Safari Mary

Addressing an imported vegetarian haggis

5th September 2006

We are at Lusaka airport, waiting for my mother’s delayed arrival. The plane was late, and there is a certain lack of urgency in the immigration procedures. Mum texts me from the other side of the sliding doors to report on her slow progress in the queue. I reply “welcome 2 zambia”.

Finally she appears, just visible behind a huge mound of luggage. We load up the Landcruiser, run around Shoprite, and then we hit the Great East Road. Chas and I apologise in advance for the appalling state of untidiness that we have left behind at home – there is a motorbike in the kitchen, the wonky desk that won’t go through the hallway door has been abandoned in the sitting room, and 40kg of rice and beans for Joost’s bridge building project have been deposited somewhere in between. Mum shrugs, distracted by the mud huts and people walking on the side of the road. There is no great novelty in my housekeeping failures, but the view through the windscreen is something entirely new.

We arrive in Mpanshya a couple of hours later, and when we open the front door to our house, we are greeted by an overwhelming aroma of floor polish. We are all slightly taken aback at the pristine interior, and we later discover that Sister Sabina has dispatched a ground force of cleaning ladies this morning in honour of the new guest. Sister S greets Mum with a similar speech to the one I was given on arrival (“Amai, you will never leave!”) and Mum then has her first experience of Zambian hospitality at the convent. Sisters Martha and Regina are summoned to sit around the table with us, and there is a slightly awkward silence as we breach local etiquette by eating our nshima with knives and forks.

6th September 2006

Bernadette and I are in Lukwipa for the mobile clinic. We are sharing a dilapidated concrete shack behind the church with the home based care team, a collaboration which might have been less problematic had the building been equipped with doors. It quickly degenerates into a shouting match, and I am very happy indeed when the last patient departs.

We receive a message that Brenda, a patient of ours, has given birth at home yesterday and she is having some problems. One of the home based care team offers to show us where her house is. We park the van at the roadside and follow her as she disappears into the grass. After ten very agreeable minutes of strolling along in the bush, we come to a stream. There is a narrow plank of wood balanced between its banks, about three feet above the water. Our guide, a lady in her late fifties, runs across without hesitation. Bernadettte edges over, freezes midway and needs a hand up for the final steps. My crossing is no more elegant. We trudge up the hill on the other side and finally reach Brenda’s home.

She doesn’t seem to be particularly surprised by her unexpected visitors, and she brings out her best chairs for us to sit on, then disappears again into her tiny hut. We sit and wait, and wait, uncertain what preparations are going on inside. Eventually she emerges, holding baby John. We carry her suitcase, her bag of maize, her cooking utensils and her bamboo mat back down the hill again. A small gathering of children has assembled on the opposite side of the stream in the hope of witnessing the ARV outreach team swimming. I attempt to cross holding the rolled-up mat in my arms in the style of a tightrope artiste, but three steps in I begin to wobble and am rescued by Brenda’s husband. The kids shriek with laughter. I have executed a few nifty manoeuvres in getting to patients’ houses in the past – high speed U-turns, precision reverse parking, running up twelve flights of stairs to avoid the toxic puddles in the bottom of high rise lifts – but the repertoire of a Glasgow GP doesn’t get you very far round here.

10th September 2006

Mass in Mpanshya is seldom a sedate affair, but this particular Sabbath is much more uproarious than any I have seen before. We are late for the service, and we hover in the doorway, trying to identify a vacant seat. The place is jammed with people, celebrating the end of an annual retreat for a local Catholic society. Eventually we sneak in, and I perch on the end of a bench with Mum sitting behind me. There is dancing everywhere, in the pews and the aisle and at the altar. I twist round to look at Mum’s face, and find her beaming.

Afterwards, we head off to Luangwa Bridge for a picnic with some other people who are visiting Mpanshya. We sit beside the river, watching a crocodile basking while Kurt plays his guitar. A small boy appears, paddling in a dugout canoe, and he clambers up the bank to join us. Someone hands him an apple, which he bites into enthusiastically and then promptly regurgitates down the front of his T-shirt in distaste. He stays around for a little while to duet with Kurt, and then jumps back in his canoe, and paddles over to the sandbank where the crocodile is resting. Playing to his increasingly horrified audience, he throws stones at the enormous reptile. It responds by meekly sliding into the river. The boy turns round to just make sure we were watching, and then disappears.