Thole's Shirt

Thole is a middle-aged man who lives with his small family in a small shack on top of a small hill near the harbor where we park our boats and sell our kapenta every morning. We pay him a small rental fee each month, and I’m pretty sure that, along with the little money his wife makes buying kapenta from us and our neighboring fishing companies and selling elsewhere, comprises his only form of income. Most days he just drinks his head off and lays around in the shade all day. I suppose his family is doing alright. He has a few young girls that are always running around playing in the morning or helping their mother cook or wash clothes and plates. They seem to eat pretty well and they’re always relatively happy. Plus, they have a house right by a beautiful lake. Life could be worse.

Anyway, the other day I came to the harbor in the morning and did a double-take. There was Thole, having just woken, dragging out his front door and donning a University of Virginia Lacrosse T-shirt (UVa being the school I attended).

Now, how a T-Shirt from my school thousands of miles away wound up in the hands of a lazy drunk guy living in a small shack on a small hill by a lake in a remote area of southern Africa is beyond me. Perhaps someone from Crestwood (my home church in Richmond, Va.) sent the shirt along with some other clothes to Namumu and it somehow circulated to Thole, but I doubt it. Either way, it was an interesting moment.

A few other similar instances have occurred here in Zambia that have demonstrated how interconnected all points of the globe are these days and they never cease to amaze me.