MILLIE CHABULKA’S SHORT LIFE OF HARDSHIP AND SORROW

 

Millie Chabulka died in the Copper Belt Medical Center Hospital in Kitwe Zambia after a long sickness. She had just turned twenty-five years old.  She died of complications suffered after a long battle with AIDS, but the records at the hospital said she died of malaria, which she also had at the time of her death. In 2001 when she died the Zambian government was attempting to conceal the staggering statistic of the country’s AIDS pandemic and since most people who died of AIDS also suffered from malaria most records showed that to be the cause of death. For the government, deaths from malaria were considered more palatable than the reality that existed in the country at that time. Millie just happened to be one of those unfortunate people caught up in the political debacle that made AIDS in the country a stigma. Her death was attended only by her seven year old daughter and Sylvia Arnold Morton, a long time employer of Millie. I heard about her death a week or so after she died when Sylvia sent me an e-mail and explained the factors concerning Millie’s death. Her husband was not at the hospital when she died. He was such a person as to have little concern for his wife. I was not surprised that he was not there. Silvia paid for her care at the hospital during her sickness, taking food in and paying for the medication that was given to her. The government hospitals in that country at the time did not provide any medicine or food for its patients—this all had to be brought in or paid for by the families or friends of the patients, or they simply went without.

I first met Millie on my third trip to Zambia in the year 2000. I traveled there on four different occasions between early 1999 to late 2000, spending a total of fourteen months working as a Consultant on a contract with the World Bank. I was there to find jobs for laid off workers (the local term: “retrenched” workers) that had been fired by the government-owned Zambian Consolidated Copper Mining Company (ZCCM) that was being privatized. During the time I was in Zambia I lived in the central mining town of Kitwe that was considered the hub of the rich Copper Belt Mining District. Initially I was housed in a bread and breakfast-like villa that was leased and operated by Silvia Arnold Morton, a divorcee and mixed blood Zambian whose father had been an English mining official and her mother a native Zambian. On my second trip to Zambia Sylvia had lost her lease on the villa but had acquired a different house that she leased just for me so that I would have a nice place to live in while I was there on contract. At a hefty fifteen hundred dollars per month the house came with a maid, a houseboy, and two gate guards.  Millie Chabulka was the maid. The house was a large three bedroom home with a living room, kitchen and office space. A half-acre-size lot surrounded the house that also had a lovely flower garden and pool and a place for a garden in the rear. Several large avocado and lemon and banana trees shaded the area around the house. The lot was enclosed by a high concrete block wall that was entered through a metal gate that was kept closed by two guards that maintained security for the home around the clock. The house, built sometime in the early forty’s had once been owned by English mine officials during the time when the mines were operated by the British. Millie, the maid, did all the housework every day six days a week and was paid in local currency the equivalent of twenty five dollars per month by Sylvia (at that time an amount for this services considered fair by most locals).

Millie lived eight miles away from the house and walked to work every day. When Millie arrived at the house to begin her work, she would put on a pair of flip-flops that she wore to do her work. She usually stayed for ten to twelve hours each day. She had only a few tools to use when cleaning the house that did not include a vacuum. So for all of the carpets in the house (which, incidentally, were like thin outdoor carpet with no padding like we might see here in the U.S.) she brushed clean every day with a small brush while crawling around on her hands and knees.

Mid-day every day, Millie made lunch for herself and the other two workers at the house (the Gate Guard and the Houseboy). The meager meal consisted of some “mealie-meal” (cooked cornmeal formally called “Nshima”), and cabbage (called “relish”) that she cooked outdoors over a crude grill placed on an old truck wheel. She used charcoal to cook these meals that like the cabbage and mealie-meal was provided by Sylvia. One large cabbage was given to her once a month along with about forty pounds of charcoal and a sack of mealie-meal. I learned sometime after I moved in that this allotment of food and charcoal was the only food that Millie and the other two workers consumed every day.

Along with cleaning the house, Millie also did all my laundry. Just outside the kitchen door there was a large utility sink attached to the house that she filled with water and soap (that I provided her) where she washed all my clothes and my bedding. All the clothing, along with the bedding was ironed with a large heavy iron. I asked Sylvia why Millie ironed even my underwear and she said that was the only way to keep the small bugs that loved to harbor in clothing from getting into our bodies. The hot iron apparently killed these creatures.

Millie was a pleasant soul that I soon came to love in a special way. She seemed to like me too, doting over me like a mother, always asking to do things she might do for me to make my stay more pleasant. For example, if I was home for any reason during the days she worked, she insisted on making my breakfast and doing my shopping for me for the meals I prepared. This was the only time she did any cooking for me. She also often accompanied me on shopping sprees to purchase dry goods or groceries. This helped a great deal since most local grocery and produce shops were operated by Zambians that spoke little or no English. Millie’s English was proficient enough that we communicated easily.

Early-on one of the things that concerned me about Millie’s employment conditions was learning how far she had to walk each day back and forth from her home to the villa, and that she did this bare-footed all the way. When I learned this I thought that possibly I could make her life a little more bearable by purchasing her a pair of shoes that she could use to walk to work. Though observing and measuring the flip-flops that she used while working that she left at the house each day, I estimated her foot size and began to search the stores in the city for a pair of shoes I could purchase. I soon found some walking shoes that looked somewhat like Keds, which were not very expensive and purchased them for Millie. Luckily they fit the young lady and she cried when I gave them to her, explaining that this was the first new pair of new lace-up shoes she had ever had in her lifetime. On learning that I had given this small gift to Millie, my landlady, Sylvia castigated me for doing this, saying it was against all normal procedure between employers and employees and that I was “spoiling” Millie by giving her such a luxurious gift. I would hear this story several times more over the months that I rented from Sylvia and attempted to make Millie’s life and work a little more tolerable, like paying her to cut my hair and taking her places in the car to keep her from having to walk.

While Millie and my relationship became more casual, I would ask her questions about her life, her education and her family. Amongst the many things I learned about this young woman, was that Millie was the next to the youngest child of fifteen in her family (including biological, half brothers and sisters and step-siblings). At the time I knew her, she and one sister were the only remaining children of her biological family. From the time she was a teen-ager she had grown up in Chingola, another mining town along the Copper Belt, where her father was a miner at the ZCCM mine in that town. Before that time, she had lived in a small village in the Northeastern Provence of Zambia. During the earlier years of her life, Millie’s father was married to her biological mother. It was in this small remote village that Millie and several of her siblings first went to school. Millie’s family origin was of the Bemba tribe that was most prevalent in the Northeastern Provence.

Millie told me that she loved going to school, and was a good student in those early elementary school years. However, she said she loved sports and chose whenever she could to play field games like basketball and soccer with the boys in the school. She was a tiny person in her adult life, weighing, I would estimate no more than one hundred pounds. She always wore a dress that seemed very old and thread-bear with a scarf tied on her head covering her hair. I found it interesting that she liked sports so much and said that she was especially good at basketball. But sadly, one day after school when she should have been home helping her mother, her father saw her playing soccer in the field near the school. Stopping what he was doing, he went into the field, took Millie home by force and beat her with a stick, afterward making her promise she would never play again and would come home directly after school to assist her mother in her housework. Millie said that didn’t stop her and soon she was sneaking out to play these games again, until the second time when her father caught her and beat her fiercely. She never returned to the field games and soon was moving with some of her family to Chingola where her father had acquired a job in the mines.

When her father moved, he took all of his children (at that time there were six children from his marriage) and left his wife behind. Soon after he arrived in Chingola and settled into one of the company homes provided by the mining company, he took up with another woman, a widow with several children of her own. Millie said this woman was waiting for him when he got to Chingola. She also assumed that this woman had been her father’s mistress while he was working in Chingola before he brought his children there from the East. He eventually married this local woman (never divorcing his first wife). She had a small clothing shop she operated in the town. Millie was in her early teens by then and so her father forced her to quit school and help her step-mother in the shop. By then Millie had only completed six grades in school.

Millie described her life in Chingola as being full of hardships from living with a stepmother who treated her badly and favored her own children over her new husband’s flock. When this woman married Millie’s father she already had four or five children and had several more after she was married to him. This woman’s children from her first marriage were much older than Millie’s and her siblings, so she fell victim to all the older children’s whims, teasing and bullying making life even more difficult.

When Millie was about seventeen, she decided that she wanted to go back to live with her natural mother and somehow acquired the funds to take a bus ride back to the Northeastern Provence where her mother was supposed to be living. When she arrived she learned her mother had died and the only person remaining of her family was a grandmother who couldn’t take care of Millie. In desperation she contacted an older brother that had moved to the capital city of Lusaka to work and made arrangements with him to go there and live rather than return to the hardships of Chingola life.

Millie’s brother had a job, but was not well off and could not support Millie after she arrived and settled in with him, so she for a short time Millie fell into bad company and turned to prostitution to earn some extra money. This was undoubtedly where she contacted AIDS that eventually took her life. Her promiscuous life in Lusaka fortunately didn’t last long. One day while she was walking along the street in the city, she passed a shop where she saw a seamstress making women’s clothing. Fascinated by what she saw, Millie asked the woman what it would take to become a seamstress. This kind woman invited Millie into her shop and after hearing her story of grief and poverty, suggested that Millie enroll in a sewing class that was offered in a vocational high school in the city, paid for by the government. She would have to take a test to become eligible, but Millie was confident that she could pass the test, so she found the school, passed the test and enrolled in the program.

Doing well in school, Millie hoped that she had a better future ahead of her since she especially excelled in the sewing class and looked forward to getting work in some establishment rather than continuing to make money on the street. But shortly after she enrolled, she realized that from one of the affairs she had entered into she had become pregnant. Continuing school was out of the question for her then and her brother was not willing to have her live with him anymore, so she somehow managed to return to the Copper Belt and her home in Chingola. Her father and stepmother refused to take her in when she got there, and so she somehow got the money to take a bus and made her way to her grandmother’s home in the Northeastern Provence. The grandmother took her in until she had the baby, and then told her she had to move out, that she could no longer support her. There was no work in this village for Millie and she heard that in Kitwe (a large mining town in the Copper Belt) there was hope she might get work as a maid. Millie made her way to Kitwe where she eventually found live-in housework and was able keep her baby daughter with her.

Not long after she arrived in Kitwe, she became acquainted with a man that was a property guard at the Kitwe Copper Mine. Soon after she married this man and moved into a small one-room home provided him by the company. This home with its one room, dirt floor was located along with about a hundred others in a crowded ghetto with no electricity, running water or toilet facilities. Millie seldom saw her husband who worked seven days a week and more or less just had her for sex and to make his one meal a day. Her husband did not make enough money to feed or support her and her daughter both, so Millie had to continue to work to make ends meet. Eventually after working for several other employers, Millie was hired by Sylvia Morton to take care of the house Sylvia had acquired for my third visit to the country. Most days that Millie worked for Sylvia in the house that I rented, she left her daughter with neighbors in the ghetto. Occasionally she brought the child along to be tended by the young houseboy that took care of the outdoors around the home while Millie did her housework. Her daughter was about six years old at that time. The little girl was not allowed to enter the house and on those days that Millie brought her to work, she remained out of doors helping and playing with the houseboy who took care of the gardens and didn’t himself ever enter the house.

The things I learned about Millie’s life came in bits and pieces since she did not offer any of this information freely. One time for example, I had been doing something at work when I caught the corner of my shirt on something sharp in the office and tore a small hole in the one sleeve. It was a good shirt and I didn’t want to throw it away, so I asked Millie if there was any way she could mend it for me. I didn’t know anything at the time about her sewing skills, but she seemed delighted to do this adding that she didn’t have any needles or thread to make the repairs. I asked where I could find such things and she told me I could purchase whatever I needed at one of the many “Indian” shops in the city. Most all of the shops in the city were owned and operated by East Indians; leftovers from the era when Zambia was a colony of England called North Rhodesia and East Indians were imported to be merchants for the British colonizers. After several hours of shopping around to several of these Indian shops, I finally found the correct thread and needles I needed to have my shirt repaired.

The next day after I had given the shirt to Millie for the repair she proudly returned it to me. The repair was done with such proficiency that I was completely taken by surprise. It was almost impossible to see the place where she had repaired the tear. It was after my conversation with her about this that I learned of her short period of training to become a Seamstress while she was living in Lusaka with her brother. More bits of the story of her life there, her pregnancy and her promiscuity came about in this conversation—a sad commentary that I sorrowed to hear from this dear young woman.

A short time after learning about Millie’s training as a Seamstress I had been communicating by E-mail with the wife of a deceased friend of mine, Sharon Blackham, who lived in Salt Lake City, Utah. In one of these E-mails I shared Millie’s seamstress training story and about the demise of Millie and her unfulfilled wishes to become a Seamstress. Sharon was compassionate about the story and after a few E-mails back and forth and discussions she had with some of the sisters of her LDS Relief Society membership, she related to me that she was planning to raise money to purchase a sewing machine for Millie, and that she would send the money to me to purchase the machine locally if I could find one. I found the idea very enlightening and replied to Sharon that I would find out what sewing machines cost in Kitwe (if they were available at all) and let her know. It took several trips to the Indian shops in town, but finally I did find an electric sewing machine that was made in South Africa that was available for about one hundred and fifty dollars equivalent to the local Kwacha currency. In a short time after informing Sharon of the price she wired the money to me that she had collected from her Relief Society sisters and I was on my way to purchase the machine.

I had not told Millie anything about these activities and when I brought the sewing machine back to the house to show it to Millie, she couldn’t believe it was for her and was a gift from these American women that had raised the money for it. I will never forget the excitement as Millie stood before this machine I had taken out of the box shouting over and over again in her broken English, “For me?” “For me?” while the tears flowed down her face realizing the machine was really hers. The machine was simple to operate so after reading the instructions I related them to Millie and invited her to try it out. She said she would, but for several days afterward the machine sat on my kitchen table and was never tried or experimented with by Millie. I had along with the purchase of the machine out of my own money I bought extra needles and several spools of thread and some colorful cotton material I thought she would like, but she seemed like she was afraid to do anything or even take the machine out of the box. Finally I offered to take it to her home where I suggested that she could use the cloth I purchased for her and she could contract with people to begin making clothing. While she seemed excited about the idea that she could make some extra money making clothing, she said she had no way to do that at her home because there was no electricity. This was the first time I had learned anything about the house in which she lived. I was appalled to learn this and the rest of the story about the poor conditions under which she lived in the ghetto. So for what became weeks, Millie’s machine remained unused in the house that I rented. Eventually after much encouragement Millie finally began to use the machine in her spare time while it sat on the kitchen table in my rented home. My landlady, Sylvia was much opposed to her using time at the house to do this extra work, but I convinced Sylvia that I was not “spoiling” Millie by having her do these activities that she might earn some money doing. Knowing all the hard work Millie was doing around the house and only receiving twenty five dollars a month for it, I told Sylvia that she should be ashamed for her treatment of this hard-working woman. Several times during these conversations I had with Sylvia about things I did for Millie, like paying her to cut my hair and giving her tips for laundry and such, Sylvia always maintained that Millie was of a lower cast that should not be spoiled into believing that she could raise herself out of poverty and become an entrepreneur.

While I continued to do all I could to assist Millie, despite the resistance I received from Sylvia, it all came to no end in the long run and Millie did little more than make a few dresses for Sylvia’s friends and some things I had her do for my daughter Kara when she came over to visit with me a month while I was in Zambia.

For the ten or so months that I spent in this rented home in Kitwe, I found many more things about Millie that were in some ways enlightening, but in most sad. During one week when Millie was supposed to be working in the house and had not shown up for work for several days, I inquired of Sylvia where she was and learned that she was home sick. I thought this was a good time to go to her house to see if there was anything I could do for Millie, so I found out from Sylvia where she lived and made my way over to the ghetto.

When I arrived at the compound that included at least a hundred dilapidated homes that had been built for the lowest level miners of the Kitwe mining operations, this was my first experience of the wretched poverty to which some lowest level mine workers in the Copper Belt had been subjected before most of the mines shut down. The dirt tracks leading into the compound were almost impassible in my car. Along each street I saw open ditches where people were drawing water I supposed for drinking that seemed to be more like sewer water than sources of clean water. When I finally arrived at Millie’s home, I found a concrete block rectangular building about twelve feet long and ten feet wide that had one window and an opening on the side with no door. The yard was a space about five feet wide around all sides of the building that was devoid of any undergrowth. The property itself was separated from the other homes by a cactus-like hedge that gave the property little or no privacy. When I drove up Millie was crouched outside the house next to a truck wheel like the one she used at my rented house to cook her meals. She was boiling some water over some charcoal for cabbage (relish) she said she was preparing for her husband. Millie looked pale and sickly like she should have been in the hospital. She was surprised to see me and apologized for not coming to work the past few days because she was feeling “a bit ill” as she described her condition. I offered to take her to the doctor, but she refused pointing into the house at her husband sleeping on a cot on one side of the room, saying she had to take care of his meal so he could go to work that night. I asked about her daughter who was not with her or in the house, and Millie said she had sent her to spend the day with a woman down the street. I felt like crying seeing the conditions under which Millie existed and seeing her so sick that she could hardly function. Not being willing to see her continue in this condition, I insisted that she finish cooking the meal for her husband then I would take her to the doctor so she could be treated for whatever it was she was experiencing. She resisted my offer saying she didn’t have any money to pay the doctor, but when I said I would pay whatever those expenses came to, she relented and sent word with a neighbor to find her daughter and have her come home. Millie had tried to down-play her condition explaining that she was having a bout with malaria and she was used to feeling that way occasionally, but I still insisted that she come with me, which she eventually did.

After Millie’s visit at a local clinic and the shot she received there for malaria, I called Sylvia and got her permission for Millie and her child to come to the house to stay until she recovered. Sylvia reluctantly gave me permission to do that, so I returned to the ghetto where we found Millie’s daughter and we left for the rented home on the other side of town. Millie didn’t tell her husband who was still sleeping anything about this saying that if her husband knew about it he would refuse to let her go with me. In two days of having to almost force Millie not to worry about the house work, she recovered and was back to her usual duties. She told me later that her husband beat her when she finally came home for not being there to cook his meals for two days.

During the early part of my stay at this rented home, I observed the back part of the large lot that had once been a garden and was now a place for refuge and broken sheds that had occupied the property. This seemed like a perfect place to have a garden, so I enrolled the house boy into cleaning the lot up, purchased some tools to make that job possible and soon had the entire back yard prepared for planting. Millie knew about a place across town that had plants and seeds that I could purchase for the garden, so together we went there one day. It was a large operation with many things I could purchase, so I got some tomato plants, seeds of a large variety and took them back to begin the gardening project. The ground was very fertile and within weeks everything was growing in such abundance I was totally amazed. The houseboy took care of weeding and watering the garden under Millie’s supervision, so I had little to do but watch things grow and harvest the produce when it was ripe. There were no herbs available anywhere that I could use to enhance the garden varieties, so on one of the short trips when I returned home to Utah, I purchased an entire lot of herb seeds and returned with them on my next visit. On one side of the house next to the garden, Millie and I prepared a small area, planted the herbs and were soon seeing the profusion of those crops.

Most of what I planted in the garden I considered community produce that was for all our use. Millie reluctantly took much of it to supplement her meager meals she prepared for herself and the other workers on the property. Sylvia and her friends also became beneficiaries of the produce that was much more than I could have ever eaten myself. During that time in some ways, Sylvia softened toward my giving the vegetables to Millie and her cohorts at the house. But even with her softening, Sylvia continued to say that I was “spoiling” Millie with all my gifts to her and paying her for such things as haircuts and making skirts for my daughter. I never, however, relented, and continued to do all I could to help Millie lift herself out of poverty.

On several occasion I learned that Millie was stronger and more assertive than I had ever imagined she could be with her small size and seemingly mild personality. One day I went to the local market that I had come to use for small purchases and found a fruit there that I had not seen before. The proprietor knew me and seemed to be an honest person in the dealings I had experienced with him, so when I asked about this particular fruit that he called “jack fruit” he said it was a very delicious type fruit that tasted somewhat like pineapple. I was intrigued by the fruit and negotiated a price with the man then took the item home along with my other purchases. When I got back to the house and explained to Millie about the purchase and the price that I had paid she started shouting saying that the merchant had cheated me and that I should go back and get my money back. According to her I had paid four times what I should have for the jack fruit and she was enraged. I attempted to calm Millie about the purchase since for me it was only about two dollars, but she wouldn’t have it, insisting that she go back with me and she would talk to the merchant.

Eventually I conceded to return to the store with Millie. We took the fruit with us. When we got there I thought the conversation with the merchant would be a calm one where Millie explained that I had paid too much for the jack fruit. But no; she almost attacked the merchant physically when he came out of the store on the sidewalk to greet us. A loud and vociferous dialogue followed in the native language that I could only assume was not nice. After what must have been at least ten minutes of arguing with the merchant, Millie explained to me that the merchant had agreed that I had paid too much for the jack fruit, but that he could not give me the money back since he had already used the money to purchase some other produce. So Millie had negotiated with the man to give us some cucumbers and tomatoes in place of the money and we left. I really hadn’t paid much for the jack fruit in the first place and thought the entire process had been a farce anyway, but Millie seemed satisfied that the “cheating” merchant had gotten his due punishment.

The entire town of Kitwe had originally been built as a support infrastructure to the British owned mining companies in the region and was the headquarters location for the large ZCCM mining operations along with being one of the largest towns in the Copper Belt. But for fifteen years after the Zambians had taken over from the British the corrupt government was failing in every aspect of the community to do its part to keep the community upgraded. Along with almost all of the neglected government managed infrastructure the roads throughout entire city of over one hundred thousand people had never been repaired. Everywhere in the city the roads were a large series of potholes. There was hardly a place where one could drive an automobile over fifteen miles per house because of the need to dodge back and forth to miss the deep and wide potholes. On one section of the city, just a short distance from where I was living, a section of the road was somewhat “maintained” by a boy that every day using a shovel filled the potholes in the road and attempted to stop passing cars to pay him for his volunteer work on fixing the road. This was fairly common practice throughout the city where I would see men and boys filling potholes with gravel from the side of the road and expecting drivers to pay them for this paltry labor. As I considered this one boy a real entrepreneur—one willing to work a little when most men and boys were without work in the country (unemployment in the country was said to be over seventy percent in 2000), I felt obligated to stop each time I came by this one particular boy and give him my pocket change for his contribution to the drivers of the city. There was one thing that bothered me about this particular situation, however. The “shovel” he was using had once been a shovel, but was now just the sad remnant of what had been a shovel with only about two inches of the metal part of the shovel remaining worn completely down and shaped more like a fork than a shovel. In addition, the original handle was long gone and in its place the boy had fashioned a stick that resembled a handle, but was crooked like it had just been removed from some old dead tree. While I passed this boy day after day seeing him use this shovel I thought to myself how nice it would be if he had a decent real shovel, he could do twice the amount of work and perhaps make himself some more money than he was getting. So on one occasions when I was shopping in the Indian shops in Kitwe downtown, I had my eye out for a hardware store where I might purchase a shovel for this boy if it wasn’t too expensive. Finally I found the right store, got a price for a shovel that was not too unreasonable, and purchased one of the short-handled models that I thought might be appropriate for this boy.

The next day as I made my way to work instead of passing a few coins out the window at the boy who was fixing the road I handed the shovel out the window and gave it to him. The boy didn’t speak any English, but I knew from his expression and his repeated term “Bwana, Bwana” and his kowtowing, that he really appreciated the gift. When I drove away, I saw him in the rear view mirror digging away at the loose gravel in the side road and apparently making good use of his new shovel.

A couple of days went by when I didn’t see the boy shoveling on the side of the road, and believed he might have taken his shovel to a more traveled part of the city to earn his money. But then about three days after I had given the boy the shovel, he was there patching the road again, but had his old shovel to do the work. I stopped to ask him about the new shovel, but he babbled something to me that I didn’t understand seeming rather apologetic, so I made a U-turn, returned to the house and told Millie what I had observed, at the same time telling her about purchasing the new shovel for the boy a few days before. Millie immediately went into a rage and said the boy had sold the shovel and bought beer with it and said we must go there and make that accusation to him and make him pay me for the shovel. I tried to explain to Millie that it wasn’t a big deal for me since I had only paid a few dollars for the shovel anyway, but she insisted that I take her to the boy right then and have it out with him. She would not back down from my arguments so in a few minutes I reluctantly gave in and we loaded into the car for the sort drive down to where the boy was still filling potholes with his so-called shovel.

Once again I thought this might be a civil discussion with the boy to find out what had become of the new shovel I had given him, but as soon as I stopped the car, Millie flew out of the car, ran around the side grabbing the boy by his shirt collar and started screaming at him about the same way she did with the produce merchant a few days before. She didn’t let go the boy’s shirt, though he was at least a head taller than her, but rather continued to shake him and shout in his face something I could only believe was castigation for selling the shovel and using the money for beer. After a long while of this, Millie let go the boy and came back to the window with the explanation that the boy claimed his father had taken the shovel away from him the night he brought it home. He had explained to Millie that he hadn’t been back to work on the road for several days because he was afraid I would be mad at him for losing the new shovel I gave him. Once again while Millie told me this story, the boy, almost in tears was kowtowing to me in an apologetic way that touched me deeply. Millie didn’t believe the boy’s story and continued to insist that the boy pay me for the shovel, but I finally convinced her that it was okay, and that she should tell the boy that. She told him something, that I didn’t believe was what I told her to tell him and we left the scene. I returned Millie to the house while she continued to grumble all the way back. The matter was never brought up and the boy soon disappeared from that section of the road and I never saw him again.

Being a true native of the country, Millie introduced me to some of the customs of the indigenous people that she had known from living in the small village in the Northeastern Provence when she was a child. One of the customs that I thought was most strange was that of eating chicken feet. She told me about how people ate these items, but I didn’t want to believe her, thinking, What is there to eat on the foot of a chicken? But she went on to tell me that this was truly a favored food of many of the indigenous people Zambians. While I had never seen her eat any of these items, I gave her the benefit of the doubt, but thought that the next time I spoke to Sylvia, I would ask her about the custom. When that day came, Sylvia confirmed that this was a normal thing that was not only prevalent with the indigenous people of Zambia, but also people in the upper casts of the Zambian population of which she believed she was a part. She even followed by offering to purchase and cook up some of these items for me when she got a chance.

In a week or so Sylvia showed up at my doorstep with her Greek friend, as they often did to sleep over in one of the spare bedrooms after they had partied most of the night. They brought a package of chicken feet and proposed that they would prepare them for me and I could taste these “delicious” morsels. With me watching and Millie grinning like a Cheshire cat in the sidelines, Sylvia’s and her friend prepared a frying pan with a little oil, cleaned up and trimmed the chicken feet they had purchased and began frying them turning them often so as not to burn the outer skin of the feet. Each item included the toes with the nails removed and all of the rest of the yellow hard shell that encased the chicken leg bone up to where the feathers began. After a few minutes of cooking they said they were ready to eat, but that the outer yellow hard scaly skin had to be removed first. We did that with a sharp knife and the next process was to suck and chew on the bone to remove that little thirty second of an inch thick scale of meat. I must admit it did have a little taste to it, but certainly didn’t have any volume. I had to eat several of the feet to feel that I really had enough taste in my mouth to validate their claims that this was a favorite food of Zambians. They all had quite a laugh at me over this little bit of revelry.

The next day while I was at work, I mentioned the incident with the chicken legs to my friend and local colleague, Douglas Meleke, who confirmed that he too ate these chicken feet on occasions and that this was a very well-known custom among all Zambians. Then he added that this was not only true, but that many people also ate chicken heads cooked in all manners in soups and other dishes. Then he went further to say that these items had a special name and were available in the super market in Downtown Kitwe sold under the name of “Walkies and Talkies.” This was too much for me to believe, but Doug insisted that it was true and challenged me to go to the supermarket and find out for myself.  So on the next trip I made to this one and only “super” market called “Shopco” in Kitwe (that incidentally, was about the size of two 7-11’s), I found in the frozen food section of the store dozens of packages of chicken heads and feet packaged under the name, “Walkies and Talkies.” I never once after doubted anything I heard of saw from any of the natives of the country.

Not long after the chicken feet incident I was again surprised one day when I came home from work to see Millie and the gate guard (a young man of about twenty who was a new employee of Sylvia’s) catching and containing in plastic bags hundreds of large green flying insect that were clinging to everything all around the house and yard in such numbers that they were covering the outside walls of the house, the trees and the security wall. These insects were quite large and looked somewhat like katydids we might see in some parts of the U.S. They were a bright green with jumping legs like a grass hopper and large transparent wings. They were easy to catch and when I approached Millie and the guard, they both suggested that I get a plastic bag and catch some myself since according to Millie these were considered a delicacy that were very nutritional and good tasting when cooked. She added that they only hatched once each years and that everyone gathered them greedily to eat during this time. I didn’t relish the idea of catching or eating these bugs but took Millie’s word that they were good to eat. Later that day before Millie left, she asked me if it would be all right if she used the cook stove in the kitchen (which she rarely used for her own meals, though I had often insisted that she did rather than cook her meals outdoors) and my frying pan to cook some of these “delicious” green morsels. I gave her permission then watched her first remove the wings from several dozen of the creatures (that were still alive), put a little oil in the fry pan and slowly cook the bugs until they were brown and crispy. When they were finished she insisted that I try one which I did. I found them to be quite palatable and tasty after all and ate a few more, however feeling guilty that while they were abundant in the yard I didn’t catch any for myself. The hatch only lasted one day and they all disappeared without a trace. For the life of me I didn’t know where they came from or where they went, but I knew that in one more instant I had tasted some of the culture of the Zambian people.

Not long before I left the country for good in the fall of 2000 Millie was missing more and more days of work each week and looking frailer after each bout with whatever was ailing her. On one occasion when Sylvia was over and I was able to speak to her about Millie’s condition, Sylvia revealed to me that she was certain that Millie was not only suffering from malaria (that was Millie’s version of her sickness), but that she was also HIV positive and would likely not live long because of it. Sylvia, like many of the “upper-class” Zambians that I knew, seemed to be frivolous about the AIDS pandemic in the country and mentioned this condition of Millie’s as if it were equal to a common cold amongst the “lower-class” population of the country. I knew better, however, since I had entered into several conversations with a doctor whom I had become acquainted and become friends with over the months that I stayed in the country who told me that the pandemic was rampant in all classes of the Zambian population.

I first met the man, Dr. Mark Walock, who was a friend of Sylvia Morton’s, when she brought him over to the house I rented from her along with some other friends she wanted me to meet. Later when Mark and I got to know each other better, he told me about his work and research in the country. Through him I learned a great deal about the AIDS pandemic in Zambia. Dr. Walock was originally from Poland where he became a Doctor of Obstetrics and Gynecology.  He came to Zambia fifteen years before I met him to become a resident doctor in the Kitwe Mine Hospital working for ZCCM. His main job for many years in the hospital had been the treatment of Mine Worker wives who were pregnant that received treatment as part of their husband’s benefits. Doing that he had become a specialist in the identification and treatment of AIDS, which he claimed over fifty percent of the women he treated were HIV Positive. Mark also maintained that the Zambian Government’s statistics of the percentage of AIDS-affected people in the country was at least twenty percent higher than that which the government reported. It was through our discussions that I became aware of the true nature of the AIDS pandemic in Zambia and of the way the government of Zambia and the Clergy of the prominent church in the country down-played the disease in order to maintain their status in the world. Dr. Walock was also of the opinion that Millie’s condition was AIDS, which was further aggravated by her continued bouts with malaria.

When I left Zambia I went with a heavy heart for this dear young woman, Millie, whom I had become so close to those few months that I knew her. It came as little surprise a few months later after my return to the U.S. to hear from Sylvia that Millie was in the hospital and was not expected to live. Then just shortly after that I received the next communication from Sylvia that she had died and that she had become the only person who had been available to pay for her hospital care and her eventual burial. Several years after my return to the U.S. and my completion of my work in Zambia, I met with Sylvia in Vancouver British Columbia where she was visiting her daughter who had met a Canadian fellow and married him after attending school in Vancouver. In the few days that I was there I had a chance to speak to Sylvia about the demise of Millie Chabulka. The scanty details and missing facts that I had gleaned from Sylvia’s earlier E-mails were then filled in and I learned the entire story of the last days of this young Zambian woman’s life—a tale with predictable endings, and a common story in Africa, as I would learn later when I traveled to Ethiopia, Mozambique and South Sudan to do humanitarian work in those countries with the poorest of the poor.