 |
| Sam Peisch (left) poses with some Zambian children and a friend. (Courtesy photo) |
I had wanted to return to Zambia ever since I returned from my previous trip there three years ago. Freshly graduated from Bromfield this year, I found myself with six months of time on my hands to do whatever I wanted, having been informed by Middlebury College that I had been accepted into the school’s February enrollment program. I was sure I didn’t want to stay at home thinking of all the exciting new experiences my friends were having at college. I saw this as a golden opportunity to work abroad. With enormous help and support from my mom and dad, we found a program for me to work in, in Livingstone, Zambia, as a medical volunteer. Before I knew it, I was in Zambia brushing my teeth with soap and a piece of wood I ripped from my mosquito-net hanger.
I stepped off the plane at tiny Livingstone International Airport with a deep breath. Dust blew up in miniature cyclones near the airport door as fellow passengers and I shuffled toward it. I was thrown off by 10 hours of unexpected “bonus” flight time and a missing luggage bag that didn’t arrive until four days later. Yet I quickly remembered one of the lessons I had learned from my previous trip here three years ago: almost nothing ever goes according to plan, yet if you are ready to quickly adapt and work hard, you can find solutions, just like anywhere else.
I had arrived on the first day of my 2½-month stay in Livingstone to work for the Happy Africa Foundation, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that runs projects in sub-Saharan Africa. The foundation helps by building schools; sponsoring students; running literacy, sports, and general education classes; and providing medical care, through medical volunteers.
During my first couple of days there I was medically trained by the foundation’s head medical coordinator, Brave Sikangila. Brave is a short, yet powerfully eloquent 36-year-old Zambian with 10 years of medical experience. He quickly trained me and a few other volunteers in simple procedures, such as taking blood pressure, and in complex tasks such as diagnosing multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis and counseling HIV-positive individuals. I knew right away that, with Brave’s philosophy and personal character, he was someone with whom I wanted to work closely. A week later, Brave and I had formed a two-man medical team. As he said, “one part ‘mazungu knowledge,’ one part ‘Zambian experience.’” (Mazungu is the Nyanja term for white person, i.e., me.)
My work day began at 7 a.m. and finished at 7 or 8 p.m. Mornings consisted of medical work, either at the clinics in the city assisting nurses, or conducting home visits in various poor parts of the city. Livingstone has six main districts: Dambwa, Maramba, Nakatindi, Libuyu, Linda, and Railways. Maramba typically receives the greatest amount of foreign aid due to its proximity to the center of the city, but all communities are nearly equal in poverty, population, and disease statistics.
 |
An apartment complex in Nakatindi where Sam treated patients. (Photos by Sam Peisch)
|
 |
| A family Sam treated in the Mwandi community, a rural village outside the city. |
Afternoons were quiet in the clinics, so I did community work, helping to build a new school for elementary students in Libuyu district. My community work also included teaching literacy to young students in community-run schools and working at a farm in Maramba district. Clinic work was repetitive, but helpful, and involved taking vital statistics, weighing babies, running the under-five clinic, and triaging (the medical process of sending patients in greater need to the doctor first). Home visits allowed me to treat patients in the city who were in the greatest need, and gave me the deepest insight into what living in Livingstone really meant.
The sun glinted sharply off a sheet metal roof as I made my rounds through the densely populated and dusty streets of Nakatindi one blistering October morning. I immediately sought out John Nyambe, a 70-year-old man dealt a virtual death sentence by virtue of his multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. John invited me into his house to proudly show me how much less blood he had been coughing up recently, and that he was continuing to drink the water that doctors and I had instructed him to drink at all times. Next I went to visit Jenny Mayaba, a six-year-old orphan to whom I delivered a 10-kg bag of maize meal as I was thanked profusely by her bedridden surrogate grandmother. After seeing 10 medium-risk patients, a woman who had been assaulted by her husband, and a mother suspected of having malaria, I was told by a local friend in the village about a seriously ill woman on the outskirts of Nakatindi. I went there immediately and saw my first patient with full-blown AIDS.
Most patients I saw lived in abominable conditions. Zambia is the 13th least developed country in the world, yet no statistic can begin to describe being forced to live in a 10 by 10-foot sheet-metal hut filled with up to 12 sick, malnourished children. I found myself struggling to treat HIV and TB patients who suffered not only from their chronic disease, but from lack of basic necessities: no mosquito nets to prevent their children from acquiring malaria; no maize meal, the country’s staple food; no potable water, causing their children to die from preventable water-borne diseases such as diarrhea, cholera, and dysentery.
A cultural belief stipulates that Zambian women bear between six and 12 children in their lifetime, making effectively caring for newborns nearly impossible. Home visits wouldn’t exist if everyone had the ability to visit the doctor, but factors such as poverty, stigma, and lack of education prevents this from happening on a widespread scale. My medical bag contained an array of different bandages and wraps, painkillers, multi-vitamins, vitamin B complex, a sphygmometer, a stethoscope, methylated spirits, antibiotic cream, anti-fungal cream, and prophylactics. In concert with the treatment or transport I gave, I frequently counseled patients on the prevention of tuberculosis and caring for their children properly, and addressed their concerns about being tested for HIV. Some of these conversations were difficult, as it took some time for me to learn to speak Nyanja and Lozi, the two most common languages in the city. I benefited greatly from having Brave as a translator.
Brave and I conversed with the mother of the AIDS patient. After seeing the patient in her mud-brick hut, we knew she had to be taken directly to the hospital. The woman was emaciated and paralyzed from the waist down. We knew that arranging for transport for a single patient was against the foundation’s medical transport policy, but one look between the two of us said that there wasn’t any policy that applied to this patient. The minibus arrived with the wheelchair we requested. We stayed at the hospital through lunch with the woman, and Brave and I decided that she needed hospice care. We talked with a nun Brave knew well and transported her to St. Joseph’s, one of the best hospice-care facilities around. We arrived back home just in time to catch another minibus to the school building construction site.
Despite having so many reasons to despair, there was no shortage of hope among Zambians. Their willpower was strong, their stories of sustaining themselves inspiring. Increasingly, I felt it crucial to focus on the concept of hope, rather than the status quo of poverty and misery.
 |
| Victor, Sam’s work companion, a man with a perpetual smile. |
Victor, a 40-year-old Zambian man with whom I worked for my entire time in Livingstone, opened up to me one day during a long walk through the bush during a home visit. “Every day is a struggle,” he said to me. “I have my wife, our six kids, my parents, and four children of my sister and my brother to care for. But we manage.” Victor is paid 400,000 kwacha per month as an employee at the Happy Africa Foundation, roughly $90. A three-month semester of school for a child is 300,000 kwacha, while a week’s supply of maize meal is 40,000 kwacha.
“How do you do it?” I asked him. The finances didn’t seem to add up to me. Victor turned to me and pointed to his heart. “With this, and with God,” he said plainly. All of the children Victor cares for are enrolled in school, and not one day did he ever stop smiling.
Surprisingly, I saw despair and idleness more often among fellow aid workers than among the population they sought to serve. I quickly became frustrated by the aid system in place to help Zambia. Livingstone’s plight had been rightly identified by the UN, Christian Relief Services, and an alphabet-soup army of other related organizations, and each had provided aid for extended periods in Zambia’s recent history. There seems to be no shortage of altruism and determination within these charities and foundations, and I am inspired by the efforts of their members and volunteers.
I became less inspired after hearing Zambia’s story from Zambia’s people. After months of meeting with, treating, and working with hundreds of Zambian people of all ages and all segments of society, the message was clear: things are the same as before. Lucy Pollock, the director of the Happy Africa Foundation and one of my closest friends today, said it best during one of our long conversations: “There are a million ways to help Africa, Sam, but there are a hundred million ways to help Africa the wrong way.”
This harsh perspective has been getting much more attention recently since the publication of Dead Aid, by Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian-born and Harvard- and Oxford-educated female economist, and The White Man’s Burden, by William Easterly, former World Bank economist turned NYU professor. Both Moyo and Easterly point out that, statistically, countries that received more aid more often than not had negative economic growth rates afterwards. The New York Times recently published a piece discussing the divide between those critical of aid, represented by Moyo and Easterly, and those proposing debt-relief and greater aid commitments, represented by the UN and economist Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty.
Before I came to Zambia, my belief was closely aligned with Sachs’. I believed that all aid was beneficial and that by virtue of having great power, we have a moral responsibility to help those less fortunate. The second part I firmly believe in today; the first I couldn’t disagree with more. I could point to hundreds of examples of how foreign aid inhibited domestic growth by creating artificial economies, of how schools were built where teachers didn’t exist, or farmers gave up their jobs selling produce because it was easier to depend on a World Food Programme (WFP) handout. This is not to say all foreign aid is detrimental or unhelpful. For example, the WFP ran a very successful program at the Nakatindi community school by providing breakfast for the students, which drastically increased enrollment. HIV infection rates among the younger population were much lower thanks to new efforts at preventing mother-to-child transmission of the virus.
Inspired by the idea of success and the opportunities an education could provide, I decided to launch two nonprofits: a soccer academy with mandatory HIV education for young student leaders who have significant soccer talent, and a scholarship fund for gifted, yet financially disadvantaged female students to attend high school. The first program was inspired by a team I started coaching with a man named Amit Rama, who also ran the sponsor-a-child program at my foundation. The second came from my month-long efforts in working to send a bright and incredibly motivated girl to high school, which I eventually accomplished after a harrowing eight-hour drive north into a remote village to get her exam results stamped by her elementary school headmaster, and raising $800 for her tuition, books, and uniform.
My soccer academy, the Nimala Futbol Academy, which recently received an incredible donation of $625 with the help of Bromfield senior Ben Landry and the rest of the members of the Bromfield varsity soccer teams from this year and last, is currently being run by Amit. The scholarship fund, the Zambian Young Women’s Scholarship Fund, is in the process of attaining 501(c)3 status.
I started these initiatives in part because I felt that aid agencies were not working in the right way to help Zambians secure their own future, a future independent of foreign aid. But I also knew that this is what I want to do in my life: help other people. Nothing makes me happier than knowing I’ve made a positive impact in someone else’s life. To me, though it is important to convey the horror that is life for millions of Zambians every day, I believe it is imperative to present their incredible stories of constant determination and hope that define so many of their lives.
Still River Road resident Sam Peisch is a 2009 graduate of the Bromfield School where, as a junior, he was selected as a winner in the International Bentley College Tomorrow25 competition, a program organized in cooperation with Time magazine to honor students who have demonstrated exceptional leadership and a commitment to positive change in their communities.