SKILLZ Plus

I mentioned in one of my first posts that GRS Zambia is working on developing a curriculum geared towards HIV positive kids.  Once this is complete GRS will offer comprehensive coverage in the fight against HIV.  As I mentioned before, this comprehensive coverage is education, pretest counseling, testing, referrals to treatment for people testing positive, and finally an HIV positive curriculum, which is meant to educate HIV positive people on how to live smart, healthy, positive lifestyles.  This will be HUGE for the fight against HIV and a big step towards reaching our goal of an AIDS free generation.

Recently we have been making a big push to complete this HIV positive curriculum.  And I’m lucky to be one of the 3 people involved in creating this curriculum.  We have realized in the past few days what a large task this is.  Because of the psychological volatility of the situation, nearly every detail of what is said to these kids must be analyzed 10 times over because we can’t risk triggering a negative reaction.  One misstep could cause a patient to stop going to the clinic or taking their ARVs, and could cause their lives to spiral out of control.  If 1,000 kids go through our SKILLZ curriculum (our standard curriculum delivered to kids whose status is unknown but the vast majority are HIV negative) education and prevention curriculum and 10% reject it, not a huge deal.  If 1,000 HIV positive kids go through our HIV+ curriculum and 10% reject it, there’s now 100 kids whose lives we have effectively ruined.  That simply cannot happen.

It’s an incredible experience and its been a blast trying to come up with fun and effective games.  We still have a few kinks to work out but if we keep going at this rate and with this quality were going to nail it.  I look forward to reporting back the results once we get it into the field.

Planet Earth: Lake Malawi

If you like camping on the beach, crystal blue water, hanging out with crazy people and three days of amazing worldwide music then Mangochi, Malawi is the place to be in late September every year for Lake of Stars music festival.  It’s truly as awesome as it sounds.  BUT if you want to track monkeys, hear stories about black mambas, and watch a nine year old kid swim 5 kilometers then go to the village just north of Mangochi any time of the year and ask for the coolest kid in the world named Hossua.  He’s never ever left his village so he should be there waiting for you.

On Saturday afternoon, while the music was on hold for a few hours, we decided to trek north of the site of the festival to where we heard there was a swimming area with even clearer blue water and a big hill with tons of monkeys.  Jackpot.  When we got to the swimming hole we were lucky enough to have some entertainment as 4 young local kids in their whitey tighties were launching themselves off a nearby rock into the water.

After a good hour of cooling off in the water and watching the kids still jumping and screaming, we decided to see what these monkeys were up to.

When we walked past the kids they were in awe of white people who would venture outside the walls of the festival into their village.  When their wide-eyed stare didn’t fade, I invited one of the kids to come on a hike with us to find monkeys, not expecting them to understand anything I said.  They quickly answered in very good English, “Yes,” and came charging up the hill with us in nothing but their underwear and whatever they could quickly grab before following us.

Right from the get-go the second oldest brother took nature’s center stage, Bear Grylls-style.  He quickly introduced us to his older brother and two younger sisters before stopping dead in his tracks and jutting his arm out in front of me (Mr. Costanza’s move) to stop me from stepping on something with my flip flops.  He picks up what looks like a coconut but with thousands of micro needles on it and says “these ruins sandals.”  Then threw it aside and proceeded to step on a couple of the “sandal ruiners” with his bare feet with no reaction.  The thickness of the calluses on the bottom of his feet, showing he clearly had never worn shoes, made me wonder how he even knew what sandals were.

We continued up the trail to where the monkeys were and became sidetracked by a huge bald eagle in the distance. 

As we moved off the trail into some green bushes to get a better picture of the eagle, Hossua comes running towards us yelling for us to get out of the bushes.  Apparently a week ago he saw a green mamba (read: one of the deadliest snakes in the world) slither into those bushes and he said it would be impossible to see them in those bushes until it was too late.  We quickly hopped out of the bushes into salvation on the dirt path and continued our search for the monkeys.  A few minutes later Hossua, whose excitement constantly took him at least 20 yards ahead of us, stopped and waved us towards him.  

He pointed down at the ground to a “fresh monkey foot,” and just as we got closer he ran 10 feet away to show us a half eaten string-bean-looking-thing that monkeys love. He handed it to me and I had it about 3 inches away from my mouth to taste it as he casually slaps it out of my hand and tells me its poisonous to humans.  Without Hoss I’d be dead times 2. 

After thirty seconds of walking in the direction of the tracks we look up and see the coolest looking little monkey just staring down at us as he eats his monkey dessert, human poison bean.  

I noticed that Hoss gave the monkey what seemed like a really heartfelt snarl so I asked him if he liked monkeys.  He hates them.  Apparently they steal the corn meal (the base for every traditional meal in this region of Africa) from homes in the village so the locals hate them.  While we were dreaming of catching the monkeys to make them our pet and play with them, he was dreaming of bringing it back to the village so his family could get their revenge.

He said that the only way people ever catch monkeys is if they have a dog.  When we asked him if he had a dog he laughed and said they couldn’t afford it but they had a cat that would catch birds.  He tried to explain the type of birds that his cat (named “cat”) catches but we couldn’t understand what he was saying.  One of them flew over our heads and landed on a branch about 100 feet away but only Hoss saw it.  He tried to point it out to us in the branches but the bird blended in too well for any of us to see.  He picked up a rock and gave it a hefty sidearm throw into this tree.  As the rock curved right on target he casually says, “its right there” as the rock hits the bird dead on and it flew away.  He just as casually moves onto the next topic of conversation, disregarding the amazing fact that he has the arm of a right fielder and the precision of a brain surgeon.  That mixed with the fact that this kid has the mind of a scientist, I’m pretty sure if he ever gets out of his village he’s going to take over the world.

As he was telling us about his 5 km swims that he normally does in the crocodile and hippopotamus infested lake, he told us the story of getting out of the water and finding himself in between a black mamba (read: the deadliest snake in the world) and the fish it was catching.  With a rock in his hand as a last resort, he hopefully threw it the snakes way and swiftly avoided it, leaving the encounter a large scrape from an underwater rock.  It had just happened a few days earlier so he proudly showed off his cuts as a trophy of his triumph over the deadly snake.

Feeling sufficiently inferior as we trekked back to the water, I quickly tried to think of something to bring to the table and teach these kids who had at least 13 years less experience on earth than me.  Should be easy right?  So I picked up a flat rock on the shoreline and whizzed it off into the horizon, getting about 3 skips on the water before it sank underwater.  Hoss exclames, “WOAH” and comes closer to see how to hold the rock to skip it.  I show him and he grabs a rock off the ground and rears back and unloads.  He got a minimum of 25 skips before the rock settled underwater.  This kids a freak.

When we accepted our inferiority we sat on the beach and watched as the kids performed nothing short of a high priced circus act.  From balancing on each others arms to playing the butt bongos on each other to having a fashion show with our clothes to making slingshots that shot bamboo sticks with deadly accuracy.

Finally when we had to get back to our campsite we said our goodbyes and started to walk away before Hoss invited us to his house to see his father’s workshop where he makes different crafts out of ebony wood.  We gladly accepted the invitation and were not surprised when Hoss’s father showed us some of the coolest crafts I have ever seen.  We all put in an order for what we wanted and came back the next day to purchase so very cool African artwork. We then said our goodbyes to Hoss and the family and left Mangochi the next day with the coolest story of anyone in attendance at Lake of Stars.

The Hitchiker's Guide to Africa

The strong scent of fish and the incredibly weak sense of personal space filled the air on the bus from Lusaka to Chipata (the Malawi-Zambian border town) on our way to a worldwide music festival called Lake of Stars on the shores of beautiful Lake Malawi.  There were five seats across with a center isle packed high enough to feel almost like a fence dividing the right cluster of three seats from our neighbors in the left cluster of two. The amount of bags in the aisle would make Pablo Escobar jealous. I sat with two bags between my legs, neither of them were my own.  The only reasonable explanation for that many bags was that every person on this bus must have been moving to Malawi.

From what I've heard and now from what I've seen I'm sure that at least one of the large duffel bags at the base of the aisle wall holds at least some drugs that the driver is smuggling across border to supplement his measly 50,000 kwacha (~10 dollars) per 11-hour trip income.  That's why our plan is to get off at the Zambian border town and walk by ourselves across the border to a separate bus that will take us the rest of the way- because the immigration officers at the border know just as well as I do the chances that this bus (and most buses like it) is attempting to smuggle drugs across the border. So buses like these will be stopped at the border for 6 hours at a time for all the bags to be checked - often times unsuccessfully finding the drugs because a thorough search of all the hundreds of bags in this bus would take probably 12 hours. 

A sign pasted on the window to my right reads 'CAUTION. No over speeding / overloading on this bus. If noticed please call the following number +260 977 794043.' I’m contemplating calling it just to see if that’s even a real number.  As much as this would suck normally, I think since I just expect things like this, they don’t really bother me too much.

The driver’s helper (or copilot, if you will), who up til now has been pointing out potholes and animals crossing the road for the driver, just switched roles to the bus attendant.  As he gets up, he grabs a huge plastic crate of drinks and snacks starts jumping over around and under the bags like an Olympian to deliver refreshments to the riders.  As he got closer I realized he was handing out glass bottles of soda and on his first trip handed out the drinks only to come back on another trip to use another bottle to pop off the tops of everyone’s drinks.  He only had to go to the front half of the bus because a guy in my row was bossing the back half of the bus using his wedding ring to open the bottles.

The bumpy roads have forced the overstuffed overhead bins to lose their grip on the bags that they had been carrying for the first three hours of the ride, surprising the person sitting in the aisle of the three seat side just barely too late to react before it lands in their lap or on their head.  Sitting near the back, I watched the bins ahead waiting to see the next suspect for a lap cannonball.  A couple times the person was within speaking distance to successfully warn them but when the unknowing person about to get crushed was in the front row, the last thing I wanted to do was accidentally incite a riot by shouting from the back of the bus.  When I didn’t notice early enough to successfully deliver a telephone-style message to the front row, I just had to watch and hope it didn’t do too much damage.  One rogue bag jumped out without warning and landed smack dab on the head of the driver.  A collective “ooooohhhhh” rose from riders that could have been out of sympathy or because the bus was jolted when the driver was domed by 50 pounds of clothes.  Feeling like Troy Aikman after the 2000 NFL season, he parked the bus and got out to walk it off on the side of the road.  A woman sitting behind me thought it was a good time to pass her baby up the rows of people one by one and out the window to the driver who was still walking off his concussion.  The driver, without skipping a beat, grabbed the baby and put her down on the ground next to the whole bus as she peed behind a 2-inch wide tree.  Only in Africa.

This type of transportation took us 19 hours total from Lusaka, Zambia to Mangochi, Malawi, about 2 km away from the site of this year’s Lake of Stars.  With a 2 km walk with our bags ahead of us, we decided to throw our thumbs up and see if we could get picked up.  Within 30 seconds we were in the back of a truck laying on our bags and as comfortable as can be for the short trip into the concert grounds.

As smoothly as the hitchhiking went for the final leg of the journey to the concert, we decided that for the trip back home we would try to hitchhike the entire way- thinking it was going to be cheaper, more comfortable, and faster than taking the official transportation.

We threw our thumbs up on the side of the road and just as we had expected from our previous experience, a truck stopped within 30 seconds to pick us up. Happy as can be we set down our bags and laid down saying to each other what nice people Malawians were. 

Within 5 minutes we were asked to sit up and make room for more people.  Still comfortable, no big deal.  Then 5 minutes later, more people. 

Then more people and more people until it’s a standing room only ride in the back of a regular sized bed with 15 people all holding onto each other so that no one flies over the edge as we cruise at 40 miles an hour down the bumpy road.  I had what you could call front row seats to this ride of a lifetime.  This meant that I got to hold onto the top of the cab of the truck, but it also meant that I was the windshield for everyone behind me and over the course of the next 2 hours my glasses and beard turned into a bug graveyard. 

 Being in the front row also meant I was the one who had to answer the questions of “what was that noise?” from the rest of the group when we hit a guinea fowl (bowling ball shaped flightless bird about the size of a turkey) going about 50 miles an hour.  The faces that I got in response to that answer were the sort of surprised face you would have if you were in the bed of a truck that hit an animal going 50 miles per hour and without slowing down even a little to assess the situation, continued to go 50 mile per hour.

As we cruised into the black market gas station (because Malawi’s currency is powerless in other economies, they have a very difficult time getting foreign goods, including gasoline), we were asked for about as much money as we would have paid to take a bus.   3 hours later, the driver said we had reached as far as he would take us and we realized we had somehow gone at an even more painfully slow pace (probably because we kept requesting coconut stops) than we would have if we had taken the public transportation.  

With no improvement in safety or comfort and a growing bug graveyard in my beard, we decided we should just go the rest of the way on the public buses.  Conditions didn’t improve.  In fact, because we barely made it in a sprint onto the final bus back to Lilongwe, we got standing only tickets for the final 4 hour trip.

Sports Saves the World

Sports Illustrated recently published an article called “Sports Saves the World” and it features organizations that are using sports to tackle issues in the developing world.  Grassroot Soccer got a great feature story in it.  Its very cool to see that even though GRS is very much a grassroots movement and is on a smaller scale than many NGOs, the best organizations in the world are recognizing the effectiveness of community level work.  Our recent success cannot be refuted.  Here’s the link to the entire article:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1190627/1/index.htm

And the part about GRS:

PORT ELIZABETH, SOUTH AFRICA


Tommy Clark figured his sojourn in Zimbabwe to play pro soccer after college would be a joyous homecoming. He'd spent part of his teens in that southern African nation while his father, former Scotland international Bobby Clark, coached Highlanders F.C. in Bulawayo. But what he found upon returning in 1992 left him mystified and heartbroken. Seven of his dad's finest players—seemingly invincible footballers whom Tommy had idolized—were dead or dying. Worst of all, no one dared say why. "I was there for a year," says Clark, who also taught school and coached, "and I didn't have a single conversation about HIV."

Clark hit upon the idea of using soccer to break down this wall of silence and educate Africans about HIV. He embarked on a medical career, with a residency in pediatrics and a fellowship in HIV research in the U.S. In 2002, Clark launched Grassroot Soccer with three ex-Highlanders, including Ethan Zohn, the Survivor: Africa champion who donated a chunk of his $1 million prize money to the cause. Today the organization operates in South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe and shares curriculum and resources with partners in nine other African countries. Studies confirm that graduates of the program wait longer to engage in sex; have fewer partners; and are more willing to talk about HIV with peers and relatives, take an HIV test and stay on treatment if they test positive. Those proven results have attracted such patrons as Elton John, whose AIDS foundation contributed $1.4 million last year to fund the program in Zambia. There's no way to tie the 50% drop in the HIV infection rate among South African teens from 2005 to '08 directly to Grassroot Soccer, but foundations are showing their confidence in the program with more grant money. This week the Clinton Global Initiative announced a $1 million commitment to a Grassroot program for South African girls.

Among the organization's most effective tools are the voluntary counseling and testing tournaments that it uses to reach the men who drive the disease. Clark invited me to a tournament in Motherwell, a township in the South African city of Port Elizabeth. For years locals had hidden behind euphemisms, saying of an HIV-positive woman, "She has a House in Veeplaas," a play on the name of a local neighborhood. But there had been a breakthrough a week before my visit, when South African president Jacob Zuma—a father of 22 children by multiple wives—announced the results of his own HIV test. (They were negative.)

The grounds outside a school teemed with players who ducked into a makeshift clinic between games, and Grassroot personnel touted a posttournament dance contest to flush more prospects out of a nearby supermarket. By the end of the day 289 more people knew their HIV status. "Five years ago, if you'd bring up HIV, everyone would shut down," one of the tournament workers, 27-year-old Mkadi Nkopane, told me. "Now a 10-year-old will tell you of an uncle or mother who's positive. The stigma will always be there, but it's much less now."

As the game that launches countless conversations in Africa, soccer is a natural idiom to cut through the taboos surrounding one of the continent's most pressing problems. In one popular drill, each soccer ball stands for a sexual partner. A player dribbling two balls is easily chased down by a defender who represents the AIDS virus; a player dribbling only one ball eludes that defender much longer, and a memorable point is made. Grassroot Soccer distributed thousands of "red cards" during the 2010 World Cup to help teenage girls, who can be up to eight times more likely to become infected than their male counterparts, use sass and humor to fend off unwanted sexual approaches. "The culture soccer creates around this topic is our 'secret sauce,' " says Grassroot Soccer COO Bill Miles. "By focusing on intergenerational sex and multiple partners, you try to shift social norms. And if you shift social norms, you change the epidemic."

Clark and his fellow ex-Highlanders work in part to honor the dead of Bulawayo—men such as the former star of the Zimbabwean national team who was refused service by bank tellers because of the stigma of AIDS, and the ex-player who trained as one of Grassroot Soccer's first coaches only to die before he could work with kids. "We're trying to be both bold and humble," says Clark, 40, whose program is nearly halfway toward its goal of a million youth participants by '14. "We ask for millions of dollars, and we're trying to change behavior and norms on a huge scale. But we also know we're not always going to have the answer, and that there may be a better answer tomorrow."

John Q. Zambia: 1, Bribery & Corruption:0

After only 5 text/email alerts to US citizens about elections riots, the Zambian Presidential election has been decided in very peaceful terms compared to history and the potential for violence.  Much to the utter joy and sheer surprise of Zambian citizens, this election sees the political party MMD (Movement for Multi-party Democracy) lose power for the first time in Zambian history since independence in the 1970s.  And they didn’t go down without a fight.

Four years ago the same election battle was fought between MMD’s Rupiah Banda and PF’s (Patriotic Front) Michael Sata.  If there were pre election polls (there aren’t here) than Michael Sata would have been a pre-election lock to win.  And with about 50% of the vote counted it was looking like he was going to win, carrying about 70% of the vote.  Then the live counting stopped for a day and the results were announced; the incumbent Rupiah Banda was the winner.  The nation was shocked.  Everyone knew Banda rigged the elections but couldn’t really say it because he now had unchecked power.

This year, Sata would have carried 90% of the entire nation if they all voted but because the memory of four years ago still haunted voters, many of them were discouraged from voting because they believed no matter how they voted, Rupiah would rig the elections and win.  So with only 1.2 Million votes casted out of a total of 12 million registered voters, the vote was counted again live on television.  At about 60% of all districts counted, showing Sata in the lead by 80,000 votes, the counting stopped yet again.  Riots broke out in the streets in the middle of town and near a public mall as a feeling of corruption deja vu overcame the country.  The riots died down at around 1 am when the results were announced.  Sata wins by a landslide.  And the crowd goes wild.

Since it’s against Zambian (maybe all of Sub-Saharan African) campaign procedure to discuss a platform while campaigning (I have heard this is out of fear that the opponent will then use your ideas while in office if they win?) no one is really sure what Sata is going to do while in office but the thought of most Zambians is that any change from the corrupt Rupiah is good.  Lets hope its good change.  There’s a lot of room for improvement.

Addendum:  So new news has emerged that Rupiah didn’t lose as peacefully as everyone originally thought.  Apparently after a failed attempt to rig the elections the same way as he did in previous years, he was reported to have been begging a vote counting official to do anything to help him win.  This official didn’t and is now talking about his pitiful conversations with Rupiah just before the vote was about to be announced….Also, I listened to Sata’s speech to parliament as they recently opened for Sata’s tenure and with equal parts determination to change Zambia and cutting humor aimed at the missteps of his predecessors he has won over the people of Zambia.  He is very anti-corruption and his main goal is to put more money in the pockets of Zambians.  I’d say both of these things could do wonders here.

Village Vacation

Last weekend Tommy, Mike Z, and I were invited to go to our housekeeper, Sharon’s, village for the day.  Sharon is like our Zambian mother.  She is hired by Grassroot Soccer to clean the house and office and cook Nshima (I could do a whole other post about Nshima because of its importance in Zambian culture, but in short it is a corn-meal dough that is the staple meal in sub-saharan Africa because it is very cheap and filling.  Its usually combined with a vegetable relish and a liquid tomato soup/sauce type thing and meat if you can afford it.  Its delicious.) for lunch in the office every day.  She was born in a village about an hour drive outside of Lusaka and moved into the city for work when she was older.  She and her sister now live near us in Lusaka with their husbands and kids.  We gladly accepted an invitation to see the village and decided to meet Saturday morning at 10 in the parking lot of the gas station to pick them up.  Expecting just Sharon and her kids, we were very surprised to see that Sharon, her sister, their kids, and their cousins all had come to the parking lot of the gas station to visit their grandparents/parents and cousins in the village.  We piled them all in the car and headed off for the hour journey.  I was the driver of the kids car and was entertained by the 10 year old children in the back yelling for me to drive faster because every time I accelerated was the fastest they had ever gone in their lives. 

 

Many of them had never been in a car let alone a plane.  When I realized that many hadn’t been in a car before I asked a question that I had originally though I had known the answer to, “Have any of you ever seen the village or your grandparents?”  Only Maggie, Sharon’s 14 year old daughter had been to the village (but didn’t remember seeing it) and none of the other kids had ever been.  No one in the family has a car so this was the first time most of the kids were ever getting the opportunity to visit their grandparents.  And they lived only one hour away.  Wow, no wonder all the Lusaka family members showed up to ride along.  This was the only opportunity they were going to have to see the village ‘til god knows when.  And this is when I realized that not only was this an incredible experience for me but an even bigger day for the family.

We arrived at the village that consisted of 2 four walled buildings and 2 huts and housed 12 of Sharon’s family members.  The next closest village was a 20-minute walk away but asking the family if they ever go there yields a confused look and a response of “why would we ever go there? We have everything we want here.”  They grow their own corn (which they harvest and keep for themselves for the year), ground nuts (peanuts), mangos, and they make their own charcoal which they use to grill their corn, cook their ground nuts, and occasionally to cook one of their chickens that roam the village.  That’s it, that’s all.  That’s their life.  We brought a Frisbee and a soccer ball with us and although it provided temporary entertainment, they refused when we offered for them to keep the items.

They only wanted what they had and they were completely happy with their minimalist lifestyle.  This also became apparent when I pulled out my camera and started snapping pictures of the village kids who seemed very uninterested.  Then when I started taking pictures of one of the cousins who we had taken from the city, Joshua , he was mesmerized by the camera.  

When I gave it to him he walked around the rest of the day with the camera pressed against his face and kept making the sound of a camera flash with his mouth.  When we finally showed him how to actually use the camera, he played with the settings and took this picture all on his own. 

 He might have a future in photography.

After a day of hiking, sitting around, talking, and eating groundnuts, we were getting ready to leave when I heard a loud whistle.  As quickly as I turned, the dog and two other village children were already sprinting towards the whistling kid.  And off went one of the chickens running for its life as the ringleader of the chicken hunt whistled signals and hand motions to the dog and the other two boys in a very well executed hunt that corralled the chicken into one of their huts with calculated commanding from the leader and acute listening from the dog and two other children.  As the kid emerged from the hut holding the chicken upside down by his legs he walked directly to me and handed me their catch and told me it was a gift for coming to the village.  After trying to refuse because they rarely got to eat chicken, they insisted we take home one of their 5 chickens and have it for ourselves.  Incredible.  

Zambia: Soccer Tournament Raises Awareness About HIV Testing

This awesome article was just written about our most recent VCT (voluntary counseling and treatment) tournament in a compound near where we live called Bauleni.  It's a really cool short article about the physical and emotional complexities of holding a VCT tournament.  The dance competition picture in this article is great too.

http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/zambia-lusaka-hiv-testing-campaign-grassroot-soccer

(Addendum: Although the testing numbers at this particular tournament in Bauleni were fairly low because this area had been saturated with HIV NGOs, we recently (Oct 15) held a tournament in an untouched area and tested nearly 1000 people with particularly high positive numbers.  Although that's really sad news, its great that this community now has the information and access to treatment it didn’t have previously.)

Mulungushi Damn

“And in last place in the Mulungushi Mountain Biking Challenge, crossing the finish line in a truck with a time of 5 hours and 23 minutes, Tommy Lobben and Bryan Giudicelli.”

This was the last sentence of the emcee’s results speech in front of all 38 racers, including women and children, and the various spectators that came to be entertained by the race that “kicks the ass of the expat mountain biking scene in Zambia.”  Commence my first 15 minutes of shame since being in Africa as Tommy and I became exhibits A and B for the viewing pleasure of the spectators.

Tommy is my boss at GRS and my former teammate at Dartmouth.  He has been in Zambia for 2 years now so he’s been showing me the ropes around Lusaka.  He introduced me to a futsal (5 v 5 outdoor soccer) team that we now both play on with two other American expats who moved to Lusaka after graduating college to start a Zambian-run and operated cycling company.  Zambikes is a very cool organization that offers jobs, business experience, and cheap bike options to Zambians (and because nearly no one has cars here, affordable bikes can greatly improve lives, especially outside of Lusaka where even one bike for a whole village can offer previously unattainable things like healthcare, easier access to water, etc.).  As one of the main sponsors of the Mulungushi MTB (Mulungushi Terrain Biking) Challenge, Zambikes was allowed 2 racers to represent the company at the event.  Since Dustin couldn’t find any experienced bikers to fill the extra spot, Tommy and I accepted the challenge, knowing that it came with a weekend of camping lakeside at Mulungushi dam- a beautiful man-made lake about 3 hours outside of Lusaka. 

We decided to share the race-load knowing we lacked the mountain biking experience and fitness to attack this 40 km “doozy” of a course alone in the middle of the African bush, about 60 km away from the nearest town.  We decided he would take the first 10km, I would go the middle 20 km, and Tommy would take us home for the final 10 km.  Easy enough, right?

We woke up early the morning of the race with our sites set on a share of the thousand dollars of prize money that was available to winners of the different categories.  Our excitement grew when Dustin pulled out two bike outfits that were as tight and bright as possible.  And he set us up with Zambike’s finest bright-yellow mountain bike.  We looked good so there was now no excuse to lose.

And since there was no separate category for people splitting the race up, we were entered in the standard adult male category and figured this was easy money.  We were sure our life experience as competitive athletes would outweigh the lack of mountain biking experience and we gave each other an excited high five as I hopped in a car headed to the 10 km checkpoint and Tommy got ready to set off on our road to cash. 

The first rider came into the 10 km checkpoint at about 40 minutes.  He wasn’t Tommy.  The first woman came into the checkpoint at about 52 minutes.  No Tommy.  The first pre-pubescent child came into the checkpoint at about 1 hour 3 minutes.  Still no Tommy.  At about the 1 hour 40 minute mark Tommy furiously pedals into the checkpoint with no bike seat alongside a man who looked like he had hung up his athletic boots a long time ago.  The only person keeping these two from being in dead last was the only woman entered into the 50+ category – and she wasn’t far behind.  I quickly shifted my mindset from visualizing being in a heated battle for first place to the reality of being in a heated battle for last place.  As the mechanic quickly got to working on the broken seat, Tommy quickly recounted the comedy of errors of his last hour and half.  By his own account in an email he sent to his family and friends he says, “I use the first 20 minutes or so to figure out the gears, which is my way of saying that I was in high gear pedaling ferociously for no reason until I couldn't breathe. I'm sitting middle of the pack when a strap on my helmet breaks, and it's suddenly flapping in my face as I'm cruising through untouched African bush, not safe. Fix it, am on my way, probably in ~30th place (and I had just passed two preteen boys that had fallen and were too pudgy to get on their bikes again). About an hour in I start to feel great as the trail flattens out, under power lines, through villages, wind flowing, until I realize that I haven't seen a trail marker in about 25 minutes. At the precise moment of realization, the trail banks downward steeply and I start MOVING.  Too excited at this point to think straight, I decide to just go with it until I see the trail dead end ahead, and as I break, the bike seat (which dustin had "adjusted" right before take off, sabateur!) completely becomes unhinged and I start swiveling around like an idiot. So now I'm stuck at the bottom of some ravine, with a broken bike seat, in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly I hear the sound of bike gears clanging and have the fleeting hope that maybe I took some shortcut by accident! Instead it's just a South African biker, Ernest, who also took the wrong turn but was kind enough to help fix my seat (he brought tools of course) before we set off backtracking, up that huge hill. Eventually we find our mistake; right as that wonderful exhilarating down slope started, there was a sharp left turn uphill where the trail was.”  

When the seat is finally “fixed” by the mechanic, I am in 36^th place with only the aforementioned 50+ woman hot on my back wheel.  I set off, racing for pride alone, not knowing that my own comedy of errors was about to ensue.

A couple Kilometers in, I’m feeling great as I blaze into 35^th place past the South African man only to be thrown back into 36^th place about 2 kilometers later as he pops out onto the trail in front of me just barely in my sights as he unknowingly has taken a rather sizeable short cut.  Even from a distance I could see his blissful naivete.  Just as I hurried up my pedaling speed to passively show him he had taken a shortcut, the seat came unhinged and I, like Tommy had done, started spinning like an idiot on the loose seat.  I had to stop to tighten the seat as best I could with my fingers, the only tools I had.  This became the recurring theme every half kilometer or so for about 3 or 4 more kilometers until finally I was passed by the only person keeping me from dead last place, the ~55 year old woman.  The next recurring theme for the next couple kilometers became me fixing my seat and racing by this woman only to stop again to fix the seat, with her moseying on by me yet again.  Finally, when she got sick of worrying about the dangerous passes that I would perform on this single track course, she gave me her tool that should have fixed my seat for good and told me to keep it in case anything happened for the rest of the race.  After I properly fixed the seat, the excitement to pass her once and for all overtakes me as I power up a large hill.  Closing in on her at the top of the hill, I change gears while pedaling as fast as humanly possible and the chain snaps off the gears and squeezes itself between the gears and wheel, an area so tight that it almost defies physics.  With nothing but a small bike tool in my hand and a confused look on my face, I tried to attack the puzzle that was this bike.  After 20 minutes of trying to yank the chain out, I decided that my only option was to pull the back wheel and derailer off in order to free the chain.  Being in a brightly colored lycra suit sitting cross legged in the dust in the middle of the African bush trying to take apart a bike with a tiny bike tool, I have never felt more out of place in my life.  Realizing that this was a record-breaking time in my life for ridiculous juxtaposition, I accepted this fact and laughed nearly the entirety of the next hour or so while I tried to fix the bike, knowing how futile my efforts were.  After making things worse and putting 2 more knots in the chain, I ended up just putting the bike back together without the chain and prepared myself for a long walk.

By my calculation, I was 10 km into my part of the race, which happened to be 20 km away from the start/finish line and in a loop race that qualifies as exactly the furthest point from a checkpoint or race official.  Awesome.  I looked around from the top of the hill thinking I would maybe be able to see something or someone that could save me from this walk.  No dice.   There was nothing but trees and unfarmed fields.  The good news was that my scan of the landscape also didn’t find any wild game animals.  At least I didn’t yet feel like this was the beginning of an episode of Discovery Channel’s “I Shouldn’t Be Alive.”  My only strategy available was to follow the trail and maybe start thinking about places to camp out for when it got dark.

(The Trail Map: Start/Finish line is almost all the way on the left.   I broke down at the furthest-most point on the right.)

About 45 minutes later, the trail led me to a hut.  My brief excitement that the occupants may be able to help me was stifled by the realization that A. there’s no chance in the world that a two-hut village that probably occupies only one family would have a phone, let alone even know what a cell phone was and B. there are 73 different tribes in Zambia who speak 73 different languages and although people in the big cities are familiar with a common language called Nyanja, there would be no use for the knowledge of Nyanja in the middle of the bush for people who only communicate with their own family members.

I soon learned that all my suspicions about this tiny village were true.  They had no phone, no knowledge of the Nyanja words I was speaking to them, and they were all just one family.  But, boy what a big family it was.  Immediately when the first man saw me dragging my bike down the path he shouted out to his other family members to come help me.  For the next 20 minutes I tried to explain to all 12 of them that the bike was not fixable but they wouldn’t stop.  I think it was a combination of their want to help, the language barrier, and the fact that my brightly colored lycra, bike chain around my neck, crooked helmet still on my head, and bright red exhausted African sun-worn face made me look like nothing less than an insane asylum escapee to these very secluded villagers.  I took the opportunity to sit down in their hut and play with their 5 new puppies that could have been no more than 3 weeks old until the mother came around and realized she didn’t want this crazy person touching her puppies.  I politely pulled my bike away from the crowd of twelve still hovering intently around my bike with no progress made.  As I started to leave I thanked the kids by allowing them to touch my hair because they were so confused why my hair was different from theirs.  Off I went for 20 more minutes before I found another village where nearly the exact same thing happened as the first village.  Two hours and three more villages later I saw a race Marshall in the distance standing next to a dirt road.  Thinking I had found salvation I jogged to the Marshall where I started to tell the story of the last few hours before realizing he didn’t have any idea what I was saying.  10 minutes into failed communication with this man, it became apparent that he was a local villager just hired for the day to tell the racers either, “Stop.  Car” or “No car.”  These are the only words he knew in English.  He had no phone and no idea how long until the next checkpoint.  Dejected, I continued on my way in the direction he pointed me across the dirt road and onto a single track into a forest on the other side.  Until a distant rumbling caught my attention and I dropped my bike and sprinted back to the road to try to hitch a ride with whatever vehicle was driving by.  I sprinted out of the forest and jumped in front of a huge truck, which screeched to a halt.  With only hand signals exchanged, I think the driver agreed to give me a ride so I hopped in the truck.  All I knew to say was “Mulungushi” and he looked like he knew what I was talking about so I felt somewhat comfortable.  More comfortable, I bet, than he did.  What would you think if you were him a white person dressed in a very tight bright yellow top and purple shorts jumped out of the woods with a helmet on (and no bike in site) asking for a ride?  Through hand signals and one word exchange dialogue, I found out he worked for a mining company and was hauling manganese across the country.  A short 15 minute drive later (what would have been at least few more hours of walking and possibly even a nighttime campout) and I hopped off this huge truck at the 10 km checkpoint where Tommy and the rest of the water point crew had just finished cleaning up and were about to set off to find me.  By Tommy’s account, “After 3 hours of natural silence, this is when this series of giant trucks shipping Manganese from the mines starts rolling through, throwing up dust everywhere. And of course as the last truck rolls up, it grinds to a halt, and out of the front seat jumps bearded Bryan in his cycling unitard, with a huge grin on his face.”

We drove back and found my abandoned Zambike in the woods, where the aforementioned marshall had found it and used it as a seat until we came back for it, and turned back towards the finish line where we crossed 20 minutes later in dead last place.  And so commenced our 15 minutes of shame as the results were being announced at the awards ceremony as we got back and we arrived just in time to hear, “And in last place in the Mulungushi Mountain Biking Challenge, crossing the finish line in a truck with a time of 5 hours and 23 minutes, Tommy Lobben and Bryan Giudicelli.”

That night, the exhaustion from the day took over and I committed a “Mazungu error” and fell asleep next to the lake with no mosquito net and no bug spray.  These pictures are the result.

… yes, those are at least a few mosquito bites on my eyelid.  Dom Wooganowski style.

And because it’s not a customary part of the culture to ignore abnormalities on another person’s body I’ve been fielding the question, “Oh God, what happened to your face?!?” a lot in the last couple days.  For the record, this is an estimated 800 mosquito bites.  No joke.

(Addendum:  Things could always be worse. http://boston.barstoolsports.com/featured/bike-rider-gets-his-ass-kicked-by-an-antelope/.  Thanks to Olsen for this find.)

“Lafferty, Daniel and Gilmore……..Happy?”

“I’m American honey. Our names don’t mean sh*t” –Butch Coolidge, Pulp Fiction

Why don’t our names mean anything? I met a guy the other day named Chisha, which means “the chief." He was a bagger at the grocery store so I don’t know if you can site this as a self fulfilling prophecy case study but at least he’s got a constant reminder of what to strive for. Actually, now that I think of it, the gas station attendant that I know is named Nshota, which means “coming up short.” Maybe we might be onto something by not giving bad parents another way to express their faults.

It is part of recent African tradition to give a child two names. One in vernacular (their home language) and one in English. The child is known mostly by their English name for the rest of their lives because the idea is that an English name will allow that person to conduct international business more easily. Since the cultural norm of giving a child a name with meaning is still evident even with English names here, we have the pleasure of meeting tons of people with awesome names. Here is a scorecard from one of our recent interventions:

Notables: Offered, Memory, Blessed, Happy, King, Gift, Boster
Other popular ones: Friday, Borniface, Queen

HIV negative – a positive result

Yesterday was one of the coolest days of my entire life. Hands down.

We held a VCT Challenge day in a compound (Compounds are the ‘slums’ or ‘townships’ of Lusaka) just outside of Lusaka city center.

**QUICK** note on VCT: VCT=Voluntary Counseling and Treatment and it’s a very important aspect of GRSZambia above all other GRS sites. In all other GRS sites, the large grants are given specifically for interventions (our education and prevention camps) but not for testing. GRSZambia is the only site that has a large grant specifically dedicated to testing and counseling. This grant provides money for us to have events every Saturday in different compounds around Lusaka where we provide on-site portable testing centers for anyone who wants to get tested. We have 3 different types of VCT events. One type is a VCT Graduation, where we hold a ceremony for the kids who have graduated from our interventions and encourage them to get tested afterwards. Another is a VCT Tournament where we invite local teams and organize a full tournament with prizes and throughout the day encourage the teams and community members to get tested. And the last is a VCT Challenge where we play a few GRS games with community members but mostly just have music and entertainment and encourage everyone to get tested. For all events we hire a DJ and entertainers and do community outreach beforehand to maximize community turnout and maximize people getting tested.
This is a very exciting step forward for Grassroot Soccer because this means we are one step closer to comprehensive HIV and AIDS education coverage. Comprehensive coverage means education about HIV, then pretest counseling (to prepare the person getting tested for either result, positive or negative), then testing, then referrals for HIV positive people to clinics where they can get ARVs (ARVs are incredibly important to our mission to defeat AIDS because they decrease an infected person’s viral load which exponentially decreases the chances that they will infect other people), then finally a curriculum that has a specific focus on HIV positive children that emphasizes the importance of continuing treatment. We are currently working on an HIV-positive curriculum that we should be rolling out in the next few months. And since we have partnered with local clinics who distribute ARVs, we are only a few months away from being able to provide comprehensive HIV and AIDS coverage- this is HUGE.

So we had a challenge day at an open field in a compound. This open field was basically a field of reddish dust with more than a few boulders sticking out of the ground. And of course there were two soccer goal posts on either side of the field. (In my 5 days driving around the city I have yet to see one open space of more than 100 feet by 50 feet without some sort of goal posts on either side. I’ve seen tree branch goal posts, cement goal posts, live trees with a string tied from one to the other for the cross bar. Not to mention the different objects I’ve seen used for soccer balls. Zambians are hands down the most creative people I’ve ever seen. They’ve mastered creating something out of nothing.) And it was a Saturday so there were youth games being played on the field where we set up.

There are no youth leagues here in Zambia. The way it works is the coach of one compound calls the coach of another compound and asks if they want to play the next weekend. If they say yes then they play. No referee. No league officials to report the scores to. No league champion. Just playing for the love of the game and to represent your compound.

During the under 14 game, I jumped into a game of keepaway with players from the under 17 team who were playing next. Two of the 10 guys had proper soccer shoes, 6 of them were wearing socks and the other two were playing barefoot. On a rock bed.

After playing with them for a while and proving my soccer ability to them (and maybe because I told them I played on the LA Galaxy) they decided I was a friend and confided in me that they were anywhere from 17 to 24 years old (read: rules for being on an under 17 team). After laughing over a few shabobos (jukes) and polinos (megs) I told them all I was going to go get tested. I don’t know if it was because they thought I was a professional soccer player or if they wanted to continue staring in amazement at my shoes (year old nike sneakers that would be throwaways at home but are the nicest shoes in a compound like this) but they followed me and decided to get tested themselves. This is why I’m here. Not to force anyone to get tested, not to be the reason they get tested, but to be the reason they know that they have the option to get tested and that they decide for themselves to get tested. Cue the beginning of the coolest hour of my life.

After signing the paperwork and going through pre-test counseling with these new friends of mine, one by one we stepped into the testing tent. (Getting tested for HIV is actually an incredibly easy process. All it takes is a simple prick on the tip of your finger and a couple drops of blood on a test swab. 5 minutes later you know your results.) After getting tested we all waited nervously in the waiting area together, nervous for very different reasons I might add. The majority of my nerves came from the very real possibility that one of my new friends is going to find out right here, today that he has HIV. And a small amount of nerves came from the fact that this was my first HIV test and, although I am confident that I have made the right decisions in my life to avoid HIV, it is still a very small possibility. Their nerves came from the fact that they have lived nearly 2 decades not knowing how to avoid HIV/AIDS and not having the tools necessary to avoid contracting the virus meanwhile living in a country where 1 in 7 people are infected. I quickly put my nerves into perspective.

As we waited together and shared a moment where our lives were very quickly going to take one of two very distinct paths, the goalie of the team invited me to play in the game against their biggest rivals later that day. I quickly and very happily accepted the invitation and was honored by the idea that I was most likely going to be the only Mazungu (white person) to ever play on this field (rock bed). And as these rival games are rarely witnessed by Mazungus let alone played in by one, a new rush of nerves overcame me. I have to play well.

Those nerves quickly dissipated when real life hit me and I was called into the results tent. After a very long 15 minutes of questioning by the counselor about all the risky behavior in my entire life and what my next steps would be if I tested positive, I finally answered to her satisfaction and she read my results: Negative. The best and least expected news of the day, however, came when I got outside the tent to all 10 of my new friends who had also tested negative. With that land mine now avoided, we were late for our game and we rushed to get to the field before kickoff to take on a bunch of huge “17 year olds.”

A crowd quickly gathered as the game started because this was the big event of the day for the local community who all came out to support their home team, my team, the Soweto Tigers. Every time I got near a sideline I would get two thumbs up and a huge smile from people in the crowd, now growing by the second to three or four deep around the entire field. We went into half time tied 0-0 and I stood and nodded my head at the halftime speech the coach was delivering in Nyanja (their language), understanding zero words of what was just said. I was handed what looked like the corner of a shopping bag that was cut and filled with frozen sugar water and I gladly guzzled down their version of Gatorade (again, something out of nothing) as a teammate approached me and said, “we’ve never had this many people out watching us. The word must be spreading about the Mazungu. HAHAH.” I started the second half determined to score the game winner to the dismay of my coach because I play center back. Every chance I got I left my defensive responsibilities in search of a crowd pleaser. The thumbs up and the smiles continued and gave me the energy I needed to continue the exhausting runs. Unfortunately the best I could do was hit the post on the header but fortunately we won 1-0 in the closing minutes on a cross that I watched from 5 feet away as my teammate buried. After the final whistle was blown, the crowd quickly closed in on the field and surrounded us, cheering for their home victory in such an important game. For the rest of the day as I went around the field doing my duties working at our GRS event, I was followed by about a hundred smiling people, of every age group from very young children to adult men to elderly women, all very excited about their victory and curious about the mysterious mazungu.

Yesterday I was in a place that had next to nothing but had more joy than any place I had ever been. I made new friends whose lives couldn’t be more different than my own, except the love of soccer and our status as HIV free. That’s all we needed. And so started my soccer career in Zambia and my love for the people and culture of Lusaka.