Written for my graduate creative writing course last semester.
About Zambia, of course. More later? Someday?
Give Us This Day
We are over the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe, shopping in the rows of open-air markets. I have bought everything I plan on buying. I have spent my dollars and my kwacha and I am not in the market for anything else, but the rest of the team continues to barter and haggle and trade with an enthusiasm I can never muster. I do not like shopping, and shopping in Africa is a full-contact sport. To all of the vendors I am “sister”: not one gives up on me until after I am out of sight or out of earshot, whichever comes last. It is understandable. They have a living to earn and window shopping does not factor in. For whatever reason, the market is mostly empty of tourists today, so the vendors are free to focus on our little group. I, however, already have the gifts I want for my family: tiny hippos for Josh and Alyssa, chetenges for Sarah and Lauren, a bowl for Susan. But the men with cardboard signs over their stalls do not know this (Mr. Cheap, Mr. Cheaper than Cheap, Mr. Bargainmaker, Michael Jordan, and my favorite, Mr. Nice Man), and they keep trying to tempt me into spending my nonexistent cash. I’m sorry, I tell them, no more. I have no more to give you.
It’s not true, of course. I have five dollars left, but I am saving it so I can buy my mother one of those ceramic thimbles they sell in airports. For some indecipherable reason she collects them and I always, always forget to pick one up for her when I go places. I am determined to bring her a thimble from Africa, so Mr. Nice Man will plead in vain.
He is persistent, though, and so are his fellows in the next block of stalls. The open-air markets near the falls are laid out in squares, open on one end. The lists that Matt and Phil and Katie and Shelly have brought are approximately a mile long each, and, since Phil has just entered into negotiations that look like they will outlast the Middle East peace talks, and rival them in diplomatic tension, I stop for a moment to look at a thumb piano with elephants carved on it.
“What’s your name, sister?” asks the young, grinning proprietor.
I do not want to answer, and I do not want to be rude. Dilemma.
“What’s your name? This is my shop here, come in, I give you best price.”
Panic: “No hablo ingles, señor. Lo siento.”
For the next hour I chat with them: Owen and Nkonga. “Soy de Valencia,” I tell them, “y me llamo Esperanza.” This second item is technically true. My middle name is Hope. They are very excited to meet a Valencian and they ply me with questions about futbol, and since I do not speak English, I cannot answer them. I nod and smile and say, Si, and Futbol! and every time I do they laugh. But they are professionals, and they do not give up, offering to trade me something for the Nike baseball hat I permanently borrowed from my sister two years ago. They point and gesture.
“Sombrero? No, gracias, señores, me gusta muchísima ese sombrero.” My grammar is probably atrocious but they do not know it, they just ask and ask and I repeat myself and they imitate my words. No, gracias. Sombrero. They ask me questions: what is this? pointing to shirt, shoes, socks. I answer Camiseta, Zapatos, Calcetines. “How about your socks?” they ask: here, everything has market value. “Calcetines?” I answer, “Pero necesito mis calcetines! No, lo siento, gracias.” In half an hour we do not progress past the stuff I remember from high school, and when they ask me something too complicated or when I am tempted to laugh I rattle off a string of vocabulary words.
The rest of the team has finished shopping and I am telling Owen and Nkonga goodbye. “Wait, sister, wait,” they say. “We have a gift for you.”
For most of the shopkeepers, a “gift” is anything in their store they can charge you for, and I shake my head. “Gift? Que es Gift?”
“Wait, sister,” Owen says. “Wait here, I will get it.” He turns to his stall and back again quickly, holding a tiny plain carved giraffe that is worth about a nickel. “Gift for you, sister, gift.” Nkonga writes down his cell phone number and winks as he slips it in with the giraffe.
I am overcome with remorse. I offer the elastic around my wrist or my bobby pins, both accepted forms of currency, but they refuse, grinning and waving. “No, no, gracias,” they tell me. “Goodbye, sister.”
I open my mouth to say “Take it back, I lied, I can’t keep your giraffe.” I don’t say it.
“Gracias, amigos,” I say as we walk away. “Adios!” They are my amigos. But they are not my friends. How can they be, when we only communicate in a way neither of us understands?
I speak only in my fake Spanish for the next half hour in case by some chance of `supersonic hearing or some kind of marketplace grapevine they overhear my American English and uncover my deception. I slide the gift into my bag, where he sits along with my passport and my hand sanitizer. I will give all the other things away, and I will keep the giraffe, because I don’t know what to do with it. And I never do call Nkonga.
* * * * *
We came bearing gifts: our contacts used us as pack mules to get crates of donations from the States over to Livingstone. Butch and Janet relocated to Livingstone, Zambia, from Texas some fifteen years ago, and they asked us to bring along donations that had accumulated Stateside. Because of this, we packed few clothes for ourselves, and my suitcase, when I opened it, held peanut butter, a saucepan, about twenty t-shirts, cardboard copies of The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck and Peter Rabbit, and a carton of black pepper that somewhere over the Atlantic imparted a sneezy benediction to the lining of my suitcase that it will probably never be wholly rid of. These things all find homes, either with Butch and Janet, or in the villages where we work: Sekute, Mahelituna, and Katubiya. Our first afternoons and evenings in Livingstone were spent organizing the boxes of clothes, separating them into individual piles by size. Into each pile we put three pairs of underwear, three shirts, two pairs of pants (boys) and two skirts (girls). We were very careful as we organized to make sure that no one got two of the same shirt, or three pairs of white underwear when there were polka dots or penguins available in the appropriate size. Each stack was folded, underpants discreetly hidden on the inside, tied up in bread bags and placed in cardboard boxes in the back of Sir, the creaky green truck, where they wait as goodbye surprises for each village.
Today is clothing day in Mahelituna. Shelly wraps up the lesson while Katie and Phil organize the kids into lines: boys with Phil and girls with Katie. We duck in and out of the building that looks exactly like it should—mud-and-stick walls, thatched roof that sheds the rain we never see. The handing-out process is one of organized chaos, as is anything involving children and gifts, and as we match shirts to shoulder blades and cuff sleeves and pant legs, I am amused by the reactions. The boys take their clothes and say thank you and look at them with stoic curiosity, and the little girls dive straight to the middle, to their patterned underpants, and immediately begin comparing them, squealing and pointing and gasping. They are happy with the shirts and pants and skirts but it is the underwear that really gets them excited. Hanes and Fruit of the Loom wave to each other, bright colors on a bright landscape, and the excitement in their faces is the same excitement of any child on receiving something new and exciting and wonderful. Floral patterns and electric guitars and scalloped elastic waistbands flutter in the incessant breeze, rolling with the puffs of red African dust so ubiquitous during the dry season.
The littlest ones, Nadia and Abraham, are sitting in the dirt, chewing on the bags. They are two and three and do not understand that the bags should be opened. Shelly stands them up on tipsy legs and sends them to where the mothers are gathered, watching, by the water pump. Every day they come closer and closer, these women, with big loose t-shirts and babies tied on their backs with chetenges. Some of them look thirty and some look sixty, but you do not see many in between. It is the same in the city. No middle-aged people. They die young or they grow old, but you don’t catch them on the way. There are never any men around. We see one or two sometimes on our way in, with the cattle or driving the trucks, but they do not wait around the well with the women, and I do not know where they are.
Ndumba-Ndumba and Patrick have gotten the same shirt. They trade high fives and gap-toothed grins while Rosemary and Eustina twirl in their bright peasant skirts: blue-green-yellow-blue-green. I flash back to every Christmas morning I have ever had, and watching them I know that I am the same as they are. They are thanking us for the gifts as they take their bags and peek inside, the way they have been taught: hands cupped upwards, head bobbing. They are thanking us and I want to stop them. I want to say, Do not thank us. We did not buy you these things. I want to say, I am sorry that in two hours we will be full of cole slaw and peanut butter and jelly and you will be remembering the chimkwa and bananas Janet brought that you ate already, to make sure your parents didn’t take it for themselves. I want to say, I am sorry that I never have been sicker than bronchitis in the eighth grade, that my mother is recovering from cancer and yours is dying of a cold. I want to say these things but I do not, because I am so happy that my mom will be okay and I really like Janet’s cole slaw. So instead I say, You’re welcome. Over and over, to each bobbing head. You’re welcome.
* * * * *
It is our last day in Katubiya village. Janet drives us in. We have grown accustomed to the hour-long trek into the bush: the bone-jarring ruts of the dirt road, the sudden swerving into underbrush whenever we encounter unexpected cows or delivery trucks full of cattle feed or wire for the transformers being erected across the low hills. We know which forks in the long road will either take us into five-foot ditches or will bounce us safely around them, which roads are sandy pits that defy the four-wheel-drive and which are hard-packed with travel. Southern Zambia is a land of low hills at high altitude, of gnarled trees and thick undergrowth. It is winter and there is no rain; the land is yellow except where the black burn marks show through, where the old growth is torched to make room for new. The black smoke from the burnings mixes with the red dust and the yellow grass so that you are always thinking of fire. Sitting in the truck I brace myself against the shocks of the rough terrain and go over the names of the fifty some-odd children in my head, trying to keep them all straight, trying to remember who they are. Tom. Junior. Ngombe. Benson. Namakando. Beauty. Helene. Like the mornings before, they will be shy, and we will play games in a big circle until they have warmed up to us and the showoffs begin to take over. Like the mornings before, Janet will sit in the truck, drawing up a preschool curriculum for the villages in the Lozi and Sekute regions. Like the mornings before, but after today there will be no more mornings.
Sir coughs and rattles into the village, and we are abruptly surrounded by shouting boys and girls, trying our best to communicate across language barriers in a country whose official language is English where something like 83 dialects are spoken. The mothers walk by with baskets of laundry on their heads. Whose laundry it is I could never tell, since the children wear the same thing every day, with the exception of Rose, who fell into the cooking fire a year ago. She hobbles about now, bent like a crone but dressed daily in clothes scrupulously clean, per the orders of the doctors in Lusaka. Rose’s surgery was sponsored by a visiting doctor from the States who was doing demonstration surgeries for the Lusaka hospital and whose specialty happened to be skin grafts. After she was burned her leg fused to her torso as it healed, so she will have more surgeries in the next year to help her learn how to walk upright again, but for now she sits and watches. She watches us and she watches her little sister Margaret who is plump and three and she watches the women with the baskets on their heads who have moved their wash site from by the pump to where we are. They shoo their toddlers in our direction, despite the announcement at the beginning of the week that the lessons were only for the children older than four, betting that we will not make them leave. They are right.
The older children are here again, arriving mid-morning: Sophia, Memory, Mary, Friday, Junior. Janet is always surprised when they come. They should be at school, she says, but the school is a mile away and we can neither corroborate nor refute their claim that it was cancelled for the day. Phil asks Virginia, who interprets for us, how often school gets cancelled. She shrugs.
Before we start we ask if they have any songs or games they want to teach us. This always takes a great deal of prompting and generally ends with us doing ridiculous dances and Phil doing handstands and the smallest ones tumbling off of their benches with laughter. Sophia is shy, like most girls her age, and Sharon and Memory nudge her forward until she comes to the front to sing a song that the kids all know. We clumsily imitate each clap, echo, and spin. Her voice is strong.
Last night we hard-boiled sixty eggs, and now Shelly and I peel them and hand them out, one egg and one piece of bread for each child. Matt makes the boys laugh by cracking the shells with his head. They imitate him, and more than one will wave goodbye with tiny white egg fragments speckling his hair. While they eat we sit with them and chat, and I ask Sophia how old she is. This sounds simple, but it is not, and it takes a good five minutes of back-and-forth before we understand each other, and she tells me she is eleven. I remark that she is tall for her age, and she smiles and laughs, yes, yes, very tall. When we get back to the house I will mention Sophia’s age to Janet and she will raise her eyebrows. “Sophia,” she will say, “is at least fourteen. She told you she was eleven because she was afraid if you knew how old she was, you would send her away, you would not allow her to learn.” But right now I am only surprised. So tall for an eleven year old!
After the lesson we ask questions through Virginia, and Sophia waits for the smaller children to get the answer wrong before putting up her hand and giving the right answer, always in English. She speaks it better than she understands it, especially our garbled slippery American.
We are packing up and saying the last goodbyes and Sophia catches my arm and leads me towards the other girls.
“We have something for you,” she says. A plastic grocery bag full of mysterious lumpish things, and a small round watermelon. “These are for you,” and she places them in my hands, “and for Feel and Sherry and Kehtee and Matty.”
“Sophia, I will miss you,” I say, and she hugs me, breaking away to reach into the bag and pull out a small cylinder wrapped in notebook paper and a folded sheet that, unfolded, shows a ballpointed message scrawled, probably by Virginia:
Do not forget us
got bless you
god bey
Janet honks outside and I hug her again. “I will not forget you,” I say. “I promise. Thank you for everything.” She and Mary and Memory crowd at the door, waving as I wade through the crowd of small people, all wanting one more hug or one more piece of gum or one more smile, and I hop up into the back of the truck with the gas can and the empty boxes. I wave as hard as I can. Phil and Shelly and Katie and Matt stick their heads and hands out of the windows and Janet leans on the horn with her elbow as she steers around the dogs and cows, to the delight of the small boys who run beside us on the way out.
Out of sight of the village I pass the bag back into the cab. “There’s one for each of you,” I shout over the rumblings of the truck. Janet can’t go much over 45 km per hour on these roads, so we can communicate still, me in the truck bed and the team up front. They open their gifts and pass them around. Shelly’s is a half-empty bottle of baby-powder, Phil gets a rusty Tonka truck, Matt a t-shirt from a university in California, Katie a brightly illustrated children’s book: Suzie Learns About Aids. I unroll my package: a pale-blue sports bra. It is stained and smells of urine and sweat. Shelly asks if any of us are chafing. Matt offers to trade Phil for the truck and Katie reads her book out loud. From the grassy path Janet turns onto the red dirt road that leads out of the bush to the highway. As Katie finishes reading Janet mentions that this is the first time she has ever known these kids to give anything away. We are pretty quiet the rest of the way back to the compound. Matt keeps his shirt.
When we get back we slice open the watermelon. The flesh of the melon is white and smells faintly of onions, indicators of soil so leached of nutrients that it cannot support even a vegetable garden. It looks strange lying in pieces next to our crumby white-bread sandwiches and Janet’s cole slaw. But we crunch through the onion-watery tastelessness til we reach rind, and as I eat I reread the note from Sophia:
Do not forget us
got bless you
god bey
