Keep the spirit

I’ve never done anything as difficult before in my life, nor have I ever done anything as ultimately rewarding. It’s one thing to see a problem from a distance, it’s another to see it close up.

Two weeks in Zambia has been both an eye opener and a back breaker. Eye opening to how a people can be affected by an environmental, social and a chronic disease. Eye opening in the realisation that there are no easy fixes to the deep problems that thwart Africa. Back breaking in enduring the physical work to build classrooms using pick axes, shovels and bare hands. Back breaking in the run in to raise funds to get there and back. The gardening work was enjoyable. What can be better than tending soil and growing veg??

Sables Nua is a shelter and primary school for homeless children on the edge of Kabwe.  You can walk in 20 minutes from its gate down the road to the pit where one of the earliest hominoid fossils was discovered almost 90 years ago. About 10 miles past the pit stands the bush school at Kangombe. Drive off the tarmac, onto the dirt track and turn right onto a trail past the medical centre. You’ll never complain about potholes on Irish roads after you’ve driven this route.  On the second day that we were there, a tyre on the 4X4 burst as we transported a patient to the hospice. Welcome to the real world.

One of the children that I met on my first day n Sables Nua was a boy called Andrew. Andrew was from Malawi.  When Andrew’s father discovered that he had infected Andrew’s mother with HIV AIDs, he sent them packing. Andrews mother took him to Zambia where she sought treatment. There is no central data base for medical records in this part of Zambia. Andrew’s mother kept her record in a book. In February Andrew’s mother disappeared. She told Andrew that she would be away at the clinic but would be back soon. And that was the last he’d heard of her.

Andrew and his mother survived by sheltering under a stall in the fish market. The smell of rotting fish acts as a magnet to rats. After a few days when his mother didn’t return, concerned stall holders brought Andrew to Sables where I met him. They brought Andrew and his few belongings with him to Sables Nua. His mother's book and a few contact numbers were inside his bag.  Attempts to track down relatives through the phone numbers ran into the ground/ Months later Andrew still asked for his mother and worried that she would never find him. Attempts to track her down proved fruitless.   It was reckoned that his mother wanted to spare him the ignominy of finding her dead and had walked into the bush where she would inevitably die.

I asked what was Andrew’s legal position as a foreign national whose father wasn’t interested in him. What would become of him? The shelter had no legal grounds to take care of him. Nothing existed on paper.

Women in Africa are second class citizens, but a woman with HIV AIDS is even lower again.  So many times, I’ve been told that when a woman becomes infected with HIV, her husband solves the problem by kicking her out.. Oblivious to the reality that he infected her in the first case, off he goes to form another relationship where he will in turn infect another woman.

All the presumptions, that we Europeans make, go out the window. On a visit to one market I took a picture of the group with the stalls in the background. Hearing voices of stall holders raised around me I asked the social worker who accompanied us, what had I done wrong? Had their privacy been breached? The answer was that there was nothing wrong. They simply wanted to have their picture taken with me!

Each of us saw something different in Zambia. For me it was the echoes of stories that my own father told me about teaching in rural schools in 1940’s Ireland.  The principal of the bush school addressed the school and the Irish students and translated a saying from Bemba. He was thrilled that his school was getting rebuilt and valued the work that was being done and the determination to see the job through. The saying goes “Keep the Spirit”.

Pretty sound advice to an Irishman.  We Irish need reminding of the people we once were and where we’ve come from.  For many who set out on the road to Zambia there was the intention of doing something positive and leaving that behind us.  But here was a rural principal, giving us sound and worthwhile advice to take home with us. If we did nothing else than to take on board that saying then the trip was worthwhile.

But before I finish off, remember Andrew? Well 2 days before we left, out of the blue Sables Nua got a phone call from a hospital in Lusaka. It was Andrew’s mother. She had been confined since February but had recovered enough to be discharged. She returned to collect Andrew. But before she left she signed an order committing Andrew to Sables Nua in the event of her death.  Sadly her HIV condition is progressive and terminal. But before she dies, she loved Andrew enough to make sure that he could have an education and a future she never had.  He will not have to live out his life wondering whether the only parent to care for him ever loved him.  Andrew has that certainty. It’s not the Hollywood ending that we westerners like to expect but it’s an ending that is better than what many more cynical like me had feared.