Make Do and Mend
Some of my friends jokingly claim that I moved to Zambia just to get my husband to hire a skip.
With just a few weeks to pack up our lives in the U.K., I finally cornered my hoarder Husband. He could either fork out for a skip or make forty exhausting trips to the recycling centre with a trailer in tow. I did the maths: fuel alone would cost nearly as much as a skip, not to mention the time wasted when we had so much else to do
He could do it, he argued. After his fifth backbreaking all-morning trip in the rain with a car and trailer fully loaded, my Husband staggered in and whispered something that sounded like acquiescence. Before he’d taken off his soggy coat I was on the phone booking the Biggest Skip I Could Find.
My Husband likes to Make Do and Mend. One Christmas, we surprised each other with identical metal buckets. The one he gifted to me had a plaque on it that said ‘In Case You Need One’. His point was that I’d thrown away a rusting old bucket that he might need one day. My gift to him made the point that buckets without holes could be bought at a reasonable price and were generally much more useful than leaky ones.
Eventually I stopped looking out of the back bedroom window because it was too depressing to survey what might otherwise be called a generous garden. I had a slice that was useable, and my Husband had the rest for what was, to all intents and purposes, a scrap yard. And two enormous sheds. I developed a blind spot where our lovely garden should have been and chose to look the other way, focusing instead on what was good about my Husband and our home. None of us are perfect.
The move to Zambia meant we both had to face the facts. I joyfully cleared the scrap yard, years of pent up frustration released with every hurl into the Biggest Skip I Could Find. As the previously unseen corners of the yard were revealed, I uncovered no less than three shopping trolleys.
A skipful, at least!
About six months after arriving in Mfuwe, Zambia, I opened our walk-in storage cupboard and had a flashback to looking out over the back garden. Every shelf was stuffed with rubbish. Half a year’s worth of garbage was now providing interesting accommodation for all the spiders, moths and bugs that could rent a space in there.
Zambia has been built on Make Do and Mend. From the cars to the houses, to the roads, shops and clinics, everything seems to be just about holding together from a rag-tag mix of re-purposed materials and tools. Items like food bags, screws, paint, and wood for DIY, are either ridiculously expensive or impossible to find in rural areas, or simply terrible quality.
In Mfuwe, you can’t buy a bag of screws—they’re sold one by one. Cable ties? Same deal. Once your eyes adjust to the dim interior of a hardware store (no electricity) your heart sinks at the limitations of what’s proudly on offer: cheap plastic buckets, flimsy brooms, and rusting hand saws that would struggle with cardboard but will definitely take a chunk from your finger. Dust covered ironing boards that will collapse under the weight of your pants? Yes Madam, we have those!
And so you move on to the next hardware shop, which is called Uncle Petty’s or Uncle Banjo’s, or Uncle Mojo’s. It’s all the same stuff just laid out in a different order, with a different Uncle beaming hopefully behind the counter.
Just some of the things we collect…
It wasn’t long before I found myself colluding in my Husband’s hoarding. In Zambia, milk comes in little plastic bags. We washed and saved every one, along with juice bottles, tin cans, yogurt pots, wine boxes and everything else. The milk bags make great containers for growing seedlings. The wine boxes have a useful foil inner. Juice bottles can be turned into chicken feeders or water dispensers with a little imagination and a Youtube video. My Husband was in his element. Until that flashback made me realise we’d crossed the line from recycling and repurposing, to waste storage.
In Mfuwe, like much of Zambia, waste management is a massive challenge. Plastic is everywhere—burned in backyard pits, dumped along riverbeds, or scattered on roadsides. Without refuse collection services, locals have no choice. There are some recycling projects, including the creation of brave artworks using old plastics and metal. And there are concerted efforts to generate tourism income from the sale of recycled items. But it’s a tiny dent in the problem. There are only so many recycled plastic bowls that tourists can buy.
So what’s the solution when there’s no civic waste collection, and litter has no clear destination? How can we blame subsistence farmers when the cheapest food is universally sold in flimsy blue plastic bags? A worm’s eye view of the local fields would show, heartbreakingly, just how many of these little blue plastics are decomposing, agonisingly slowly, to become part of the food chain. Local NGOs such as Conservation South Luangwa and other community groups are trying—they organise litter walks and recycling projects, and even make art from trash. But it’s a small dent in a mountain of waste. What would it take, I wonder, just to swap the prolific blue plastic bags for paper ones?
Zambia, I love you. I love your resilience, your ingenuity, and your unwavering spirit. I love that, even on wobbly foundations, you stand strong and proud and peaceful. But Zambia, please don’t let my husband drown me in rubbish.
And don’t let your people and wildlife drown in it either.
