Gee Whizz

I have been living in a foreign country for a year and a half now, but I am far from assimilated. I still struggle with the mundane. Trying to get health insurance, car insurance, driver’s license, bank account, a Visa to remain here legally – you know, little things like that – only one of which I have successfully managed to obtain.

It definitely helps that most people speak English, but sometimes that just leads to more confusion. For example, when buying car insurance, you do not buy a policy with a deductible. You buy a “facility” with an “excess”. I can’t tell you how exasperating this conversation was, “What kind of a facility would you like to buy?” I don’t want to buy a facility, I want car insurance. They don’t understand why I don’t understand because we are both speaking English.

Here’s another example: whizz. It’s now summer on our side of the globe so the little backyard blow-up pools are now on display in the stores. The box is labeled “Whizz pool”. When I was a too-cool teenager, we called the kiddie splash pool in public places the “pee pool”, because we all knew what was inevitably going on in there. They can’t help it, they’re little kids. But would we buy something called a pee pool? I don’t think so - it must mean something else here, right?

Then I saw a big ole bin of Vanilla Whizz on sale. Now I was really baffled... so I had to buy one. Basically it’s a Twinkie. Whatever this whizz was, how are kiddie pools and twinkies both filled with them? It was a cultural enigma wrapped in a riddle.

My friend and neighbor Amanda, previously identified as my resident poop expert for identifying the gecko poop on my pillow, explained that whizz means anything that bubbles or fizzes or spins, or something like that. It is associated with fun, which kinda makes sense. So now Amanda has the dubious distinction of being both a poop and whizz expert. Can you believe how junior high I can be? Or perhaps the harder thing for you to believe would be that I actually used to handle murder cases in a court of law.

Back to whizz. Last week I was whizzed on (in the American sense) and was thoroughly touched by the experience. I was out in Soshanguve painting the bathroom at the orphan center (don’t get ahead of me here). Pastor Jack arrived and said that someone had broken into the crèche kitchen and stolen the frozen meats. The crèche is a paid day care run by the church and separate from the orphan program that AFnetAid operates in partnership with the church. Pastor Jack brought me into the crèche area to show me the window that had been broken and how he had since reinforced the burglar bars.

I rarely go into the crèche so I was very surprised when a little boy, maybe a year and a half old, reached up his arms to me as I was walking by. I don’t know this child but he was raising his arms and scrunching up his little hands and opening them again, his big brown eyes puppy-dog pleading. I may not be a mom but I know the international sign for “I want to be picked up” when I see it. Even though I had a bathroom to paint and this was not one of “our kids”, I couldn’t resist.

He snuggled in against my neck. I held him as Pastor Jack continued his saga of the break in. Pastor Jack went back to work and I walked around for a few minutes still holding Salvation, his name supplied by one of the teachers. When I realized Salvation’s pants were wet with whizz, I tried to hand him off to a teacher. He turned his little face to me and said “mama” and would not let go. I had never had someone call me mama before and I had NO idea how that turns your insides to mush.

So I held him for the next hour, fed him, played with him, not minding at all that my T-shirt and jeans were now whizz soaked too. Several times a teacher would reach for him, and he would scream and grab for me, crying mama.

I am still wondering why he made this attachment. Being makuwa, I am sure I look nothing like his mother, but for some reason he wanted me. He only speaks Sotho and I only speak English. I guess using the right words wasn't so important after all. But how are these bonds made? And within minutes?
My only guess is that he somehow knows that I love him even though I do not know him. It was such a glorious thing to be loved back.

We are called to be the hands and feet of a loving God to serve the poor, the oppressed, the abandoned.

And for that one hour, I got to be His heart too.

Happy Birthday Mom! 9/19/11

The other day I went to Ithemba La Bantwana in Soshanguve to take photos for the new flyers I was putting together to try and increase child sponsorships for that orphan center.
Only 5 of the 46 children there are sponsored so we cannot meet all the needs of the children.
(Oops, how’d that shameless plug get in there?)

After climbing walls and ladders trying to get the right angle and shading and get the children to look natural instead of posing, I gave up and admitted “photographer” will not be listed under skills on my resume.




The kids went inside to have their meal for the day. I was packing up my ladder when Sbusiso and Sidwell shyly approached. They looked quite serious as they posed their question, “The girls got to go to a girls-only Camp, we want to know if we will get to go to a boys-only camp?” A few weeks ago, Pastor Jack’s church (the one that partners with AFnetAid to run the Tsakelani orphan center) organized a girls-only camp and invited the girls from both orphan centers to attend. The girls went to a camp in the country for 4 days and talked about “girl stuff”. Weeks later they were still talking about it, and the boys had had enough!

While we were talking to the boys, Christo noticed Sbusiso’s shoes – the top half peeling back to reveal all his toes. Christo asked him, “What size shoes do you wear?” Sbusiso looked down and covered his face with his hands. He was silently crying and he didn’t want us, and perhaps more importantly Sidwell, to see. He was shamed by his battered shoes and now he was embarrassed of his tears. Christo apologized for drawing attention to them but let him know that it was only because he wanted to help. I piped in, “yes, we have new shoes at Afnet just waiting to go to someone who needs them, maybe we have some in your size. Please tell us.” Sidwell tried to make him feel better too, “Look Sibu, look at my shoes. They are worse than yours.” And they were. Only he was missing the back portion of his shoes, so his heels were on the ground.

My zectron heart went out to both of them - the boy who cried when asked about his shoes, and the boy who understood and tried to restore his friend’s ego by pointing out his own tattered shoes.

They were boys on the verge of being men, wanting to be proud and confident, approaching us to ask for a boys-only camp to learn about things that a boy should know to be a man. Most of these boys do not have fathers in the picture, no male role model. They are being cared for by a grandma, an aunt, or if they are lucky, they still have a mom. At 12 and 13, they are the men of the house, with no one to turn to for the “boy only” questions.

The camp was going to take some time to pull off, but shoes I could do something about! (You may be wondering, what about that shoe drive you just had? It was a huge success! But it was spearheaded by a team that was volunteering at the orphan center in Mansa, Zambia and they distributed the shoes to our children in the program there. Every child, 95 of them, got a new pair of school shoes! It was awesome - can’t wait to share that experience with you in an upcoming blog…)

I have the most wonderful parents in the world. When I decided to quit my lucrative job as a lawyer and move to Africa to care for orphans, and not get paid for it, they didn’t say, “WHAT?! What about the loan that we gave you to go to law school and you haven’t paid back yet and was supposed to be our retirement plan?”
Nope, they said, “What can we do to help you?”
I do have a point here and it does have something to do with shoes. Last Christmas they told me, “Don’t get us any presents. We don’t need anything. Buy something for the children.” So now on every holiday, my parents get a card with a picture of the children enjoying a gift from them or a dorky picture of me with the gift. For Christmas, the children of ILB got swings. For Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, the children at both centers got something they don’t get very often – fruit!

Today is my mom’s birthday and she is getting two new pairs of shoes – one for Sbusiso and one for Sidwell.

Happy Birthday Mom!

Zectron Heart

Written August 2, 2011
How does a human heart keep on beating after it has been stretched out, bursting at the seams with intense joy and overwhelming love one minute, and then pierced and wrung out another? My poor heart was tested in a 24 hour period with such highs and lows that I am convinced it must be made of some super high tech rubber compound.

Last night I arrived in Mansa, Zambia after being away from the orphan center there for 4 months. I was anxious to share the program with a team of ten I picked up at the airport, friends from my home church in Santa Cruz, California. We decided to walk from the lodge the team was staying at to the center to stretch our legs after the 10 hour drive from Lusaka. As we walked down the dirt road to the orphan center, a perfect African sunset reddening the sky, we could hear the children singing. I hadn’t realized how tightly I was wound until all the stress and fatigue of a 4 day pothole-plagued road trip to get here melted away at the sound of their beautiful voices.

When the children saw me, their singing abruptly stopped, a loud cheer rang out and they ran to me. I was surrounded, 45 little bodies all trying to hug me at the same time. They jumped up and down and squirmed to get in close enough to touch me. I was blown away by their excitement to see me! I could not believe that these outgoing affectionate positively-bubbly children were the same dead-eyed child/zombies who greeted me a year ago when I first met them. The sweet sweet reunion brought a flood of happy tears.

Then today, my first day in Mansa, I went to the funeral of one of our orphans. Alick was 18 years old. He was only in 9th grade because he had to keep dropping out of school each time he was in the hospital. He got further and further behind in school and got skinnier and skinnier as AIDS ravaged his body and stole his childhood. But he kept going back to school, eager to learn, eager to live. He was on ARV’s for years, but his tired body finally gave out yesterday.

Those same children that were singing songs of joy last night were now inside Alick’s house singing songs of comfort for his family. It wasn’t actually a funeral, just a gathering at his house. Friends and family come to the house and sit with Alick’s grandma and his brothers and sisters. They do this for days - a silent comforting presence. I saw this way too often when I lived in Mansa last year. I would be walking down a street in town or a nearby village and see a house surrounded by people. Sometimes there was wailing, but often times it was a quiet house with dozens of people sitting outside, leaning against trees and the sides of the house. Nobody talking. I knew what that meant. I never imagined that one day I would be one of those silent sitters.

So this team from America, on their first day in Mansa, had to scrap their plans and instead of playing fun getting-to-know-you games, found themselves following the older children in the program down the dirt roads of the village towards Alick’s house. The children went inside to sing, to hold a hand, to say good bye to their friend. The team and I stayed outside and just sat, to show this family that we cared about Alick, that his life meant something. I prayed with his granny – prayed for her strength as she still had other orphaned grandchildren to take care of and provide for. I prayed for the children left behind, that they would know a future that had conquered this disease, that this would be the last generation of silent sitters.

I feel anger and disgust and frustration. It is absolutely senseless that this disease has been killing people for decades and will go on killing people when it is 100% preventable. There doesn’t have to be a single death beyond those who already have it right now. It can end with those who are currently infected. It can end in our life time. If everyone was tested and knew their status, it can be stopped. There are steps that can be taken to prevent every method of transmission. These are not insurmountable challenges. This is not a hopeless situation that Africa cannot overcome. This turns my anger to hope and hope to motivation!

What are the other emotions bouncing around inside the walls of my high tech rubber heart? Sadness – such sadness for the children who suffer because of choices someone else made. Then my sadness fuels a renewed dedication to make the next nine days here in Mansa the best they can be for these children who have experienced so much loss. Give them new memories – of laughter and carefree times, of love received, of pride in new skills gained.

Hakuna Matata

Note to Readers: Did you know that if you click on a picture it will open up full screen? It really helps because these photos are so small. Don't you want to see for yourself that the crew really was chiseled?
The Journey to Zanzibar- Part Deux.
When we last left our heroes, Tim, Katrien and Lisa (hey, that’s me!), we had survived the Tazara train ride through Tanzania and had boarded the ferry to Zanzibar. It felt like when Dorothy woke up in Oz, shifting from the dismal grey of depression-era, dust-bowl Kansas to the bright sunshine and brilliant colors of a fantasy paradise. Remember watching that as a kid? You thought you were watching a black and white movie and then – wham – technicolor! Whoa… trippy. And there were singing flowers and munchkin punks with lollipops and flying monkeys. That’s what the ferry ride and arrival on Zanzibar felt like.

We sat on the top deck of the ferry and shielded our eyes against the diamond sunshine bouncing off the toilet-bowl-blue waters. Dar Es Salaam looked exotic and mysterious as we pulled away from the dock. We sucked in deep lungfuls of fresh sea air after the confinement of the train for 56 hours. There weren’t any singing flowers but the deck did have big bean bag chairs as a seating option. And a Boston-accented family each wearing one big letter on their chest so that when they lined up along the railing, they spelled out their last name. Whoa…trippy.

Zanzibar is also known as the Spice Island, having plantations that grow clove, nutmeg, cinnamon and pepper that once made the island a busy stop for merchants bringing flavor to the Middle East and India. It was also East Africa’s main slave trading port. Slaves from all over inland Africa were funneled here and sold to ships on their way to the palaces of Arabia, Persia and all parts of the world. I did not have the cajones to visit the slave market museum – I knew my heart was not up to the task, having been broken too many times by what I had seen in present day Africa to withstand the horrors of its past.

Zanzibar is no Oz mixture of munchkins, witches, and Kansans, but it is an equally fascinating mix of cultures. It has a Caribbean island feel with swaying palm trees and Rastafarian African beach boys whose mantra is Hakuna Matata – Swahili for “no worries”. Then there is the conservative Muslim culture with the Burqa-clad women and Persian style architecture of Stone Town. Throw in a spattering of Christians around the island and the clear presence of tribal Maasai warriors as the security system at all the beach front hotels and you got yourself the makings of one interesting vacation.

Stone Town, a World Heritage Site, is the ancient city that greets you upon your arrival at the dock. Karibu – that is welcome in Swahili. The city doesn’t exactly greet you, but a pack of touts and cons and shouting/grabbing taxi drivers make it known you are quite welcome. We chose Akbar to help us navigate the maze of narrow cobblestone streets to get to the Zanzibar Coffee House, our hotel for the night. We followed the peppery little man in flowing white robes through the maze - twisting and turning, every new alley looking the same, no visible street names. We tried to keep track of our path with landmarks, 2 lefts and one right after the blue turret then 3 rights and a left after the spice stand. But there were too many turrets, too many mosques, too many spice stands. We were like rats in a lab maze, but then we realized we were probably more like the cheese because this shady looking guy has been behind us all the way from the ferry dock and our money belts are the reward at the end of the dead end alley.

“Akbar, we are stopping right here and we are not paying you anything until that guy is gone.” Not sure what we expected him to do, some kind of Indiana Jones move where he whips out a pistol in the face of a pack of robed assassins.“Trust me, I will get you there.” “We don’t know you. We will find it ourselves.” Which we would not have. Akbar went and spoke to the guy and poof he was gone. True to his word, Akbar got us there.

Zanzibar Coffee House – what an oasis. Fresh fruit smoothies free upon arrival. Gorgeous lush courtyard. Beautiful carved wooden beds with white netting. Balconies overlooking the city of Stone Town. A colorful rooftop pillow room where our morning heart-shaped waffles and fresh squeezed tropical juices were served. At sunset and sunrise, many deep voices singing the call to prayer found their way upward from different parts of the city and joined to echo from the rooftops and ricochet down the alleys.

It is Ramadan so there is no drinking and no food may be served until the sun goes down. But it was worth the wait. The place to be at sunset is the Forodhoni Gardens where the public square is magically transformed. Tables appeared under the trees, candles and torches flickered against the backdrop of the pink and lavender haze of the sky. Vendors lay out long skewers with octopus, prawns, lobster claws straight from the boats, I swear they are still twitching. There is fresh baked naan bread crusted with Zanzibarian spices. The bright colors of juicy red watermelon and sweet yellow pineapple make your mouth water just looking at it. Green sugar cane is cranked through rolling steel bars to drip juice into glasses. It is surreal with soft light, soft air, soft music - a sensory symphony of savory smells and fresh fresh flavors.

The next day we were off to Kendwa Rocks – a small beach town on the northwest side of the island, though you couldn’t really call it a town. It is just what that strip of beach with a few hotels on it is called, famous for its full moon parties. Sunset Bungalows was just the ticket - hammocks on the beach, beach volleyball court - what more could an ex-Santa Cruzan pining for home ask for? Besides sharing it with all my wonderful amazing friends back home that is…

We purchased a cheapo snorkel trip from a smooth-talker wandering on the beach with a laminated picture of a boat and hoped a boat would actually appear the next morning to pick us up. It did! This “trust” thing was working for us. An old rickety wooden boat called a dhow scraped up and we hopped on for our adventure. We got stuck on the rocks, stuck in some fishermen’s nets, stuck on a beach at low tide. But our crew was chiseled with great white smiles and made our repeated snagging seem a part of the charm of the experience. When we got to our promised “exclusive destination” for snorkeling off a private marine reserve island, about a dozen other boats had beat us there.
The snorkeling was okay – schools of fish, schools of tourists. It was like being in one of those shimmering walls of silver fish, only less fluid and pretty. The fish don’t whap you in the face with their fins like Gordy from Texas does.

When we got back to Sunset Bungalows, I took a night off from my third wheel duties and left Tim and Katrien to have a romantic dinner at our beachfront restaurant. I played beach volleyball with the locals and some young men from Canada, Italy, and Holland. We played until the sun went down and we struggled to see the ball. We finally had to give up when the starving Zanzibarians who hadn’t eaten all day rushed off to their Ramadan dinner. Under the moonlight, I went swimming in the clear, silky, bath-water-warm Indian ocean. Heaven.

I was sad to leave Sunset Bungalows, my beach volleyball fix not yet met, but we had more of the island to explore. Our three hour taxi ride to the other side of the island became an all day fiasco with the following obstacles: empty gas tank, dead battery, 3 taxi switches, fellow passengers who couldn’t pay for the ride so we went from bank to bank looking for a functioning ATM in ancient Stone Town, and a driver who forgot where we were going. By now Tim and Katrien have gotten the hang of TIA and Hakuna Matata so we got as comfortable as we could in our wedged-in back seat and went with the flow.

Twisted Palms Lodge is on the southeast side of the island, completely different than Stone Town and Kendwa Rocks. There are no people, no strips of hotels, no real activities. No swimming, no snorkeling. We are forced to relax, read, nap, do nothing. It is beautiful and quiet and there is just the three of us at Twisted Palms - on the beach and in the restaurant. This was the view from the front door of my cabana, just steps from the water and only $27 per person including a real breakfast. I splurged on a one hour massage for $10.

We went for a walk down the beach and found a stand selling African crafts. We were eager to buy some souvenirs to bring home but there was no one manning the store. We looked down the beach aways and saw a soccer game in progress with an unusual spin on the team designation of shirts v. skins. It was shuka vs. Speedo. Maasai warriors were taking on a group of Italian tourists.
Sorry for the blurry pictures of the game but I really don’t like to get too close to Speedos unless they are being worn by Olympic swimmers.
Shuka is the red fabric that the Maasai wear around their neck as their only garment. A few Maasai broke off and came running over when they saw us standing in front of their hut. I bought some jewelry for my niece and Tim bought some carved animals and they ran back to their game.

I mentioned earlier that many of the hotels use Maasai warriors as their security and Twisted Palms was no exception. The Maasai are tall and thin and always have a tall thin stick in their hand. The shuka is tied around their neck and hangs to about knee level. They wear beadwork going up their neck and sometimes connected to beadwork hanging from their ears. They also wear beadwork on their wrists and ankles, but it is not in any way feminine. They are a quiet presence and exude pride and confidence and centuries of tradition.

My last morning at Twisted Palms I woke up at sunrise intending to go for a swim. This is the only time you can swim at Twisted Palms due to the tide charts. I looked out the window of my cabana to check the tide and had another one of those perfect African images seared into my memory. Framed by palm fronds and in front of a glowing red sun rising from a perfectly flat Indian ocean was the silhouette of a Maasai warrior on duty guarding my cabana.

Completely relaxed, refreshed, renewed, we headed back to Stone Town. Tim and Katrien were staying a few days more on Zanzibar then flying to Morocco. I guess they hadn’t had enough adventure yet. I was heading back to Mansa to open a new daily orphan program and was eager to start the work. But first I had to get back to Dar Es Salaam and figure out how to get back to Lusaka. No Tazara train this time!

The ferry dock in Stone Town was not as organized as it was on the Dar side. There were no announcements of arrivals or departures. No signs, no numbered docks, no designated lines, no body in charge. A boat would arrive and hundreds of people would surge forward trying to load the boat, battling against the hundreds of people surging the opposite direction trying to get off the boat. The crowd simultaneously surging in both directions included men carrying refrigerators on their shoulders, women with huge bundles on their heads, children, livestock, and really large unidentifiable fruits. At least I think they were fruits, they looked like lumpy, spiky, brownish watermelons. Not wanting to miss the boat, I joined the surge. We would surge down the dock, find out it’s not our boat then turn and surge back the other way yelling, “it’s not our boat, it’s not our boat.” Because after doing this a couple of times, you knew who was waiting for the same boat you were. Ohhhhhhh, that’s where that saying comes from, “we’re all in the same boat.”

When I finally battled my way onto the right ferry, my seat was in the bowels of the boat, instead of on the sunny top deck with the quirky bean bag chairs. It was a rough crossing and I was surrounded by crinkling brown paper bags being filled with vomit, little Muslim girls with live chickens, and a large bundle of lychees under my feet. Right in front of me was a window that looked onto the front deck. Outside, staring back in the window directly at me, was a man in a perfectly pressed three piece suit sitting on a full branch from a banana tree, swaying side to side turning green and periodically puking over the rail. Somehow I didn’t get sick and even got through two chapters of the book I was reading. I was back in Dar Es Salaam, vacation over.

It was all smooth sailing from there – God delivered me safely, quickly and cheaply back to Mansa. He had some children there He wanted to hear laughing again…

I'll take “Games You Play on a Train” for $500, Alex

In February I returned “home” to South Africa. Africa stole my heart seven years ago when I visited here, but it is still strange to have that feeling of coming home when returning to a foreign land. I no longer have to think before pulling out, “Which side of the road am I supposed to be on?” Like I did when I was in California in January, with one close call when I forgot what country I was currently in.
Some things still came naturally to me in the USA. After eight months in Africa with no Starbucks, I made a bee-line for it during my one hour layover in Atlanta. I was outside the Starbucks waiting in a long line when a girl appeared with her notepad to take my order. Without even thinking, it just popped out, “grande nonfat no whip mocha for Lisa”. I still spoke the language.

Now that I am back, I am determined to catch up on my blogging. I have so many stories to tell and they are dying to get out of my head! So forgive me if my blogs jump around in time. I am trying to get them all down before the details get blurry.

For this blog, I am going back to August 2010 when I took a side trip to Tanzania. When I returned from this jaunt, there was no time to write and post the tale as I was immediately immersed in the overwhelming task of trying to open the new daily orphan program in Mansa. I am hoping that with the seven month time lapse, the players in this story are now over the trauma and can look back and laugh at the experience.
Tim and Katrien, is it funny yet?

Blog disclaimer: Let me just apologize upfront for the potty humor that follows. There is simply no way to describe the train trip to Tanzania without sharing the gory details. The Tazara train is not for sissies. In the past, some of my readers have given me crap for discussing crap. If you are one of them, you might want to sit this week out. But you should also know that I promise not to write about it again, I am pretty sure I have exhausted the subject. It’s not that I particularly enjoy the subject, it’s just that it seems to come up a lot in Africa. It happens.

This story picks up where “Naked Knees and Other Misdeeds” left off. Tim and Katrien had just finished painting an orphan center in Soshanguve, doing craft days at both orphan centers, then packing up the AFnet van and moving me 1000 miles to Zambia and delivering supplies for a new program to be launched there. After they had me settled in and had a day of coloring and treats with the orphans of Mansa, the three of us set off for a well earned vacation on the beautiful island of Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania.

Tim and Katrien having spent a good deal of their travel money on gifts for the orphans, and me being a missionary and all, we opted to take the budget-friendly train ($50) rather than fly ($250). Besides, what better way to see the scenic countryside of Tanzania than from the windows of our first class cabin on the express train from Kapiri Mposhi to Dar Es Salaam? We would leave Zambia at 4:00 on Wednesday and at noon on Friday be pulling into the train station at Dar, bop on over to catch the 4:00 ferry to Zanzibar, and then enjoy the sunset from the rooftop bar of our hotel in Stonetown.
Piece o’cake.

We barely made it to Kapiri Mposhi by 4:00, having run out of gas out in the African bush. Luckily a Seventh Day Adventist van happened by and our hero Pius, a friend travelling with us as far as Kapiri, hitched a ride to the next town and came back with a gas can. We had bought our train tickets in advance, to be sure to get all four beds of a first class sleeper cabin so we would have it to ourselves. By the time we arrived and found our compartment, there were already two women firmly ensconced in the bottom bunks, their bags spread on the top bunks. Their tickets showed the same cabin number as ours. We calmly and confidently explained that we however had purchased all four beds of this cabin, so clearly this cabin was ours. They refused to leave. We summoned the conductor, sure that he would right the injustice of this situation. He meekly suggested to the ladies that they ought to leave the cabin. When one bellowed, “you’re just taking their side because they’re white”, he left, declaring that it would be up to us to sort it out.
Katrien and Tim staged a sit-down strike in the corridor blocking the path of passengers trying to load the train. Five hours and several emotional meltdowns later, we were still without a cabin. It was now 9:00 at night.
There were two women in our four bed cabin, and next door were two men in a four bed cabin. The loud woman was married to one of the men in the cabin next door, but she could not sleep with him because men and women cannot sleep in the same cabin together unless they book the whole cabin. It is not culturally acceptable for the two men and two women to be combined. So they got to keep their whole cabins, even though they didn’t pay for them. And we, who had paid for a whole first class cabin, got bumped to second class.
The conductor oh-so-graciously said we could still have a whole cabin, even though these have six bunks and we only paid for four. Our new cabin was at the other end of the train, next to the pleasant odor and banging door of the toilets. It was also the first door that everybody getting onto the train sees. This door did not lock. Therefore, every hour when the train stopped, our door would be yanked open and we would argue anew that we had paid for the whole cabin. Not understanding English, men would be throwing their bags on our empty bunks and trying to climb in. At 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m.

I am allergic to only two things in this world, and they were both happily thriving in that cabin: dust mites and cockroaches. So aside from the hourly cabin disputes, my sneezing, wheezing, and nose blowing kept us all awake. I was also going through my roll of toilet paper at an alarming rate. We were each down to one roll. In Africa, you must bring your own TP as a mandatory travel accessory. By Day 2 we were all exhausted, we all had diarrhea, and TP had become a precious commodity.

Which brings us to the next subject, the toilets. I call it that, but there were no actual toilets, no porcelain thrones to perch upon. Just a hole in the floor where you could see the tracks going by underneath you. You had to straddle it and try to hit the hole. And mind you, this was not a big hole, so you had to squat low. I don’t know how to describe this feat, and perhaps I shouldn’t try. Remember, we have diarrhea and we are trying to hit a moving target.

If any of you have been on a train, or seen movies set on a train, you know about the normal sway of a train. There is some slight rocking back and forth which some people even find soothing. The Tazara train, however, was not laid during the height of African technology. Have you seen The Ghost and the Darkness? Great flick. Val Kilmer is the brave English chap who comes to finish the railway lines in Africa. He brings in Michael Douglas to kill the lions who are eating his crew. The crew, when they were not being eaten by lions, is busy laying track. Think about it, did you ever see them using a level? My point is, take the normal sway of a train and multiply it exponentially for the Tazara train. Although it’s not really a sway, more like spasmodic jerking.

Squat, sway, aim. Needless to say, not all passengers hit the hole. So this tiny room with a hole in the floor was equipped with a bucket of water to wash the floor down after use. By Day 2, they were out of water, hence the pleasant aroma of this room and our cabin next door. (At the end of the trip, we discovered that the first class car had toilets with toilets! Rrrrgggghhhh)

I must say, Tim and Katrien were amazingly good sports. Tim was able to take gorgeous photos out the window, when he wasn’t vomiting out the window. Katrien was able to fall back to sleep, after finding a large cockroach nesting in her hair. Day 3 we awoke with a sense of unease - the train was too quiet, too still. Why hadn’t we been awakened every hour by people moving into our cabin? Drats! We were still sitting at the same station we were at the night before. There was an accident on the tracks up ahead, we would have to wait until it was cleared. Four more hours we sat on those tracks, 12 hours total.
How do you pass the time when you are stuck on a train for 56 hours? Here’s some fun travel games for the kids to try:
Name that sickness – players speculate as to what is causing the vomiting and diarrhea. Malaria, food poisoning, allergy, dengue fever, parasite?

Name the offending food item – once players determine it probably was something ingested, players try to guess what it was. Was it the eggs or the chicken or maybe they didn’t boil the water for the coffee or tea. Players take turns experimenting by eliminating different foods on their trip to the dining car and see who gets better first.

Find the stinky item in your cabin – Players first guess if it is animal, vegetable, mineral. Then the hunt is on! Players look for forgotten food items left at the bottom of a backpack, old socks, B.O., what IS that smell?

Who can make 10 squares of TP last the longest – self explanatory

Name the object being shoved in your window – at each stop, women would run up to the train with baskets on their head full of food for sale. Players first try to guess what the item is, then decide whether to take the risk – is this item safer to eat than what the train is serving? Bonus points for guessing pastries – anything could be stuffed inside!

Name that language being shouted at you at 2:00 a.m. by strange man inside your cabin – Tanzania has 126 of them

We pulled into Dar Es Salaam at midnight, of course missing the last ferry to Zanzibar. Tim expertly dodged the aggressive taxi drivers and found us a helpful one who drove us from guest house to guest house, banging on doors to wake up someone to find us a room. The driver came back the next morning to take us to the ferry dock. Ahhhhh, we were finally crossing the incredibly blue waters of the Indian Ocean on our way to Zanzibar…

As miserable as that train trip was, it wasn’t totally miserable! I am glad that I had the experience.
The countryside of Tanzania that we passed through was beautiful. I loved pulling into all the little villages and having the children come running barefoot alongside the train.

And buying fresh fruit from the women in brightly colored fabrics with baskets on their heads.
And sitting in the dining car chatting with fascinatingly-accented fellow travelers.
It was an interesting cultural experience, seeing the way that the locals live and travel. This was not a tourist train.

It was also interesting to see the change in the people groups as we traveled north. Different modes of dress, language, facial features, customs. Beautiful land, beautiful people.

Plus I can say, I survived the Tazara train! I would do it again, if I could be assured of that first class cabin I paid for!
But TIA…

Tim and Katrien, good times, eh?

Back to Normal?

I am back in Africa. Just when I think life here is not so much different than my life back home, reality smacks me upside the head again, or I should say the heart again.
After a whirlwind 6 weeks in USA, visiting family friends supporters, speaking to churches schools small groups community groups, staying at 12 different places in 27 days, I was looking forward to getting back to normal in my new life in South Africa.
Today I joined a gym on my lunch break. It is bright and shiny with all the latest exercise equipment. It is going to be just like my old routine in Aptos, CA - use the elliptical for cardio and go to pilates class. I was very excited about my new gym, the new healthy body I would soon have, and the new red backpack they gave me for signing up.
I was having a good day. With an email to Zambia, I paid the school fees for a 16 year old boy who didn’t think he would be able to go to high school. After lunch, Christo and I drove out to Soshanguve and delivered gas tanks to the two orphan centers there so they could continue to cook hot meals on the gas stove. We brought worksheets for the children to practice English and math (drawn up by a seven year old girl in California, thank you Mia Karina!) We made plans to have a future Art & Craft day at both centers. We drove away, happy for the little part we get to play.

On the way back to the office, a different route took us past the cemetery in the township of Soshanguve. The huge mounds of earth, from dozens of new grave sites dug each day, spoke louder than any statistics on the effects of AIDS in South Africa. Christo pointed out a tree in the middle and said to the right of the tree is the children’s section. I should have known better but I asked him to pull over. Why do they have a separate section for children? In America, family members would be buried next to each other. I am not sure I want to know the answer to this question. The possible answers are all too depressing to contemplate.
I am at a loss to describe the feelings you have when you are looking at rows of tiny little mounds of dirt, knowing each one is the grave of a child. And they are fresh piles. So many little ones buried in one day, how can that be?
Most of the parents cannot afford gravestones, so the mounds are marked with sticks and paper, like marking the rows of a garden. Or with a little bit of money, they can buy a thin metal sign, like we use for garage sales or real estate. Some of the children’s things adorn the graves - bottles, tippy cups, baby food jars. The smiling faces of teddy bears sitting on top of a child’s grave sets off a disconnect inside of me. I am still struggling to process this…

Daily Life in Zambia 10/27/10

I just went through and read some of my old blogs from when I first arrived in South Africa. I had to laugh at how I describe how different everything is from my cush life in America, how difficult and challenging every little thing is. HA! That was nothing compared to life in Zambia. South Africa is Africa Lite.

I actually wrote about going to the movies in the mall during my rant on cultural differences. What a dolt.

Upon arriving in Mansa, Pastor Henry said, “Welcome to the real Africa”. He teases me that I am living in the AFnet Hotel because I have indoor plumbing and electricity, while most of the people here do not. However, the water and electricity stops working every single day, it is just a matter of when and for how long. When there is water, you fill up buckets so you have something to use when it is not working. And I have candles for when the power is out.
But don’t drink the water – it’ll make you sick. You must buy it, boil it, or add clorin to it to make it safe. I had diarrhea for the first five weeks I was here. I knew better than to drink the water but I was being hosted for meals and it would be rude not to eat and drink everything they give you since they are making a sacrifice to serve you the best of what they have. They use unsafe water in meal prep and without electricity there is no refrigeration so the food is sometimes questionable.
When vomiting and fever set in also, it was time for me to go to the hospital to get medication. My malaria test was negative so it was probably the food or water. Sorry to include you in this discussion of my bodily functions but diarrhea is a big part of daily life around here, as you can see from this mural painted on the side of a school. The children get sick fairly regularly – from malaria or unsafe water or lack of nutritious diet so they can’t fight off a common virus.

Now that I am cooking and shopping for myself I have been able to stay healthy. The new well is in (thank you Twin Lakes Church elementary school students!) so soon the orphans and I will have safe drinking water. We are just waiting for the electric company to increase the voltage to our site so we have enough energy to run the pump. Right now, even when we have power, the amount of it is not enough to read by light bulb. I can only read during the day.

What do I eat? Nshima is the staple here. Zambians adore it. It is not considered a meal unless nshima is served. This is mealie meal, a powder made out of pounding corn. In South Africa, it is called pap. In Tanzania, ugali. You add the maize meal to boiling water and keep stirring and stirring until it is impossible to move the spoon. Then you grab it with your fingers and moosh it into a ball to dip into relish (usually cooked tomato and onion). But that’s not what I eat. Too much work for almost nil nutritional value. It’s easier to throw pasta into boiling water, which I can buy at Shoprite, the only grocery store in town. The selection there is very limited. You can only get eggs if you go first thing in the morning, cheese and yogurt only if you happen to be there the same day the truck arrives, every couple of days but not regular. There is one kind of bread – white. No salad! Oh how I miss a good salad! But I shouldn’t get started on the things I miss… So that leaves cereal for breakfast, PB&J for lunch, pasta and veggies for dinner. Sorry to bore you with my menu, but people keep asking me. I stay away from the traditional foods, the little dried fishies at the market, dried caterpillar, or the village chicken - and it keeps me out of the hospital. This woman is on her way to the market to sell a big bowl of caterpillar goodness.

I do like the door to door food sales – the ladies arrive with the baskets on their head. Sometimes I don’t know what the strange food item is, and they don’t speak English to explain to me what to do with the item.
But if they have tomatoes or carrots or pineapple, I buy.

I do not have a car so I walk everywhere, like everyone else. Because it is so hot, and tennis shoes and chitenge look silly together, I wear my flip flops all the time. With the heat and the hard packed dusty dirt roads, I soon had cracked and bleeding heels. I thought it funny at first when the skin hardened and made sharp ridges. “Look, you can grate cheese on my feet”. Then the sharp bits started poking into the cracked open bits and it felt like walking on shards of glass. The ladies told me to use a stone. Now I rub my feet each day with a stone and put camphor cream on the shredded bits. Don’t ask me what’s in that. Evidently they don’t have labeling laws in Zambia so I have no idea what is in any of the products I am ingesting into, or slathering onto, my body.

My hate affair with roosters continues. Judging by the ear-plug-penetrating, ear-drum-shattering, SKAreeches of the roosters here, Zambia has clearly been cross breeding chickens with pterodactyls. And they get up even earlier here. They begin at 3:30, I guess to make sure that people are up in time for the 5:00 a.m. worship service in the church. Yes, I said FIVE a.m., every day, Monday thru Friday, they are shouting to the Lord for joy! They really take that verse seriously, a few feet away from my bedroom.

Back in California I used to think, if I slip and hit my head in the bathtub, I could be dead for a week before anyone noticed or found me. By then, my cat Charlie would be eating me. That could never happen here! People are knocking on my door all day long, checking on me or wanting something from me or just to greet me. And if I don’t answer, they go from window to window looking for me. Doesn’t matter if I am in the bathtub, on the toilet, in bed sleeping, they will find me! It is so hot here that I have to have the windows open during the day and they will reach in to move the curtain aside to look for you, yelling Madame Lisa, Madame Lisa, or the Bemba version, Ba Lisa. There is a concept that I spent 3 years in law school learning and 10 years as a lawyer arguing in court that does not exist here. There is no “reasonable expectation of privacy”. They are not being rude or insensitive to my need for personal time or space. It’s just a different culture. Everybody is in everybody’s business because they take care of each other.

Of all the embarrassing things I have admitted on this blog, this is probably the most embarrassing thing I am going to admit doing. I divulge it for several reasons: 1) to show that you do what ya gotta do for the survival of a loved one; 2) perhaps someone out there can tell me a better way to accomplish the same end; 3) maybe my method is useless and I can stop risking my health needlessly. The loved one is my laptop and each day I perform a form of CPR on it.
Because of the heat (did I mention it was really really hot here?), the windows are open which means all that previously mentioned dust and dirt blows in and covers everything in my house. When my laptop started to overheat a lot and I could hear the fan struggling to blow stuff out, I knew drastic measures must be taken. My laptop is my life line – to family, to friends, to getting my job here done. So now every day I place my mouth over the exhaust vent and suck as hard as I can to get all the dust particles out. I am allergic to dust mites so sometimes I have to use my inhaler afterwards if my airway starts to constrict. Small price to pay to keep my laptop alive.
I have two fantasies that I have concocted to adapt to daily life here. Yes, it is called living in denial, but it is what allows me to have peace of mind so please don’t burst my fantasy bubbles. The first is my magic shield mosquito net. I know that the rats, spiders, cock roaches, frogs, lizards, and mosquitos that I see in abundance flying and crawling and scurrying in my house by day, cannot penetrate the net and gnaw on me as I sleep. If if I did not firmly believe this, I would not be able to sleep at night.
I carefully wrap myself into a cocoon each night, obsessively tucking the net underneath every millimeter of my mattress, which sets on the floor. Then I emerge each morning a beautiful butterfly. Not really, but I couldn’t resist. I am not getting enough beauty sleep due to the prehistoric pterodactachickens.
And the soft breathing of a rat. My front door has a gap at the bottom about 2 inches high, so lots of critters can creep in. I put a box up against it to block their nocturnal entry. In the middle of the night, I was awakened by the eerie sound of cardboard slowly scraping across concrete. In the morning the box was in the middle of the room. The next night, I jammed a really thick blanket into the crack. In the morning, I found a shredded blanket in the middle of the room. Now I put a cement block in front of the crack. But one night I saw a furry little butt dart around the corner so he is still getting in somehow. I swear I hear him breathing right next to my pillow at night, but outside the magic net of course. And perhaps it’s not breathing, it’s probably rat laughter.

Fantasy number two involves my laundry. It is a long process that takes two days. First I wash it in the bath tub, rubbing it with a stone (no, not the same one I use to scrape my feet).
Then I hang it to dry on the clothesline, hoping today’s wind direction leaves my clothes drying upwind from the outhouse the line is attached to. EW, gross, why attach it there? It is the only patch of grass around. If I attach it over the dirt, the dirt just blows up onto it and sticks to the wet fabric so it ends up dirtier than when I started. I forgot to mention you must first separate out the “unmentionables”, that’s what they call it. My bras and granny panties must not be hung out in public for the world to see. Given the fact that they are granny panties, I am on board with this policy. I strung a second clothes line in my bedroom. With concrete floors, it doesn’t really matter if they drip on the floor. Then after the mentionables and unmentionables are dry, I have to iron them all. Sheets, socks, towels, underpants, you name it, it must be ironed. This is because when clothes are drying on the line, tiny flies lay their eggs in them. Then when you wear the item, your body heat causes the eggs to hatch and they burrow into your skin, causing redness and itching. Zambians iron to prevent this from happening. So I iron. My theory on this is that the extreme heat from the iron causes the eggs to combust and all the little baby fly particles immediately completely evaporate into the air allowing me to put on a pristine garment. This is better than the alternative, that I am walking around with melted dead fly embryos in my underpants.

I don’t mean to make it sound like my life here is horrible. It is hard, but very far from horrible. As I said in my last blog, I love the people of Zambia. The way they have made me feel part of their community, it will be hard to leave them all in a few weeks. I am also in complete awe of them. After long days of walking and hauling; shopping, chopping and cooking for 75; teaching, singing, and playing with children ages 3-18, I am exhausted. But not the amazing volunteers, they keep right on going and right on smiling. Everything I am doing, they are doing alongside me but in high heels with a child strapped to their back. Then they still have a 30-45 minute walk home to the village and still have to cook a meal for their own family.
And you know what I am going to say next, what totally makes it all worthwhile – the children! To see the change in them after just two days in the program was miraculous. This morning my eyes misted over as I heard their little voices sweetly singing. So I will gladly keep sucking dust, ironing fly babies, wrangling rats, and stoning my feet if I can keep seeing their beautiful smiles…