After a few days of ‘come and see’ and a week of teaching, we moved into the third aspect of the trip: taking the Huckabys away for a short trip. We felt like they needed to get out of Lusaka as a family and knew that if we sent them money for a vacation, they would spend it on other people (something that we appreciate about them). While doing it this way meant that they had to take us with them, they assured us that this wasn’t a problem.
A friend of the Huckabys let us borrow their Toyota Hiace, which allowed us to travel together in one vehicle, rather than caravaning down in two vehicles as we thought we were going to have to. This was a blessing because it was an eight hour drive and this way only Kelly would be exhausted.
Shortly after leaving Luska, the terrain opens up and the landscape gets greener (aided by the fact that they had received the first rains since March the week before). Life in rural Zambia is much slower paced and spread out. One of the stranger aspects is that every few miles you will have a group of people selling goods on the side of the road. In each area, everyone is selling the same exact thing. In one town, you will have ten people selling tomatoes, in the next village it’s all baskets, then mangoes, charcoal, or eggs. But rather than each town having a variety, it is all one thing and then all another. It drove Jeff, who is a businessman, absolutely bonkers. I think he wanted to get out and give them a lesson on supply and demand.
One of my favorite parts of this drive was going through ‘the sweetest little town in Zambia.’ Mazabuka is one field of sugar cane after another (along with factories to process all of the sugar). As you drive through, kids with cut sugar cane run alongside your car trying to get you to stop.
One of the parts of this trip that I did not enjoy was four hours into it when we realized that I didn’t have my passport. In the preparation for the trip, I had gotten all of my things together including making sure I had enough Kwatcha (we were not sure we would be able to convert money for a few days). I had gotten my talk together for the seminar that we were going to stop along the way for me to speak at. What I did not do is put my passport in my bag before we left. This was a major problem because we were planning to go to Botswana for a safari in a few days.
After checking a few possibilities, including overnighting it to Livingstone, they settled on having someone from the camp hand deliver it. So Happy got on a bus that afternoon for the 8 hour trip, stayed the night with us in Zambia and then took the long trip back the next day so that He could be back at the Pastor’s College on Monday morning. While I was embarrassed by my mistake, and a bit ashamed that I had caused a problem, I was also honored that someone would sacrifice most of their weekend to make sure my trip was not ruined.
It was an extremely humbling experience, but one that helped me to better appreciate the African pace of life. As Happy told me that it was no problem, and that he didn’t want me to miss out after traveling across the ocean, I believed him (maybe I just wanted to because it made me feel better). Over the whole trip, I noticed that time was measured in relationships rather than ‘fear of missing out.’ Americans tend to say: ‘time is money,’ but in Zambia, time is more relaxed. This can be quite frustrating when trying to get things done (and faced with people who do not ‘value’ your time), but I got to see the benefit of it. Trying to be continually ‘in the moment’ means that you don’t weigh what you are doing against all of the other things you could be doing. The thing in front of you is simply what it is, not one out of many possibilities. I want to live my life with that kind of presence.