Tales from the road in Zambia

23 May 2014

I cannot imagine living in Zambia.  The most redeeming aspect I can find is the people; they are warm, friendly and quick to smile – at least the ones we meet in the medical field.  Driving through the run-down towns, I noticed a lot of hardened faces walking down dusty roads; it’s not all smiles here.  I like the people, but I find Zambia in general to be one of the most depressing developing countries I have visited. 

Unfortunately, the Zambia I have seen so far is lacking in natural beauty.  The terrain is mostly flat with some occasional rolling hills.  Then there are the dusty roads, open plains with tall grasses, interspersed with large trees, and once in awhile, a slow-moving river or marsh area.  The winter weather we are experiencing here now is lovely though; it’s cool in the evenings and warm, sunny, and dry in the daytime.  I have only seen one mosquito all week.

The highways we’ve been driving are pretty decent by third world standards.  They are overall well paved with occasional dirt portions.  They like to throw in a series of speed bumps and police checkpoints at random locations, which creates a lot of traffic.   The highway only consists of two lanes, which means there is a lot of high speed passing going on, even with large tractor-trailers which is proving to be more unnerving than normal due to the fact that they drive on the opposite side of the road here.  So as the driver (which fortunately I am not), you are not only darting past tractor-trailers, but you are also trying to avoid the man teetering past on his bicycle in the shoulder, the teenage boy who sprints out into the street, the brush fires on the side of the road, and the many broken down cars, trucks and buses who take up one of the two lanes.  Our driver, Chris, has been doing a great job getting us safely around Zambia.  Without him, we’d be screwed.

Spending three to six hours a day in the car has given me a lot of time to observe Zambian life from the roadside:  at certain times of day, there are groups of uniformed school children walking along, most young women have a baby strapped to their back and sometimes a heavy item on their head, sometimes there are two men on a bicycle in their factory uniforms.  Also on the side of the road, you will find any number of items for sale:  bright red tomatoes stacked into a pyramid, dozens of watermelon, freshly made cinderblocks, butternut squash, plates of honeycomb, couches, packages of charcoal the size of a man.  One town was selling nothing but calabash gourds.  According to our Zambian travel partner, these gourds are dried out and then used to hold and drink the local moonshine.

 

From driving around, it is clear that the Zambians are very religious people.  It seems that half the buildings we pass by are churches, everything from the United Church of Zambia, to the Church of Latter Day Saints, and even the Jehovah’s Witnesses have made it out there.  The tiny cramped buses that pass by have giant stickers on the front and side with slogans like, “God’s time is the best time,” “Only Prayers,” “Favour from God,” and “Missing Identity.”  Although I am not sure the religious significance of the last slogan, but it was on the side of the “God’s time is the best time” bus.

It is obvious that Zambia is an industrial nation.  During our travels, we have passed by steel and copper mills, oil refineries, cement factories, and large agricultural corporations like Zambeef and Zamseed.  The hand-painted billboards on the side of the road advertise for borehole drilling and flushing or construction supplies like Harvey Roof Tiles, “A house with out Harvey Tiles is like a zoo without animals, there is no entertainment!”  Many of the towns that have sprouted up, are located around major transit points.  We always see a steady line of tractor trailers at the major highway junctions, some are coming to and from the capital city of Lusaka, others are on their way to adjacent countries like Zimbabwe, Malawi, Tanzania, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

 

Zambia is not all industry though; in fact most of it is rural with some farmland.  We have visited a number of cities already, but between those cities, is nothing but dusty earth, bush, trees, and anthills that seems to stretch as far as the eye can see across the flat terrain.