Rolling Stones: Picking Up Where Sisyphus Left Off

“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to 
fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
                   A. Camus

“Man is sacrifice.”
                                      Chandogya Upanishad

PART I: 
Hunter Nielson, a Peace Corps volunteer in eastern Zambia, is ranting—railing in an African tongue I don’t understand though I get the gist, inflection makes that possible along with the down-turned mouth and the creases in his forehead like corrugated metal.  He wears frustration like disappointment.  I always knew he was hardheaded—stubborn and bullying and passionate about everything he set that head to.  His stringy blond hair is matted behind his ears and his arms dance from punctuation to punctuation.  He is confused and sorry and angry, all.

Two Zambian villagers rest quietly on their haunches.  Heads down, they’re dressed tip to toe in bright and baggy clothes.  One draws rings in the red soil with a lean forefinger and they both listen casually to Nielson’s harangue. 

It’s hot, hot only as I imagined Africa would be.  Hot and dry, and I’m of the mindset that today we say the hell with Africa and go find a spot to sit, to sip at our boiled water and spar over a game of chess.  The blue sky above is painfully free of clouds.  The rainy season’s ended and the temperatures are on the rise.  “The hell with it,” I say, “you can’t help if they don’t want the help.”  Nielson is unresponsive.  His eyes are set on the two men who’ve grown uncomfortable beneath the weight of his gaze.

I turn my tape recorder off—I can’t understand any of it anyway—and grab a spot of cooled earth under the nearest tree.  To say I’m pouting would be an understatement.  Nielson, arms now crossed over his chest, stares at the men as if waiting for something.  I assume that he’s asked a question but the heavy silence doesn’t portend an answer. 

Hunter Nielson, an aid worker who cares to an extent somewhere beyond reason, is languishing in the African sun because toilet slabs aren’t being built, because drying racks for dishes aren’t being fashioned, because people aren’t washing their hands.  The languages here aren’t the only things I don’t understand.  Hunter Nielson is pushing a stone that won’t roll.

It’s a question that faces Nielson and his volunteer colleagues in Zambia, if not all of Africa and around the globe: how do you introduce change, development in particular, where communities are unprepared and perhaps unwilling?  In the simplest terms, how do you convince an African villager that the six-foot pit latrine you’re digging is better than the bush?

It’s simple, really.  So I’ve discovered after my few weeks sweating beneath the weight of underdeveloped Africa.  The frustration, I should say, is simple.  I’m not here to build toilets or lecture about health and hygiene.  But my introduction to Nielson’s slice of Zambia, brief and unofficial though it was, had me thinking that change was on the way and that I could help affect it.  Journalism be damned, I wanted to fashion the future alongside Nielson and his colleagues.  It was a quaint effort, me gung-ho and greedy for the fruits of labor, anxious to see new toilets built and death rates plummet.  Success was certain—a few weeks of casual digging, a few more meals of nsima and dried fish, a few thousand lives saved from the horrors of disease. 

Success isn’t a given however, and my naïve enthusiasm was quickly turned a jaded realism.  And it’s not surprising to Nielson, which explains his evenhanded response to my early excitement and lately, my caustic criticisms.  Journalism be damned was on the mark, I’m as far from objective as Nielson is from home.  And it’s nothing he hasn’t seen before.  What strikes me most isn’t his understanding or his personal frustrations.  It’s his continued effort against the grain that gets me. 

* * * It’s still dark when the roosters began to call.  The sound of women sweeping the dirt of their compounds into ordered and alternating streaks is regular and welcome.  It’s morning again.  Another morning in Chipungu village.  Another morning in Zambia’s bush.  Another morning and another day to confront the mold and shape of a developing Africa. 

The breakfast Nielson provides, pancakes with chunks of fresh banana, is cooked over homemade charcoals that are packed into a rusted bucket with holes punched around it.  We make coffee after the pancakes and sit quietly in the insaka he had built when he first arrived at his village compound.  Nielson is blessed, so he tells me, that his home—one low-ceilinged structure for a kitchen, one for sleeping; a pit latrine and this insaka, all covered with thatch—isn’t in the center of the village.  When he tries hard enough, he can convince himself that he’s alone. 

After breakfast we ride bicycles out of the village and down a footpath trod for generations.  There is little traffic.  The occasional cotton fields are empty and when a rise in the terrain provides any vantage, the countryside slips away in thick dried grasses and periodic Baobab trees.

Where the path widens and meets a stagnant stream, we shoulder our bikes and step through a mass of branches, limb to limb, working our way to the opposite side.  There is no bridge—one of the things Nielson is trying to change—and during the rainy season it’s this same river, swollen to 30 or 40 or 50 feet wide, that stands between the children in Nielson’s village and the nearest school.

It’s the school that we’re off to see today, and it’s another fifteen minutes by bike from the river crossing.  I would put the walk at somewhere in the neighborhood of an hour’s effort, village to village, if not more.  And that’s only when the river’s spill is low enough to traverse through the mess of branches.  Education’s failure in this part of the world has as much to do with convenience, it seems, as policy and economy.  And so it’s not surprising when we find the school abandoned, resting quiet with opened and empty classrooms.  There was a funeral this morning.

As much a part of the landscape as Baobab trees and cotton fields, funerals in Africa’s rural corners dominate life in a frustratingly monotonous fashion.  Regular.  Real.  Painful.  Death strikes the young as often as the old and for the aid worker—for Nielson—it presents a regular obstacle.  Here is the weekly reminder of why wells should be dug, latrines built, hands washed.  Here is the evidence that life’s sought regularities—like education, like development—are at best intermittent efforts and convenient political tools for African bureaucracy.  Chalk another day up for frustration.  Chalk another day up for disappointment.  Chalk another day up for the inertia of history, brutal history. 

PART II:
The setting is simple but ironic.  A handful of Peace Corps volunteers are settled into shabby couches and chairs, plates of barbecued chicken, beef tips and vegetables crowd their laps and the lone coffee table.  A can of Dr. Pepper sits empty at one volunteer’s foot.  One man swills a beer.  A Sony VCR pipes reruns of Friends to a 27’’ television.  If it weren’t for the African darkness outside and the Zambian man perched at the gate with a bowl of nsima and a machete, you’d think we’d just finished a weekend in Middle America.

The conversation is original though, and where a Saturday evening in America may consider bowel obstructions or acute diarrhea a dinner table taboo, Africa levels this particular playing field to the point that no topic is unspeakable, much less shocking.  Aid workers here, as members of the African community if only for a short while, are apt to discover illness as often as wellness. 

If it’s not the water that gets you, it’s the food.  If it’s not the mosquitoes, it’s the ants or the spiders, the scorpions or the snakes.  While AIDS may afflict one in five African males in some southern areas, there’s also meningitis, cholera, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and occasional outbreaks of the bubonic plague.  And in the end, dealing with your own health is one thing, watching those around you—those whom your efforts are designed to help—suffer and continue to suffer is something completely different.  One aid worker went so far as to suggest western killers such as cancer would never feature predominantly in African society because “people just don’t live long enough here.”

Given all that, you’d think a community offered western assistance, whether in the shape of Peace Corps volunteers, bore holes, or schools would be willing, even enthusiastic, about efforts to right a yawing ship.  And in some respects, villages and communities here are often eager for the attention.  It’s an unfortunate reality however, that their enthusiasm powers the hand of free-receipt as much as the shovel-gripped. 

“Villagers disappoint me on a regular basis,” says Nielson, “but we disappoint the villagers.  I want to do one thing; local authorities want to do another.  And they’re (local governments) still dragging their feet after so many years, saying ‘we can’t get to education until you get passed diarrhea.’”

The conversation is a recurring one for these volunteers.  It preceded them just as it precedes the next wave of Peace Corps recruits.  And for those in the room, you can sense a disinterest in the question.  And I can’t fault them for that.  Most of them have been in Africa, living between their village sites and this Peace Corps safe house, for nearly two years.  Some have been here as long as four years.  Certainly long enough to become jaded given the height of the hill and the weight of the stones they’re rolling. 

“I came here with individual anticipations and expectations,” says one volunteer still clutching a half-eaten chicken leg.  “And what I’ve learned and taken from this, I consider different and successful.”

It’s impossible to put a spin on this.  It’s impossible to sum up the effectiveness of a development effort in a particular community, let alone a continent.  But the fact remains, the effort continues and the problems persist.  And given this, volunteers will continue in their pursuits; understanding that the development of themselves is tantamount to developing their target communities may be the only way that Nielson and his colleagues can walk away from their time in Africa with a sincere sense of success.

PART III:
We all push boulders.  Sooner or later we all climb hills.  The reasons for doing so vary however.  If I’m to believe some, we do it for doing’s sake.  No right to a reward, no right to the fruits of labor.  It’s a simple assumption however, that we don’t always take to task with the spiritual intent.  Even as I write I’ve in mind a particular outcome—a publisher, a paycheck.  As Nielson struggles with a community and for a community not bent on change, he can’t help but ask to what end?  And this is, or at least would be, Nielson’s greatest if not only failure.  It’s certainly mine.

My struggles here—so much more than Nielson’s, as he’s learned to play this game—are struggles in the face of an American understanding of success and failure, venture and loss.  My American understanding suggests that from agriculture to industry to technology, advancement and evolution are the founding theories of this modernized West, this global leader in human rights and flushing toilets; and that these same principles should easily translate to an African community with change on the brain.  Trouble is, my approach—like so many volunteers’—fails to consider the culture into which we would so hastily inject Western principles.

In Africa, Nielson and his colleagues find a foe that can’t be bested.  Not to be glib, but in Africa volunteers find a foe that forces a prefigured acceptance of failure.  It’s with an American (if not simply Western) understanding of variables and sums that aid workers enter Africa’s rural communities and meet the most troubling resistance. To be successful, to be victorious or heroic or just walk away with some basic sense of accomplishment, volunteers in Africa need more than supplemental vitamins and daily dosages of doxicycline or mefloquine, they need a healthy helping of relativity training.  African communities, like all communities, buck change.  The power of tradition is a tough one to break or match and the struggles of aid workers are rooted in this simple logic. 

So Sisyphus drove his stone to the top of a hill only to have it fall.  He did it again and again.  He does it today.  And today, inside Africa and elsewhere, volunteers devoted to AIDS education, nutrition, industry development and a stabilized Third World set shoulders to stone the way they did yesterday and the day before.  Today, Hunter Nielson is challenging rural Zambians the way he will tomorrow and the day after. 

If cultures do in fact persist by virtue of their own inertia, communities know this.  They at least believe it, hence the disengagement and near disinterest in efforts to affect the status quo.  Nielson knows this now, and so the days he spends mounting efforts at reform are days he must remind himself that success here is not defined the way it is in Denver or New York.  Success here is given only as a result of combining what you know of the history with what you know of yourself.  I see it that way now that I’ve paid my minor dues—dues dwarfed by the effort of Nielson and others.  Success is reached when you can calculate the small note of change in the village air—a child inspired to learn, a mother insistent upon hygiene and health—and couple it with the change in yourself. 

Postscript: A few days ago I received an email from Nielson.  The toilet slabs we first built in Mpampa village are still resting silently in the sun.  No latrines have been dug and the slabs, round platforms of concrete and wire, lay as memories on a landscape with little shape.  Chances are they’ll be there when the next aid worker enters the village inspired by the scent of change and convinced of the greatness to come.  I hope there’s change evident within. 

©2003 Adam Sopko