Three days staying in the home of
a family deep in the Zambian bush; three days eating what they eat, sleeping
where they sleep, doing whatever they do wherever they go to do it. I have
stayed in communities just like this before, but this time was different. And it
wasn’t because of the unusual size of the rats scuttling along the beams of the
thatched roof above my head. It wasn’t that beautiful early morning frost or
the unbearably hot sun that soon melted it. It wasn’t trying to squeeze down
ground nut porridge and a guava after the ten lumps of nshema and cabbage they
tried to feed me every meal. It was a ten year old girl named Loveness; and it
was all of it the fruit of a moment two weeks before.
I’d been walking with some of our
care workers in the community, a village marked by a single dirt track cutting
its way 40 kilometres through the grass with everything else built around it. We
saw her in the distance long before we came close enough to greet, strolling
toward us in her tattered school uniform. She was with an older woman and the
pair of them walked with the archetypal African pace, slow and without purpose.
I’ve never liked walking slowly. I figure if you want to get somewhere might as
well get there as quickly as you can. But I’ve long since learnt that here you’ll
dehydrate quicker rushing to find shade than you will walking slowly, even in
the blazing sun. Here people move so slowly you might have cause to think
they’re not walking to any place in particular, as if they’re saying, “Why
rush? It doesn’t matter what time we arrive.” What matters is the way you spend
the time getting there. Because in Africa life isn’t the sum of its events but
the space in between them. So a journey is not an arbitrary link between A and
B, it’s an occasion for life to happen. Conversation, silence, sharing, laughing,
talking; it’s not about “passing the time”, it’s about making of even the most
insignificant time something sacred, because relationship is formed as much in
the space between significant moments
as in the moments themselves. So it was after walking toward each other for 10
minutes on that long dirt track that we finally met. Her name was Loveness. She
was 10 years old. That’s as much as I’d been told when I walked over to her to
say hello. She smiled at me shyly and took my hand and right then, in that
passing moment, something strange happened. I was caught off guard; something
from somewhere in my head or my heart telling me that I was going to have a
real, deep connection with this girl. I didn’t know what to make of it, but it
was so clear. It turned out the lady she was walking with was her grandmother
and also a care worker in the community. The two of them turned around and
walked with us the other way, back the few kilometres they had just crossed
(which really made me wonder whether they had ever been going anywhere in the
first place). Some of the team walked ahead of us, some behind, but Loveness
and I walked together, hand in hand. Every now and then she’d let go, look at
the glisten of sweat that has appeared on her palm, then show it to me with a
disapproving expression before wiping it on her skirt, which embarrassed me
every time. But then she would take my hand all over again anyway, until the next
break. Every now and then as we walked she’d squeeze my hand more tightly for
just a moment. Sometimes she would look up at me and say my name, to which I’d
ask, ‘yes?’, before she would just turn back. All I could make of it was that
she was checking, as often as she needed to, that I was still there. Perhaps
checking that I wasn’t about to leave. I can’t read a lot from people’s
behaviour, from first introductions, but I could have guessed at least a shadow
of the story that her grandmother told me when I asked. I’ve heard stories just
like it so many times now. Her father had died four or five years earlier after
being bitten by a snake. Loveness and her sisters had been kept in her mother’s
care, until she lost her mind and was unfit to keep them. Now, her sisters are
scattered across the homes of various aunties and uncles, and Loveness is left
with her grandmother. Despite that, the family remains closer than any I have
ever met. Every one of them is the responsibility of them all. None of them claims
anything for themselves. Perhaps that is why when, two weeks after meeting this
mismatched pair, I turned up to invade their home for 3 days with nothing more
than a bag of groceries and a backpack, I wasn’t a stranger but a son, a big
brother, a friend of the kind that can leave for years and return as if only a day
had passed since parting. As for Loveness and me, the language barrier was
really no barrier at all. It turned out that she was, even without speaking
English, one of the funniest girls of her age I’ve ever met. She took care of
her younger and older sister
beautifully. She took care of me too, making sure I was safe and well fed,
taking my hand when we walked past groups of drunk teens. It all seemed pretty
backwards. But then, in a village I don’t know amongst I people I don’t
understand with a language I don’t speak, Loveness figured that of the two of
us I was the more vulnerable.
Whatever measure you use to
define genuine relationship, whatever it is that makes friends of people with
nothing else in common but the tie that binds them, I made a friend in
Loveness. As unlikely and unfounded a friendship as any I’m likely to have the
privilege of knowing! And it was of such a friendship that the voice in my head
and my heart spoke two weeks before. God brought us together, whether for her
or for me I’m still not sure. But then that’s what makes friendship beautiful, it's the
kind of relationship that has no more purpose than the relationship itself. God’s
desire was that we meet, and no doubt that we keep meeting. That tells me nothing more than that God laughs when two strangers, across all the spatial and cultural distance that lies between them, become the most improbable of friends.
