Bosses and beneficiaries

On the one hand, it seems that my work involves ‘rolling with the big bosses’, as one colleague described it. The first day at my job in Public Information, for example, Sonja and I nearly ran into the President of Zambia – had he shown up at the national conference on education we were sent to early in the morning. Nevertheless, somewhere between lunch and my stomach refusing it, I found myself interviewing the Minister of Health. A week later, I was hosting a charity dinner for various heads of agencies in a hotel almost as fancy as the one where Sonja and I did not meet the President.

 

On another day, you could have spotted me jumping into a UN-vehicle with the Country Director (displaying the makeshift casualness of someone still pretty fresh at the job). An hour later I jumped out again, after having taken pictures of the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between WFP and the World Health Organization at the latter’s country office. Now if the prospect of going into the field next Saturday with WFP’s Deputy Executive Director Sheila Sisulu wasn’t so incredibly cool, you might think that all is fair and classy on this side of the planet.

 

Not so. After all, despite my efforts, Zambia remains ‘a low-income, food-deficit country’ (FAO 2008). The not so gentle reminder of this everyday reality for many Zambians has presented itself in different forms. One way has been through visits to various health centers on Lusaka’s outskirts and inside its compounds. Day two at the job, for instance, had me shooting footage of HIV/AIDS- and Tuberculosis patients (aka ‘beneficiaries’) receiving food through a pilot project. Had it not been for the numerous children orphaned by AIDS in Zambia, like the HIV-positive babies in the orphanage I visited the following weekend, a more cheerful passage might have followed this one.

 

I might have pointed out how those kids in the compound I visited one evening were quite humorous, had it not been for the drugs some of them were on. Their little game of chasing the mzungu (white person), too, was pretty funny. But running after me, barefoot in the dirt, didn’t seem like the wisest of ideas. And the boys in the street I come across on a regular basis, the ones that point out how hungry they are and ask if I, ‘boss’, have some money to spare, serve as another reminder of my position in this society.

 

It sometimes seems that these contrasts, those between rich and poor, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, need to contradict. As if fighting world hunger and enjoying a nice barbecue should constitute some moral collision. But what’s the point of residing at either one end of the empirical spectrum? Nobody likes an idealist on a Friday night, nor does anyone hope to turn into that pessimistic fifty-year old aid worker who equates a loss of hope with realism.

 

My visit to the orphanage was actually more interesting than attending the conference on education, and hanging out with the ‘beneficiaries’ was a whole lot more fun than an absent President. Many things are not what they seem and I’ll reserve stronger judgments for more informed times to come. For now, this is what I felt you should know.