Bus to Montero

Upon arriving to the seminary where we stayed at in Lusaka, I met the King family. Had I made it to Mali we would have worked together at Silah Mali doing humanitarian aid work. The Kings left the country just before the coup happened for other reasons and have been unable to return because of the heated political situation. They told me many things about Mali, they shed a little more light on the complicated political world in Mali and they shared many stories of the beautiful people in Mali. I was quite jealous of the King’s and their experience in Mali but there is one thing about Mali I was happy to be missing, the weather. April is one of the hottest months for Mali 115+ degree weather. Zambia, however, was cool and pleasant, just entering the beginning of fall. Zambia is lush and green, and there were happy black and white crows hoping around campus.  

                At the seminary, I settled into my room shared with three other single girls. I recall the first evening, after playing some card games I came into the room and was hit with a wall of raid. Apparently Krista found a large eight legged friend when she opened her drawer. No other spider dared to step foot in our room after the entire thing had been fumigated with Doom (African version of Raid… pretty sure it’s illegal in the states).

                So we settled into a schedule that consisted of waking for breakfast at 7am, then at 8am small group and then we would set out for our daily adventures known as daily field assignments (DFA) in the afternoons we would debrief and listen to lectures about African Culture. The main event of course were the DFA’s. Every day we’d head out with a set of questions to ask Zambians about their culture. There were two Americans and one Zambian helper per group. My helper’s name was Christine. She was from Montero as were two other helpers Rose and Bridget. So the whole group of us, 9 in all, would head out every morning, walk about a mile to the intersection and then take a mini-bus about an hour to Montero. The Mini bus is a van with four row seats plus the seat next to the driver. On each seat four people were expected to sit, so the capacity of this bus could be up to 20 people including the driver and the conductor. Children never seem to factor into the head count so there might be more than that if children are involved. For the most part, Zambians ride squashed on top of each other in the mini-buses in utter silence… but not when American’s are involved. Since it took us so long to get to Montero we would never have had enough time to ask all our questions if we just sat in silence. So many day we’d cram on the bus, sit in awkward silence with a knee or and elbow stuck in our side, and then we’d start chattering away and in a few moment the entire bus was hoping with conversations.