When The Going Gets Tough

I failed at letting go. I admit it, I completely failed. The intention was there. I was going to accept the inevitability of our move and to prepare for it during my usual two day ritual of leaving my place of residence for any period of time longer than a weekend – this ritual involves lots of washing, list making, winding down the refrigerator, and cleaning. I suppose it’s all relative. I thought I was making personal progress at letting go control over where I was living and working, which I compensated for by tightly controlling the moving process. However this inner negotiation was put into disarray when, in a typical TG move of what they interpret as the common good and I interpret as a complete and utter disregard for personal time and space, we were told on Saturday morning that we were going to leave on Sunday rather Monday, so could we please bring all of our belongings to the head office that afternoon? This call was received around 9.30am as I was lying in bed preparing to pack, clean, and bake road trip cookies (no I am not kidding) in order to be free Sunday morning to go to Patty’s for a good-bye brunch.

I must say, with my carefully structured weekend out the window I was left unequipped to ‘go with the flow’. I did not handle it well. There was screaming, door slamming, and some crying. At the time I raged at this latest example of management (by which I mean TG) forcing its beliefs about common time on everyone around them. And I raged about my loss of control throughout this whole experience – I do not do well with authority in the best of times and being informed about where I will be living, what I will be doing, and when I will be leaving instead of discussing it felt like a slap in the face. I walked around slamming doors and yelling, thinking that I was pissed off…until I started crying. And it wasn’t until Brian came over to sit down beside me and said “You had just started to make this a home, hadn’t you” that I realized that I just didn’t want to leave, to start over again.

And so we spent Sunday not chatting over mimosas at Patty’s homestead, but instead driving the 12 hours to Katima Mulilo, our new home. As we entered Kavango Region the vista began to change. The trees became taller and here grass still grew. Village life, too, looked different. The homesteads were closer to each other and the road than in Omusati and were ringed by thin fences instead of the tall, tightly packed together mopane fences I was now familiar with. The homes were square instead of round and made of wood frames packed together with mud. In general the homesteads looked sparser, poorer. I was surprised at the strong reaction these changes evoked in me, something like local pride in the beauty and relative richness of the homes in what had been my home and distaste for the differences presenting themselves around me.

We arrived in Katima after dark, tired from the long and bumpy road. There I met Ana, our new project leader, who seemed nice if very young and shy. She assured us our accommodation was more or less ready. Then she led us to our new home, located at the end of a cul-de-sac in a maze of houses that seemed not dissimilar to the ones in South Africa.

The house was, and is, a complete and utter disaster. The place crawled with cockroaches and the owners belongings were still occupying the house. The smell of urine was everywhere and in the one empty room there stood only one single bed and two ratty old mattresses. The window of our bedroom was smashed and broken and there was no fridge in the kitchen. I felt like crying and throwing up at once, a fact which I am sure my face did not hide. Looking around me at the roaches crawling over every surface, thinking about the comfortable home we had left behind, I could not help but think, if our new Project Leader could not even manage to secure us decent and empty accommodation, how could she possibly run a project? I felt defeated before we had even begun.

Our belongings were unloaded, to my chagrin, into the roaches lair, and we were abandoned to spend the night in our new ‘home’. Brian made a little safehouse in the glassless room and blocked the bottom of the door with his Irish flag, the only piece of cloth available. With images of bugs crawling over me, I had finally managed to fall asleep (Brian had to sleep on a mattress on the floor) when I awoke to Brian jumping up and running to the door. Then I heard the sound of voices. It was our landlord, who had decided to ‘come home’ at 12am because he had nowhere else to go. It seems he had planned to rent a room in elsewhere and move his belongings there but had found out that day the room had been rented to someone else.

In general it was a nightmare of a night and we arrived at work the next day exhausted. I don’t know how people with kids do it, I really don’t. We have spent the last four evenings struggling to make the house livable. The cockroaches have withstood two separate Holocaust-type bug bombings and still more appear. In the first day alone Brian killed well over 1,000 cockroaches, with me acting as spotter (I refuse to kill anything but don’t seem to have a problem as accomplice). To date I would estimate that we are well over the 2,000 mark. We have taken down the curtains, vacuumed the floor, moved all of the landlords belongings to one of the bedrooms (yes we had to move his belongings) and begun the great task of disinfection. After our nightly cleaning marathons we sit down on the hard plastic chairs that serve as a couch for a cup of tea before going to sleep on beds made of wooden frames with wooden slats, covered with mattresses 3 inches thick, slats digging into our backs.

So far the one silver lining, in a very twisted way, is our neighbor. The first day we arrived she introduced herself to Brian and said she wanted to talk to him. Two nights ago she came to our house and sat down. The scene was like something out of a movie or a textbook, and it was the first such conversation I have had since coming to Africa, most likely because it was the first one I was able to understand, since she was able to speak very good English. She sat down and began by telling us that she had seen the TCE truck drop us off and had said to herself in relief “They might be able to help me”. (I was very impressed that she had recognized the program!) She explained that she had been tested in 2008 and had tested positive for HIV. Her husband had been working in the mines in Tsumeb but when the mine closed he had lost his job and he is now in Ghana looking for work. They are both from Zimbabwe and have two children, a girl and a boy. When she was diagnosed her CD4 counts had been very low, around 130 (HIV officially becomes AIDS at 200) but she had started on ARV’s and as of last October her count was in the 900’s. However, since her husband lost his job she had to move in with her uncle and she had to stop taking the ARV’s because she could not afford them. She is afraid to go to the public hospital because most of the staff there are Zimbabweans and she is afraid of the stigma. She has not had her count checked since last October but she has been losing weight and she is stressed and afraid. We listened and promised to help her all we could. I mentioned joining a support group and Brian said we would find out from the Ministry of Health what help she is entitled to.

It is a sad, sad story that unfortunately does not have the shock value here that it would have at home but it does represent, as a twisted silver lining to our crappy living conditions and forced move, the good work that can be done here. Even if we only help our neighbor.

P.S. - I was walking to lunch today, angry and depressed at our living and work situation here, listening to my ipod. My ipod was on shuffle, which for me is a little like emotional Russian roulette. As has happened so many times in the last two years, a song came on, the Eagles, that immediately transported me back to my father - specifically to the innumerable early morning car rides north in search of good skiing. If he were alive, I thought, and had read the blog I was composing in my head (let’s be honest, he would never call me), what would he say?

When the going gets tough, the tough get going

Of its own accord the familiar phrase, voiced in the familiar self-assured, slightly self-righteous way popped into my head instantaneously, with no time for thought.