Dear friends family and internet strangers, after a lovely month and a half at home in Cape Town, a time filled with family and friends and appreciation of the irreplaceable sense of home, I arrived in Zambia on Monday 10 October. After a 3 hour delay in Cape Town (yes, that’s also after I woke up at 4:30am to be in time) and a breakfast courtesy of the airline, I boarded my flight to Livingstone. An endless expanse of dry brown. Really, that’s the best way I could describe the majority of the flight. However as we approached Livingstone, things got more interesting with the Zambezi sluggishly snaking below and a glimpse of the Victoria Falls, or Mosi-oa-Tunya, smoking in the distance.
Livingstone airport: crisp, colonial, green gardens. The airport swarms with tall, lithe, beautiful, dark-skinned men wearing their orange-airport-official vests that hang off regal frames, frames that move with serene gaits. Frames that seem somehow strange in orange-airport-official vests.
As we wait to board the plane, the well dressed little boy of about 5 or 6 sitting across from me strikes up conversation: “My daddy’s going to buy for me a new car,” he says in English. He has this strange habit when he talks; lifting his arms up to his sides, at the sides of his face, and raising the index finger of his fisted hand up and down, up and down. Like little rhythmical goalposts surrounding his speech. He also followed me into the ladies bathroom to the dismay of his mother.
People on our flight are somehow friendly towards one another. In the queue in front of me a man chats to a lady, says he recognizes her. He is slick, business-like. He wears nice sun glasses. He strikes me as some kind of Man of Questionable Morals.
Basically, after being loaded off, luggage and all we all head through customs, pay $11 airport tax (which Man of Questionable Morals passive-aggressively debates; in the way that powerful men do; with the airport officials: “My good man....(why the hell should I pay this? or similar)” and are herded back onto the exact same plane with almost all the exact same people. Man of Questionable Morals jokingly proclaims once we are all back on the (less than half full) plane “We pay $5.50 to walk in the airport and then $5.50 to walk back out!” May he’s not so Questionable, maybe he’s just used to this.
The flight from Livingstone to Lusaka is short. Leaving the airport, I get my first taste of the town I’ll be spending most of the next 2 months in. The airport and outside are surprisingly quiet and peaceful. Maybe it’s to do with the afternoon rain clouds brewing in the sky. There are plenty of interesting things and people to look at but no hustle, no chaos. I am reminded of the mayhem of Lagos airport, granted I was only about 12 at the time. But still, I was expecting something more like that: a wall of heat hitting you as you exit the vaguely air-conditioned airport and a swarm of money-changers and porters looking as though they might do the same. But no, Lusaka, on first impressions seems distinctly “chilled.” Joan and her daughter Maya come to pick me up, they are the family; old friends from East London; that I’ll be staying with here.
Other first impressions of Lusaka as we drive home: The streets are wide and un-potholed. Dry. Lots of coppery-brown. Not chaotic. Many billboards. There are so many South African chains and brands here, I’ve never really thought of it before but we are like the USA of Africa.
Also, I keep getting called ‘Madam.’ It’s weird, I haven’t been called that in South Africa. Ever, I think?
The Littlefield house is a big, old house on huge grounds in an ex-pat area. The house and the area bring back memories of my time in Nigeria with my family when I was 12. Not always comfortable memories, a place I didn’t really understand and felt like retreating from.
After a somewhat uneasy first day, I feel like I’ve settled down to do what I set out this year to do: be selfish. To read my books, do some study, think and observe. I’ve been going for a long walk or run every day, trying to map out the place in my head a bit. I discovered a yoga DVD in Joan’s bookshelf which I’ve been doing and loving (yes, I’m doing yoga from a DVD...). Other than that, I’ve been working on my other housewife skills such as figuring out ways to trick the kids into eating more vegetables or distract them from the TV. And of course watching So You Think You Could Dance (advantage of SA being the America of Africa- I get to watch programmes on M-Net! Albeit American programmes...), bonus since I thought I’d have to catch it all up when homeJ
The rain came on the first afternoon, the kind of thunderstorm rain that releases this lovely dusty smell from the dry red ground.
More to follow...
