Getting Bearings. Lusaka. Day two.

[Note: these posts will usually appear the day after events occur. This post, for example, describes events occurring yesterday, 10/17/2025.]

Woke up today early for morning prayer in the chapel at 6:30. The community here does some vocal prayers and then meditation for about 20 min, followed by Morning Prayer and then Mass. They do this really nice thing in Morning Prayer where they sing all of the canticles—led by Br. Simon, who has a great voice. Today’s canticle they layered like a canon, which was very impressive considering there were only eight of us in the chapel. Mass afterwards was concelebrated by Frs. Joseph, François, George, and Andrew.

I forgot to mention that, last night, Fr. Joseph said Mass at 20:00 with only myself in attendance. He had an early morning traveling from Lufubu and had been unable to celebrate. I, for my part, had been being shuttled around on various airplanes and unable to attend. Responding for the Mass parts as the only member of the congregation made me aware of the fact that I was actually participating in the sacrifice of the Eucharist. It is not only the priest, after all, who offers the Mass—the faithful offer it with him. It is our worries, wants, needs—even our sins that are put on the Paschal Lamb. They are atoned for by the same once-and-for-all cosmic action that occurred at a single point in history—looped back to again and again by collective memory. Like a wormhole making spacetime bend, the Sacraments create bridges through eternal consciousness. You are a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek…

Afterwards, breakfast with the community. I volunteered my help to Fr. Andrew, who told me: “in Lufubu you start work—here you rest.” Nevertheless, after he left, I convinced Naomi (their cook) to let me do the dishes. She is very sweet. Seventh Day Adventist, one son (18) attending University of Zambia sitting Economics.

Fr. Joseph had a doctor’s appointment in the city and asked me if I wanted to tag along. I was on a quest to replace the mud boots I had thrown out in Paris and he suggested that we could look for them. I met him at 9:00 to head out. We went first to an AutoWorld shop to try and get a new rim for his Toyota technical. The roads in Kazembe are terrible and a pothole had bent the rim, causing the tire to be off balance. They didn’t have any single rims (except for expensive ones), and recommended that he instead replace all of them. One of the workers behind the counter quoted him for about $1500, which was very expensive compared to the ~$800 he had paid last time he had gotten new rims and tires.

We left without purchasing and he left the truck in their parking lot. Right next to AutoWorld was Kamwala Market, and we entered through an alleyway. Kamwala is the quintessential African open-air market: frenzied energy, people roasting whole goats right in front of you, plastic fires burning unchecked, cheap Chinese electronics on sale for a pittance and every consumer commodity under the sun visible in packed-to-the-gills market stalls and precariously leaning buildings baking under a hot Lusaka sun. Cars and trucks and vendors with wagons and wheelbarrows carted to and fro narrowly missing throngs of market-goers and women with towering piles of fruit carried on their heads.

We stopped in to a shop and bought fifteen footballs (soccer balls), five volleyballs, five netballs, and a football net for around $400. They got this ready for us while we went to another vendor selling football apparel and accessories, tried on some turf football boots (I bought my pair for $50, fake as the day is long), returned to pick up our Santa’s bag of footballs, hauled them over-shoulder back to the truck—where Fr. Joseph deftly secured them with a dazzling series of hitch knots.

Traffic in Lusaka is an absolute nightmare and road-safety is less than an afterthought. Fr. Joseph navigated expertly through swarms of bikes, busses, trucks, milling pedestrians, salespeople carrying odd items along the lane dividers—changing lanes with full body gestures out the driver’s side window, hands outstretched to push away encroaching cars, wordless conversations to discourage would-be salespeople from offering us their wares.

We inched along and avoided probably one thousand collisions by millimeters until we reached Dr. Agarwal’s Eye Institute along a roadway flanked by tall flowering trees. Fr. Joseph has developed a pterygium in both eyes—basically a growth that comes from the corner of the eye inwards until it covers the pupil and eventually blinds—which need to be removed by surgery. The eye doctor’s showed nothing but a cycle of American news—CNN to Newsmax back to CNN again, Trump saying something about buying his supplements on a dot-gov website.

We left the hospital and made our way to a hardware store—Handyman’s Paradise. It had been recommended by the guys at AutoWorld as a place to buy mud boots and a chainsaw—mine and Fr. Joseph’s items of interest, respectively. They had neither, but directed us to another vendor that might carry a Husqvarna 24” chainsaw (maybe). Returning by way we came, we made our way to a shop deep in the markets selling large LiPo batteries, solar inverters, and panels—where Fr. Joseph was good friends with the 6-odd fellas running the place. Muli bwanji, the tripartite Zambian dap (learned originally from Jackson on the way back from the airport), some good banter—good Catholic fellows wanting to support Don Bosco. We left with a 51V 100 A/H LiPo battery that could probably burn down a small forest, put it in the trunk of the pickup before getting smart and putting it behind my seat where it would be in the shade, wormed our way out through the traffic of downtown and headed back towards the Provincial House. Along the way, we snagged South African gum boots at a home supply store then enjoyed some Windhoek Namibian barley beers and a delicious bony fish eaten with hands in the African way. We never did get that chainsaw, though.

All-in-all the feeling today was one of total enamorment and freedom—enamorment with Lusaka and the Zambian way of living, and freedom in service to Christ that stripped away the usual scrupulous anxieties that come with indulgent first-world living, stepping into the blessed realm of going-with-the-flow that to a large degree is necessary in mission work. I hope that it is a correct development of thought to be able to set aside some of the scrupulous baggage I often struggle with in service of a kind of survival-mode flow-state that comes with living and existing in a locale as frenzied and impoverished as Lusaka. What is important is the Love of Christ, I believe, and the sincere desire to serve Him.

Getting bogged down in scrupulous minutiae is a first-world luxury—and thank the Lord for it, since the feeling of being liberated from it is amazing. When among the trash fires and destitution of the city, the minutiae cease to make an earth-shattering difference, and one might lean into the concessionary nature of Christ’s practical love. He knows we are but men, and I believe He values certain things over absolute perfection in the minutiae: seek first the Kingdom of God, and the rest will follow. Perfection is a fruit of friendship with Christ, and not a requirement—and the Kingdom of God requires honest workers.

[Endnote: I’ve started a YouTube channel where I’ll upload footage throughout the year. I plan to put out videos slightly less frequently than blog posts. If you would like to put a visual to the events described yesterday and today, the first videos are live here:

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