Sticks and Stones

Sorry I haven’t updated my blog in a very long time. Mostly, it’s because these past couple months have been really frustrating! I finally got my kits to do HIV assays at work. For those of you who are more scientific minded, I’m running ELISAs on HIV samples in order to establish the HIV prevalence of various communities where ZAMBART has implemented interventions. I’ve got about 6000 samples to test, which is a lot. A lot of the same test over and over, which should take me about 2 months. And since I’ve been here for about 3 months, theoretically, I should be done by now. Alas, things never work out that nicely. It took the first month to get the kits and to order the fridge to store them in. It took the second month to figure out why the tests weren’t working. ELISAs are not complicated so having it go wrong millions of times over was a bit of a downer. Anyway, after two weeks, we decided it must be the water which we get from across the street at University Teaching Hospital (UTH). (It’s quite strange to have to leave the building and drive across the street in order to transport distilled water back to the lab.) After we started getting our water from CIDRZ instead, the test worked! For a day. It took another two weeks to finally sort it and start getting valid results, but now we’re finding that some of the results aren’t reproducible. Perhaps now you understand my reticence. Being in a constant state of frustration is not very conducive to writing. Hopefully I’ll have some social science work soon, considering that’s what I came here to do. It was a bit disappointing when I mentioned to the social science team that I wanted to work with them. They thought I was joking since I’m considered a lab person.

Moving on, I managed to solve the root of a few of my other frustrations, the main one being transportation, or the lack thereof. I’ve wanted to write about this, but I needed to break the news to my parents first. It went something like this:

“Shruthi, how are you getting to work?”

Pause.

“Shruthi?”

“Well, you see……I have a car.”

“YOU BOUGHT A CAR?”

“No, no. Someone gave it to me.”

“SOMEONE GAVE YOU A CAR?”

“Yeah, and it’s a manual, so I had to learn to drive stick….”

Here’s where you can really tell my parents apart. Mom’s reaction:

“You learned to drive stick?! So you can drive us around when we visit?”

Dad’s reaction:

“Do you have insurance?”

So yeah, I drive here. And I can drive stick, which I’ve always wanted to learn. Perhaps learning to drive stick while adapting to driving on the left hand side of the road in Lusaka traffic all at the same time was biting off too much, but I did it! Helen, who runs ZAMBART and wrote a letter of support for me for the Fulbright is the rightful owner of the two-door periwinkle Suzuki. It was sitting sadly in her garage and she agreed to let Ramona and me drive it for as long as we need! It can’t do long distances and it leaks a bit when it rains, but we’re quite delighted with it. Ramona is a Dutch intern who will be here until May. We were living together in the guest house at Petra’s. I say “were” because I’ve recently shifted, as they say here. There are quite a lot of other British English phrases I’ve picked up since I’ve been here. Fries are now officially chips. The hood is the bonnet and the trunk the boot. Flashlights are torches (very helpful during power outages). When I leave work, I’m knocking off. And instead of signal lights, we have robots, though I’m not actually sure if that last one is British or just Zambian…Anyway, I now live across from Manda Hill, one of the shopping areas. I’m much closer to work, and I live with Barbara, a woman who works at CIDRZ (she’s also the one who got kicked by the zebra). This makes sharing a car with Ramona a bit tricky and we’re still working it out.

Learning to drive was quite interesting, both liberating and frustrating (sorry, there’s just not a sufficient synonym I’d like to use…aggravating perhaps or vexing or chagrining…so maybe there are others I could use…). It’s much easier to get around now. Being dependent on others all the time for transportation was like being in junior high again. The only problem with driving stick is how easy it is to stall, and it usually happens at the most inopportune moments, like at intersections or in heavy traffic. And people here don’t hesitate to honk to let you know how annoyed they are. Also, you have to find this balance between the accelerator and clutch when you start moving, but I couldn’t get it for the longest time and kept jerking back and forth. It didn’t help that Ramona, who drives stick in the Netherlands, got it right away and proclaimed how easy it was to drive the car.

Luckily, since I already had a driver’s license from the States, I didn’t have to pass a test to get my driver’s license here. I did, however, have to go through an interview to make sure I knew the rules before I could even get the form you’re supposed to fill out to obtain a license. I went down to the RTSA (Road Traffic and Safety Administration) with one of the ZAMBART drivers, which is probably half the reason everything went smoothly. For my interview, the man asked me if I knew the ten basic highway road rules. I said I didn’t, but how different could it be from driving in the States? He didn’t really like that answer. Then he pointed to a poster with a bunch of different road signs on them and asked me to tell him what some of them meant. I got the cattle crossing and railroad signs right, but there was one of a locomotive and one of a picket fence about which I had no idea. I took a stab at the latter and said it stood for a residential area. He kind of chuckled, told me it stood for a barrier, and gave me my form anyway. So it only took about an hour and half for me to get my license, which I’m told is really fast. Of course, it’s just a sheet of paper for now because they’ve run out of the cards, so I have to go back in a couple months to see if they’ve come in.

There are some strange road signs in Zambia. Besides the cattle crossing and “deep potholes ahead” signs, I’ve seen one for an elephant crossing and one that said “careful of flying stones”. It’s no wonder belief in spirits is so prominent if the stones are flying! Another funny thing about driving here is what you can buy along the roads. When cars stop at the robots, people come into the streets and try to sell anything from talk time, newspapers and umbrellas to potatoes, floaties for the pool and ab workout contraptions.

One event that took place before the holidays was World AIDS Day on December 1. Any AIDS-related organization had the opportunity to participate in a march through Lusaka. It started off around 9:30 in the morning and we walked for about an hour. It was shorter than previous years. There were a lot of groups there though and, as we marched, the ZAMBART people sang songs about HIV and TB that the drama groups had made up for their community interventions. Here are some pics: