The Turd Sandwich

So today’s edition of ‘the Badger weekly’ is a bit of a turd sandwich. The good and the bad and the good again. It has been a rollercoaster of a week with some really serious eye opening moments to the level of poverty there is here in Zambia. I apologise if you find some of the following upsetting.  

So in previous blogs I have mentioned the male attention you receive as a blond musungo. Since the sunburn incident these have been limited. I bizarrely missed the regular questions of ‘can i have you number?’ ‘I want to marry you’ and ‘lets go for a drink’. Do not get me wrong the locals still take pretty much every opportunity to acknowledge the colour of my skin and randomly shout musungo at me but the bigger questions had ground to a halt. . . . . until yesterday morning when I set off to see another volunteers project in the Kamwala area of the city. As I stroll through the market having a range of mainly useless items offered to me for ‘a very reasonable price’ I realised I was lost. I asked a few women for directions, most of whom did not know or simply ignored me. I ask a Zambian man who’s response was ‘lets grab a drink’ I pointed out it was 8.30am and probably a bit early. I must have asked a further ten people before I finally found the place in which time I received multiple proposals and suggestions rather than directions. As exhausting as the episode was I was simply delighted to get my mojo back and  vow to keep my sunscreen levels up to avoid another drought.

We have the opportunity to celebrate the Queen’s birthday at the British High Commissioners’ house. You will be thrilled to know that your tax is paying for people like myself to quaff good white wine and cheese and various other English delights which are being imported for such an exciting occasion. In anticipation of said feast and an opportunity to go out without hair scraped into a bun to stop it looking like a lions main as it fills with dirt, feet that are clean and are likely to remain clean for the whole night and to feel very British I ventured out to find a new dress. In the shop I select a few items and go to try them on. The shop assistant joins me (!!!) and it was reminisce of the Kingkong boob moment in Thailand 10 years ago when I was informed my bosom was too ample and my rear was a pathetic excuse for a bottom. It seems this musungo temple is not designed for African dresses.

So I blogged last week about a project I am working on implementing biogas digesters in slum areas. On Friday I visited Kanyama, a large slum here in Lusaka. You leave the main road and safety of tarmac to be bounced around on the peaks and troughs of a mud track. As far as the eye can see there are very small homes, some made of breeze blocks, others of any material than can be found to create a home. Children are everywhere, highly amused at two white people strolling through their compound. There are 148,000 residents in Kanyama, 10 years ago there were over 200,000. The drop in residents in not sadly a result of their success and moving on to a better place but the high level of deaths as a result of cholera and diarrheal diseases. Very few houses have running water, instead the women must walk to a bore hole to fetch the families water. Toilets are scarce and instead people use pit latrines or worse just defecate on the side of the road. Research complete and sincerely inspired to sit for hours and write bids to fund this project we go off to meet Levy who runs a community project in Kanyama which teaches young men skills to help them find employment. It was a hugely inspiring place with men creating sofa’s, welding machines, mills for grain and various other products which can then be sold. We aim to work with this project to train these young men to become engineers so that our bio digester project can become sustainable and not rely on westerners to come in and solve the issues. Although I was really taken aback by the severe level of poverty surrounding me I am genuinely excited about such a sustainable and realistic approach to solving the sanitation issues in these types of slums where so many of the cities population try to survive in.

This morning however my faith in humanity has been rocked. I went to visit the Fountain of Hope, an organisation which rehabilitates street children to help them integrate back into society. I was taken out by two chaps who are mentors there to the city market area of Lusaka with the aim of meeting with the children and gently encouraging them to come to the Fountain of Hope to seek support. The city market was like a sensory overload. Buses and cars all over the place with no real sense of which direction traffic was supposed to go in, piles of stinking dried fish and other food all over the place causing me to gag, stalls selling second hand clothes which happen to be our English charity shop rejects, people grabbing you left right and centre to sell you things or just to ask for money and worst of all the meat section. I have seriously decided that vegetarianism is my only option after what I saw today. Meat sprawled out on dirty tables in baking heat with no refrigeration. Flies all over it. Out here they literally use every single party of an animal and I had to walk past piles of cow stomachs, intestines, hooves and at one point was almost mown down by a man pushing a wheelbarrow full of cow heads. We headed to a few points in the area where the children spend their time, the bus station and then an area behind the stalls. Here we found vast numbers of children, dressed in filthy rags, often with no shoes on. Many were passed out on the floor others were drinking jili jili or sniffing some kind of white liquid which gets you high. I could not believe what I was seeing. There were so many children, really high, just hanging out. One of the children is a 17 year old girl who has two children herself. One who looked about 18 months and the other about 6 months old. All three of which live on the street. I was truly devastated. I was most struck about the complete lack of innocence in these children, a lot of them just looked hollow. Like you are reading this now, I have heard these stories before but have never been face to face with it. Many of the children suffered such poverty at home they were asked to leave as the families cannot feed them or they are fleeing abuse. In all the years I have volunteered with the homeless in London I have never seen anything on this level. I am now going to do some voluntary fundraising for this organisation to provide them with a mobile health unit and an opportunity to do more outreach to ensure that at least some of these kids can lead some kind of life with more hope.

Now back to some more light hearted incidents so that you do not stop reading my blog through misery! One of the vital things one needs to do when living and working with such sad realities daily is ensuring you have a good work life balance. Tonight we attended a volunteers leaving drinks. Due to everyone having tight finances it is hard to buy gifts so a few of us got together and wrote a rap song personalised to this person and performed it to some accordion music. As you know I was banned from the choir at school due to my terrible singing voice. I can assure you my ability to rap is equally poor but needless to say I think it was one of the best leaving presents someone could ask for.

At work on Monday I was happily typing away, working up a genius proposal when all of a sudden a cockroach crawls out from under one of the keys causing me to FREAK OUT. The roach ambled casually across my laptop and then across my desk. I was thrown into a dilemma as I did not want to spend the day working around said roach but equally if you squash them they lay their eggs and a whole family of the damn things would move into my keyboard. I had no choice but to bravely pick up the offending animal and remove him from the office.

Finally, I want you to join me in celebration that for the first time in 5 years I can fit into a pair of jeans I have refused to throw out in anticipation of this day.