The Spiritual Side of Life

Disclaimer: This one is a happy-go-lucky ramble about life is like, for me, in Zambia, and has very little to do with development and everything to do with life. It is more personal, and less professional.

I love my little room dearly. It has almost nothing in it. The bed is just 5 inches of foam covered with a couple blankets and my bundle of clothes as a pillow. My rucksack sits in the corner, empty save for the dirty clothes I put in it waiting to be hand washed in the yard on the weekend. My dress shoes sit under my bed next to my hiking shoes for trips to the field, which are in turn next to my Birkenstocks, and only my tropicals [rainbow coloured flip flops… the most common non-formal Zambian footwear] are not there as they are on my feet. All my possessions, save for the couple sets of clothes for work hanging on 5 hangers in the open closet, sit on my little table. My little collection of books, more than half of which are the Baha'i books I brought thinking they would be harder for Zambian Baha'is to get than me [it turns out they are all readily available in Lusaka]. My nalgene bottle full of water, and my nalgene with the nalgene tea/coffee press that my friend Pam gave me for my birthday. Zambians love sugar-milk-tea, which is how I refer to the way they drink their tea, being the list of ingredients from most abundant to least in your cup. I’ve fallen in with the Zambians on sugar-milk-tea. It is quite delightful. Especially because all the milk here is full cream, and if you are in a town smaller than Livingstone or Lusaka you get it in little bags straight from the dairy farmers. Here in Livingstone I get the milk satchels that get shipped from Lusaka after being processed. They are 500ml and totally sealed in plastic, which is very convenient for brewing the milk in an electric kettle [Zambians make tea by heating up milk, diluted only slightly with a bit of water, and adding the tea leaves to milk] as surprisingly the heating coils do not melt the plastic and you can pull the piping hot satchel of full cream milk goodness out of the water and make yourself tea at the office [right there is how my mornings at the office start… gloriously]. I guess this would be a convenient point to share something I have learned about myself: I can live on pretty much any kind of food, no matter if it is unappealing to me, so long as I have some sort of hot beverage to look forward to during my day. They told us Zambians don’t drink coffee, but Katalausha loves coffee. So I bought the family a big bag of Zambian coffee, ground, espresso roast because Katalausha says he likes it strong. He usually has instant coffee, but I wanted to see how Zambian coffee tastes anyway. When we made it, and despite it being night and my reminders of how it will keep them up at night, the entire family wanted coffee except for Lidia and me who enjoyed our less caffeinated tea. As we sat outside under the clear sky showing off the amazing array of stars and I poured the hot milk into cups while the family anxiously awaited their respective teas or coffees, I had a moment [which I hope you sometimes experience to because they feel great] where I was so happy to be me for my eccentricities. It seems wherever I go I ended up making those hot tea or coffee based drinks for people. There is magic in beverages I swear, they are the great undervalued parts of our diet.
My little table also bears my Leatherman multitool… perhaps the best investment ever [shout out to Duncan], and my little container of spices I got at Mountain Equipment Co-op [another great investment for the traveler]. I may have mentioned Zambians only know about one spice, salt, which to be fair I love more than most people do also [my little container has garlic salt in it… some of you know my love for salt… you haven’t seen me with garlic salt. Thanks Geoffrey, for getting me hooked on garlic this year.]. Katalausha is also an avid lover of spices like black pepper and chili flakes [I don’t have chili flakes but I do have cayenne]. Beside my mini-library sits my pile of Moleskin notebooks. I got some skeptical looks when I brought a pile of those Moleskins, but I am using everyone of them. One, the sketchbook, I gave to my sister before I left for her to use during her first year outside of high school, whether she be in university or taking a year to work and travel like I did. The one Clare decorated so eloquently for me is filled with all sorts of things that I have needed to write down as I am on this crazy journey. I am not so good at writing for my own sake, but I do write down things I am trying to work out, such as using the problem tree technique that is common in development to figure out how to tackle the changes I want to make in my life back in Vancouver [I feel it is a novel, but useful application of development theory]. I also write quite easily when I am coming up with things to say to people. So a few blogs have been written down in there, while I hope that getting them out of my head and on paper will let me sleep! My undecorated moleskin is filled with quotes from the Baha’i books as I am studying this [for me] new faith which I feel I can’t help but become apart of. Also it has random bits of other things like ideas and little poems. The little moleskin the chapter gave me never leaves my side, even when my passport does. Beside being filled with all your messages, it now also contains a list of contacts, a calendar, hand drawn maps of Zambia, Lusaka, Livingstone, and the Southern Province, lists of emails to write, or blog ideas, and everything else that comes across my path. I am hoping if I get pick-pocketed they won’t grab that little book, as I also use the little folder in the back as an emergency stash of money. And the moleskin folder keeps my photocopies of important documents, postcards, and other assorted odds and ends neatly organized.
The table is covered by a brightly coloured, beautiful chitenge [traditional Zambian cloth wrapped around the waste to be a skirt], which now has wax stains from where my reading candle has over spilled its holder.

Life in that little room, lit by my lone candle, is a glorious thing. I do yoga on average once a day [sometimes twice a day, sometimes not at all, but mostly once a day]. I do other exercises like pushups and sit-ups, or I go out to the mango tree in the back yard [sadly mangos aren’t in season till December, but when mango season comes Zambians are drawn in mangos… how I envy them!] and do chin-ups on the branches.

Happy little nights in Zambia, belly full of warm sugar-milk-tea,
dancing around to a funky Metric song in between yoga poses.
Perhaps I should listen to different music while I do yoga.
Perhaps Not.

I think I easily enjoy these living conditions more than most people. I’ve always admired monks and sadhus and other spiritual aspirants who turn their back on worldly pleasures in favour of the inward journey. And that is just how I view this temporary life of mine, like the lives of my spiritual heroes except I am also surrounded by a wonderful Zambian family which has taken me in like a brother and uncle.

At night I curl over that little candle to read books like The Tipping Point, which makes me go crazy with ideas for EWB in Canada, or When the Rivers Run Dry which makes me go crazy with ideas for EWB in Zambia, or just Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums which makes me see everything as a merry, poetic, and above all transcendental journey. My favourite definitely has turned out to be the Kerouac book. How it has inspired me for life back in Canada. I marvel at how perfect the books I chose at random before coming to Zambia all have turned out. I couldn’t have picked better.


Last night I chased Dorris around the house, had a hearty Zambian meal with my family, did some yoga, meditated, and prayed in my room, then made tea and coffee for the family before slipping back into my room containing my little foam and blanket bed, rucksack, and little table of books and moleskins and my lone candle. The cement walls are bare and dirty, their plainness only broken by random divots [by which I mean little pot holes only an inch or less deep. The only decoration is the patterned fabric that is draped over the window and serves as oversized blinds as it runs wild on the floor for a foot or two. I’ve added a bit of colour by using that chitenge for a table cloth on my little table but somehow, last night, that small extravagant addition almost seemed too much. I was tempted to remove it, and probably would have if the table underneath wasn’t in such a miserable condition. There seems to me a great wealth in living with the barest supplies. All those material things truly are a burden that you only realize when you are free of them… and how free that feels!
Yet I can picture my room in Vancouver, bare as this room here in Zambia, and I can’t stand it. Why!? Is it the ungodly bright white walls under the glare of the fluorescent lights? I think what it truly comes down to is the lighting. Even my bare little room is not the paradise during the day that it is illumined by my lone candle during the cool nights. The candles flickering lights barely reaching any of the walls except the ones in front of my as I curl over it, trying to get as much light on my book or moleskin as possible so I do not strain my eyes. Or maybe, and probably, it is just all in my head. Maybe my bare Zambian room is so perfect because that’s what the idea was: to live in a bare room while I am in Zambia. While the ide of a room in Canada is that it is only as good as the amount and quality of stuff we fill it with. Maybe it all comes down to how we construct expectations about a room. Regardless, in that bare Zambian room I am overcome with the question: What more could a person want?

[the answer, by the way, is one of those back packing espresso machines and milk steamers for camping stoves that they sell in Mountain Equipment Co-op, high speed internet, Chai [there is none here, but I can get my hands on some spices…], and all of you wonderful people back in Canada]

But until the day I return and we start living like Zen Lunatics like Kerouac, having transcendental evenings, reading poetry, and meditating on the absurdity of life while we drink Chai and smoke hookah… I will continue on in my happy-go-luck adventure here in Africa. Down dusty trails with a spring in my step and smirk on my face [which I think is more common than a big smile for me… just my way I guess]. I hope those people in Vancouver are taking advantage of the summer weather by going swimming naked in the pacific ocean, cooking on the beach, and getting in plenty of adventures.

Much Love from Zambia.



Stayed tuned for more stories from Zambia including…
nshima what?
and
The Sounds and Smells of Zambia
And if you are particularly unlikely, a scandalous photo of me taking a bath [just kidding, I will save that for facebook].