The Greatest Hula-Hooper in the World

The greatest hula-hoopper in the world

This is a lass playing on the field outside Packachele Primary School and feeding centre. It's playtime and all the teachers have buggered off leaving me alone with one hundred and fifty ophaned children for four and a half hours. It was a new kind of fun of my own making after declining to chair the interview panal for the recruitment of a new teacher, something I honestly felt I wasn't really able to do. This situation was somehow and suddenly thrust upon me and I had little time to think about it or what to do if it happened. That's just the way it goes sometimes.

There I was in the field with the kids with the sun and my camera. It was alright though because the school is relatively rich with a number of admittedly dog-eared text books in each class, a computer, seven hula-hoops, a basket ball with court to bounce it on, one football and plenty of poisonous toads and snakes to excite and to share around. It is like the Aladdins cave of recreational time activity equipment in comparison to other fee paying schools I've experienced. The kids even have a pencil each and an occasional ruler can be spotted. The school is for primary age children orphaned from Aids, with or without the HIV virus, and other children deemed vulnerable for other reasons, whatever they may be. There are as many reasons as vulnerable kids.

 The school follows the Zambian primary syllabus (more or which another day) from Grade 1-6. As the Grade 6 class finish and progress to Grade 7 another class room is constructed by local labour to accomodate them and so on. A logical way to work and one that the foreign donars seem to like, although, as elsewhere in funded organisations in Zambia, it's a constant and time consuming challenge to apply for, get and then justify donations. And this girl, well, I don't know her name but at playtime she was the greatest hula-hooper in the sunny field and the whole wide world. Maybe. So she seemed it to me.

 

Breakfast at Packachele School and feeding centre

Aids is popular in Zambia,  more than the Victoria Falls, amoung the people who live there and has been hanging around getting to know people in the country since it introduced itself to other more familiar longitudes and latitudes in the western world. The disease was first identified in the mid-1980's or something like that, when doctors at a Lusaka hospital noticed that people with formerly treatable and curable diseases,  such as tuberculosis, seemed to be dying. Since then there has been no looking back and Aids has gone from strength to strength. It's difficult to get reliable figures for the countries infection rates; some people are not counted such as the street kids in the cities and others don't want to be counted or refuse to take a test or accept that they may have the virus. Hundreds of others slip through a somewhat tattered medical net. It's certainly a complicated business. Nowadays, Aids is still the big killer in Zambia alongwith Malaria and respiratory infections. People, unknown to have HIV and dying of other diseases are often found to be HIV positive thereafter. It's still devastating and the after effects are equally, perhaps more, so. They are the things that affect the living.

I find that many people I discuss Aids/HIV with, in Zambia and here in the UK, seek, perhaps inadvertently, to simplify the situation. They cite clear explanations; particular religious denominations, racial groups, sexual orientation, moral issues, poverty, witchcraft, economics and long distance lorry drivers, amoung other factors, for the rapid spread of the virus in Zambia but in my opinion they miss the point completely. In fact there is no single point and it's foolhardy to approach the challenge from that standpoint. Certainly, as with any disease, factors, particularly those of poverty, exacerbate its transmission but it is the incredibly complex amalgamation of these that leads to a pandemic. The virus, a living being in it's own right (if viruses have rights), needs to live and has found that the breeding ground of Zambia and southern Africa is one hell of a place to do it decadently and get away with it.

Grade 3 lasses

Treatment is more complicated in a country like Zambia, facing the challenges it does. It's not straight forward. Zambia and the people who live there are different. The culture and the way people exist in the world are different. Being alive is different for the Bantu, as is dying. Sex and relationships in the society are different. Hiv and Aids is different. It means a different thing and most of the ideas about treatment and preventing re-infection (a massive factor) are driven by medical minds from the west. Whilst this is effective in one way it doesn't account for many of the differences that exist. Ideas exported from the same west have also helped the spread of the disease.

Many, can I use the word westernised, Zambians, die each year from Aids because the Lord the majority proclaim to believe and trust in has apparently healed them. Approved Government literature still to this day reinforces this possibility. They don't connect improvements in their condition and health as due to the anti-retroviral treatment (ART) but due to the Lord making the drugs effective. The drugs work (they do), they thank the Lord in prayer, and then stop taking them. Another belief prevalent is that if you have hiv and you sleep with a virgin, you are cured. Yes, people still believe that.

Grade 3 lasses shortly before getting done for not wearing uniform

Thousands stay in their homes afraid of the taboo that infection can bring with it and the shame attached to open treatment and there in their homes they get sick and die or travel back to their native tribal villages in the bush to do so. Nobody, barring thier families, ever knows. Traditional beliefs and witchcraft, another much distorted part of Bantu culture in many christianized western psyche, plays it's part, as does alcohol. Sometimes, so it seems to me, Zambia is often simplified, pitied for it's poverty and patronised for it's culture. People go to Zambia and take what they want from it, load their guns or cameras, point either at an elephant or waterfall, fire, bugger off and stick the trophy up on their wall or in their holiday snaps zip file. Night safaris are as popular with the tourist as Aids is with the natives. You drive across the black African bush with a guide in a Land Rover to where you can see the car lights blazing in the distance. When you get there you park up in any gap you can find in the circle of 4x4's and while the guides shine the spot lights on the pride of sleepy lions in the centre, you shoot away to your hearts content. It's the same sort of thing with the hunting too; just swap the film for some lead.

It's a simple country with native Africans that look good in reed skirts and holiday photographs and the elephants look good. You can buy traditional tribal wooden masks that don't really mean anything to you at all which you can take them home and tell visitors to your house that they are traditional african tribal wooden masks and then sit down to dinner before going through your trophy photographs. It has a waterfall and when you see the old colonial buildings in Livingstone, they're weird, apparently, and slightly uncomfortable but reassuringly, they and those times, the time of exploitation, has nothing at all to do with you. Tourists don't visit Lusaka, unless they're passing through, or sidetracked backpackers with maps looking for the international bus station and a quick exit south.

HIV/Aids clinic/drop-in centre

It is a place where people live, as anybody lives, and then they die. It is a place where people feel, where they make love, argue, try to survive, hope, celebrate, fight and cry. They grow food, eat it and laugh. It is a place of life and all that goes with it. A place very much of today with apprehensions about tomorrow, This manifests itself in a thousand different wonderous ways but that's only my view as an outsider. It's difficult for me to see how I could ever understand how my own complicated country and society works and ticks along, nevermind a country in southern Africa. People, the millions of Bantu included, are a billion different things and to simplify them and the way they live is a path strewn with dangers and pitfalls to any sense of understanding, to any feeling of empathy.

Some people say that the Aids situation is improving in Zambia. Whether this means that the instances of the disease are declining or that less people are being identified with having the disease is up for debate. It is in the interest of those that run the country that things are improving, especially as they hope to be the African country of tourism next year, or maybe this, I can't remember. Aids, like most things, has it's targets, it's objectives to meet. It's important that the figures add up. If the target is to have only seven people with the disease and there are ten, then just count seven and Bob's your uncle. Most statistics are official ones and their the only ones that people want. If Aids is increasing in one sector of society then don't count them; it improves the overall figures and avoids additional embarrassment. Being selective is good economically and you don't want to scare the tourists with their cameras away. Tourists don't want photographs of young mothers dying of Aids at the side of tarmac roads. It's indecent. That's the way it goes.

Lads at playtime practising being men

So it's not just the disease and the dying that are devastating. That's the easy bit, the straight-forward bit in one way. The consequences that death leaves for those alive don't go away and most of these consequences fall upon the young children and those that care for them. There are approximately one million orphans due to Aids in Lusaka, one third of the city population. There could be more but there are basically too many to count. The school I worked in accomodated one hundred and fifty. They and those like them in similar establishments are the lucky ones. The proportion of lucky ones to unlucky is miniscule. There is a queue a mile long to get a place at such schools but there are very few such schools because there is no money in the country to pay for them. Packachele school is funded almost exclusively on foreign (mainly Dutch/Canadian, I think) donations. They get a little mealie meal from the Departmant of Agriculture or at least some financial savings on it. The school, like the 80% of Zambians, survives on a hand to mouth basis. Year on year is spent applying for more foreign grants by justifying those of the previous year. When I was there the headmistress, a wonderfully ebulliently alive woman called Angela had to photograph the schools' new born chicks one day to prove to the donars who provided the money that she'd spent the money on them. She didn't have a camera though.

To attend the school requirements have to be strict. People will try to get around them, such is the demand, and corruption is not uncommon. Pastors will forge letters and death certificates stating that a child's parents are deceased. Parents, buried in the bush outside tribal villages hundreds of miles away are difficult to identify. The kids in this school are a drop in the ocean of the vulnerable, abused, exploited and orphaned children that just want to learn and play and be but with the cards that have been dealt them, they just don't have the time. Their's is a different and short path to adulthood, a different and often tragic life that nobody sees or hears about. The lucky ones, take nothing away from them, at Packachele and like establishments, are the exception.

Child with sibling

The big gap in the country demographic is the people who were having sex and procreating in the 1980's and 1990's. Many of those are dead now and what they have left behind are children. These children are now the heads of their households and the chief sources of family income and now have parental roles It is they who need to get married, often for economic reasons. Early marraiges are the norm as are active sexual relations from the age of ten, particularly in the compounds. Extended families, with children sleeping in the same beds as distant uncles and relatives, are open to abuse and childhood pregnancy and sexual abuse are more day to day occurances than here. Aids is a great proponent of equal opportunities and doesn't let a chance pass it by.

Very beautiful twins

And what about the orphans and the people of Zambia? What about the orphans and the children with HIV or with the responsibility for raising, as principal carers, their young siblings? What about the four year olds who have to spend the whole day, from sunrise to twilight, breaking rocks into smaller rocks to put into a basket so that they can sell them at the side of the road - a days' solid hard work for 20p? There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of children that are not children for long. Their wonder of the world is short-lived and life becomes something only to survive from day to day.

But then people live and the people in Zambia live. They play games at the side of the road and they laugh at winning and at losing. They laugh when they hit the crossbar with a cracking long range effort from the edge of the box. They crowd into the open top lorry they've manged to get hold of that leaves from the football pitch to take them to another funeral and they sing songs loudly, in beautiful tune, from the flatbed back, as they set to Leopard's Hill cemetery again, leaving behind it another cloud of dust that clears to leave the kids training and the noise of the pitch behind. People live with Aids, they live with HIV. It's almost like a cancer that you might get if you live your life as normal and are unlucky. Life is there to be lived and death is always the consequence.

Women with stuff on their heads

And so there I was and the lass with the hula hoop in the field was just one of those that were alive. I don't know much about her and I don't know her name. I don't know if she is HIV positive or whether it's her mother or father or both that are dead. I don't know the story of her life and I didn't speak to her about it, but when I watched her there, at playtime in the sun, swinging her body beautifully, dancing, with the hula hoop a blur in the air around and belonging to her, I felt that she was the greatest hula-hooper in the whole world, and from the look of unrequited joy staring out of her face and out of her own world, I assumed that she felt something along those lines too.