Malawi

On The Road In Malawi

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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May 20, 2002
Up 5 am and out 6:30. Most of the day is spent traveling to Zambia. A bridge is out on the road south so we have to double back to Mezuza and take another route. Stopped off at Mezuza again for a couple of hours in a frustrating attempt to get e-mail.

Back on the Road
I turn around to say something to Bob two seats behind me and see Rod lying in the aisle asleep-recurring Malaria he thinks. He stays there for two days and then gets up but he is a rag. His head hurts and he is weak. Bob starts reading about Malaria. There are many kinds with symptoms all the way from feeling like you have the flu to feeling a piercing cold that makes you tremble and shake. During these times you want a heavy thing to mash you down and keep you still…you wish you could die.

Rod warns us to use mosquito repellant but Bob has his doubts about it’s effectiveness. In the tent at night we use a towel to kill off any mosquitos we find before we go to sleep but invariably during the night they mysteriously materialize-buzzing in your ear…keeping you awake until you finally get up and thrash around with your towel again.

The Malaria carrying mosquitos were especially bad around wet marshy areas like Dar es Salaam and Lake Malawi. Sunday is our day to take our Larium but it makes us have vivid dreams at night. One night I dreamt that some people had cut my chest open and was slicing up my heart and eating it!

To pass the time on the long haul today I read Edward Said’s memoirs “Out Of Place.” As I read I gaze out of the truck from time to time wondering…what to wonder…what to think…Edward was born a Christian in Palestine, had ancestors from Lebanon, grew up in Cairo but isolated from the muslim community, went to English schools which he hated, was educated in the United States and now teaches at Columbia University in New York and has become a spokesman for middle east affairs. “Out of Place” is a good title; I have felt that way myself.

Las Vegas Bottle Store…pass one woman chopping wood out behind a mud hut and two men sitting in front…”makes me mad!” Melissa from New Zealand says…children literally scream out their greetings…villages are perfectly neat no litter or pieces of paper or the proverbial third world plastic. As in Moroccan casbahs you would think absolutely no one lived there at all because they use and reuse everything over and over until there is nothing left to become garbage.

Cleaning The Lenses
I am feeling comfortable and at home in Africa. The lives and cultures of the people in these countries at least seem to have integrity…congruity. The way they live makes sense in relation to their history, geography economics and culture-not to be compared to any other place. Rather than judge, a friend says she tries to engage “others” with a “reverent curiosity” to describe how she travels. We are intentional-we borrow her idea and make it our own-we call it “reverent inquiry.” We want to respect the dignity of those we are coming to visit.

I want to be transparent in sharing my struggle with my own ethnocentric/class biases I have learned from living in my culture…insofar as I can become aware of them. Where are you from, he says…America, I say…which America, he says? And there it is again. I could cover it all over with political correctness but I want to explore-I want to peel the layers off the lenses-I want to write with integrity. Traveling is a seriously important business. Rod says 90% of Americans don’t have a passport which means that many Americans have never, in a substantive way, experienced any other valid way to live in the world. Isolated. Insulated. For how long? We cannot be a “superpower” and not be inter-dependent with the rest of the world; the world is going to force us to look and listen to it. It has begun with 9/11. And we thought the Cold War was bad!

I made the mistake of remarking to Rod that we liked the fact that our drivers were Africans and none of the other trucks had African drivers. He reminded me that he was African, which he is, and that even some of the British and Australian drivers have been at it for 15-20 years and know Africa well. There I did it again-I used the term African when I really meant black African. Assumptions can work both ways however. I have a friend whose husband happens to be black and when he visited Africa he had to explain that he and his brother were Americans born and raised in New York.

I ask Rod if the local people can tell that James and George, who are Kenyans, are not from this area. Yes, he says, because of their size and they are very dark. And people here don’t speak Swahili so they have to use the common language-English. Rod says that Malawians and Zambians are more friendly than people in the north and south of Africa because they are not around western tourists enough to become inflamed with desire for the material things we have that they don’t have. In the north and south the feeling is that “You’ve gotten yours, now it’s my turn to get mine-no matter how.”

Time, Walking, Women

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Time, Walking, Women, Waiting, Matatus and Plastic
In Africa these things work together in a synchronous whole says Ryszard Kapuściński in “Shadow Of The Sun.” Rattle-trap matatus-minibuses that serve as public transportation-all seats and the space in between and the space full from floor to ceiling whiz by. What time does the bus leave for it’s destination? The answer is when it fills up. Time for on most of this continent only has meaning in relation to events. If you ask when does the bus leave it makes no sense. The bus will leave when it is full so one must wait…quietly with unseeing eyes…when people are waiting…for this is what they must do before something can happen…they do not react to anything around.

But people are happy to wait for the bus because for eons before this Africa walked-indeed they still walk in the rural areas which is most of African countries and they carry whatever has to be transported on their shoulders or heads. Entire cities and everything in them were carried into the interiors on the heads of the people in the 18th century when there were no roads-only paths.

On this ancient system of paths people walked silently and single file and they still do today even if they are traveling on one of today�s wide roads. And it is the women who do the transporting…they may have to walk several miles every day in one direction for wood and often in another direction for water.

Modern technology has made their lives easier because instead of heavy earthen urns for water they now have red, green and blue plastic buckets. A woman will squat down and place the bucket on her head. Then straightening up she will carefully balance herself. Stepping with an elegant, smooth even gait she walks silently and resolutely down a forest path leading to…a place we will never see. When we pass in the truck she may turn her body slightly and wave. I am immensely impressed. They learn early how to do this…we see a girl about 7 years old walking down a path with a huge heavy bucket of water held up on her head by her tiny neck. When the woman has collected the wood for a fire and the water then she can begin cooking the one meal of the day…

The women carry water, chop wood and work the fields; the armies of men for the most part are unemployed. But they could help the women carry water and wood and work in the fields, we say to each other! But this is Africa and it won’t happen!

The younger men trek from the rural areas to the city in search of work but they find neither jobs nor a roof. They should do something…But what? What should they do with their unutilized energy? With their hidden potential? What is their place in the world? They squat idly on all the larger streets and squares of cities we have been in. In less stable countries, with the promise of shoes or a meal they are recruited by local chieftains when they need to recruit armies, organize coups or foment a civil war.

Malawi Village Walk

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Sun May 19th 2002 Village Walk
Africa does not really exist. Africa is a geographical name for a continent. Africa is made up of countries but people, especially in rural areas, don�t especially identify with the country they are in-most of which have artificial borders created during colonialism.

People do identify with their social groups. Each social group has its own language, distinct culture and system of beliefs and customs including all it�s taboos. The family is large and time spent communally together is highly valued-in fact it is how they survive. Families who have ancestors in common are called clans. At the head of the clan stands the chief who is chosen by a council of elders. Several clans together is what the western world calls a tribe and at it�s head stands the king. A �tribe� can number in the millions-bigger than many western countries. There is no such thing as Africa.

One morning the son of the Chief of the Tonga group (the use of the word tribe is not pc) from a nearby village takes us on a walk to his village for 100 Kwatcha each (about 25 cents). On the way down a dirt path we are taken to his house first. It is very small-about four rooms and we have to duck to go through the doors. The rooms are incredibly bare.

The Chief�s son whose name I didn�t write down, encouraged us to take pictures and showed us two large frames hanging on the walls with collaged pictures of tourists who had visited the village in the past. All he asked of us was to send him copies of the pictures we took of the villagers so he could hand them out. Then he showed us a typed letter hanging on the wall from a Canadian woman that had been sent several years ago. He gently took it down so we could read it…

Then we went into his bedroom that had one single bed with mosquito netting and absolutely nothing else. We didn�t ask where his wife slept; he introduced us to his children who were playing near the house but we were all scared to ask him about a wife because we were afraid there wasn�t one! I suspect there was a wife (or maybe more) but that she/they didn�t have enough status to be introduced to us. However we did meet his mother. There was a second little building with two rooms. Both were for cooking; wood was stacked near the walls and ashes from fires were still hot on the dirt floor.

While we were standing looking around we asked the Chief�s son some questions. How is your work divided among your family members…women do the easy work, he said patronizingly, �because it is simple� and men do the hard work. I looked at him to see if he was kidding. Then I asked him to give me an example of hard work and he answered that men build the house and work in the fields. He was not telling the truth about work in the fields though because in all the time we have been in these African countries we have seen only women working in the fields and we have seen a lot of men sitting. About this time the village brickmaker joins us-an obviously important man in the village. He explains that houses used to be made of mud and sticks but now they are made of cement floors, mud-baked brick walls covered over with mud and thatched roofs.

We move down the trail and are introduced to some extended family members while we take more pictures. As we walk the mile and a half past the homes to the center of the village children in tattered clothing come running out and grab ahold of our hands…as soon as Janine takes her hand away they latch onto it as soon as she puts it down again. Soon we have about 12 children walking-talking-laughing with us. We visit the elementary school-walls open to the outside, dirt floor and nothing else. A white volunteer from England is the teacher and has 90 students in one room.

I say to one of the older children that they must have to be very quiet during school. He said oh, yes, very quiet. I asked what happens if a student is not quiet. He says, oh, he is just asked to become quiet again. I gathered that this request carried a lot of power. From what I understood him to say, school is held in three shifts during the day so all the students have a chance to attend. Parents have to pay school fees so sometimes, he says, tourists will offer to help a family with the fees for the children.

The littlest, about 2, says he has to pee-pee. I repeat this to the Chief’s son and his reply was that “they all know where they are coming from” in other words he knows how to get home so he can pee.

Then we visit the hospital which amounts to a sort of two-room outpatient clinic. There are half a dozen beds in one very unsanitary room. He shows us a second room with a very crude delivery table that the nurses use, he says, to deliver babies. He says there is no doctor and if patients are very sick they are sent to another hospital in a nearby town. We were confused, however, because on the way back down the trail a man of about 30 in an acrylic athletic suit was in the yard looking after his young twins (this was a Sunday) and he introduced himself as the village doctor. Bob shook his hand, introduced himself and asked him some questions…the doctor had gone to medical school in Malawi and the weekdays were very very busy for him, he said. These two understand each other.

We walked past a tiny little grocery with a few items and buy some pop for the kids to share. The chief�s son directs the sharing much to our relief and the kids-anywhere from two to ten years old-are all very cooperative-which they probably wouldn’t have been if it had just been us handing it out. We pass a few tables with some vegetables like potatoes, yams, tomatoes, cassavas for sale. I buy a package of local tea and some biscuits (cookies).

Then we head back down the two-mile trail through corn and cassava fields to the camp. At the gate of the camp, children want to sell us bracelets made of telephone wire. We tell them they are going to screw up the phone lines but they just laugh knowing they have been caught at their trick. Older boys are selling carvings and other crafts items. One tells me he is licensed to do massage and only charges $7 an hour. I don�t think I will have a massage…

On the way back the chief’s son points out the nice big Chief’s house nearby…well, nice and big for Malawi anyway. His father is Chief of the whole Tonga tribe that covers quite a large area with two thousand people, he said. I ask him what are most of the Chief’s duties. He answers that the Chief is a “very very busy man because he has to help people when they have problems”-a one man judicial system-unless a crime has been committed in which case the police are alerted.

Dinner & Dancing On A Mat in Malawi

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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That night Rod has arranged for us to have dinner at the home of a local family. We each take a bowl and spoon from the truck and are led down a series of paths in the pitch black night air to a little mud hut. Various families and clans have their own paths which cross one another and we would have become hopelessly lost among the thorns and branches of this jungle-like neighborhood without our leader who we stuck to like glue.

Dinner of delicious chicken, rice, cooked cabbage and beans was served to us on straw mats on the ground in front of the hut. We had wanted to taste Cassava root, the staple of the people, but it wasn’t served that night. After dinner we were told that the children of the village would �sing� for us. What followed is almost impossible to describe. There were probably 40-50 small children aged 3 to about 8 (or it seemed like it was that many.) A few were as old as 12 or 14. They clapped and moved their little bodies in a very fast rhythm to their loud energy-charged chanting in their Tonga dialect. Spontaneously two would jump out in front of the group and really go at it-moving their hips, butts and legs.

When they all had a turn we were each invited by one child to come dance with him/her in front of everyone which absolutely delighted the children and greatly entertained the rest of us! The group was so charged and the chanting was so loud that when you danced with them you got a tremendous hit of emotional and physical energy. They were alive to this moment in which they were able to express themselves, affirm their presence in this world. They were visible, needed and important-this was their creation.

Then they all sang their National Anthem both in English and in dialect. Then we (Brits, Aussies, Kiwis and the two Americans) were asked to sing them a song in return. We had a hell of a time with our heads together trying to come up with a song that we all knew but we finally did it-Row Row Your Boat-in rounds even! Must have sounded pitiful to those Tongan ears! I will never forget those beautiful alive children as long as I live.

Then the older boys brought out some little paintings to sell for a couple dollars each. African culture is a culture of exchange. You give me something and I give you something. My dignity depends on it. But things of a very different order can be exchanged. Something non material can be exchanged for something of material value and vica versa. If an African bestows his presence and attention, imparts information (warning you about thieves, for example) which ensures your safety this generous man now awaits reciprocity and he will be very surprised if you turn on your heel and walk away. There is a cultural dissimilarity of expectations here that we did not understand in Egypt-not that it would have made it any easier. The question then was how do I refuse the exchange in the first place when the Other is insisting? We are still working on this.

Back at the gate to the camp a group of young boys and men had begun to drum. Several hours later we fell asleep…still listening to the sound of the Drums Still Drumming…a meditation on sound…during all these hours there was not a break in the rhythm…

Cross Dressing At Kande Camp

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Sat 18th 2002 Town of Mzuza
We get off the bus and go to the market in Mzuza to buy clothes for the Cross Dressing Party at Kande Camp-we have drawn names of the opposite sex and have to dress them-we have a $3 limit. Walking back to the truck I take a picture of a street sign “No Stop!”

Malawi Lake Kande Camp Two Nights
We drive into camp past the Kumuka truck that is roasting a split pig with it’s head still on above a charcoal fire…OH SICK…the girls on the truck wail. By now we are pretty dusty and scruffy and everyone wants a shower before heading to the bar for a Fanta or beer. This bar owner is a bald guy in his 50’s with a huge round gold earring in one ear-I ask him for a Pimm’s Cup. He looks at me like I am nuts and says he ha”)

I drew Rod’s name for the Cross Dressing Party so I bought him a bra and hot pink half slip and funky shower cap-we make him take off his shorts before he puts on the half slip-he loves it! Someone bought Bob a pink and white dress that looks like one his 80 year old mother would wear. Lorelle is hillarius in a diaper with a pacifier in her mouth. Rod buys Janine a snappy little outfit with a black and white zebra “Hooters” cap. Adrian gets to wear a bright pink billowy taffeta dress that looks like a Balenciaga designer model.

This clothing must be sent here by aid groups in western countries because we never see African women wearing these things which are really inappropriate for this culture. The party is in the bar and riders from the other trucks get a kick out of us-they will have their turn the next night.

Chitimba Beach Camp

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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When we pull into the camp compound there are three trucks aready there-drifters.com, ontheaway.com, and Africa.overland.com written in huge letters across the sides.The camp bars in Africa are open-air like they usually are in tropical countries. The camps are more like resorts without all the expensive amenities and they don’t really have a “bar” feel.

The bartender, from the UK, was an overlander driver for two years, has owned the bar four years-and has had recurring Malaria countless times. In anticipation of the worst, Bob asks him many questions about Malaria.

Half a dozen burly middle aged men are already at the bar when I go up to ask for a plug-in to recharge the computer and the camera. I ask if they are independent travelers-no-they say they are building the road. I say oh, you are responsible for our horrendous ride into the Camp! They laugh. They are here for the girls on the trucks, the bartender says later.

One British guy born in Burma is married to a Tanzanian and another from the UK is scared of AIDS after having hundreds of prostitutes, he says, so he hooked up with a woman from Ghana about a year ago-his wife of 31 years at home. I ask if there are many expats in the area. There are several doctors and some Peace Corps volunteers; they say they have been told by the volunteers that most of them will go to work for the CIA when they are finished with their two years which surprises the heck out of me.

Each truck gives the bar a list of clients and we just put everything “on the tab” and pay before we take off in the morning as we do at all the camps.

Slave Trade At Malawi Lake

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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We are headed to Malawi Lake which is huge-of Malawi�s 118,000 sq km 20% is taken up by the long narrow lake which nearly runs approximately 500km down the length of the thin sliver of land which dips deep into Mozambique.

In the mid 1800’s an Arab trader from Oman shipped thousands of slaves annually to the eastern lake shore before they made the three to four month march to Kilwa on the coast. At the same time a tribe of Islamic converts, the Yao, captured the local Maganja and Chewa people in large numbers for sale to the Portuguese. Villagers unfit for shipment were slaughtered.

In 1859 David Livingstone visited the area and tried to set up a mission to interrupt the slave trade. After his death in 1874 Scots missionaries, inspired by Livingstone�s humanitarianism, risked their lives to end local wars and curb slavery and provided education to thousands of the locals. In 1895 the first British Commissioner dealt the final death blow to the slave trade in Malawi with the defeat of the last two Yao traders in the south and the execution of Mlozi, the self-styled Sultan at Karonga in the north.

Malawi was led to independence by Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda who maintained absolute power until 1992 when a group of Catholic bishops publicized the Lenten Letter which documented the failings and abuse of power of the Banda administration. An election the following year was won by the current president Bakikli Muluzi. However, the Capetown Cape News reported June 17 that a priest in Malawi was arrested for translating documents opposing a third-term bid for President Muluzi. The priest said he was arrested in the central district of Kasungu after taking documents to be typed. He was told he was in possession of seditious material. So the battle for democracy rages on.

Muzungu At The Malawi Border

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We stop at a small town for supplies and “toilet stop” near the Malawi border and to spend the rest of our Tanzania shillings…scores of young boys in dirty and unbelievably tattered clothing surround the truck selling sweets, pastries, bananas, nuts…most of us stay on the truck…I don’t want the pastry but I do want the Rastafarian scarf on a young guy’s head-I buy it from him for 700 shillings-about 70 cents. He is delighted as he touches his bare head-probably had traded for it in the first place. We watch two women being introduced to a man-they bend elegantly at the knee as they extend their hands.

Malawi Border
We are the third overlander across the border that day, the kids outside the truck tell us….and then they ask for pens. I tell one that I have already given my pens away to all the children. “Fibber!” he yells at me. Then he says something and I only hear the word “white.” I ask him to repeat what he has said and then I learn the word “muzungu.” Rod says it means “white vomit from the bottom of the sea” and is a word for anyone that is white. Rod steals away the word and wears his black T-shirt with “Muzungu” written across the front and back in white.

At the border Bob gives his Sifnos Greece pen to the immigration official who stamps his passport with a crack on the desktop as if he were killing a cockroach. The immigration guy is happy. I think Rod keeps a carton of cigarettes and some magazines in the truck and hands them out to grease delicate situations.

Truck pulls out to cross the border and then begins backing up which confuses everyone but we discover Janine had dropped her towel and a little boy is running about 100 yards behind the truck to give it to her. She threw pens and sweets out the window to the boy in thanks. She has a soft spot for the children!

Coming into Malawi the land becomes lush and green. The terraced rolling foothills look manicured-not a bit of land wasted-breathtakingly beautiful. A couple miles inside the border the truck stopped for lunch at the top of a hill but a group of children and a couple elders were there and watched us eat which made us all very uncomfortable. What are we going to do about the little ones, I asked George. “Nothing!” he said with a resolute tone. Tim from New Zealand played “soccer” with them with a small ball from the truck and they really knew how to handle the ball! When we left they were happy to get all our empty plastic water bottles and some sweets and pens thanks to Janine again!

Malawi definitely has a different feel. Most of the country is rural and very poor; people are friendly…we see more waving at the truck-especially from young girls…little towns…we go through the little village of Chatinze…Don’t Walk Alone Resort…Dental and Maternity Clinic…Man On Man Hair Dressers…Come Boys Hair Salon…little huts dot the middle of fields with women standing alone waving with their arms up wide…we see the universal thumbs up from young men. We are elated…little guys as young as 5 and 6 tending small herds of cows quickly turn and whistle… We stop and buy a huge bag of charcoal from a family by the side of the road for 2000 Kwatchas ($4.)

…Judy Shop… We can see the floor fires in the little mud huts that people live in. We see six bicycles carrying huge bags of charcoal instead of a rider…I’m looking out the front windows and see a huge white truck coming at us…oh shit I yell-waking everyone up-and James has to veer to the side of the road…children stand waving and whistling as if they were extras in a movie-Melissa and I wonder what they were doing the split second before we got there…kids holler at the top of their lungs both arms waving….we give the thumbs up and they whistle and holler louder…even adults wave with both arms in the air…the soft friendly Malawi people….poor but healthy looking. They weren’t so friendly in Kenya and Tanzania. Malawi is one of the poorest but friendliest countries but Rod says they won’t be so friendly in Namibia and South Africa.

Then the roads turn to shit. Britain has the contract to rebuild the road to Lake Malawi so we are on pot-holed dirt. I try the ejector seats over the wheels in the back but quickly retreat to my own middle seat. Mud huts are made of hand made mud bricks here. Malawi is lush, green…rolling foothills…then through more little towns…Wannagwa Shopping Center is a small 8×14 foot building divided into two little stores…fields of marijuana are one of Malawi’s biggest crops.

Nairobi to Cape Town Overland

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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May 5, 2002
We left for the 4000 mile seven week trip in a Mercedes Benz truck overland from Nairobi to Capetown. As Bob suspected there would be, there are 17 kids all under the age of 30 on this truck-very cheeky Aussies and Kiwis and half a dozen ball-busting Britains. Overland trucks are the cheapest way to travel Africa so the trucks are always full of kids-guess we will be content with being the token elders.

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The master of African roads is the truck driver-cars cannot manage the ruts and potholes. The truck can go almost anywhere with its powerful engine and wide tires. James understands the power under his control. We are dumbfounded by his ability to wedge the truck into the smallest path, narrowest driveway, around the sharpest corner! Drivers are extraverted and have tremendous confidence-an almost regal bearing. I read this on my blog to James and he whooped and hollered and jumped up and down…Yes! Yes! That’s me! That’s me! First instruction from Rod: it’s a TRUCK and not a bus! Every time someone calls it a bus we are supposed to buy Rod a drink-I’m the biggest offender. I just laugh.

We are all divided into four groups that rotate daily-cooks helper, dish washing, security and “dog’s-body.” Security has to stay with the truck when are parked in the towns. Dogs-bodies are the go-fers. They fill up the water jugs at the camps and set up the folding seats. They set up the folding table for food preparation and put up George’s tent. (George is the Kenyan cook.) They also periodically sweep out all the dust and mud out from under the seats and the aisle of the truck. Dish washers make up three tubs of water-one soapy, one with disinfectant and one rinse. They set up two plastic pans for hand washing-one with soap and one with disinfectant for rinse. They dry the dishes by swinging them in the air.

George makes a fire on the ground with the charcoal he has purchased along the road and sets a big grate over the top.

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The charcoals much softer than ours…coals are red and coffee-water hot in just a couple minutes. Cooks helpers peel veges and generally do whatever George wants them to do while they try and keep out of his way. George has pretty fixed and definite ideas about how he wants things to go.

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For breakfast we have had eggs all different ways, French Toast, pancakes, dry cereal made with reconstituted dried milk, toast, wieners, bacon, canned spaghetti, beans. Lunch is grated carrots, sliced tomatoes, grated cheese, green or red peppers, sliced meat and bread for sandwiches. I ask Claire if this is always going to be lunch and she says yes, but to shut up and don’t complain because it’s the only fresh veges we get! So I don’t say a word! George usually puts out the leftovers from the night before too. Pineapple or bananas or dessert.

Dinner usually is served with creamed soup first and then African stew with mashed potatoes or rice, steak and baked potatoes, chicken and rice with good spices, spaghetti with interesting sauces…and many more good things like that. We sit on little camp stools to eat. A couple times George has fixed the African staple, maize, for us-a kind of fine white corn meal. You dip your fingers into it and form a little ball with which you then dip into a spicy meat stew and eat. When it is dark and getting colder and we want to sit awhile around the campfire we put a few coals on the ground underneath each folding canvas seat…works nicely.

The truck has padlocked compartments all the way around with doors that fold down. George has the keys on a shoelace that he wears around his neck. I get tired trying 14 keys to find the one that unlocks the compartment where our baggage is so I paint the key with someone’s nail polish. George just laughs.

The truck periodically pulls over for “toilet stops.” We scatter…boys on one side of the truck and girls on the other. On one stop I was one of the last to get off and after walking down a small bank I looked to the left and saw 6-7 shiny white butts all in a row. I yelled to the girls that I wished I had my camera-you can imagine the hullabaloo! Our hands get sprayed with disinfectant before we get back on the truck.

There are two heavy plastic drops on each side in place of windows that are rolled up during the day so we get lots of fresh air and can see out. It also gives us accessibility to people standing around the truck when we are parked at border crossings and supply stops for those who choose to stay on the truck. If everyone gets out we put the drops down because local kids are known to jump up and grab things off the seats. If we are in a camp the drops come down to keep the monkeys and baboons out of the truck.

The other riders on the truck ranging from early twenties to early thirties are bright and sassy. Besides Bob and I there are two other couples, Damian and Melissa from Melbourne Australia and Tim and Belinda from New Zealand-the rest are single-Heather and Fiona are sisters from New Zealand, Nikki from New Zealand but had been working as a nanny in London, Michelle, Claire, Sarah and Lorelle traveling together from England. Adrian is from Australia with a Canadian passport who lives and works in London and Pete is a New Zealander. In Victoria we will pick up Michael from Johannesburg South Africa and lose everyone else except Nikki, Fiona, Heather, Sarah, Michelle, Adrian and us. Heather, who was working as a nanny in London had a friend who knew Mick Jagger”s nanny (hope this is right, Heather!)

Most are already well-traveled-the four girls from England spent a year traveling together after “uni” (university) and Michelle and Nikki have done overland trips before-Nikki amazingly did a 6 month overland trip in the year 2000 on the old “hippie trail” from England to Kathmandu via Iran, Pakistan and the Karakoram highway. Both Michelle and Nikki are gunning for a job in the overland business and will remain in Africa at the end of the trip.

It’s fun listening to the British, Aussie and Kiwi accents but they insist Bob and I are the ones with the accent! I am starved for conversation and want to discuss the linguistic, cultural and political differences among the English speakers but I sense they don’t like it…that maybe they assume I am being critical of them…the arrogant American…little do they know how critical I am of my own popular culture and the foreign policies of my government.

There is a library (big box of tattered paperbacks) ranging from slut novels to the Autobiography of Nelson Mandela on the truck for long travel days. There is a cassette deck with speakers at the front and the back. The smokers have to sit in the back-always Michelle in her funky little hat under which you can barely see her sparkly eyes and Rod the tour leader. At the very front of the truck there are two steps up to a section of four seats on each side where the Brits usually sit facing each other so they can chatter. The rest of the seats face forward. There is a cooler for drinks.

We have lucked out with a really nice group that is very compatible and everyone enjoys each other. Tim from New Zealand says he couldn’t imagine his mom doing an overland trip-makes me feel good. Rod has confiscated the Michael Jackson tape but the rest of the music blaring all day on the truck stereo is ungodly as you might imagine. We would prefer to remain steeped in images of Africa…the sounds of the local dialects in soft voices…he sound of children’s laughter…the look of the bright wide smiles…the sounds of the daily village activity and of the animals in the parks, the sight of the incredible red clay soil reflected in the morning and evening light, the mind blowing brightness of the stars at night…the breathtaking red sun while it is setting down on the Zambezi…we have left home partly in an effort to get away from the abrasiveness of western popular culture…but James says the other riders are young-this is their time to enjoy…

Bob and I don’t sit together…24 hours a day since February is more than enough togetherness. The truck is not full and many of us get two seats to ourselves. In July and August we are told the truck will be filled to capacity-36 people! I can’t even imagine it! It is good to be traveling now.