Purple people and albino baby baboons

Composing these blogs is more difficult than I expected it would be. Not only is time a factor – being very busy with work and having been away for the last five days at our mid-summer retreat and conference with the rest of the team here in Zambia – but figuring out exactly what I want to say takes a great deal of thought and reflection. Every time I think I know what I want to address, I end up changing it or scrapping it. There are so many aspects, so many angles, and so many experiences that just can’t be captured in mere words or pictures, so I struggle to best communicate what I am thinking, feeling, and encountering.

The best way to try to put you, the reader, into my headspace is with some sort of analogy. “Cultural integration” is the big buzzword/buzzphrase, but it goes way beyond eating what the locals eat, picking up key phrases in the local language(s) (Zambia has over 70), and even living within communities, within local families. Never being able to become one of the locals is a drastic understatement, and I hope the following analogy and story can help you to understand the constant intense focus that I (and the other overseas volunteers) feel when over here.

My analogy involves purple people from outer space. Yes. Bear with me. So imagine that a new species come to our planet, and that they look pretty much like humans in every way but they have bright purple skin. They even act like us – mostly. But many rumours fly around about the abilities that they have, superior intelligence, what-have-you, and of course the advanced technology – I mean, look at the sleek spaceships they arrived in! There are not many of them here on Earth, just a few here and there who are living and working among us to see how we can mutually benefit from trade deals and such. They speak only a little bit of English, otherwise their own language is unintelligible to us. Some of them attempt to mingle with us humans, but by and large outside of work situations they keep to themselves. Otherwise, they seem friendly enough.

So put yourself into this scenario, with these strange but interesting beings here and there among us. How do we react to them? How do we see them?

If you’re honest with yourself, you’d be downright excited to see one and to be able to talk to one and see what they’re like. Everyone is talking about them. If you see one walking down the street, aren’t you going to stare? I mean, they have purple skin!! And even if it’s not meant maliciously, you still have to look – you’ve never seen anything like it before. It is a weird mix of exotic zoo animal/movie star fascination. You don’t really know what they’re like, but you have heard so many things about them. Someone said they could fly! Someone else said that they have come to take over, so we should be careful. You also heard that they have so many amazing gadgets that they carry with them – a shrinking ray (wow!), a transporter (can you believe it!), a food materializer - wouldn’t you love to see those things, OR even try them??!

But you also heard that they eat through their noses – you just gotta see that. And that when they sleep, they peel a new layer of skin at night. You’re just not sure, so you might be a little intimidated of them when they do say hello.
But if you were to be able to talk to a purple person, you would find that they do not have any special powers, and that they do not want to be singled out. In fact, they are quite shy, and when given so much attention, they feel targeted. Because they can’t speak English very well they are not able to talk to humans much, except for the few who they have trained in their special purple language. As a result, they remain misunderstood.

Okay, before I lose myself too much in this scenario, I think you have figured it out. Here in Africa, us whites are the purple people. This is especially true in the villages where there are never any whites, like in Chileka village and area where I stayed for a month. I was the only muzungu (white person) that had ever stayed there, so the majority of people had never seen one before, and definitely never interacted with one. This would be why I continually got comments like “now I can say that I’ve eaten a meal with a white person!” or why people would get SO excited if they shook my hand (in fact, people would line up in great crowds to shake my hand sometimes). Every place I went, any time I was outside of my house, even sitting in the front area or ANYWHERE, everyone stared at me. Everyone. And Africans don’t use a smile as a greeting, or even respond to smiles, so having dozens and dozens of cold-faced intense stares meet me 24/7 can get pretty weary. On the other hand, as soon as I opened it up with a “muli bwanji!” (hi, how are you), the faces would break into a large grin and a warm friendly “bwino!” (fine). Not only were people excited to talk to me – she actually IS friendly – but speaking in their own language, now that was the cat’s ass!

The reason I talk about this stuff is because although it may seem trivial or even anticipated, it has an effect on my mental and emotional health, and on everything I do. To constantly be the centre of attention, for better or for worse, can be very draining. Like I said: zoo animal, movie star, physical deformity; even if the attention is just simple curiosity, you have no privacy, no peace at any time. You can try to ignore it, you can try to change the reference through positive interaction, but you can never make it go away. You never become “normal.”

I think what really helped me to accept that attention was something that happened when I was on safari. Lots of baboons everywhere, but one day we saw a group of baboons with babies – you gotta love the babies! We were busy oohing and aahing over all the babies, and then we spied an albino baby! Wow! How often does that happen?! Suddenly, all of our attention was on the albino baby; all of the other baboons and babies forgotten. All of our pictures were of the albino baby as well. Then it hit me – why were we so drawn to that one? Because she was different? Because she was rare? She didn’t ask to be born albino, nor did she ask for all the special attention. She was just hanging onto her momma and doing the same things as the rest of the babies. That little albino baby baboon was a reflection of me here in Zambia. I could no more blame the locals for their fascination with me than I could blame us and our fascination with that albino.

The next time you wonder about it, consider a day in the life of someone with a serious facial disfigurement and the kind of attention that receives. I may be feeling this intense pressure here, but I will eventually go home to where my comfort level will return to normal (in terms of race majority, anyway). Others do not have that advantage, and must deal with that stress of tactless staring throughout their entire lives.