Adventure to Zambia: Reflections

If someone were to ask me if I would do it again, my response would be YES!  Zambia was an amazing experience.  Coming to Malawi, almost everything about our move here was planned down to the finest detail. Traveling to Zambia was another story, it was a chance for Rachel and I to travel on our own for the first time, and what a place to start! I started to discover that in a world where schedules and timetables do not really matter, the more you plan, the farther off course you get.  The more we tried to plan and correct for lost time, the worse it got, a 7 hour bus trip became 14 hours, a two hour taxi ride became 6 hours, and a 6 hour journey became 10 hours.  However, when we finally gave up and began to embrace the absurdity of our situation, and stopped trying to force a rigid schedule that may work in North America (but not in Africa), the easier it became – a 2 hour taxi became 1 hour, a 6 hour bus trip became 4, and so on (as I said our total travel time was 58 hours).   Now a lot of this might have just been bad luck, but it was a bit interesting that it seemed to fit our analysis of the situation.  At one point, we were stranded in the absolute middle of nowhere, in a village somewhere in Zambia where they looked like they had very little contact with the outside world. I noticed a house was being built in the centre of an informal road or path through the community, children were drawing water from a well that seemed to be located outside of the community, and the community ‘medical clinic’ seemed to be in the least accessible area of the village.   Therefore, I have begun to consider the question “how to plan in a world, without planning?”  Do you try and force a rigid goal and specific guidelines? Or do you say that we would like to achieve X at some point, and allow the community to set its own pace of progress? Or is it a combination of both?  This week was probably one of the greatest, most challenging, scary, stressful, as well as one of the most rewarding weeks of my life.  Most travelers to Africa spend the money, book private transportation and never really touch, feel, and taste the African experience – they might as well have saved their money and stayed home to watch Planet Earth.