My Saturday Evening

The women suddenly clapped and yipped as if they had just come out of a trance. It was six o'clock in the evening on a Saturday. Dusk. The sun had dipped behind the clouds on the horizon making it very difficult to see the black board in the classroom, despite the fact they were all sitting only five or six feet from it. I had just congratulated them on the progress they were making and announced that we would probably be starting to implement their agriculture project next week. One of the women, Shantale, said something and Charles, my translator decoded: "It is good because we need to start soon. The rains have come and already the people are sewing their seeds in the fields." I was happy to hear that coming from one of them. They sensed the urgency.

 

For the past week and a half we've been planning out the project details, going from a vague idea of what we want the project to entail, to every single piece of work that needs to be done to accomplish the project, cramming much of what took me a semester to learn in my master's program into just two or three weeks. It's intense. A couple days before Justin, who rides home with me everyday, told me that "these are the ideas that one expects to learn at the university." Another one of the male participants had mentioned that he imagined the women were having difficulty understanding the workshops now that the material had gotten so advanced. He was surprised when I told him that the women were actually picking it up a little bit faster than the men, which is true. I hate hearing those kinds of sexist remarks and jump at the opportunity to provide evidence to disprove them.

 

The women had come back to life after two hours of work that most people would probably consider mind-numbingly repetitive. Now that we have all the pieces of work needed to complete the project, we are sequencing the activities, which is much harder than it sounds. The complexity arises from the fact that, in such projects, some work can be done at the same time as other work, and some work can not be started until other work is completed. To illustrate this fact, I've been using the example of washing the laundry. I explain that the first three steps - gathering the clothes, buying soap, and fetching water - can all be done at the same time, yet all need to be completed to start the actual washing of the clothes. Without any one of those things, you can't start washing the laundry. This concept is incredibly important in our project. Understanding when we need to start and complete each piece of work will help the project to run as smoothly as possible. Boring for some, but important nonetheless. I happen to love this kind of logical thinking.

 

I have to admit that I was worried that sequencing would be so difficult for them to understand and so difficult for me to explain that it would discourage them. In anticipation, I planned the lessons rigorously, being careful not to skip a single step and check their comprehension at each stage before continuing on to the next. It seems to be paying off.

 

I thanked the women and shook their hands as they left the classroom. Charles, Justin, and I started to pack up all the materials. There were a lot - six flip charts, 50 index cards taped to the chalk board with arrows going from one to another, excel spreadsheets scattered all over, and a dozen pieces of chalk (apparently I have a problem with breaking chalk, resulting in many small pieces that are quite annoying to try to use). In just five minutes we had it all packed into my back pack. As we were packing, Charles asked me if he could borrow my bicycle for the weekend. He wanted to go to Solwezi and his bicycle was broken. He was accustomed to riding the five hours there and back and preferred to bicycle to taking a vehicle. It takes two hours to walk to the place where he can get a vehicle and costs four dollars each way, which is quite a bit when you live on about one dollar a day. It would mean I'd have to walk an hour home in the dark, but I didn't really need my bicycle over the weekend, so I told him he could borrow it.

 

As we stepped outside, the crisp cool breeze struck me. I stepped into the courtyard of the school and looked over my shoulder in the direction that the sun was setting. The clouds that hugged the horizon created a jagged line across the sky where they suddenly stopped. There was a mess of pink and blue emanating from the clouds, and their edges were deep orange - like the crayon. There was a hole in the clouds down near the horizon through which a strip of deep orange light cut across the pink and blue in the clouds. "Look at that. All the colors," I said to Charles and Justin. They seemed amused by my amazement. "That's marvelous," Justin said. He says this a lot, and I love it because it sounds like "Thass maavelous." "It is," I said.

 

Small villages in Meheba come alive in the evening. During the hottest part of the day you rarely see anyone out. People are either in their fields, inside their huts hiding from the heat, or out running errands. Around dusk, everyone comes home and sits outside their huts. Children chase each other, screeching. The contents of pots bubble over flames that mirror the orange of the sky. The women are busy cooking and the men are busy sitting around and chatting with neighbors as the women cook. Even the goats and pigs come home.

 

Watching all this made me sad that I was going home. I always try to be home before it gets completely dark. I hate riding home in the dark because there are big rocks jutting out of the road. They exist solely to destroy bicycle rims and gash tires and tubes. I would love to spend time hanging out at Justin or Charles' houses for an hour or two in the evening. I think I might soon, since the moon is almost full.

 

We decided to go visit Samuel, one of the participants in the workshops who is also the village leader. He's been absent this whole week. His leg is swollen to the point where he can't even walk on it. We arrived at his house and shook all the hands that were there to be shaken. I was immediately given a stool to sit on. I sat and gazed at everything, enjoying the sound of Swahili that I heard from all different directions by a dozen voices. When I listen I can pick out words. When I don't listen, it just sounds beautiful. Every language sounds beautiful in its own way. Sometimes it's hard to appreciate when you can understand the meaning the sounds are carrying.

 

After five or ten minutes Samuel hobbled out with the help of his wife and a cane. It took a couple minutes for him to get the ten feet from the doorway to the chair that was out for him to sit on. Several neighborhood men had gathered by that point. We all watched with empathetic grimaces on our faces. No one was saying anything. I usually wait to take cues from people for what to say in situations like this, but it was getting to the point I felt like I needed to say something. "How are you?" I asked. "OK," he said in French, shaking his head. Obviously not that OK. He rolled up his pant leg to above his knee. I asked him a couple questions in French. Had he gone to the clinic? Was it getting better or worse? He shook his head and started talking me in Swahili through Charles. His knee had been swollen to the size of a cantaloupe (my estimate, not theirs) on Monday. He had been to the clinic every day since. They had stuck needles in it to drain fluid that was inside. Samuel kept looking at me as he explained what had happened up to now. There were literally ten other men there, watching silently, and he was addressing me. I started to feel as though I was supposed to have some kind of solution. Like Samuel and the others expected me to be able to diagnose it and tell them what they should do. This has happened to me multiple times in Africa and each time I wish that I was a doctor. "I wish I knew what to do, but I am not a doctor," I told Charles. "Can he go to the hospital in Solwezi?" I asked. Samuel explained that the clinician wanted to wait a couple more days to see if it got better. If not, they would give Samuel a transfer letter to go to the hospital. We sat there for a little while longer, and eventually Charles gave me the universal "shall we go?" look.

 

Charles walked me to the junction before leaving Justin and I to walk home. Justin and I talked about what could have caused that to happen to Samuel's knee. "Some people say that there is a powder that people can lay on the ground, and if you step on the powder it will cause the legs to swell." He was talking about witchcraft. I tire of hearing people using witchcraft to explain the inexplicable. "I don't believe in that," I said. "Then you are a true Christian," he said, as though I had just passed some kind of religious faith test. "But we Africans, we believe in these things," he said. I understand why people here believe in witchcraft. Sometimes bad things happen that have no obvious cause. Human beings want to have some sort of an explanation for everything and most people here don't have access to any health or medical care, so medical explanations are almost non-existent. When bad things that have no other apparent cause happen to people who have done something bad, it is a punishment from God. When bad things that have no apparent cause happen to people who have done nothing wrong, it is witchcraft. I'm sure that's a simplification. But that's the way I see it.

 

Justin had his bicycle with him but was walking with me. I told him that he could go ahead if he wanted. "No. We have come together and we must go together," he pronounced. After a long pause he asked me how I liked Africa. I had trouble coming up with an answer that I found satisfactory. I just sort of rambled about how nice people were and enjoying learning about other cultures. I was hoping he would have some follow up questions, but he didn't. When I finished, he just said, "Thass maavelous." I smiled in the dark.

 

A man whose voice sounded like J-Man (his real name is Gyro, I think), one of our guards, passed us on a bicycle, carrying a woman on the luggage rack on the back. Later, just after we arrived at Justin's house and I wished him goodnight, the man on the bicycle returned. He walked about five feet behind me with the bicycle for several minutes. I was annoyed. I asked him if his bicycle was broken and where he was going. He answered "yes" to both questions, which told me that he didn't understand what I was saying. I still couldn't tell if it was J-Man or not, since he had a baseball cap on and I couldn't see his face in the moonlight. For the next half-hour he walked about ten feet behind me. I tried to ignore it. Finally, when he got to a flat part he rode up beside me and offered me a ride. I got close and saw that it was J-Man. My annoyance instantly evaporated. I asked him, "I am heavy. Is the bicycle strong?" "Yes," he said, "Your bicycle is strong." It was definitely J-Man. He always uses "your" when he means "my". It still throws me off sometimes when he says, "I am going to see your wife," or "I want to have your lunch."

 

I've never been given a ride before. I'm so big that very few people offer and I usually decline because I don't want to ruin their bicycles. But J-Man was insistent, so I hopped on the back, straddling the rack as men do when they ride on luggage racks here. Women ride side-saddle. It's funny what customs I choose to conform to. It took a bit to get going, but we eventually picked up enough speed that we weren't tottering all over the road. I struggled to lift my legs high enough that my feet wouldn't drag on the ground. Over J-Man's shoulder I watched the silhouettes of trees and termite mounds float by. We passed my favorite tree on the road, which bends over the road almost completely horizontally at one point. It rarely notice it in the daylight, but at dusk and in the moonlight, it is striking. It feels welcoming and spooky at the same time.

 

We arrived home. I stepped off the rack and thanked J-Man for the ride. There were three pots of food waiting for me in the dining room that our cleaning/cooking lady, Mama Eunice, had left. She put them on top of each other in a shallow bucket of water on top of a chair. It took me a little bit to figure it out when she had started doing this a couple days ago. It was to stop ants from getting in the food. The ants have taken over our compound, and you can't leave any food out for more than five minutes before some ant will find it and invite his three thousand friends to come share the jackpot. I sat down on the couch out in the courtyard, switched off my headlamp, and ate the cabbage salad and fried potatoes in the moonlight. There were no sounds but the wind and the cracking of the charcoal in the brazer that one of the guards had left out for me. It was peaceful.

 

Soon after I had finished eating, Auggie, came in and sat down next me on the couch. Auggie is the guard who speaks the best English, is super friendly, and is a jack of all trades. I made him some tea and we chatted about his previous jobs, what Meheba used to be like when the population was almost 50,000 people. He has lived in Meheba since 1978, when I was born. Twenty-eight years stuck in a refugee camp that he had no right to leave for more than a couple weeks at a time, thanks to restrictions on refugees' rights of freedom of movement in Zambia (and most other countries in Africa).

 

Eventually he reminded me of the postcards I had promised to show him a couple days ago when he took me on a half-hour tour of his farm. I had taken my video camera so that I could get some footage of people cultivating to show people back home what farms were like here. Auggie used to be an agricultural extension worker, so he knows a lot about farming. The soil on his farm was the blackest I'd seen in Meheba. I asked him a lot of questions and told him how almost all the soil was like that on the farms in Iowa, where I am from. He had sounded interested, so I had told him I would show him the postcards, which I bought last minute just before coming.

 

I ran to my room and pulled out the fifteen or twenty post cards. Most featured farms with cattle, corn, and pigs. I have shown the postcards to several people here, but none have scrutinized them as much as Auggie did. On one there was a picture of a big farm (barns and a silo) surrounded by vast fields of soybeans and corn. He marveled at it and asked lots of questions. He thought the farm buildings were a village. I told him that just one family lived there. More marveling. We looked at pictures of cattle, other farms, a tornado, a windmill, a tractor, and pigs. There's one postcard with a picture of a huge pig with several piglets suckling. Every person I've shown the picture can't believe how big the pig is and proceeds to count how many piglets are suckling (eleven). I told him he could have one of the postcards. He shuffled through them for almost five minutes, narrowing them down before he finally picked one. It was interesting watching him look through them. I tried to guess which one I thought he would pick. He ended up picking the one with three different pictures on it - a tractor, a huge field of corn, and a close up picture of a piece of corn. The corn here is white. Auggie told me how he'd like to have the seeds of the yellow corn because it was harder and more resistant to pests, meaning it could be stored for longer.

 

We sat and chatted for a while longer before he wished me good night and walked home. It was almost 9:30. I sat on the couch for a while thinking about the day and staring at the few glowing orange coals still left in the brazer. I don't know if it was a typical day. It felt like a good day, except for Samuel's swollen knee. It felt like the kind of day that I should come away from with a lesson of some kind - or an insight into life. I couldn't come up with one and decided not to try to force it. I just sat in the moonlight and enjoyed the cool breeze, which eventually brought a bit of rain.