We're having an odd (?) spat of wind and lightning. I have so long been blissfully ignorant of the contents of the sky above that upon leaving the office this afternoon, I revealed in the usual shock one gets from seeing clouds when so long without.
That's not quite right ... I was home for most of the month of August following my birthday and the CARWG conference, and it rained plenty a couple of times. However, I have so perfectly separated the here from the there that vacation seems as if it happened to another person. Simon & Garfunkel weren't kidding when they said "Michigan [and Indiana and New Orleans] seems like a dream to me now."
Back in the here, September has been somewhat ludicrously sweltering; by the time I got back to Mongu on the 8th, temps were starting to hit 35C; yesterday, it finally topped 40C. For the audience back home, that's 95F up to 105F. It is a dry heat, thank God ... and the nature of the soil causes most of the heat to radiate up and out an hour or so after dark. However, this large shoddily armored knight sleeps mostly on top of the bed's dust cover, alternating between fitful dreams of the Lake Superior shoreline and sweaty wakefulness staving off the ever-present specter of regret.
Eventually 5:15 rolls around about the same time I'm finally dozing off; the cell phone alarm ding-dongs a number of times before I roll out and mash the keypad trying to silence its blaring. Such a chump now ... used to roll out of bed instantly awake; now I feel like a tottering fool in the morning, unable to find my bathroom slippers (flip-flops) and stumbling barefoot to the bathroom. After hauling on my shorts and a t-shirt, stretching, I wake the guard from his deep slumber on my porch and head out for training.
Any time someone in Zambia is running with shorts and a t-shirt, people refer to it as "training" ... there has to be a point to running, such as an upcoming football match, or, ermmm, a football match. No one runs to lose weight in this culture; why the hell would someone not want to be fat? I plod along and think of little other than the fire in my lungs and avoiding the invariable gentlemen steering their bicycles home to the village with the rolled up corrugated steel sheet strapped perpendicular to the long axis of his bike. Or the taxis, which believe they'll get better mileage if they don't turn on their lights. Or the Chinese ...
Ah ... the Chinese. I've not touched that hot-button topic much since I've started this blog. The Chinese are in Mongu for the same reason many Chinese are in Zambia or Africa as a whole: they are building something. In our case, it is a dual project; repair of the roads around Mongu town, and the road across the floodplains connecting Kalabo on the Angola border to Mongu, the rest of Zambia, and sensu stricto or otherwise, the rest of the world. The former is happening in a circle around my house, and as is their wont, the Chinese get the crews on the road early and keep them working late. It's been wonderful for the already staggering colloid levels in the air; their is a constant aura of dust that at times makes people appear as spirits emerging into and fading out of view. Most of the dust comes from their hauling clay out of Mawawa pan 14 km east of town in long, jolting convoys of Dong Fang tipper [dump] trucks and taking it out into the Barotse floodplains to build the roadbed.
Knock down those pronouns; "their" in this case is mostly China Geo's (the company's) local hires; it seems an essential element of this sort of work is to hire tons of guys at cheap wages; if you quit, there is always someone else who wants to purchase skinny jeans and soon-to-break oversized headphones who can lean on a shovel with the best of them. However, real Chinese employees are not few, and totally unlike most NGOs do not bother with the assumption or pretension that nationals will do the job. Each job has a Chinese supervisor somewhere, typically smoking, donning a boiler suit, and wearing a straw hat with an oversized brim (hence my disaffection of such haberdashery ... I got tired of kids calling me a Chinese, using the racial epithet "cho-choli", or shouting "shey-shey-shey-shey-shey" at me). One cannot figure how they supervise lacking either English or siLozi, but they accomplish much with pointing and shouting things like "you work!" or "you dig".
I can't wait for October to go by ... we need the washing badly.
