Family First

“I think Government is making a terrible mistake in making it so easy for people like that to have so-called university education. Education for what? To get as much as they can for themselves and their family. Not the least bit interested in the millions of their countrymen who die every day from hunger and disease.”

-Mr. Green – “No Longer at Ease” by Chinua Achebe



I know, I know, I just recently made fun of people who try to sound cool and intellectual by recommending obscure books, and here I am not only recommending books but quoting from them as well. Whatever. It fits.

People in Zambia look out for their families. It’s great. If an uncle is sick they’ll jump on a bus and travel across the country to visit and take care of them. If an aunt is critically ill but can’t pay her hospital bills they won’t hesitate to take out a large salary advance and wire them money. If a niece or a nephew needs money for school fees they’ll have no problem doing the same. It’s nice to see people loving and taking care of each other.

The problem comes when people help their families at the expense of others, putting the needs of their families above everyone else, completely disregarding and showing a total lack of concern for those outside of their inner circle.

I’ve seen it over and over and over in my time here. I could list hundreds of specific examples. For brevity’s sake I’ll just give you a few that come to mind…

Theft is a big issue in the local kapenta fishing industry. Fishermen, if unsupervised out on the lake, will often sell the fish themselves to black market traders in the middle of the night and pocket the money, benefiting at the expense of their respective companies. Every company deals with this problem, and while it can be limited it will never be completely stopped.

Back in my days of African infancy I foolishly believed that Namumu’s fishermen would never do such a thing. After all, they were raising money to feed orphans and vulnerable children. Surely, no one would steal from orphans and vulnerable children!

Ah, what a naïve young man I was. I’ve since realized that it doesn’t matter where the money comes from, fishermen are going to try to get theirs. They are struggling to make ends meet, and feeding their own kids is always going to take precedence over feeding Namumu kids, even if it means stealing. The fact that they’re stealing from orphans doesn’t matter because these orphans are not in their family or inner circle.

It’s not just within our fishing operation that we’ve experienced theft at Namumu. I’ve seen it to some degree in every Namumu income generating activity.

Recently, a customer came to our carpentry and welding workshop for a small repair job that took only a couple hours. For most repair jobs we don’t have set prices, we simply negotiate depending on the time spent and materials used. Since the workshop is a ways a way from the front office and I can’t always be our there, we’d given our carpenters and welders a fair amount of freedom in negotiating and collecting the money. We trusted them. For this one repair job, our employee (who shall remain nameless) came to the office in the afternoon and submitted 10,000 kwacha (about $2), reporting that that had been the negotiated price. I thought that sounded a bit low, and something about this employee’s behavior suggested that he might not be telling the truth. I had the customer’s phone number and so I called him up. It turns out he had actually paid our worker 20,000 kwacha. Our worker had pocketed half and submitted half.

Now, obviously, we’re not talking about a lot of money. Our guy had only stolen a little over $2. But we had been running things like that for a while and it soon became clear that this was not the first time this had happened. Because we had trusted our guys it’s likely they had been skimming off the top again and again. It didn’t matter that he was stealing from an orphanage. It didn’t matter that he was hurting a department already struggling and losing money for this organization. This guy wanted to get his for his family and he did.

It’s not just stealing, either. People put their families’ wellbeing above that of others in additional ways too.

There are a number of kapenta traders in the Siavonga area who make a living by buying kapenta from us and reselling it elsewhere. That’s how they survive and feed their families. At certain times of the year I’ll have five or six traders calling me a day looking for large amounts of kapenta. There are a good number of traders out there.

We try to take care of everybody. We don’t make actual lists or queues at this point but we try to cycle through and give everyone a chance to buy from us.

On numerous occasions I have had supervisors of mine (who shall remain nameless) lay claim to large amounts of kapenta for them or their family members to resell. They don’t ask. They demand. It doesn’t matter how many traders wanted or needed to buy that kapenta. It doesn’t matter who we had kept waiting for weeks. These guys, my supervisors, have family members in need and take the opportunity to use their positions to get theirs at the expense of traders who have been waiting, and at the expense of Mubita and myself who look like jerks for being forced to stiff these other customers. They know exactly what they’re doing and they still do it without hesitating. It really bothers me.

To give one final example, I recently visited a small organization in Kitwe, Zambia, run by the Catholic Church, that houses 30 orphans of all ages. The Sister-in-Charge, an old Italian woman (who bore a striking resemblance to Tomie dePaola's “Strega Nona”) took me on a tour of the place, showing me the dormitories, the kitchen, the play areas and all the rest, explaining things as we walked. She told me that the local community had been very supportive and that local shop owners would regularly donate money, food or drinks to help support the children.

As she was telling me this she stopped, leaned in and said quietly, “But you know what? They will never give the items to anyone else here [pointing to her Zambian co-workers, all nuns]. They’ll only give them to me. They think that if they give them to these ladies they will just take them home to feed their families.” She suggested to me that this was probably, in fact, the case. Which is crazy, if you think about it. This is a bunch of nuns, we’re talking about. Nuns looking after orphans. Even so, the focus is placed on family above all else.

It’s all been a tough lesson to learn.

You do start to view this all in a new light once you’ve been around here for a while, though. Abject poverty abounds and many times those working in these charitable organizations are worse off than those the organization is catering to. Our fishermen, carpenters and welders make very, very little, and many have big families. It’s very possible that those nuns’ children were malnourished and in desperate need of additional food. It makes sense that people here will do what they can to ensure the survival of their families. I get it, even if Mr. Green of “No Longer at Ease” didn’t.

Still, it’s all been a tough lesson to learn.