Sunday, March 14, 2010

Puddles, Bubbles and Troubles

I have now given nicknames to the new group of fearless travelers on our mission to mentor young ladies into successful business women and spread solar-powered IT across Zambia. I can only hold my head high if I can do this with a group of professionals with ridiculous names.

Penelope has a tough act to follow after Fatuma (Flash). When I first met Penelope she was a serious talker and dropped a lot of fancy IT “buzz words”. She said she was very interested in IT and learning and had done a lot of IT in the past. But as she had not yet proven herself in the field as an experienced “troubleshooter”, I had decided she had only earned the first part of the name. So I call her “Troubles”. Until she can prove herself in the field, she is simply “Troubles”.

The group told me that Mr. Rain was not a legitimate nickname as it is a literal translation of his Bemba last name. So I was inspired by the story of Lazarus giving nothing but a red balloon to his wife every Valentine’s Day. All of us were giving poor Lazarus a very hard time for this fact. The girls especially continued to say that he can’t give his wife a balloon for Valentines Day. Lazarus consistently defended himself with the same response – “But it’s big…and it’s red!”. So now Lazarus is “Big Red”.
Our new driver, Justin, had car troubles on the first part of the trip and as we had already set out for the second half of our trip 5 hours late, we were about 7 hours behind schedule and I was becoming increasingly annoyed. Zambia still has problems with night car-jackings, especially with Toyota 4X4s (which I was seated in), so we were given explicit instructions not to travel at night. As the sun quickly fell out of the sky and night approached, we were still 4 hours from our final destination and I was growing more and more concerned. We had already been driving for 10 hours. Any of you who know me well understand that when I am concerned and annoyed, it can make for a lethal combination.

Justin was driving at a snail’s pace barely breaking 100 km/h (we had traveled at between 130 and 140 km/h before Justin came on the scene) when he suddenly pulled over, jumped out of his vehicle and ran off into the ever-darkening distance. When he came back towards our vehicles, I jumped out of the car, briskly walked over to face him and impatiently asked, “What are you doing? We need to hurry up and get going…we still have a long drive ahead of us!”. He smiled widely as he proudly held up a bag of colorful little balls and replied, “I wanted a bubble gum!” I almost lost it right there and then. And that was when Justin became “Bubbles”. Earlier in the trip, Justin proved to do a very good job looking after Ruth’s son, Junior, while we explored Victoria Falls and so I eventually promoted him to “Uncle Bubbles”. The girls nearly keeled over with laughter every time they heard it for the remainder of the trip.

Ruth became “Goldie” because the day I came up with it, everything she was wearing was gold. Her shirt, her bracelet, her toenails - even her hair had a gold hue.

On the way back from the West, Mwangala still had no nickname. So many of the nicknames accrued over the last four weeks had a similar ring – we had Dongles, Googles, Troubles, Bubbles, and so the last nickname I came up with had to stick to the theme. Mwangala’s new name came to me when we thought the vehicle which Uncle Bubbles was driving had a new round of technical troubles (the battery had died 10 times so far on the trip and he had a flat tire). So Big Red turned our vehicle around and we went back to aid the second vehicle, but as we approached, Mwangala waved us away from the bushes she was tucked into. It turns out they did not have technical troubles with their car at all. The truck had stopped so that she could simply relieve herself in the bushes. That’s how Mwangala became “Puddles”.

The group now has two nicknames for me. Sometimes they call me "MacGyver" (after the American action adventure television series created by Lee David Zlotoff and executively – and excellently - produced by Henry Winkler). They also call me "Shoots" (the better half of the IT team "Troubleshoots"). I prefer Shoots as MacGyver implies they take me seriously.

On the business side of things, the group we mentored on this sunny Sunday was raising baby chicks to be chickens so they could resell them on the open market. The girls were paying only 3,000 K ($0.60) for a chick and selling chickens for 30,000 K ($6). As the facility for raising the chickens was loaned to them for free, they only incur the cost of the feed and a security guard. These girls will have a pretty profit after all is said and done. And the way this group was running the business and the hatchery really impressed me very much. These girls had a lot of energy and proved themselves to be very competent, enthusiastic and clearly a group of driven young ladies!