After two days in Lubumbashi occupied with mostly debriefing and hanging out, I boarded the plane to Zambia, planning to meet up with Thierry and Katy from Dubie – logistician and nurse, as well as Bruce, one of the AirServ pilots who were there already for a few days. We were to overlap for 3 days given my surprise extension, and then I was to fly back to Lubumbashi, spend one night here and be on my slow way home, definitively out of Congo this time.
Zambia is directly South of the province of Katanga and shares its climate. The country has not known war and is developing rather than recovering. At 10 million inhabitants, it is the least densely populated country of the continent. As neighbouring Malawi and Botswana, AIDS has ravaged it - the percentage of HIV+ people usually quoted in Zambia is between 10% and 20%.
Landing in Lusaka on Wednesday, I marvelled at a normal airport, without the gaggle of people at the luggage area and the general sense of chaos that I’d grown accustomed to in Lubumbashi. There was a functioning ATM right at the airport where I was able to pull out Zambian Kwachas – again, nicely refreshing to see a functioning Barclay’s bank. A taxi took me into town, straight to the bus stop, where I took the night bus to Livingstone to meet up with the gang. The bus was jammed packed but I had secured the last window seat. A family of three sat next to me, with a toddler straddled across mom and dad’s legs (and his feet on me), but we all fell nicely asleep during the eight hour ride. The road had some pits but nothing like the Congo, and the bus left and arrived right on schedule, an anomaly in Central Africa for me. Arrived at the backpackers hostel called Jollyboys’, recommended by fellow MSFers who had all taken their vacation here, I was given a bed in an empty four-people dorm, hoping to meet up with the friends in the morning.
Unfortunately by the time I woke up, at 8 o’clock on Thursday morning, they were already gone. They had expected me in their dorm and I hadn’t shown up so they assumed that I’d missed the plane – whereas I had just been given another dorm room. Disappointed, I took the free bus to Victoria Falls and made the best of the day. At the ticket counter at the falls, I met an American girl called Anna who was also there on her own; she had been given my bed in the main dorm the night previous, as Jollyboys’ mistook her for me. She is working with a local NGO in Lusaka, a project called HEAL which is the only existing orphanage for HIV+ children. She had been there for a month and had mixed feelings about her experience, frustrated with the non-sustainability of the affair and the limited impact she felt she had. I needed to talk about my overwhelming sense of finiteness and mourning of my MSF mission. We happily started sharing thoughts under the mist of the falls, walking the thin bridge and admired the huge falls, at their heaviest as this was the peak of rainy season.
The mighty Zambezi river falls 118 meters down at Victoria Falls, 1.7 km wide (Niagara falls are 50 m high). The bridge at the Victoria falls, just a few hundred meters downstream, when the gorge begins, is smack at the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Rainbow over the falls
While I was finishing a banana, this large baboon started galloping towards me from afar. Startled and a little afraid that he would attack me, I threw the rest of the banana at him. Unphased, he ate the banana calmly and royally ignored my protests.
In the afternoon, I reintegrated Jollyboys to find the crew waiting for me; they had gone on an early-morning walking safari. Now was the time for the all-important daily chess game between Bruce and Thierry.
Friday, the next day, was the day of adrenaline. Livingstone is developing as Africa’s answer to Queenstown, New Zealand, with the first bungee of the continent and second tallest in the world, right over Victoria falls. A mere 111 meters down the bridge (7 meters from the water). Alternatives are tandem bungee, bridge swing where one is harnessed rather than tied by the feet, and tandem swing. I still couldn’t muster the courage to go bungee jumping, having issues with hanging upside down. My job was to convince Katy to join me on a tandem bridge swing. The boys had already signed up for the trio package of bridge bungee, bridge swing and zipline (tarzaning across the gorge to the bridge, nothing too scary).
We started the day with a microflight over the impressive falls:
Then it was time to get to the bridge. We passed the border post between Zambia and Zimbabwe, lined up with an impressive queue of huge trucks loaded with minerals from the Copper Belt in my soon-to-be ex-home of Katanga, DRC – all to be loaded onwards to South Africa. An all-too-immediate reminder of the mineral richness and paradoxical poverty of DRC.
Getting strapped for the big jump. What in the world am I getting into? Katy was appropriately petrified, I wasn’t, until the last minute when it was too late.
And we jumped. Or rather, we closed our eyes and took a step into sheer emptiness. And we screamed.
It was all over in a few seconds, but the view from down there, 111 m below, was staggering, the underside of the bridge, and the view of the falls.
So we made it into Zimbabwe – by a few feet, that is. No stamp in the passport for this.
The plastered silly smiles are because we’ve all jumped at least once down that bridge – quite the adrenaline rush. It didn’t last a whole day like the skydiving experience I had in Queenstown six years ago, though. Or maybe I’m just older and more jaded.
Saturday, the next day, was farniente day; the Katanga friends were leaving for Lusaka in the afternoon. Anna came back from a safari in Botswana and we signed up for canoeing the Zambezi river the next day.
Sunday was the canoeing day. The day started very hot and sunny and we were afraid of getting downright fried on the water. The river was at its peak in the rainy season and was basically flooded – its highest level in 20 years. Treetops peeking up were the only clues that islands were sitting underneath. Hence no rafting until May or so. We canoed 27 km down, to just about a few hundred meters before the falls. It included a few small rapids, level 2 or so. It rained most of the afternoon so we got soaked, but the rain falling on the mighty river was a pretty sight. This trip gave Anna the idea of her next project: canoeing down the Zambezi and putting it live on the internet on the
Wilderness Classroom for American inner-city kids, in which she had been previously involved on a trans-Amazon river expedition. After the day of canoeing, Anna boarded her night bus back to Lusaka.
Zimbabwe to the right, Zambia to the left – Zim-zam down the Zambezi!
Monday was spent walking around and trying to go to a village by local transport, which was a little disappointing. Seeing another African village just made me homesick of Shamwana, so instead of spending the night there as initially planned, I returned to Jollyboys to find my dorm overtaken by quiet Japanese backpackers.
Tuesday was the bus back to Lusaka. It was a nice ride, among bush, farmland and a few hills. Anna picked me up at the bus stop and I spent the night at her orphanage. The
HEAL project is the only orphanage of its kind in Lusaka. J, the Zambian woman who started it, was sick herself and had worked on sensitizing and destigmatizing HIV positive patients. There is still much denial and stigma associated with the condition, resulting in the fact that many people, in spite of presenting all the symptoms, refuse to be tested. J knew all the families of the children in her orphanage at one time; after the parents all died, she took them all in, one by one. She gets grants from different NGO’s and the children get free medical care and medications from a private American doctor.
This is another type of work than MSF, more development and socially-based, and I was quite impressed with the initiative, even if its sustainability is questionable. For each child at Heal there must be a line-up of five others somewhere in Lusaka. The orphanage will soon expand to a farm slightly outside of town. Foreign guests are always welcome – typically volunteers who come help out like Anna did, or foreign medical students using it as a home base while working at one of the Lusaka clinics. The kids danced and sang for me, there was a lot of joy and noise in that house.
Finally, Wednesday, I took the plane back to Lubumbashi to spend my last night in Congo dancing the night away before heading to Tanzania to climb the Kilimanjaro. The week had flown by, rich with new experiences, some touristy, some less so.
nb: Brucie's take on things can be found
here.
