“You try not to think about it”

8/24/2009

Yesterday morning I got a call at 8am from a man saying “I am so-and-so at Immigration in Chapata. I’m having your papers”, which kind of freaked me out. I’d been waiting for my passport to arrive from Lusaka by the end of last week, and figured it would show up on Monday. What made matters worse was that beyond that initial line I couldn’t understood another thing the guy was saying. You could say that we experienced a complete failure to communicate. I would try to ask questions like “do you have my passport?” or “do I need to come to Chapata”, but his answers, if he understood them, made no sense to me. Topping it off, we could not keep a connection. We would talk, he would start to get frustrated, and I would lose him. I would call back, sounding extra friendly and apologetic, but he was getting more frustrated and talking in an increasingly loud, harsh tone, and I swear he was hanging up on me, although I can’t say for sure. By the third lost call, and despite being Sunday morning, I decided I needed to call Carol, the woman in Lusaka who was contracted to help me with my temporary work permit. We agreed to worry about it Monday (today), and I tried not to let it ruin my day. It was a windy, dusty day and I spent most of it reading in bed, drinking the cold pot of coffee that I had brewed the previous night in anticipation of not having power. There being none, town was dead until 3pm, when I met my friend Heba for the finals of the soccer tournament that had been going on for the past couple of weeks in Lundazi. The local team, sponsored by the Lundazi Police Department beat the Rangers - from somewhere south of here - in a heated, come-from-behind, 3-2 ass-clencher, scoring twice in the last 7 minutes. Fans stormed the field each time the Police scored. It was a riot! Wish I had my camera.

I was supposed to start my first day of field work today, meeting with COMACO supported farmers in the Zumwanda Chiefdom. Nemiah, the Director of COMACO’s Lundazi Community Trading Center (CTC), had returned on Friday after being away for most of my first week, and we made plans for a quick visit to the District Commissioner this morning to get the official Zambian Government blessing of my work in the area, something which may or may not be a requirement, although I get the impression that where land and land use are concerned, they like to want to know what non-profits/ngo’s are up to. At around 8am FedEx arrives with my passport and the receipts for my work permit leaving me baffled, but it was 3pm before we made it out of the office and to the government offices where the DC was supportive of the project and welcoming, and we moved on to immigration. There I waited an hour and a half for the friendly officer to return from his “computer lesson” at the local internet cafe, by which point it was too late to make any calls about my temporary permit, which I now, however, am reasonably certain is what is waiting at the immigration office in Chapata. Despite having had to wait for him, Mr. Zulu, the Lundazi immigration officer was very helpful and offered to call Carol first thing tomorrow in Lusaka, and find out from Oscar the Immigration Grouch in Chapata, whether my permit can be mailed to Lundazi. Otherwise I will get to spend Wednesday on the bus, riding back and forth along the 170 km long pot-hole that is the Lundazi Chapata Road. Do your magic Mr. Zulu!

Anyway, tomorrow morning I’ll be heading out to Zumwanda Chiefdom with a WCS driver to meet with Zebron the Area Manager responsible for COMACO activities in the area. Zebron will be assisting me with the data collection in Zumwanda, and I’ll work with Billy in Mogodi the following week, and Nixon in Chama the week after that. Tomorrow we plan to visit a few of the villages, collecting GPS data on COMACO supported farms (locations of apiaries, goat, poultry and fish farms, and the homes of poachers who have been transitioned in to more sustainable livelihoods) and meeting with locals who can steer us in the direction of the new settlements that have been cleared near the boundary and inside of the Lundazi National Forest. Even with the satellite imagery we have it is impossible to see the dirt roads we will need. The following three to four days will involve driving to as many of these settlements as we can reach by road, unloading the motorbikes and riding out to the more remote locations that are only accessible by single tract, and collecting the GPS points on newly cleared fields, that will serve as the ground-truthing points for the land cover change maps that I’m working on. The data will also help determine the needs of these communities and how COMACO can best assist them to provide for their families in a sustainable way.

I am interested to see how people react to my presence and to questions about their lives. The people we call poachers come from hunting traditions, feeding their families the same way that generations of men in their communities have been doing, but has only in the past two generations begun to result in the kind of exponential change that will preclude future generations from following the same course. Life is hard here.

On Saturday evening I found out that two friends that I’ve recently made in Lundazi are on ARV’s, and that an alarming number of people in this area are suffering from HIV and AIDS. These friends didn’t tell me this themselves, and the person who did said that he thinks half the population of Lundazi is infected. Half the population……………………
I asked how he knows that these friends are positive, and his explanation struck me as so sad. “Lundazi is just a small town and when someone stands in a certain line at the clinic, a person sees and says to people ‘that person is positive’.” It’s not something anyone can hide for long. About living amid this epidemic he said simply “You know it’s there. You know many many people have it, and you try not to think about it. You know that if you go to get tested, on that day you will be very afraid and will only think about dying. You know that if you find you are positive you will always worry about dying with no way to do anything. You don’t think about it, and when you meet a girl you wear ‘gloves’.” He was unconvinced that it would be better to get tested and get on ARV’s, than to avoid knowing the truth until you are very sick. I came here knowing that many people are positive, but when I meet a young, strong, person in what should be the prime of their life, it’s just about impossible to think that they may already have been dealt a death sentence that they may or may not even know about. The loss that this represents is too hard to fathom when you start to think of all the smart, talented, motivated people – kids who want to go to college and have families, and parents who won’t be there to teach the ones they have, if they aren’t also infected. And it’s not something you can spend all day thinking about if you want to be productive and make friends. So I don’t know, maybe you try not to think about it?