A town called Nyimba

About five minutes from my place, just a few lefts, a few rights and one roundabout away, lies Zambia’s Great East Road. If you hang a right and drive east for about 4 hours, you will come to a non-descript stretch of highway which doubles as a town called Nyimba. This is where I spent three days last week, facilitating a fundraising workshop for a group of rural farmers. This is also where I fell in love with Zambia all over again.

Nyimba is a quintessential rural Zambian town: a stretch of highway that you would miss if you blinked, lined with a few buildings on each side, most of which are painted in the red and yellow of Celtel, the leading mobile network. At one end there is a small maze of a market, where people gather to shop, or just hang out among the overflowing baskets of kapenta and caterpillars, the old vodka bottles full of fuel, the neatly stacked piles of tomatoes, bananas or fritters and the strings of colourful chitenges hanging in front of many of the sagging stalls. Halfway down the stretch of town is a row of grass enclosures serving as‘barber shops’, followed by a wall-less Prison Farm where prisoners can be seen out playing football on Wednesday afternoons. Beyond that is an open area where farmers bring their cotton for sale and where it sits in a fluffy white pile waiting to be shoved into burlap sacks until cotton balls burst through their seams. Across the road where the buses stop are a few large trees providing shade to the women who sell bananas to those passing through. Further down there is a ‘Public Pub’ playing music that can be heard from one end of the town to the other from 6am til midnight. And attached to the pub is Nyimba’s one sleeping place, a ‘hotel’ where I stayed for three nights and where our workshop was held; it was about the most run-down place I have ever seen, but it served it’s purpose.

Scattered amongst these landmarks are Nyimba’s people: its women, steadily balancing buckets of water or baskets of food on their heads, cushioned only by a plethora of mesmerizing hairstyles; its babies, snuggled tightly in bright chitenges and blankets on the backs of their mothers; its boys, kicking up piles of dust playing soccer, hollering ‘maaazuuuunguuu!’ in sweet, high pitched voices at the white stranger passing by, rolling old bicycle tires down the road as they make their way home, or riding bikes so big their feet never pass within a mile of the ground; its girls, who – like their mothers – are often seen carrying buckets of water atop their unwavering heads or toting younger siblings on their own young backs, and whose voices may be heard amongst the drumming of an initiation ceremony taking place in the distance; and its men, some of whom spend the day sitting by the side of the highway watching the world of Nyimba pass by, some of whom get inconceivably drunk on Shake Shake, some of whom go to sell things at the market, some of whom do other work, and none of whom carry baskets on their heads or babies on their backs.

There is little electricity and no running water in Nyimba, which made the prospect of a three-day stay seem a bit bleak at first, but I quickly adjusted to using the cockroach-infested outhouse and having a steaming bucket of charcoal-heated water delivered to my door atop the head of one of the friendly female staff when I wanted to bathe. And what Nyimba lacked in basic facilities, it made up for in it’s many other endearing qualities: it’s golden light, it’s peaceful nature, it’s friendly smiles and laughs, and the window it offers into rural Zambian life.

The workshop itself was quite successful. The group of farmers made up for their academic shortcomings with their cheerful dispositions (including the poligamist who wanted me to become his third wife so that I could take him back to Canada), and they did extremely well in the workshop, despite being led by a mzungu who talks too fast, even for her own mother. Outside of workshop hours we also had all of our meals together: nzhima, rape and chicken for lunch and dinner three days in a row, and a hard boiled egg, stale bread, rice or chips, and insipid, milky tea for breakfast three days in a row. In the evenings we returned to the room we were having the workshop in to sit in front of one of the town’s only TVs, watching one of Zambia’s only channels: ZNBC. The public channel shows news and South African soap operas scattered with smattering of outrageously tacky advertisements and various public announcements: “ZESCO electricity meters being installed in the following areas…”, “Water stoppage this Saturday in the following areas…”, “TV license inspection in the coming weeks in the following areas…” On my last night in town I tore myself away from the exciting programming to meet with Albert, the man who had organized the workshop, at the small, mouse-inhabited office of the Nyimba District Farmers Association. Later we climbed on his motorbike and we wove our way through small, dirt paths in the fields north of the ‘tarmac’ (highway) until we reached his house, where he introduced me to his family, who promptly ushered me into the living room to watch ZNBC!

By the time Saturday morning rolled around I was sad to leave Nyimba, the little roadside town that had captured my heart. I soaked in as much as I could as I sat waiting for the bus to Lusaka. Fortunately, I had a lot of time with which to do my soaking, as catching a bus en route to Lusaka is a waiting game like no other. A few times I got my hopes up when I asked “When is the bus coming?” and was told “Don’t worry madam, it is coming very soon”, but by the third round of “it is coming” I finally realized that was actually Zambian for “I don’t want to say ‘I don’t know’.” So I sat, and waited, and soaked it all in. I also got to shake hands with one of the presidential candidates who rolled through town at 7:30am in a convoy of 4x4s with megaphones blaring his campaign messages for the upcoming tripartite elections on Sept 28th. By the time the bus finally came along, it was more disappointment than relief.

The journey back was along the same road I traveled when returning from Malawi in February. The landscape, however, was barely recognizable. Zambia’s subequatorial winter had brought out its palette of browns and transformed the land into a mosaic of barren branches, dry grass and parched leaves. The only splashes of colour were the rare trees that managed to defy the laws of nature to sprout new leaves or blossom after five months without a drop of rain.

I reached Lusaka in a state of euphoria at having managed to arrive in one piece after a 4-hour journey traveling at speeds that made the bus feel very much like an airplane. Except when we had to slam on the breaks and swerve to miss the odd cow, that wasn’t so airplane like. I wasn’t in perfect condition, however: I had managed to make myself slightly deaf in my attempt to drown out the symphony of gospel music, the bus driver’s sing along, and the horrendous Nigerian movie that were all playing simultaneously at top volume throughout the whole trip. So, ears ringing, I made my way home, sad to have left Nyimba behind, but undeniably excited at the prospect of such modern conveniences as a toilet and sink!