Money, it's a gas

Okay, I admit it, as good blogger “eatanicecream” pointed out, I’ve become lazy.

I should’ve known you’d be tired of “One survivor’s story” after a week and a half.

Well, I’m back. I just got home from a draining two days of immigration wrangling, which I won’t elaborate on because all ended well (and I’d rather not risk ruffling any feathers – my $300 “temporary permit” should be ready in a few days). Immigration permits, like most things in Zambia, aren’t cheap.

Which brings me to the topic of this blog post: money! After enduring the shockingly high cost of living in Nairobi for six months last year – as an unpaid intern, no less – I figured smaller, less developed Lusaka would be a walk in the park in comparison. How horribly wrong I was.

Being landlocked, Zambia must import almost everything overland via other African countries – including, crucially, fuel. Gas prices hover in what I thought was exclusively social-democratic Scandinavian territory, around $3 per litre. Anything that’s transported using fuel (just about everything) bears costs to show for it.

Taxis are a common cash grab, since walking after dark isn’t advised, and taxi drivers have to pay for gas, after all. Even the public minibuses charge around a dollar a ride, which seems cheap but adds up. As for food, I’m fortunate to live near various small vendors, but rising global food prices mean even a few bananas or tomatoes don’t go for cheap. (You may hear me whine from time to time about my scanty CIDA budget, but the reality is that most Zambians live on a fraction of it – and their bananas and tomatoes don’t cost any less than mine.)

I enjoy cooking and spending time at home, and I walk to work, so budgeting hasn’t been too difficult. Nonetheless, I was more than relieved to discover a glorious vegetable market last Tuesday, a mere 10-minute walk from my house. Taking place every Tuesday evening in a large sheltered area behind a church, the market is full of life and activity, and just about any produce you could hope for. The very reasonable prices are fixed, which means no hassle with bargaining.

My shopping routine now consists of one heaping bag of fruits and veggies every Tuesday evening, and whatever odds and ends I need throughout the rest of the week. Though seemingly minor, the cost savings have been enough to ease at least a little bit of budgetary stress, and I eat better too!

View of the Tuesday market at sunset, around 6:00pm.

One survivor's story

As Dr. Bob was away at conferences for much of my first two weeks, I spent most of my time getting to know his partner organizations.

Last Friday, I learned about the work of the Zambia Mine Action Centre, the governmental department responsible for fulfilling Zambia's Ottawa Treaty obligations. After a long and drawn out process, ZMAC has finally begun a landmine impact survey, carried out by Norwegian People's Aid, to uncover exactly how much land is mined and what demining needs to be done. Although Zambia is not as affected as many other countries, the lack of information has been devastating for development and tourism – a plot of land with one suspected mine, even if it’s not actually there, is as unusable as one with hundreds of mines.

IRIN published an excellent article on the landmine situation in Zambia, "Zambia: A deadly reminder of the hospitality of the past," in which Mr. Yona Phiri, a prominent Zambian landmine survivor, was interviewed. Yona lost his right leg when he was 16 years old and struggled to even move around. Over the course of two decades, he singlehandedly fought for the Zambian government to provide him with the attention and care he knew he deserved. 28 years later, Yona is still struggling to get such basic services as transport to and from the hospital for appointments – and he is one of the lucky few survivors to live in Lusaka, relatively close to the services he needs.

Yet his resourcefulness is startling. He now has stable employment as a welder and moves around on crutches with ease. As I waited to meet him a couple weeks ago, I was surprised to see him arrive by bicycle, sweating from the long ride from his home to the hospital downtown. We talked about his and my backgrounds, the landmine and disability movements in Zambia, and of course the three cardinal conversation topics of the country: football, religion and politics.

Addressing a gap in Zambian civil society, Yona has set up the Zambia Foundation for Landmine Survivors, an organization to be comprised of landmine survivors and disabled persons as members. His goal is to create a common voice for the disparate struggles of survivors across the country. Personally, I see great potential in the Foundation to achieve social change – Yona is an inspiring leader, and there is much yet to be done.

On Saturday, I attended one of the Foundation's meetings. Besides Yona, founding members include two teachers, a nurse, an ex-military deminer, an accountant, a journalist, a reverend, a disabled rights advocate, and a sociologist, among others. Facing dire funding constraints, the Foundation has thus far failed to gather even the one million Zambian Kwacha (around $300 US) needed to register as an official organization. Following registration, the Foundation will have the legitimacy needed to submit project proposals and raise funds.

I hope to scrounge up the remainder of this registration fee (a negligible sum in fundraising terms), and then to help the Foundation get off its feet in what spare time I have. I feel strongly about the nobility of their cause – to give landmine survivors and disabled people active membership in a meaningful, nation-wide organization. I only hope that they will be able to overcome the many obstacles they are sure to face. Besides lacking the funds to register, the Foundation has little to no access to computers or printers, complicating seemingly basic activities.

Yona on his bicycle, prosthetic leg and all.

Founding members of the Zambia Foundation for Landmine Survivors (plus me).

My humble abode

Upon arriving in Lusaka, I quickly became aware of the troubles other interns and expats faced in finding accommodation. I met another CIDA intern who had been sleeping in a hostel tent for six weeks, working 40 hours per week, yet to find a proper place to rent. I devoted my first few days to preventing this situation at all costs.

Though I got in touch with many people and pursued various avenues, I ended up at my current residence after a roundabout and hugely coincidental sequence of events:

- Met two Dutch students who thought there was a spare room in their house, but couldn't help me until landlady returned from Holland.
- Met American researcher on public minibus, who invited me to a barbecue.
- At BBQ, met Greek photographer who knew of Swedish expat who had recently left Lusaka; Greek didn't know where Swede lived, but knew taxi driver who drove Swede around.
- Called taxi driver, who agreed to take me to the house.
- At house, landlady was away; longtime maid told me there was definitely a room, and agreed to show me around.
- In kitchen, was surprised to find same two Dutch students eating dinner.
- After calling landlady in Holland and pleading our homeless cause to her, Canadian tent-dweller and I both moved in temporarily; there were two rooms available, but questions over whether landlady would want to rent the second room.
- Landlady returned and decided to rent only one room.
- Canadian and I flipped a coin (very suspenseful); I won!
- A few days later, landlady decided to rent second room after all... this is where I, ex-tent-dwelling Canadian and five others will be living for the next four-and-a-half months:


The place is idyllic. Lovely pool, beautiful vegetable garden, free range chickens, wireless Internet, 5-minute walk to work. My room is the window on the left. So for those of you worrying about my trials and tribulations in Africa, just imagine me sunbathing in the pool during lunch hour in, say, mid-October (before the rainy season comes and the above paradise abruptly ceases to exist).

Chipolopolo 1 - Togo 0

At 4:00am on Wednesday morning, my two Dutch housemates and I woke up in pitch darkness and made our way to the inter-city bus station in town. By 6:30am, we found a bus going to Copperbelt Province, where Zambia would be playing Togo in a World Cup qualifier later that afternoon. Around 1:00pm, after a long and bumpy ride, we arrived in Chingola, and linked up with a group of die-hard Lusaka-based fans (like ourselves) to find tickets and complete the last leg of our journey.

Fifteen minutes before the 2:00pm kickoff, the three of us, along with four others I had invited, marched into the Chililabombwe stadium sporting Zambian colours of green, red and yellow. We encountered roaring cheers, partly because of general excitement about the game, and partly, I think, because of the novelty of seeing seven confused looking 'muzungus' (white people) wading through a sea of football-loving Zambians. I managed a few snapshots on our way around the stands.

Zambia's Chipolopolo (Copper Bullets) scored the first and only goal. The celebration was raucous. If not for this fence and an abundance of police officers, the pitch would surely have been swarmed with fans. The match turned out to be dominated by the Chipolopolo, whose only fault was a complete lack of finishing touch. The score could easily have been 5-0. Mind you, Togo's Arsenal-based superstar, Emmanuel Adebayor, refused to fly to Zambia reportedly because of rumours that his plane would crash; Togo's coach quit over internal disputes one week prior; and the Chipolopolo dedicated the match to Zambia's late president, making the stakes of winning quite high indeed.

After halftime, we switched ends to continue to watch Zambia's offense from up close. In this picture, you see the overcrowded bleachers, the blooming jacaranda trees surrounding the stadium, and a Zambia corner kick in action (Zambia in white).

If only North American sports fans were this creative.

Zambia's love of football is surpassed only by its devotion to Christianity – why not to combine the two?

After the game, us seven muzungus and our fellow Zambian fans caught a minibus and then a bus back to Lusaka, completing a marathon 22-hour day. The bus, which left around 8:00pm that night, was a quarter full of singing and drinking football fans. Until around midnight, the driver blasted song after song about the Zambian football team – apparently, there is an entire industry of pop music devoted to the Chipolopolo. After resigning to the fact that sleep was simply not an option, I came to really enjoy the celebration. Driving across the Zambian countryside, bopping in my seat to nationalistic football songs, I felt a part of something special.

Since the tragic 1993 plane crash that killed almost the entire Zambian football team, the state of the country's football hasn't been the same. But the love of the game is there. I think it's only a matter of time before Chipolopolo re-enters the vocabulary of football fans the world over.

A state in mourning

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog!

As this is my first foray into the world of blogging, you’ll have to bear with me as I orient myself and settle into some kind of routine. I am writing from Lusaka, Zambia, where I have just begun a CIDA-funded internship with the Zambian Campaign to Ban Landmines. The program is administered by Mines Action Canada, a coalition of Canadian NGOs devoted to stopping the use and addressing the humanitarian costs of landmines and cluster bombs.

I arrived in Lusaka a week ago last night, and found myself immersed in the nation-wide mourning of a well-regarded late president, Levy Mwanawasa, who died on August 19 after six weeks of critical care following a second stroke. The Zambian national football team postponed its World Cup qualifier with Togo; shops, restaurants and bars are forbidden from playing pop music – Christian gospel is all that can be heard; newspapers and billboards seem to contain more messages of condolence from local companies than news articles or ads. Driving in from the airport, I passed a Batman-like beam of light apparently emanating from the president’s yet-to-be-buried body.

But on Wednesday, the day that would have been his sixtieth birthday, the president was finally buried. Tomorrow, September 8, marks the end of a three-week period of national mourning, and life is expected to resume its normal course – or rather, all the events and activities that have been put on hold will pile one above the other, and, parallel with fast-approaching elections in Canada and the US, the race for the Zambian presidency will begin in full swing. (Also – probably the topic of my next post – the Zambian football team plays Togo and I reserved tickets!)

My first impressions of Lusaka have been entirely positive. Compared to Nairobi, where I lived for six months last year as a UNHCR intern, Lusaka is smaller, quieter and cleaner. It still has the familiar orangy-red dirt sidewalks and dust-filled air, and the sweet smell of burning garbage brings back memories, but the diesel fumes are less pervasive, the traffic less infuriating, and the persistent touts nowhere in sight. Further, Zambia lacks an African language that is spoken by more than 20-odd percent of the people (unlike Swahili in Kenya), making English the most widely-spoken language in the country – I have yet to come across a Zambian who couldn’t utter at least a few words to send me in the right direction.

Of course, this expatriate perspective does not cover the expansive ‘compounds’ that surround Lusaka, bearing an all-too-close resemblance to Nairobi’s infamous slums. I have not yet encountered signs of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Zambia, where well over a million people currently live with the virus. I understand that regular funerals are a part of life here. My work, though focused on landmines and cluster bombs, will spill over into the many interconnected projects that comprise Zambian civil society and address problems of health and development in the country.

In my first week here, I met many of the people I will be working with, all involved in some way or another with landmine and disability work: social activists, medical practitioners, journalists, landmine survivors and public servants, few of whom are limited to one of these categories. My supervisor, Dr. Bob Mtonga, is a regional leader in countless major campaigns, traveling the world advocating against nuclear weapons, landmines, cluster bombs and small arms, publishing on all of these issues in Zambia’s national newspaper, all the while working as a medical doctor addressing HIV/AIDS among youth, diabetes, and landmine victim assistance, among other issues. I understand that he also writes poetry and enjoys fixing things – to pass the time, you know. It’s a pleasure to work with him.

Closing in on the end of my inaugural blog post, I already see that I’m going to have to work harder at filtering down my experience – so much has already been left out. Let this be an introduction. In the coming months, I hope to share with you the perspective of an ordinary Canadian on this exciting and fast-changing African city, and hopefully nearby areas and countries as well. Most importantly, I will write of my experience working with Dr. Bob and the mine action movement in Zambia, which I am so fortunate to be a part of. Please feel free to share your thoughts – I and others would love to hear them!

Louis