Annoyances

We were supposed to have a meeting at work at 2 pm. At 1.55, I was starting to feel a bit restless, and at 2 o'clock I asked from the people next door that weren't we supposed to have a meeting. They smiled at me and told that we'd have lunch first but the lunch wasn't ready yet. After perhaps ten minutes they called me to go to lunch with them. Around 3 pm we went to the office to wait for the meeting to start. Around 3.20, others arrived and we were able to actually start the meeting.

Waiting is the thing in Zambia that usually gets on mzungus nerves. ”I'll be there soon” usually means that you have to wait at least 20-30 minutes, and when somebody says 20 minutes you should at least double the time. This has taught me new aspects of myself: I have almost endless patience when it comes to waiting. I guess I should thank my brothers for this as they have very Zambian time concept.

There are some exceptions to my patience though: My 8 o'clock communication skills class is a nightmare. First, I have to get up very early to make it to work before 8, and then the students come very late. By 8.30 maybe a half of the students has arrived. It makes teaching next to impossible.

Patience isn't always such a good thing either. It took over 1,5 months from me to get my work permit. I'm sure that if I had had less patience, the process would've been faster.

I get annoyed with waiting also if it seems that I cannot make it home before it gets dark. That is one of the things that I've found most difficult to get used to: it's not safe to walk alone after dark. (This is not a general rule of Lusaka though, there are areas where also a white girl can walk safely in the evening, but Kamwala South is just too quiet.) I've had someone escort me when I've gone home as late as 8 o'clock in the evening. It's also annoying when I know that it means that my friend spends extra two hours traveling with minibuses just to make sure that I got home safely.

On more technical issues, I was thinking what would I choose if I could have one thing fixed here to make my life more comfortable. Would I choose running water, washing machine, indoor toilet, no power cuts, internet connection or something else? (Actually having reliable running water would fix most of the problems. For the moment, having an indoor toilet or a washing machine would be rather pointless when you cannot count on having water all the time.) In the end, I came to the conclusion that I would choose a functioning waste management system. At home, waste “management” means that we dump all the garbage across the road. At work, it's chucked in the backyard.

The lack of waste management annoys me in several ways. It means that there is trash just about everywhere. The trash is burnt regularly, and walking through the smoke that comes from burning plastic is not one of my favorite things to do. It makes me also feel guilty for everything I buy - particularly for bottled water - because I know where the empty bottles end up. It also feels like a personal insult for me as an engineer. This country has numerous problems that are really difficult to solve. However, waste management is plain logistics so it shouldn't be such a difficult problem to solve but it does require money.