Dirty Jobs: Zambia

On a break from teaching in Mongu, in Zam’s Western Province, I decided to stretch my legs by trudging through the heavy, resistant sand outside the Lilelelo congregation’s church building. Although Mongu is about 120 miles west of Angola and its Kalahari Desert sands, I could easily have been convinced that I was smack dab in the middle of that desert, or on the beach at the Jersey shore. The previous week, a good hour’s drive south of Mongu, in Senanga, I’d snapped some youngsters who were looking my way. When I saw the pic - which I could've taken virtually anywhere in Senanga with the same result - I asked myself, "Does this not look like they're lounging on a beach?"

At Lilelelo though, as we were teaching I’d become aware of a grating, whirring sound buzzing from beyond the church—like an electric circular saw. As I passed by the opening in the church’s flimsy, straw-colored reed fence, I saw some folks hunched over a waist-high rectangular box. My curiosity aroused, I walked over to investigate.

A young woman and what might have been her daughter smoothed their fingers back and forth over the box, filled with maize. Soon I could see gaps in the maize that revealed shiny gray metal. Beneath the maize, the aluminum box bottom was dotted unsystematically with hundreds of holes that looked like they’d been randomly punched out with a Philip’s head screwdriver. Pebbles, twigs, and too-small maize kernels dropped down onto the camel-colored sand.

After sifting the maize, they poured what remained into a tightly woven white plastic sack and handed it over to the miller. He emptied the sack into his milling machine until the hopper was full, then hit an electric switch. Ah, that grating whir, the one I’d heard all day. The machine churned the hard, yellowy kernels into a fine powdery dust, spitting it into a white plastic sack. The whitish residue clung to everything in the miller’s outdoor shop. The workspace reminded me of the workshop my father used to have in our basement—after he’d been cutting wood with his radial-arm saw. I used to vacuum the sawdust that the jagged blades of that powerful saw spewed out. In the miller’s shop however, the maize and cassava dust looked, as a Zambian might say, “a bit” permanent! It also clung to the gap-toothed miller himself! In a funny way, this pleasant Zambian looked like the dirty job yang to the dirty job yin of a West Virginia coal miner—brown-skinned and covered from head to toe, with white dust. I shuddered to think how much of that fine dust was caked in the poor chap’s lungs. OSHA would have a field day.

In Senanga I spoke with a man who also milled rice. He dried the husks in the sun and sold them as chicken feed. The usable output for our maize miller is mealie-meal, the staple of the Zambian diet. The chalky miller processed others’ maize so he could buy or mill his own. The church, whose operation this was, employed him. Many Zambian churches engage in commercial enterprises to support their ministries. In addition to milling maize and cassava, these include making bricks, and cooking up a homemade liquid refreshment called munkoyo.

The church charged the equivalent of about 60 cents to mill a 25 kg. (60 lbs.) or so sack of maize. My miller friend said business was pretty slow. With revenue of 60 cents/bag—including his wage—he can’t be making much doing this dirty job.