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Friends you make while travelling

 

Probably the most prominent  friend I made while travelling is Melitta, an Austrian girl I shared a house with while in Zambia. She was, like me, young and idealistic, keen to improve healthcare in our little segment of Africa. We shared a house at the back of the mission hospital with an English woman. Helen was a difficult character, a woman who played There’ll Always Be An England every Sunday morning and corrected Melitta and me if we didn’t display perfect English manners. The work we did was challenging, and the nuns’ rules could feel petty. Melitta and I bonded over a daily beer and shared stories of our patients. Occasionally, a European teacher or an agriculturalist would turn up to take us to a party on a weekend and we would laugh and dance as though we had few cares.

Melitta and I still drink beer, dance and laugh outrageously. Helen, however, took God’s wedding ring and joined the convent.

Matrine was another Zambian friend. She was a law student when we met in Lusaka. I can’t remember what drew us together, but we had keen conversations over politics, changes to Zambian society and feminism. After I left the country, we wrote to each other but, as children arrived, we lost touch. However, I looked her up one day. I was keen to return to Zambia and see what had happened in the 25 years since I had left. Matrine’s name up came up quickly online. She wasn’t simply a lawyer. She was head of women and law in five southern African nations. I called her office. “Who will I say is calling?” asked the receptionist. I gave my maiden name, and Matrine came on the line laughing, “Yvonne, I still tell people about you.” A few months later, I stayed with her during the Zambian elections, and she gave me insight on who were the key players in politics. She even took me to a relative’s house. He was a candidate for the presidency. He didn’t win that year, but guess who is Zambian president today?

One of Matrine’s daughters messaged me a few years after my visit to say, “my mother is now late,” a Zambian euphemism. Matrine had passed away.

Ghassan was a medical student who joined our obstetric unit in the Abu Dhabi desert one summer. He was shy in asking questions, and I was happy to pre-empt his curiosity and explain why decisions were made on specific pregnancies. It helped and his own curiosity came forward. Ghassan was Syrian and Christian. As a result, his family had been pushed out of Syria. To make matters worse, he was attending medical school in Iraq. I cannot help but hope that he finished medical school and was free of that country well before the Iraq war started.

Sometimes, you meet someone and don’t even swap names. Two visitors swept into the Abu Dhabi hospital one day. They were young, linked arms and had an easy exuberance that wasn’t common among Emiratis. I sensed they were Nomads. The woman was wearing a beautiful dress – embroidered in bold colours with little mirrors sewn into the fabric. I had few Arabic skills, but she easily gleaned that I loved her dress and lifted it up to show me her embroidered petticoats. Then something happened. I don’t believe either of us suggested it, but we went into an empty room and swapped clothes. She put on my skinny white uniform, and I donned her petticoats, dress and face mask – its stiff frame left my vision blinkered. We had no mirrors to look at ourselves, no phones to record the image, but we laughed with each other. I often wonder what happened to her. She probably occasionally tells people of the night she swapped clothes with a complete stranger.


Melitta and I

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