Day Seven: The Path

Sometimes it amazes me how things come full circle. Amongst all our school touring and social work visiting we have also been working diligently on the school. All the walls are as high as the door jams and the Zambians don't trust us to help with the final tricky step so we are leaving it to them.

This morning, we were looking around the House of Martha attempting to find another project to occupy our time. As we stood in the dirt and mud out back, the obvious solution comes to us. We ought to use the brick we just tore out of the school to make a path to the school to help cut back on all the dirt and mud tracked into the buildings during the raining season. There is something so fulfilling about reusing the brick we've demolished to make something new and beautiful and there are few things as beautiful as a worn, brick path.

The kids decide to join in on the work. They scramble around the pile of rubble in their bare feet looking for usable brick. We attempt to stop them, we don't want them to cut their feet on the metal and rock in the pile but we eventually admit defeat and let them join in. As we load bricks carefully into a wheel barrow, they pile them 3 or 4 high on top of their heads and scurry over to the construction site. It amazes me out these kids know how to work. They are able to watch a task for 2 or 3 minutes and then hop in and do it better than the person who was doing it first.

We end up with kids sorting brick, moving brick on their heads, laying the brick alongside the path in easy reach of the brick layers and laying the base layer of sand that the path is on. I asked Nixon, one of the Zambian workers, if the kids help him with other chores around the house. He laughs and says he is not as exciting to work with as a bunch of white people.

Once we finish laying the brick, we distribute a layer of damp sand across the top and use our fingers to push the sand down between the bricks. Gradually, I feel a presence growing around me and I look up. Every kid in the yard has stopped what they were doing - playing, braiding hair, hanging clothes up to dry - and every kid is around the edge of this path, quietly and intently pushing sand into the cracks between the brick. What a perfect job for such little fingers. As they intently focus on the task in front of them, I wonder what lessons we Americans should be taking home from these very special kids.