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.