Our Last Night in Africa, Lioness at Kafue National Park, Zambia

 

An Evening With Mr. Sky, The Kamunjoma School Fete

It’s amazing what a set of gloves can do. Scott and I made the six hour trek by bush taxi and bus to Chipata to buy gloves, levels and whatever else we could find that looked like it would be helpful in constructing a bridge, which meant we also bought a lot more wine.

We planned to stay only one night in Chipata but the rumor of a Mexican restaurant proved true. In the lush garden of Msamwa’s Descanso Guest House and Restaurant we ate home made tortillas filled with chicken, beef, rice and beans, dipped warm chips into freshly prepared spicy salsa, and drooled over soft tacos.

SOFT TACOS! At happy hour we treated Msamwa’s husband Steve, a former Peace Corps volunteer, and Abe, who refers to himself as a “Peace Corps Boma Volunteer”, to beers. (It is a tradition of ours to buy beer for Peace Corps volunteers and we’re celebrating our tenth year in Africa alone!) Abe had just married Mildred a local girl.

It was love at first sight in Chipata over the New Accounts desk at Barclays Bank where she worked. Abe and Mildred were about to move to Indiana. When I asked Mildred what she would miss most she didn’t hesitate. “Sheema!” Sheema is the starchy mashed maze that is the staple of every Zambian’s daily diet. “I have eaten sheema everyday of my life!” she added. “Will I be able to get sheema in America?”
“No,” I said. “But there is this place called Costco where you can buy Creamy Mash that you might find an acceptable substitute.” But really, there is nothing like sheema but sheema.

Scott and I returned to Kamunjoma in separate vehicles, which brought the total of vehicles driven to Kamunjoma that week to two. I came back with 50 bags of cement in a Council vehicle, a new-ish Chinese truck. The driver got so lost that I’m sure we were in Mozambique for part of the journey. It took four hours to get to Kamunjoma but I still beat Scott by several hours. He was on another new-ish Chinese truck with Manson (former Zambian national soccer star) along with roofing materials and a dozen villagers who were hitching a ride in the back. What does roofing material have to do with building a bridge? Nothing! Scott being Scott had noticed an unfinished brick house behind the school at Kamunjoma and asked headmistress Diana about it. “It’s meant to be a teacher house but we will never have the funds to complete it,” she explained. In Zambia rural communities must provide a dwelling before the government will assign a teacher to the school. Scott asked Diana what would be needed to finish the 600 square foot house and that led to a trip to Petauke to buy materials. I’m really proud of the bridge but I am most proud of Scott. Because of him, Kamunjoma will be able to get one more teacher.

My homecoming back at Kamunjoma after three days away couldn’t have been better. “Madam! We missed you!” everyone said as they stopped by to shake my hand. “How was Petauke? How was Chipata?”

The next morning Scott distributed the gloves. Some of the guys had never put on a pair of gloves before and put on two left hand or two right hand gloves. Some didn’t even own a pair of shoes so why should they know how to operate a pair of gloves? Every day after work they locked the gloves away with the wheelbarrow, shovels, and buckets in a storage room. I will never in all my days forget how happy 13 pairs of gloves made them.

Days at Kamunjoma were always filled with lots of interaction with villagers but since we were camped by the school, which was deserted by 5:30, nights were quiet. One afternoon Scott said to the headmistress, “We would love to get to know you and the other teachers better. How about if we arrange to buy a pig so that we can share a meal together?”
“Yes! Let’s do that!” she said. “But,” she added making a face that told us we had made cultural blunder number 23, “we don’t eat pig. When we eat meat we eat chicken or goat.” Our dreams of a Zambian luau vanished. “O.K. Then let’s have a goat and a chicken!” said Scott. The next day to get the ball rolling Scott gave Diana the equivalent of US$20 in Zambian Kwatcha and the live chicken given to him by a headman of the next village. “It’s going to be wonderful!” she said. “The children have been practicing their performances for you and they are very excited. I have already arranged for the goat and my daughters and I will prepare all the food.” Performances?? Scott asked how many people would be there. “Less than 50,” she assured. Scott and I exchanged looks. Fifty? We expressed concern that $20 would not cover the expenses but she assured us it was more than enough. I was also concerned about which goat she had arranged since I had taken quite a liking to a number of them that wondered through our camp every day. I almost said, “Please don’t pick the tawny brown one with the cowlick,” but I knew she would not understand why I would be picky about meat. As they say in Africa, meat is meat.

Over the next two days we could hear the children practicing their skits, singing, and drumming behind the school. This was turning into something a lot bigger than just dinner with a few teachers. On Thursday afternoon, the day of the fete, I found Diana’s daughters and three of the teacher’s wives under a tree chopping vegetables, plucking and cleaning chickens (2), and tending enormous pots of sheema over a wood fire. A large aluminum bowl was practically overflowing with small pieces of cooked goat meat.
Next to that was a pot of discarded chicken parts, feathers and all. I can say with authority that chickens are pretty stupid because the ones that were lucky enough to avoid being fare at the fete repeated tried to climb into the pot that held the dead chickens.

One of the teacher’s wives, Florence, put a few chicken innards and, I don’t know, maybe it was a neck, into a tiny pot with some water. She built another small fire between two bricks on the ground, handed me the pot and said, “This is Treeza’a pot to cook,” just so I could part of the kitchen preparations.
Later when I left to help Joyce (mother of eight) fetch more firewood I was laughingly scolded for leaving my pot. Diana saved me. “We are ready to begin the program,” she said and we walked together over to the sandy crossroads near the soccer field that was to be the stage.

“Less than 50” must mean something else in Zambia because there were well over 100 people gathered. Scott and I were seated at school desks arranged for the best view of the stage, a newly swept patch of the sandy road. The teachers were seated at other desks, two by two.

The dynamic dirt-bike-riding Doreen who runs the clinic two villages away was there too.

“Here is the program for today,” said Diana with a smile as she handed Scott and me a 14 item hand printed agenda; Opening prayer, Introductions, Poems, Skits, Dramas, Rumba, Speech by Mr. Sky… Closing Remarks.

The introductions were in Nsenga so one of the teachers, Mr. Tembo, sat next to us and translated. Mr. Tembo reminds me so much of my brother Sean. He is so kind and considerate. In fact, a lot of the time here, I feel like Dorothy in Oz because there are a number of people who remind me of someone at home. Washington, the new foreman on the job reminds me of my brother Joe because he is funny and loves to get the crowd going. Manson is the Eric Hagquist of Africa because he is an incredibly decent and nice person. And headmistress Diana reminds of my sister-in-law Cyndy because she moves through her day with such patience and grace. Anyway, the tin man, I mean Mr. Tembo translated the prayer and all the opening remarks. Most of what they said made us feel uncomfortable. At the same time, it made our hearts glad. Everyone just seemed so happy we were there. One of the teacher’s said during his introduction that there hadn’t been a “white man here since 1912” and that us coming to build the bridge made them feel good about themselves and their community. He said, “Before you came, we were nothing. Now we are something.” Can you imagine!

The skits performed by the children made me laugh. Some brought me to tears. (In fact, I must have sprung a leak in my tear ducts or something because lots of things in Kamunjoma seem to move me to tears.) They led off the program with original poems on subjects ranging from abstinence, to the hardships of living in Africa, to AIDS, to deforestation. Then four of the older girls lip-synced and danced several numbers from the Zambian top ten. Several boys performed a few short morality plays. One portrayed a student resorting to a life of crime because his father couldn’t afford to pay school fees. An older boy did a Zambian version of SNL’s Weekend Update. Scott got up to dance with the men and I got up to dance with the women.

So, I should explain about the dancing. It’s very provocative; especially dances performed during the harvest when bellies are full and everyone is happy. One dance is called “the push-push”. I know some of your kids read these updates so I’ll just say, well, it is a little disturbing to see girls so young doing the push-push. Joyce and other grandmother’s got up to show the young ones how it’s really done. Lots more to tell about the push-push but it will have to wait until later when I see you.

After all the acts were done and practically everyone had gotten up to shake their booty the headmistress said, “Now we will have a few words from Mr. Sky,” and she looked directly at Scott. That’s how we found out that Scott was Mr. Sky on the program. Scott, ever quick on his feet, rose to the occasion and gave one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard because he exactly expressed what was in our hearts. I remember the last part was something like, “Though our time here is short, the time spent with you here at Kamunjoma will remain in our hearts forever.” As corny as it sounds, it’s true.
After the performances and speeches we ate. Believe it or not, one goat, two chickens, some tomatoes and onions, and bucket loads of sheema – all bought for less than $20 – is more than enough to feed over 100 people, at least in Kamunjoma.

We had been in Kamunjoma for nearly a month and had completed two foundations and six tiers. The entire experience greatly exceeded our expectations. We wish we could have stayed to the end but because of logistics in the developing world it takes four months to build a bridge and we needed to return to America. Villagers will be finishing the bridge. That’s the whole point anyway. The main aim of B2P is not to build a bridge. It’s to teach locals how to build bridges so they can build more bridges. That’s one of the reasons it can take four months to finish a bridge. We learned a lot about bridges.

Scott enjoyed teaching and I, well, I really enjoyed playing with the children and getting to be a Madam (not in the Heidi Fleiss sense.)

Zoe, The B2P country director, returned from her vacation in Italy and drove Candice out to Kamunjoma to manage the project for the week after we left. All the remaining materials needed to complete the bridge– 1500 feet of cable, rebar, more cement, gravel, wood (and more gloves!) – were delivered and Scott presented Washington with the heavily dog-eared bridge manual and his Leatherman, which is useful not only for opening canned corned beef when the aluminum key provided snaps off –as it inevitably will– but also for wiring rebar.

Zoe said she could use our help before we flew out setting anchors at another bridge site in the Copperbelt and that afterward we could stay in Kafue National Park while she checked progress at a bridge near the Angola border and collected Valentine a volunteer there from Germany. We jumped at the chance to learn how to set anchors and camp in a wildlife area.

We spent two nights in the Copperbelt. It’s a long drive and the bridge there was having more than it’s share of challenges. Workers ran into solid bedrock within 24 inches of digging the second foundation hole so work had come to a standstill while Zoe was in Italy. It took some time to gather the workers and to track down the man who had the key to the latrine where the tools and cement were stored. After that we had to drive to town to buy sheema and tomatoes because the main concern was not who had the key but would they get lunch that day. I spent most of the time driving Zoe’s Toyota TRD (the pickup like the ones Keith Bramer and my nephew Colin have which Scott lusts after) back and forth from a pile of sand to the bridge site.

Two men went with me and loaded sand into the back of the truck while I talked to the children who were there pounding rocks with rocks to make little rocks for mixing with the cement which would surround the rebar cage we made for the anchor. Scott helped Zoe teach the workers how to pull cable over the towers that sat atop two tiers. Compared to Kamanjoma the Copperbelt bridge was a short one so it only needed two tiers.

Rebar was bent to just the right angle using a tree and discarded remnants of cooled charcoal left after sheema preparations was used as chalk to mark where the rebar should be cut.

Zoe left the workers with instructions on how to build the approaches, said she would return in a week and we drove off to Kafue. We learned from Zoe that Candice, Valentine, Scott and I were the only volunteers she had all year to help her build the five bridges in Zambia. Unfortunately, we were flying home in three days, Valentine in four, Candice in five. But Zoe has built over 30 bridges for B2P in South America and Ethiopia. She is a dynamic woman and mother of two girls, age 1 and 3. Seeing her in action in the Copperbelt there is no question she is up to the task.

Our last two nights in Zambia were spent amongst hippo, lots of hippo, camped at Mukambi Lodge in Kafue National Park. We enjoyed sunrise over the Kafue River and watched lions roar. On a late afternoon game drive we came across a big herd of elephant, porcupines, civets, a bush baby and yet more hippo.

We also were attacked by tsetse flies. If you’ve never been bit by a tsetse fly you’ve never experienced frantic self-slapping. They can bite right through a pair of jeans and I had swellings the size of a tennis balls. Ouch!

It has been an amazing five months. First hiking the Camino in Spain then two months spent transiting Africa through Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. We got lots of exercise and met great people. Kamunjoma was best. There’s no place like home, that’s for sure. But Kamunjoma comes close.

Boots, Bedouins, and A Bridge signing off.

Scott and Tris
Mukambi Lodge, Zambia
http://picasaweb.google.com/scottandtris/TheBridgeAtKamunjomaZambia#

The Dancing Bridge at Kamunjoma

“Mwauka bwanji!” greeted the Nsenga woman as she shook my hand and curtsied. She doesn’t curtsy just for me. Everyone greets one another with a respectful dip.

It was our first morning in Kamunjoma Village and the beginning of our bridge project. Well, not our bridge project. The community, led by the indomitable headmistress of Kamunjoma Elementary School Diana M’wanza, contacted the non-profit Bridges to Prosperity for help in building a pedestrian bridge between the village on one side of a seasonal river and the school and clinic on the other. B2P provides an engineer and volunteers to a developing country to oversee and teach, but the village takes ownership of the bridge from its inception and is responsible for gathering all the materials and labor. Most of the funding comes from grants from local rotary clubs partnering with rotary clubs from around the world. Though not big fans of many NGO’s or charity organizations in Africa, this one sounded unquestionably worthwhile to Scott and me and we finally got our chance to volunteer this summer. I mean, anything that can prevent kids and sick people from being washed away during the rainy season and keeps girls going to school all year can’t be a bad thing, right?

We met Candice, an Engineers Without Borders volunteer, over breakfast in Lusaka after an epic 18-hour bus ride from the Zambian border. Candice is overseeing the four bridge projects under construction in Zambia this summer. Later that afternoon, we met Zoe the B2P country director who said brightly, “This is full immersion for you!” as she handed us a manual before leaving to spend a month in Italy. “Have fun!” she added as she drove off. The next morning Candice showed us a fifty-foot long “demonstration” bridge in Lusaka built by B2P. As a local woman walked from one side of the suspension bridge to the other she complained, “It dances when I walk on it!”
“She should try walking on the 350-foot span you guys are going to build!” said Candice. She drove us to the Shoprite grocery store where we bought supplies -camp stove, food, wine (you can take the girl out of College Park, but you can’t take College Park out of the girl!) then drove us 400 kilometers to Kamunjoma village in Eastern Zambia 5 kilometers from the Mozambique border.

The bridge site at Kamunjoma is 45 kilometers from Petauke the nearest boma (town) but it takes four hours on a bush mini bus, or two hours in a Community Council vehicle, or three and a half hours in a land cruiser (more specifically the land cruiser of former premiere national soccer team player Joseph Manson) which has no brakes – or starter motor, a proper fuel tank, springs, or the sufficient amount of lug nuts to keep a tire in its place – to get there. Kamunjoma village has a population of around 50 families, has no running water, no electricity and is way out in the boondocks over very rough dirt roads. It’s perfect! The only thing lacking are elephants. The extent of wildlife out here is bats (flying out of the hole in the ground we use as a toilet), and the goats, chickens, cows, pigs, and enormous spider (Eek! almost too big for the toilet paper roll it climbed out of) that wander through our camp.

We set up our camp under a tree just across from Kamunjoma School. The compound consists of four classrooms in two buildings and five tidy teacher houses behind the school. Because there are only five teachers for 316 students, the students attend class in shifts all day from 7am to 5pm. The teachers are delightful, hard working, and earn US$ 400 per month.

At 6:30 each morning students – some who have walked more than 5 kilometers – begin sweeping the entire compound with knee high brooms made of twigs. After the grounds are swept, the Zambian flag is raised and classes begin. Subjects are Geography, Science, Math, Civics, English, History, and a couple of other subjects I can’t identify by their abbreviations. The classrooms are bare except for desks (shared by two), a sweeping roster, and a blackboard. I have yet to see a single book. Though the children all live in huts made of mud and they walk to school over dusty paths they always manage to look sparkling clean, tidy and spotless in their pressed school uniforms and ties.

Our camp is comfy cozy with two chairs, a table, and of course, the hammock we brought from home is slung between two branches on the tree. Each morning at dawn a family of chickens join us for breakfast. They cluck and scratch outside our open tent door while we sit inside sipping coffee, and dipping and eating Rusks (rock hard buttermilk biscuits). A brand new shower enclosure built just for us is 20 paces away and the clean and odor free brick enclosed long drop toilet – hole in the ground – is 60 feet away. I can’t figure out how it is that they have no odor. Except for the bats, spiders, and occasional mouse, they are as pleasant as they get. At 6:45, the bridge workers begin arriving by foot or bicycle from their villages. Sometimes a few ox carts or cowboys pass by our tent window. Cowboys are boys who tend cattle instead of going to school. They get paid after five years of service – one cow.

The school is located along a ridge with soft shallow valleys dropping away on either side. We are able to watch the sunrise in the mornings and see it set (just over the toilet enclosure) in the evenings. The harvest is complete and farmers are busy burning off the maize fields – all that smoke in the air makes for spectacular sunsets. Sometimes Manson comes by for popcorn, a glass of wine, or a cup of tea we serve with shortbread cookies called Eet-sum-mors. You can never go wrong offering someone food. There are two seasons here: the “harvest season” and the “starvation season”. Right now everyone is in a good mood and there is lots of laughter because bellies are full. There is loads of the staple corn meal (sheema) to eat and ground nuts aplenty.

It is full dark by 6:30 and the school is deserted so after cooking and eating dinner we usually go to bed. Most nights we can hear drumming and singing coming from distant villages.

There is no phone service and no cell coverage, except for in two spots. One is a two-kilometer walk away on a well-worn path that leads to a tree overlooking another pretty valley. The villagers call the fifteen square foot spot “The Network”. The first few times we walked to The Network children had to show us the way. Now they just come with us for fun. They run and bounce and laugh with absolute delight when we talk to them or show them their photos on the camera screen. Everyone, even the headmistress, bursts out laughing when they see their image. Some have never seen a picture of themselves so friends have point to the screen and say, “There’s you!” in their language, Nsenga.

The other place we can get cell service is outside the head mistresses office at school. But you must face classroom number 1 and hold the phone way above your head. Conversations are never possible (unless you are 6’7’’ like my brother Sean) but texting is – though this only works between dusk and dawn, and only if there is no wind. Despite the inability to make phone calls regularly there are signs on one-room shops or stalls from Kamunjoma to Petauke that read, “Top Up (your call time) Here!”

Candice stayed with us on the job site for only one day. She (thankfully!) confirmed that
the foundation holes had been dug in the right spots and were approximately the right dimensions. Together we confirmed that the sand-to-cement proportions the block makers were using was correct and that there were the required three huge piles of rock and river sand next to the bridge site. We weren’t exactly handed a bridge manual and told, “Good luck!” but almost. As she left, Candice told us, “Don’t worry! There will be a Zambian man who works for B2P joining you in a few days. Boston knows everything!” Boston never showed and a week later we received a text that he was no longer on the job. Maybe he had gotten tired of waiting for the project to actually begin.

Bridge construction was scheduled to begin on May 15th while we were transiting through Africa. On May 15th in Egypt I said to Scott, “We’re missing out on the beginning of construction! I hope we get there before it’s completely finished.” Scott, ever the realist, looked at me and said, “Are you kidding? We will be lucky if the project has begun by the time we arrive!” We had the same conversation in Sudan on June 15, in Ethiopia on July 15, and on August 1st the day we arrived in Zambia because construction had been routinely delayed. Apparently the village had been too busy with the maize harvest to worry about a bridge. But by the time we arrived most of the fields had been cleared and they were completely committed to the project. (Maybe that was because of the three-page letter from B2P threatening to build a bridge elsewhere unless the village started assembling materials.) Anyway, Candice drove away and left Scott and me with a manual, two holes in the ground, and a crew of men, women, and children to build a 350-foot bridge. “Holy crap!” I said to Scott as we dove into the project headfirst. We set centerlines and corners with the masons (a frustrated Scott continually saying to the masons: “It must be a square, not a parallelogram”) and began studying the bridge building manual. We know construction but we’ve sure never built a bridge before – especially in a developing country with people who have never even seen a structure over one story tall and who don’t speak or understand English. Of the three masons working on the bridge, Boma Banda is 86 and really doesn’t see very well. The second mason, Grandwill Pheri is not quite that old but he had to quit after a week because of a swelling in his groin (every time I ask the crew, “How is Grandwill today?” they begin giggling uncontrollably.) The third mason is Patrick Chirwa. He is a little older than Scott and savvy about bricklaying but still bewildered about what “level” means. (Though we had a breakthrough the other day when he used a tape measure to make sure one of the tiers was square.) The masons get paid four dollars a day. None of them speak English.

There are also 8 unpaid laborers who mix cement and move river sand and rock from an ox cart (if we are lucky to have an ox cart show up that day) to the wheelbarrow, and 4 other unpaid laborers who are detailed to make 2000 cement blocks. They all call me “Madam” and are thrilled when I remember their names. Last names are easy because there seems to be only 4 or 5 main clans in the 9 surrounding villages that are supplying labor and will benefit from the bridge: Banda, Zulu, M’lungu, Tembo, and Pheri. The first names are sometimes harder to remember. One of the block makers has a name that sounds like Onebagof Salt. Many have biblical names like Aaron or Joseph or Moses so those I remember but only after pairing their name with a physical characteristic like, Few Teeth or NYC Baseball Cap or Beautiful Smile, though that one is not as helpful since they all have beautiful smiles, even Few Teeth.

The women and children of the village work as well. The women and girls deliver river sand from plastic buckets on their heads and the boys, well, the boys do whatever the headmistress tells them to do.

The second day we were there, seventeen 12 to 18 year-old boys were detailed to build me a shower enclosure. Dressed in their school clothes – blue trousers, light blue shirt and blue tie – they constructed an enclosure near our tent made from tree branches and tall grass. It was all tied together with strips of bark. They even fabricated a hook from which we could hang our sun shower. When I stood in the nearly finished enclosure fully clothed and mimed taking a shower one of the younger boys said with a smile, “Yes. Be very clean. Yes, get all the details.” I thought he was too young to know all about the “details”, but apparently not.

Another eight boys were excused from class while they unloaded the 50 bags of cement that had arrived one day and, with regularity, the youngest boys suddenly pour out of class at a full run and pick up sticks to chase the cows, goats or pigs that walk through our camp. Today, a line of forty students, each one carrying a cement block that weighs at least 30 pounds, made their way from the spot where the blocks are being made to the bridge site, a half kilometer away. The girls – three of whom bring us buckets of water balanced on their heads each day each day – carried the blocks on their heads too.

Whenever children bring any adult or us something (oranges, lemons, a message…) they present it with both hands on bended knee. One day Scott asked the headmistress for a bucket so we could get water to do laundry and she said, “I will get one of the children to do it. The children here are free!” There are two other phrases Diana is fond of saying, “These children are strong!” and, “We teach our children to be self reliant!” And they are. There is an invisible boundary 40 feet from our camp where the strong children take a break from schooling or laboring or playing to stare at us. We were told that the last white person to stay here was when the school was founded in 1912. “How are you!” they sometimes call with impressive rolls of the “r”, but mostly they just stare and smile because we are the first white people they have ever seen.

The walls inside the foundation pits on each side of the bridge were completed within a few days. Eight men, led by Edwin the ever-smiling foreman who speaks English but doesn’t seem to always understand it, threw large stones into the pit and compacted and leveled the rocky mass. The masons applied a concrete apron around the rim readying it for the first of three one-meter-high tiers that will be built on top of each foundation. The main thing Scott and I have to do everyday is to keep an eye on the four guys who mix the mortar. Often there is not enough sand, or they are mixing it with cloudy river water instead of clear bore hole water, or it has been kept sitting too long before the masons are ready for it, or it has too much water. The other concern is, like I said, one of the masons is 86 and doesn’t see very well. His blocks are rarely level but because he is so venerated, no one, including us, wants to say anything because he still manages to climb in and out of a one-meter hole in the ground, heave blocks and rock around, and is sweet and nice and 86. Scott’s major frustration is that there doesn’t seem to be a word (or concept!) for “level” in the Nsenga language and of the 4 levels on the job site, only 1 actually works and that one is so scratched up it’s barely legible.

This bridge project reminds me constantly of something my dad always said, “Do the best you can with the tools you’ve got,” because the level is the only tool we have on the job site. I shouldn’t say that. We also have one wheelbarrow, two buckets, three shovels, and three trowels. But what we would give for a water level, a string level, a sieve, gloves, and a plumb bob! If fact, this weekend we are going to make an all day trip to the nearest town that has a hardware store (Chipata, about 150 kilometers away) to buy some or all of these items. In an ideal world we would have brought our own tools from home but since we’ve been on the move in South America, Spain, and Africa for four months it just wasn’t feasible to lug it around with us. The only “tool” Scott brought from home was his Leatherman. He thought at least he could us the pliers to wire rebar together but after carrying it more than 14000 miles, the only thing he’s used it for is to open a can of corned beef. Anyway, we don’t really mind going to Chipata. There is reputed to be a Mexican restaurant run by a former Peace Corps volunteer and his Zambian wife. Definitely worth 6 hours on public transport!

We’ve had one disheartening day when the importance of using correct amounts of sand, water, and cement was clearly driven home. The masons had finished the first bridge tier, measuring 11-square feet by one meter high. All night Scott had a nagging concern that the mortar hadn’t been mixed properly and wasn’t strong enough. In the morning he was able to knock down blocks simply by tapping on them. When Scott told the workers that the entire tier would have to be rebuilt they weren’t too happy. They thought it was a waste of cement. “It is going to lower your profitability” one man said to Scott. “There is no profitability!” said Scott exasperated. “These bridge approaches will be 4 stories high. The most important thing is that they are strong!” They were still doubtful. Also they have real difficulty picturing something they have never seen. “…Four stories…” But the tier came down so easily that there has been a lot more attention to detail ever since, especially where mixing mortar is concerned. Scott really knows his mud. One of Scott’s jobs in college was mixing mortar for mason extraordinaire, Al Giovanni and Scott was fond of saying to Al, “Whoever mixed the mud must have really known what he was doing!”

If I’m not on the bridge site by 7am each morning everyone asks, “Is Madam alright?” “She’s fine! She is with the block makers this morning,” says Scott. But the bush telegraph has already gone out that Madam may be sick and pretty soon I have women stopping by to mime that I should drink a little water with sand or dirt mixed in it and I will be fine. (Not a bad piece of advice actually. Pepto Bismol is always a fall back remedy for me when I’m traveling and it mostly consists of clay.) Anyway, so no one worries about my health I have to be at the bridge site first thing and greet each worker individually with a handshake and “Mwauka bwanji!”

Then yesterday the head of the PTA walked (there are no vehicles except for the once a day bush mini van within 35 kilometers of Kamunjoma) from his village to meet Scott. He said, “The block makers are lonely if Madam doesn’t come by to see how they are doing.” The bridge site is between the village and the school but the block making takes place near a well behind the school so now I have to make several trips a day back and forth between job sites. They all work so hard and it is important that we notice. “Zicomo quom beeli!” “Thank you so much for your hard work!” I say when I see them and their smiles could light the village.

We are having the time of our lives out here. Aside from walking between job sites, (“Madam! See how many stones we have collected!”) I spend my time with the children. Mostly they teach me words in Nsenga of which the most common words sound like Mocha, Beano, and Nacho (with a decidedly Italian inflection), or we take turns drawing pictures in the dirt with a stick, or they show me the trucks they have built from discarded wire, cardboard, and plastic bottle caps. One day Edwin brought me a flat lump of mortar that had sat too long. “This one is expired!” he said handing it to me. It made a wonderful bush blackboard.

Scott thrives out here. He gets invited to the huts of headmen in adjoining villages and is given live chickens as a gift. (When he returned to camp carrying the still live chicken by its feet I said, “What the heck am I supposed to do with that?” I hope the headman did not hear that we re-gifted it to the headmistress.) The other day we were the guests of honor (“Thank you for the invitation. Please, keep the chicken”) at a village Nyao Dance performance. I loved it that Scott joined in on the dancing and the frenetic gyrations of the masked Nyao dancers.

Most of all, I love people’s names –Innocent, Sweetness, Happy, Charity, Special, Godfrey... I also love hearing women sing, just for the heck of it. And the drumming. Oh, I love the drumming. And I love it that the village is throwing a party just for us. The children have been practicing all week what they will perform for us. I just love it.

Scott and Tris
Kamunjoma Village, Zambia

You can see photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/scottandtris

To read more about Bridges to Prosperity you can find their link at http://www.firstgiving.com/teresaokane

Next: The Kamunjoma School Fete, an Evening with Mr. Sky.