19. Contrasts

Twatotela Ba Lesa pakutulenga ukuba no mweo mubushiku bwalelo.

 

When people pray in Zambia, the prayer very often starts with some variation of this phrase, there written in Bemba, and meaning something like “We thank you Lord that today you have counted us among the living”. Or, to paraphrase further, “thanks that we didn’t die yesterday”.

 

I suppose in some way most of us are, at least subconsciously, thankful to be alive. But for people in Zambia, there is a real, heartfelt appreciation just in seeing another day. Even as Zambians become slowly more prosperous, they still hold life lightly and appreciate the very fact of living.

Last week I was driving with a Zambian guy and we were talking about village life. In rural areas people basically do one of two things to survive – they grow things, or they burn things. The growing things feed the family and, if they have the good fortune to grow more than they need, some can be sold at the roadside. The burning refers to making charcoal, which is used for cooking a family’s food, and again for selling at the roadside. It takes about a tonne of wood to make eight bags of charcoal, which will sell for around £6 a bag. The adult minimum wage in the UK is just over £6 per hour, so eight bags of charcoal sold in Zambia is equal to a day’s wages for someone on the lowest working income in Britain. Can you imagine cutting, hauling, splitting, stacking, and baking a tonne of wood every day to earn the minimum wage? Neither can I.

 

Of course, thinking purely in terms of wages is slightly misleading because in Zambia the minimum wage is less than 10% of the UK minimum: £90 a month against the UK’s minimum of £1000 for a full-time worker. But here’s the thing: the cost of living in Zambia is not 10% of the cost of living in the UK, and certainly not if you eat a varied and healthy diet (which includes meat) and have electricity in your home. Often a family will eat one meal a day, and that meal will be a plate of nshima; maize porridge. Last week I was at our training centre after a heavy storm and our caretaker was out with his wife and children collecting the abundant flying ants which emerged after the rain. That was probably the first protein they’d had for many days.

 

And here’s why so many prayers start with simple thanks for living another day: people just don’t take life for granted.

 

Now this is not intended to pull at your heartstrings and let you know the dreadful plight of people in Africa. People’s plight isn’t, on the whole, dreadful. I asked an elder in one of the villages if his people were happy. “Oh yes, we’re very happy. There are challenges, yes. But we are happy.”. “What are the challenges?”, I asked. “Well there are 40 of us here and I think 5 of us can read; we know there is a better way to do farming but we don’t know how to learn it; when we get sick the nearest clinic is 2 hours’ walk away; we want to work but there is no work.”.

 

And yet…look again at his answer: “Yes, we’re very happy…”.

 

That’s why this blog is called Contrasts. We came to Zambia full of high intentions to immerse ourselves in the culture, to learn the language, to meet the people on their level. It quickly became apparent that that’s so far from being possible that we may as well try learning to levitate. None of this is because we are insensitive or incapable of adapting, it’s just that our cultural context is so far removed from the average Zambian that we will never truly meet on the same terms.

 

We are importing our car at the moment, and the import duty is shaping up to be in the region of £2000: we need to do this so that we can legally drive in the country, and so that we can sell the car at the end of our stay here. Yesterday and the day before I took the maximum amount out of the bank using my card in a cash machine: 4000 Kwacha. The minimum wage is around 900 kwacha a month. That means in the last two days I have taken out money worth 9 months of wages. In my wallet, right now, I have enough money to employ someone for almost a year.

 

When we came back from our visit home at Christmas we brought a few things with us, including some cooling pads to keep our laptops working in the heat. We gave one to our friends, and when they offered to pay for it we declined “it’s only £4, don’t worry about it”. It was at that moment that I realised all the above things about the impossibility of immersion here. A Zambian would no more readily write off £4 (35 kwacha, almost a day’s wages) than you would write off £50. We may be donation-funded missionaries, but here in Zambia we are the wealthy elite.

 

A friend of ours is diabetic and his health is seriously compromised at the moment. His specialist said that he must reduce his consumption of maize and eat more protein. Now he is comparatively wealthy by normal Zambian standards, but when he was telling his wife about the new diet I overheard him say, “…so I think we must try and find some money to buy a little dried fish.”.

 

So every day we appreciate just how blessed we are by our supporters, who enable us to live in safety and comfort, and who remove for us the need to choose between taking food and taking medication. And every day we rue, just a little, the fact that we can never truly meet on an equal level the people we are here to serve. We will always be, and we will always be seen to be, elevated above those amongst whom we live and work.

We’ve begun to accept the situation, and to realise that we have no need to be embarrassed by it. Yes we are elevated, and thus we are set apart, but that fact in no way diminishes our ability to serve. We try to act with humility and to be good stewards of the resources with which we have been blessed.

 

So that’s all very philosophical and, hopefully, interesting, but we’re not here to be sociologists: we’re here to make a difference. So what is the practical outcome of all this introspection? Well, look back at the challenges our friend the village elder noted: literacy, farming, health, work. Those are very practical things we can use our wealth of money and skills to affect.

What we have at our disposal is a large and underused building in the centre of a rural community. We have a small amount of money from our ministry fund and a social enterprise which is making a tiny profit. We have time, and we have transport. Our aim is to use all of those for the people of the area. So here are a few things we are doing, or hoping to do:

 

In the first instance the road to our centre, 1km of sand through the bush, gets washed out every time it rains, and so requires a 4x4 just to get to the building. Instead of getting a professional company from town to fix it, we’ve employed three guys from the village for six days to repair the road using sandbags. They’ve done a great job so far, it’s given them a wage they wouldn’t otherwise have had, and it has got our road repaired for a really good price and three sets of new wellies. Everyone wins.

Secondly, one of the J-Life Zambia management team is also an agriculturalist in his day job and we are in the early stages of setting up training sessions in farming for the local villagers. We hope to start a small demonstration plot, so that the local guys can come along to learn and practice new farming methods.

 

Thirdly, we are hoping to expand the training centre to be more of a community resource. Ideas we are exploring are to provide space for kids to study, with very small and cramped accommodation this can be a real issue, and we’re looking to provide a shop for very simple provisions saving a walk of 6km to the nearest market. We are also intending to keep a stock of malaria test kits and medicines at the site, which we will provide free of charge.

As the prophet Isaiah wrote when he echoed what God was telling him:

 

“Is not this the kind of ‘fasting’ I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every bond? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe them..?”

 

I wrote in a recent Facebook status that if you want to see God’s Kingdom come you have to be God’s Kingdom come. If you want to see people’s lives improve, you have to be an agent of the improvement.

 

Our plans really are not much, and even these may not be practicable, but we’ve started talking to the community about whether these ideas meet their needs and it’s a start. If we can achieve this in the next year alongside our other J-Life responsibilities then we’ll be very happy.