Victor

We never know who will show up on our veranda. We found Victor there one Friday afternoon when we returned from a trip to Choma. He had been waiting for four hours. Victor had been given a sponsorship to Kabanga Christian School, and earlier we had agreed to give him a ride to Kabanga with Obrien on Sunday. We just weren’t expecting him to arrive two days early. We asked enough questions to find out that he had left his village that morning on foot at 12:30 a.m. and had arrived eleven hours later. He came with a letter from his father explaining that they weren’t able to get him all the things he needed for school and asking for our help.

Victor’s father is a great evangelist who has planted at least five new congregations since the medical mission last summer. We think highly of him and were glad to help his son. We fed him a meal—his first all day—and asked if he had a place to stay. He told us that he had friends in a nearby village that he could stay with until Sunday. We told him he was welcome to rest on the veranda until he was ready to go there, and then we went back to our business inside the house. An hour or so later I noticed Victor still sitting quietly, so I went out to speak to him. He admitted that he was very tired. I asked him if he would like to stay with us that night, and with a look of great relief he said yes. It was only about 6:00 in the evening, but Victor crawled into bed and went right to sleep.

The next day I saw what Victor had brought in his small duffel bag: one pair of pants, two shirts, and a sweater. All were ragged and worn. The only shoes he had were the plastic flipflops he was wearing. Since Obrien (see “Our Starfish”) was also headed for Kabanga on Sunday, we enlisted his help in getting Victor ready for school. David drove the two of them into Kalomo and let them off at the market so they could buy a uniform for Victor and the other items they would need for boarding school. They came home later in the day with the uniform and a solid friendship. We invited Obrien to spend the night with us, and the two young men spent the evening packing, planning, and laughing together.

Victor had obviously not been out of the village very often in his 18 years. I noticed that he had some difficulty figuring out how to use a fork to eat his pancakes on Saturday morning. (Zambians use their fingers for eating.) He watched Obrien carefully for clues about what to do at dinner on Saturday night. On Sunday morning Obrien left very early to go back to his house and retrieve the rest of his things, so Victor was by himself. He came shyly into the kitchen where I was working and said, “Madam, I need to bath.” I realized that he had never used a bathtub before, so I took him into the bathroom and showed him how to put the plug in the drain and turn on the water. I gave him a towel and soap and hoped he could figure out what to do.

We packed their belongings in the Land Rover for the trip to Kabanga: one plastic trunk that the two of them would share, Victor’s tattered duffel bag, Obrien’s plastic pail, and one cardboard box. I couldn’t help contrasting this meager collection with the boxes and boxes of items that my own two children had packed when they left for college. Victor and Obrien were quite happy with what they had, though, and I knew that most of their fellow students at Kabanga would have no more.

As we left Victor at school, I realized that his parents had no way of knowing that he had made it to Namwianga, or that he had gotten a uniform, or that he was now safely established at Kabanga. I marveled anew at the sacrifices and struggles the Zambians make to get an education.

A week later, though, I got a chance to tell Victor’s mother about his safe arrival at Kabanga. She came to our veranda, bringing her seven-year-old son and a letter from Victor’s father. The letter explained that they had no food in their village and asked if his wife could work for us a few days in exchange for food and blankets. (We assumed that the father was not in good enough health to work just then.) Mother and son had taken two days to get here, stopping to sleep somewhere in the bush the previous night. I fed them a meal and told them about Victor and Kabanga while David set out to get some help and advice from church leaders who knew the family. Victor’s mother told me that she had five children still living, and that two had already died. She was happy to hear that Victor was settled at Kabanga, and she thanked me repeatedly for the meal.

David returned later with a stack of blankets for our visitors. He took Victor’s mother and the boy to their relative’s home nearby, and then came back to tell me what he had learned. Last year the family had been without food and had gone out to forage in the bush. Two of the children had eaten poisonous mushrooms and died.

We didn’t ask Victor’s mother to work for us. We helped her start home the next day with food from our garden, mealie meal, the blankets, and some cash.

And we wonder who will be on our veranda tomorrow.