Day 4: St. Joseph HBC

Highlights o Day 4

1. Meeting the lovely, warm caregivers of St. Joseph;

2. Debrief with PCI

3. Dinner with expats and World Bicycle Relief employee Craig

The original plan was to go to Bwafano today and then visit a few educational centers tomorrow. However, tomorrow I will be traveling to Lusaka and Bwafano had some changes in their availability. Instead, Namonje and I headed to St. Joseph Catholic Church which is the location of one of the newer home-based care centers that have partnered with PCI. As usual the "system" of caregivers visiting congregation members and neighbors had been well established in the community. The caregivers explained that their congregation is so large that both services on Sunday have members pouring out of the sanctuary and into the courtyard. PCI realized this was a large area of Lusaka that did receive care from any caregiver partners. About four years ago PCI partnered with the St. Joseph Catholic Church to formalize their caregiving system.

St. Joseph's has received 5 PCI bikes that they share among the 20+ caregivers. They have a log so the caregivers can check out a bike and they can keep track of the location and maintenance of the bikes. Priority is given to the caregivers who travel the furthest day. These caregivers visit 190 patients and over 300 orphaned or vulnerable children.

I met Rene, Grace, Ester, and a nurse. The nurse told me about her clinical training that was made possible through PCI. She described the difficulty of the course (ie trying to listen to the teacher while writing down the information on the board or the four complex tests). Her expertise is very helpful in evaluating the need for the patient to visit the clinic or provide care that patients would normally have to travel to the clinic to visit. She had a nickname that I couldn't really understand and I got so caught up in trying to learn the nickname that I have forgotten her actual name :(

Since the start of their caregiving program, they have only "retired" two women. The two women were retired for sake of age; they're over 70 years old. They are still involved in the caregiving meetings to advise the other women. Rene refered to the caregivers as all being "elderly women". All of the caregivers are women above the age of 50. They use the term elderly as a word of respect, honor, and acknowledgement that they have been blessed to live that long. They laughed when I told them that my mother would be insulted if I called her "elderly" explaining that Americans often use that word to describe feeble geriatrics. These women are not feeble by any means, especially if they're biking 15km to visit patients.

All of the women are mothers who have older children (a few had children my age) and volunteer their time to work as a caregiver. They have various income-generating projects; Rene crochets and makes other crafts that she sells at the big curio market in Lusaka the last Saturday of the month.

Grace sells produce. *Side note: The only problem with selling produce is that even though she sells a wide variety of produce that I'm sure are very tasty, however, these are the same vegetables and fruit that every woman sells at every street. I didn't ask how successful her business is because it must be enough to support her*

I became very attached to these women. They were very warm and welcoming towards me. Yes, I was still the mzungu but I didn't feel ostrisized. They inquired about my family and hometown. It was fun to tell them about Concord. These women made me feel comfortable enough telling them about my father as well, which is rare. Again, I had a deep sense of appreciation for their dedication and altruism.

The sanctuary of St. Joseph's decorated with murals on the front wall near the alter; bronze impressions of the Stages of the Cross lined the walls, and the floors were covered in marble slabs. Thursday is "cleaning day" so my arrival had interrupted these women from waxing the floors and cleaning the entire sanctuary. Waxing the floors is a very Zambian thing to do; even in the villages having shiny clean floors is a status indication. They joked that they would hand over a towel and a can of Cobra wax for me. After hearing these women's dedication to their community I was ready to "wax on, wax off" the rest of the afternoon. I caught them off guard when I grabbed the towel and put down my bag; laughing they shook their head and motioned for me to follow them out the door.

I followed them around the side of the church to the community school located next door. The school has grades one to seven; grades 1&2, 3&4, 5&6 are combined classrooms with the seventh graders having their separate classroom. The 1& 2nd graders had an math exercise of "3+4" on the board and the 3&4 graders had a math exercise of "3400+616". The 3&4 graders' exercise seemed it was lower on the aptitude scale than Americans are asked to do at that level; I'll leave that judgement call for my elementary education friends though.

At any rate, the teachers were very eager for our entourage to enter the classroom. Each class stood up when we entered and recited a rehearsed greeting of "Hello, Madams, how are you..." I'll put up the video at some point. Of course as we continued into the other classrooms the older students recited less enthusiastically but they were just as courteous. The seventh grade classroom had posters on the wall leftover from a workshop on preventing sexual and gender-based violence. Again, pictures would be helpful here. I thought it was pretty cool that the school provides that kind of practical education as well.

As we left Namonje and I talked with the 3&4th grade teacher. He was not "certified" but he spoke of his keen interest and desire of making teaching children his career. St. Joseph's is all about passion!

For lunch, I went to the local store Melissa's with Mudesta, Jen's maid. I picked up food for me to eat at Jen's and Mudesta got supplies to make zuchini bread for my trip to Livingstone. It was Jen's idea and I was so on board with it! I tried to engage Mudesta in conversation as much as I could on the walk back but she's so so quiet. Really sweet, but quiet.

That afternoon I had a debrief with PCI. It was a meeting with Rajeesh, Pule, and Namonje about the experience I had throughout the week. I'm gonna make that into a bulleted blog entry.

That evening, Jen had coordinated a dinner date with several of her NGO/expat friends. First Jen and I went to a yoga class at "Alliance Francias" with Jen at 6pm. There was some sweet moves and series that I want to remember so I can show my track team. They need to branch out from Rodney Yi and tree poses!

Then we met Jon, Kate, Craig and his fiance Jennifer at Diane's Korean Cusisine. Dave who is the country director for World Bicycle Relief was also supposed to join us for dinner. However, Dave is sick. It's not malaria, thank goodness, but its a severe infection of some sort. Craig works for World Bicycle Relief as a technical advisor. I can't remember his actual title but he works with the their main sponsor Trek to design and test bicycles for caregivers and other NGO partners that receive bikes. Behold, where their quality of bicycles comes from the design expertise of Trek, Shimano, and Cannondale. He also explained that they work very hard to buy high quality parts within the small budget range they allow in order to keep the final costs down. A lot of the parts are bought from the Indian company Tata which is the Johnson & Johnson of everything that can be made (from plastic bottles to bicycle parts). The parts get shipped to Craig and from what I understand his team puts them together. From there they have partners they give these bikes to as well as a stock of bikes they sell to other NGOs, which is where PCI got them- using globalbike donations.

He also talked about their new partnership with Ministry of Education in Zambia. They're working on donating 10,000 bicycles to students who travel really far to get to school. Cutting down the time they spend traveling makes it easier for them to consistently attend school, is the main concept. I didn't get to delve into details with Craig about how their whole system works because, well, it was a dinner party with 5 other people. Jen was really excited about barbequeing the meat and it was fun to hear about the NGO and expat world of Lusaka. I think later this month I will be able to meet with Dave and Craig again so a more indepth discussion will unfold.