Call for Content: Zambia

Regular readers may remember that, back when Associated Content existed, I had a pen friend in Zambia. At least, the computer shows that readers in Zambia do. They may be wondering about this friend. Are we still in touch, and what's the news from the Mkushi School?

(The friend we have in common, in real life, always emphasizes that it is the whole school who are pen friends, really. One man who's about our age is the designated writer of letters in English. He lives in a village, about the size of an American neighborhood, and these letters are shared with the rest of the village.)

The answer is: we're not still in touch, and I've not received news from the Mkushi School for a few years. But I'd like to.

I would like very much for the first article this web site actually buys to come from Zambia.

One reason: it's an interesting country, home of the world's most impressive waterfalls, exotic wildlife, and quaint little river villages where people still build their own temporary huts and stay in them until the next flood. Since we've evolved different immunities over the centuries, most North Americans probably shouldn't go there, but it's a delightful stretch for our imaginations to read about places like Zambia.

Another reason: A friend worked on a charitable mission in Zambia, years ago. (Despite the medical consequences, she has remained active and given birth to a son.) She stayed in one of those river villages near the Mkushi School. Although she's Jewish and the villagers are Seventh-Day Adventists, and both of those religions limit the kinds of animal protein believers are supposed to eat, she recalled that they all got hungry enough to eat caterpillars. Like most Zambians the villagers spoke a local dialect but had learned English as an official business language at school--when they went to school.

During the years when British investors were trying to prevent Zambians from competing with them for opportunities to exploit the country's natural resources, the British built a school system that sounded good in theory but, in practice, functioned to limit the number of people who could benefit from the system. Students were required to buy their own uniforms and school supplies. If unable to buy these things or keep them in good condition, as most poor children were, they would be banned from the classroom. As a result many adult Zambians have only a third- or fourth-grade education, and in the village where my friend stayed with three or four extended families, only one young man (well, he's about our age) felt able to write letters in English after she came back to the United States.

Attempts have been made to improve the school system. They feel a bit the way one imagines swimming upstream in the Zambezi River might feel. After a higher than average flood destroyed the more permanent buildings where the Mkushi students' school supplies were kept, friends in Washington collected boxes of school supplies and mailed them. We were warned that postal deliveries could be guaranteed only to the city of Lusaka, and more than one postal employee told me, "Lusaka is full of thieves." I paid to mail three large boxes of books, pencils, paper, crayons, scissors, binders, a few toys for the preschoolers, and secondhand T-shirts to line each box. Who'd steal that? Nevertheless, our friends reported receiving only books, T-shirts, and playthings.

In the 1990s, reporters who'd ventured into Lusaka described ten- and twelve-year-old children (of both sexes) competing to sell the most peculiar and painful sex services to truck drivers. I wasn't sure how much of that sort of story to believe, but, if true, that kind of situation would explain the theft of secondhand binders and cheap wide-ruled paper--things Americans couldn't imagine anyone bothering to pick up if they'd been abandoned on the street.

Our friends--her real-life friends, my pen friends--were living an incredibly frugal life, spending most of the year in the river village, eating mostly fish and garden produce, and selling most of the vegetables they raised. This made it feasible for the man who physically wrote the letters to try to bring up children on an income equivalent to US$600 per year.

People who live in Zambia have evolved resistance to the tropical diseases that used to kill visitors, but the evolutionary process is not as complete as might be hoped. It was a bit of a shock, as we all reached age 35, to read that the average lifespan of Zambians was less than 40 years...and our correspondent had just been appointed an "Elder" in his church! However, in real life the average lifespan is shortened by counting in the number of Zambians who aren't born immune to tropical diseases and die very young. A Zambian who had reached age 30 could reasonably expect to live to or beyond age 60. Our correspondent did have a few older friends.

And he does occasionally go into town and visit an Internet Cafe, so from time to time he could send an e-mail. Which is why I'm hoping that he and his children, some of whom are now adults, will be able to contribute something to this web site.

I fear that the uptick in readership in Zambia means that they've made their visit to the Internet Cafe for this season, and won't be online again for another three to six months. However, they've found the web site...that's a start.

As an aid to web searching, let's throw in some keywords and links:

Zambia has an official national web site of its own: http://www.zambia.co.zm/Home

Zambia has a tourism board, which displays a stunning video of the Victoria Falls, zebras, and other exotic sights: http://www.zambiatourism.com/

The United States' Central Intelligence Agency has compiled a web page for Americans interested in Zambia: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/za.html

The British Broadcasting Corporation has also compiled a web page for British readers interested in Zambia: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-14112449

Zambia also has an embassy web page: http://www.zambiaembassy.org/

There.