Romantic Zambia: "Holy Crap, I'm in Africa"

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Romantic Zambia - “Holy Crap, I’m in Africa!”

On one of the first days that I was out in the field in Mazabuka, I definitely had one of those “Holy Crap! I’m in Africa and this is amazing” romantic moments. We were travelling through one of the very secluded small Tongan villages on our way back late in the day from a busy schedule conducting meetings with farmers. Steve, and I stopped to speak with one final farmer to see why he hadn’t attended one of the meetings before we headed home. Steve and the farmer were speaking in Tonga and being the end of the day, I was getting tired of straining my mind pretending to understand what was being said. So, as what happens when you’ve been sweating in the 35-degree heat all day, my mind started to drift. I started admiring the natural masterpiece of small hills dotted with the evergreen muputu and massive baobab trees that surrounded me. The sun was just slipping behind the horizon creating what seemed like a watercolour array of pink and orange strokes that bounced off the few scattered clouds. These same streaks seemed to accentuate the interlacing rows of violet and white flowers used to create the walkway up to most of the thatched roof village huts. These painted yellow huts with a black stripe on the bottom sometimes housed up to 10 people. They were less then the size of my bedroom, but at this moment they seemed an almost perfect size because if they were any bigger they’d crowd out the many orange and guava trees encircling them.

Mesmerized by the visual imagery that lay before me at that moment, I was all of a sudden rudely interrupted by a sharp bolt of pain shooting up from my right ankle. A large rusty metal wheel had crashed into me from behind causing me to angrily swing around in a caveman-like fighting stance preparing for the next attack. Then, barely-illuminated by the last few rays of the setting sun behind me, a giggling little girl came running towards me carrying a small wooden stick in her hand. As she reached me, her innocently curious pearl white eyes in perfect contrast against her glossy dark skin were fixed directly into mine. Her tiny little innocent body stature seemed completely miniscule to the caveman like attack stance I had readily assumed. Her eyes carefully studied mine making sure this giant angry Muzungu (white man) beast wasn’t going to eat her alive. She then ever so slowly bent over towards my feet, rubbed off the small bit of dirt the wheel had left on my ankle, straightened back up making ever so sure to keep maintaining eye contact and then gave a questioning half smile to gauge where her life was at. Paralysed by the events at hand, I realised my threatening stature and the lack of need for my caveman attack stance. I relaxed a little allowing a giant smile to surface to my face. The girl, sensing her forgiveness all of a sudden grew a huge toothy grin, winked at me and then bent over and picked up her wheel, rolling it back in the other direction to again start running after it.

Turns out, a very typical form of childhood entertainment in Zambia consists of getting any sort of semi-round wheel shaped object, rolling it along the ground and trying to keep the it upright and moving forward by batting it with the stick. A very basic game that doesn’t seem so complicated, but provides hours of endless challenge and entertainment for a poor Zambian child who has few other resources to make toys out of. At this very moment, I knew that despite whatever other crap is going to happen to me. I was going to love being here in Zambia.

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