Numbers not for the feint of heart

photo by Kathy Munkley
I was checking on-line to see what I could find out about Zimba, that I could pass on. Here’s all I could find!
Zimba is the first town reached from Livingstone, after about 76km. It's about 397km to Lusaka and really only notable for having a large local market beside the main road. There's little else to detain you here, although there's basic backpackers' accommodation at Trekkers 97. Otherwise there's just a church and a couple of small shops.
If you like to play with Google map you can try this link and zoom in on Zimba and Kaloma and take a look, it’s rather fun.
http://www.maplandia.com/zambia/southern/kalomo/

I make note of Zimba, as we passed through it most days, and I was wondering if there was much interesting about it besides it’s main thoroughfare. Large convoys of trucks could be seen passing through, or pulled over at the sides of the road, so I surmise that it is a main stop for the truckers passing through Zambia. To me, that is worth noting, in regards to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Southern Africa, where it is noted that perhaps a lot of the transmission of the virus has been through truckers & sex workers. Last year I read a book by Adrian and Bridgette Plass about their visit to Zambia with World Vision, ‘The Son of God is Dancing’. I’ve actually re-read it a few times now, finding it informative, funny and heartbreaking. In their book they make mention in most chapters about the HIV/AIDS pandemic, but in the chapter named ‘Chililabombwe’ there is specific writing in regards to the trucking industry, which I’ll try and condense here.
The Cross Border Initiative began in Tanzania in 1992, on the border between Tanzania and Zambia, to help raise awareness about safe sex between sex workers and their clients, the truckers, who travel thousands of miles across one African country to another. Truckers are forced to wait at every border crossing to be processed, sometimes for weeks at a time, and just stop to think about it, Zambia is a land - locked nation, bordered by nine different countries.
Bridgette figures it this way:
A long-distance lorry driver sets out from Uganda with a cargo bound for South Africa. He will have to cross six countries and stop at 12 border crossings. He will be stuck at each of those borders for up to three weeks. There he may have sex with a girl a night, but let us assume he is more circumspect or short of money and only has sex with a girl every third night. That is 84 girls. If it was every night it would be 252 girls. Any one of those girls might be HIV positive. When you bear in mind that he has to retrace his entire route order to get back home (now we are up to 168 girls), you realize this means our driver would have to be incredibly fortunate to escape infection. He will then pass on the infection, and each girl he infects will in turn pass in on to another quarter of her clients.
Now the statistics become truly frightening.
According to the one-in four statistic, we could now have 42 sex workers who have caught HIV/AIDS from this one man. Most of them will have sex with three or four men per night. Suppose it was only two. Bearing in mind that there are no holidays, built into the trucking occupation, each of hese 42 sex workers could have sex with 730 men a year. Let us take off a few nights for sick leave and nights out with the girls or the boyfriend and take a conservative stab at 700 men each.
700 men times 42 sex workers = 29,400.
Divide this number by four, and there is a very real possibility that 7,350 men could contract HIV/AIDS as a direct consequence of the actions of one lorry driver.
If only it finished there. Each of these men, in their turn, will have sex with - how many girls did I conservatively estimate just now- 168? And they in their turn?
This is how corridors of death have come to be built all over this beautiful continent.

Even for me and my math addled brain, these computations are beyond comprehension, and this is what comes to my mind as I pass through a trucking town like Zimba; but please, don’t think that this is an actual case scenario for Zimba, I would hate for anyone to think I was saying that Zimba is nothing more than an abysmal truck stop, I don’t know, but trucking towns like this one are exactly what Bridgette was writing about.