behavior change and getting busy

Moments to remember:
- the sound of the little feet chasing my bicycle after I pass some kids on my way home
- my neighbors baby STILL crying every time she sees me
- my taxi driver telling me he loves me and even though I’m “dating” someone in America, we could date because that’s “far away!” Thanks, but no thanks
- my neighbor’s 1 year old son kicking my punctured football that’s the size of his head
- my cats figuring out how to jump through the hole in my grass thatched roof so that they can sit in the sun up there away from the iwes (little kids) who inhabit my yard during daylight hours
- all of iwes running, shrieking, and diving after the bubbles that my mom sent in her last package
- two people asking, when I mentioned that my dad was getting married, if he was going to have two wives

I’m feeling more and more like my life is here. At times it still feels crazy, to try to make a life here and to try to be productive in some ways… but, increasingly, I have routines here and, whether or not I have lots of people who I would really call friends, I have lots of people who are friendly and who make me smile and feel happy with my life: neighbors, kids, counterparts at the ministry or NGOs… it’s hard to make real friends who I feel like our relationships are even and symmetrical because I’m busy, or I can’t communicate, or I want time to myself, or we can communicate through language but our cultural differences are still being communicated.

My work is taking off. I’m trying to start a library at one of my schools (if anyone wants to hold a book drive for me, e-mail me please!!!!), get computers for some of my schools (if anyone has creative ideas for how to shop computers, let me know!), start an environmental education pilot project with the Zambian Wildlife Authority, take some of the leaders from my youth group to Lusaka for training at another youth center, teach computer skills at the ministry and I’m still trying to do work with my women’s groups. I think we’re going to try to make paper next week. I found a recipe to make paper out of corn husks on the internet, what could be better here?! Though it’s not that season… but maybe in the spring?

Some of the work is moving fast and quickly. When I have good counterparts it can be incredible. It’s people like that that make me feel like there’s so much possibility in this country. In other places, it’s frustrating. Often not because of counterparts at all, but because of my inability to communicate fluently. I left a women’s group meeting last week wondering why on earth I think my coming in with condoms and explaining in ENGLISH without much of a translator will translate to ANY kind of behavior change? I mean, why should it? And, even if I could speak Bemba fluently, why would these older women, mothers who teach ME how to lights fires and cook and paint my walls and wax my floors, listen to me? It made me question my ability to ever be culturally fluent or competent and truly made me question the effectiveness of outside NGOs ever. Why do we think we can come in and change things?

Yet, then this week, I had a meeting with the same group. We were doing a lesson on HIV and AIDS that I call “myths and facts.” I read statements and the women were supposed to raise their hands if they thought it was “chishinka” (true) and keep their hands down if they thought it was a “bufi” (lie). The women got a lot of the answers right and a lot of the women just followed the other ones, but they asked questions and took notes. And then at the end I passed out pieces of paper so they could write their questions down and not put their names on them. It worked, though in a funny way. Women wrote down some great questions, questions that were about them, how to care for neighbors, how to care for children… but a lot of them were somewhat illegible so we’d have to go to the person and clarify what they said anyway. So even as I attempted to make it not obvious who was asking it become obvious, but women didn’t stop asking. So, even in this group with many illiterate women writing questions was easier than asking EVEN if people knew who asked. Anyway, I left that meeting feeling the opposite from the week before… that I was useful, that AS an outsider I could address things they maybe couldn’t, that they were interested.

Yet, it didn’t have much to do with “behavior change” which is increasingly becoming a word I’m a little uncomfortable with. Who gets to define behavior change’s benefits? When do you cross the line of changing someone’s behavior because they want to with forcing people to change their traditions and cultures?

I just read an incredible book about HIV and AIDS in Southern Africa: The Invisible Cure by Helen Epstein. She writes a lot about the failures of massive international campaigns: to use condoms, to get tested, to abstain… for various reasons their impersonal natures were unable to massively change behavior…. That really, the places where you SEE the changes are in small-scale projects that teach people to care for each other and themselves. Women’s groups that talk about sexual or physical abuse for the first time in their lives, kids who are given the opportunity to cry for their dead parents, communities who feed, clothe, and bathe their dying neighbors, women who can take out loans… the places were HIV and AIDS are talked about as personal pain get their numbers down; whereas, big campaigns don’t have much effect in the long run. Not so surprising when you think about it… but as someone coming from the outside, white, a young woman, how can I possibly create that safe space that is so needed? I’d REALLY recommend the book, it’s incredibly interesting and an easy read.

In some ways, I feel I can’t create that space, so instead I need to help people in the other ways that I, as an outside, can: build libraries, talk about education and sex and AIDS, teach computer skills, teach about the environment, go with people to get tested if their willing, give people a vision of a bigger world and be a caregiver in the best way I can… to kids, colleagues, neighbors, friends. It’s almost about leading by example in some way, that that’s what I can give and some of the rest HAS to come from powerfully motivated Zambians. They are the people who know how to communicate and know where the boundaries are that need to be pushed and they exist! All over. All these incredible people who have ideas that never get acknowledged or realized and who don’t have the resources to start projects, even ones that might fail but from which they would learn. So, I’m trying to find them.

Otherwise, things are mostly good… moving forward, less homesick, though letters from home are such gifts that I still get teary when I read them, less sick in general, and much more able to envision what two years here may look like. My roof is supposed to be fixed tomorrow (so the cats won’t be able to climb out my hole!) and maybe by the time it gets hot I’ll have an insaka (an outdoor hut/cooking shelter) to sit in the shade under… my library, my computer projects, my youth group, and my women’s groups might take off in some way soon…

So, in honor of 5 months at site and 7 ½ in country and 20 to go I’ll close with yet another invitation to come visit… see the “real Africa” (as Zambia advertises itself), my iwes, my women and neighbors and the beautiful savannah and incredible sunsets that make you feel that this country just deserves more: more time, more money, more faith from the outside, more training, more opportunity, more schools, more books… and maybe less wind and fewer kids. 

And lastly, I love hearing from you. If that’s by real letter (a lost art, I’m telling you!), by e-mail, by text message whatever… I just got a great e-mail from a brown friend who was reading this and just wanted to say hi. Don’t hold back! They make me smile. And, I’ll write back, eventually, I promise!