Thoughts on a year.

        I expected Africa to be different than the US. Clinics filled with HIV-positive patients on ARV day, elephant sightings, strange bugs, ridiculous rain leading to ridiculous pot holes, bargaining at the market, red dirt that gets everywhere… I expected all this. Well, maybe I couldn’t have predicted how much I actually like nshima, or learning to cook all sorts of plants (pumpkin leaves in peanut sauce, anyone?), or clinics that lack drug A through X (and tape, and sutures, and whatever) and are entirely run by the maid, or regularly wearing chitenge to the office, but more or less I expected things to be different.

         What I didn’t expect was how much I think this year marks a transition in life for me. When I think about where I was last year, and where I am now, it’s pretty unfathomable. Exactly 12 months ago, I was a full time med student, sporting scrubs through my 30-hour shifts in OB/GYN out in Boise, Idaho, fitting in 6-8 hour breaks (include sleep, eat, shower, in that order) between stretches. I was loving the OR, especially surgery with the super cool DaVinci machine, wielded by a rockstar Gyn/Onc. Kings of Leon playing while we whipped through a para-aortic dissection of lymph nodes invaded with cervical cancer. Dinner usually consisted of cafeteria pudding, coffee, and wilted salad or other unidentifiables. All of my shopping, I hate to say, was at WinCo, which was a convenient 500 meters from the apartment. My favorite run took me out in the desert, past scrub and flowering grasses, where mountain bike trails criss-crossed over streams and steep rocks turned red and sandy gold at sunset. Once, I took a risk on a slowly progressing patient and went for a run while on call. Of course, my pager went off. Twice. I convinced a passing rollerblader that I needed to borrow her cellphone (saying hospital is like a free pass), and set a personal best for the miles home.

          Looking back on the past year as a whole, my life was full. I was set to graduate in a less than two years from medical school, had just signed a lease on a great apartment, and had a fantastic boyfriend. I applied for a few fellowships on the off chance they would deliver, thinking that it was the time to do these things before residency, buying a house, maybe getting married, and the other milestones that one expects at that point of life (heck, I was toying with the idea of a pet!). Now, one year later, I have walked away from all of that for one reason or another (don’t worry Dad, I am going back to med school!). It seems Africa, and her promises of adventure, has a way of coming to call and staying for a lifetime.

This all begs the inevitable: Now what? And that is a darn good question.

Meeting expectations

It’s come up a lot recently that my photos and blog posts aren’t always living up to people’s expectations of Africa. Before I left, I’ll be the first one to admit that I had pretty firm ideas about what I would encounter while I was in Zambia, even though I tried not to. When I told people about my upcoming year, I got responses ranging from “Cool! You’ll see lions!” to “What will you eat?” Now, I think about how I prepared for a year here, I think in some ways I was right on target, but in others I was way, way off base. For instance, I packed about 5 bottles of bugspray, 2 rolls of floss, a headlamp, and a bag full of random medical supplies. All useful. My preconception that I would spend many, many days near a toilet with various stomach bugs, that I would be deprived of Thai food, and new movies? Not so valid. 

You can find parallels between African and American everywhere you look, or you can note the chasms that separate the cultures. This is what often gets overlooked when thinking about a foreign place before you visit – how similar, not how different, things will be. I expected to stand out in a crowd, to find the food unusual, to feel awkward when I made social gaffes. I didn’t think as much about how teens here still buy the Zambian equivalent of Cliff Notes and SAT prep at the market, or how the majority of patients present not with exotic parasites or HIV (though lots do), but with banal complaints of headache and fatigue and the flu. 

The thing is, Africa isn’t only the place that exists in National Geographic-like stills, with mud huts and hippos and little kids with flies everywhere. I can’t even vaguely pretend I know the first thing about how it is to live here, really, but I can say that it’s complex. It’s a place where rural (really, really rural) life meets huge cities and urban progress, and where the same things that impact society in America, or China, or Argentina affect life in Zambia. All these are facets of one existence here: the dusty rutted red roads and the village chickens; the kids without shoes playing with a ball made of plastic bags; the urbanites in patent leather heels and pantsuits; waiting for oxen or elephants to cross the road; the laboratory at Kalingalinga with uber high tech automated sorting machines; a minibus towing another minibus to the gas station with a length of rubber; ladies carrying everything from suitcases to water buckets on their heads; cops asking for bribes; huge superstores; tin-roofed shacks at the market; nshima; fine Italian wine; guys reading statistics books next to little old ladies reading the bible… This is not an incongruence or a dichotomy. Life here is one blend of all of this. So to note some single strange aspect and say aha, look, this is Africa! is impossible. Unusual, familiar, old, and new – it’s all part of the same raucous, wild, sometimes beautiful, often smelly, fantastic place.

Whirlwind update (no reflections here, sorry!)

Been out of touch for a while. It's been a combination of lots of weekend trips and really, really bad internet at home (and at work, unfortunately). October has flown by in a blur... I'll do the highlights of my last three trips:

* Sinkholes (October 9 - 10), near Ndola. Good swimming (great swimming), good food, good people. Need I say more? Oh, I guess I should mention that someone heard that maybe there was a python swimming in with us, but we didn't spot him. And as everyone knows, if you don't see giant snakes, they can't hurt you. Matt gave a bunch of Zambian teens a kick by boarding their floating log and playing around with them - probably the most entertaining thing a mazungu has done in the sinkholes aside from getting eaten by a python. We did get a bunch of stuff knicked, which was our own fault, but still was a bummer. We balanced this out by filling up the back of the car on the way home with pumpkin and onions and other veggies from the roadside vendors...Yum.

* Lake of Stars Music Festival (October 15 - 18), Mangochi, Malawi. 15 hours in a car each way. Awesome bands ranging from the Noisettes (No Doubt meets Amy Winehouse) to a school for orphans performing hip hop to a guy playing a gourdophone (yeah, that's right, like a xylophone, but with gourds). Right on the beach, housed in a resort with white sand and poolside drinks. Picture lots of young, sunburned, and hungover white kids inside the fence, with lots of equally young Malawians trying to peer through. That was the weird part, it was like crossing from Africa to Fort Lauderdale when you walked through the gate. Also, we got a ticket on the way home. For having an expired road tax sticker. In Malawi. For a Zambian road tax. Explain that to me, Mr Officer. Oh well, he did issue us a receipt. The drive was definitely the most harrowing part - chockerblock full of goats/little kids/potholes bigger than your car/guys parking their semis in really, really inappropriate spots (e.g. blind curves)/narrow shoulders and guardrails that rusted off the side of the highway. Mom and Dad, I AM trying not to get killed, I promise.

* Livingstone (October  22 - 25). Home of the natural wonder, Victoria Falls. It's pretty darn wonderous. You could see all of the rock formations as it was the dry season, and the depth and breath of the waterfall is spectacular. Easy to see why Livingstone had such a verbose response to the sight. Went white water rafting and may be a total junky if I kept that up. I think I made this noise the whole time: AHHHHHH -WHEEEEEEE - HAHAHAHA (repeat ad nauseum). We capsized once, on a class 3. Thankfully, we didn't go over the class 6, which resembled a sheer cliff with some water shooting over it. I also went for a swim in the Devil's Pool at the top of Victoria Falls, which was definitely worth the chunk of change to be sheparded along through the guided chute. A few minutes in a pool at the top of the falls - feeling the tug of the water going over the edge... Awesome. Livingstone was, all in all, a place to indulge (for example, the Royal Livingstone hotel, complete with flute players and tame zebras roaming the lawn) and a place not to think too hard about your existance in Africa by losing yourself in the maze of tourism.You could be shuttled around from bus to hotel to packaged tour and back without ever lifting a finger or making a decision beyond choice of safari hat.