Rolling with the Punches

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Some would say that here in Zambia, it is necessary to roll with the punches. I think that Peter should win an award for the amount of rolling he did in the last 48 hours. He intended to take his class to the Dag Hammerskjold Crash site as a small field trip on Wednesday morning but there is a fuel shortage in Zambia currently and there was no gas to be found in Kitwe. So the trip was postponed to Thursday morning. Meanwhile, late Wednesday morning, Peter texted me to say he heard there was gas at a certain petrol station nearby. I hopped in the car with the bit of petrol we had left and was able to put in a full tank. Then Peter is told that he is going to be one of the speakers at the Dag Peace Symposium next Thursday so he has a week to prepare a talk on Peacebuilding and Ecumenism. This isn’t much notice, especially since he is teaching this week, has to mark four theses, and I am gone for the weekend in Lusaka for a trauma workshop and he is on for full-time parenting. In the afternoon, he was told at his staff meeting that the coordinator for the peace center, Tasila, has resigned. This is not a complete surprise given that she is well-educated, overworked and hasn’t been paid for several months but it is still sad. It means more transition for the peace center and Peter and his colleague, Mukunto, will now have to share all the teaching and together act as peace coordinator until another one is found.

So this morning, Peter and the class was all set to go to the Dag crash site and our car won’t start. Turns out the gas I got yesterday was mixed with water. Apparently the tanker trucks like to make a few extra bucks on the side so they offload some of their fuel to guys on the side of the road and then fill the tank back to full with water. A bit of extra cash for them and a big pain in the butt for us. Our neighbor is a mechanic and so he proceeded to siphon out an entire tank full of gas . . . WITH HIS MOUTH! Well, not completely, but he got at least 10-20 mouthfuls in the process. That can’t be healthy. The fuel station gave us a refund but the process took all morning. In the middle of all this, Peter had an awkward conversation with the director who said that he had volunteered to do the speech that Peter was asked to do but then found out that Peter had been asked. It was suggested that Peter could write the speech and the director deliver it, and further suggestions were forthcoming, but finally it was decided that Peter would write and deliver the speech as planned. Talk about uncomfortable.

By noon, the car was back in working order but didn’t have any petrol in it. The class decided to try to go on their field trip in the afternoon so Peter and I hopped in the car to find some gas and to pick up the kids. Three gas stations later, we found a place with “plenty of gas” and we prayed it was good gas. As we were driving around town, it also became evident that our air conditioning really wasn’t fixed and so that will have to be worked on at a later date, again. We picked up the boys, Peter inhaled a quick lunch, and then set off.

I’m glad it worked out for them to go. The Pan-African students will be graduating in a week and after nine long months they will be returning home to their families. I’m afraid their experience at MEF hasn’t always been positive. They are all on scholarship and were supposed to receive money for social outings. Instead of spending it little by little on small outings and barbecues, they decided to save all the money and take a trip together to Livingstone to see Victoria Falls. Unfortunately, after going all year without any social functions, they were told there was no money for them even though it had supposedly been set aside at the beginning of the year. There is no money anywhere, not for salaries, not for paper, not for anything. So these poor students had their trip taken away from them and that is a big disappointment. Even though they have received good training in peacebuilding, things like this leave a bad taste in their mouths. So they really appreciated the effort Peter put into taking them off-campus for this outing. A bright spot in their time here.

This morning I tried for over an hour to upload pictures to my blog which finally worked in the end. But by the time it was ready to post, the internet was so slow that it couldn’t load any web pages anymore. But tonight when I came back to try again, apparently it did send after all. Go figure. Sorry if duplicates were sent out. Since I am here and the internet is working, you get a bonus blog to read!