The Desert of Silence

Sitting in the (uncomfortable) front seat of the bus, I am suddenly very glad that I have just spent eight days working on my relationship with Jesus. I watch with a mixture of comedy and anxiety as the guy who passes for the bus conductor starts to winch the front door of the bus shut using a once tan coloured strap and an also broken winch. The sadomasochist in me (the guy who thought it was a spectacularly good idea to jump off a platform 130m above the Zambezi) smiles with glee at the prospect of an ‘exciting’ journey from the capital, Lusaka, back home to Chikuni; the diminutive, sensible part of me starts berating me for not getting the decent bus. Silently I start to pray to just about everyone I can think of who relates to my current situation, St. Christopher (patron of travellers), St. Patrick (patron of the Irish), Jesus, Mary and my ever present and perilously overworked guardian angel.

I found myself in the capital because I was returning from Kitwe, a town in the Copperbelt which is in the north of Zambia. Kitwe is about 30 kilometres away from the Congolese border (in the East) and is right in the middle of all the mining action in Zambia. I was there because I’ve just completed a spiritual retreat in silence. Who knew that eight days of silence would involve so much (damn) silence? Not me anyway! I’ll keep personal insights for when I see people, especially given the propensity of my friends/readers towards atheism or agnosticism but it was an interesting experience and something worthwhile from far more than a spiritual aspect.

Kitwe is a very interesting town. The whole region has seen much more investment over the decades because of the mines, much more than lots of other parts of Zambia. There’s a fair amount of wealth and while not huge, it’s obviously sizeable compared to my dinky Chikuni. I really liked seeing the smelted copper being hauled away for transport from South Africa (I guess) and there was a huge black heap of apparently still-rich copper slag. There are electricity pylons everywhere to service the two/three mines dotted around the town. And while I was waiting for the bus to bring me back to Lusaka (for an unenviable two and a half hours) I discovered that Pemba women are hot! See, every cloud has a silver lining…

I returned to Chikuni (eventually) and now have but a short week left before all hell breaks lose and London Town welcomes me back with icy-cold, unsmiling and mango-free arms. Can you tell that I’m not ready to leave yet?

Your reporter in the middle of nowhere

Thank you Photobox

A special shout out to photobox who I’ve been using for a long time to produce dead-tree versions of my photographs. I've taken a fair few photographs of people over my time here and I wanted to get some produced on paper so that I could give them to the people who've been kind enough to let me photograph them. I recently appealed to photobox's good nature and they responded very kindly. Thanks! They also provided great customer service after the Italian postal service spent too much time drinking coffee and not enough time delivering my photos on time to make the connection to me here in Zambia. If you need photographs, I’d recommend them as their stuff is very good value, high quality, there’s often good special offers (like 50% off everything recently) and their support is top notch.

Rain (again)!

I woke with as start as the room reverberated with the sound of thunder. My eyes closed again sleepily but even so I ‘saw’ the lightening through my closed eyelids seconds later. The rains had arrived with full on force. I sat up and yawned as again, my room is lit up as a huge streak of lightening sizzled down from the heavens. I checked my phone, 2:15 in the morning, arse!

I love a good lightening storm. All that power, noise and light created out of nothingness by nature. So I sat in bed and watched through the mosquito net as the lightening exploded out of the darkness time and again, counting the seconds between lightening and thunder to discover how far away the storm was. I love it when you see a really big bolt of lightening and you know the thunder that is ‘slowly’ making it’s way towards you is going to be immense. And then it hits, the walls shake, the dogs whimper and you feel utterly alive.

This morning, long after the storm had passed, the scene was serene. As I sat outside and had breakfast, nature seemed to be fully alive, as if refreshed by the night’s storm. Birds were delirious, singing, chirping, larking about and generally having a good time. Frogs, crickets and a host of other noisy creatures were all making a racket and the smell of soil starting to breath for the first time in months was heady in the air.

The rains are late this year compared to last year. Sixteen days to be exact and everyone suffered in the (lovely) heat that I will always associate with Africa. Living in high thirty degree heat while Europe shivers its way into winter brings pure joy to me as I sit smugly sweating my brains out, in blissful self-denial about what I will return to in three weeks. Now the real business of Chikuni, cultivating maize, will start. Everywhere, ox drawn ploughs will start moving up and down fields from predawn to dusk. Families will follow behind, sowing maize seed in the ploughs wake. What was brush and scrub land will suddenly be transformed into farmland as each family tries to grow as much as they can manage, and maybe even a bit more than that. I just hope I get to have some roasted green maize before I go back now (not likely).

The Silence In-Between

Sometimes in my life, I have felt like there has been so much that has gone unsaid. So much empty space that words, important words, should have existed to occupy the silence and yet they did not flow. For much of my life I was something of an introvert (and still am despite peoples protests) and I had very little to say to the world, I was too preoccupied with my own suffering and didn’t have the tools to open up and share my pain with a world that also suffers. Perhaps this is why I have always liked music, it fills this space and keeps me from thinking too much. But sometimes the distractions get in the way and I let moments go past.

With an ex-girlfriend of mine, we always had something to talk about. There were silences but never any uncomfortable silences. And yet, we never talked about the important stuff, the white elephant(s) in the corner of the room that lived with us for over a year. I was a very different person then, still a boy in a way, still that teenager unable to deal with the emotions bubbling just underneath my happy-go-lucky smile. Only sometimes, if the moment were right, would you see it in my eyes, a very sad little boy trying desperately to escape.

Then things changed, that girl and I broke up and afterwards I finally managed to find a way to start opening up. To try and fix me, if you like (actually it was more like forgiving myself). And it worked; I started opening up, I started dealing with all the confusion I had stored up over the previous 15 years and it felt fantastic to air out those skeletons. Since then, I have continued to be vigilant about saying what I feel is important or at least trying.

So it was interesting to think recently that it is often the conversation that goes unsaid that is the most fascinating thing to talk about. In particular, I am thinking of questions I have for people. When I ask a question, I am generally interested in the answer. I weigh up the importance of this question and the information contained within the answer against the possible (negative) impact on the person answering. I superimpose my psyche on the other person, add some (Catholic) guilt for flavour and then decide whether or not somebody asking me the same question would upset me. Then regardless of the answer I air on the cautious side and decide not to ask… I do of course realise that I should just let the other person decide whether or not they want to answer the question but I don’t know… asking the question will result in the person thinking about the answer and this could cause as much upset as telling me the answer. Then again, perhaps it’s important to remind people of the things that we don’t really want to think about.

This is just one of the many thoughts I’ve had the time to explore during my time here and to look back and laugh or tutt at my own inability to open up sometimes and say what needs to be said or to what I’d like to say. You may find all this boring but it’s a truth that I think applies to many people, especially the characters of “One Day” which is what I just happen to be reading at the moment (thanks cuz!!).

Your reporter in the middle of nowhere