• Category: Youth
• Location: Chongwe, Zambia

This is Part 3 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.

Across the front of her vibrant orange shirt was stitched in yellow, “Barbados.” Behind the word, a palm tree swayed in lime green yarn. It was a remnant of someone’s vacation, a souvenir that never made it out from the bottom of the drawer.  Now it was here, worn by this plump, sad woman who intently twirled its frayed edge with her dark fingers.

She had welcomed us here with the most captivating baritone voice, leading her peers in a song and dance to show their appreciation for our visit.  The melody was upbeat, a traditional welcome, but the solemnity of this woman made it strangely haunting.  Since the song ended, she hadn’t said a word.

She sat in the circle with the rest of us while the others eagerly answered our questions, their hands shooting up to share what life was like as a caregiver here in the Kampekete region of Chongwe, Zambia.

It was admirable work.  They were only volunteers, but spent five or six hours every day tending to those with HIV and AIDS. They would clean, cook, mend wounds, and make sure their clients – they don’t call them patients, and it reframes the relationship - took their antiretrovirals.  If needed, they would haul them off to the clinic by bicycle.  They were each given a bicycle through World Bicycle Relief and such a reward was definitely important to helping the caregivers stay with the program during the bleak periods. Their day would start early and end late as they balanced the needs of their own families and those of their community. 

We had sat together a long time before someone finally asked, “How do you handle the emotional strain of treating AIDS patients on a daily basis?” Funerals are all too common here – the life expectancy is just 48 because of the disease.

The woman in the orange shirt stood up for the first time and spoke softly:  “You cannot show too much compassion. Compassion can kill.” Heads around the circle nodded as she sat back down and focused again on her shirt.

The words lingered with me. In this deeply Christian society, it was an unexpected response.  Infinite compassion was the goal, I thought.

In trying to understand her words, I discovered this quote from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera:

“For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

If compassion for one person’s pain weighs so heavy, than an endless procession of people who have lost spouses, neighbors and children to a disease that now hangs them over a cliff, must be debilitating.  Unbridled compassion would leave a caregiver tattered, unable to help.  So compassion can kill – it can destroy the spirit of a caregiver, which in turn can leave a client pawing at the air.  There’s a balance that must be reached between compassion and detachment.

Thanks to the efforts of men and women like this, the HIV/AIDS rate in Zambia has dropped from 23% in the 1990s to 14% today.   There have been significant challenges – like the prevalence of polygamy as a cultural norm, and the belief of some rural witch doctors that sex with a virgin can cure you of AIDS.  But they have been largely overcome.

The bicycle has become a key tool in the fight, allowing caregivers to visit many more clients in a day and giving them a makeshift ambulance when a visit to a clinic is necessary. It allows this community to stay connected, and connection is survival.

Teresa, a big jovial woman with a boisterous laugh, told us about a recent visit with a client. She was taking care of household duties when she got the call.  Teresa’s other volunteer position, as a midwife, was suddenly the priority. A woman in labor needed to get to the clinic, stat. So Teresa hoped on her bicycle and rode the eight miles across town on rough dirt, baking in the sun. She plopped the woman on the back rack of the bicycle and grinded her large self, mother-to-be, and baby-to-be to the clinic. Delivered safe and sound. Back on her bicycle she returned across town to her original client to finish her sweeping, damp with sweat. All in a day’s work.

To get a sense of her route, and those used by all the caregivers, we headed out by bicycle to meet some of the clients. As we rode along the dusty paths, glowing red in the afternoon sun, I thought about the extent of my volunteering – an hour here, a couple there. Nothing more than the odd Saturday during which I’d count the minutes, like I was trading each one for karma points. Even karma wasn’t worth more than a few hours on a weekend. I couldn’t wrap my head around how someone could spend so much time in the service of others, to go as far as to sacrifice time tending to his own family and farm, as our guide Lackson did.  So as we approached the home of a client, a man with HIV who had lost his wife to AIDS, I asked Lackson, “why do you do this?”

He stopped pedaling and coasted to the home, saying: “My family is bigger than my bloodline, it includes the people who share this place.”

And that’s the thing here.  Community is family. What one might do for a brother or sister, one does for a neighbor.  It’s assumed to be that way. It’s not idyllic – the moral obligations of that social environment can strain. There is happiness in reaching out to others, but when you’re constantly the rock, the healthy one, as with the caregivers, maintaining positive energy is a fight. Still, I could only commend the tight networks of support that had formed, and how this community had managed to face, and begin to defeat, such adversity together.

In the West, we have chosen to place more value on the individual, and less on the social structure that surrounds him.  It has gotten us far, but not without sacrifices.  We have isolated ourselves and forced that upon each other. Outside the miniature worlds we’ve created - our houses, our cars, our offices – thousands suffer alone amongst the crowd.

After visiting two children with sickle-cell anemia, Lackson turned to me to reinforce his point, “These are our children, it is up to us to take care of them.”

For all the time we spend preaching about how to fix Africa, it was refreshing to see today, in the heart of all its devastation, how Africa can fix us.

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

Simon Dunne

Global Advocacy Manager

Specialized Bicycle Components