll stay for one or two nights. I am very excited to see Victoria Falls, and I’m glad I have company to travel and eat with. I will probably go on a game drive and go rafting on the Zambezi by myself.
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I will write and post about the patients, the medical staff, how I learned to ride the minibuses, Carol and Wombah, more about the Freedom and Linda communities, the City of Hope orphanage, and of course, my adventures trying to teach the children of the community school, in two or three days.