21 November 2003
This will be my final post from Zambia. In 12 hours, I'll be in a plane aloft over Africa, and in about 36 hours I'll be back at my hotel in Washington, D.C., trying to self-medicate jetlag with a healthy dose of HBO. (I'll also be checking my work email account for the first time in six weeks -- I can't even imagine how many thousands of messages we're talking about.)
It's been quite an experience. Regrets: I've worked too hard, and I didn't get to explore the country much beyond Lusaka. A cab driver today asked where I've been in Zambia. "Did you go to Livingstone?" Check. "Did you see Victoria Falls?" Yep. "Then you've seen Zambia." Not true, of course. But many, many positives.
The Internet cafe closes in five minutes. See you on the other side of the Atlantic.
20 November 2003
Well, my time in Zambia is winding down. I leave Saturday morning (1 a.m. Dallas time) for a flight marathon -- 10.5 hours to London, then 8.5 hours back to D.C. Actually, marathons don't take that long. Although they do involve more caloric exertion, I presume.
This won't be my last post (I don't think, at least), but I figured it's as good a time as any to recap some bests and worsts of the trip:
Best purchase: The 12-inch fan I bought about three weeks in. Yeah, US$30 was a bit much to pay, but the weeks of relative coolness that followed have been soooo worth it. Sleep has been almost bearable!
Worst fashion decision: My purchase, at a cost of $8, of a white polo shirt at a D.C. Gap just before leaving. Not that it isn't a fine shirt, but white is not the color to wear in the Zambian dry season. Five seconds outside leave you with a fine coat of brown dust. Stay any longer outside and your forehead'll start sweating -- tempting you to wipe it dry with your sleeve, and thus leaving huge black and brown marks on your no-longer-white shirt.
Best intentions unfulfilled: My multimedia ambitions. I brought a small video camera here, thinking I might pull together something for TV. I used it once. (Although I may get something salvageable for DallasNews.com from that one time.) I've already discussed how my radio dreams went up in smoke.
Line I'm most sick of hearing from staff at Chachacha Backpackers: "Josh, you work too hard. Have some fun!" True, sure, but I don't need to hear it 3,674 times.
Thing I'll miss most about Chachacha: The way everybody puts the emphasis on the second syllable ("chaCHAcha").
Thing I won't miss about Chachacha: Having the room next to the bar, whose blaring music made sleep impossible before 12:30 a.m., even on those (many) nights with 7:00 a.m. appointments scheduled the next day.
Interview subject I was most tempted to pick up, stow in a British Airways overhead compartment, and ship back to the U.S.: Chileshe, a 15-year-old girl I interviewed today. She's been HIV positive since birth and has been crushed by TB for the last six years. If you saw her on the street, you'd think she's eight or nine at the oldest -- maybe 65 pounds, if that. (And that's up from about 55 a couple months ago.)
She stopped going to school earlier this year because she couldn't take the teasing and discrimination from the other students. When she walked into a classroom, all the other kids would run out, or at least move to the opposite corner of the room to yell names at her. But Chileshe took action! She found a youth counselor at a local NGO and convinced them to put on a play at her school about AIDS, about discrimination, and why people shouldn't be mean to her. Anyway, she's still sick with TB, but she hopes to go back to school when the new term starts in January. Just a darling, sweet girl. Wants to be an accountant when she grows up, loves math. Makes doormats to sell so her mom can feed the family. (Her mom's great, too.) If someone has a couple hundred dollars lying around and wants to make Chileshe's day/year/life (so she can attend a private school where she won't be brutalized so ruthlessly), let me know.
Local term I'll remember most clearly: muzungu, which in Nyanja means "white dude" (roughly). I've spent much of the last week in the compounds, the dirt-poor neighborhoods of Lusaka -- no running water, no electricity, no real roads, just poverty and death. Whenever I'd roll through in my taxi, on my way to an interview, I'd hear it from every direction: Muzungu! Muzungu! Normally said by six-year-old boys in a totally friendly and welcoming fashion (although occasionally by drunken teenagers in a less friendly way).
Aspect of Zambian culture that would have the American Dental Association shaking its collective head in dismay: Coca-Cola is considered something like a health drink here. I can't tell you how many people here lump beverages into two categories: good and healthful (milk, water, Coke) and evil (beer). A Coke or three at 7 a.m. is considered a perfectly acceptable pick-me-up. (Zambians aren't big coffee drinkers, which may explain the caffeine substitution pattern. Honestly, I don't think I've even seen a cup of coffee in six weeks.)
Best sneaky good drink: The whiskey and ice cream concoction at Cafe Fra Gigi at Manda Hill. Only had it once, but boy, did it hit the spot on a sweaty hot afternoon.
18 November 2003
I think there's a special circle in Irony Hell reserved for a certain official in the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), the ruling party here in Zambia.
I've been trying to get an interview with Levy Mwanawasa, Zambia's president. I got in touch with MMD headquarters to see about setting something up. I said I wanted to talk to Mwanawasa about a variety of topics: HIV/AIDS, his education policies, traditional healers, agricultural development -- and, I said, Mwanawasa's anti-corruption fight.
Some background: Mwanawasa was Zambia's vice president in the early 1990s, under MMD President Frederick Chiluba. Mwanawasa had a reputation as a pretty clean, honest guy. Chiluba, in contrast, was widely considered corrupt. In 1994 (if memory serves) Mwanawasa announced he was resigning as VP, saying the Chiluba government was too corrupt and he no longer wanted to be a part of it.
In the months before the 2001 election, Chiluba tried to change the country's constitution to allow him a third term as president. (The constitution allows only two terms, like the American one.) There was much public outrage -- the people wanted Chiluba to go. So Chiluba ended up, strangely, endorsing the candidacy of Mwanawasa, his ex-VP who had publicly called him out as corrupt.
Mwanawasa won a close election and became president. Some folks wondered if Mwanawasa had been bought off or otherwise compromised by Chiluba in exchange for his endorsement. But shortly after taking office, Mwanawasa announced a massive anti-corruption campaign at all levels of government -- pissing off many in his own party, MMD, who benefited from said corruption.
The biggest element of this campaign: Mwanawasa convinced parliament to remove Chiluba's immunity from prosecution. Chiluba and a few of his cronies are currently standing trial for embezzling about US$30 million from the government.
Enough background, but to sum up: Mwanawasa is leading a big anti-corruption fight, and he leads a political party known for graft and corruption.
So I wanted to talk to Mwanawasa about all this, but I had to go through MMD to get to Mwanawasa. The MMD official I talked to said, yes, it would be possible to talk to the president -- but the price would be $100.
In other words: Yes, you can interview the president about his fight against corruption -- but only if you bribe me.
I wasn't insulted -- just terribly amused. I let it be known that American newspapers aren't in the business of giving bribes for interviews with government officials. The MMD fellow said if I couldn't afford $100, perhaps $50 would do? I said no thank you. He said he would see what he could do.
So it appears I won't be interviewing the president. And it appears the president has quite a bit of work still to do.
Cultural Dissonance: Yesterday, I ate a "chicken cajun sandwich" [sic] at a Muslim fast-food place called Strictly Halal. In Zambia. I'm not sure what made the sandwich Cajun, per se -- no peppers, no "blackening," no crawfish (mmmm...crawfish). All I saw were mayo and pickles. Maybe pickles are, like, underground Cajun and I didn't get the memo.
Why Journalists Can Appear Evil to Outside Observers, Part 3,637: When I got a phone call this morning saying that a teenaged girl had died after a long bout with tuberculosis, my only thought was, "Yes! Woo hoo!" (See, I'm writing a story on Zambian funerals and I needed to do some reporting and...never mind. I am evil.)
My Ever Declining Story Count: It appears that one of the five stories I was planning on writing is about to fall through. I had hoped to write a profile of Nevers Mumba, the vice president of Zambia. Mumba is a televangelist who got his theological training in, of all places, Dallas. Would have been such a fun story to write, but I don't think I'm going to be able to get an interview. Alas. The religion section of the DMN would have ate it up, I bet.
17 November 2003
Optimist, n. 1. One who usually expects a favorable outcome. 2. A believer in philosophical optimism. 3. Someone who, despite being in the middle of a Zambian hostel with sporadic water and electricity, habitually turns on the wireless networking function of his laptop -- thinking that maybe, just maybe, someone has taken the initiative in the last few hours to create a broadband wireless network within a 100-foot radius.
Well, this is the start of my last week in Zambia. After driving myself crazy with work all last week, I decided to (gasp!) take the weekend off. Didn't do a damned thing, other than post some photos here, buy some postcards, and visit a couple art galleries.
Oh, and finish reading Lost White Tribes, Riccardo Orizio's questionably executed book on an intriguing subject: Europeans who, during the colonial period, moved to the developing world and, in essence, "went native." (As in, intermarried with locals, adopted local ways of living, or simply isolated themselves from their Euro peers in some way.) When colonialism ended, most white folks went back to their motherlands, leaving these strange, impoverished "white tribes" behind.
It's a fascinating topic -- I've always been interested in microcultures and their ability to persist within a larger whole. (It doesn't take a genius to figure out why: I grew up in one. I'm a Cajun from south Louisiana, which means I grew up as part of a French-speaking American microculture. Issues of cultural survival, linguistic persistence, and other such Sociology 101 topics are of deep interest to me.)
I'm also, more specifically, interested in the ways European and non-European cultures interact -- most notably from my last long-term foreign assignment, my trip to Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific, where about 40 half-British, half-Polynesian descendants of the mutineers on the Bounty live to this day.
Orizio's book didn't do as much for me as it should have. The stories of the "tribes" are left unconnected -- it's clear their origins were in distinct newspaper or magazine stories cobbled together in a book. But the biggest problem for me was the hyperflorid, hyperstylized writing. I bet it's lovely in the original Italian, but all the translation going on in "Lost White Tribes" makes all dialogue seem stilted and artificial.
It's understandable. For instance, when Orizio is interviewing the ethnic Poles who form a strange mountain community in Haiti, he is having Creole French translated into English by a local. Orizio then translated that English into Italian for the book; the book's translator, Avril Bardoni, then translated that Italian back into English. Creole French to English to Italian to English -- it's not surprising the language sounds fake by the time it's all over.
Anyway, still a recommended read -- it's only about 200 pages and some of the tales (the Haitian Poles, the Dutch/Bushmen in Namibia, and the Blancs Matignon in Guadaloupe in particular) are fascinating.
A moderately busy week ahead -- lots of little things to do if I can squeeze in the time. The one thing I really, really need to do -- interview someone at the Central Board of Health -- has proven difficult. Five times I've set up interviews with people there, and five times they've been summarily canceled when I arrived. For three of them, my subject wasn't even in the country. Harrumph. Oh, well -- back to the coal mines.
