7/7/7

An auspicious day for a 16 hour bus ride, if any day could be an
auspicious day to sit on a bus for so long. When you travel via bus to
Lusaka, you get up at 3:30 to catch the 4am bus to the nearby city,
Solwezi. This is the same bus I took back in March, which has to be the
most maddening bus ever because it picks you up at 4, but doesn't leave
until 6. You may ask, 'Matt, why don't you just catch it at 6, then',
but it drives 5km away and sits there for the 2 hours, so that it's not
really practical to go find it at 6am. Anyway, I made it onto Mark's
Motors (pronounced Max Motors, don't ask me why) at 8:30, managed to
score the seat on the back row that faced the aisle so I could stretch
out my legs, and settled in with my iPod for the trip.
Travelling by bus is one of the best ways to get a sense of the country;
you see Africa 1st-hand, sometimes really close-up, like when I was
holding the baby of the woman sitting next to me, or reading about the
uncle who wanted to marry his niece on my next-door neighbor's paper
(the lead article for the day). But nevertheless, I was ready for a
break from Africa at the end of all that time, so I was glad to see the
smog and lights of Lusaka in the distance.
Now I'm back at the first place I saw when I came to Zambia. It's not
quite full circle, but it is an opportunity for reflection, remembering
the days of sweating and swatting mosquitoes. Hard to remember all
those too hot days when it's 40 degrees outside now and I've got only
two sweaters to my name. I nearly was down to one after a woman in the
hospital got pretty angry with me this week when I declined to give the
one I was wearing to her. I feel much more comfortable and more
uncomfortable than I did 6 months ago; just having some Zambian Kwacha
and a basic grasp of the language goes a long way to feeling
comfortable. I don't feel nearly as much out of place as I did, and
there are few places that I could go where I wouldn't know anyone
around. On the other hand, I get more uncomfortable with the limits of
what I can provide for the patients at the hospital, more uncomfortable
with the sense of entitlement that I get from some Zambians, and
uncomfortable with how some of the ex-pats have responded to their
Zambian brothers and sisters.
Although there's no more marathon bus rides in the future, I guess my
journey in Zambia still has a long way to go.