‘Experiencing a Culture Shock’

Darragh Dobbin

Zambian Immersion Project 2007 Culture Shocks – Darragh Dobbin

Ireland’s Call


“…We have come to answer
Our country's call...
From the four proud provinces of Ireland”

These are some of the lyrics from a well known song, Irelands Call. I am sure that most of you are familiar with the song because of the success of the Irish rugby team in recent times. But I think that this song very much relates to each of our Immersion trips. If you think about it, we have come from all over the country with a common goal, to help people in the developing world. By doing this we are also answering our country’s call, the call of Edmund Rice.

I myself went on Immersion in Zambia, Zambia is a central African country surrounded by 6 other countries which are Botswana, Zimbabwe, Angola, Zaire, Tanzania and Mozambique. It is approximately 10 hours flying time from the UK, and around 11 times the size of Ireland. Zambia has a population of 11 million. There are 73 different tribes each having their own language, in the area we stayed there were the Bemba, Tonga and Selosi tribes. The Zambezi River which runs through the country is 2700kms long, about 8 times longer than the longest river here in Ireland, the River Shannon.

You may be thinking that Zambia hasn’t got much in common with us here in Ireland but you would be very much mistaken for example both of them were colonised by Britain for many years. Ireland gained independence in 1921 and for years after this, Ireland was quite a poor country. It wasn’t until around the 1990’s that Ireland began to developed, mainly down to the “Celtic Tiger”. In 1964 Zambia gained independence, maybe in ten or twenty years it to will follow in the footsteps of Ireland and experience its own “African Tiger”.

We were based in Livingstone, the tourist capital of the country. The main reason for this is that it is situated beside the Victoria Falls, one of the seven wonders of the natural world. Dr David Livingstone, the first European to see the Victoria Falls described them as “scenes so lovely, that it must have been gazed upon by angles in their flight.” We visited Zambia just as the rainy season was coming to an end. This meant that the falls were fuller and more breathtaking than usual.

Approaching the falls, we could hear the massive roar of the water long before we could see it. The local name for the falls is “Mosi – O – Tunya”, this translates as “the smoke that thunders.” I’m sure the other groups that visited the Falls would agree with me when I say that the Falls are amazing and could hold your attention for hours on end.

I am now going to try and give you an insight into my own experiences and the groups experience’s on our Immersion.

Six years ago I experienced something that I will never forget for as long as I live, my experiences in Zambia brought these memories flooding back. When I was in 1st year my baby cousin, Andrew, was born. He was the first child of my auntie Jacqueline and my uncle Declan. The thing was that Andrew was born with a life threatening heart condition, and we were told his chances of survival were very slim. I can remember the out pour of emotion of my whole family and how the situation changed everyone. Thankfully Andrew survived, but what I witnessed in Zambia bought back memories of this back to me.

The event which got me thinking was when I saw a funeral in Zambia. This wasn’t just any funeral but, it was the funeral of a baby boy. It was very different to any child’s funeral I have ever witnessed; there were no mass crowds of mourners or lavish ceremony. In fact it was the opposite, it was very simple. There were only four people at it, they buried the baby in an unmarked grave and finally they took back the blanket the baby was wrapped in and not once was there a tear shed. The fact that they took the blanket back shows the sheer poverty these people live in.

After seeing this I couldn’t understand how their reaction to a child’s death was so different to our own. This immediately struck me as a cultural difference between the two countries. As the trip continued, what I witnessed was still on my mind, the more I though about it the more I began to realise that it wasn’t just their attitude to death which was different, it was there outlook on life in general and in particular children.

In Zambia they treat children very different to the way they are treated here at home. As we travelled through the compounds on a daily basis we saw young children running round the street with nobody looking after them, they didn’t have any shoes on their feet and their clothes were in bits. We also came in contact with a lot of children in the orphanage, these were children that had no parents and had a very traumatic life, playing with these children every day made me feel good and I would like to fink that it made their day a wee bit brighter as well. Despite of all of this the Zambian Children are the happiest children I have ever met and everyday we would be greeted with the welcoming of “Hello, How are you?” accompanied with a warm smile.

The way I saw these children being treated angered me. I couldn’t understand that despite these children being the future of the country, that they would be treated in this way. Surely if they wanted to develop the country then they would try and educate the youth so that in the long run they might aid in the development of the country.

If I am being honest, working in the orphanage has made me feel very guilty. I was playing with the young children and very much enjoying myself and I think they were to. This once again brought me back to my cousin; since he was born I’ve taken him for granted. I came remember times when he has wanted to talk to me on the phone and I’ve told my mum I wasn’t there simply because I couldn’t have been bothered talking to him. Since I’ve came home its one thing I’ve aimed to do, I want to try have a better relationship with him.

Something that struck a cord with everyone in our group was the home care visits that we attended. Each member of our group went on two home visits each, these were such an eye opener and for many people difficult to experience. These visits involved going out into the compounds to one of the local clinics to help administer drugs to the patients and then you would go to see those who were not fit enough to attend the clinic. Most of the patients we came into contact with at these clinics were suffering from AID’s.

These clinics were run by a group of Franciscan nuns, two of which were from Ireland. Sister Mary Courtney was from Co Cavan and was the leader of the clinic. Sister Sheila was one of the helpers, she was an 82 year old from Ravensdale in Co Louth, the fact that she was 82 and still as active was inspiring to see. One of the boys told me about what he seen one afternoon on one of his visits and it will always stick with me. He told me how he walked into a hut and seen a woman who was lying on the floor because she was too weak to move. He said she had with her a child who looked about three or four months old, but he was later to learn that the child was in fact fifteen months old. He told me how the child’s ribcage was showing and his stomach was swollen. During Sister Marys conversation with the lady, she told her how she was not the babies mother, but a relative of his. The likelihood is that the baby will die soon or has died by now.

Another experience our entire group went through was teaching in their schools. I was in Linda Community School, it was a badly run down and in grave needs of repair. I taught a composite class of Grade 5’s & 6’s and it was very challenging. Although my job was made a lot easier by the fact that the children were so hungry to learn. If you asked a question, hands would go up everywhere. Maybe with the wrong answer but it was the fact that they wanted to learn and find the right answer. It was a shame that these children’s desire to learn was not being fulfilled because of a lack of funding.

Two years ago our own school donated £12, 000 to Libuyu Community School and the difference it made is unbelievable. It’s amazing to see the difference that sum of money made.

Another part of the culture which struck me was their attitudes towards females. Gender inequality was the focus of this year’s Trociare Lenten Campaign, I have to say that I never thought that this would be such a major issue in the developing world, but I was wrong. We all have heard the jibe that “women belong in the kitchen” but the reality is that in Ireland women have as many opportunities as men and they are very career driven and in many cases high profile positions are held by females, there is no better example of this than the President of Ireland, Mary McAlease. This is something that would never happen in Zambia, women are treated almost like objects, they do a lot of hard labour and get treated very badly. It wasn’t unusual to see women walking around with large loads on their head or sitting at the side of the road breaking stone, to sell to try and make a living. I wondered why the men couldn’t do this, these were very labour intensive jobs done in the sweltering heat.

There were three examples that summed up the gender inequality for me. The first was a sight that two of the boys witnessed one Thursday evening. In Zambia, Thursday night is a night for the ladies to head out and a Friday night is the night for the men to head out. This particular evening the boys were over in the bar getting a few drinks for that evening, they saw a man enter and drag a women outside; they saw him push her to the ground and hit her. The bouncer then told the boys that the man was the ladies husband and that she had not asked permission to go out that evening.

The next example was, our bus driver Justin. He told us how he had a wife and two girlfriends and the way in which he talked about them was more like they were possessions than people he loved. In Justin’s defence he wasn’t speaking out of sheer disrespect for the ladies it was just their culture. We found out on our travels that polygamy was very common in Zambia and that it was also legal. Another problem of this was that having many partners was helping the spread of the HIV/Aids.

The final example of gender inequality was an incident which occurred in my class in Linda Community School, two girls became involved in a fight with each other. The boys instead of breaking it up, proceeded to hit the girls as they were fighting. After this their proper teacher, Joy, came into the class and removed the two girls who were fighting. I asked the two girls the next day where he had taken them, they informed me that he had taken them outside and hit them as punishment for what they had done. This reaction baffled me because here we are always taught that it is wrong to hit a woman.

To finish off I would just like to say that it would be naive to think that aspects of the Zambia culture are not evident in our own society. Sure there is domestic violence, People having affairs and even people who have lost one or even both parents. It took my Immersion to make me aware of this side of life here at home. Maybe this was my call during the Immersion.

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