Closing our Africa Chapter

My favorite picture of Joe in Africa - this was on his week-long school trip for World Literacy Day.

This post is way too long for anyone to read. However, we use this blog as our family journal and so felt we needed to include all of it. Only a crazy person would read the whole thing. For my lazy brothers, I have included lots of pictures to make it more enjoyable for you.

For those who don’t know, we have left Africa and are now living in Paris while Joe interns for the UN. However, we still felt like we needed to finish our Africa chapter. Below you will find a summary of our top ten moments in Africa. After this list, you will find a summary from Emily about her work and then a summary of what Joe did. We love you all!

TOP TEN MOMENTS IN AFRICA

To summarize our days in Zambia we thought it would be best to simply write our top ten favorite moments from the two months we were there. While some of them are more inside jokes between Emily and myself, I hope that if you know our personalities, you will find humor in some of them.

10. Early on Joe decided he really wanted to see hippos. We decided a canoeing safari down the Zambezi river might take care of that, but in our ignorance we didn’t realize how many hippos there were in Africa.  When we arrived, little, excited ignorant Joe asked, “Are we going to see any hippos today?” Nicholas (our 23 year old African tour guide, “Millions.”

9. As you know, stomachs do not function the same in the southern hemisphere. This can cause the digestive system to inadvertently misbehave. Emily and I easy lost ten pounds each because the food went surprisingly quick through our bodies. You can tell this didn’t bother Emily too much because she would often say, “Now I don’t feel guilty about eating a pastry every day in Paris.”  

8. Emily: To get to the health clinic every day, I could either walk 25 minutes past a dozen different groups of men working, and cat-calling out to me. OR, I could ride the sketchy 80’s public buses that are falling apart, the driver’s texting, I’m the only white person that rides them, and it costs $0.30 a trip. You betcha I’ll take that sketchy bus. The most people we fit in on at once was 20 adults and one baby. You have to admit, it's pretty impressive

7. Living in Utah for the past 5 years, we were frequently asked and hounded about our potential for being eternal companions. While we appreciated the trust and faith that so many, well meaning people had, Emily and I were relived to be abroad during the past year, as to avoid too many questions regarding our potential for rearing children. That was until we went to Africa. A typical African introduction would include the following: African: “Oh you are married that is great! Do you have children?” Joe and Emily, “No not yet” African, “Why not?” Joe and Emily, ‘Well, we have only been married a year.” African: Blank stare…followed by, “And you still don’t have a child?” This conversation knew no boundaries in Africa. Co-workers, bus drivers, taxi drivers, even children at schools I would visit.

6. One of the seven natural wonders of the world, Victoria Falls, is located in Zambia. Many people will either drive the 6 hours or fly the 2 hours to go and see this beautiful part of God’s great canvas. Emily and I, in our desire to “see the world” and have “adventure” (lets be honest, we wanted to save about $500) decided that taking the bus from Lusaka to Livingstone would be the best way. I often ask myself if the nine-hour bus ride without air conditioning and at one point, a live chicken, was really worth saving $500. I still don’t know.   

Victoria Falls during the dry season. The length of the waterfall is over a mile long during the rainy season (Look it up!)

Wild Zebras. Joe came *this close to touching it.

Swimming in the Devil's Pool. Right on the edge of Victoria Falls!

5. I once walked up on a group of about sixty kids at a school I was visiting. One of them started asking me his basic questions, “How are you?” “What is your favorite color?” etc. After we exhausted his limited English and since I don’t speak any Bemba (the local tribal language), I asked the group of kids to sing a song for me. This is very common for them as Zambian’s love to sing. All sixty of them quickly broke out into their national anthem. Afterwards one of the kids then said, “Your turn, you sing your country’s anthem.” Ha ha well, not wanting to disappoint them I started singing. About 15 seconds into the song one kid began pulling on my arm and said, “Okay Joe, that’s enough.” Lesson learned, you can’t out sing a group of African school kids.  

Kids from one of my school visits

4. Church in Africa was always an experience. We would arrive five minutes early and still beat everyone by half an hour. Our bishop had been missing for six months, the first counselor was attending another church, the 2^nd councilor in the bishopric, who ran the ward, admitting that he had ran into a member the other day who he thought was dead for a year (surprise), they call you out for not doing your home teaching or scripture study in front of everyone and in two months, they never were able to move our records. But, the church is still true.

3. We went to a bush camp one night to have a “real” African experience. A “real” white man’s African experience includes a really nice cooked bbq, bush bread, popcorn, an armed guard, and great stories from your cook. Emily and I were the only people this particular night. Ammon, our cook, spent the night telling us stories about chasing away elephants from his farm, being bit by a crocodile, and being chased a hippo. All this as we watched the beautiful sunset over South Luangwa National Park as the hippos began calling out to each other.

Our tour guide and body guard

Wild Dogs - difficult to find

Personalized safari drives

Leopard - also difficult to spot, unless you find it right in the morning out for its kill.

2. In my security briefing at the embassy, they kindly explained that the greatest threat we had in Zambia would be the drivers. Wanting to test this hypothesis out, we decided to drive to one of our weekend trips after our taxi driver offered us his car for $50 for the day. Image a slightly larger Toyota corolla. We left at 4AM one morning to make our 8’oclock trip and enjoyed great smooth asphalt road for about an hour or so. We came to a dirt road (nothing to be afraid of, that is typical in Zambia) but pretty soon we found ourselves on a washed out road. We carefully guided our little Toyota down (took about 30 minutes) and laughed as we continued down the dirt road about how great of a story that would make when we were old. As I drove down this dirt road, which Google maps surprisingly located, the road got smaller and smaller, and we passed less and less villages until we were in a dry river bed, no cell phone service and no village for at least 45 minutes. After 3 hours of driving through this dry river bed, destroying the bottom of the car, and only getting stuck once (3 men emerged from the woods to push our car up a hill) we made it to the camp with the owner looking at our car saying, “You took the mountain road? Oh my gosh. We usually have to get rescue people from that road and they are in four wheel vehicles.”

1. There is nothing better than the African people

Eating Nshima with our good friend, Ireen, and her family, 

JOE’S WORK

Since we have moved to Paris now, I decided that I probably should give you a little glimpse into what I did in Zambia. Sorry I am behind. I was an intern for the United States Agency for International Development in their education office.

USAID is the U.S. Governments arm that handles the distribution of aid around the world. Aid can also be a controversial topic. This is something I can understand; however, there has also been a lot of done good done.  

USAID sponsored a reading competition for World Literacy Day

Zambia currently has about 13 million people. Of these, it is estimated that close to 2 million people, mostly youth and children, are HIV/AIDs positive. The average life expectancy of a Zambia is 52 years old. Depending on where you are, between 50-85% of the population cannot read or write a single word. While English is the official language, there are 73 tribal languages spoken in Zambia. This makes teaching simple reading, writing, and math a significant challenge.

Ironically, Zambia contains almost 60% of all the water in the Southern Africa region. There are massive farms and waterways across Zambia. Additionally, Zambia has a vast amount of resources including some of the largest copper mines in the world. However, very little is actually owned by Zambians. Most is owned by businessmen from Europe and the United States who bought up the resources shortly after the colonial powers left. In short, with many of the resources that actually produce money being owned by foreign investors it leaves many Zambians in poverty.

So, what do I do then? My job is to help develop and then oversee programs that will help the Zambian Ministry of General Education (US Equivalent of the Department of Education) produce better educational outcomes for the country. I worked on three main projects.

One of the projects works at improving leadership in schools including teaching how to set goals and use data to achieve those schools. The other two projects are helping the Ministry of General Education better test and teach students. I have also developed an evaluation of our programs to ensure that they are actually having the impact that they are intended to.

While most of the time I am housed in the U.S. Embassy in Lusaka working on reports, on the occasion I was able to get out and visit schools. These are my favorite memories.

During one visit, I traveled north (9 hours by car) to World Literacy Day celebrations in Luapula Province of Zambia. Luapula is located right on the border with the Congo. While there we visited several different education officials and then went to a handful of schools to see what work they are doing. It was great to see some of the impact of our projects. In these villages, often the parents are unable to read and write so the schools will invite the parents to come to school with their kids. This helps keep kids in school and at the same times encourages the parents to help with homework.

Zambian Primary School

These visits are also a lot of fun for the kids, because they don’t often get to see a white person. The kids love to come up to me and just touch me, or smile and try and practice their English.

These are the moments of Zambia I will never forget.

EMILY’S WORK

I wanted to volunteer as a nurse while in Zambia, and naïvely thought it would be easy to find a location – I wasn’t looking to get paid, just volunteer. However, the Zambian health system is surprisingly strict on letting people volunteer as nurses – I would have to pay a fee, take a test, and wait for all of my paper work to go through, and let’s just say Africans run on a much slower time scale than we do. I spent several frustrating weeks running around to different places, talking to people, and receive approval. The day I was going to through the towel in, my driver told me about a clinic that was down the road from where I lived which I hadn’t seen on the internet before because it is located in an impoverished area. The next day I went to the clinic and met with the in-charge, Esnart. The district nursing office had said I couldn’t volunteer, just observe. Esnart called to verify, and then said she would be happy to have me come observe every day. I had such a good feeling talking to Esnart. She has a warm, welcoming personality, and I also knew this was where I was supposed to volunteer.  After that, I went to the clinic every working day for the last month that we were living Zambia.

It’s difficult for me to describe everything that I observed and learned. I have been to Africa before, but I was still appalled the first several days and how different their healthcare is than ours. It may sound horrible and harsh when I describe it, but this is the reality for these Zambian people – they don’t have anything better.  

There is an out-patient area of the clinic where anyone that is sick shows up and waits in line until it is their turn to be seen. I helped one day out here, checking vital signs before people were seen by the doctor. The desk was split into two sides – HIV/AIDS positive, and everyone else. I got to help with HIV testing for mothers and newborns several days, and the healthcare workers were amazed that I had never tested anyone for HIV before haha. I tried to explain that we have a much lower rate of HIV in the states. In Zambia, the rates are about 14%, but the clinic I volunteered at had higher rates because it was a poorer area.

The majority of my time was spent in the Prenatal/Postnatal clinic, the Measle’s campaign  week (giving the vaccine to all children up to 15 years old), family planning, and especially the Labour ward.

I won’t go into too much detail because I know most of you don’t want to read pages and pages about healthcare experience (maybe you do, I would be pleasantly surprised). But volunteering at the clinic instilled in me a deep love for these women, especially women from poor backgrounds. I saw how coming from poverty affected the healthcare decisions they made. I saw how HIV was a major part of their life, and influenced the lives of their children who could potentially contract the disease from them. I saw women go through labour without any pain medication (I know women do that in the states as well), but they had to bring all of their own supplies (plastic sheet for bed, blankets, cotton, pads, cord clamps, towels), deliver a child, often get stitched up with little anesthetic, and then get up off the bed 5 minutes later to go wash and carry their luggage into the other room. They had no family members in the room with them. These women are not pampered at all.  And if the women were crying or yelling, they would be told to stop immediately because it would make them weak, which would make it harder to deliver and their babies would be week. They had to be strong so their chidlren would be strong. Honestly, there were a few days where I came home and told Joe I didn’t know if I could have children haha. Talk about effective birth control right?? (Just kidding, guys, Joe and I still want to have kids. No, we’re not pregnant). I gained so much respect for these women.  They are some of the strongest women I know. I was blessed to have wonderful nurse-midwives in the labour ward who taught me so much about how delivery works there. I received the infants on multiple occasions, wiping them off, weighing them, and wrapping them up. I have fallen in love with Women’s Health.

I just wanted to share one of my funniest moments at the clinic – I will apologize in advance. I personally think the story is hilarious, but it might be TMI for some of you. Sorry if it’s a little inappropriate, I guess nursing school got to me.

In the outpatient clinic, I was helping a student nurse take vital signs of patients coming in. A young man somewhere in his 20’s came in and was speaking to the student in their dialect.  She asked me after if I understood what he was saying, and I said no. Now, you need to understand that Zambians are very upfront about things – there is little privacy. Well the young man said he had unprotected sex with a girl he hardly knew, and then started having abdominal pain. The student nurse asked why he didn’t wear a condom (condoms are free in Zambia) …. And his response was:

 “It was an emergency”.

.....The things people say :) I got a kick out of that one.