Good Deeds by Chalwe Nyirenda
I have been travelling to Zambia’s newest province frequently for the last two years now, training members of community based organisations about how they can know, claim and secure their rights and hold their duty bearers accountable for service delivery. Muchinga has effectively become like a second home and I am glad my work in ZGF’s capacity development team allows me to visit far flung communities. It has been a great joy seeing how groups of timid men and women blossoming into confident people when talking about issues that affect their communities. During one of these trips I met a petite but feisty lady who barely spoke English but had gained such a great understanding of what her rights were that she could explain in her local language with impressive conviction. Her name was Esther*.
As we got to know each other better, Esther began to open up about her life. She was widowed when he children were still very young and was raising them singlehandedly. She then told me about her very intelligent 14 year old son Taonga* and the “strange” illness he had. She explained that he first got sick when he was 10 years old, and since then he had been experiencing bouts of total paralysis.
He had been through physiotherapy, which had been recommended by Isoka district hospital but this had not helped because he still experienced the paralysis. He had missed most of his grade 7 classes and when he was able to attend class he could not write and simply just had listened to the teacher’s explanations. Miraculously, Taonga regained the use of his hands at the end of the academic year and was able to write the grade seven exams. Despite the challenges he had faced, he passed with flying colours and earned a place at a technical high school.
However, the paralysis then came back more severely when he was in grade nine, leading to his confinement in a wheelchair. This time around he was not able to sit for his grade 9 exams as the district not have facilities to cater for people with that kind of disability.
I listened to this story and tried to think of ways our work at ZGF could help Taonga. Maybe we could support a local organisation to lobby the district to make education more accessible to those with disabilities or even support an organisation working in health service accountability to ensure people could get specialized services. While all these were commendable initiatives I realized that Taonga needed help immediately, he could not wait for me to “change the world”. All this time I had spent talking about the need for citizens to engage their duty bearers for “improved services” and yet I was presented with a real-life urgent problem all my theories could not fix. I felt like a hypocrite when presenting to a room where Esther was present, knowing she needed an immediate solution to her problem and all I seemed to be saying to her was “it shall be well in future”. Meanwhile, her son’s health was deteriorating, the physiotherapy sessions that had been recommended were clearly not working and she did not know what was wrong. It was heartbreaking to witness her pain and sense of powerlessness.
I returned to Lusaka and shared the story with my workmates. To my delight everyone felt touched by the story and quickly began thinking of ways we could practically help Esther and Taonga.
Tigwepo - March, 2017 21