Taking Off the Training Wheels (Or, The Cheapest Ticket Ever)

It’s quiet except for the sound of metal security gates rolling open and shut throughout the neighborhood. Everyone’s coming home for dinner, trying to beat the chill that follows on the coattails of sunset these days. I’m watching its afterglow in the backyard, eating spoonfuls of chunky peanut butter straight from the jar. It isn’t long after the last streaks of orange fade from the clouds before the cold forces me indoors as well.

At the end of my first week alone here, it’s a good time for reflection. Since Monday, I’ve no longer had the luxury of having Jamie around to guide me at work, bring me around to social events or, most serious of all, to direct me around town. It has come time for me to strike out on my own, to seek my own fortune, or something to that effect. I feel each day has been progressively easier and more productive. Slowly I’m figuring out where Jamie left off and attempting to carry on that work. At the same time, I’m trying to lay the groundwork of my own impact here. I’m meeting with the heads of the three private schools to hear their thoughts on the KF students, what changes (for better or worse) they’ve noticed in the program and kids and how we can more effectively work with the school administrations. I also spent an afternoon at Chalo interviewing each student individually to get a better picture of them both academically and personally, and I plan to do the same with the other two schools. I’ve found that one on one, the kids are much more open and friendly with me. Leaving the school that day I felt a rush of optimism; it was a good first step towards becoming more comfortable with each other.

I’ve moved into the Mwenye house for my homestay which should last until the end of July. I lucked out once again with my host family; the Mwenyes have made me feel truly at home from the minute I stepped through the door. There have been four young cousins visiting for the holiday so in my free time you can usually find me jumping rope, losing at tic-tac-toe, or playing games on the computer. In fact, they love computer chess and minesweeper so much I typically can’t sleep past 9 am on the weekends before being woken up by eager knocking. The location of the house is a trade off; it's very close to two of the schools but fairly far from just about everything else. As I look for housing for the remainder of my time here I’ll probably focus on areas closer to one of the main roads where the KF office is located, in the center-north of town. Fortunately, I have been provided with a car which makes traveling around the city infinitely easier. I’ll definitely be paying a stiff price for that luxury though when I use the car for personal driving; by my calculations it’s over $6 USD per gallon of diesel.

In other news here, KF just received an intern, Julian, from Switzerland who will be joining us for 6 weeks. He’ll be working primarily on creating short video profiles of the students. It’s surreal to be welcoming new people like Julian and others to Lusaka being so completely fresh off the plane myself. But I’m getting the impression that that’s the way of things here; the NGO worker/ expat scene seems like a constantly revolving door with people always coming or going. It’s a really strange context in which to try and build meaningful relationships, but seasoned veterans here assure me you get used to it, for the most part.

I’ll leave you with one funny anecdote. I was pulled over today for the first time, for answering my phone will driving. It was definitely dumb on my part as I’m new to driving here and the roads can be crazy at times, but it’s also illegal. So I didn’t protest when a cop hopped into my car at a stop sign and had me pull over. He told me the fine was 270,000 kwacha (about $50 USD) and asked how much I had on me. Having just bought gas, I had a laughable grand total of 25,000 kwacha. This amused my new passenger so much he called over a policewoman standing nearby. We chatted for a bit and, after realizing I was a poor NGO worker, they asked me to just fork over the little bit I had. The scene ended happily with the man mockingly handing me back a 5,000 note “for airtime” (i.e. to buy more talktime for my phone) and me having to politely insinuate I was engaged in order to avoid giving the woman my phone number so she could set me up with “a nice policewoman” she knew. In terms of run-ins with the law, this goes down as one of the most enjoyable (and least costly).

(Disrupting class at Chibelo Basic School)