Pedro's Revenge...According to Tom

My apologies for the delay in posting here. The phone line has been down and I haven’t been able to get on for a while. TIA, after all.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes. Birthdays aren’t a big deal here, so it was pretty low key around Namumu, but I definitely enjoyed reading the posts/emails from everyone.

A number of interesting events have occurred recently. I’ll get to them soon enough. As for now, though, I’ve got a little something new for everyone.

The group of visitors from The Woodlands Community Presbyterian Church in Houston, Texas, spent the week with us last week. Tom Swaffield, the youngest of the group at 16, wrote up a little something at my request. Tom is a bright kid and I think you’ll enjoy what he has to say.

So, here you go. I’ll try to expound on some of his thoughts in the future, but as for now I’ll leave it to Tom…

And yes, animals were harmed in the making of this blog…


Tom’s Blog


This is my first time to add to this blog as I am not Sam, but a visitor from Houston, Texas named Tom. We arrived here at Namumu as a part of a longer trip which included multiple stops beginning in Lusaka at Justo Mwale Theological College, moving along to Siavonga at the United Church of Zambia, and then now here to Namumu. The stay here has been, in my opinion, the most enjoyable part of our trip. Something about the lake, hills, and the kids here just puts a very positive spin on the area that makes you feel good no matter what issues arise during your stay.

We began our time here with a nice welcome by the kids and staff, including the regular author of this blog, Sam. This, though, was followed by a series of long and in-depth meetings between our church, The Woodlands Community Presbyterian Church, and the Namumu faculty to discuss our partnership. I won’t go into detail, but on the whole, being the only youth on this trip (at 16), I found it quite boring. Fortunately I was able to skip the rest to interact with the kids. Most of the time I have spent with the kids has been through the playing of either soccer, the biggest sport in Zambia, or various card games, because both are not hindered too much by the cultural barrier between me and the kids. Not that the barrier really isolates me from them, it just makes things a little harder (you would surprised how often someone is speaking to you in English and yet you have no idea what they are trying to say).

Mostly this trip has been full of new experiences for me, such as having to travel almost everywhere in the backs of flat bed trucks, or having an event scheduled for a certain time and being lucky if it happens within an hour of the planned start. Not to say these are bad things, just something to get used to. With these new experiences has come some fun as well. Eating nsima with your hands, as is the custom here, as well as finishing every day with some time around the fire have been great.

On the third day here our group went with Sam down to see the kapenta boats come in and meets the crew when Sam and I had the idea to prepare one of our own meals the way many of the Zambians do around here, specifically buying a live chicken and turning it into what you would normally find in your grocery stores over in the USA. The first step in this process was acquiring a chicken, which is surprisingly easy as they roam around almost all the towns and are sold in every market. We selected a handsome, fat bird for 25,000 kwacha, or a little less then five dollars. Once we had the bird though we were a little lost as what to do next, as neither of us had killed, plucked and prepared a chicken before, so we had to ask a few of the welders and cooks at Namumu what we should do. After a brief tutorial we had a neighbor help us carry out the deed behind Sam’s house.

The act of killing the chicken fell to me, so doing as we had been told I stood on the wings and legs of our chicken, which at this point was being referred to as Pedro, and stretched out the neck before taking a knife and slicing it at the top of the throat. It turns out though that this doesn’t quite do it. You have to hack away quite a bit before it begins to bleed out and during this time the chicken is struggling quite a bit. This may sound a little barbaric to some but you have to remember this is how many chicken are killed by people all over the world, and at least to me is a little more humane and respectful then the ways they kill them by the hundreds of thousands in the USA.

After the chicken had fully bled out and was unarguably dead the next step could begin, the plucking of the feathers. You cannot just have at it and pull them out as they are still firmly attached to the chicken and are very hard to remove, so what we were told to do is dunk the chicken in boiling water to break down what ever it is that holds the feathers in. After doing this they come right out with little trouble. The rest of the preparation fell to Sam and I’m sure he will cover it in his blog, so now I’ll move onto what we are calling Pedro’s Revenge.

You see, after killing and preparing Pedro, our group began experiencing a bit of bad luck. It began the day of the killing when the power and water went out for most of the day, making flushing toilets an interesting task. But this wasn’t too drastic; it happens a lot over here so I thought nothing of it. Later that day, however, we were scheduled for a boat tour of Lake Kariba, but when we got there we were told the boats could not go out due to their fuel pumps not being able to fill the boat tanks because of the power outage. Still, these things happen with or with out a vengeful chicken’s influence. So we awaited another boat or for the power to return.

During this time we sat down by the lake discussing the day and, in particular, Pedro’s death. While this was happening I was holding onto a rope that kept one of the boats tied up when the knot slipped, sending me and the rope into the lake, soaking me from head to toe in nasty harbor water. After all this we still didn’t end up with a boat tour and as my cloths were wet I had to spend the rest of the time in a chitenge, or a dress skirt the local women wear, which greatly amused our driver as well as the kids who saw me after getting back before I had a chance to change.

This may sound like enough to satisfy Pedro and avenge his death, but that night things kept getting worse.

While watching the evening news (the power had come back by then) our group leader noticed that the airline we had booked to take us to the Copper Belt in Central Zambia the next day had gone bankrupt and was no longer in existence. This was made worse by the phones going out, making it impossible to contact the company HQ to see if another airline had picked up the flights. This being the case our leader had to wake up the next morning at 4am to drive to Lusaka and solve this transportation issue. While on the way though Pedro struck again as the minibus our leader was on smashed into a truck that was reversing down the main highway to Lusaka for God knows what crazy reason. Like I keep being told, T.I.A., or this is Africa. The crash resulted in a few bruises and a hairline fracture in our leader’s big toe, and after all that, we found our flights to be canceled with no hope of a refund. So far this has been the end of the Pedro’s Revenge, or at least we hope.

For the most part this trip though has been more than the sum total of the experiences I have had here. I know this may sound cliché but it has been an eye-opener to see how, in truth, probably most of the world lives. As an American I tend to think about the world as a much smaller place than it is. I can go to sleep in New York and awake in Johannesburg. A single meal can have parts from the US, Canada, Mexico, India, China, Japan, and many other countries all on and including one plate. My jeans are from a textile mill in Korea, my shirt Singapore, my shoes Africa and all of them shipped to me without delay.

Here, on the other hand, areas are much more local. You eat what you or your community can grow. You sleep in a house constructed from bricks made by a friend from the dirt that was the hill in the middle of the rape fields down the street that provides you with something to go with the tasteless nsima you eat for most of your daily calories.

What has gotten me the most is how happy everyone is here. When we stayed at UCZ a guy showed me to his house in a squatters area outside of town where he and his wife and four children slept in a brick room smaller then my bedroom in the US, only a few feet from the public “toilet” where human waste ran in the street. Still, I did not see one sad face among them, as long as there was nsima at every meal they where happy. This shocked me as an upper class American living in the suburbs, where every family has a decent house and money to spare, because amongst all of our excesses many are unhappy. Maybe unhappy is not the right word to describe it, but we definitely lack the joy I saw in the kids at that compound playing with a toy made of old bottles and wire and with the adults sitting at their shop stalls shooting the breeze with anyone who would pass by. Even the day laborers making around $2 a day had something to be happy about, whether it was the birth of a child, or a small bonus received for a hard days’ work, or even just having chicken for dinner that night. To me what it seems is that the more you have, the less you have to be truly thankful for, oddly enough. When all you have is three square meals and a few kids then you are really damn grateful for that food and those kids because without them you would have nothing, where as if you have three square meals, two cars, a few kids, and a house full of luxuries (and yes even a fridge, washing machine, carpet, or hot water are being considered luxuries here as a lot of people would consider them so around the world), losing one or two of these does not do a whole lot and so each one has lost value to you.

It is not our fault that we think this way, it is simply a by-product of our success and lifestyles. It is not a crime to be fortunate. It is only a crime when we stop counting our blessings and begin to ignore the problems of others only to focus on our own much more meaningless ones, sometimes even going so far as to blame the misfortune of others on themselves, which to me is a very ignorant view. Even trying to get a basic education here is blocked by huge obstacles. Many of the kids at Namumu have to wake up at 4-5am so they can walk to the high school every morning, and this is a short walk in comparison to some of the more rural communities which still are living in the bush without power, running water, or plumbing of any kind.

But, stepping off the soap box so commonly occupied by those in the area of mission work, I think it is necessary to look at what it is feasible to do about this issue. I myself have no answer as to what to do, and in a week I will return to the USA, changed…maybe. Able to do anything about what I have experienced? Maybe not, but at least I am aware and I think that is the first step many need to take. Remove the blind fold and see the world through new eyes, explore what you find uncomfortable and remember that we are all in this together. As $6,000 boots leave footprints on the moon and single people make more money than some countries, much of the human race still live in dirt homes on a few dollars a day. Whether you believe in a higher power or powers, science, money, or nothing at all, we can all agree that the survival and comfort of the human race is an issue we can all see as important.

I do not know how I came to be here living on this rock hurtling through the possibly endless void with another 6.5billion people like me, but one thing I do know is that we need to stick together and to help one another unconditionally.