learning

so i moved to africa. here’s five things i’ve discovered so far...

1. i’m more likely to get eaten by a hippo than to pick the correct key to open my front door.

i don’t know why there are twenty keys on the key ring for my house, but i’ve been told that’s the way it has to be. i spend a chunk of time each day searching for keys in haystacks for all sorts of other buildings too. over one hundred and fifty keys come to my house every night in a brown bag. i kind of know what eight of them do, but remain fairly convinced that the rest of them are just there to teach me patience.

a small percentage of my key stash pictured here

2. i shouldn’t be allowed to have a pet.

it sounds kind of heartless, but i don’t really like pets... and i’m pretty sure the feeling is mutual. i have to have a dog here for safety reasons, so i arrived and was greeted by my new dog kelly. i referred to kelly as a ‘she’ for a few weeks before someone kindly pointed out that she was a dude. kelly is brown and white and is a breed of some sort who i suspect now has a touch of gender dysphoria. in my fist week here he got locked in a room at our project over night. i didn’t notice he hadn’t followed me home. then just a few days ago i accidentally locked him in a shipping container for an hour on a 57 degree day. he only escaped by way of an accidental intervention from one of my colleagues. i’m not a great pet owner, and it turns out they have a host of good reasons to not like me. in other news, i probably shouldn’t have children.

kelly reluctantly posing for a selfie with me

3. my feet will never be clean again.

i only have to take four or five steps out my front door before my feet are 12 shades darker than they should be. mwandi is built on sand. it’s rainy season here so some days the sand is a bit clumpy and wet. other days it resembles a beach... kind of... but no matter what the weather is doing, the sand gravitates to my feet like i gravitate to donut king - meant to be close together at all times. i scrub about nine layers of skin off my feet every night in the shower to attempt to get them clean. my pumice stone has halved in volume and i think my feet may have gone down a size or two due to the lost skin layers. i see children’s shoes in my future.

the result of a four-minute morning stroll

4. jobs that should take five minutes will always take at least three hours.

i haven’t always had the best of times when dealing with zambian immigration, but i was assured that this time would be smooth sailing... and it almost was. i got served immediately when i entered the building and it seemed like the five minute job was only going to take two minutes. i thought i was about to leave, only to be informed at the last moment by the officer serving me that they didn’t have a photocopier and they needed a copy of my documents before i could get my passport stamped and leave. i was told i had to take my almost-completed documents to a hotel (kind of nearby... but not as nearby as i was initially led to believe) to get them to do a photocopy. once this was done i had to line up all over again to give them my copy and get the magical stamp in my passport. i eventually made it back to the front of the line only to be told that the person who operated the stamp for people with surnames beginning with ‘w’ was not in the office so i’d have to wait a bit longer. five minute job took three hours.

two year visa... if i last that long :-)

5. this place is good for my soul.

i’ve spent the past month working harder than i ever have in my life. i work ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week... although it is sunday today (theoretically my day off) and i’ve just worked for eleven hours :-) it’s hard. it’s hot. i don’t know anywhere near enough to get through most of my days. sometimes i’m frustrated. sometimes i cry. sometimes the stories of the children i’m working with rip my heart out of my chest... but other times their stories gather the pieces of my broken heart and put it back together. orphaned and vulnerable children are not voiceless like some are inclined to say. they don’t require me to be their voice. they require you and i to take the time to listen to their voice. i’ve discovered it to be one of the best sounds in my world... one that restores peace and contentment to my soul. you should totally come and hear them for yourself.

one of the amazing kids i get to hang out with every day

vietnam II

so much has been happening since i last wrote... so much laying about drinking cocktails by pools... so much walking through old towns so annie can look at handbags... so much eating of vietnamese foods that are light like clouds, and delicious – delicious like chicken flavoured clouds... so much sitting in bunkers imagining the horrors of war... so much riding of bicycles on terrible roads and marveling at the generosity of people who put up with us interrupting their lives. then we went to some tunnels...

the location: vinh moc tunnels

the scene: a terrified annie and a slightly less terrified kt being ushered into three hundred metres of tunnels that descend to fifteen metres below ground.

i was keen (if a little scared) to go adventuring in the tunnels. ‘keen’ is probably not the word we’d use to describe how annie was feeling about the tunnels, but we were on a tour with about a dozen other people and she didn’t want to be the only one not brave enough to go in. so in we went. *insert joke about camels and needle eyes here*

annie’s face quickly went from this...

to this...

we were underground for about twenty minutes, in which time annie managed to hyperventilate an impressive fifteen times. then it was all over. annie quickly declared that it was the worst experience she had ever had and that she would henceforth be referring to events of her life as either BT (before tunnel) or AT (after tunnel). eight hundred people took turns (three hundred at a time) living in these tunnels for six years during the vietnam war. mind sufficiently blown.

four days AT was the date of our next big adventure... a tour to the perfume pagoda. i had no idea what this was but annie wanted to go so i paid for our tour and gave it to her as a birthday gift (her birthday was 5 days AT).

it all started with another horrific bus ride (the starting point for any vietnamese tourist experience... this was number seven for us). we were then ushered to a fleet of small boats being manned by tiny vietnamese women who would row us up the perfume river for an hour or so. annie and i were ushered to the side by our tour guide while everyone else was stuffed into a boat. we’re not exactly sure why, but along with three people from holland we got put into a bigger boat with seats... i quickly decided our boat was for the bigger boned and will be calling it the bbb (bigger-boned-boat). the bbb was being rowed by what i can only assume was a vietnamese olympic rower. she weighed slightly less than my left thigh, but she moved us up the river like a pro.

bbb in action

we arrived and had lunch where, due to my complete inability to use chopsticks, i ate about 5 grains of rice in the time everyone else polished off their meal. we were informed that we had a gentle 2km ascent ahead of us to get to a cave that looked like a dragon’s mouth. for as long as i can remember i’ve longed to see a cave that looks like a dragon’s mouth... count us in! there was an option to get a cable car to the top which was annie’s initial preference, but i talked her out of it and convinced her to hike up with me.

the gentle ascent swiftly turned into what annie started referring to as a cliff of stairs. turns out vietnamese tour guides are big fat liars. there was nothing ‘gentle’ about what we were doing. it was raining and slippery and there was no end to the staircases that stretched before us each time we turned a corner. annie made it clear that all of the horrors of the world were my fault, and about three quarters of the way up she uttered these words... “i’d rather be back in the tunnels.” safe to say it was the best birthday gift i’ve ever given. you’re welcome annie.

annie refusing to look at the camera because i'm ruining her life

other phrases uttered by annie on the way up the million stairs...

“i forgot to put deodorant on this morning... we really need to get to that perfume pagoda?”

“if this cave doesn’t look EXACTLY like a dragon’s mouth i’m really going to lose it.”

we eventually made it to 'the dragon's mouth' cave. it looked just like a giant cave. someone pointed to a pile of rocks and asked if it was the dragon’s tongue. if i tilted my head and squinted my eyes a bit it looked exactly like a really nice pile of rocks inside a giant cave.

spot the dragon's mouth... and if you find it point it out to me

we were shown several different altars where people knelt to pray for babies, husbands, money etc. lots of people were leaving butter cookies for buddha on the altars which i found lovely, but they also reminded me that i’d just hiked up a mountain with five grains of rice as my only fuel. wanna share those cookies buddha? my tour guide suggested i should stay a while and pray for a husband. i thought a better use of my time would be to pray that i regain feeling in my frozen feet (pluggers: the sensible hiker’s choice).

this way to buddha's cookie stash

 all in all, i loved it. annie hated it. we got the cable car down.

vietnam

annie and i are in vietnam for a relaxing holiday before i move my life to africa in three weeks. what better way is there to relax than to jump on some bicycles and ride through the mekong delta. a tour was booked. this was going to be FUN.

day one. we met our tour guide trieu and headed off in a bus to pick up the four other ‘casual cyclists’ we’d be touring with. first we picked up an american couple (let’s call them GI jane and GI joe) on their honeymoon. we rolled on to our next pick-up point only to have to wait almost half an hour for our remaining tour buddies. GI’s jane and joe speculated with us over where our missing members were from. there was a consensus that they were probably european. i voted for french... certain they were late because they were too busy eating bread, smoking, and being better looking than the rest of us.

they were all smiles as they eventually boarded the bus. one i forgave immediately... prematurely greying, definitely the best looking member of our tribe, i’m going to call him george clooney. the second i forgave only because he was friends with mr clooney. i’m going to call him puffa because he chain smoked for the entire tour. they were a pair of hungarian mates... our group was complete.

we drove for some hours then transferred to a boat, then a smaller boat for seemingly no reason. hours passed then someone force fed me more fruit than i’ve eaten in a decade. this was the best cycling tour i’d ever been on! GI joe told us about a time he ate a guinea pig and about how he wanted to eat snakes and rats. GI jane looked on lovingly. puffa smoked a pack or two. mr clooney told a witty anecdote about a game of hangman he once played, and in trying to translate ‘hangman’ accidentally called it ‘the execution game’. we eventually got on our bikes to roll for a few hours in the afternoon. annie didn’t fall off, which was good for the esteem as we quickly discovered we were riding with four elite athletes.

preparing to eat my own body weight in fruit by riding in a tiny tiny boat

cruising in a bigger boat... wearing my helmet cause, you know, i'm on a bike tour

our day ended in rustic bungalows atop the mekong river. puffa puffed and drank. the GIs swapped travel stories with annie and i. mr clooney persisted in wearing a shirt in public at all times.

the mekong

day two. if day one was anything to go by we’d probably spend the majority of our day eating pineapple then get on our bikes for fifteen or twenty minutes in the afternoon. this was not to be. we found out there would be several hours of cycling... how dare they make us do that on a cycling tour. it was stinking hot and we were all struggling. puffa was only able to smoke a handful of ciggies on the bike, and had been forced to replace his vodka with water. about an hour in, i looked over at annie and she started crying. i’d like to believe it wasn’t purely the sight of my face that caused the meltdown, but i can’t be sure.  the GIs battled on in true american style. mr clooney single handedly brought fluro orange lycra back in fashion.

cycling by rice paddies...smiling cause trieu just told us we were fifteen minutes from lunch

trieu cut the cycling hours back a bit due to the extreme weather – or as he called it – “a perfectly normal summer day.” annie and GI jane had a break from the cycling after lunch. i desperately wanted to not cycle, but mr clooney was cycling, so...

a well earned dinner at the end of day two was a trip highlight for me. it started with puffa and george clooney approaching annie and i saying, “before we go to dinner we have a surprise for you in our room.” i vaguely recalled someone once warning me about men who used this line, but mr clooney...

it turned out the whole group was invited, so we were safe with the crazy hungarians. we gathered in their room and they poured an unknown liquid into glasses for us to drink together. again... something about accepting drinks from strangers... blah blah. it smelled like rocket fuel that had been diluted with nail polish remover. GI joe was sure he’d smelled something similar before. i pondered whether it had been his beverage of choice to wash the taste of squirrel out of his mouth after an afternoon snack at some point. i chugged it down as quickly as i could. not surprisingly, it tasted like rocket fuel that had been diluted with nail polish remover. thank you hungary.

more mystery drinks were served at dinner when trieu poured another unknown liquid into our glasses at the restaurant. i shot something down that had hints of rotting rice at its core. trieu proceeded to pull out his phone and show us photos of the brewing process for the beverage we’d just ingested. there was a glass receptacle of some sort with green things floating in it which we were informed was ginseng. in the corner of the picture was what appeared to be a floating baby tiger. trieu went on to tell us that a baby tiger was, in fact, one of the key ingredients... along with six additional tiger penises and the penises of five himalayan goats. at this point, puffa chose to speak english for the first time on the tour to utter the phrase we were all thinking but were too afraid to ask... “is he f#@king kidding us?” the answer is still unknown. either way, i find it hard to believe that a baby tiger would taste like rotting rice.

day three. trieu finally realised none of us were particularly interested in cycling on our cycling tour, so he cut back the bike hours some more. this gave us time for some more boat cruising on the mekong (more in line with what we were all expecting of a cycling tour) and i was finally able to realise my lifelong dream of eating an entire pineapple in one sitting. mr clooney touched my arm even though i was wearing oversized men’s running shorts and the same singlet i’d had on for three days. i think he might be god.

more boating on our cycling tour... GI jane in the background

me with the first quarter of my pineapple
(wearing my lifejacket because it's important to be safe while eating a whole pineapple on a river)

we eventually got on our bikes for our last bit of cycling. puffa prepared with half a pack and a shot of nail polish remover. george clooney looked on like some kind of perfect greek statue. the GIs remained upbeat and positive and i wondered if they’d secretly had a few shots of polish remover themselves. annie and i assessed our chafing and decided we had more left to give. we ended up by cycling in to can tho (one of the five biggest cities in vietnam) where i was passing mopeds and cycling into oncoming traffic like a vietnamese maniac... it was perfect.

george clooney on the left and puffa doing what he does best on the right

we did cycle probably a bit more than this post would have you believe, but again i experienced that it’s not really what we’re doing in life that we remember, so much as the people we are doing it with. i met some wonderful people this week who i may never see again, but who gave me the gift of themselves for a few short days. trieu, mrs and mr GI, puffa and george clooney... thank you!!

lovely

last week someone told me i was lovely.

about a year ago i wrote a blog about my body... about appreciating and respecting this body of mine that had just cycled over 2000km down the west coast of america. the moment i hit ‘publish’ on that blog post i began a familiar descent into doing exactly the opposite of what i had promised myself i would do. it was like the time i said i wasn’t going to eat fast food for the rest of the tour my band was on in america... only to lead the entire band into a chinese buffet some fifteen minutes later... my promises cannot be trusted it seems. as soon as i published my blog proclaiming to the world that i loved my body, i began to loathe my disproportionately large thighs, and figured that the best way to silence the screaming voices in my head was to engage in several sessions of lamington abuse... that will make it all better. i told the world i had figured this weight/body image thing out, only to find myself straight back in the dreaded cycle of yo-yoing weight and self-loathing.

then someone told me i was lovely.

in the wise words of one of my feminist icons – rizzo from Grease – ‘there are worse things i could do’. admittedly, she was talking about having sex with lots of boys and i’m talking about being intimately involved with more than my fair share of caramello koalas... but you get the picture (i hope). it could be worse. i could be really mean... or void of compassion... or a collingwood supporter. but my thing... my drug... my problem... is that every day i have to try and convince myself to like (dare i say love) my body. and it’s silly and i hate that i waste energy on it when there seems to be so many legitimately terrible things happening in the world around me. people are dying of starvation, living in abusive relationships, suffering under oppressive regimes, getting bombs dropped on their houses, and continuing to support collingwood. i know i’m silly and i dislike myself for it...

and yet, last week, someone still told me i was lovely.

i’m almost certain they weren’t referring to my body when they called me lovely, but i guess that’s the point isn’t it. the two aren’t connected... and yet in my brain i have allowed them to become so inextricably linked that i find it impossible to believe i could BE lovely when i feel as though i don’t LOOK lovely. i can believe it for other people, but most definitely not for myself. that’s messed up.

the fact remains: someone told me i was lovely.

i have thought about it, and felt uncomfortable about it, and told myself it couldn’t be true... but to settle there would mean that ‘the someone’ was a liar... and the thing is, they can’t possibly be a liar because they are quite lovely themselves.

mutafela: a lovely kid i'm going to be hanging out with in zambia next year

lollies

when i was growing up my family would go and visit my wallis grandparents every friday after school and stay for a roast dinner. the whole extended family would show up... cousins, aunties, uncles, random strays someone found on the street. i was one of the youngest cousins and was pretty captivated by how cool my older cousins were. my cousin kay came to friday night dinner one week with a brand new batman t-shirt on and i just about exploded with jealousy.

BATMAN T-SHIRT.

i wanted to be her so bad that it was beginning to hurt a little when i breathed.

five minutes later her younger brother (my cousin david) threw a gravy-covered roast potato at her. the new, crisp, white, batmanny goodness was destroyed. i was distraught for both kay and myself – couldn’t davo see he was hurting us all? i considered offering her my knock-off hypercolour... but we all knew there was no replacing the batman. there’s a streak of mild (or legitimate) insanity that runs through the veins of the wallis clan, which meant that friday nights were full of laughter and drama. and then there was the food. my grandma’s roast potatoes remain the best i have ever eaten. i think the trick was the 5:1 oil to veggie ratio.

my grandma wallis: a strong, remarkable woman who stretched every resource she had at her disposal to breaking point in order to care for her family. upon initial inspection you would assume she was a garden variety grandma. i don’t remember an occasion of walking into her living room and not seeing her on her recliner with a crochet hook in hand.  but if you hung around for a few minutes until the footy replay began you’d have seen this crochet-bandit grandma burst out of her skin and approach near hysteria. in her later years she couldn’t watch live sport on tv anymore... the excitement was literally too much for her ginormous heart. she could only watch replays where the result was known... and even then she had to take half a sedative to cope with the excitement. she loved sport like i love donuts... and she loved her family.

a few years ago my mum reminded me of this story about me and grandma.

grandma and grandpa wallis had a lolly jar in their kitchen that never ran dry. for a young kt marie, this = heaven. for an older kt marie, this = heaven. i love lollies. i will smash an allen’s party mix any time of day. apparently i got into a bit of a habit when i was a child of walking into my grandparents house and immediately asking grandma if i could have a lolly. my mum was obviously a bit embarrassed by her sugar-addicted offspring when she sat me down one friday to give me a stern talking to. “kt, it’s rude to always ask for lollies. today you aren’t allowed to ask grandma for lollies. just sit down and have a normal conversation like a normal kid.” the message was devastating in its clarity.

i don’t remember mum having this conversation with me but i can only imagine that this news shattered me almost as much as the batman-gravy disaster. i would never be as cool as kay and now here was this woman telling me i couldn’t ask for lollies anymore. what was the point in living?

as we walked up the front stairs of my grandparents house that afternoon, my mum reminded me of our deal. no talk of lollies. i was not to mention the word.

we walked through the front door. i kissed my grandpa on his bald head like i had a hundred times before and then approached grandma in her recliner. she looked up at me with her gorgeous sparkling eyes and cheeky grin. she wanted to give me the world... we both knew it. and by ‘the world’ i mean ‘the lollies’. this was clearly going to hurt her as much as it was hurting me so i had to think quick. i hesitated a little, eventually kissed my grandma’s curly head, and simply said, “hello grandma, do you have something yummy to put in my mouth?”

there was no talk of lollies. i didn’t even mention the word.