Workin' Late

I think you know you’ve been working here for a while, that you’re settled into your projects, that maybe you even really know what’s going on, when you start staying late at the office.
To Zambians, the concept of staying late at the office is totally foreign. The exodus at 5 pm is rapid and complete. Within the period of five minutes, the office goes from bustling to almost silent. The aircon gets shut off, the lights turned down, computer monitors go black. If you peak into the CIDRZ offices past 5, the only faces you’ll see are white.

It’s the same for lunch. Between the hours of 13:00 and 14:00, you can never expect that anything will get done. Even if you have a meeting that starts at 14:00, a meeting you’ve confirmed with many people, including the driver, that you need to leave the office early in order to make it in time and they all say yes, sure, no problem. Inevitably, at 13:45 when you’ve arranged your day to take lunch early and get back to the office and go, the driver will be lounging and just beginning his large plate of nshima. (The pharmacists here have a joke about nshima. The way you feel after lunch, after you’ve eaten a large plate of nshima, it’s like you’ve had nshimazipam.)

Up until now, I’ve managed to be fairly Zambian about my after hours working. Usually if I’m in the office after 5 pm, it’s to use the internet for personal reasons. But all of a sudden, everything is happening at once. The fact that I’m leaving on Wednesday means there’s at least four days worth of work to do before then. Today found me drafting IRB exemption forms for my peer educator evaluation, rewriting an abstract about the OPD-ART integration for a conference, and playing architect as I did a site visit at our newest clinic to be integrated, attempting to draft the entire clinic building layout with a pencil on plain paper (map not drawn to scale). I don’t think tomorrow will be any better. Drafting another clinic, finishing the abstract, submitting to the IRB, presenting data to the drama group on their performances. And oh yeah, packing. I’m going to Cape Town on Wednesday!