Rain!

I woke up to a gray sky on Friday. This, in itself, was not so unusual. We’ve had many gray starts. It’s always a tease, a hope, a hint of what could be. But inevitably, the sun burns through and that’s that. But Friday morning, the gray clouds trapped in a humidity that hung just a bit heavier than usual. By the end of our early morning run, Liz and I were dripping with a sweat that would have made you think we had run at midday.

At the office, Linah glanced out the window, “It’s going to rain,” she said-matter of-factly. But Linah says a lot of things. And I hadn’t rained here since April. And rainy season doesn’t usually begin until November. And we get rainless gray mornings often.

But as the morning moved on, the grayness thickened. As we waited outside the office for transport, off to the east, across the fields and open spaces of the university campus, it looked as if a storm was brewing. The breeze was picking up, the trees in front of our building began to sway.

“It’s raining in Chelstone!” somebody said, getting off their phone. Indeed, that heavy grayness, the kind that brings the sky to the earth, where you can tell you’re watching a storm from the outside, was headed in our direction.

Last year, the rains came late, not until December. This year, October 10^th seemed as if it would mark the beginning.

It began with that intense smell, the imminent release of moisture. Then, the occasional drip, the kind where you’re not even sure if you feel it or just think you feel it, or want to feel it. But soon, it was undeniable. The sky opened up. Gentle at first and then heavier, big individual drops, plop plop plopping and spattering the windshield of our van. This being the debut rain of the season, just raindrops were clearly not enough. The sky peppered in a little hail, just for good measure. Cold, icy, bouncing pellets of hail. It came in gushes, softer at times, and then thoroughly soaking downpours. Small rivers began to form along the drainage ditches at the sides of the road. Children, caught unprepared, ran along taking shelter under their backpacks. Some had taken off their shoes, and hopped, from dry spot to dry spot, as if skipping across the stones of a river.

As October is meant to be the peak of the hot, dry season, the sun was not yet ready to give in. Despite the clouds, the grey, the rain, and the hail, the sun slowly burned its way through. Several hours after the darkness had descended, the rain continued through bright sunlight. And then it stopped, and the sky cleared. The newly created rivers ran their course. The dry land drank up the long awaited wetness. By the next morning, it was hard to tell it had ever rained. It was hot, clear and dry once again.

But the rain made its debut appearance. It may be gone for now, but it will return. There’s a lot more where that came from.

A Jewish New Year, Lusaka Style

The Jewish community of Lusaka, and yes, there is one, moves in waves. There are several kinds of Jews here. The majority, these days, are those like me: transient, here for one, two, three years at most, working for NGOs, or an embassy, or some short term business. A few others were grew up abroad but have lived in Zambia for many years, like Dr. Bush, an older British physician who has lived in Lusaka for 37 years. Finally there are the few who were born here and who have lived here their entire lives. They are all that remains of the once thriving Jewish population of Zambia, they are lone storytellers and historians to speak of what once was.

Some parts of the story are the same as the Jews of many American cities. Go to any downtown area and you will find the oldest synagogue in that city. Look in the museums there, the history books, and you’ll see old black and white photos of blocks and blocks of Jewish shops on streets that are present day Hispanic or Asian markets. One of my favorite pictures in The Jews of Boston is a photo of a little chassid boy standing on the corner of Prince Street and Salem Street in the North End, in front of a Jewish book shop. I love that picture because today, that bookshop is my favorite Italian bakery.

It is no different in Lusaka. The synagogue is right in the heart of downtown, in a business district, in a place where nobody lives anymore, not even many Zambians. It’s the kind of downtown that’s a financial district, busy with businessmen, government officials and shoppers during the day. They walk hurriedly past the unassuming synagogue gates, completely unaware of what is inside. I think even if you told them it’s a synagogue, they wouldn’t really know what that means. When Zambians ask me what church I attend, and I say I’m Jewish, I get questions like:

-What day of the week do you attend your church?

-Which books of the bible do you use?

-When do you celebrate Christmas?

-You must be from Israel then?

I’m not sure how shocking my answers are to them.

But back to the shul neighborhood. It’s the kind of downtown that closes at night, and there’s nothing but men walking around who you wouldn’t want to meet after dark. These days, the shops are all Zambian and Indian owned, with a smattering of fast food restaurants. But years ago, when Lusaka was just a tiny city compared with the much larger and more important cities on the Copper Belt and down in Livingstone, there was a kosher butcher, and kosher restaurants, and a bookshop, and more. In fact the Lusaka congregation was not even the largest one in Zambia. There were many more Jews involved in the mining in the copper belt and several congregations for them. The dedication in the front cover of the Rosh Hashanah machzor I picked up this morning read “To The Ndola Hebrew Congregation from Samuel and Aviva Ron, Jerusalem, 1964.” Independence and nationalization put a good dent in the Zambian Jewish community. They left in droves- to South Africa, to Israel, to the States. The shuls closed. The torahs and siddurim were given away. The small Lusaka congregation is all that remains.

The shul building itself is very pretty. Recently restored, it is white, spacious, and airy, with heavy, carved wooden doors and magen davids above the entryways. The entry hallway is in the middle of the building. To the right is the sanctuary. To the left is the social hall. Only it’s not a social hall anymore, it’s rented out as a school. The sanctuary has become the all purpose room. There is a big, old fashioned, heavy wooden carved bima in the center of the sanctuary, with rows of wooden benches facing it on either side. Once upon a time they told me, the entire sanctuary would be filled with benches, in a U shape all around the bima. Now, half the room is empty. On Monday night, it served as our dining room as well.

I walked into a room with a few small groups of people milling about. There were several young people my age, all NGO workers, several of them I had already met around town in various settings. Most of the rest were middle aged to older gentlemen, all dressed in the Israeli style of white button down shirts with the top few buttons open, no tie. Some of them were indeed Israelis, others spoke with accents of England, South Africa, and that general British Empire manner.

I finally met Lilac, an energetic and talkative Indian-Israeli girl somewhere around my age, who I had been speaking with on the phone. She’s here with her husband who works for the railroads, she did most of the cooking for the dinner and she helps organize social events for the synagogue. Her dinner, by the way, was amazing and included some traditional Indian Jewish Rosh Hashanah foods, like this cut up soft root vegetable that looked like apples but was spiced with cardamom. Like all Jewish women, she cooked absolutely too much food, and there loads of leftovers, which were given out to us and to the guards outside to enjoy.

The service was about 22 people strong, or maybe not so strong. Getting back to those waves of Jews who come through, apparently we’re at a nadir. Several families who had been pillars of the shul community in the past few years just left a few months ago. Of the 22, I counted 7, including myself, who were newly arrived NGO people. Without us, it would have been even smaller.

Coming into this service, I knew that I had to approach it with an open mind. Beggars can’t be choosers, I felt lucky enough to have found a shul and a Rosh Hashanah service in Lusaka. But there is something so powerful about tradition, about memory, about routine and about all of those things connected with the high holidays. And it’s hard to experience that spirituality with a service lacking those pieces I have come to rely on. For instance, I hear Unetane Tokef, sung passionately by the chazzan, and I know Rosh Hashanah is here. I didn’t get that here, exactly, so it was a struggle for me, both in the evening and morning services. The machzor we used was that of Liberal and Progressive Judaism out of the UK. I was surprised, actually, with how much Hebrew there was written in it. But we didn’t make very good use of it. To me, it felt more like a meeting than a prayer service. We took turns going around the room, reading out loud, mostly in English.

Whether he volunteered or was just pushed into it, Dr. Bush has become the informal leader, the all-purpose guy, of the congregation- the chazzan, the shofar blower, the torah reader. I give him full credit and respect. He tried very hard and did a good job. But his tradition and my tradition are so different to begin with, that his interpretation of that made it even harder for me to follow it. I don’t mean for this to sound at all judgmental. But it seems that for him, all of his knowledge comes from what he learned as a child, in Hebrew school, and leading up to his Bar Mitzvah. He was certainly opening and welcome to what we wanted to do, if anybody wanted to read out loud in Hebrew, or add a melody to a paragraph. I tried, whenever it was my turn, to do that. But there was little singing overall in the service and for me, that’s one of the most powerful parts. There was no opportunity to read quietly to ourselves and thus, it felt to me, little room for reflection.

For the morning service, I was very curious to see what would happen with torah reading, because there didn’t seem to be anybody there who would know how to do it. They did, in fact, take the torah out of the ark. They opened it, they lay it on the table, called the first person up for the aliyah and then, Dr. Bush proceeded to read in English from the torah portion as it was written in the machzor. From the depths of my memory, from the women’s tefillah I attended back in Stamford, from the times I learned the trop, I began to read to myself, hear the melody in my head and chanted it quietly. My coworker Lonny, who was at the service too, noticed me chanting and leaned over excitedly. “Do you remember that?” he whispered. “I would much rather have you chant it than listen to Dr. Bush read it in English.”

Dr. Bush noticed me too. After the torah reading was done, he asked if I could, if I would like to, read the haftarah, and I said I’d give it a try. So without ever having looked at the portion, or practiced the trop, I chanted my way through the haftarah as best as I could remember the trop was supposed to be. I could hear Mr. Soifer, who came into our 6^th grade classroom back at Bi- Cultural Day School to teach us the trop, singing in his gutteral voice, “mooooonaaaaach zakef.” It was a bit surreal to be standing there on the bima in a shul in Lusaka, trying to read a haftarah I didn’t know. The last time I read a haftarah at a service was probably 12 years ago. I guess you never know when those skills will prove important.

When it came time to blow shofar, Dr. Bush gave it his best effort. At first he could make no sound come out. As he kept trying, the sound improved. Back in his memory, he clearly knew that there was meant to be a tekiah, a shefarim, and a teruah. He was able to replicate the general sense of each one, in no particular order, although sometimes his teruahs, would die out prematurely. The usual series of 9 sounds at each portion of the mussaf service became something like 5.3. At one point though, he turned to me to ask me to clarify which sound was which, and what they should sound like. For the final set of 9, he did all 9 sounds, almost perfectly.

At the end of the service, I was filled with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I felt sad that it was nothing like a service I was used to, and that I needed to go home and daven myself, to try to make it a Rosh Hashanah I could identify with. But on the other hand, I felt happy to have met the Jews of Lusaka. I felt proud to have been able to read the haftarah, to have brought song to parts of the service that would not have had any, and to have reminded somebody how to blow shofar.

It also got me thinking a lot about communities. At home, back in the US, in the Northeast, in big cities, we are spoiled. To have so many Jews, to have strong communities, so know that the shul is there when we need it. Of course there are shuls that struggle with getting a minyan but in general, there are enough members of the community to fill the roles that need be filled. But here, every single Jew counts, I mean really counts. One person’s absence is felt by all, in numerous and untold ways. Somehow Judaism survives, but without that critical mass of knowledge and support, it’s easy to see how traditions are lost, changed and confused. At home, people have their choice, have the ability to find the type of Jewish community that fits them, because there are so many. Here, it’s either the one or nothing at all. And so it takes patience, and compromise, and putting aside of those age-old conflicts that separate orthodox from conservative from reform. It’s a reminder than in this country where we are not only a religious and cultural minority but an ethnic minority as well, we must set aside our difference and hold dear our common bonds.

So the tiny, transient, wave-like Jewish community of Lusaka pushes forward, losing and picking up pillars along the way, but always standing together, facing North (towards Jerusalem), in the little shul building on ChaChaCha Road.

A week at Bauleni

A week in the life of a clinic.

For the past seven days, I started my days at Bauleni Health Center, coordinating the patient waiting time survey in preparation for integration. The clinics open at 8, so I had to be there before that. Sometimes as early as 7 am, they begin to line up outside. Even when I arrived at 7:45, the waiting shed outside would be almost filled with people, waiting to rush in the doors as soon as they opened, to hand their patient cards into the registry, to be little further up the cue to see a doctor. They sit patiently though, for where else can they go, and what else is there to be doing? The chitenge wrapped babies make the occasional coo or hiccup, the toddlers waddle and wander, the women stroll back and forth, chat and laugh. The occasional elderly man or woman sits quietly, just watching. They make their way into the inside clinic waiting room when called, jam onto the benches, watch the loud Nigerian movies on the television. As the line moves forward, ever so slowly, they inch along the benches, one bit closer to the screening room, where they will have a doctor’s attention for perhaps three minutes. The registry staff works diligently. With Zambian music blasting in the background, while chatting politics, they take ID cards, fish through shelves of old files, stamp cards, mark times and weights, move the files forward. That’s all only the outpatient (OPD) clinic.

In the back, the ART clinic has an almost intimate feel. With its one short hallway, not nearly as crowded as OPD, it feels more private, more manageable. The staff knows them, because they return so often. There, too, they may sit for hours. But when they do get attention, it’s for longer. They have their vitals taken. They see the peers for adherence counseling. They see the doctor. They pick up their ARVs. They get health education talks while they’re waiting. In the back of the ART registry, a few patients each day spend a good half hour with one of the nurses, enrolling in the ART program. Space is at a premium though.

One day when I was in the one medium sized room of the ART registry, not only were the file clerks finding and putting away files, but one of the COs was seeing a patient, while a nurse enrolled a patient, while another very sick patient was being seen on the one cot/bed in the clinic.

Across the courtyard out back, the women crowd in masses at the doors of the MCH (maternal and child health) clinic. Some days are devoted to antenatal, others to under 5 pediatric visits. I could have sworn that every child in Lusaka was at the health center last Wednesday, and Bauleni is only a medium sized clinic. I couldn’t even figure out how all of the waiting patients could be seen before sunset.

In the building all the way to the back, women in labor push out new life, without making a sound, because it’s thought to be bad luck.

In the kitchen, the clinic cooks/cleaning ladies peel potatoes, scrape fish, boil beans, lunch for the staff and the women in Labor and Delivery. When I come to see what’s going on, they chatter in Nyanja, good heartedly laugh at my attempts and tell me they want to teach me to dance like a Zambian woman.

Patients like to come in waves. Even on Saturdays and Sundays, the masses start in the morning, and thin out as the morning goes on. By noon, it feels almost manageable again. But come afternoon, the waiting shed will once again be full. I usually leave by that time, completely drained by crowds, the heat, the effort put into my interactions. I imagine though, that only when the sun begins to set do the crowds clear out for good, at least until the next morning.

Adventure City

Lusaka never ceases to surprise me with all the western style things it has to offer. I mean really, what’s a good city without a water park? Adventure City is just that. Hidden away in the hills on the outskirts of town, it’s a lush oasis of sorts, winding paths between shady trees and thatched roofed shelters, and of course, swimming pools and water slides. These are not just any pools though, they are big, uneven shaped, lazy river type pools with waterfalls in the middle. The highlight is the two water slides. One of the curvy sort and the other of the straight, fast drop sort. They both descend from the same platform, into the same whirling pool. Unlike water parks at home, which hire bored high school kids to carefully regulate how many people climb up the stairs to the top of the slide and when each person can head on down, there is nobody watching. Children would push their way past me, running up the stairs. They’d go down two, three at a time, practically crashing into each other at times. Feet first, head first, backwards. Cheers would go up for some particularly daring leap down the slide. It was, interesting. But definitely loads of fun. I can’t remember the last time I darted down a water slide. I never imagined it would be here.

It got me thinking about what socioeconomic class somebody from Lusaka would have to be in to attend a place like that. With a K20,000 entry fee (about $6), it’s no Six Flags or Disney World, but for the cleaning lady at the clinic who told me she makes K260,000 per month for her and six children, a day at Adventure City seems very much out of reach.

Decision 2008, Zambia Style

The campaign is finally in full swing. Election day is October 30^th, which means the candidates have just over a month to convince everyone of their ability to be Zambia’s next president. Except that, from talking with most Zambians around here, that won’t matter much at all. The general feeling is that the election of 2006 was rigged, and that this one may be too.

There are three main candidates, but two front runners:

Rupiah Banda. He was President Mwanawasa’s Vice President, he’s serving as the current acting president. The general feeling, at least around Lusaka, is against him. There have been corruption accusations. The national TV station, ZNBC, is being accused to covering Banda more than the other candidates. The politically independent newspaper The Post is reporting that Banda wants to stop them from speaking out against him.

People say that in 2006, when he and Mwanawa were running for re-election, that the highest population areas, Lusaka and the Copper Belt, all voted for the opponent, Michael Sata. The votes that reelected Mwanawasa and Banda all seemed to come from remote areas of the country. Those votes took days to travel into Lusaka, and the numbers of votes coming in seemed inconsistent with how many people could reasonably be registered in any of those places. So their entire administration is questionable, and people don’t seem excited to continue it. On the extreme end, I’ve heard that if Banda wins, people will again say the election was rigged, and there may be protests. In addition, his opponent is the very person who they say he stole the election from two years ago.

Michael Sata. He was Minister of Health in the 1990s and people say he was able to bring about change. At multiple health centers, I’ve heard stories of him coming on his own, just to spend time at the clinic and see how things were going. People around here really seem to have faith in him. I have yet to talk to a Zambian in Lusaka who is not voting for Sata. On the most extreme end though, I’ve heard that he would almost go the way of Mugabe in Zimbabwe and kick out all the non-Zambians. But most people have explained that he just wants more Zambians running business, and he would not go so far as to kick out NGOs or aid workers and such.

I suspect as the campaign goes on, the claims of corruption will increase. It should certainly be an interesting month.

To reassure all of you a bit, should you be worried, the US embassy is not overly concerned about the elections at this point in time. More updates later.

Kalingalinga

Kalingalinga is probably my favorite neighborhood in Lusaka. Well, not really my favorite at all, but the most fun to say. Say it, Kalingalinga. My theory about why it’s called that:

Kalingalinga is the place to go if you need a large metal gate for the wall around your house, a wooden bed frame, an overstuffed couch or a pile of rocks. That’s right, apparently the entire gravel industry of Lusaka centers around the rock hammerers of Kalingalinga. Drive through at any time of the day, and for blocks and blocks, people sit by the side of the road, under the hot sun, making the sound, “Kaling! Kaling!” as they monotonously hammer rocks into gravel. Old and young alike, they sit on the ground and hammer. Sometimes they even have the little babies wrapped around them while they hammer, perhaps to accustom them to that “kaling” that will be the rhythm of their lives. The children who are old enough to sit and hold a hammer can break rocks too. Imagine being born into a rock hammering family.

It’s actually not a very nice place at all. It’s busy, it’s dusty, it’s hot, it’s dangerous at night. One of my fellow interns has a good Zambian friend she works with who lives in Kalingalinga. She was recently staying there at night. Even though there were bars on the windows of the house, they can’t keep the windows open at night for safety reasons. And the power was out, so there were no fans. So she lay awake all night, sweltering in the Kalingalinga heat. Recently though, I have found its saving grace.

In the past few weeks, the Jacaranda trees have been in bloom. Tall, branching trees alive with a rich purple flower, a sort of opposite of an autumn maple alive with reds and oranges. The Jacarandas, which cover the trees like the leaves, are a beginning instead of an end. They are the kind of flower that you just want to look at in awe and appreciate. That you wait all year to see. All around me, people say, “Look, the Jacarandas are in bloom.” And people who are not here, but who have been here in the past will write to me and say, “I imagine the Jacarandas must be in bloom.”

These beautiful trees grace even the dustiest, hottest and most unappealing neighborhoods. Under the Jacarandas, even Kalingalinga looks inviting. Almost. But do let me know if you need some of the finest gravel in Lusaka.

A weekend in Chirundu

For the first time in a month and a half, I managed to get out of Lusaka for the weekend. Much like at home when Boston starts to wear me down and I feel that pull towards the mountains and wide open freshness of New Hampshire, I just had to get out of the city. In this case, the destination was Chirundu, a town to the south, on the border with Zimbabwe, on Zambezi River.

Chirundu is hardly New Hampshire. In her book Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller describes Chirundu as “possibly the hottest, least hospitable, most malarial place in all of Zambia.” Sounds lovely huh? Well actually, I didn’ t remember having read that before I went. I went because I was promised a weekend of camping, relaxing, wildlife and tiger fishing on the Zambezi River, and that’s definitely what I got, although it certainly was hot.

Although travelling in large groups can be challenging, the good thing about traveling with nine people was that we were able to charter a minibus all to ourselves. Yes, there was the adventure of going to the City Market bus station, and having every minibus driver there gather around us to find out where we were going. But it helped having a Zambian friend who came along, and he managed to haggle us a deal, not only did we get our own bus down there but we got driven directly to the camp at Zambezi Breezers (www.zambezibreezers.com). Having our own bus, we were also able to avoid the constant stops, the overcrowded, packed the brims, sweaty, stuffy, fish/live chicken filled experience that it could have been. Within a half hour of arrival at the bus station, we were speeding southwards out of Lusaka. The crowded, traffic ridden city starts to thin out, and then it’s gone. Then nothing but clusters of thatched roofed huts, little one room markets, cinder block structures adverising pay toilets for 500 kwacha (that’s about 15 cents), and dry bush on a dusty plain with hills in the distance.

I also discovered on this ride that Lusaka is indeed at elevation. Eventually we started heading down, some roads with a surprisingly steep incline, nestled between rubbly/sandy/dusty hills. I think it was the wind through the open windows that helped us not to bake under the sun. Chirundu itself is nothing special, a border town, a truck stop. Lines and lines of trucks on their way to somewhere, carrying fish norwards to Lusaka, goods southwards to Zimbabwe. With my mind stuffed full of HIV programs, I couldn’t help but think of all the truckers right there at those crossroads, an important target population. But it was the weekend. Our minibus turned off the main road, up and down the rough dirt road. Past the occasional cinderblock house, turned right at the goats, around the bend at the fish farm with its large concrete tanks, and up to our camp. All along the ride, the theme for me was dirt, dust and hot.

Happily, Zambezi Breezers is a haven from the inhospitalbe dustiness. A narrow oasis along the river. Sprinklers scattered drops of rainbow catching water along a soft green lawn. A small, kidney shaped swimming pool glistened in the sun. A large, thathed roof cabana caught breezes off the river and enveloped them in shade. Down in the river, halfway across, what looked at first to be a cluster of large boulders soon revealed itself to be a large group of hippos. And beyond them, Zimbabwe. Not surprisingly, it didn’t look much different than Zambia. A flat plain with those stereotypical low, branching African trees of paintings, large termite mounds, and some hills in the hazy distance.

I set up my tent on a grassy, tree shaded nook with a view of the river. It was the first time I haven’t set up a rain fly over a tent for as long as I could remember. I haven’t seen a drop of rain since I got here.

For those who know anything about fishing, tiger fishing is a well known sport. People travel to the Zambezi River for miles to have a go at catching them. A blackboard at the cabana proudly announced that Diane had caught the biggest tigerfish of the year there, back in June, at a whopping 7 kg.

The nine of us rented a boat for the afternoon. First, our driver Robin took us speeding down the river, close to the Zimbabwe side, where we saw several groups of elephants, hippos, and even a crocodile. The nice thing about being on the boat was that we were able to slow down, double back, and get much closer to the elephants than I had at Kafue National Park. They glanced at us briefly, seemed to give it some thought, and went back to rustling through the trees, stuffing clumps of brush into their mouths. From the middle of the river, the hippos continued their loud, grunting calls. They always sound closer than they actually are. At one point in the middle of the night, I had to peek out of my tent to make sure they weren’t standing right there.

The second half the boat ride was dedicated to fishing. We each had a go at reeling out the bait, which in itself could have been a fish worth catching. At one point I felt a tug at my line, it seemed that I may have caught something, and we even moved the boat in pursuit. But I came up with an empty line, hook broken off. We’ll never know if it was a fish or if it just caught on the bottom. In the end none of us caught a thing, but we enjoyed an afternoon out on the water, the breeze and the sun, some cool animals and cold drinks. At several points, we passed by other camps and lodges along the Zambian side of the river, which looked much more luxurious, and I got little panks of missing Mukambi Lodge where I went in Kafue. But our camp was a no frills (=cheap) kinda place, and that’s what we were going for. One of the girls who came along, who doesn’t work for CIDRZ (!) is spending the week in Chirundu, staying on the river in one of those very structures, doing research at an Italian mission hospital with some nuns. Seems like a lovely way to spend the week.

Besides the boat ride, it was a lazy weekend of lounging, by the pool, by the river, under the cabana, reading, chatting. We took a walk down the road to a banana farm, watched some monkeys dart between the trees.

After our banana stroll, we walked by the fish farm. At that point, I was rather hot and thirsty, and decided to return to camp rather than explore. That decision ended up costing me an intereting experience. My friends who did decide to go ended up meeting the old British couple who runs the fish farm, and they turned out to be the parents in the memoir I mentioned above. Indeed, if you turn to the last page of the book, Alexandra Fuller describes how here parents are living on a fish farm in Chirundu, on the Zambezi river, down the road from some Italian nuns. How neat is that? Talk about bringing a book to life. I could not have feigned the ignorance my friends did when they were speaking to the couple, the parents in the books, “Oh yeah? We’ve never heard of the book, we’ll have to check it out.”

I was sad when it was time to head out. Relaxing is addictive. Yet much like I feel when returning to Boston, coming to Lusaka this time felt like coming home, in a way.

The weekend ended with a nice surprise. Our friend Rodney, the plains camp manager, came to visit (we thought he was coming next weekend). The occasion called for dinner at this lovely Italian restaurant called Portico. One of those places you can go and forget you’re in Zambia. Hidden among the green trees, we all dined on caprese salad, homemade pasta and crème brulee, and sipped red wine by the polo grounds (yes, there are polo grounds), surrounded by actual Italians speaking Italian. It’s nice to discover all the other foreigners who are in Zambia too.

I didn’t want all the relaxation to end. I have many busy weeks ahead. But actually, that feels good too.