Not in Kansas (or Kolkatta) Anymore

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I arrived in Zambia Sunday afternoon with cankles and a strong desire to never set foot on a plane again. It didn’t take long, however, before my preoccupation with the swelling in my feet was replaced by a faint but irrepressible smile on my face and an admittedly uber-Western sense of satisfaction at having arrived in the middle of a sun-drenched and quiet, flat landscape. Africa!

I collected my luggage and walked out into what felt like a dream: a perfect 70-something degrees and a breeze that hailed from bright clear blue skies and rustled the palm and teak trees. There couldn’t have been more than thirty people in sight and not a single one of them seemed to notice me. I found the driver holding the sign with my name in big block letters, and after introducing himself as Moses he told me in fluent English to wait where I was; he would be back with the car. Was this real?

If it wasn’t for the three little boys—one in sandals, one barefoot, one with a single sock, each with a bag of garbage thrown over their shoulders—who turned their heads to stare at me as they walked by in a single line, I might not have believed I was really there at all.

I suppose there was nothing particularly remarkable about my arrival in Lusaka or the relatively simple scene that I entered, but it was this very quality of unremarkableness that caught me by surprise. The last few years of my life have involved travel and work mainly in South Asia, and as a result I think I’ve come to expect all arrival cities to look like Delhi or Dhaka. When I left the airport in Lusaka I expected to be greeted by a wall of hot humid air and a sea of humanity—children pulling at my clothes to ask for money; every man and boy between the ages of 14 and 50 trying to carry my luggage and offer me a taxi ride; whole families asleep on the sidewalk. Instead I found a cool breeze and a fairly uninterrupted horizon.

I don’t want to turn this into a neo-colonial novel about the fascinating distinctions between saffron robes in Hindustan and the red dirt roads of the Dark Continent, but I can’t help but want to share my probably superficial interpretation of what I am experiencing from the lens of the only other thing I really know: South Asia. The differences, of course, are many, though I suspect (and hope) that the contrasts I draw now will differ greatly from the contrasts I am able to make in ten weeks—after I have hopefully developed a more familiar understanding of the context here.

Not surprisingly my primary preoccupation is with gender (if there is one thing that my first trip to India taught me it is that I am a woman, and that what I see and experience is a result of this). In the car ride from the airport to the hotel I saw pre-pubescent boys carrying babies on their backs, and thought how strange it was to see boys tasked with child care (and not just sent off to play cricket in a field somewhere). Further down the road a gang of kids played at the side of the road and I was immediately impressed by the fact that boys and girls were playing together—that girls were even able to play at all.


When one of the CARE drivers who knows I’ve lived in India asked me what it was like to live there, I thought about the many ways I could frame the differences between what I have seen of Lusaka and what I know of India. We drove by a young Zambian woman in a tube top and a skirt who walked down the side of the road confidently and undisturbed. “India is a difficult place to be a woman,” I said. He didn’t seem to understand.

Perhaps the distinction that has made the starkest impression on me is the remarkable contrast between the population densities of the two regions. In South Asia there is hardly a place on the whole sub-continent where you can avoid people. An interviewer I was working with in Tamil Nadu, for example, once led his respondent on a two hour march through rice fields because there was literally no place he could confidentially conduct the interview without exposing the respondent (whose tuberculosis status was unknown and would have led to his being stigmatized in the community) to the judgment of neighbors and passersby. In Lusaka, the capital of Zambia and home to over 3 million people, I found myself cruising downtown on a Sunday afternoon—shops closed up for the religious holiday and just a few meandering teenagers or guards on the sidewalks—wondering if the place was really a ghost town.

And while these comparisons to what I have known in the past are helping me process and appreciate my experiences in Zambia, what I hope is that this frame of reference eventually fades away. A large part of why I am here is because I was (am) insistent that I begin to experience the developing world beyond South Asia. So many challenges and opportunities in international development are context dependent, and I was afraid that my ability to think about development was becoming too limited by an understanding of the world as Barisal or Butwal. I hope that by the end of ten weeks here I can begin to experience Zambia not just in terms of South Asia, but rather that I can locate these new experiences (as well as the old) in a way that allows me to pick apart the unique historical, cultural and political factors that drive the development of a place, while also starting to understand some of the more universal components of global health and international development.


P.S. I have been warned by friends who followed life or work in South Asia with life or work in Africa that after a few days I will be begging for channa masala and the madness of a traffic jam caused by a cow—garlanded with orange flowers and oblivious to the world in his position as Hindu God—in the middle of the road. But for now I am too enchanted by the ease of life here to be pining for anything else.

P.P.S. I wrote this yesterday evening. And then I went to Masala Mantra for dinner. So fine. Maybe I’m pining for channa masala. Nshima (a ball of steamed maize flour) just isn’t cutting it. More on that another day.

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Comments

[rhoda Rafkin]

thank yu
Libby, I am one of your grandmas friends and am so happy to have your blog to read again, thank you rhoda

[Ashley]

Ahhh... nshima :)
You'll learn to love it, eventually. But in the meantime, there are (were) some decent Indian restaurants around Lusaka (you probably already know this, but just in case...). I can't remember the names of any of them, but there is one tucked away on the lower (?) end of Cairo Rd, one on Great Eastern Rd somewhere not too far from the city, one at Longacres and a few in Kabulonga. So when your South Asian cravings kick in, don't fear!! Bon apetit!