Dr. Livingston, I Presume?

I can only imagine Africa as Dr. Livingston saw it, 150 years ago. After seeing Victoria Falls and going on my first Safari this weekend, I can hardly imagine a continent as wild as the one he explored.

It was something driving through tall grass fields, around large bushes, not knowing what to expect on the other side - a group of grazing impalas, a heard of elephants, or a clan of baboons playing in the trees. We camped overnight in the park, inviting a second thought when getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night given the megafauna witnessed during the day.

Hippos, crocs, elephants, giraffes, leopards, impalas - we saw them all - and LOTS of them. An elephant or water buffalo just a few feet from the car would make a sudden move, inviting nervous screams from the girls in the open sided safari truck, drawing a friendly laugh from the guide - "Do not worry, no problem." I wonder what the driver of the car said to his guests later that day when a leopard jumped onto an empty seat in the vehicle, stared eye to eye with one of the tourists, and promptly jumped out the other side. I wonder what was going through the tourist's head. I wonder what was going through the leopard's head! Dinner?


The change in lifestyle from Livingston's day until now has been an interesting progression. Signs of progress and the lack thereof abound. There was a fascinating exhibit at the Livingston Museum about the transition from modern village life to modern city life. Unabashedly, the plaques read:

"With the passage of time the people of our village have found themselves alienated from their natural environment. Now they have to obtain a license to hunt for food, cut poles for their huts, cut trees for their canoes. Day by day they helplessly watch their environment being depleted of its natural resources by outsiders, people from afar, authorized from somewhere else without any recourse to them and at no benefit to them, in desperation, all they can do is offer manual labour, for a pittance."

"Transplanted from 'Our Village' and out of touch with ourselves, our living heritage, the alienated individual walks the world at the crossroads of cultures. Struggling to retain an identity, the only place he gets flashes of his culture is the museum though only as an abstraction."

If those are the 'politically correct' words to be found in a museum, I wonder how the people really feel...

Breaking the Bubble

They call Lusaka a 'soft landing' for expats. After being here for a week and a half, I am amazed at how easy it is to make a life here, and how easy it is to ignore the reality around the corner.

My temporary housing through my host organization, the Center for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia is a furnished room in a four bedroom guesthouse. Complete with small pool and large yard with an exotic garden, the house is walled in from the outside world with a giant iron entry gate and 24 hour security guard. It doesn't come cheap. I am likely to pay as much as my last apartment three blocks from the sand in Newport Beach, California for a place with much less than the amenities of the guesthouse.

The number of aid workers here is astounding - almost everywhere in town you are likely to run into someone working for the Clinton Foundation, a fellow CIDRZ employee, the World Bicycle Relief Organization, or any number or other foundations. Everyone here is constantly cycling through Zambia it seems, on a contract for a year or two - and is outgoing, fun, and friendly. Western culture has been imported as a result. There are yoga and spinning classes, ultimate frisbee on Sunday mornings, and touch Rugby Mondays and Thursdays. The lack of tourist attractions within the city promotes a tight-knit group of friends always willing to welcome the new-comer to the daily activity or weekend plans. Food choices reflect the diverse expat scene - from Indian to Mexican, Italian to Thai.

Its easy to live life here in a bubble. Without trying, it would be easy to avoid the local traditions and food - nshima - a paste made with corn meal rolled into balls with your hands and used to scoop up dishes of beef stew, eggplant or spinach. Just outside the high walls of the expat houses, the streets are filled with signs of the other side of life - bafefoot kids and broken down minibuses stuffed to the brim with passengers. The further from the expat center of town you travel, the more you are reminded of the true nature of your location: cement block buildings with sheet metal roofs, held in place by large rocks. Grass fires burning along the side of pot-hole strewn roads - that may or may not be paved - pot-holes large enough to swallow small children. Trash strewn neighborhoods with women strolling down the street carrying all shapes and sizes of goods on their heads and a small child on their back in brightly colored cloth.

I'm told its winter here. That doesn't bode well for the summer, when I already I feel stifled by the mid-day heat, and nearly faint from a game of ultimate or a jog around town. The locals all dawn jackets and blankets - I'm surprised I haven't seen the down jackets popular with the Newport locals in January.

I can see my work here being very rewarding. We are setting up a data collection hierarchy, from the city center to the district offices, local clinics, and community health workers, instituting electronic correspondence between the person on foot in the village to the clinic. We are standardizing primary care, and hoping to make a drastic decrease in under-5 mortality. Im helping to implement everything technical - from software to hardware. Last week I had a crash course in solar power to figure out how to run our new data entry system off the power grid in the rural clinics. My current role draws a surprising number of similarities to my last role in project management for an unmanned helicopter - struggling against politics, bureaucracy, and the way things are 'typically' done to meet an ambitious schedule with limited resources. Substitute unmanned helicopters for electronic medical systems.

I can assure you my time here will be an adventure - and I invite you all to come and visit - enjoy some nshima and get a feel for a very different way of life.