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.

Moving at the speed of life

Since schools are out of session and a lot of the office has been away on vacation, today was the first day that we actually had a scheduled work event. At 2 pm we had a development session (DS) for our coaches. DSs are the weekly meeting between our coaches (the people who deliver our curriculum to the kids) and their program managers to make sure that the coaches are keeping their facilitation skills sharp between the annual trainings that we hold for them. We were running errands in town before the meeting and decided to stop in at a coffee shop and grab a quick coffee before heading to the DS. We sit down, order our coffees, and enjoy the MTV jams music videos playing on all the TVs in the café. (MTV jams is always playing at any establishment that has a TV here. Dear diary, Jackpot.) About 10 minutes later our waiter returns to tell us that the power has gone out in the half of the café that has the coffee machine so he has to go make us coffee at the restaurant next door. He assured us, “don’t worry. This happens all the time, it should only take about 5 minutes.” Thankfully the MTV jams still had a power source because we were about to be waiting for a while. 40 minutes later we finally get our coffee and headed out to the DS – about 15 minutes late already. We arrive about 30 minutes late to 30 coach DS with only 5 coaches there, who had arrived just about the same time that we did. We waited for about 30 more minutes for the rest of the coaches to show up before starting.

This is one example of about 5 different instances of this type of thing that I have already experienced so far in my 3 days here. In a country where the word “milo” means both yesterday and tomorrow, you can’t expect that they hold timeliness in too high a regard. The world moves a bit slower here. People don’t feel pressured to do anything in any specified amount of time. Things just happen when they happen. This coming from a Californian, that’s really saying something. I think I could get used to this.