Liquid Gold

Thwack, smack, whack goes the axe through the night sky and into the hollow tree. Woodchips rain down on us with each swing of the axe. Eriterial stands on the platform above us and swings the axe with expert control and precision. The platform he is standing on continuously wobbles despite three of us holding it. Excitement, anticipation, adventure and adrenaline flow through me with each thump of metal tearing into wood. In the dim light I can see similar excitement in Elizabeth’s eyes. Slowly the buzzing sound grows louder and louder until I feel the first of the bees land on my bare arm and I jump. Elizabeth, beekeeper and enthusiast, tells me to just be calm and relax, the bees will not sting me unless I pose a threat and they can apparently sense my fear and will sting me as a result. So I breathe, try to relax and Eriterial continues chopping.

Next comes the smoke, Eriterial picks up a bunch of burning hay and stuffs it into the hole he has hacked in the tree. I am now standing back behind the dying embers of the fire about 2 meters from the tree. The embers glow red and make a curious shape, something like the shape of a three-legged starfish. Somewhere on the ground I can hear the distressed buzz of bees disoriented by the smoke and the disturbance of their slumber. I watch in awe as Eriterial reaches into the hole in the tree and starts to pull out great big lumps of honeycomb. He has stripped to his trousers to avoid bees getting trapped between his clothes and his body. No such thing as a beekeepers outfit here. His work-sculpted body is silhouetted against the star studded night sky and yet again I feel the utterly compelling reality that I am in Africa and this experience will never happen again. I watch as time after time, he tilts into the tree, his left leg going in the opposite direction to counterbalance his body. His right arm dissolves into the tree all the way up past the elbow and then emerges with even more honeycomb. This gets dropped in the waiting bucket that Elizabeth is holding. After depositing the honeycomb in the bucket he gives a masterly flick of his arm to clear it of little lumps of honeycomb and presumably, bees. This goes on and on for the best part of twenty minutes until eventually I hear “gwamana”, meaning finished and we all exit stage left to leave the bees recover from our night time raid.

Back near the cooking fire we examined the haul. Both Elizabeth and I are worried for Eriterial but apparently he has escaped with just one sting and seems totally unphased. Men are clearly made of tougher stuff here because there’s no way in Hell I would have been able to do that! The bucket is three quarters full and in the dim light we can see glistening honey, white larvae, sealed up cells containing more larvae and of course a few bewildered bees. We cannot see the queen which is good news as it means she is most likely still in the tree and may decide to stick around meaning more honey in a couple more months. Eriterial, Elizabeth and Gian start to sort through the honeycomb as I ‘supervise’. They carefully examine each piece of honeycomb and talk excitedly about each piece. Gently, they brush off the bees and return them to the bucket while putting the honeycomb in another basin. The bucket will be returned to the base of the tree so that the bees can return to the slightly tattered hive either immediately or in the morning. By the time the job is complete the basin is practically full to the brim. Elizabeth and I look astounded while everyone else seems to just take it in their stride and are just pleased to have the honey without anyone getting badly stung.

Your honey thief in the middle of nowhere

Life in the Bush

Sadly, just now I don't really have anything witty to say and as life is going pretty well compared to the last couple of months, I don't even have anything to complain about. So instead here are some video's of what my little bit of African bush is like... Some have been plagurised from one of the priests blogs which you can find here. I'm not sure without some references how useful these will be but hopefully they will at least give you an idea of where I now live.

Enjoy you lucky people with broadband ...

The opening picture is of Radio Chikuni. The cheetah is very friendly :)





A walk around Chikuni


Your broadband-less reporter in the bush

A Change of Scene

“SHUTTTIT!” I holler at the noisy pack of boys whose voices have been steadily rising as I explain something to a small group of three. Echoes of “shhhh” and “quiet” reverberate around the classroom until eventually there is a sort of silence. Ah days of school, how I used to hate them, with a passion! Now though things are a little different and I am the one trying to imbue knowledge into these kids brains.

As of a few weeks ago I have started teaching at the boys secondary school, one of the most prestigious schools in Zambia. I am teaching extracurricular mathematics to twenty grade 8 boys. These kids are struggling with maths and it’s my mission to de-stigmatise and de-mystify some of the ingrained perplexity they have. Maths is a regular pain-point here and many people are unable to do even basic mathematics which is a shame because basic maths, in my humble opinion, is rather easy and dare I say even fun because it means solving problems in logical ways (spot the computer geek). So I am trying to make the classes as fun as possible while still maintaining a modicum of control.

I’ve discovered though that when kids are afraid, they absorb very little. I have one little fellow who practically shivers with fear when I approach and ask if he understands. His voice is lower than a mouse’s squeak and when he says an inaudible no, you can see he is expecting retribution for not understanding. My heart goes out to the poor kid. That someone along the way has managed to instilled such fear into him is a real pity because there will also be many more like him in the years to come. I am doing my best to reassure him that it’s ok if you don’t understand but he needs to let me help and not be so afraid. I sense an uphill struggle but at least the class size means that I can give kids like him more individual help and the boy next to him usually leans in to listen and then when I leave helps his friend to better understand.

It turns out that teaching is good fun and quite rewarding. The boys are happy to be given an opportunity to improve their grades and seem on the whole to work hard, at least during class. I have tried to make the atmosphere as relaxed as possible so that the maths doesn’t seem so scary. I am going for the knowledgeable (but cool) older brother approach rather than the formal teacher approach. Amusingly, this relaxed atmosphere did result in two boys falling asleep the other day, which perhaps points to a need to not make it too relaxed. Memories of an infamous ex-colleague falling asleep at his desk resulting in his head smacking the keyboard came flooding back. I am also revelling in the change of scene as it gives me a wider ranging experience here. I only hope that I am making a difference to the weaker kids. Their exam results at the end of term will be the best indicator of that I think.

Your teacher in the middle of nowhere

The Brutality of Reality

“What are these white bits that keep appearing on my arm?” I pondered from time to time when I happened to look down at my exposed arms. I was already weary of the little flies that seemed intent on biting my apparently tasty skin. These tiny little white-ish lumps were inanimate though. They appeared sporadically and even when I brushed them off, more appeared. Where were they coming from? The answer came shortly after I took over from my friend holding up the sack of meat. First I felt the tiny shards of bone hitting my arm, then my face and then landing in my hair. I also occasionally felt little bits of cow accompany the spray of bone. This horizontal shower of bone and meat was accompanied by the constant shrill sound of the band saw cutting through the 120kg of cow carcass.

I find myself standing in the back of a butcher, helping the butcher cut up the carcass of the cow that just yesterday had a heartbeat. Thankfully I wasn’t around for the murder but I suspect it was pretty grime. The cow belongs to a friend who has bought it to supply meat to a group of visitors who will shortly arrive in Chikuni. There are four legs and the ribcage to be cut up. We start with the legs; firstly the hooves gets cut off and then the butcher starts cutting from the top of the leg so that we get the fillet first. The sensation of being hit by bits of cow, thrown off by the speeding blade of the band saw, as you might imagine is unpleasant to say the least. In fact my skin crawls each time I feel a new bit land. I look down to find bits clinging to my tshirt and run my hand through my hair to remove fresh debris. The only thing I can really do is laugh at the absurdity of the experience. Once again I am reminded that my time here in Zambia is a once in a lifetime experience and that my life here is just so unbelievably and utterly different from everything I have lived through before.

At one point the power goes out. We are plunged into semi darkness and the band saw grinds to a halt. I look at my friend and we smile, Murphys Law! All we can do is wait and hope that it comes back quickly. There is still a full leg and the main body to process not to mention the in-progress leg. After five minutes the power comes back and we get back to business. Twenty minutes later though, the blade of the band saw snaps loudly and clangs against the inside of the machines body. Everyone except the butcher jumps and scatters at the sound. He turns the machine off and opens up the machine. The inside of the walls are pasted with the same tiny bits of flesh that have been bombarding me. The only difference is that the layer of meat is about one and a half centimetres thick; I shudder and wonder how often the machine is cleaned. The butcher goes to get another blade and we wait to resume the fun.

Many thoughts go through my head as the work progresses. I remember being a child and happily watching the family butcher, Mr. Bresnan, chopping meat in the back half of his shop while my mum or dad bought the weekly supply of meat. I remember his shiny band saw and the handsaws and knives. I remember watching the skilled staff slice through the meat as if it was a knife through butter. There is none of that here though. There is no notion of choice cuts and neither knife nor handsaw made an appearance for the two hour stint I spent in the butchers. The only thing that seemed to get done properly was the T-bone. I never knew that it came from the top of the ribcage and the ‘T’ is essentially part of the spine. I also thought about the day in school when Billy Murphy chopped his finger of using a band saw in woodwork and the raucous that ensured there after. I also thought about an ex-lovers beloved cows and how they face the same fate as the poor retch in front of me.

As a confirmed carnivore I am well aware of the fate of many an innocent animal for the gratification of my taste buds but I am always amazed at how well my mind can abstract away the process of turning docile, soft eyed, grass eating cows into delicious, bloody streak for my eating pleasure. This is the brutal reality of eating meat and I can live with that, just about. I will spare you the more gruesome details of the days events but in many ways, the butcher was the least gruesome experience of the day. The shower at the end of the day was not just necessary to stay clean, it was necessary to stay sane and feel like I no longer had bits of cow all over me. Now I just hope I get to taste some of the spoils of the days labour.

Your reporter in the middle of nowhere

Uninvited Guests

Time was, I could sit outside the back of my house, in the dappled shade of a guava tree, enjoying a delicious coffee and reading a good book or writing in my diary. The only thing I had to worry about was the ants making their way up the legs of the chair and crawling all over me. I could get over that though for the pleasure of being able to just relax in the glorious African heat and feel at ease. No more though. I have new neighbours and not just neighbours across the wall, oh no, these neighbours have moved into my attic! Nowadays, if you spend more than ten minutes outside the back of my house between nine in the morning and five in the evening you are likely to get buzzed, bothered, barraged and maybe even stung by the hundred or so bees that have settled in the attic directly above my kitchen. They fly in and out of a hole at the rate of about four or five a second, seemingly all day long. They don’t seem to like me very much and I have been chased around my own house on three different occasions while checking on my laundry. I am not at all impressed, I can tell you!

Now in an ideal world, this wouldn’t be a problem. In my head, I see the bees and the giant feckin rats having a war in the attic and essentially wiping each other out. No more rats and no more bees seem like a wonderful outcome. Horrifyingly though, the two seem to be coexisting just fine. I know this because the rats are still doing their best to knock a hole in the ceiling and/or ensure I get as little sleep as possible. So I am left in a bit of a tricky situation. I quite like the idea of honey but I’m not so keen on being stung repeatedly for the next six months. The bees and I need to become friends! Apparently you doing this in much the same sort of style as you would with a girlie you are trying to convert into a “petite amie”. You bring them their favourite thing in the whole wide world! No, not diamonds or chocolate or flowers, well maybe flowers; I’m talking about honey. When the bees realise that you can provide honey, all of a sudden you are less of a threat and so don’t need exterminating. So we are about to embark on a black ops mission, code-named “Lets not get stung again because it hurts like a bastard”. A snappy title I’m sure you’ll agree. Time will tell what the outcome will be but one way or another, we need to deal with these unruly and very much uninvited guests.

To add insult to injury, last Thursday, upon my return home after a hard days toil I was unable to gain access to the house. I could hear the noise even over the music of the ipod. The sound was the simultaneous beat of two hundred odd wings. A second swarm had arrived. I was beginning to wonder if I had missed a sign somewhere which read “Free Luxury Bee Accommodation” with an arrow pointed at my house. This time they were in my front yard. There was no way in hell I was going to risk going anywhere near them and so I had to just stop, wait and marvel at the sheer number of them and the noise they were producing. They disappeared from the sky but I could still hear them. I took a few steps forward and realised that they were sussing out the abandoned doghouse in the corner of the yard. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do with two swarms to contend with when one is more than enough! Thankfully, the darlings decided the accommodation was not up to scratch though and so slowly dissipated into the last rays of sun of the dying daylight. I breathed a large sigh of relief and slowly made my way toward the door. A few bees still hung around, like ASBOs on a street corner but they seemed more intent on the doghouse than me. I was very, very happy to close the front door and feel the safety of the house engulf me.

Your unintended and hapless beekeeper in the middle of nowhere

The most repugnant sight of my life

A damp cloth covers the woman’s left leg, just below her kneecap. The ever-present flies hover, buzz, land, take off and dance on and around the cloth. I can see it’s sitting on raised flesh and I suddenly think that I really don’t want her to lift that piece of cloth off of her leg. I sit with the HBC nurse, a HBC client and this woman, another client. The woman didn’t show up for the monthly outreach meeting and news reached the nurse that she had a bad ‘sore’ on her leg and couldn’t walk with it. The reality was far more perverse, disgusting and downright unbelievable!

One of the sure fire signs that someone is HIV+ is the presence of Kaposi's sarcoma. It is a cancerous growth found either internally or externally on the sufferers’ body. Now I have googled the condition as part of the research for this article but I can tell you that nothing online compares to what I saw when the woman lifted the cloth…

After a few minutes of talking with the nurse, the woman very tentatively lifted the cloth off her leg. What I found myself looking at was a cancerous growth that had been left unattended for many, many months. It was hideous beyond anything that I can describe to you here! It was 10 to 12 centimetres in length and almost as width as her leg. It had grown up to 2 centimetres off the surface of her skin but not evenly, oh no! There were lumps, hollows and sores like little craters all over. The ‘flesh’ was brown with cream coloured puss, congealed blood and a clear sticky fluid covering various sections. I really, really wished she hadn’t taken the cloth away and yet, like passing a car crash, I was compelled to stare at its monstrous and unimaginable appearance. I wanted to look away, honestly, but I was so totally shocked by what I saw that my neck refused to move my head sideways. Then to add insult the injury I watched as the flies moved in, almost as quickly as the cloth was lifted. They stormed all over the monstrosity and even with the woman’s persistent swiping, a few refused to leave the ‘mana from heaven’. I thought I was going to be sick. I was very glad I had yet to eat lunch and was unsure if I still had an appetite; yes me, David Shorten, man of three stomachs and two hollow legs!

After what seemed like an eternity, our nurse had seen enough and the woman got sick of chasing persistent flies, who were as determined to lay eggs on the abomination as drunk men are to pull at the end of a night in a club. I blinked away the mental image and realised that my mouth was wide open. I quickly closed it before a fly decided to try its luck. I blinked some more and then turned my head and tried not to think about what I had just seen. Of course, ALL I COULD THINK ABOUT was what I had just seen. I shivered despite the 26 degree heat and wondered what sort of idiot this woman was. I mean, why, why, oh dear Lord why, would you let it get that bad? The woman was near tears as the nurse explained the situation to her. The nurse suggested she come with us to Chikuni but to my continued disbelieve she refused, quoting a need to do laundry as an excuse. LAUNDRY!?! This woman looks like she’s going to need to have her leg amputated and she’s worried about the feckin laundry… I stared at her face, then at the cloth (now covered with flies), then back to her face, then back to her leg and just felt totally lost as to how this situation has occurred. She was insistent though that she remain and promised that she would go to Chikuni the next day. So we had no choice and leave her to be harassed by the flies and the midday sun.

Later, the nurse explained to me that it’s a common side effect of being HIV+ and that that growth is almost certainly a sign that the woman hasn’t been taking her anti-retroviral drugs. Much to my disbelief, the woman did turn up at the hospital the next day, true to her word. I haven’t heard what has happened since but irrespective, I am still left with the sight of that growth imprinted on the inside of my eyelids. The thing of dreams, it most definitely was not!

Your reporter in the middle of visual trauma

The awesomeness of people

“Your heart will always be where you riches are” was a line I came across in a bible passage I read recently. It really stuck me as true because without doubt, the relationships in my life are the most precious things I have. I’ve lost friends over the years and every time it has hurt a lot because that person nearly always meant a great deal to me. And I still miss them because they have left a hole in my heart where they used to occupy. The love I received and indeed continue to receive has added wonderful colour to my life and made me so happy time and time again. I often feel like there is no way of really thanking these people for this other than to be the best friend I know how to be. We support each other as best we can.

There are a few people who have really gone above and beyond the call of duty while I have been out here. It has reminded me of just how much I love receiving stuff by post. There is something really special about receiving a letter that somebody has taken the time to sit down; craft in their head all those thoughts, pieces on news and funny incidents and then finally and carefully transfer onto paper, where there is no backspace key or spell checker. I cherish those letters and indeed the postcards, birthday cards, and photos that have also turned up to further brighten my days here.

Somebody though has even gone beyond that. Aoibhinn, my favourite cousin in the whole world has sent me so many books and so much chocolate that I couldn’t quite believe it when I saw the parcels. When I got home the other night I made myself a cup of proper coffee (still loving that I am able to drink coffee again) and had a cold Maltesers bar. As I munched through the bar, I thought that my dearest cousin really is a goddess, with a heart made of pure gold and who represents, I sometimes forget, my oldest friendship, starting at the tender age of 3. Now I just have to engage my (often feeble) will-power and not devour the whole lot within a week or two and instead eke it out like I am doing with the letters and cards many of my lovely friends gave me just before I left.

Sometimes I don’t know what I would do without my friendships. I feel like my life would be in greyscale rather than Technicolor and I would only be a shadow of the person I am today. I miss those friendships here and it’s one of the things I look forward to going back to at the end of the year. I wonder though, when was the last time you told your dearest friends just how much they mean to you…?

Your sentimental reporter in the middle of nowhere