Yesterday we said goodbye to Eden Farm and the treacherous roads of Chingola and headed to Ndola. It's weird how hard goodbyes can be when you've only been somewhere for a week.
On Saturday we were in town picking up some things at the market when a street girl walked over, begging for money. Street boys are all over the place in Chingola but girls are much rarer. We gave her some peanuts and talked for a while; found out her name was Jackie and she was 8 years old. She kept asking us to buy her zapatos (the Bemba word for shoes.. and yes, it's the same word in Spanish. Weird.). We asked where her family was and she pointed to a blind woman sleeping with hands outstretched on the side of the road, with a few young kids playing around her.
When we passed through town yesterday, I saw Jackie sitting near her Mum on the sidewalk. A man and a woman were grabbing at her her feet and she was screaming and kicking. We parked the car and I went over to see her. The couple had left and Jackie was now lying in a heap by her Mum, sobbing. I asked her what was wrong and she pointed to the bottom of her foot, with a band-aid on it, which I assume the couple had been trying to put on earlier. I peeled part of it off and found a wide, swollen, bleeding laceration right in the centre of Jackie's foot. A street boy told us she had stepped on a broken bottle, and they'd pulled a large piece of glass out of her foot earlier. Very reassuring, since street boys are such qualified doctors, typically high out of their minds on glue. We had a bus to catch in 20 minutes. I grabbed some antibiotic ointment and a bigger band-aid and put both on her foot and prayed for her. She just lay there sniffing, next to her incoherent, blind mother. All I could think of as we left was, what if I'd just bitten the bullet and gotten her a pair of $1 flip flops from the market a few days ago??? Ugh. This is the hard part of Africa.
Today we take a bus from Ndola to Kapiri Mposhi to catch the infamous Tazara train to Tanzania. The journey takes anywhere from 30 hours to 5 days, but we are stoked, mainly because it's not another bus. On the bus from Lusaka to Ndola last week, a woman spilled a whole bowl of chicken on the floor by my feet and it stayed there for the remaining 6 hours of hot and sweaty travel. I hate to sound like the martyred vegetarian but SERIOUSLY, out of ALL the 80 seats on the bus..???? Also I'm pretty sure one of the wheels on that bus was wooden. And square.
BUT it doesn't matter because train is the mode of transport for now.
Miss you all and look forward to seeing everyone in just a month...
More from the land of Tanzania!
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