From Boston Children’s Hospital to the Mining Town of Kabwe with Drew (Guest Post)

The past few weeks in Zambia, since Drew and I returned from Boston, have had a distinct quality. We are opening our eyes a little wider to take it all in – the hundreds of children in their plaid school uniforms on the street in the morning, the birdsong and flowers in our garden, the chaos and color of driving in central Lusaka, with its vendors, minibuses, trucks, potholes, and people everywhere. Aware that our time in this extraordinary country will be over all too soon.

Leaving Boston Children's Hospital for the last time - returning to Lusaka

We are also being a little kinder to one another – still delighted and a bit incredulous to be back together. It could easily have been otherwise. Had the orbit of Drew’s eye had not improved quite so much at the last MRI in Boston. Had kind, empathetic Dr. Gise not been the ophthalmologist caring for him. Had the orbital specialist Dr. Freitag not known and trusted Drew’s surgeon Dr. Eliot… Then Drew and I might not have returned to Zambia at all. And we know it. And our gratitude at being back together, back in Lusaka, is fierce. 

And yet, after rarely being more than five feet away from one another for the entire 1.5 months in Boston, Drew and I found ourselves strangely bereft when it came time to be separated. It was hard to say goodbye to each other when he shut the car door and walked off to school. We gave each other extra hugs. Those weeks of hospitalization, homelessness, and profound uncertainty, together with the full-body embrace of our beloved community, had fostered an unusual intimacy between us. It was good to return to normal life. But we were a little protective of our connectedness.

Maybe that’s why we decided to take a trip to the town of Kabwe together, just Drew and me, just one week after our return to Lusaka. It was a long drive, and we were on an unusual mission:
Find Black Mountain. 

Small-scale minors returning from Black Mountain with slag

Black Mountain is what remains of the most toxic lead mine in history. It is no longer officially mined, but acres and acres of lead tailings, heaped into towering mounds, uncovered, remain. Until recently, there was no fence around Black Mountain and it was a favorite playground for kids. The lead dust has contaminated the soil not just right around the mine, but along roads and homes for miles around. In fact, Kabwe is considered among the top environmental disasters in the world – Chernobyl in the Ukraine generally comes in number one, with little known Kabwe, Zambia coming in at number four. 

You may be wondering why Drew and I would drive for three hours to find such a place. 

If you want to know that, you’ll have to check out the petition Drew created on Change.Org. 

For my part, I’m just going to tell you about the journey. 

We arrived in Kabwe together on a Friday evening at dusk, and set off walking the streets, introducing ourselves to schoolchildren and talking with them about the mine and the companies that benefitted from it. Most children didn’t speak enough English to talk with us. A few did. We asked for directions to Black Mountain, and eventually found it down a long dirt road. We struck up conversations with small-scale miners hauling slag, trying to scrape a living from bits of lead still in the soil. They told us how they and now their children struggled in school. How hard it is for them to remember things. 

The next day, we were invited into the classroom of some high school students who live and attend school near Black Mountain. One was named “Kabwe Mine Secondary School.” We spoke with a 14-year-old girl who wants to grow up to be a lawyer someday. We wrote down everything she and her classmates wanted to share about growing up near the mine, lead pollution, and accountability for the colonial-era companies that benefitted from the lead extraction. 

There is a lot more to tell you about. For instance, what the students said, how lead exposure affects children's IQs and capacity for learning, and what the defense attorneys in a class action lawsuit in the works against one of the companies responsible for the mine told us when one Drew Lanfer interviewed them. 

But that is Drew’s story to tell. And if I were you, I’d check it out.