Eastern Endeavors

Manase (center) and her friends at their preschool in the Eastern Province.

I’m typing while sitting on the porch of my hostel after a rainstorm in Lusaka. Around 1am last night it started thundering and the downpour didn’t stop until an hour ago. It’s Saturday morning and everyone here is slowly getting up; sleepily walking down a gravel path to the outdoor sinks to brush their teeth and pulling on green Zambia football jerseys in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.

I came back to Lusaka on Thursday evening after a sweaty and crowded bus ride. The majority of this week was spent outside the small township of Petauke in the Eastern Province. I stayed there with the Lachman family who live and work in Covenant College, a pastor training school. The students there range from their mid twenties to their seventies and come from all over Zambia (and even some parts of Malawi and Zimbabwe). Over meals of nshima and truck rides to the boma (Petauke’s center is still referred to the “boma”, which refers to an area with colonial government offices), I talked to many of the students about their families, about tradition, and of course, about names.

My host Katie and her son Elijah, demonstrating one of the chitenje's many uses.

The Lachman Family: Katie & David, Elijah & Ketzia

There’s a lot that came out of this visit, and a lot of notes on names that I hope to spend some time unraveling and writing about this week. In the meantime, images of the east are clear in my mind. These images are from a very different kind of Zambia than I’d seen in Livingstone or Lusaka.

To get to the Eastern Province, you cross the Luangwa bridge and the landscape (and roads) change dramatically. We winded around mountains and hills and I felt the tiniest bit like I was in Vermont. The drive is a pretty remarkable one. You simply head east on the Great East Road from Lusaka and pass by tiny villages with straw-thatched roofs and children carrying water who stop to wave at the cars passing by. The road is filled with the kind of images that I think most people envision when they think of daily life in Africa. The majority of the Eastern Province feels like that. It’s a place where there is no power three days a week, where you have to be careful going outside after dark because of snakes, where you don’t see any women wearing pants.

Bridge to the Eastern Province

En route

Stopping along Great East Road to rearrange some cargo and meet some people.

I got invited to visit a makeshift preschool in one village nearby that was started by a Zambian man. He volunteered to teach kids ages four to seven who don’t have any other educational opportunities nearby. Some of the people working at Covenant College got involved and are helping him learn teaching strategies. On the afternoon I visited, the preschoolers were taking turns in groups playing with materials that had been donated. They drew circles with chalk and kicked around a soccer ball. Everyone is so scared that the ball will be stolen that the teacher carries it home every night and brings it back every morning, tucked under his arm.

The recently built school building.

Marjanne (one woman from Covenant College) and I caused the scene above when we pulled up to the school in a car.

Classroom

There are so many orphans within this preschool class that there is a system of differentiation. The teacher casually mentioned the “double orphans” and the “single orphans” in the room and I didn’t hear much of what else he said because I became fixated on these group labels; on what it means to be in a place where such categories are necessary. A place where there is taxonomy for tragedy.

Eastern Zambia is not the only place in the last year where I have been a witness to people living in very desperate circumstances. There are plenty of people living in similar situations in Lusaka as well. And Indonesia, and India, and Morocco, and many American cities, for that matter. I have little patience for travel blogs that make the atrocities of poverty seem like new or foreign things. I am very sick of the western travel takeaway message that shouts, “Look at these other people living their lives; they are poor but they are happy.”

This not only romanticizes poverty but also overlooks what I think is a rather basic human commonality. Of course people have found ways to be happy, or at least appear to be happy. I don't think there is a way of living otherwise.

And just because someone finds delight in their baby’s smile, and fresh avocados, and the pleasures of daily life does not mean that they should stop there and also not want a comfortable bed and an internet connection and new clothes and their kids to have an education. Everyone has the right to want for something more.

Photo of the chaos that developed from these kids' realization that I had a camera with me.

I’ve tried to avoid using terms like developed and developing on my blog. I’ve tried to avoid evaluating the countries I’ve been to by those terms. I don’t believe there is some kind of imaginary spectrum where the endpoint is the same for everybody. But I will say that there are a lot of people in Zambia who want a lot of things that are impossibilities for them. And a lot of these things are what I would consider basic human rights.

I’ve become good friends with a woman named Stephanie who is doing research on water use in Lusaka. She’s interested in how people prioritize among daily tasks like bathing, laundry, cooking and cleaning when there’s a shortage of water. Stephanie talked to one Zambian woman about how she made decisions about using water in her home, particularly in times of need. The woman gave her a long list of things in her house she needed water for, and things there was often not enough water for. She told Stephanie how she would give her children baths, and then if there was enough water, she and her husband would then take them. At the end of the conversation about these basic tasks she added, “If I had more water, I would like to plant some flowers.”

Kalulu

Photo from Kavitha, a new friend I made in Livingstone—a group of us took a boat to Livingstone Island (right on the edge of the falls) last week. We had high tea and went swimming in the Zambezi River. (Kavitha's own travel blog can be found here: https://labtofab.wordpress.com).

Coming back to Lusaka the second time around felt much better than my initial arrival. I was coming back to a few familiar faces as well as some new additions at Kalulu Backpackers, including, as luck would have it, a few other sociological researchers and medical students who will be here with me more long-term. We’ve formed a kind of Norweigian/British/American/Swiss contingency of young women in Lusaka who are trying to figure this city out together. It’s nice to have some company.

Riding through Lusaka on the back of a pickup truck.

I got back on Thursday and the last few days have been mainly spent getting resettled. I’ve stepped out on a limb and decided to lay some ground work for hiring a few Zambian research assistants to help me out in the next few weeks. I’ve taken a day trip with some new friends to the nearby Munda Wanga wildlife sanctuary a few miles out of Lusaka (perhaps the most entertaining aspect of this trip was learning that in addition to playing host to Zambian wildlife, now is also home for Gaddafi’s camels). I’ve become friends with Shawn, the energetic four year-old son of the owners of the hostel, participated in huge communal dinners, and visited a few of the city markets.

This is just a brief post for the in-between because tomorrow I’m leaving Lusaka again for another adventure. As I mentioned briefly before, a very kind blog reader, Katie Lachman, who is living with her family in Zambia got in touch with me and generously offered to give me a place to stay and people to talk to in their neck of the woods. I’ll be heading to Petauke tomorrow and will be there until returning to Lusaka on Thursday. I am very excited to meet their family and hear about their own adventures in Zambia. Katie’s blog can be found here: http://katie-kette.blogspot.com).

It’s a lot of coming and going, but this place is starting to feel like home. I am reminded once again how easy it is to create a home for yourself when there are people around you who are looking for the same thing. My home in Lusaka for the next month borrows its name, “Kalulu”, from the African Brer Rabbit. Kalulu is supposedly the hero of many Zambian folktales and stories told around the fire. On Friday night a few of us set up our own campfire and, as the resident American, I ended up teaching fellow travelers from Norway, England, Zambia, The Netherlands, Russia, Brazil, & Ireland how to make a proper s'more.

Those of us who are here for a while are all going through the process of adapting and figuring out ways to make Kalulu into our own little home for the next few weeks.

We're finding that campfires are an excellent way to start.

Name Post: A Name Like Sadness

Livingstone scene.

I’ve been in Zambia for a week now. Like the seven months that prefaced it, it feels like it’s been more and it feels like it’s been less. The week featured a rocky arrival, massive housing dilemma, some tired tears, bad sunburns, and a lot of mosquito (and unidentified insect) bites. It also featured seeing one of the seven wonders of the world, some breathtaking wildlife, a microlight flight, new friends, and getting to bond with the African cup. In between there were mornings that began with Munali coffee and daily dips in the hostel’s pool. Amid the madness, I began my research.

Calling it research sometimes feels like a lie, because in truth, I’m really just having informal conversations with anyone who wants to talk and calling it research. (One of the many reasons I love this year). As I was getting my feet on the ground this week I happened to have one conversation with a Zambian man about what he thought of all of this. He is the colleague of a woman staying at my hostel in Lusaka, and he was eager to talk about names and generously said I could share the information with you all.

His own story is an interesting one. Ndaniso’s name means sadness. He explained to me that he was given this name because he was born during a time of mourning. His aunt’s husband (his uncle), had just died. Out of respect to the family, they gave him a name that described what was happening at the time of his birth.

I learned from Ndaniso that this is a common practice in Zambia. Often, names here refer to situations, to moments in time. In 2012, these moments in time can be easily discovered on a massive global scale, and he told me that there have been many Zambian babies born in recent years with names that their parents found on TV news reports. In 1990, when the first George Bush sent troops into Iraq , it was on the news so much here that many parents decided to name their babies “Baghdad.” Currently in Zambia, the names of the Chipolopolo Boys (the Zambian football team) are spreading like wildfire after their recent victory. I’m hoping Super Tuesday gets little enough coverage on Zambian news that I won’t run into any babies named Santorum or Romney while I’m here.

Lusaka bus station.

The idea of naming your child after what is going on at the time of the child’s birth is one that works on a lot of different levels. As Ndaniso explained, this makes for names like “Saddam” and “Baghdad” that are taken from global news; but it also makes for names like his, a name that means sadness, because of what was happening within his family. There is a lot of space for the in between. He told me children here have been named a particular craving their mother had when pregnant with them, or even after named after an act of infidelity, if those were the circumstances surrounding their births. He told me that in Zambia there are a lot of babies named Caesar and that all of these babies were born from a caesarian section.

It is hard to make generalizations about names in Zambia, because a lot of parents’ motivations in choosing names are very dependent on what tribe their family is originally from, and what part of Zambia they’re living in. In some tribes, it is traditionally the father who has the power to name the baby, in others, it is the mother, and some tribes, the decision is shared. It is also not uncommon in Zambia for the father to give one name to the baby and the mother to give another, so the child has multiple names that change depending on who is speaking to him.

Showing Zambian pride on the day the Chipolopolo Boys came to Livingstone.

Unlike in other countries I’ve been to this year, (Germany in particular comes to mind), I doesn’t seem as if name choices in Zambia correspond as directly to the socioeconomic status or education level of the people choosing them. In my limited time in Zambia I’ve found names that run all over the gamut. I’ve met a “Moses” and a “Godsend”, a “Kingston”, a “Prince Harry”, and a “Nora.” The Lonely Planet guidebook explains that a lot of Zambia’s legal code is based on Victorian England’s and I think, that many of the names are as well. Whenever I give my name to waiters or taxi drivers here they all respond, “Oh Nell! You mean Nelly?” Zambians recognize my name (and its derivatives) far more than people in any other country I’ve been to this year have, which makes an odd kind of sense when you consider that my name shows itself the most in Dickens novels.

Although the David Livingstone story is pretty well known, I’m finding that to dig into the variety of names you find around here, I need a better understanding of Zambian history than that story alone. Livingstone remains remarkably popular here which was somewhat of a surprise to me. I think that a large part of his popularity is because in some ways he was ahead of his time. When he traveled up the Zambezi in the 1850s as a missionary he was hoping that teaching Christian principles would be a way of abolishing the slave trade. Because of his work for racial equality, most Zambians see him as a heroic figure (despite the fact—excuse my cynicism—that he came right in and “discovered” the waterfall they already knew existed, and slapped a new name on it after the Queen). He paved the way for many missionary groups in Zambia, and there are still copious missions today all around the country. When Cecil John Rhodes led the British South Africa Company to lay claims on Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia), mainly for its large copper deposits, the country became more directly under colonial influence, both legally and religiously. Zambia was under the control of the British from 1924 until the Prime Minister turned President Kenneth Kaunda led the independence movement.

In other words, Zambia has only been an independent country for less than fifty years and I think in some ways it’s still figuring out how to band together its diverse population and demographics. In addition to the diversity of its own population, it is a landlocked country surrounded by no less than eight other countries (Zambia touches the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and Angola). The large amount of unrest in this region in recent years means that Zambia has been trying to figure out how to stay above water, while geographically being smack in the middle of it all. This also wasn’t made easy by the fact that right after independence, due to corruption in the government and a fall in copper prices, Zambia became one of the poorest countries in the world. Although the economy has greatly improved since then, (particularly in the early 2000s), today 68% of Zambians live below the recognized national poverty line, and on the UN’s human development index in 2008, Zambia ranked 163^rd out of 179 countries. There is a lot that hasn’t made economic recovery here easy, not to mention the scarily high HIV/AIDS rate here (more than one in SEVEN Zambian adults is infected).

Map taken from LonelyPlanet.com

Excuse the history lesson, but I do think this all does relate back to names, and I’m finding these national stories to be increasingly important tools for my research this year. Ndaniso told me that a common question many Zambian parents ask themselves when naming their children is whether to give them African names or English names. Some parents compromise by giving them one of each. I asked him if the use of African or English names corresponded to certain population demographics and he said it varied. According to him, “some educated people who go to school or work in the UK come back and want to use English names, so they give those to their babies instead of African names. But the same situation sometimes means the opposite; some educated people who go to school or work in the UK or something come back and that makes them really want to use African names, no English names.”

I asked Ndaniso (who has a four month old son named Jems) whether he would use African or English names for his other children and he said that he only cared that they were family names and Zambian names. For Ndaniso the question of names is one that is strictly about place. “I couldn’t have my name in the U.S”, he told me. “If I moved to the U.S. I’d have to be Daniel Brown or something.”

I told him I thought this was a little sad. “Why do you think you’d have to be Daniel Brown there?”

“Because if I wasn’t, people would know I didn’t belong. If you go to another country, illegally, and you want to blend in, you need to change your name.” He explained further, “If I moved to South Africa, I’d need a new South African name. The police would stop me and I’d tell them my name and tell them a lie about which South African tribe my family was from. The police would then touch here” (he gestured to his elbow), “and ask me what the word for that in my tribe was. The police are in a big group, with people from different tribes, so someone would know the right word.” He thought about it a little bit. “But they’d know, in South Africa. Whenever people try to go there illegally they’re given away because of this.” He lifted his sleeve and showed me a small indentation. “That’s from a polio vaccination,” he told me. “In all of central Africa they’re given in the right arm, but in South Africa, they give them on the left arm. That way they’d know I wasn’t from there.”

Your name has serious implications in this part of Africa because it describes where you’re from and who your family is. Ndaniso tells me he could hear any name in Zambia and know what tribe the person’s family is from (he thinks he'd be right about 90% of the time). There are rumors that Zambian police are more likely to arrest people whose surnames are not Zambian; it’s assumed if your last name is Banda, for example, that you’re Malawian. Foreign sounding names can make it harder to get jobs here and because of this, for Ndaniso, names correspond directly to place. If you change places, you change names.

I asked him if it was easy to change a name in Zambia and he told me there are a series of steps you need to take. The first of these is that you need to put an advertisement in the paper for a certain number of weeks announcing that you want to change your name and asking if anyone objects. He told me that this is to prevent criminals from legally changing their name so that no one can find them. (“No one reads this part of the paper, so no one objects,” he told me). When that happens, a new name is granted.

In addition to representing place, Ndaniso explained that names here often describe placement within a family. The name “Chola”, for example, is a Bemba name given to a child who comes after twins. The name “Mutintu” is given to a baby who is of the opposite gender than his or her older siblings. (Mutintu could be given to a girl with an older brother, for example, or a boy with an older sister). Coming from Germany, where the gender of the child must be clear from a strictly legal perspective, I find it very interesting that in Zambia, Mutintu is a common name that is not only unisex, but indicates there’s been a shift in gender within the family; the gender of the individual is less important.

Spotted en route to Livingstone

Ndaniso told me babies are often named after people who have been successful. “A lot of people here believe in witchcraft,” he said with a smile, “I don’t, but they think that maybe the baby will grow up with the same spirit, the same motivation.”

I asked Ndaniso about his own philosophy on names. “What was it like growing up with a name like sadness?” I asked him. “Did that make you sad as a child?”

“No.” He told me. “Some people believed that would happen and they wanted my father to change my name. But I’ve never been sad in my life. My father’s name meant celebration.”

He thought for a while and then added, “certain names remind you of what happened. When people say, ‘when did auntie’s husband die?’ We can remember that it was 1969 because that’s the year I was born.”

Ndaniso believes that names don’t affect who you are, but he gave one counter example. “I have a cousin named Ndaba Zinhle. Ndaba means “news” and Zinhle means “good” because the day he was born his father got good news. He went on to become the best journalist in Zimbabwe.” He shrugged. “Maybe names control what you’re going to do.”

These kids were too shy (or didn't understand enough of my English) for me to learn their names, but they REALLY liked seeing pictures of themselves.

Ndaniso told me that different groups in Zambia are divided on the issue of names. Some people believe that African names should be used exclusively, others English names. It is also a country that is now home to many Christian missionaries from the English-speaking world, a fairly large Chinese population, as well as an Indian population. All of these people influencing names in modern day Zambia. Ndaniso told me, for example, that “churches want parents to give positive names, like names that mean success or happiness.”

He smiled, “A name like sadness would not be encouraged.”

Ndaniso has a smile that seems to take over his whole face. It does seem peculiar to me that he has a name like sadness, but on the other hand, maybe it’s actually perfect. Because, I imagine that when family members do turn to each other and ask, “When did auntie’s husband die?” they may remember sadness, but that also makes them remember his entry into the world. And if Ndaniso as a baby is anything like Ndaniso as an adult, I imagine that this entrance into the world was nothing less than joyful. I wonder if by bearing his family’s sadness through his name, Ndaniso may have come to mean something else entirely.

The Falls & The Flying

I’m not really an extreme sports kind of girl. To be honest, I’m not really a most sports kind of girl. Because of this, it’s hasn’t been too hard to turn down the various adrenaline-pumped activities offered at Victoria Falls. Except for one.

When I was in Bali, and had the good fortune of meeting my fellow fellow, Sara Bates, she told me that when she was in Zambia she had gone mircolighting above the falls and it was one of the most amazing experiences she’d ever had.

This means I had about six months to think about it. Perhaps “obsess over it”, would be more accurate. It is a ludicrously expensive activity and I am squeamish about safety precautions, particularly after the news that one young woman was bungee jumping at Victoria Falls a few months ago when the cord snapped.

But I really wanted to. Not so much because I had to see the falls from that perspective, but more because I wanted to be the kind of person who would. I wanted to be fearless.

I signed up, alone, and they sent a car to the hostel for me. I turned my nerves into incessant and incoherent chatter to the poor Zambian driver taking me there. I think by the end of the conversation I had promised him I’d move to Zambia at the end of this summer. I’m not quite sure how we ended up there because the entire time I was paying more attention to my churning stomach.

I saw the sign for microlighting and the car turned and my hands started shaking. I asked myself why in the world I had agreed to pay so much money for fifteen minutes that would probably feel more like torture than fun.

They made me read a sign about how propellers are dangerous, put a helmet on my head, and strapped me in.

And suddenly the shaking stopped. It stopped because there is a strange kind of liberation that comes with knowing you will go through with something, simply because you have no other choice. I have stopped worrying about this year away from everyone and everything I know, in part because I don’t have a choice. There is a loss of control that brings a strange kind of comfort.

All I could do was sit back and (quite literally) enjoy the ride.

I took a deep breath and we took off, and then there was this.

I was their last flight of the day and the sun was hanging low. I could see everything. I saw the falls, I saw the gorges. We flew over trees and birds and cars and water. We saw hippos and wildebeests and wild boars and elephants in the grass. At one point, he turned the plane around and we dove through a gust of spray.

For a few seconds, there was only white, and the feeling of warm water on my arms and my neck.

It felt like I was in a cloud.

I almost cried because of how beautiful everything was. How simple. How amazing this world is---a world that is growing smaller every day I spend away.

I have taken a lot of airplanes this year, but this is the closest I’ve ever come to flying.

I haven’t stopped smiling since we took off.

The Smoke That Thunders

This trip to Livingstone was not how I envisioned spending my first week in Zambia, but as the week goes on, I’m thinking it ended up being just about the perfect way to spend a first week in this country.

Saying that yesterday was a red letter day would be an understatement. I got on a free shuttle leaving from my hostel, met some other travelers, and together, we marveled at the majesty of Victoria Falls.

Locals call the falls Mosi oa Tunya which literally means "The Smoke that Thunders." The (most likely untrue) story goes that this is because before David Livingstone arrived, people hadn't seen the falls up close; they'd been scared away by all of the spray (which looks like smoke) and noise. After visiting the falls, I can see why.

Dr. Livingstone, I presume?

The Zambezi River on the other side of the falls.

There is no way to avoid being soaking wet there, which really only adds to the excitement. We walked, drenched, on slippery paths, and counted rainbows until we lost count, and were truly in awe of this wonder of the world. Its beauty and force are kind of indescribable.

Afterwards we visited the pool of a high-end hotel with its own park and I met Webster, a self-described “animal doctor” with an unusual name. We walked around with him and dried off in the hot sun. We saw zebras grazing, and a crocodile swamp, and after a long walk to find him, we petted a giraffe.

We got back to town and Livingstone was busy. The Chipolopolo boys, the Zambian soccer team who just won the African Cup of Nations two weeks ago are touring around the country and tonight they were here. I waited in line to get a glimpse of the cup myself. It was pretty wonderful, but what was even more wonderful was the morale of town--the creative Zambian flags made into dresses, the facepaint, the excitement.

The Line

Waiting

With the cup!

I had originally pictured doing my research in Lusaka and then giving myself the gift of exploring Livingstone and the falls.

I'm thinking that maybe it worked out the right way after all. Maybe, before beginning my research in Lusaka, I needed to fall in love with this country, too.

Mission accomplished.