• Category: Youth
• Location: Lusaka, Zambia

This is Part 2 of the Africa Rides series, a six-part depiction of bicycles and life in Zambia from a recent trip by a Specialized employee with World Bicycle Relief. Read Part 1 here.

Don’t drink the water.

Sound advice for feeble Western stomachs.  But water, in all its shape-shifting elusiveness, can show up just about anywhere. Even, believe it or not, in drinks.

My brain was clearly in the off position when I took a swig of the local Zambian fermented maize drink, munkoyo on my first day. It was a unique flavor, an acquired taste one might say. I can only assume that a bonfire would taste about the same. Not in a spicy hot kind of way, that I could deal with. No, this tasted more like a mouthful of smoke, like drinkable Marlboros.

I thought the taste was lesson enough, but the munkoyo, ripe with local water, had other ideas.  So my first day in Zambia ended with me, fetal position on the floor of my hotel bathroom at 3am, my knees tucked into my chest, trying to predict the direction of my next expulsion, wondering if perhaps there was some mathematical pattern to the matter – geometric maybe, or was it a Fibonacci? Whatever the sequence, I took it as a sign that I was going to see some things on this trip that might be hard to digest.

I had heard Zambia referred to as “Africa Light,” I suppose for its relatively delicate imprint on one’s emotional wellbeing (clearly it’s harsher on physical wellbeing), or maybe, for its faint glow – a single firefly on a black night.  Outside its borders, in all eight directions, the neighborhood is dark. Angola has the highest infant mortality rate in the world, the Democratic Republic of the Congo was ranked the poorest country in the world in 2011, Zimbabwe has been imploding for ten years thanks to political sabotage, and Rwanda struggles to rebuild after the devastating genocide of 1994, which took the lives of an estimated 800,000 people.

In Zambia at least, there is a feeling of hope.

There is peace – 72 tribes that live together harmoniously, and a recent election in which the defeated incumbent simply stepped away quietly, saying, “When the dance is over, you stop dancing.”  Sensible yes, but a rarity for African elections.

And there is progress – I opened the paper one day to find a copy of the country’s constitution and an invite to submit comments. A committee is leading an update, a democratic process to reflect a nation living with stable independence. I was tempted to submit a request for mandatory cotton candy wigs in Parliament, but refrained. Yet even without my input, the economy is growing at 7% per year and the HIV/AIDS rate has been falling steadily for the past decade.

But life is by no means candy-coated.  There is extreme poverty here, visible everywhere. To see the Zambian version of a soccer ball is to know how close to the edge people live.  Soccer is religion. Just mention the national team, Chipolopolo, champions of the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations, and you’ll be treated to the full spectrum of Zambian celebration –woots and bird calls, big white grins, wide eyes and powerful handshakes that won’t let go.

And yet a soccer ball in rural Zambia is a dusty collection of crumpled plastic grocery bags, bound by other bags shredded into makeshift string, and shared by a school of seven hundred children.

That’s not to say that people need FIFA-certified balls to be healthy or happy, but it points to the fragility of life here. The soil is fertile and the water is mostly clean (despite what my stomach might say), but a single illness or a diseased crop, and a family could be left scrambling for a simple bowl of nshima, the staple maize porridge.

Introduce a bicycle to that world. There is no single item in the West that means as much to us as a bicycle does to a rural Zambian. A bicycle is the kind of gift that brings a person to tears, and for good reason.  It’s a tool that connects, and connection is the single biggest contributor to development. Without it, a student can’t be taught, a patient can’t be treated, and a farmer can’t sell his goods.  In sparsely populated rural Zambia, connections are both critical and difficult.  In this world of plastic bag soccer balls, just imagine the value of bicycle.

It was strange then to arrive at our downtown hotel the first day, to the impeccable service and the crisp white sheets folded back, a delicate chocolate waiting on the pillow.  The segregation wasn’t lost on me as I sat by the man-made crocodile lagoon in the middle of the hotel’s courtyard, lounging in a padded rattan chair, sipping a frosty imported beer.

The division of wealth is a blatant, defining characteristic of life in Lusaka. Restaurants and hotels frequented by whites and the black elite show off lavish gardens and five-star service that compares to the highest standards anywhere, while just blocks away, urban slums, piled with burning garbage and wobbly corrugated huts house some of the poorest people in the world.

So later that night as I lay curled on the floor, sweating and shivering at the same time, it was difficult not to question the insidious role of guilt in my intestinal demise. Earlier in the evening I had stood under a wonderful shower, blushing from the hot water and my unjustified abundance, knowing that much harsher conditions were the reality for 99% of the population here.  And now my fine Italian dinner was staring back at me from the toilet bowl, chastising me for my gluttony in the face of poverty.  I should have passed on the tiramisu.

Stay with the series to learn more about life in Zambia, and the different ways the bicycle creates positive change, and please consider donating to World Bicycle Relief, here.