Vila No. 78

This is about my holiday stay in Lusaka, Zambia. The area called Mulungushi Village is a vast expansion of wooded land with houses distant from one another. Most of the houses are inhabited by expats, Chinese, Indians and from other continents to add to the distance of neighbourhood. The only common factor amongst the houses is that these are serviced by the local natives as Maids, Gardeners, Drivers and for other errands.

I have known this part time Gardener Derrek for the last two visits to Lusaka. He mends and works at the patch of land around the house that my son and family live in. He has little knowledge about the plants but is a hardworking, sincere and conscientious soul that brooms the area to make it look clean, digs for no reason and waters the plants.

I had no connection with the people that belong to this country except with that of Derrrek. I would seek information on food, living expense, community and health from the expat Indians that told me that people lived in abject poverty and having just one meal a day was the common practice. Despite all the misery, the people looked happy and were warm in conduct with one another. I gathered information from Derrek but wanted to know more about them. In that pursuit, I requested Derrek to take me home to meet with his family. He looked shy initially but agreed on my insistence.

The visit called for 2.5 miles walk to the point wherefrom we caught 18-Seater bus that took about 20/25 minutes to reach the inhabitation of one roomed cluster of houses called the ‘’Compound”.

The walk from destination point of bus to Derrek’s home involved walking through a different culture but much poverty around. The only thing that looked sufficient was insufficiency. The compound is not serviced by water pipeline and it has to be bought in small containers and fetched home. The toilets are WC in one corner of the tenement, kitchen is another with pots and pans empty. I tried to notice any food item or grain anywhere. One could not see a sack, a bag or a little packing of the grain anywhere. Maybe it was last day of the month, September 30^th, and Derrek did not have enough in the kitchen to show off. This did not however deter him from distributing the bananas and bread that we carried for his family, also, to the other children of the neighbourhood.

The compound has a hospital for Derrek to boast. It looked like any Primary Health Care Centre that we have in villages in India. The wall of the Centre carried worn out message with importance of breast feeding and also talked about the ways and means to keep mosquitoes & malaria away. It was similar to the National Malaria Eradication Programme that Government of India had some three decades back.

It was about 4 in the evening and one saw school children going about in the area. The Government has a Primary School in dilapidated condition where it does not charge a fee. Derrek has three children. Two of the younger ones go to the Primary School. The elder is enrolled in a Private School in the same compound where mid-day and evening meals are provided beside education. The fee of the private school was considerable compared to what he earned as wages.

The bus ticket was no cheap. On my enquiry as to how he afforded paying it every day, he told me that he would hardly catch the bus but would come to and go from work walking. It meant over three hours of fast walking every day to work as a manual labour. A bicycle that would save him time is exorbitant and a luxury. Any Zambian riding a bicycle has a successful confident look on his face.

Derrek and I talked on way back about the year gone by. He had told me earlier that he had a brother that died a few months back. A Zambian death entails a lot of expense on burial and related rituals. Derrek sought loan from the expat families that he worked for. Some gave little but some were considerate enough to have given him amount to suffice his need.

In the following month on wages day, Derrek offered his employers to deduct the advance money in small instalments. The gentleman boss at Vila No. 78 asked him to forget about the deductions and handed over the wages. I was appreciative of his employer’s good gesture when he told me that the same Boss at Vila No. 78 pays each month towards his elder son’s fee at the Private School.

Having got down from the bus and entered the Mulungushi Village Complex, I was walking past the houses and for the first time trying to look and notice the Vila numbers. It prided me with tears in my eyes that the house that I was staying at Lusaka had No. 78 thereon.