26 Hours In a Truck

Once again there has been a lapse in entries, this time due to a trip I took to Zambia's Northwestern Province. MCC was providing some blankets for the Nazarene Compassionate Ministries program there to distribute to victims of recent flooding and I got to tag along to see the sights and take some pictures of the distribution.

I was to be based in the town of Zambezi (located, go figure, on the Zambezi River). To get there, one first travels north of Lusaka, through the Copperbelt and then west into Northwestern Province. After about 600 kms you hit Solwezi, the first (and only) major town in the province. Solwezi was once a small frontier town but has recently grown rapidly, particularly due to the development of two large mines nearby. In the brief time that I spent there I thought it was a bit out of sorts with itself - a small town having to take on big town responsibility. It was as if a skinny person gained a lot of weight and their clothes didn't really fit any more. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the town but, then again, I can't think of much positive to say about it.

Perhaps my view of the town was clouded because, after leaving Lusaka at 4:45 and arriving there at 17:00ish (with several stops in Lusaka and Kitwe along the way), I was wanting to get back on the road. Alas, we had to spend many hours waiting for some people to catch up with us so they could ride on the back of the truck for the rest of the way. As night approached I wasn't particularly enamoured with the notion that the driver had been awake since 3:30 and there were still at least 10 more hours of driving to go.

A random highlight from 26 hours on the road: we were somewhere on the 230km stretch between Kitwe and Solwezi when, out of nowhere, a guy walked out of a village wearing an Oilers jersey.

All went well, however, and after driving through the night we arrived at our destination at about 6:00 the next morning, about 26 hours after departing Lusaka. I wanted to get down to business right away, knowing that my time there would be brief.

That afternoon the first blanket distribution was done - to the Zambezi District Hospital. It is the major hospital for the district and is falling apart. The mattresses are crumbling, beds are breaking, and if it weren't for some current renovation work, the building would be too. The hospital had no bedding to speak of so the blankets were eagerly welcomed and staff and administration were overjoyed. They had no money to get any bedding on their own and, with cold season setting in, were getting desperate in the search for a solution.

The crops in the Zambezi area were also completely wiped out this year. The crops, consisting of maize, cassava, and rice, were either flooded by the river (to the west) or received far too much rain (to the east). The soil there is incredibly sandy and so any attempts to fertilize were leached away into the soil. The result is that food prices are double what they are in the rest of the country, especially damaging when no one has a crop of their own to fall back on. No organizations have planned food relief for this year and the government, which proclaimed that it had taken care of the people of Zambezi, provided a sum total of 2.5kgs of mealie meal per family. That won't last a week, let alone till next harvest.

Zambezi had some interesting characters that I saw in only one day. There was the pastor who tried to raise a woman from the dead with an allnight prayer vigil. Then there was a "mad" person (the word for anyone with a mental illness) who lives in the grave yard and, rumor has it, eats stillborn babies. Probably such characters exist here too but I just don't here about them.

Unfortunately my Zambezi trip came to an end sooner than I had anticipated. On the first afternoon of my visit there I got a phone call informing me that a good friend in Lusaka had passed away. By the next day (which was the first available bus) I was back on the road to Lusaka. The bus was nice enough, although they liked to cram as many passengers on as possible and as a result the aisles were often filled to capacity for short stretches. It seemed to stop at every three-hut village along the way, which got a little tedious after awhile. The net result was that the bus quickly acquired a lovely stink of body odour. In the end, however, the bus connections all worked out very well and the distance was covered in a mere 20 hours.