Livingstone

Here I am sitting in the internet cafe in Livingstone, Zambia. So much has happened since my last post that I am not sure where to begin as there are many stories crowding together, wanting to be told. I'll start with an update:

Orian flew out the other day to Boston. We dropped him off at the airport at around 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, October 4th, and his flight was scheduled to leave at 1 p.m. on that day. I received a call from him yesterday evening at 10:30 p.m. Zambian time (~3:30 p.m in Boston), saying that he had found our good friend Maria Luckyanova at her office and would be running errands.

Orian is in Boston for a final round of interviews for the Hertz Fellowship. I have heard that there are 50 applicants remaining and ~10 Fellowships will be given out. The Fellowship would be for Orian to pursue a degree and research at M.I.T. where he would like to study energy and transportation.

The four of us still in Africa--Minwah, Nate, Quinn, and myself--are staying with Gustav on his grandparents' farm. We call his grandparents Granny and Papa, and we often go over to their building where they sit all day chatting over tea and the paper at their table. Papa George started a crayfish farm in the area, and pioneered that type of aquaculture in this area, through correspondance with a professor at the University of Louisiana. The aquaculture and the rest of the farm are now in disrepair, as old age is preventing the Grubbs (Granny and Papa) from running the farm. They originally had 150 acres but in the past 7 years have sold all but 12 of those acres since they needed to money and were unable to farm them. Gustav has returned from England to help revive the farm and he hopes to focus primarily on aquaculture. He has been in Africa one month now (he grew up in the area but had been living in London-area for many years) and is getting a feel for the place and organizing the purchasing of supplies, such as a generator, and preparing to build larger pools and such.

The farm borders the Zambezi. We can see the tall trees that border the river from the building that Gustav has been sharing with us. He and Papa are always warning us away from the river, saying it is infested with crocodiles and hippos. "Don't mess with nature," he says. We have also been warned that the fields are infested with all types of poisonous snakes...black mambas and cobras and pythons. As such, I have not ventured beyond the area just around the house. If I leave Africa without ever seeing a snake of this type I will not be sorry.

We ride down dirt roads and walk (or ride) over a footbridge with loose planks towards the main road. Livingstone is almost all on a single road and the airport is smaller than the CWA (Central Wisconsin Airport) near Orian's house in Wisconsin. We go mostly to a little strip mall, seemingly geared towards tourists, for our grocery and internet needs. From the footbridge we can see quite far, as the topography, though somewhat hilly, is predominately flat. And when we stand there, looking over the tops of the trees, a few kilometres away a mist rises from the greenery, and this is the falls, Victoria Falls, which we visited with Gustav a few days ago.

One of the interesting things about Africa is that nothing is really very cheap here. South African prices have been the cheapest so far, with food being two to three times cheaper than in the States. But when we got to Botswana and especially since entering Zambia, we have been astonished to find the food prices only a bit less than what we pay for food in the states, especially because many people here in Zambia live on less than $1/day. Here, a dollar will only buy you some mealie meal (mealie is what they call their course, not very sweet, white corn) or some fat cakes (the deep-fried bread mentioned in a previous post). Moreover, the prices for manufactured goods is also steep. A sort of trivial example is that we went to look for a chess/checkers set the other day. Gustav found one for ~50 000 kwacha (about $10 U.S.). The set was the cheapest set of Chinese-made plastic I have seen in a long time and could not be sold in the U.S. for more than $2, but that is how things are here...there is not much, what there is is often of comparitively cheap quality and make, and the rest cannot be had for love nor money; if you want something really bad you would have to order it overseas and then pay for the expense of having it shipped to you by post.

Our diet consists mainly of rice, pasta, canned baked beans, and pulses (lentils and split peas) as things that you make yourself are still affordable, say about $1-3/kg. I am just amazed at how expensive things are here...a small box (say 250g) of cereal is about $3-4. Who is buying this stuff? Not locals, because if we can't afford to pay that, then they also can't. It is so weird. I cringe every time I go to the grocery store and it makes me feel so frustrated, thinking of how sparse the diet of the typical local is. Papa George and Gustav say it is because nothing is made here...all the processed food is imported from South Africa and much of the produce is. How do people live?