360 Degrees of Sky - Life in Rural Zambia

Sayonara

2006-01-11T14:48:00.001+02:00

This blog is now closed. Copyright still applies however; thieves will be taken out and bullwhipped. Feel free to browse the archives, telling the story of an Irishwoman working in rural Zambia, for a British NGO, from 2004-2006.

Swimming

2005-12-12T07:38:00.002+02:00

Muscle pushes against water, chlorinated limbs working their way from one end of the garden to the other. To my right, Venus, cupped by an Arabian sickle-moon. Left across the Prussian-blue sky glares Mars, hot orange. I lift my arm out of the water to turn, droplets trail and the planets switch sides.

Dragonflies bounce off hot bricks as a canopy of fruit bats flies low overhead into the dusk, scalloped wings outlined against the thumbprint-whorled clouds. Lights buzz into life; immediately the winged termites blizzard round them, a malevolent snow.

The heady wafts of potted basil trigger memories, a train of scents - parmesan, sweet tomatoes, garlic.

An arc of light from a car's headlamps sweeps over the gravel; a dog's plangent barking is echoed from one gated enclosure to the next. And in that space what I love is what I also don't. What is fenced out? What fenced in? A curlicued prison.

There is of course the delicious freedom of nakedness in the water; not here the sudden appearance of screeching hordes of children, nor a thousand eyes intrigued by every move you make. But not here either the laughter of those children, nor the giggling gossip from know-all neighbours. Silence, save for the changing of the guards. Toughened vehicles zip out of gates and zip into other enclaves.

The prisoners do not even think to use their feet to exit, say hello to workers tending lawns, buy some roasted groundnuts from the street vendors. Behind the walls you are anywhere. Behind the walls you are nowhere.

Conversation With A Housekeeper

2005-12-06T15:57:00.001+02:00

It's good to laugh. Today I am amused by an advert in the local press. No, not one of those ones for a Dr Love Chinganyi, purveyor of herbal miracles for bad accounts and heartsick pains, all worries eased by traditional Congolese juju. No, it's an advert calling for tenders to provide the entire security set-up for the UN in Zambia. Heh. I wouldn't even be advertising here. You'd be better off with Dr Love. And the conversation with the housekeeper? Went something like this...

"Hey William, how are you today?"
"Yes, I'm good."
"We had a bit of a problem with the security last night."
"Is it?"
"Yeah, we tried to go out at about twenty hours (to the pub! to the pub!) but there was no guard on duty and we don't have keys for the gate." **
"Ooooooh-oh." William thinks. "But the night guard was there when I was leaving yesterday."
"Really? Cos there was no-one on duty when we were trying to go out (to get booze!) at twenty hours."
William considers. "Yes, but these people. They come. Stay a little bit. Then they go home to sleep. Then they come back early in the morning and pretend they have been here all night."
"I see. Perhaps you'd better help me sort through the five squillion keys in this room until we find one that fits the gate."
"Shuwah."

I think I will apply for that UN job myself. Am now square-eyed from watching several seasons of 24 and utterly convinced I could kick ass way better than any Zambian security firm. Back at the weekend when I will have to - sob - relinquish the swimming pool, the satellite tv, the washing machine, the hot and cold running water and proximity to food and booze.

** see now I understand what people mean when they say the rich are imprisoned in their ivory towers

Transmission Interrupted

2005-11-26T16:00:00.001+02:00

The house-sitting gig appears to be all set. Blogging may be sporadic or not at all for the next few weeks, due to lack of internet access and abundance of swimming pool.

My Absolutely All-Time Favourite 'They Cannot Be Serious' Moment In Zambia To Date

2005-11-26T09:34:00.001+02:00

Overtaking on the main highway between Lusaka and Ndola, a 'vehicle' travelling at about a half a kilometre per hour. That's some long journey. The 'vehicle' in question? One of those little trucks with the airplane stairs on them. You know, they're like an electric milk cart and when your plane lands they drive up and position the steps so you can get off. Yeah. Heading off down the highway...out for a jaunt. The word incongruous was invented for stuff like this. What's even funnier is that each step was laden with bags of charcoal, although I guess that's only funny if you live in Zambia.

The Husband's Favourite to date is learning that the workers at the oil refinery seriously suggested using a grenade launcher to keep their flare alight.

That time of day

2005-11-16T07:56:00.002+02:00

My favourite time of day, in this life I'm living right now, is evening time. I come home from the office, sling my work junk in the corner, and go find my cats. Their white coats are somehow always immaculate, like those starched-shirt missionaries who seem to repel the red dirt out here and fling it over the rest of us.

The cats smell happy, of dustghosts and sunshine, fur soft and warm on my nose. Neat little paws bat butterflies, chase chickens. Sometimes, I lay down on the forest floor with them. Tree bark and stones press into my arms and legs, are crushed by my back. Crickets jump over me, ants tickle the hairs on my skin.

I watch the unfettered skies overhead and fancy I can feel the earth beneath me breathe. Sticks and straw decorate my hair; some crazy lady. We play simple games, the cats and I, with twigs and leaves. We are in our own Hundred-Acre Wood.

There are no willows here for the wind to whistle in, but I have a blanket of fallen bougainvillea petals, crisp like parchment paper and a faded glorious pink. Bigcat emits a low growl; Wild Ginger Tom is crossing the edge of her territory. Littlecat pounces on my midriff, winding me. They both run off after a bee out past its bedtime.

I sit on a rock drinking a blue gin and tonic, watch rivulets of water run down the outside of the glass and over my hand. The heavy heat of the day is gradually peeled off by the cool night; the incessant clamouring of people fades out into distant drumming and the low crackle of fires, a gentle peace before the rising hum of crickets and frogs.

As the sky-light moves off elsewhere in the world I start to think about dinner. Sharp, pungent garlic will feature. And juicy mangoes picked fresh from the tree, sliced and slithery on the tongue.

Cops

2005-11-14T12:05:00.002+02:00

Zambia, 2005

The sound makes me turn from the post office counter.

Slapslapslapslapslapslappityslapslap

The post office security guard is belting some guy. I don't know what the man has done. Perhaps he has tried to steal something, perhaps he pushed someone, maybe he called the security guard's mother a ho. But whatever it was, it cannot call for this bitchslapping him upside the head. The man does not even retaliate. In fact, he has no aura of threat or aggression about him whatsoever. Neither is he shouting or causing any commotion. The only noise is that made by the security guard.

Slapslapslapslapslapslappityslapslap

The man tries to back away as the guard continues to hit him. A crowd starts to form. I get out of there, no desire to be caught up in it.

Out on the street I see a police truck pull up. The security guard and the police start to drag the man out of the post office. I am amazed. That there is an emergency number in Zambia. That works. That the police answer. That they have a vehicle. Which works. That they arrive quickly. In itself, this sequence of events is incredible.

The man is now quite close to me. He is still not resisting, despite the violence being inflicted on him. I would guess that he either has a slight mental disability, or possibly he is a bit drunk. The police manhandle him into the back of the truck and pull off.

************

USA, 1995

"Ma'am, ma'am! Is she gonna expire?"

The police officer is leaning over me. I am leaning over my friend Rosa. I am confused. No-one has ever called me 'ma'am' before, and I don't know what he means by expire. Rosa has stretched Happy Hour into Happy All Night Long, and suddenly the path - no, the sidewalk - looks like a great place to lie down and sleep off all the margaritas. I look into the officer's face, and I see that he has never had the need to feel a cold hard tile pressed against his cheek. And then my slow brain translates the copspeak and I realise what he is asking me.

"No, of course she's not going to die." I drag her up, and we stagger off, laughing.

************

Ireland, 1990

I am running late. Late, late, late. A crust of toast in one hand, packing my bag with the other, trying to wriggle into my coat, sprinting for the front door. Just as I get to it, the doorbell rings. Arse. I can't just ignore it, wait for whoever it is to go away, I am late! But if I open it, I will get caught up dealing with whoever it is. The bell rings again, insistently. I need to get away. I wrench open the door and try to step out. Four large men are blocking my path.

"Garda Drug Squad", says the biggest one, waving something at me. Big arse with cherry on top. I don't have time for this.

"Do you know Seamus O'Toole?" a Garda in the middle of the posse says.
"Mmm, not personally, but I think he lives in the flat upstairs."
"Fine," he says, elbowing his way in.

I brush past the others and race towards my bike. And I spend the next few weeks convinced that Seamus O' Toole is some major drug baron who will find me and cut me for confirming to the Gardai where he lives.

A Man Walks Over A Bridge

2005-11-11T13:50:00.000+02:00

A Man walks over a bridge. He doesn't know it will change his life. Dark, but moonlit. Drunk, swaying. Spies somebody out on the water, fishing. Thinks he'll have a little fun, add a little buzz to the one he's already got. Hollers at the three figures in the boat hauling nets.

"Ha! I am reporting you! It is illegal for fishing here! I will get the police!"

In truth, the police get him. One occupant of the boat is startled, jumps out. He can't swim. Drowns. The other two concoct a story. The Man On The Bridge is imprisoned, awaiting trial for manslaughter. A nephew of The Man goes to see him in jail. Conditions are filthy. The Man asks his nephew to bring him a bar of soap. The Nephew runs to the market, returns with a block of soap. Now he is stopped by the police, who are bored, want a little fun.

"No entry. Visiting hours are finished. Go home."
"Can I just...."
"No!" A gun is pointed.
"But the soap..."
"You are tormenting us now, go home."
"Ok, I'm going. But could you give this soap to my uncle?"

The nephew is slung in jail too.

This Is How We Live Now

2005-11-10T10:40:00.001+02:00

The editor of the only independent newspaper in Zambia is threatened with imprisonment for criticising the president. It is a crime in this country to do so. Imagine not being able to say 'George Bush sucks' or 'Tony Blair is an asshat' ? Truly, Zambia, you show your utter odious stupidity with this act.

Committee to Protect Journalists

Conversation With A Bank Teller

2005-11-09T11:28:00.001+02:00

In which I manage to get to town and attempt to lodge money to my account.

"Can't put money to your account."
"Why not?"
"Access nothing computer card flashy here."
"Excuse me?"
"Nothing number screen now."
"Excuse me?" I think he is speaking Gerbil. It may be that I am not hearing him right, as I have malaria yet again and I fear that my brain is now permanently damaged. I give him the benefit of the doubt and try once more.
"What's the problem?"
"It's finished."
"Pardon?"
"It's finished, the account."
"What do you mean? I just opened it."

It transpires that Barclowns Zambia have a unique way of operating their banking system. To open an account you must first fill in 957 pieces of paper, provide them with photographs, fingerprints and the right foot of your firstborn child. Then, after several months, they will open an account (if you're lucky). They will not, however, notify you that the account has been opened. As soon as they open it they will immediately charge you fees, which you have not been notified of either. This will send your account overdrawn. You are not allowed to be overdrawn. Then they will add lots of interest onto the illegal overdraft. Rinse, repeat. Then they will close your account even though you have only just managed to get it open.

*Note: previous mentions of using the ATM refer of course to my UK bank cards. Now imagine the horror of losing them in this country.

Termites

2005-11-07T09:49:00.000+02:00

Ah, the blessed rains have finally come. Lightening the load of the temperature which has been in the mid 40s C for weeks. And, of course, bringing also the delights of the termites in flight.

For the first couple of rainstorms of the season the termites come out of hiding in their millions and fly about. Mostly at me. They are particularly attracted to light, making the start of the rains at night-time hazardous. I am reading a book when the sound of the rain begins to thunder on the roof and the temperature drops. I breathe a sigh of relief at the sudden coolness, but fail to notice the profusion of winged things which have wiggled their way in to the house through the cracks in the windows, the doors, the roof. The torrent of water makes me want to pee, but when I look up from my page my exit is blocked. A wall of termites is between me and the door. Well, actually between me and everything else. But I need to pee.

I put my hands over my face and race through the termite wall. Running to the outhouse my torch-holding hand is covered in critters. In the outhouse I switch on the lightbulb. A mistake. Not even Hitchcock in his finest moments could have envisioned the horror. I am immediately swarmed. Covered from head to toe in flappy flippy termites. I am not dropping my pants in there.

But I do not want to use the longdrop in the dark, in case I fall in and drown in poo. I run out of the outhouse spitting out wings so that I can scream, and tearing at my clothes to rid myself of the persecutors. A neighbour hears my yells and asks if I have been bitten by a snake. Um, not this time, but that might be preferable to a bazillion flickering fliers hellbent on tickling my nether regions.

Yelling, I fling away my cumbersome umbrella and the torch which is attracting my attackers mid-run, getting soaked in the process, and head back towards the house. In desperation I squat down in the dark beside the verandah.

'Raaaaaaaaawrk!!!'

I have peed on a frog.

Conversation With A Security Guard

2005-11-04T08:10:00.000+02:00

"Hello, we've come to see Mr & Mrs Smith."
"I not Mr Smith."
"No, we've come to see them, they live here."
"No."
"John and Mary? Are they in?"
"Who?"
"John and Mary Smith. They live here. Are they in? Can you please tell them we've arrived."
"I don't think so. Not Smith."
"Who lives here?"
"I don't know."
"But you are the Security Guard, working at this house?"
"Yes, it's me, the security."
"Can you find the owner of this house please?"
"Ah, I am not owning this house."
Sound of my head banging off the gate and Mary running out into the driveway yelling at the Security Guard. Damn sure no-one's going to get past him.

Welcome To Nutsville

2005-11-01T07:26:00.000+02:00

Which of the following are true, and which are false? Prize to the first person with the correct answers. It may be a virtual prize:

Regular residents of Ndola are now afraid to go to the service stations, after a group of taxi and minibus drivers physically lifted up a private vehicle and literally flung it across the forecourt of one station, claiming that as their livelihoods depended on fuel they should get priority.

Some kids from our community who have progressed on to a secondary school in the area have been sent home because of rioting. See, the Headmaster died. Because the Deputy Head bewitched him. And the Deputy Head has now run off because the students were rioting and harassing him over the juju.

The Prez pulled up alongside me at the weekend, as we were trying to hitch into town. He gave a little wave, then ZP1 pulled off again.

I tried to stash my bag in the 'Parcels Here' section of the supermarket, but there was no server there. A live chicken sitting on one of the shelves clucked helpfully at me though.

I managed not to throw up in one vehicle which gave us a lift, as in the 40degree heat the 5-day old remains of a slaughtered pig which had not been washed out of the vehicle began to hum along to the radio.

We realised there was a potential burglar lurking outside the house by the sudden presence of an overpowering stench of smelly feet.

Aretha Franklin Junior

2005-10-30T12:25:00.001+02:00

I just knew she was trouble the moment she boarded the bus, about 30 seconds before it was due to pull off. Her face was set to 'attack', her handbag clutched tightly to her bosoms. She wanted a row. The woman's enormous frame blocked out the light in the doorway, and she struggled to make it down the aisle. The yelling began.

"THAT'S MY NUMBER! THAT'S MY NUMBER BOSS! THAT'S MY NUMBER!" The shouts were directed at The Husband; we were sitting half way down the bus. As a woman I am studiously ignored in this country. If we are together, all greetings are directed at my hubby. In this instance I was glad of the fact. I curled up in a sniggering ball as The Husband began to get fretful.

While on holiday we had needed to take a coach from Livingstone back up to the capital Lusaka. Tickets are best purchased in advance as seats fill up quickly. We decided to try a new coach company, mainly because their departure time would allow us to eat breakfast first. On approaching the ticket booth a seating plan was presented with a flourish. We were able to choose our seat numbers, which were then written on our tickets. This was highly unusual. In general, it is a total bunfight to get on board any kind of public transport here and seat allocation is unheard of.

Sure enough, on the day of departure we boarded the bus only to find some other people in our seats, and everyone just squishing in any old how. We suggested that our seat occupants switch, but they refused, so we just shrugged and sat somewhere else. Thinking nothing of it, until The Giantess stepped on.

Her yelling increased in volume as her girth approached. "THAT'S MY NUMBER BOSS, THAT'S MY NUMBER!" In another setting it could have been an Aretha Franklin gig. Everyone on board turned to stare at us. Some of them opened their bags of food and settled in to watch the entertainment. The Husband lost no time in agreeing that we were indeed in her allocated seat, but that the gentlemen in ours refused to move. People ducked as she swung around yelling for the conductor. I tried very hard to hide the fact that I was laughing so much, in case she hit me. The conductor lost no time in bounding aboard to sort us all out. We explained that we were happy to give up our seats to the Fearsome Lady, but could he please get the two guys to vacate ours to avoid any more incidents? A sharp smack to the back of the heads of the offending gentlemen and the issue was resolved. They began punching each other as they made their way to a different seat. The Giantess seemed taken aback that we'd agreed to the swap, and carried on muttering and yelling loudly about her 'number'.

A slight man at the front of the bus popped up out of his seat like a meerkat. "You! You you you! You talk too much! Give it a rest."
He popped back down again. A ripple of laughter spread its honey tones throughout the bus.

Why Are Things Crap?

2005-10-28T08:22:00.001+02:00

Let's face it, this could be an ongoing series.

I like food. I like it a lot. I'm not snobbish about food, I'll eat anything. Anything as long as it is actually food, is prepared properly and has never been mentioned even in passing by Anthony Squirrel Pompom. Is it too much to ask?

The Husband and I had a particularly bad run of Food Related Incidents on holiday. On our first night in Some Town we excitedly ran to the Indian Restaurant on the main street. Mmm, Indian food yummy. Distressingly, the temperature inside the restaurant seemed to be many degrees higher than the boiling heat outside. We paused in the doorway, wavering. It was a tough choice. Would we go for lovely curry, with the possibility of an embarrassing falling-over from heat exhaustion, or would it be fried chicken on another premises which had a bit more air? Curry won out.

The Husband paused again on the cracked lino, causing me to bump into him and almost suffocate. "Um, is this right?" He found the round brown lady sitting in the plastic box upsetting.
"Yes!" I said, marching him in. I have experience of people sitting in plastic boxes.

There appeared to be a sort of takeaway section at the front, which was milling with people, but a sign for the restaurant pointed towards the back. A waitress ambled over and we were waved through an entanglement of candy coloured plastic strips dangling from a doorway. It didn't take long to realise that we were the only people in there. I beckoned to the waitress and asked her what the difference was between the front of this place and the back, as it suddenly seemed rather lonely in the 'restaurant' and more fun in the takeaway section.

"Here is for executives."

The Husband began sniggering into his menu. I tried to kick him under the table, but on placing my feet beneath my chair they had immediately glued themselves to some sticky mass on the lino.

"Thank you. We just need a minute to look at the menus."

We ordered some poppadums to begin with. You can't go wrong with a poppadum, right? Huh, wrong.

Now, I've eaten in a lot of Indian restaurants. But chewy poppadums seem to be an Indo-Zambian specialty. Cooked in 500 year old recycled oil, they clag to your teeth and the roof of your mouth, rendering your facial movements akin to those of a 99-year old care home resident with ill-fitting dentures. The 'dums don't come with chutneys or raita either. Oh no. To accompany the chewy 'dums we get.....ketchup. Ketchup which is weeping crustily out of a filthy plastic bottle. A bottle whose rim is a bug graveyard. It is very much highly unpleasant.

We start to play a game called 'What Would Gordon Ramsay Say?' but quickly have to abandon it as soon as it becomes evident that Gordo would probably have to resort to immolation.

I have ordered a butter chicken dish and a pea-based vegetable curry for my main course, but after the poppadums I am nervous about my decision. My skittishness is not helped by the 27 ½ fans on the go in the room, which are doing nothing to assuage the heat, and everything to reinforce my decapitation nightmares.

Seasons come and go as we wait for the waitress to return; dehydration begins to set in. At least the sweat puddle which has formed underneath me has loosened my feet from their gluey grave.

The closest wall-mounted fan to me begins to make a frightening racket. I shuffle around to the other side of the table. The waitress immediately appears and is confused because I am not sitting where I was. I understand her dilemma. After all, it is very hard to do your job properly when ALL TWO of your customers insist on switching places.

We order more drinks and mildly enquire as to when the main courses might appear? The waitress looks puzzled, and stares at her pad. I lean over to look at it. She hasn't written down our full order. They are not right this minute cooking our food in the kitchen, oh no. A glance at our watches indicates that it is past the witching hour and therefore too late to try another venue. We are trapped. I repeat our order and watch her write it down.

I smell my chicken dish long before I see it, and I try not to gag into the one tiny see-through paper napkin at my disposal. A bowl of oil with bits bobbing in it is plonked down before me in a precarious manner. At first I wonder if it is a dish of floating candles, but no, I am expected to eat it. The thing is though, Butter Chicken is supposed to be cooked in butter, not boiled to death in the cheapest and most rancid margarine you can scam on the black market. The dish containing the alleged pea-based curry is also placed in front of me. I can count three round green things, no less, no more. I am very sad, and think to myself, Why are things crap? I would probably be cross but I am incapacitated by the heat. They are very clever, these restaurant people.

In comparison to the vomfest which is residing on my plates, The Husband's biriyani is Not Too Bad Considering, so I pick at that. Quickly.

On the way out we pass our cash to the round brown lady in the plastic box. I bet she eats real butter.

Interesting

2005-10-27T09:53:00.001+02:00

The most eloquent and expressive person around here is man who can neither hear nor speak.

One of my colleagues seems to have lost his glasses; he is squinting away trying to work. However, in removing them he has dropped age from 50s to 30s.

The aliens may be coming. Three of my female colleagues have twisted their hair into spikes sticking away from their heads. Perhaps they are trying to pick up a signal. Another one has shaved her head and eyebrows entirely; maybe she is the leader.

Attack Of The Killer Bees

2005-10-25T08:48:00.001+02:00

The office has been taken over by bees!!!

It's highly inconvenient but also quite funny. Well, funny as long as I don't get stung and swell up like a swollen thing. I think about all the offices I've ever worked in and hated, and how I'd like to go back in time and shut them down with a bee invasion. All those places with fluorescent strip lights, no air, hideous co-workers. The smell of dirty carpet and farts in the lift, cracked and dirty cups in the sink and pigeons shitting on the windowsill, freer in their filth than the pigeon-toed nutters inside. Immutable desks, back-breaking chairs, all possessed by the African Killer Bee. That tickles.

Water is heavy. I stumble carrying a full bucket into the wash-house. I catch myself before I fall, but still I project a possible future, of smashing my knee open on the step, a magic bandage to stick it closed, no hospitals open, bad stitching when it comes, a wonky leg. A scar on the front of my knee to match the one on the back – flesh gouged out to remove a poisonous spider bite. I should be afraid of spiders but I'm not. I fear rabies and snakes. And, sometimes, bees. It seems to be the time of year for the Camel Spider to breed, they are everywhere. The Husband thinks he has been told by someone that they are vicious, with a poisonous bite. They are funny, in any event. The kind of spider you would see on acid. They streak across the floor like Road Runner, and when we see one we shriek and raise our legs in the air. They are big. Like stretched out tarantulas, toffee-coloured furballs. When I Google the Camel Spider though, I find these creatures are not in fact poisonous or dangerous to humans; this is a myth perpetrated by US soldiers serving in Iraq. That figures.

It feels like a day to day existence right now, a wait-and-see life. Bobbing in a boat of normality in a sea of anarchy. When will we capsize? The first five service stations we try in town have no fuel. The sixth says they might have a delivery at midday. That means physical fights to get in the queue, and a wait of up to six hours. These days the temperature is hitting 40 degrees C. We pull off. Miraculously the seventh station has petrol and allows us to fill our jerrycan. The seventh station. Like the Stations of the Cross. The ATM is working. It often takes the money from my account without spewing the physical cash out of the wall. Sometimes you don't get all the cash, the flimsy paper chewed in the jaws of the mechanical monster. Money is worth so little I take out a million kwacha at a time. You don’t need a wallet, you need a backpack. Often the ATM doesn't work at all; it's a gamble, sticking in that piece of plastic.

They have Doritos and Heat magazine in the supermarket. I am made. They also have a bottle of wine I used to drink on the beach back home. We don’t usually buy wine, the 250% Random Tax on it makes even the cheapest vinegar beyond our means. For some reason this bottle is not so many kwacha. I drink it later; it is waves, pebbles, illicit barbeques and much-missed friends.

I have a secret. I am a fan of conspiracy theories. Hell, why not? But it's quite whacked to be privy to one for real. I know something about this fuel crisis, information which has come from the top. I bet the papers would love it, but I'm not telling. I have a secret.

I Have Arrived, Fo' Shizzle

2005-10-25T08:38:00.002+02:00

Andre made me a picture. Ha ha. I bet you are all jealous. Here it is, all for me:

It is the attention to detail I love, ie the fact that there is no water in the swimming pool.

If you have never read Andre's blog you should hop over there and take a look, he is very funny and very talented and apparently has great hair. These things are important.

Monsters

2005-10-20T08:20:00.002+02:00

I'm not supposed to be blogging or webbing for the rest of this month. The bandwidth monster has been and eaten our allocation; THEY are threatening to cut off my only contact with the outside world.

I haven't felt much like blogging anyway.

I'm hungry. I think I may be having a panic attack. There is no petrol again. So we can go to town and get food with our spare can, but then have no petrol here to get us in the next time. I feel like I went to sleep and then woke up in Zimbabwe or somewhere.

I wonder if Andre would draw me a picture? The words are kind of lacking right now.

Babymama

2005-10-14T07:02:00.001+02:00

I love this picture. That Community Midwife looks like she's all set to have a giggling fit. This one is for all five hundred brazilian of my mates who are sprogging at the moment - enjoy the ultrascans. Here they check that the baby is ok with some kind of ear horn....

So the ambulance managed to get out and about to do outreach. I don't know where they got the fuel. A convoy of trucks coming in from Tanzania with fuel for the country was given a police escort, but strangely the fuel 'disappeared' before getting to its destination.

When there is fuel in the country you can actually buy it anywhere along the road. The tanker drivers stop and siphon off fuel to some 'entrepreneurs' in the bush who then sell it on. It's probably not the best idea to buy this stuff, because not only is it illegal but who knows what they put in it. But then, the fuel at the service stations must be watered down, because despite siphoning off fuel along the way, the tanker drivers still have to arrive at their destination with the requisite number of litres.

You can tell which guys along the roadside are selling this illegal fuel because they stand there madly waving their arms and swinging empty cooking oil drums. At night-time they light huge fires to attract attention. What's interesting is that if you pull off to buy this fuel, you more often than not come to a traditional village with round mudbrick and thatch huts, and right in the middle will be The Fuel Man's house - made of cement, with crenellations, a huge satellite dish perched on the roof, everything painted in gaudy colours. What most impresses me is their ability to source coloured paint. It seems like the only paint colours available in Zambia are blue and black. I also wonder what this country would do if they didn't have any cooking oil drums. Everyone uses them, mostly for carrying water, but often for fuel as well.

I suspect the cats have been Out Doing Evil. In my path this morning was my chum the bright blue gecko. Except he's not blue anymore, on account of being dead an' all. He actually looked like one of those rubber toys, except for the bloodstains and the gouged-out eyes. I tell The Husband that something bad has happened.

"You mean the dead gecko? Yeah I saw that this morning."
"Those cats are so mean. They get fed. They're not supposed to kill geckos or birds or the things with the furry tails. Just mice and rats and bats."
"How do you know it was the cats? I think he fell out of the tree and died."
Yeah. Right. Of course he did. The tree he's been climbing his whole life. Absolutely, he just fell clean out of there and hacked his own eyes out on the way down.

H20

2005-10-12T15:53:00.001+02:00

It is so hot. I need to bathe at least every hour. No water came out of the tap this morning, just trails of weed. I smell like turnip.

Update

2005-10-11T12:19:00.001+02:00

So there was some petrol, but not lots. Enough food to keep us going, but hardly any vegetables. Scurvy approaches. At the first service station we tried, the pump attendant refused to fill our spare jerrycan. I can understand putting a limit per person so that people aren't stockpiling the fuel and going mental, but one 20 litre can for one vehicle hardly seems excessive. Johnson, who is normally chill personified, shouted at the attendant. "What, you think we all live in towns? How are we supposed to get fuel?" At the next service station they are not bothered; they're filling a lot of cans.

But it's doubtful the ambulance and clinic crew will be doing outreach work this week as the ministry has been unable to deliver their fuel supplies.

The Husband has just come from a very depressing meeting with the Community HIV/AIDS counsellors. So many women walking miles to the tarmac every day to work as prostitutes to the truck drivers. They have no way of earning income and not enough food. The women have been left widowed, gaggles of orphans piled into their small houses. AIDS is not just a disease which could be cured if people cared enough; it's a situation. I have no real desire to debate the issue of prostitution, but it seems to me like it should be a choice, and when it's not that's a problem. And what of the truck drivers? Adding to the problem, or helping the women out with money? Using condoms? Doubtful. Our Food Programme already covers a massive amount of people, but it's never enough.

Another senior manager here is about to be sacked for corruption.

I just read a geographical magazine, full of photographs of landfills. Beeyoodifull.

There is a possiblity of house-sitting for some people in town who are going abroad for a while. It's tempting - they have satellite TV and a swimming pool. Not to mention electricity and running water, aircon etc. I think they may even have a washing machine.

An Irishman has won the Booker. Hurrah.

A parcel has arrived full of books and chocolate. I am going to go bury my head in the sand. I may be some time.

Bugger

2005-10-05T08:53:00.001+02:00

Our order for cement for our current construction work (wells, creche extension and health centres) has been declined - no fuel, no deliveries. It's about six weeks until the rains start and you can't build in the rain. Which will probably mean a year's delay for all these things. Thinking about it I'm not sure there's any point in going to town - with no fuel there will have been no delivery of physical cash to the ATMs anyway. Nor will there be food in the shops most likely. Hmmm. Somebody said caterpillars are tasty...

State of Muppetry

2005-10-04T15:28:00.002+02:00

How do you know when an African country is really in trouble? When there's no Coca-Cola to be had anywhere. If those guys can't get the deliveries in, something's screwed.

I am Concerned now with a capital C. I'm hoping it doesn't develop into full-blown paranoia. We're almost entirely out of food, and re-stocking will necessitate the 3-hour round trip to town. I can't even grin and bear it and live on Nsima, having just had to throw out two sacks of maize meal which were wriggling off the shelf of their own accord.

The whole country is YET AGAIN completely out of fuel. We have an emergency can of petrol, which would get us in and out of town to buy food, which is obviously necessary. But if we use the emergency fuel in that way, we have no way of replacing it right now. This is not funny when you live in the bush which is full of snakes and rabid wildlife and other Dangerous Things which might constitute a Medical Emergency.

It is an hour and a half's drive to the nearest hospital, or, five and a half day's limping if you have no fuel. The options seem to be (1) use the fuel to go fetch food and risk being stuck in the bush with no fuel and possibly dying some hideous death by attack of the monster locust, (2) Starve, safe in the knowledge that at least we have fuel to get to hospital if necessary.

Planning ahead is a waste of time here. As with the fuel, we try to have emergency cash, for the times when the ATM doesn't work. Thing is, it rarely works, so the emergency cash gets used up. As with the so-called emergency fuel. There are rumours of planned riots in Lusaka this weekend. What fun ho! Somebody somewhere needs to sort this stuff out. Me, I am signing up to become a biodiesel producer.

And for your amusement, below is a little test for anyone who is thinking of working in development:

Test: You are required to help your colleague resize some digital photos, which are only available on her hard drive, and email them to the UK office. Your colleague's computer is running Windup 88. It does not have email. The floppy disk drive is broken. Where there should be a CD-Rom drive is a gaping hole. It will take a memory stick, but no other computer in the office will. Some of the other computers have CD drives which work, some have floppy drives which work. No machine is fully functional. Two of the computers are randomly networked. There is only one printer. There is a portable CD drive which works sometimes. One of the computers which is connected to the internet has no email system set up on it. The only computer with email and internet is password protected and the person who uses it is not in the office. You have 30 minutes in which to complete this task. This is not a Rubix Cube.

I need booze...

Avauntular?

2005-10-02T11:56:00.000+02:00

Why is there no female version of the word 'Avuncular'? At least, I can't find one. Is there one? If not, why not? Tsk, it gets so tiresome having to invent new words all the time.

Also, would people please stop dying. The funereal drums are giving me head pains.

Kiddlytinks

2005-09-30T12:02:00.001+02:00

Many of my friends refuse to believe that The Husband and I LIKE being childfree and have absolutely no desire to change that status, ever. I was recently sent a link to this article. Well, I see you that article and raise you this one. I have a pain from laughing so much.

Hot Press

2005-09-30T08:39:00.001+02:00

Q: What is the best cure for a 24 hour bush-bug which includes vomiting & diarrhoea?

A: Ampersands, or, a supper of gin&tonic and M&Ms.

On a work note I have nothing but good things to say about our local government District Health people. Not only have they kept their word and continue to supply more than enough fuel to run the ambulance we donated to the clinic, started HIV testing, counselling and ARV facilities, they are now coming up trumps with disposable supplies for malaria testing once we supply a microscope. It just shows that governments are more than willing to invest in basic needs once they have the opportunity. I just hope debt relief begins to loosen the coffers at the District Education Board, even getting a reply from them is like getting blood out of a turnip.

Oh Yes, It Was Lovely...

2005-09-27T07:18:00.000+02:00

"Oy! Can't a giraffe get some lunch in peace? Bloody tourists!"

"Ok, that's it, I'm coming for that camera."

Some very lazy buffalo, as seen from horseback

See it and weep! That thar is the POOL at the lodge we stayed at in South Luangwa National Park. Look, look at all that water! Bliss. Especially with a constant parade of lion, hippo, elephant, antelope etc trooping past on that dusty bit in the background.

Elvis Has Left The Building

2005-09-02T07:53:00.001+02:00

Worn out. Go holiday. Back end month. With stories. Oh yes, there will be stories.

You Are The News

2005-08-30T10:32:00.001+02:00

"I'm sorry, you'll have to speak up please. My wife and I were attacked last year; I can't hear properly now."

The simple lines are not referred to, they are not even a conversation-stopper, but they are like a punch to the guts for me. For I have heard similar before, and each time the shock is like a little bomb-blast of somone else's reality. The man speaking is a Zimbabwean we have just met, and the weight of his words hang heavy. There is no need to ask him about the attack, or even, actually, to feign horror. I know what he is talking about. The vicious and unprovoked attacks on large-scale farmers in Zimbabwe has been an item on the news for so long now that we have almost become inured to it. But you cannot be impassive when it's sitting next to you over a cup of coffee, when the speaker speaks of trying to rebuild a new life in Zambia, when so many decades and centuries of livelihood in another country have been wiped out in one blow. Or many blows, raining down, leading to hearing impairment and who knows what else. Which isn't to say that large-scale farmers are the only ones in pain - all sectors of Zimbabwean society are currently being made homeless and subjected to violence.

Shocking words, spoken in a matter-of-fact manner, can jolt the listener from the hum-drum. You are at once moved to question your own existence, what you take for granted, the things you never give a thought to, your easy dismissal of people you don't know because you never take the time to ask. I guess, though, this does depend on being a listener, rather than a hearer. Or non-hearer (no deafness implied).

I knew what the Zimbabwean man was talking about, but I wasn't always so quick. In a previous incarnation I was an EFL teacher. Some of my students were refugees of the war in Bosnia. In an elementary class I taught was a young man named Ali. Like many of his compatriots, his eyes were haunted. He couldn't sit still for very long; against all rules he would leave class every ten minutes to smoke a cigarette. One day I started a dictation exercise with the class. Ali became very agitated, and with what little English he had, stammered over and over again that he couldn't do it. I tried to jolly him along, telling him it was just a listening exercise, and to simply jot down any words at all that he heard, that it didn't matter if he couldn't write sentences. In due course I came to realise that Ali was in fact illiterate. It wasn't the English that was bothering him, but the paper and pen. It hadn't even occurred to me that somone might not know how to read and write. Ali was learning those skills from scratch in a foreign language. I thought I would learn from that lesson. I didn't. In a later class we did some frivolous exercise on using the phone – how English speakers speak on the telephone and so on. The exercise included questions on how often the students used the phone, how much it cost them, which countries they telephoned. Round the class we went, the students calling out their answers. Ali's seemed a bit odd. He was spending an inordinate amount of money and calling many different countries across Europe and I thought he had misunderstood the questions. I gently probed him about his answers.

"I calling everywhere Germany France Italy Switzerland UK. All friends family moved everywhere after war. No-one here. My girlfriend, she in hospital Italy." He proudly showed me a tattered passport photo of a young woman. Stupid dumbass teacher.

It didn't stop there though. In an advanced class was Ivo. Ivo was a phenomenally goodlooking man, a rock star back in Bosnia. The level of English in the advanced class was impeccable, some days I really didn't know why they were there. We mostly spent the time having philosophical debates. On a particular day I chose to discuss 'Euthanasia – Right or Wrong?'. I had used it before, and as euthanasia at that time was not legal anywhere it seemed a fairly abstract topic. We had barely even begun when Ivo spoke up. And subjected us all to a story about him fighting in the war and finding his best friend practically slashed in half by a bomb. Ivo wept as he told us that despite his friend's obvious agony he just couldn't 'put him out of his misery' and kill him, as it is always wrong to take someone else's life. We fell silent and I sent everyone out for a break. It's never really just a philosophical debate is it, if it's someone else's reality? And it's never ever just some old story on the evening news, because ordinary people's lives are always affected.

Agua, agua

2005-08-28T14:14:00.001+02:00

The heat arrives unannounced. Heavy, like an anchor dropping. No heraldry, just hypnotism. It sneaks up, like a sea turning from low tide to high in what seems like an instant; mesmerised by the waves I suddenly find myself drowning. Gently opiated, smothered by the weight of a thousand smooth blankets, it would seem the very oxygen has been sucked out of the air. Flesh touching metal is seared like tuna. Around me is the visible hum of ripe bodies.

A haze hangs, a Vaseline thumb-smear across the sky. Brittle tree-bones crack underfoot, and sweat dries as it forms, leaving dusty salt crystals on my skin. Dizzy leaves yellowhiteyellowhiteyellowhite fly in formation across my path; a child shaking a packet of crisps, an adult shaking a bottle of Goldschlager. Fighting torpor; torpor wins.

Somnambulant. I try to speak but I cannot muster the energy, only the zzz zzz of a worn-out battery. The dry hiss as a tap is opened but nothing pours forth.

Monkey(s)

2005-08-27T13:15:00.001+02:00

A man walked into the office, carrying a monkey. (So many posts begin 'A man walked into the office [something ludicrous]'. ) I don't know where he got the poor little mite from, because there ain't no monkeys in the forests directly around us. The monkey was tied up in a plastic bag with only his miserable head poking out of the top. The man asked The Husband if he wanted to buy the monkey.

"Absolutely not, you must put it back in the forest."
"You don't want to buy?"
"If I bought it I would release it."
"Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Then I would just catch it and sell it again."

What is wrong with people?

Lemons

2005-08-26T14:21:00.001+02:00

Well how's this for a barrel of smugness on a Friday morning - an article in The Goonsquad by famous fabulous author Tim Clare. Never heard of him? Me neither. Tim would like to tell you all that not everybody has a novel in them. And that publishing a book is really dead simple if you're good enough. And that any "drudges" who can't get published are just "needy bumbling timewasters". Or "burnt-out English teachers". (Wonder why he bothered to take an MA when he's so dismissive?)

Mr Clare shows that he knows very little about the publishing industry when he denies that it is a giant cartel. He clearly has never had an insider's view. But a flick through Carole Blake's From Pitch to Publication should bring him back down to earth with a bump. He claims that if anything, publishing is too open to newcomers. I think he is confusing this with the inexplicable trend of some publishers to put any old rubbish into print.

Many well-written novels are rejected for tenuous reasons which are rarely to do with the quality of the writing. Their subject matter is not 'trendy' enough, it's too 'difficult'; the book is set in the 'wrong' country; it's too big; it's too small. And other such whimsies. It's worth bearing in mind too, that someone who is skilled at creative writing might not necessarily have the aggressive and tenacious personality needed to market themselves and their work. In fact many writers prefer to work alone with their creations; the idea of having to face agents and endless rounds of PR fills them with dread. Does this really make them "disaffected and untalented"? I think many many people have a novel in them, a good one. Just not everybody manages to get it published. There is a difference.

A quick google search (what on earth did we do before google?) finds this quote by Tim himself: "Naturally, like most foolish rookie authors, I think what I've written's rather good... " Didn't take him long to switch from a foolish rookie to a pompous knob, did it? Well it would seem his book has stalled on its way to the public, because Amazon has never heard of him. Keeps directing me to books about The Burren, in Co. Clare, Ireland. A lovely place, should you ever get the chance to visit it, and most likely a far nicer way to spend a Friday than reading over lemons. And while we're on the subject of fruit, it might interest Mr Clare to know that a kumquat ("accountants with ulcers the size of kumquats") is about the size of a grape. I think, perhaps, you were searching for a larger fruit analogy. Who wants to read you showing off your Scrabble words?

Wildlife

2005-08-25T08:13:00.001+02:00

I walk into the dark bedroom last night and a bat flappy-flies right at my face and head. Brrgghghffff! Fffgggnnmmmrr! The Husband is of no help, laughing maniacally as I run screaming from the room. He says I am flapping more than the bat. I send him to kill it with the broom. But the broom is bald and useless. We have a new one, but it's in two parts. We keep forgetting to buy a nail to put it together. For want of a nail the bat lived.

I get up this morning, leave the bedroom, and walk smalk bang into a giant cow with ferocious horns. Moo! it says. Moo! I say back. Perhaps it is inspecting the verandah?

And there I was thinking we needed a break, a holiday, a little safari somewhere, watching animals. Silly me, it's all here. The Husband though, is hunched over his desk, playing with rocks. Should I worry?

On a positive note, the cats are bored and listless and have FINALLY decided to hunt the chickens. Hurrah. I hate chickens. Littlecat even made an attempt to biff the cow. I'll make a lion out of him yet.

Elephants

2005-08-23T09:52:00.003+02:00

You know it's time for a holiday when the vagaries of life leave you wanting to land a punch to the face of everyone you meet.

Our esteemed and beloved leader President Levy Mwanawasa, democratically elected ruler of Zambia, has decided that when he leaves office he would like to take a large wodge of cash with him, to the tune of £80,000 equivalent or thereabouts. Well, wouldn't we all like to take that home with us? How marvellous. This has been announced out of the blue. He somehow feels he deserves a big payoff, despite the fact that he is already entitled to a presidential pension and perks such as secretarial services (that always amuses me), car, house, international flights, yada yada yada when he departs his position.

Before he went into politics he was a qualified solicitor with his own practice. It's not like he couldn't work if he wanted to top up his already substantial pension. The newspapers have been fairly neutral in their reporting of this latest development, probably because it is a criminal offence in Zambia to criticise El Presidente. It's one thing to let the government off the hook with their lack of support for primary needs such as food, healthcare and education when they literally do not have any money. It's quite another to see Zambia reach HIPC point, have all kinds of promises made to them for debt to be written off, and then the first thing the leader of the country does is announce that he'd like to write himself a big fat cheque.

Yesterday I went to Some Town in Zambia. There was an infamous green slip at the post office, indicating there was a parcel for me. I tried to collect it but was told that they couldn't release it as Customs wanted to open it and inspect it. Great. You would think that as long as a parcel didn't contain something dangerous such as bomb-making equipment that if it's addressed to you, legally it's yours and they can't hold it. Pah!

"Ok, so where is my parcel?" I ask Post Office Man.
"Oh it's here. But I can't give it to you. Customs must inspect it."
"Right. How do we do that?"
"Oh, sometimes the Customs Lady is at the post office, but sometimes not. You will have to go and fetch her."
"Excuse me?"
"You will have to go and fetch her."
"What, you mean drive there and pick her up and bring her back here?"
"Yes."
"Are you serious? She will just get in our vehicle and come with us?"
"She will come, surely."

I turn to Johnson our driver. He shrugs his shoulders. You couldn't make this stuff up. We drive across town to the Zambian Revenue Authority. The offices are full of flashy computers and filing cabinets, smart desks and workstations. It's pretty much empty of people though.

A woman strolls out of an office.
"Excuse me," I say, "we're looking for the Customs Lady."
The woman gives me a disdainful look. "Ah, she is coming."
How very helpful, not.

After about 20 minutes the woman wanders back again. She gestures for us to come into her office. A sign on her desk indicates she is in charge of licensing. She asks for my name and shuffles through some papers. She thrusts something at me, saying, "We were supposed to post this to you. You have to pay us money." Excellent.

Eventually Customs Lady wanders into the office she shares with Licensing Lady. Customs Lady chews on a doughnut. For half an hour she chats with Licensing Lady, shows off her new handbag, packs up her things in a giant bag la la la. Eventually she says hello to us. Or rather, what she says is "You have to pay me money."

The problem seems to be stemming from the fact that as well as drawing materials for the school and books for the library, the parcel contains 3 mobile phones to be given out to the community.

"What are you doing with these phones? You have to pay duty on them."

What makes me mad is that these people in government offices are Power Mad. There is no recourse to make complaints or ask for a supervisor because they are all crap. They call all the shots and you have to go along with it. They make some random decision and you are not allowed to dispute it. Johnson and I explain that we work for an NGO, the phones are donations, we are helping some of the poorest people in the country, as an NGO we are exempt from such charges etc etc. She doesn't give a rat's ass.

"This parcel is addressed to you. You must give me money."

Her colleague, the Licensing Lady, who actually has absolutely nothing to do with Customs apart from sharing an office with the doughnut-muncher, is insistent that I am charged for the phones. Licensing Lady is puzzlingly vitriolic in her insistence to her colleague.

Johnson turns to me and whispers, "Ah, she is Lozi that one. Those people are not friendly." Whatever. This is just insanity.

Customs Lady follows us to our vehicle. Licensing Lady also jumps in. Does anyone actually do any work at the ZRA? We drive to the post office. Where ensues further argument.

I wouldn't mind if there were rules, laws, things written down. If something is a certain way in a country I am happy to abide by it. But where is a written list of items which are subject to duty? Where is an explanation of why they are subject to duty? Something official on paper to show how they calculate what that duty is? Information for NGOs on how they get around paying this? Nothing, nada, simply another official with not so much a chip on her shoulder as a great big sack of potatoes. She is quite possibly the most unhelpful woman I have met here, and that's saying something. She opens the box and examines everything s..l…o…w…l…y.

"Are you at a school?"
"We are providing education to over 800 kids as well as many other projects."
"Ha! Well, this is a small box of pencils. How can you give it to 800 children?"
Actually right now I would prefer to shove them up your nostrils.
I mutter something at her.
"How much are you going to pay me for these phones?"
See what I mean? Shouldn't she be telling me?
"Give me £30."
"No."
"Ah!"
"I'll give you £3."
She is outraged. "I am only doing my job."
"So am I. Any money you take from me means less money to those who need it."
"Phones are not essential items, not like food." She wipes a doughnut crumb off her lip.

Phones ruddy well are essential if you live out in the bush. And who is she to make such a decision? If a community member has access to a phone they can call town to check what price produce is going for, if there is a demand, ask someone to help them transport their goods, so they can sell it, so they can pay school fees and buy clothes for their children.

I barter her down to £15 duty payable. It is a figure plucked from thin air. Yes, she is only doing her job, but as there appears to be absolutely no guidelines what is to stop her from saying 'Oh look, these are old and broken phones, no duty chargeable' instead of clawing money from people who need it?

I tell Customs Lady I will pay the duty and then figure out how to claim it back. A smug smile crawls over her face.

"Oh with this receipt you can't claim back. For duty exemption you must ship things, and get the government to pay the shipping agent."

This is a really helpful tip. Because the one and only time we shipped things they took six months instead of the promised 30 days, and were opened and pilfered by customs officials in over 3 countries.

She takes an inordinate length of time to write my receipt. And then she says,"Now you must take me back to my office."

I grasp my parcel firmly in my arms. "You want a lift? No problem. The charge will be £15." I turn on my heel and walk out. She doesn't follow.

I need a holiday. Communing with elephants. While someone else cooks on a twig fire because it's been six weeks and there is no gas in the entire country because believe me we've tried everywhere. Apparently there is a 'national crisis'. Still on fuel shortages, and bare shelves in the supermarket. Never mind, it is excellent practice, because, Rest of World, these fuel crises are coming your way and they ain't pretty.

Busybody

2005-08-21T13:51:00.001+02:00

No time for blogging. Too busy working. Yes, even on a Sunday. Some people will be happy though. Took an opportunity and hitched a ride Lusaka way, to purchase PE equipment & Class Games for the schoolkids. See, there are some nice people in the world. A thank you to a particular school of kiddies in the UK who sent over their pocket money (or something) to pay for these. Littluns here make hoops out of reeds and footballs out of plastic bags for their PE classes. To be praised, definitely, for their innovation and creativity. But it will be nice for them to have some more durable stuff, which will last longer than one lesson, and be a bit more exciting. I want to see them bash merry hell out of the Swingball. Damn I used to love that as a kid. It was so violent. My brother and I only played so we could try and crack open our neighbours' heads, or at the very least reduce them to gibbering wrecks, curled up on the lawn eating daisies and screaming 'No, no, stop!' as we went WHACK WHACK WHACK.

Attack Of The Bee

2005-08-16T08:22:00.000+02:00

I have to pull down my trousers in order to garner any sympathy.

"Look! See? It's ma-hoo-sive!"

"That's not a bee-sting, that's a helicopter launch pad."

"It is a ruddy bee-sting."

"No way."

"Way, I pulled the bastard off there myself. A honeybee no less. Not so sweet."

We are staring at an enormous angry red raised patch of skin on my leg, which measures about 15cm square.

"Nah, can't be from a bee."

"!!!!!"

"Something else must have bitten you."

"It is from a bee. Can I have some sympathy now?"

"Yeah, it looks nasty."

"You're just lucky I didn't go all anaph...anypho...anil..."

"Anna Phalanges?"

"You know what I mean. That thing where you swell up like the fat chick in Willy Wonka only your throat closes over and you can't breathe, and you woulda had to slash open my throat with a broken pen just to get some air in. Yeah, lucky that didn't happen. Seeing as we don't even have pens in this godforsaken place."

"True."

Humanity's Inhumanity To Others

2005-08-16T08:00:00.001+02:00

Chief was in a car crash recently, a bad one. An imbecile truck driver decided to pull out of a side road at top speed, complete with gigantic trailer, so that he took up the entire highway. In the space of seconds Chief had nowhere to go but smack bang into the truck.

Chief is lucky lucky lucky to be alive. Streaming blood, he crawled out of the wreckage, to find a gaggle of people staring at him. He refused to go to hospital immediately, as he (probably rightly) believed that if he left the scene the truck driver would immediately move our vehicle, destroy any evidence, and buy off any witnesses. He wanted to make a statement to the police first.

In the space of an hour he made several anxious calls to a police station nearby. No police officers came. Finally one of the bystanders offered to go in a taxi and fetch the police. Chief gave the guy some money for the return taxi journey. The man ran off with the money and was never seen again. Luckily a passing man stopped – this now almost two hours after the accident – and tried to take Chief to the hospital, but again Chief asked for the police. The man managed to get the police to come. Having filed their report the police then wandered off, leaving the bleeding man to his own devices.

Chief began to try and hitch-hike into town. Despite the evidence of the crash and the obviously distressed state of Chief, nobody stopped. The passing traffic carried on, ignoring the problem. Another hour later, one more kind person finally pulled over. They took Chief to the hospital. At this point Chief could not walk, from blood loss and shock. When they carried him into the hospital they refused to treat him until he had paid some money upfront. When they were finished examining him they sent him to the government pharmacy within the hospital. The shelves were bare. He had to pay for his medicine in a private pharmacy.

The truck driver never even bothered to report to the owner of the haulage company that he had almost killed someone. Our project vehicle is a write-off. The lack of a project vehicle means we are seriously limited on what outreach work we can do at the moment. I hope nothing bad ever happens to me in Zambia, because I sure as hell wouldn't want to be depending on the majority of its citizens to help me.

Two Little Girls

2005-08-15T08:36:00.001+02:00

"Hello. We've come to visit you."
"Oh. Right. Hello."

Two little girls show up at my house, uninvited. One wears a mumu in a bright African print, her fat braids tied with a blue ribbon. The other wears a stiff nylon merringue-style dress, of an indeterminate pink colour. These nylon monstrosities are beloved of Zambian parents; perhaps the itchy-scratchy items are considered the height of fashion. The two little girls look around them. They decide to park themselves in the deckchairs on the lawn. They settle in, smoothing their skirts down like two queens. Merringue's English is considerably better than Mumu's, so she takes the lead.

Zambian adults, I've found, are quite formal. Zambian children can be similar. I quiz the two small girls until I have found out their names and who their parents are. Then I run out of things to say. They have fallen silent, offering up no conversation, simply sitting and looking at me. I am unused to this. My own niece back home is a livewire who could happily entertain a conference room of people, so I do not know how to deal with these silent beauties. Sugar! I think, and go inside to fetch them some orange squash and biscuits.

They finish their snack in record quick time, and return to staring at me. They seem particularly fascinated by my toe-ring. After sugar my second standby is drawing materials.

"Would you like to do some colouring?"
"No," says Merringue.
I am taken aback. Bad luck, you're doing it anyway.

I collect up some colouring pencils and paper for them, instruct them to get on with it, and return to my own hellish paperwork. It is some minutes before they start drawing. Mumu covers the entire page in pictures of foodstuffs. I wonder if she is hungry. Merringue draws a boat on the water. Zambia is a land-locked country, and this part of the Copperbelt area is far away from major rivers or lakes.

"Have you ever been on a boat?"
"No."
"Have you ever seen a boat?"
"No."
"Just in pictures?"
Silence.

It starts to get dark. Littlecat is mewling around my legs for his dinner.

"Do you have any pets?"
"No."
"Oh. No cats or dogs?"
"We have four chickens."

I wasn't expecting Merringue to say that she had pets, but anything to make conversation. In a country where people struggle to feed themselves, pets are a luxury. And yet taking care of a pet is one of the ways kids learn about responsibility, about the fact that there are others who need taking care of apart from themselves. But then I'm sure Zambian children get all that from looking after their many siblings.

I invite the two small girls into the house to help me feed Littlecat. I put all his grub in a bowl and ask Merringue to carry it through to where I feed him. Littlecat is so excited by the smell of the wretched kapenta* that I have to hold him, wriggly biggly that he is. I turn to Merringue –

"Ok, you can just put the food down there now."
She holds the bowl aloft, on high, and proceeds to tip all of the food out on to the floor. I bite my lip. This is the funniest thing to happen all day, apart from when a bee stung me. No wait, that wasn't funny…

"Oh no dear, I keep the food in the bowl. Never mind."
I scoop all the food back in the bowl, trying not to laugh, while Littlecat is slobbering all over me, the floor, the girls, the bowl. Why not tip the food on the floor? How was she to know?

"Ok now we're going."
"Ok. Do you want to take your drawings?"
"Yes," says Mumu.
"No," says Merringue.
Mumu snatches up her paper with such ferocity I hope she's not going to attempt to eat the pictures she's made of food. Merringue changes her mind and takes her paper too. They run off into the night.

*This fish is dried (for preservation purposes) and sold everywhere in Zambia as a source of cheap protein. It stinks like nothing on earth.

Good Pink, Bad Pink

2005-08-11T14:17:00.001+02:00

I'm one of those people who loves to check out foreign supermarkets and pharmacies, just to see what kind of whacky stuff they got going on in there. So tell me, is this toothpaste now widely available in the free world? Cos I kinda hoped it was an African thang. It's new to me anyway. And although it says Xtreme Red on the tube, trust me this is hot pink. Makes tooth-cleaning so much more fun. So fresh! So hot! So pink!

This, on the other hand, I'm sure is not widely available. Thankfully. It is vile. The ingredients list is: Maize, sugar, colour, flavour. But as it's liquid, I think there must also be water in there. A favourite drink with the urban population of Zambia, costing only a few pence. The acid coloured cartons can be seen littering the towns - available in yellow, orange, purple...depending on the 'flava'. In Namibia the schoolkids had a similar drink - they never opened the top but preferred to chew off one of the bottom corners and suck it from there. Who knows why.

Ashes

2005-08-10T09:46:00.001+02:00

Now is the burning time. Roadside undergrowth ablaze, we drive down the dusty track through a tunnel of soaring heat and ash. My cheeks redden and it feels as though our very vehicle is on fire. Small rodents are forced out by the crackle and pop to be clubbed to death. Later they will hang on sticks, on sale, for eating.

At night-time the sky is an eerie orange, and the galloping fingers of flame sound strangely like rain. Fire-Water. Bricks too burn. Hand-moulded from clay, and burnt to harden. Charcoal also. Smoking mounds turning once-trees into now-coal.

Patches of black soot, brush already eliminated, reveal thousands of small grey termite mounds, poking up like so many endless tombstones. Skeletal trees fork upwards into a cloudless sky. We pass beneath the power lines, swooping low like tangled wool; a sorcery so close yet not ours, a miracle bypassing the regular wo/man on its way to the President's farm.

Now is also the time of the wind, whipping sand into whirling dervishes, spinning-tops to leave grit in eyes, nose, grinding against teeth. Reed mats for purchase flap wildly on poles. Everyone is watching, waiting, for the rains. It is many months off, and already streams are reduced to puddles of mud. Where once were local laundromats now are water-lily ghosts.

Time is marked by no clock, but by produce. On the roadside stalls women in woolly hats tout the last of the squashes, the sweet potatoes. The fat watermelons are already past their best. Avocados are gone; green peppers linger.

I look at this life around me as we make our way into town. The Husband, meanwhile, is busily selecting his Fantasy Football team.

I Am, The Donkeyman

2005-08-08T17:07:00.002+02:00

Five in the evening. Seventeen hours. A truck pulls up, in a cloud of dust. Unusual; no traffic in these here parts. A man gets out of the truck and walks into the office. He is very tall, as tall as a giraffe. He has to bend his upper body just to fit under the rafters.

"Odi!"
"Hello."
"Afternoon."
"How are you?"
"Very fine. And you?"
"Fine. How can I help you?" Goaway getlost buzzoff. I am the only one in the vicinity and not in the mood for visitors.
"I have bought some donkeys. I've come to collect them."
"Some donkeys?" I didn't even know there were donkeys for sale.
"Yes, donkeys."
"Hmmm." The Big Cheese is in hospital, the Medium Cheese is in bed with malaria. I would look for The Donkeyman, but I don't think we have one. I huff and puff a little bit. "Everyone's gone you know. We finish at sixteen hours."
"Is it?"
"Yeah."
"Oh. But I've come to collect the donkeys."
I think we established that Mr Giraffe. I think a little bit. Perhaps Lonely the Security Guard can help. He is a very nice and helpful man, in a smart uniform with polished boots. I go outside to look for him.

The Giraffe follows me. "Do you have any milk?"
What? Milk? From the donkeys? From the cows? How is the cow's milk related to the donkeys? "No, I think it was all sold this morning."
"So you haven't done the milking yet?"
Do I look like a milkmaid I wonder? "I don't think there's any milk."

No-one is there, where the Security Guard should be. I sigh a little bit. A man I have never seen before in my life pops up from behind a pile of straw. He is wearing a red Noddy hat.
"Oh. Have you seen the Security Guard?" I ask him.
"Is me."
"Oh. Hmmm. Can you please go fetch [Medium Cheese] and tell him that a man is here to collect some donkeys.
"Shuwa."
I turn to Mr Giraffe. "[Medium Cheese's] house is some way, so if you'd just like to wait here while we fetch him. "
"Ok."

I turn and head back for the office. Mr Giraffe has ignored my request and is now following Noddy. I feel very bad for sending these people to someone sick with malaria, but really, there are LIMITS to just how far I am prepared to stretch my job description.

I am not The Donkeyman.

Welcome To Lusaka!

2005-08-05T11:51:00.001+02:00

Thundering downhill, as the sun sets to the right and behind, the approach into Lusaka from the North gives one the impression of entering into a dustbowl. Pollution and dirt hang low and heavy in the air, lit up by the sun's dying rays. To each side of the tarmac road is more dirt, and a sudden breeze whips up a fine spray of sand. There are no paths.

On every available centimetre of space someone is trying to scrape a living. Small wooden shacks are painted in the bright red of Celtel; here you can purchase your 'scratchcards' to top up your mobile phone credit. Under a broad squat tree is a coffin perched on a chair, a carpenter displaying his wares. Elaborately carved doors to nowhere line the roadside, propped up by their makers. Tyres for sale.

The afternoon session of school is out, and children in uniforms range round the various shacks and stalls. Some small boys push toy cars made from wire through puddles of sewage. Everything is random and dirty, squalid and rundown. Pedestrians step over burning heaps of rubbish, stopping to purchase some groundnuts, a watermelon.

Slow-moving bright blue battered minibuses, held together with some string and a prayer, lurch to a halt every few metres, tumbling over the edge of the tarred road onto the dirt, like stunned beetles. They are picking up and dropping off those majority Zambians who cannot afford their own vehicles. Golden banners in the windows of the buses proclaim Jesus is Fortunate! Allah is Loving You! All sedan cars in the city, it seems, are white. It is an unfortunate colourway given the proliferation of red dust.

We are overtaken by monstrous 4WDs, grumbling beasts which belong to the large Aid Agencies, the diplomats, the wheeler-dealers. Tinted windows hide them from scrutiny, as their mile-high walls in the nicer neighbourhoods hide away their manicured lawns.

BOOM! Washing paste is best. Advertisements are painstakingly painted by hand onto the walls which lead into the city. The few hoardings proclaim 'Advertise here!' but hand-painted signs reign.

Sitting stretched out in the dirt and coated head to toe in grey dust are the stone-breakers. Their arduous daily task is to hack great lumps of rock out of the ground, and spend hours cracking them down into small stones. The stones are then bought by those with some kwacha, to use for building work.

You could probably count the number of streetlights in Lusaka on one hand. Few roads display their names, there are no signposts. You need to know where you're going.

We are stopped on the way in at a police post. There are about eight officers milling about in the road, and it is unclear what they are doing. One of them makes our driver Johnson pull off onto a side road and park the vehicle. It seems he is doing it simply for his own amusement, as he makes Johnson re-park three times before he is happy. Johnson goes to speak with the officer to find out the problem. The officer shrugs. It would appear he is simply the Parking Policeman. Johnson goes up to each of the officers in turn, trying to find out why we have been stopped. Each one sends him to another one. Finally Johnson lies, yelling that he is taking the muzungus to the airport, urgently, and must be allowed to leave. A fierce-looking policeman orders Johnson to drive to the police station, some two hundred metres further along the road. The police station yard is piled high with junked cars; it looks like a scrap-metal merchant's. Johnson storms in.

When he returns he is shaking his head.
"Well," I ask, "what was it all about?"
"Ah! Inside there….there are women with moustaches! They are very serious those ones. They are not understanding why I am here, so I shouted at them."
"Did you have to bribe them?"
"Mmm mmmm. Not these ones. Let's go."
We pull off into the night.

Morphing

2005-08-04T15:52:00.001+02:00

Forwards, backwards. Older, younger. A cyclical dance through time-worn grooves, on sticky school-hall floorboards, dust catching in your throat, then skating on ice in front of winter palaces. The younger is the time I spend, and the fun I have, putting animal stickers just so on the pink envelopes I send to my niece, who is a Fairytale Princess. Not quite sticking my tongue out of the side of my mouth as I do it, but definitely in that childlike space, oblivious to anything but the fixing of pretty pictures. I can practically smell crayons.

The older is the sudden fear that I am turning into my own aunt. Because no-one wants to become somebody else, no matter how good that other being is. My aunt, like me, is happily childfree. A traveller she be. As far back as the 70s she was taking full advantage of her teacher's holidays, whisking herself off to places no-one had even heard of then. She was almost arrested on a trip back from Russia, because, after all, who would possibly go there for fun?

As a child I subjected my classmates to displays of the 'treasures' my aunt would bring back in her suitcase. And they did come in a suitcase – the hard kind that knocks merry hell out of your legs – for those were the days long before cheaply available rucksacks.

I had a Babushka before they ever appeared on Sesame Street, counting. (Counting was for the Count, sometimes in Spanish. Words too – agua agua.) The thin wood of Babushka screeched as she delivered her next generations. I had neon-pink mirrored pens, from old Siam. They never worked. They ran rainbows round my room where the sun caught the bits of broken-up glass pushed into plastic, but made no mark on paper. We wondered about the unfortunate people in Thailand, my brother and I, with pens that didn't work. Strange leather belts from Malta, creaking of sherry-soaked sun. Sweets on a string from Spain, violently orange and fizzy. Such various things amassed themselves in a higgledy-piggledy fashion about my bedroom. 'Gewgaws' my mother called them, 'dust-collectors'. To me, though, they were glimpses of a bigger universe, lands and time outside of my patch of Irish countryside.

Until one day, grown-up (moody teenager), I looked around me, and came to believe that I was surrounded by tat. And I chucked everything I could into the bin. So now I am nervous, as I parcel up a piece of Africa into a pink envelope for the Princess. A bubble-wrapped bejewelled gecko, made from the finest wire and beads…destined, surely, to some day be relegated from exotica to tat from Auntie C.

Mind you, I kept my Babushka.

The Comfort Of An Egg

2005-08-03T08:16:00.001+02:00

The cold season lingers. The hot season tantalises, making a brief appearance in a blast of afternoon sunshine, but by nightfall the temperature plummets and breath is still visible in the morning air.

I want porridge, something hot to sit in my belly and spread its warmth through to my rigid fingers. But there is no water. No water in the tap inside, no water in the tap outside, no water in the drums outside the wash-house. I could use the last litre of drinking water, but that seems unwise.

Then I find some dirty water in the end of a bucket and decide to boil an egg. Standing next to the flame I listen to the egg rollicking against the sides of the saucepan. I lift the egg out of the pan and put it in the pocket of my fleece, where it keeps my hand warm.

The fleece is something my mother gave me in the last minutes before I left for Zambia, over one year ago now. I hate it. I hate it but I need it and I'm so thankful she thrust it into my bag when I didn't have time enough to seek out my own before departure. It's old and pilled and far too big for me, but I have no other warm clothes and it has kept me from hypothermia throughout two cold seasons.

It is, I think, also, the fact of having to wear the same thing over and over again with no variety. But then, that is what everyone else here must do. The egg slowly cools down, and in the office I reach into my pocket to retrieve it. It falls to the floor where it cracks. I pick it up. In rolling it has gathered red dust into the crevices. I make a pile of eggshell on my desk, then eat the egg. It tastes good.

Gossiping Round The Water Cooler

2005-08-02T16:10:00.001+02:00

This is Freddie Beakery. You all want one, I know this. But he's mine. All mine. Give Freddie a slap on the head and water spurts out his mouth. Poke his little black eyes and his head flips open, for re-filling. Freddie kicks ass. We don't have a water cooler here for gossiping round. Hell, we barely have water. But I got Freddie sitting on mah desk spittin' at me for all he's worth. For about $6 I have my very own happy flask, one which reminds me of a sunny technicoloured 1970s childhood. This is the kind of thing, my friends, which London homestores would file under 'retro' and charge you a fortune for. And I got it in town for next to nowt. Bless the Chinese and their tat stores.

Mad. All Mad.

2005-07-29T11:50:00.001+02:00

Apparently a possible British terrorist suspect is on the loose in Zambia. I mean, no disrespect, but if you were about to be arrested is this really the last country you'd want to visit before lock-up? Because, you might have difficulty getting out again. As we are down to one day's supply of diesel in the entire country. Which should make life interesting... But more cheerful news is that apparently the number of doctors in rural parts of Zambia has 'soared'. Now there are 66 of them bushside. The population of Zambia is approximately 10 million...

I Hurty

2005-07-29T08:58:00.000+02:00

Bad: I hurty. Eyes hurty, nose hurty, ears hurty, throat hurty. No pharmacy roundabouts here. Worse, no chocolate.

Good: Being able to put in a cup - honey from our bees, lemons from the trees, ginger and thyme from the garden. (With anty water). Licking out the remains of the Nutella jar.

Not the £1m Hungry Caterpillar

2005-07-28T08:52:00.000+02:00

Mostly, the critters here are the wriggly biggly bitey unpleasant kind. But sometimes, ya see things that are just mindblowingly psychedelic. And that's quite cool.

Acid Orange Butterfly

Mangetout With Legs

Hotel d'Horreur

2005-07-27T08:34:00.001+02:00

Accommodation in Lusaka is a curious thing. There is a place we like to stay at because it's cheap and cheerful. With emphasis on both those things – it costs very little money to stay there and the company is always good. Unfortunately everyone else likes to stay there too, so it's usually booked pretty solid. We did manage to book a room for last weekend however. Or so we thought. But on rocking up, with an hour before the Embassy do started, we got told there was a mixup and now there was no room at the inn. And thus ensued a fraught 2-hour drive around Lusaka desperately trying to find somewhere to stay.

Unless you are a big businessperson on an expense account (we're not) and stay at somewhere plush like the Pamodzi or the Intercontinental Hotels, you are left with a choice of guesthouses which beggar belief. Many are openly brothels. The rest charge exorbitant prices for décor last seen in Auntie Marge's house, after she overdosed on her HRT meds with too many back issues of Gardener's World and Woman's Weekly to hand.

As we drove round and round the capital The Husband was getting a bit hysterical at the thought of showing up to the reception late, in case it was a sit-down affair. I was more worried about them running out of booze, but figured that the combination of an Irish reception in Africa would mean the show wouldn't start until at least a couple of hours after the advertised time.

In the end, in desperation, we handed over all our spending money for the weekend in return for a night in the Hotel d'Horreur, and rushed to get ready. Of course the only clean clothes either of us had were cream-coloured, as this is a colour one must never show daylight to when living in the bush. So, we kinda matched. We also looked quite crumply. Our cheap and cheerful place has an iron. Hotel d'Horreur didn't. As my flat-flat flip-floppy feet climbed into a pair of heels, I thought that given the matching outfits there would surely be some Posh 'n' Becks jokes at our expense. In any event, the climbing into crumply cream clothes was done in a terrible hurry, and it was not until the next day that we realised the true extent of the Hotel d'Horreur.

Waking up with the mother of all hangovers is bad. But waking up with the mother of all hangovers to what looks like a slaughtered zebra draped over your bed, bright sunlight streaming in the windows, and no water in the room, is a nightmare. Having gotten to bed at 2am, I woke up again at 5am, with half the Sahara residing in the back of my throat. We had no water bottles with us, and despite the ludicrously high price we had paid for the room, no water jug there either. I wondered about drinking from the tap. I could vaguely recall brushing my teeth in the tapwater earlier, but that is a different thing entirely to drinking 500 litres of it all of a slap.

I went in to the bathroom. The bath was full of ants. I don't know what they were doing. Not taking a bath, as there was no plug. But there they were, in their millions. I tried to sit down on the loo to take a leak, but the entire seat fell off and it and I ended up on the floor. I briefly wondered if urine was toxic to ants, but then I was a good girl and weed in the loo after all.

Waterwaterwaterwater, it was becoming very important. Perhaps the breakfast table would have some. Or the bar. Surely, somewhere, was water. I pulled on some clothes and caught a frightening glance of myself in the mirror. No mirrors or lighting in the bush. It's quite good that, but not when you come to the city and see what you really look like. My hair was quite borked (new favourite word) but as I was doing a very good impression of the tall one from AbFab on the lash, I decided to roll with that.

But everywhere was quiet. No bar open, no breakfast room open, no reception open. I wavered in front of the swimming pool, but come on, I have standards. I went back to the room and was frightened again, this time by the full on view of the zebra bedspread with matching pillow. I decided to go on a little hunt around the room, to keep up the safari theme. I found:

- 3 Bibles
- One bedside lamp, but the only socket in the room half a mile away
- One electric fan, plug cut off the end, no hope of plugging it in here, there or half a mile away
- Joseph's technicolour dreamcoat, posing as a blanket
- A plantpot posing as a dustbin
- Ikea (?) handles on the concrete wardrobes
- No water

There was, however, a kettle. I decided that if I boiled the tap water it would be less likely to give me the trots. But first I had to wrench the plug of the TV out of the wall, for there was only that one socket, half a mile away. The kettle was perched on a dresser thingummy, and the cord was too short to reach the socket. So it had to sit on the floor – v dangerous.

There was no switch on the kettle itself (is this even legal?). I looked inside and saw no bubbles, so clearly the connection was dodgy. I lashed the plug into the socket with a karate chop and it started to hum. The karate chop unfortunately had now rendered the whole sockety business to dangle wildly out of the wall. LUCKILY there was a switch on the actual socket, as otherwise I would have been faced with the prospect of a boiling kettle spouting steam all over my feet and no way of ever switching it off and it's The Husband's job to set rooms on fire, not mine.

I didn't however, have a wooden spoon for flicking the switch, so I had to use my hand and hope no electrocution occurred. I made tea. I hate tea, but I thought it would be slightly better than hot water. I sat on the chair to drink my tea, but the back of it fell off and I wasn't really into a stool at that point. So I went back to bed, and sat there drinking tea, and thinking how nice it would be to be able to watch TV at the same time, except that now the plug for the kettle was jammed in the wall, so no TV. I went back to sleep.

Bushsavages Wreak Havoc In Capital

2005-07-26T11:38:00.002+02:00

It must be a truth universally acknowledged, that if your husband is networking with a politician responsible for distributing aid money, that it is A Bad Thing to butt in and suggest that a possible starting point for halting the spread of AIDS would be getting men to keep their penises in their pants. Ahem. Politicians are a bit like the BBC in that regard, no time for rude words. Still, I don't think said politician will hold it against me. I googled him, he has a dodgy background in line-dancing. Anyway, I blame the free booze. Did I mention there was free booze? Did I mention there was positively no security and we just rocked up at the ambassador's residence going 'Hello, we're here for the party!' Like, you could make a LIVING out of that. There must be parties at embassies every night of the week. You could go to all of them. For the free booze. Did I mention there was free booze?

The layout was admirable. Toilet immediately on the left (for you know you will need to know where that is later), free booze bar immediately on the right, and food out in the garden with dogs waiting to hoover up the droppings. It took 20 seconds for the Resident Nutjob to find us. And only another 30 for her to invite us to sleep on her floor, although she had no mattresses or bedding of any kind, and her house was very full, but she liked it that way. Indeed. Luckily the Resident Bore didn't find us until the very end, by which point I had drunk enough free booze to forget to be polite. Drink is a terrible thing. Actually that's not true. I was in fact rudely polite. Or politely rude even. I'm so sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but I have absolutely no interest in talking to you. Goodnight. Well yes it was a horrible thing to say, but the drink, the drink! Besides, if nobody ever tells him he'll continue boring people to death for the rest of his life.

Then we went dancing! It was great! In heels as well! I didn't fall over once, and had only three mystery bruises the next day. In fact the whole shebang could even have been deemed a success, were it not for the small matter of accommodation. But more of that another day.

Escape From Bushsavagery

2005-07-22T11:07:00.001+02:00

I have been invited to a ~~pissup~~ civilised reception at the Irish Embassy in Lusaka. This is quite exciting. I have never been to any Embassy do, and rumour has it that the Irish ones are always piled high with booze. I will duly report back next week. I must avoid sweaty politicians and corn-footed nuns at all cost.

360 Online Breaking News

2005-07-21T16:39:00.002+02:00

Residents of Bushland, Bushyville are currently chanting 'We are not Afraid' as their area has been put on to high security alert, known as Code Chicken. Reports are coming through that Head of Security, Jehosephat the Nightwatchman, has been called out to investigate no less than three different occurences.

At around 16:00 some villagers reported smoke billowing from the muzungu's house at the edge of the compound. Upon investigation it was discovered that the muzungu had drunk too many g&ts and fallen asleep with some buns in the oven. In a separate incident Shoes the Mechanic reported seeing someone board a bus carrying a suspect goat. This was immediately dismissed by Jehosephat, as neither buses nor goats have ever been seen in the area. Loveness the Nurse was despatched to provide a banana and some panadol to Mr Shoes, to counteract the effect of whatever he had been smoking.

And finally, at about 16:30 Roger the Dodger – bicycle repair man – made an attempt to secure the title of local ne'er do well, when he threatened Chief with "blowing your brains out". Witnesses were unanimous in their belief that he was unlikely to achieve this with an inner tube and an old candle.

Residents have been advised to stay indoors and watch out for anything suspicious. Unfortunately this advice has had to be ignored, on account of no lights for watching anything, and the danger of using a paraffin stove indoors with no ventilation. We await further updates.

Brandishing Pens

2005-07-21T11:08:00.001+02:00

Once upon a time, before glittering wings smashed into ivory towers, I went to New York on a plane. I went in the company of a work colleague, a young man who designed things. I was the young woman who wrote things. We worked in London for A Very Large Company, which had offices worldwide and Headquarters nestled next to the shiny Big Apple. We were off on an annual trip to the Holy Temple of Spin for a Marketing Workshop. Otherwise known as 7 days' worth of being bored to death and drinking insipid beer on the company tab.

We arrived at JFK ~~having stolen many bags of free toiletries from business class~~ suitably refreshed and proceeded to battle our way through several different lines of bureaucracy. The last hurdle before collecting our luggage and heading for the ~~discounted beauty product shops~~ workshop was Security. The Machine-Like Grumpy Security Guard asked me what I was doing in the States - if I was there on business or pleasure. Thinking to myself that I could not possibly call being holed up in a bland hotel for a week with a bunch of really stupid and trying Americans* pleasure, I stated that I had come on business. And therein was the start of some nightmare half-hour quiz show, complete with scary presenter, bright hot lights, and a buzzer continuously going 'neh-eh!' in the background. For Grumpy Security Guard's interest was now piqued.

"What kind of business?"
"Oh, I work in Marketing."
"Doing what?"
"Uh, you know, marketing stuff."
"What, like Sales?"
For Pete's sake don't make me try and explain the difference between Marketing and Sales. I have no idea. I write things. It makes stuff sell. The end.
"Well, kind of."

'Kind of' didn't cut it. There was clearly an answer he was looking for, and I was racking my brains to find it. Eventually in the midst of his interrogation I enlightened him to the fact that I was a copywriter in our firm's marketing department.

"Aha!" he yelled, banging his fist on the desk.

It seems I might as well have said I was a terrorist. And thus ensued another tortuous half-hour where he threatened to send me back to the UK because I didn't have a journalist's visa, and I got exasperated trying to explain that I was not, in fact, a journalist, but a mere copywriter, employed to sell American products. I eventually managed to convince GSG that I was not about to wreak havoc on New York, or America at Large, by whacking people to death with my sheets of copy, and he let me through. Meanwhile, my colleague had sailed through Security with a wave and a smile, despite the fact that he was carrying several scalpels and a large can of aerosol glue in his hand luggage… Such, it would seem, is the power of words and the almighty fear it drives into some people.

In those days it was a case of using my words to sell overpriced tat to people who didn't need it and probably couldn't afford it. I'd like to think that now my words go some way towards making a real difference to people. I posted earlier about a particular village here being in desperate need of a well. We have a great donor in Wales who likes to fundraise for us, so I spent ages writing up some publicity material for her about this village, for use at her next fundraising event. Before she could even organise anything, a neighbour of hers dropped by her house, read through my words, and promptly wrote out a personal cheque for close to £1,000 to build the well. While this is obviously fantastic, and yes, the villagers do need clean water, I am very conscious that publicity material such as this only ever gives one tiny piece of the story.

It is difficult to write all the time of people drinking filthy water on a daily basis, water which should bring life but often brings death. Of the thousands of small babies killed by malaria. Of the swathe of AIDS deaths which leaves widows caring for up to 20 kids in one household. For while these people undoubtedly have tough lives, they are not limpid beggars with their hands outstretched. They have pride, dignity, laughter. Their children go to school, even if it is under a tree. They work their farms, hard, every day. The women sit and twist each other's hair into elaborate styles and gossip about their neighbours. The men sit and gossip about the women. The rhythm of life is the same here as it is the world over. And yet it is not the laughter or the gossip which sells, but the hardship and the illness. And that is the way of the word.

*Disclaimer – I am not saying that all Americans are stupid. Far from it. (Hello American friends!) But I would rather chew off my own toenails than ever work with that bunch again.

Some Very Important News

2005-07-20T09:48:00.001+02:00

Oooh look, I'm in the BBC today. The final piece based on my 'interview' has turned out to be a bit choppity-chop and out of context, but such is the nature of journalists and their editors.

I would like to sincerely thank Darren Waters for saying that my writing is 'considered and informative', when he could so easily have described it as the work of a 'Mad Ranty Bint'. (Ok, so he only said it was considered and informative sometimes, but that's my editing.)

The Remains Of The Day

2005-07-20T08:04:00.002+02:00

I wish to speak with the scriptwriters of my life. I'm sure I requested an Adventure Story, not Black Comedy. I am bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. The Bushbaby has kept me awake by cackling up in the tree at an eardrum-busting level all night long. When I walked into the living room this morning I saw what was making it laugh. We have recently acquired two cats, in an attempt to stamp out the wildlife that runs riot inside our home - the bats, rats, mice, voles, giant hairy spiders and so on. Unfortunately the cats feel that they must show off their captives. On the sofa, next to a cute and fluffy toy mouse, all tucked up neat and tidy next to it, almost like bedmates, is a real mouse. Well not so much real anymore, seeing as it's dead an' all. And missing its head. But that's ok though, because I can see the head. Puked up all over the floor.

We have a sweet old lady in the UK who likes to send odd bits and pieces to the schoolkids here. We just received from her a big box of teddies for the creche. Donations in kind have to be registered, so we've got a record of incoming goods. I went to speak to the Man In Charge Of Records about the donation. I showed him the box and told him how many teddies we'd gotten. He didn't know what a Teddy Bear was. There is something incredibly sad about that. But also something incredibly funny about the fact that I now have a receipt for Teddy Balls. I don't really need a box full of furry genitalia, I've had quite enough body parts to contend with this morning...

We Have Ways Of Making You Scream

2005-07-10T16:44:00.001+02:00

If I was actually from Mars, things would be easier, I'm sure. I can now see why – in my previous incarnation as a copywriter - I was never employed on a well-paid government job, for I would surely have brought sense and sensibility to an arena positively proud of its utter incomprehensibility. Not following? Welcome to my world. I am attempting to fill in a hideously written Self-Assessment Tax Return Form, which the British Government has demanded I do, or prison. Or something. Well, good luck finding me. Ironically of course, I have no income to pay tax on. But still, must fill in form or prison.

Before I even begin the preliminaries I am instructed to gather round me supplementary pages. It might as well read 'suppositories', for all the joy this brings to my heart. Enclosed with all my taxy forms is a lovely big form which is supposed to help me. Except if I am using the Non-residence suppositories. Then it is officially No Good. Given that I reside in Zambia, (or do I?…) I will surely be taking the NR (jargon alert!) suppositories. The Non-residence suppositories have not been included in My Big Fat Tax Envelope. I must get them from the interweb. I am lucky to have the interweb, there can't be many aid workers living out in the bush that do.

While I am online I see that I can file my assessment by interweb. I am urged to do so, as it will be fast, secure and jolly good all round. I plough my way through the details, trying, and failing, to bypass the section for postcode, as we don’t have postcodes in Zambia. I make one up. Then I am told that my high-security access code will be posted to me. Yes, by old post. Not by zippy email-style post. So I must wait another six weeks for that to arrive before I can file online. Raah! Jolly super, how fast and efficient indeed.

I give up and try to find the correct NR forms. They are nowhere to be found. I am lost in the maze at Hampton Court Palace with no kindly guards to rescue me. You would think, on the original form, where it tells me to go get the NR Supps, it would tell me what number these extra papers go by, no? Or would that fall into the 'helpful' category? I scream at my computer screen. For good measure I also scream at a few rats who are attempting to run off with the papers on my desk. The Husband finally manages to find the forms for me using secret magic search tools. The guidance notes are TWELVE PAGES LONG. This is not right. I have a life to be getting on with.

I know you are probably bored already. Imagine how I feel. I have not filled in a single box yet, due to suppository searches. And now, before I can fill in the first bit on the first suppository, I must decipher which one of these I am:

Resident and ordinarily resident, domiciled
Resident and ordinarily resident, not domiciled
Resident but not ordinarily resident, domiciled
Resident but not ordinarily resident, not domiciled
Not resident but ordinarily resident, not domiciled
Not resident and not ordinarily resident, domiciled
Not resident and not ordinarily resident, not domiciled

There seems to be no tickbox for 'Alive, but driven crazy by the Inland Revenue.'

I do the absolutely FORBIDDEN and sneak a peek ahead at the section I have to fill in once I have figured out my residency status. Am I an EEA national? I have no idea. What does this mean? I am an Irish national, who used to live in the UK and a citizen of Europe. What is EEA? Is it same like EU?

I am instructed to fill in my forms in either blue or black ballpoint pen. They will get it in purple crayon if that is what is to hand at the time I actually figure out what I am supposed to write. And like it.

The Inland Revenue state many times all over their forms that they will calculate my tax for me (even though I will pay none). What a great idea. No apples minus no oranges equals no bananas. This is what I am now planning to fill in and return to the Inland Revenue by carrier pidgwidgeon, with spangly stars on for good measure:

I am from Mars. I eat bees. 42. Wibble.

Based on the delicate intricacies of their incomprehensible forms, I feel it is the only response they will understand.

Corruption

2005-07-06T08:40:00.001+02:00

There is an excellent article this morning on corruption in Africa, for those naysayers who like to blame the citizens of that continent for the shenanigans between their leaders and those of the West. And if you are interested in that period of colonial withdrawal from Africa you could do worse than read Ryszard Kapuscinski's excellent book.

Out Of Water, Out Of Words

2005-07-05T09:38:00.001+02:00

Monday and Tuesday of this week are Zambian holidays, so I am alone in the office. Well, not quite alone. There are giant rats working in tag teams to strip the place of paper and it's really wigging me out. Especially as I am trying to watch my Desperate Housewives DVDs. Water is already running out even though we've just hit July. Normally we only need to ration come September, and rain starts again in November, but the drought last rainy season is having a knock-on effect. What water we have is a lovely brown colour and full of things. Twiggy planty insecty things. How can one possibly get clean in dirty water? Luckily I am not dehydrating as we have both gin and whiskey to drink. It is also so cold I can see my breath in the mornings. It may be time for some hibernation. Chat amongst yourselves, or have a read elsewhere...

Seems we are not the only ones promoting mobile phones and microcredit...

And how depressing that we never ever learn, and the world continues to turn a blind eye to malevolent dictators.

Things That Go Squeak In The Night

2005-06-30T08:47:00.001+02:00

It was a dark and windy night. Back and forth the noise went, not unlike a saw struggling with some very hard wood. Louder and louder the noise got, filling my head. It began to sound like people exercising their bedsprings. Impossible! No beds outside my window. It must be trees.

The noise got louder still. More like quacking. A screeching squeaking quacking. Could it be a pair of ducks, shagging up against a tree? But no, surely duck copulation is not so loud as to penetrate earplugs, a pillow and a giant duvet? Perhaps that last gin & tonic had been unwise.

The noise reached a crescendo. It was unbearable. I called The Husband. Armed with a giant spotlight torch (thank you, Robert Dyas) we went outside to investigate. We shone the torch high up into the trees. And saw something not dissimilar to this:

Having had a poke about on Google, I'm pretty sure what we saw was a Bushbaby. This is rather exciting, as apart from insects, birds, snakes, rats, mice, squirrels and the local drunk, there's no wildlife around here.

As recently as 20 years ago there were elephant, antelope, zebra, giraffe etc in this area, and now there is nothing. Startling the red-eyed nocturnal beast with our high-beam interrogation tool has also put my mind slightly at rest. For only last week there was something far, far bigger than a rat thumping across our roof. I have been refusing to think about what it might be, but surely here is the answer. A Bushbaby.

Welcome Bushbaby! But please keep the noise down...

And So It Goes On...

2005-06-30T08:32:00.001+02:00

Quite a depressing article about climate change, and how this too is going to impact severely on Southern Africa.

Also in the news today, the question of 'brain drain', or poaching healthcare workers from developing countries to places like the UK and the US. To be honest, if I was a doctor or nurse from a developing country and someone offered me a well-paid job abroad, I'd be on the next plane out. Yes, it's a problem that there are so few medical staff per head in places like Zambia, but do you really expect people to turn down the opportunity of a better life? Rather than castigate these people for so-called 'turning their backs on their country', better look at why the situation is so bad there first, no?

When I read about Zimbabwe I could cry. One of the most beautiful countries I've travelled around in Africa, amazing, friendly, interesting people. And yet everyone stands by and watches Mugabe trash it big time. They have just tripled the price of what little fuel is currently available in the country. I just don't know how people are managing to live there anymore. Some more details of the atrocities.

ZamNews

2005-06-29T10:09:00.002+02:00

The BBC has a series of interesting articles on both Zambia and Africa at the moment. Mark Doyle has written an article on trade, in which he cites Lusaka as one of the cleanest capitals in the world. Had I been drinking tea at the time of reading I would have choked on it. He has obviously never been to any of the places ordinary Zambians go, such as the bus station, the minibus station, the markets etc. They reek of piled-high rubbish.

The article talks of privatisation and what that has meant for the economy. I'm all for economic development, but it's worth remembering that privatisation was forced on many Zambian companies because of IMF stipulations. And that privatisation has brought about mass unemployment and the ensuing problems which surround that.

It's interesting also to read the replies from many Africans to the question 'Does Debt help you or hold you back?' There must surely be a distinction between good debt and bad debt. For example, there are very few people in the UK who would be able to buy their homes without a mortgage. As long as you can cover your repayments this can be classed as good debt.

The debt that Zambia has been holding all these years should be wiped out, because it came about through irresponsible lending as much as anything. It is ridiculous to expect a country to repay debt, plus interest, plus carry out measures which are damaging to that country's future prospects.

It is inhumane, if not criminal, to ask a government to pay what money they have to wealthy nations, when their own citizens are literally dying in droves due to lack of education, healthcare and opportunity. Ironically, however, our project is seriously thinking of setting up a bank. Or more specifically a Credit Union style revolving fund. For how can anyone in this rural environment advance without opportunity?

I recently interviewed a farmer we trained several years ago. He is doing really well for himself, and grows enough to feed all 6 of his kids, and sells a small amount of surplus crops to get income to clothe and school them. He knows that if he didn't have to plough his fields by hand, he could clear a larger area for farming, grow more crops and make more income.

He wants to buy an ox-drawn plough. But where will he get the money to do so? Who will give him the capital? Right now, no one. Even if he could get into town, the banks would laugh at him. And with ludicrously high interest rates it wouldn't even be viable. But as he looks like a good bet, if we ran a loan scheme we could help him improve. I think he would classify that as a good debt.

Many Africans get indignant at the constant cries from wealthier nations of 'Give them Aid!' and I can totally see why. But unless you level the playing fields and break down trade barriers as well how can they compete? Africa has a wealth of resources but is unlikely to profit from them if trade rules and lack of opportunities continue to stand as they are.

And although this article
is somewhat meandering and schizophrenic, Jack Straw is right – why the hell are the African leaders so quiet when it comes to Robert Mugabe? Why are his atrocities hardly mentioned in the press, and never with condemnation? And yet more proof that he is completely bonkers.

And on a slightly lighter note – as part of our infrastructure development we have been collecting unwanted mobile phones from the UK and distributing them to staff and community members here. I just wish they weren't subjecting me to the A-Team Theme Tune ringtone on a daily basis…

Promotion

2005-06-28T12:03:00.000+02:00

It's time for hard hats. In addition to doing Publicity, apparently I am now in charge of overseeing the new creche extension. Should be a barrel of laughs...

Update From Wall Street

2005-06-27T08:09:00.001+02:00

Unsurprisingly I have not heard back from Wall Street re a donation to our charity in return for a report on our 'expertise on Africa'. However, all of the typos I pointed out have now been corrected on the mining website, without so much as a thank you for my services. BEYOTCH!

Wish I'd stuck in some hilarious erroneous stuff as well....mwahahahaha

And YES to this article.

Orwellian

2005-06-24T11:27:00.001+02:00

Sing Praise! We are breeding literate pigs.

As part of my work here I set up a local newsletter. I trained some of our staff in such things as basic DTP, story gathering, editing. The newsletter is delivered to the local communities when we're out doing extension work, and it's been well-received.

It's an ideal place to announce such things as times and dates of AIDS workshops, closing dates for applications for training courses, and recent achievements.

Unfortunately the editor was also The Man Who Gave Away The Sawmill, and he has been sacked, so we have a new editor in place. The latest edition has just been printed and I have asked to see the distribution list before it goes out. Ladies and Gentlemen, 40 copies have been earmarked for the piggery.

Now, the piggery is staffed by three people. Three people who have to pass by the giant noticeboard outside the office, on which we have pinned the latest edition of the newsletter. So I can only presume that the PIGS are going to read these 40 copies. 20 copies have also been allocated to the creche. The creche is full of babies, none of whom, to the best of my knowledge, are advanced enough to read what is essentially a newspaper.

The new editor is also a pastor. I wonder if he is performing miracles?

What's In The Meedja?

2005-06-24T11:20:00.001+02:00

Me, possibly. The BBC want to interview me for an online article on blogs. Er....does this mean I have to tidy this up and watch what I say?

So glad to see a decent article, finally, in TG - Here - looking at whether Live8 will do more harm than good.

And in a similar vein - Here - on what good aid will do Tanzania.

And although I do not hold Michael O'Leary in any kind of esteem, as if reports are to be believed he treats both his customers and staff with disdain, man the guy is funny.

Working Wall St

2005-06-23T14:40:00.001+02:00

I got an email today. From Wall Street no less. From a woman who purports to work for the Public Relations company which represents a mining company about to start work in Tanzania. She emailed our project as she wondered 'if I could ask you your expertise about Africa' (sic). What a fine plan. I mean, we work in Zambia, but you know, Africa's jus' one big ol' country y'all...ain't it? Dwayne....is this country Africa anywheres near the Caribbean?

Apparently this mining company is concerned about its corporate social responsibility. Read, how they can appease 'the locals' while stripping their country of its assets to make Americans rich. I emailed this lady back and told her I would be happy to write something about the devastating effects of mismanaged mining, and how to work with local communities in developing countries, for a reasonable fee. What, lady, you of Wall Street no less, you think I'm giving you my 'expertise about Africa' for free?

What I did give her for free was a long list of typos to be found on this company's website. Not least the fact that Zanzibar is listed as a major town. I'm sure the island will be delighted to hear of its new status. PRAT!

Bush-trekking Again

2005-06-20T14:16:00.001+02:00

Some of our donors like to give money to support very specific projects. We currently have a group in the UK fundraising for a well for one of our local villages. I've just been out to the village to chat to the community about where the well is going to be and how they will benefit. This is what they're currently using:

It's basically a filthy stream. At this time of year it's the dry season so the water is underground. It's a dangerous climb down this hole to get the dirty water. The villagers are looking forward to a new protected well - they're all sick with diarrhoea from drinking this water, and are covered in rashes from bathing in it.

The new well is going to be built next to their community school, which is a focal point of the village area. These kids are not actually as miserable as they look - Zambians have a strange habit of shutting down their smiles and posing in a very serious manner for photographs. Although they'd have every reason to be glum - yes, those are logs they sit on for the duration of lessons. Numb butts....

A Pot Of Self-Obsessed Morons

2005-06-16T10:17:00.001+02:00

I am absolutely flummoxed by the savagery in the UK press which is being lobbed in the direction of Bob Geldof at his attempts to organise Live8. I am staggered at the narrow-minded opinionated drivel that is being aired.

Every single person who feels this welling urge to attack the man is completely and utterly missing the point of what he is trying to do. He is accused of being a hypocritical millionaire, by the same people who say he is a crap musician who hasn't sold any records in years.

And your point is? Do any of you personally know Bob and have access to his bank accounts? Can you say what percentage of his personal wealth he has given away over the years in charitable donations? Didn't think so.

He is criticised for the line-up, not enough African acts. It's a fair point, there aren't. But what percentage of the British population would turn up to the show if it had been headlined by African acts? My guess is not many.

There are many things wrong with the attitudes, tastes, opinions and morals of people living in wealthy countries, and he can't possibly be held responsible for them all or expected to change them overnight. If he influences even just a handful of people with this concert then it is a job well done. And what is with the persistent complaints about Coldplay playing and how awful their music is - grow up, what have your personal musical tastes got to do with raising awareness about poverty?

The poisoned arrows are slung at him for being 'a failed popstar' and therefore, obviously, a complete idiot and unable to grasp world politics. Haven't you noticed what happens when the running of the world is left to the 'experts'? Why can't he know as much as anyone about trade, aid, debt relief? If a person is in a wheelchair does this mean they can't learn French? If a person is black can they not be a gourmet chef? What kind of farcical non-logic is running through these people's minds?

'Whinge - Africa is not the only place experiencing poverty'. We know that. Gotta start somewhere. Toss a coin. 'Whinge - Africa is totally corrupt. If we wipe out debt the leaders will just steal the aid money.' So what, we should do nothing? Seriously? Then you'd better get down on your knees every night and give thanks to your Kinesiologist that you weren't born a starving woman being raped in a war-torn country.

If the IMF and the World Bank can give loans which come loaded with crippling restrictions and conditions I'm sure future aid can be given with conditions of transparency on expenditure and on the proviso of non-corruption. 'Whinge – I hate celebrities, it's all for themselves.' Well think about that next time you're jerking off over a picture of Paris Hilton and having an 'ironic' discussion about Celebrity Love Island.

Bob Geldof is not a saint, I'm sure he hates that ridiculous label. Live8 is not perfect, nothing ever is. But why not give the man some credit for trying to make some difference? As he says, it's about AWARENESS, about wanting to change things. About getting off your backside and letting politicians and world leaders know that you're not happy with how things are being run. Maybe debt relief is not the way forward. Maybe increased aid is a waste of time. But at least open up the debate, for surely you cannot be suggesting that everything is ok as it is?

What would be preferential, that you all carry on sitting on your fat arses and living in your own cossetted little bubble, listening to whichever band is 'cooler' than Coldplay on your ipod, but it's ok really cos you buy Fair Trade coffee when you go to Starbucks?

Another one under fire for drumming up publicity to Make Poverty History is Bono. Again, cries of 'self-aggrandizing popstar, not his place, blah blah blah, sucking up to George Bush'.

Personally I think George W Bush is an evil misguided grunt who probably ought to be tried for crimes against humanity, locked up and the key swallowed by the Loch Ness Monster, but does my opinion influence his policies? Hell no. If Bono manages to get him to act in a more humanitarian manner by chuckling over Jesus-stories, then more power to his elbow. At least he is doing something. You, all you rabid, close-minded, selfish selfish stone-throwing people, what have you done lately?

I would like you all to come and look in the eyes of the kind of people we are trying to help in Zambia. Maybe Mary, HIV+, a widow, husband died of AIDS. Eight of her own children to look after and five nieces and nephews orphaned from her sister's death from AIDS. Drought in Zambia this year, empty maize fields. An entire household with growling stomachs. Can't exactly nip down the shops for a takeaway. A kid without food in its stomach will not have the energy to go to school. A malnutritioned HIV+ mother will not live long. More orphans. And so it goes on. Look them in the eye and say 'Yeah, Live8, load of rubbish, that Geldof is only in it for himself. And I won't go cos I hate Coldplay.'

Steak & Wine

2005-06-14T07:42:00.001+02:00

Tomorrow we are off to the capital. This is a good thing! For food will be available. Most notably steak and wine. We are collecting a UK staff member who is coming to visit. They are bringing me the entire contents of LUSH. This is indeed a good thing for a bushsavage to receive. And chocolate. But you knew that anyway.

Things That Go Crunch

2005-06-10T09:33:00.001+02:00

It has been some time now since the appearance of any critters of note on this blog. I suspect it is because it is winter and they are all hibernating. (Note to self: do not go turning over stones). However there is a slow-moving skeletal beast that is showing up in places such as underneath my bare feet and on top of the food-preparation work surfaces. It looks a bit like this:

I have yet to find out what they are called here in Zambia. In the part of Namibia in which I lived they are called Malindilindi, nicknamed 4x4s as they are almost completely indestructible. The posh name is Armoured Ground Cricket or Acanthoplus discoidalis, but that is not as exciting as calling it a 4x4. Or perhaps in this day and age, an SUV. Or a Hummer.

They are not totally indestructible however. Much as an SUV could surely be blown up with some dynamite, the crickets can be killed if you drive over them. Several times. Back and forth. But I wouldn't advise it. For inside is something like custard. Except it's not custard, obviously, and therefore not much good for your rice pudding.

An Interview With A Grump

2005-06-06T08:51:00.001+02:00

A thank you to Birdy for providing the interview questions for today's blog post.

What one piece of advice would you give someone who was about to embark on the kind of job that you do?
Either bring valium, dope, or a multi-pack of humour, patience, determination and open-mindedness.

What is your theme song? By which I mean what song do you hum in your head in order to have the confidence to do things?
I don't have a theme song. Songs in my head come and go. But currently I'm humming Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika which is the South African national anthem, because it is so beautiful and so African. I also like to sing Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now by The Smiths because I think it is one of the funniest songs ever written and it always makes me giggle. In particular the words 'In my life /Why do I smile /At people who I'd much rather kick in the eye ?'

If you could only eat one kind of chocolate ever again, what would it be?
Fair Trade milk chocolate. I like my chocolate simple.

What do you like best about blogging?
I like blogging because it keeps me sane. I am very far away from friends and family and no means of talking to them except by email, which is not as good as a proper conversation. There is no-one here apart from The Husband with whom I have anything in common, and who I can properly chat to, which is very hard. My blog could be subtitled 'Conversations with Myself'. I talk to the blog because I can't talk to anyone else. Hmm that makes me sound nuts. I'm sure I'm not. Much.

What's your next ambition? Is what you're doing what you wanted to do when you grew up? Or do you have more in mind?
When I was about eight years old we had to write an essay in school entitled 'What I Want To Be When I Grow Up.' Mine wasn't so much an essay as a short list. I had three things in mind - A Tennis Player, A Ballerina, An Author (yes I did use the word Author, very pompous).

The Tennis Player ambition went out the window for two reasons. One, I was adamant that I would never curtesy to any member of the royal family at Wimbledon (I believed in equality from a very young age), and two, I have absolutely no hand-eye coordination when it comes to ball games. Unless they're very big balls. Like football. Or basketball. But not little ones, such as tennis, golf, squash etc.

The Ballerina ambition fell by the wayside in a very dramatic manner. I was about ten years old, and I arrived for the lesson in the dusty musty local village hall one cold winter's evening. I took a look around and decided that it was not to be the life for me, because my parents were very poor and there was no way they could possibly afford to send me away to ballet school in Russia, which was obviously where I was headed. So I had to sacrifice myself for the greater good. I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact that I was far too tall, too big, and quite frankly not good enough to ever grace a stage. In writing this I am now having a horrible flashback to a performance that my classmates and I gave at the same village hall one Christmas, prior to my abandoning ballet as a career possibility. We had learned an ever so pretty flower fairy dance specially for the occasion. The curtains drew back on us poised to begin, and the entire audience burst out laughing because we were brandishing watering cans. Mine was bright orange, courtesy of the hardware store where my Dad works. That watering can is still hanging in my parents' garage.

But I digress. I'm still working on the Author ambition. In fact ambitions now are an endless list, but off the top of my head - I want to finish the various books I'm writing and get them published. The Husband and I want to open our own business. I also want to travel heaps more.

Why am I here now? I have always wanted to go to Africa, I don't know why. I may have been influenced by the fact that my aunt lived and worked here when she was younger, and her house in Ireland was full of funny carvings and drums and suchlike. I have travelled to most countries in Southern Africa and still think that Namibia is the most stunning. I lived there for two years and would happily go back.

I think I will now retire for the week because I am in An Official Grump. The only food left in the house is brown rice and dogfood for the (recently deceased) dog, I have far too much work to do, the office is freezing cold and full of rats, my kitten has ringworm, I have an annoying tic in my eye and there is no chocolate. The tic and the freezing cold mean that I can't see or type properly so pleeze forgiv spellin errirs.

The Fiends!

2005-06-06T08:16:00.001+02:00

Word of the Day: Dastardly
adj.
Cowardly and malicious; base

I can't remember the last time I heard someone use the word 'dastardly'. It's fabulous. Unfortunately it is being used by Max Lawson of Oxfam to describe, oh go on, have a guess.

Elsewhere, "The US secretary of state calls for greater intervention to promote democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean." It's so bloody obvious the US govt is hellbent on their own agenda. Not to debate here the rights or wrongs of 'intervention to promote democracy', but what about a country that is actually desperately in need of help on the democracy front. Zimbabwe anyone? Thought not.

And apparently the Daily Hate Mail is poised to be Britain's No. 1 paper. Lovely.

A Good Deed Done

2005-06-02T15:34:00.001+02:00

I look like a Christmas tree. I look this way because today is a very important day. And the Chieftainess is coming. As are some government representatives.

I am wearing a bright red dress with toenails to match, and a green cardigan. My white flip-flops are the snow. The Chieftainess is also wearing red and green; we are Christmas trees together.

An awning has been erected to keep the heat of the sun off the 'dignitaries'. Sit there we do, and watch, and listen. My Matrix sunglasses look incongruous. There is drumming. There is dancing. There are speeches.

There is also a fight, hastily broken up by a couple of HRH's bodyguards. We are all here for the Deliverance. We have successfully fundraised for an ambulance for the local community, and by a stroke of luck sourced one locally, thus avoiding shipping delays from the UK. It is here.

The Husband is asked to drive it up to the waiting dignitaries and there is much whooping. He is mortified, but everyone else thinks it hilarious. The flashing red light causes much laughter. "I'm telling you it scares me!" There is an elaborate exchange of keys, from the UK staff to the Zambian staff to HRH to the Ministry of Health and finally to the staff of our clinic. There has been much whispered consultation about this chain before the keys are produced. The order is important.

The Ministry of Health announces that our clinic is next in line as a centre for ARV distribution. This is news to us, and we hope they follow through on their promise. The Chieftainness takes everyone to task over AIDS. She hauls her husband to his feet, waggles his hand in the air, and tells everyone they should stick to one partner as she does. Then there is lunch.

In Zambia, as in many African countries, food is eaten with the hands. Great bowls of nsima are produced. This is maize meal boiled with water until it reaches a rubbery consistency. It is served with 'relish', usually some green leaves and tomatoes, and today because it is important, with chicken. The chicken is literally chopped up and fried. There is much crunching on bone. A pretty nun says grace. She is the only other woman on this table of 'dignitaries'. The men tease her about her chances of becoming pope.

The Chieftainess and her husband are eating by themselves in a separate room, as is customary. Why? Are they messy eaters? Do they eat with their toes? I don't know, but no-one is allowed to see them eat. I want to run up and peek in the window but I don't. I fear the juju.

Anticipation

Drumming

Curiosity

Celebration

Field Trip

2005-06-01T11:10:00.000+02:00

Plastering home the non-B&Q way

Roadside Shop - Nothing for sale today

One of the better highways

I'd Like The Orange One Please

2005-06-01T07:59:00.001+02:00

The Husband and I celebrated four years of ~~drunken oblivion~~ wedded bliss at the weekend. We went to A Lodge, in Some Part of Zambia. It was a nice enough lodge, by a body of water, if a little odd.

It's not advertised anywhere, and there were only 4 other guests. It is way way way deep in the bush, with no phone, email or any other visible means of communication with the outside world. There is however a private airstrip, where small planes landed in the middle of the night and had disappeared again before daybreak.

The lodge also happens to be situated on a game farm. Now, what The Husband and I find puzzling, is how on earth does anyone get the money to buy a massive property (even in Zambia), and game, and not appear to work, and have no real interest in drumming up paying guests? Game must surely be expensive. It's hardly a hobby, is it? And you have to feed them a lot (apparently – so said the pale chap who was getting up at 4am to do so).

Unfortunately Google was not much help in telling me how I go about purchasing a giraffe for example, although one site did state an estimate of USD$1600 per beast, which I think is a little on the low side. Anyways, how are these people running this place? Drug smuggling? Money Laundering? Sale of human body parts? You've got to wonder.

"Has the plane been to pick up those sacks of heroin which are disguised as maize meal darling?" said Jan Van Vinder Vong as he idly flicked through the latest edition of the Wild Animals 'R' Us catalogue.
"Not yet Janni. But we have a case of fresh kidneys which is due for collection at midnight," said Marianna Van Vinder Vong.
"Excellent!" huffed Jan Van Vinder Vong, "in that case I shall send a note by carrier pigeon that we'd like a couple more Zebra."

Rural Zambian Dictionary Dot Com

2005-05-27T09:03:00.000+02:00

Moveous

adj.

1. Slippery (of person), constantly moving, evasive, especially where there is money owing; applied usually to an urban male wideboy 'businessman' aged 16-25

Ex. : "Where is Lovemore?" "Ah, somewhere that side. He is very moveous that one."

Like Chinese Shoes

idiomatic simile

1. Crap, rubbish

2. Something which works for a very short period of time; a waste of money

Ex. : "Sheuw! That TaTa truck is like Chinese shoes. Eh-eh, never buy one like that, it will suck your money."

The Meme

2005-05-22T17:04:00.001+02:00

I was starting to feel a bit all out of blog posts, but now I've been 'tagged'and challenged to do the meme "A List of Ten Things I've Never Done". I have, however, decided to add my own twist. Here is a list of twenty things, ten I've done and ten I haven't. Go figure...

Gotten a tattoo
Kissed in Paris
Killed something
Pulled the emergency stop on a train
Cooked with celery
Touched a leopard
Made a Call Centre Operative cry
Enjoyed a mushroom
Scuba Diving
Bungee jumped of Vic Falls bridge
Drunk Absinthe
Been to Australia
Completed a cryptic crossword
Quoted from Withnail & I
Something Illegal
Had an operation without anaesthetic
Experienced zero gravity
Eaten worms
Seen a corpse
Been joyriding

Backpedalling Furiously

2005-05-19T09:07:00.001+02:00

Oh here we go. Not even a month after the elections in the UK and already there is the threat of badly broken promises.

The EU is apparently unhappy at the UK's pushing for debt relief etc for poor countries. Particularly as it has been an agenda campaigned for by NGOs and celebrities. Huh? It seems to have failed to register with the EU that NGO workers and celebrities are also, in fact, human beings, and voters at that. People who are more concerned with the inequalities in the world than with yet more crippling trade agreements. Oh but of course, regular people are just not qualified to have an opinion about such things, are they?

I am currently writing another batch of publicity material for our NGO, and really struggling with just which part of how awful things are, people globally are failing to grasp. Or perhaps they really just don't care, as long as it's not in their back yard.

Some refresher points:

With a life expectancy of just 33 years, Zambians die earlier than people anywhere else in the world.
1 in 5 people is HIV+.
The Ministry of Health expects half the population to die of AIDS.
Zambia now has the world's second-largest population of orphans.
In Zambia, debt repayments to the IMF alone cost more than the budget for education, despite 40% of rural women being unable to read and write.
Zambian students struggle to learn in classes containing 70 pupils on average.
But IMF restrictions means that the Zambian government cannot appoint more teachers, despite the fact that thousands of trained teachers are currently unemployed in the country.
In 2004 pupils in some rural areas did not even see a single teacher for the entire year.
IMF rules also insisted on large-scale privatisation and the introduction of user fees at medical establishments. Privatisation led to widespread job losses, and coupled with user fees, last year up to 45% of people in the Copperbelt region could not afford to take their children for medical treatment.
Despite their adherence to crippling conditions Zambia has to date only received 5% of the debt relief promised to it under the HIPC initiative.
Zambia's external debt is 128% of its GDP, compared to Britain's at 42%.
Debt repayments are making it impossible to respond to the health, educational and economic challenges facing Zambian people.

It would cost about US$300 Billion to cancel the debts of the world's poorest countries. In the USA US$350 Billion is spent on gambling every year.

But none of it matters so long as the EU and others can keep making unfair trade agreements and subsidies.

Welcome To The U.S.

2005-05-19T08:28:00.001+02:00

Aren't stat logs wonderful things? Hello and welcome to whoever it is at the US Department of State that finds my blog so interesting.

Their mission statement, should you choose to read it, states that they wish to: "Create a more secure, democratic, and prosperous world for the benefit of the American people and the international community."

Nice how the rest of the world is just sort of tacked on the end there. And you can literally see the rest of that sentence just hanging - "...by any means necessary even if is based on lies and propoganda and involves the slaughter of thousands of innocent people."

Actually the person came via here - scroll down, buried at the bottom of page - which means some naughty little worker is slacking off and not doing very important security things.

I just got a really sweet card from a friend in California, which had a couple of photos of her little girl in there. Wrapped around the entire thing is a big green sticker, courtesy of the US Department of Homeland Security. Because pictures of babies are the new form of terror you know.

Another friend of mine teaches at a school in Virginia. They were evacuated yesterday because one of the students threatened to litter the school with blood, bones and bodies. Nice.

Stetson Mike

2005-05-17T08:14:00.001+02:00

You know how you sometimes get a flashback to days of yore and get really embarrassed at how things were? Well, when I was little, growing up in an oppressively Catholic household, every Lent (look it up) we had a collection box in our house for Trocaire, an aid agency who gave money to the black babies. They actually said that. The Black Babies. It was like their unofficial slogan.

It makes me die to think of it now. What were they thinking?

One day, during Lent, my mother had served up my brother and I with some particularly revolting supper. Any attempts to leave it on the plate were met with a stern 'Think of the poor starving black babies in Africa'. After several of these pronouncements my brother, who is much cleverer and sharper than I am, held his still-full plate aloft to my mother and declared 'Send it out to them then, I'm done'.

Her sputtered attempts at explaining the impossibilities of posting a plate of soggy food were lost. We was long gone from that table. Nowadays I am a happy atheist, and I have to constantly rebut people who insist on calling me a missionary. (Except my grandma, who's 104, she can call me whatever the hell she wants. I figure you get to that age, there are no rules.)

The latest tiresome argument was with Stetson Mike, highly abridged version below.

I was standing in the car park outside the supermarket in town, when a very very large man, wearing a very very large Stetson waddled up to me.

'You a missionary?'
'No, a humanitarian aid worker'.
'So you don't work for the Lord?'
'Nope.'
'I do. We breed rabbits. Rabbits are a gift from God, hallelujah. Best eatin', easy to breed.'
'I see.'

Most people in this country can't even keep their chickens properly. I was imagining the havoc of millions of bunnies unleashed on the pitiful crops.

'So what's a humanitarian project like?' said Stetson Mike.
'Well, it's like a missionary, but without the hallelujahs. Works just as well, but without indoctrinating people. And no rabbits.'

Stetson Mike wasn't convinced, but then he didn't convince me either. Stetson Mike woke up in his condo in Florida one day and God spoke to him and told him to bring the rabbits to Zambia. There's someone like that in the White House right now you know. It's a scary scary world.

The Angel

2005-05-16T14:02:00.001+02:00

Ran away in the night, she did. Upped sticks and left as me ma would say. Took all her belongings and hoofed it into the darkness, baby bouncing on her back.

You think you have writer's block, and then, stuff.

It's amazing how, when you put your foot down about operating a zero tolerance policy towards theft and corruption, you can actually get rid of the rot.

So this lady, let's call her Laura, was asked a couple of days ago for a routine report. The next day she tries to resign. Chief goes 'woah there lady, what's the rush?' and refuses to accept it. Then away off into the ether she went last night.

Who knows what hornet's nest we are about to uncover...It kind of beats the usual painfully worded resignation letter though. Where you just want to tell your boss you think he's a moron, but you know you need a reference. Good old Laura is just like 'Damn you all!! I'm going to run away!'

I think that Chief's daughter and Milly are embroiled in a row. But it's difficult to know, not speaking the language. And the body language is different too. (Zambians also do this thing where if they don't quite understand something they bust out laughing. Which can be quite unnerving if you're telling them someone just died.)

But something is not quite so. Chief's daughter is a bit of a princess. Today she seems to be wastefully draining our drum of water and expecting Milly to refill it. Which is not good, for she is our Lovely Milly and no-one else's. I shall arrange for peas to be put in the princess's mattress.

What's Hot
A locally sourced ambulance means expected UK shipping costs can now be used for other medical needs.

A particular local ministry is refusing all invitations/demands to meet with us about a certain pressing issue. What they don't know is that the cabinet minister is a personal friend and will whup their asses when he finds out he he.

What's Not
Our much anticipated gas-powered fridge is stuck at some customs border, claiming we haven't got the right papers.

The incessant pestering by everyone to know what presents I brought them from the UK. Presents?! We had over 10kg of machinery parts for the NGO in our luggage. Do they KNOW how much chocolate I sacrificed?

Here is a lovely quote, which is attributed to Michelangelo. I don't know if he said it or not, but anyway it's nice:

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

That is all. Everybody keep carving.

Knobbery of the Highest Order

2005-05-15T11:32:00.001+02:00

I know I'm going to sound like a broken record, but honestly, the Observer has totally gone to the dogs. A leading story online today, in their Escape section, on some twat who paid almost four and a half grand to go and visit some tribe in West Papua who had never been in contact with outsiders, and then complained when they threw spears at him.

I mean, where do you even begin with what's wrong with this? The arrogance in thinking that a tribe would want to meet outsiders? The fact that they were trying to placate them with tobacco?

I'm refusing to link to this story because I don't see why I should give it traffic, but this is just one extract: "Yakobus tries to lure the natives back to their bivouac, repeating, 'Tsabat! Tsabat!' (Tobacco! Tobacco!)"

If he wants to give us four and a half grand he can stay in a mud hut and I'll find some locals who'll happily chuck rocks at him so he can write about his 'amazing experience'. What a knob. And what a knobbish newspaper that would print this.

Only slightly more outrageous than their '50 things every foodie should do before they die', which mostly consists of visiting restaurants in the UK and France. Because let's face it, the world stops there, right?

I suggest an alternative list might include: 1. Picking and sorting tea, to fully appreciate exactly what people (yes PEOPLE, human beings) have to do to get you your bloody Earl Grey 2. Living for a week with some villagers who eat one meal of maize porridge a day, to truly appreciate what it's like to be hungry 3. Wait tables/work in a kitchen, so you realise just how hard people work to bring you your michelin-starred food.

Worshipping At The Altar Of The Blue-Footed Booby

2005-05-13T10:46:00.000+02:00

"I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect." Oscar Wilde

Random Copy

2005-05-11T09:20:00.000+02:00

WRITE ONLY ON THIS SURFACE WITH SPECIAL MARKER

Gaaaah!

2005-05-10T15:46:00.001+02:00

I do often wish I was a fancy economist-type person, to better understand the tangled mess that is the wealth/poverty divide in this world. But to add to my list of 'degrees I must take some day' must be something in the anthropology/sociology line.

PLEASE can someone explain to me why it is in this part of the world that no-one, but no-one, is capable of thinking or planning any further beyond the next five minutes?

Why the person running a fully-funded training programme which was signed off months ago, would turn around two days before it ends and declare that there is no paper for the certificates. When it is a three-hour round trip into town, provided you can get a working vehicle and there is some fuel to be found, a town which is unlikely to have such paper at short notice anyway, and the guy in charge of printing the certificates is on leave. When the candidates have come from all around and about in the bushy bushland and the likelihood of them all being together in the same room again is slim. What about a little forward planning? No? Just a little bit? A few weeks even. Not asking anything much.

Sound of head banging on very hard hardwood desk made from the finest hard wood hardwood. Ow.

Save Us From Bland

2005-05-09T09:05:00.001+02:00

More rumbles in the jungle. Perhaps African Leaders will eventually give the two fingers to their debtors.

And way down on the list of the Guardian online's important news stories - Huge Radioactive Leak Closes Thorp Nuclear Plant. They say it's not a danger to the public. It's kind of an important thing to know about though, wouldn't you say?

Meanwhile, spotted in a print edition of the Observer I just got from somebody - a half page article devoted to telling us how seven-year old girls in the UK are now going to spas. FFS. (a) What teeny tiny fraction of the child population does this actually apply to? (b) Why does anybody care? Reporting on this only encourages more pillocks.

Word of the Day: Pillock

Darkness Falls

2005-05-04T15:37:00.001+02:00

When dusk drifts in, a veil of shadows, all at once the little things start to speak. Crickets. Frogs. Songbirds. Shouting their last hurrah as another day’s dramas come to a close. The sunset burns a bursting-out orange, and as it slips below the horizon the forest comes alive with trees silhouetted against the sky.

Sound carries on the air – radios, laughter. There is a sweet smell of woodsmoke and charcoal as braziers begin to burn, to cook the evening pot of nsima.

Later, at night, the sky is inky-black, shattered by stars and flaunting a full-fat moon. It is completely still and peaceful, the world suspended, hanging in the clear air. An occasional low owl hoot is the only thing to break the silence.

But in between these layers is a feeling of oppression. Dusk closes quickly, there are no lights. Fumbling, stumbling, a velvet smothering, mozzies biting, and when finally you find where you left the candle, the moths attack.

You can’t see to cook your dinner or find the longdrop. There is a rustling in the bushes, unknown whatnots. And it is in this heavy in-between-time that schoolchildren must study. By candlelight.

Currently fundraising for: Solar lighting for our school

Lust for Truth

2005-05-04T08:26:00.001+02:00

One of the things I was really looking forward to when back in the UK, was the pleasure of getting the weekend papers and spending hours, if not days, poring over them. Sadly, it gave me as much of a faceache, if not more, to read print journalism, as it does to read it online. I must be way off base and out of synch with everyone else's way of thinking, but I have always believed that journalists had a responsibility to tell the truth, as much as possible. Especially journalists who work for what purport to be serious newspapers such as The Guardian and The Observer. To say that the selection of articles I read left me disappointed would be an understatement. Some random examples -

An article on macho getaways. For a start, do we really need to be encouraging this? Included in the list of things to do was go big game hunting in Namibia. Again, is this something we should be encouraging? But the thing which really incensed me was that the tone of the piece made it sound like you could just jump off the plane in Windhoek, shotgun under your arm and start taking potshots at the animals willy-nilly. Which is blatantly untrue. Namibia is stringent on its preservation of game. Taking a deck at a big cat will land you in jail quicker than you can say 'pass the lager'. Perhaps there are some asshole private game reserve managers who will let you shoot their animals, but it is not something that is condoned by either the people or the government of Namibia, and I object to a country being portrayed this way. LAZY journalism.

An article on Zimbabwe, although I use the term loosely. And I read it because now that the 'elections' are over Zim will once more slip under the radar. The writer described how the country was falling apart. How the only place still just ticking over was Victoria Falls. And how the only people going there were White South Africans. White South Africans who were hated by the locals because they refused to shop locally and support the local economy, bringing in their vehicles full of food from their own country. Well ain't that a damning indictment. It's easy to take a potshot at the White South Africans isn't it? What the journalist failed to mention was the stores in Vic Falls are full of empty shelves. Basics such as milk and sugar are just not available. If bread is made there are hundreds of people queuing out the door to get their hands on it. You can't always get fuel at the service stations. Hell if I was going on holiday somewhere like that, I'd be bringing my own supplies too. At least they're still going there. But showing all sides of the story would take a bit more effort, wouldn't it. CAN'T BE ARSED journalism.

The guy who wrote that tourism was booming in Zambia and that the economy was on the up. Well sure tourism is booming if you have the money to pay for fly-in safaris and luxury accommodation. I'd say that market is somewhat limited, wouldn't you? And making a sweeping statement about the economy on the up is all very well, but if you put it in the context of Zambia's debts falling from USD3 billion to USD2 billion, or whatever the true figures were, it suddenly doesn't seem like such a boom after all. I can attest to the fact that the people I work with are not exactly skipping through the daisies with joy about economic and tourism booms, as they trek barefoot for kilometres to fetch dirty water. COMPLETELY OUT OF CONTEXT journalism.

What bothers me is that I only know these articles are a bunch of arse because I live in this area and know what's going on. What about all the places and things I know nothing about? Say an article about China buying up oil. Well is it true? I don't know anything about China. I don't know a lot about oil. So is everything we read a lie?

An article not read in the UK but rather in the Guardian Weekly, at which I laughed out loud. Jonathan Freedland - who actually brazenly admitted he'd written the article while on holiday in Cape Town, sitting in a deck chair in his friend's garden - whingeing and bemoaning that post-Apartheid South Africa did not live up to the expectations he held for it in his protesting student days. He was disappointed to find black people working as cleaners and waiting tables for example. Erm, hello? In a country where the vast majority of the population is black, then black people will be doing all kinds of jobs, from government ministers and businesspeople through teachers and nurses down through to cleaners and waiters. It would be a bit like going to China and declaring that you were disappointed to see that Chinese people had to sweep the streets. Get a grip. South Africa's not perfect. It has a lot wrong with it. A lot of the wealth is still in white hands. But you are never going to have a day when you won't have black people working 'lowly' jobs, people do those jobs everywhere.

And lastly, nothing to do with Africa. An article (also written by a man, I wouldn't dare to suggest a pattern) by a music journalist. Who was in an airport waiting for a flight. When he saw a Famous Rock Star, who was travelling with his young child. According to the 'journalist' the Famous Rock Star was really rude and wouldn't sign autographs. Perhaps. But also perhaps he was enjoying some family time and didn't really want to be hounded by people. The 'journalist' then took great delight in detailing how the Famous Rock Star then rudely pushed his way to the top of the queue to board the plane. Erm, all airlines call parents with young children and those needing assistance to the front of the queue. But that wouldn't have made such a good story, would it?

Happy Birthday To Me

2005-05-03T12:41:00.000+02:00

Happy Birthday To Me!
Chocolate Cake for Tea!

And a great big vodka cocktail for lunch I think...

The Latvians

2005-05-02T11:51:00.002+02:00

I am aware that the following discourse has the potential to make me sound like a Daily (Hate) Mail reader, but no matter. The Latvians. Everywhere in Ireland. Of course it may be high-handed xenophobia to call them that. Perhaps they are from Lithuania. Or Slovakia. An Eastern place in any regard, sporting skin with a waxen pallor suggestive of a lifetime of cabbage soup.

Now, I welcome a country with mixed-up people. Hurrah! New music, culture, food, ideas etc. It’s a good thing. But…is it too much to ask that if you move to a country and work in the service industry that you speak the language?? After the nth time of being met with a blank stare when asking a reasonable question, I can feel the Daily (Hate) Mail thoughts rising up within.

Example 1 – To The Latvian waitress in a restaurant.
“Can you tell me what’s in this dish please?”
“Vat?”
Lather, rinse, repeat, lather, rinse, repeat, order something else.

Example 2 – To the Latvian man in a store, sporting an Assistant badge.
“There’s no price tag on this bag, could you please find out how much it is?”
“Vat?”
Lather, rinse, repeat, lather, rinse, repeat, go ask somebody else.

It’s not like I was asking for a discussion on nuclear fission. I used to teach EFL. I speak and enunciate clearly, and I never use that loud patronising tone that so many people do, when speaking to someone whose first language is not English. But honestly, at times it makes you despair. I’ve worked abroad where I’ve had to use a language not my mother tongue, and if I’ve ever not understood someone I’ve apologised and run off to get someone who could help, not stood there shrugging glumly and thinking of dumplings.

It reminds me of all those ridiculous UK TV shows – “A New Life Holiday Place in the Overseas”. Cut to miserable looking British man standing in front of a lovely (falling down) Tuscan farmhouse, wife and six kids in the background.

“No, it hasn’t really worked out. We sold everything we had to move here, now we’re broke. I couldn’t get a job (BECAUSE I COULDN’T BE BOTHERED TO LEARN ITALIAN), my wife couldn’t get a job (BECAUSE SHE COULDN’T BE BOTHERED TO LEARN ITALIAN), my kids are starving (BECAUSE NONE OF US BOTHERED TO LEARN ITALIAN AND THEREFORE COULDN’T ASK FOR FOOD IN THE SHOPS). It’s a disaster. I don’t know what we’ll do now. (LEARN ITALIAN?)"

But I do have a favourite Latvian. She could speak fairly good English, and was working on the check-in desk at Ryanair (Kwality!). Having ascertained the price of the bag in the shop from someone non-Latvian, I had bought it and stuffed it full of the books I’d bought from Johnny Pottymouth. If I picked it up real quick, it wasn’t that heavy, honest guv. BA might have let it through. But Ryanair are not known for their generosity. I put my bag on the scales. Tap tappety tap.

“Ok, you arr two kilos over, you vant take somevink out or you vant pay?” Big smile from The Latvian. Beads of cold sweat from me. I’ve never had to pay excess luggage, but I’ve heard the horror stories from those who have. 1% of the highest fare on that flight, per kilo over. Cogs start turning in brain. Was it an aviation authority rule or an airline rule? For if it was an aviation rule, then the highest fare on a Ryanair flight could not be that much. On the other hand, if it was an airline rule, you could bet your grandma that Michael O’Leary would have a seat down the back with a price tag of a squillion euros.

“How much would it be to pay?” I winced.
“Ayte euros”, big Latvian Smile.
“8? 18? 80? 800? How much?”
“Ayte euros.” Yes, I had heard correctly. Eight euros.
“Where do I pay?”, big Irish smile.
Go Ryanair & The Smiling Latvian!

Warning, Dangerous Clouds

2005-04-29T08:44:00.000+02:00

Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha.

The Day I Accidentally Fell Into An Episode Of Black Books

2005-04-28T07:51:00.001+02:00

I am running out of books. This is not a good thing. So one of my missions while back home was to procure a stack of second-hand books to take back with me. I didn't actually consider how this would work weight-wise on the plane, but more of that later.

Brother the Younger and I decided to go to a Town In Middle Ireland to a second-hand bookstore. It started off well enough; it was lashing rain outside and the comfort of shelves full of dusty tomes was appealing. We slipped in through a side door in an alley and up a winding staircase. It was a small shop, and the only other person on the premises was The Shopkeeper. We said hello and started browsing.

Fu**etywacketywaahwaahc**tc**traaaar! Thump. Thump thump thump. Woooooh!

I looked at my brother. But no, it was not he emitting the obscenities. Which left only The Shopkeeper. My brother and I carefully slid our eyes in his direction, being careful not to get caught. He seemed normal enough. Apart from the fact that he was wearing a giant anorak indoors, complete with hood drawn over his face. We carried on browsing.

Muckerfu**erbollixcraprooooar! Thumpety thumpety BANG. MumblemumblegrumbleF**K!! In unison my brother and I shuffled towards the back of the shop, nearer to the door. I was doing my best to smother a laugh, and I could see my brother's shoulders shaking. Was it even legal to have someone with Tourette's working with customers? Afterwards my brother confessed that he was convinced Johnny Pottymouth had been asked to mind the shop for five minutes, and that the real owner would soon come back and save us.

It seemed that The Shopkeeper's dvd player was the source of his annoyance, and in retrospect I'm glad it was. For surely he would have turned on us in the absence of a machine to aim kicks and belts and rude words at. He definitely had the potential to rear up in a Father Jack manner - Books! Books! Feck! GETOUTGETOUTGETOUT bollixbooks!

Of course during the time that all the swearing and thumping had been going on, I had actually found some books I wanted to buy. My eyes had also been inadvertently drawn to every paperback with the word Mad or Crazy in the title, but that was only to be expected. The dilemma now was whether or not to risk taking my armful up to the counter. For a moment I considered just walking out the door with them. Would The Shopkeeper have noticed? Would he have come running after us, or stayed behind to kick some more machinery?

With trepidation I approached the counter.

"I'd like to buy these books please," I said, just in case he didn't know why I was standing in front of him.

The Shopkeeper grabbed the books from me and made a big show of adding up the prices in his head (tongue hanging out of side of mouth a big help).

"Turteen Euros".

I gave him a twenty.

He grabbed the note and groaned loudly, shaking his head from side to side.

I stepped back.

Rrrrrrrmuttermumblegrumblec**t. Now he spent five minutes looking for a giant calculator, in order to subtract 13 from 20.

I feared for the machine, as he battered hell out of the keys. Then he took two one-euro coins and wrapped them up tightly in a five-euro note. I cringed, hoping he wasn't going to put sellotape on it. He looked away from me in drama queen fashion as he held out the change.

Then he began battling with a brown paper bag, which admittedly, was doing its best to eat him alive. To my horror, I noticed that he had bundled up a notebook and a dvd (presumably his) with my books. I was working up the courage to try and point this out to him, but at the last minute he noticed, tipped everything out, and started all over again.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Bangedybang. F**kf**kf**cbollixc**t. Whack.

I took the bag and my brother and I tried not to make it obvious that we were running down the stairs.

Sorry, We're Closed

2005-03-21T12:47:00.001+02:00

BlackWhiteStopGoUpDownPositiveNegativePositiveNegativePositive.

Clearly the parasites went into hiding when I had my malaria slide last week, for it is back.

The jackhammer in the back of my head is matched by the bongo drums in my liver. I am scheduled to go to the UK in a few days anyway, so I shall have to present myself at the Centre for Tropical Whatnots for De-parasiting.

So this blog is now temporarily closed while its owner undergoes a major renovation.

I don't know when it will be open for business again, so don't wait up. There may be intermittent blogging from Europe, but I doubt posting from Rural England or Rural Ireland holds as much interest as Rural Zambia.

Somehow I don't think back there I will have somebody offer me a bag of uncut emeralds for pence over the breakfast table. The day is lightened somewhat by the fact that the most stunning giant chocolate brown and turquoise butterfly has taken up residence in the bougainvillea outside our house.

I Hate Pidgwidgeons

2005-03-18T09:40:00.001+02:00

Hoo Hoo Huh Hoo Huh Hoo

Hoo Hoo Huh Hoo Huh Hoo
Hoo Hoo Huh Hoo Huh Hoo
Hoo Hoo Huh Hoo Huh Hoo etc etc

Somewhere, nearby, a wood pigeon, must die. Because the relentless monotonous repetitive hoo hoo is driving me crazy.

Paddy

2005-03-16T12:06:00.002+02:00

Caterpillars

2005-03-15T09:46:00.001+02:00

It's obvious everybody likes the worm stories. But the comment "Oh how you deserve a worm-free trip to Ireland" made me giggle, as it reminded me of a caterpillar story...

Many moons ago before I left Ireland to live in Namibia for a while, my family had a sort of last supper on the eve of my departure. You can tell it was a long time ago, because fresh soup in a carton was a new and exciting thing.

My mother emptied the carton of 'Spring Vegetable' soup into a saucepan. Plop! Right on top was a giant hairy caterpillar.

We had a lengthy conversation about whether it was better or worse to find a whole caterpillar, whether it indicated the vegetables had been pesticide free and therefore better for us, and so on.

But we didn't eat the soup. We stuck Caterpillar on a piece of card and I left my mother to send it off to The Soup Factory with a letter of complaint.

As a family we have a very high success rate of Getting Lots of Stuff for Free - we find a lot of weird things in our foodstuffs.

Anyway, I arrive in Namibia. I am tired after the long flight, but decide to spend my first evening there in a Traditional African Restaurant. The kind of restaurant where they don't rush to put bread on the table upon your arrival. Oh no. Instead you get a large basket of mopane worms. Which are of course, big hairy caterpillars.

wormswormswormswormsworms

2005-03-14T11:39:00.001+02:00

So, Claypot, how is your first day back at work?

Oh it's great, really rockin' so far. The internet was down for hours, thus depriving me of any contact with the wide world. But you know, I'm cool with that. I wasn't tearing my hair out in frustration or anything. Oh no, not me.

I decided to go home and make...porridge. Don't ask me why. Well I made the porridge. With a coupla cinammon sticks. I'm trying to fish out the sticks before I put the porridge in the bowl (said Baby Bear).

There's other stuff in there. Stuff that looks like cooked worms. But no, surely not. Perhaps they are the brown husks from the oats.

I decide to make some more porridge. But first I tip the oats on to a plate. Writhing. I'm surprised the plate didn't move off the countertop with the worm-force.

The oats had been in a box inside a plastic bag. Could the worms have come from the porridge factory? Hmmm, I don't think so. And so my 20-minute snack break turns into an hour-long deworming of the dry goods press*. By the end of it I have a bucket full of foodstuffs that is churning away like a washing machine. Still, it will make good compost.

*Press: This is what people in Ireland call a cupboard. I'm going there in three weeks where I shall use words like press to my heart's content and not have people looking at me funny.

Of Interest

2005-03-14T11:30:00.001+02:00

Good articles seem to be like buses - nothing at all and then lots in a slap at once. There has been a dearth of linkable material in recent weeks, but maybe the worm is turning (heh!):

There is an excellent pro-secularist article by Salman Rushdie in the Guardian today, and an interesing one by Naomi Klein on the US foreign policy. Sadly, as if the horrific tale of Mukhtaran Bibi is not enough, a new Human Rights Watch report tells of shocking sexual abuse of women in the DRC. Perhaps if Malawi's president hadn't been in such a hurry to turn the parliamentary building into his private mansion, he wouldn't be having this trouble. And finally, this is why I Love Jay Rayner

That's Negative Ma'am!

2005-03-13T12:08:00.001+02:00

We went to town yesterday to check my malaria status again. It was a public holiday, so we weren't even sure the clinic was open. The roads were quiet. On the way in we passed a lone police officer on a California-style mountain bike, complete with go-faster helmet. A solitary watermelon sat on an abandoned roadside stall.

The clinic was open, and as always the staff were pleasant and cheerful. Even the nurse who was telling someone on the other end of the telephone how she thought she would be murdered in her bed any day now.

Thankfully, the test was negative. No horrid quinine. We decided to go out for lunch to celebrate.

Outside in the bright sunshine a small girl in a spiderweb of stiff bright nylon carried a juice bottle on her head. A ribbon-tailed flycatcher trailed across the windscreen as we pulled up at the restaurant. In the tv room, a large comfy chair was positioned directly in front of the screen. Its occupant: a fat hen.

Back home a man on a bicycle was waiting. He addressed The Husband. As a woman I am unseen, unimportant, no need to greet me.

"Evening sir. I am Nkhoma from the Chief's Camp. I am bringing you a rock." I left The Husband to figure it out...