This Friday I had a Writer's Group meeting. I am new to these meetings and I had reservations about joining them to begin with; writing can be personal and having others read it is sometimes uncomfortable. However, it has turned out to be the real highlight of my time here, the other members have become friends and I have learned a great deal from them. We meet, drink wine, eat cheese and talk about what we have brought along. However our meeting this Friday had something of the atmosphere of a wake. A long standing member of the group who is also a dear friend is leaving Zambia after 10 years and moving to Senegal. I have only known her a few months, but she has had been an important influence in my life here. And soon she will be gone. She is the second member of the group that has left in the last three months and soon another will be gone, back to England. The whole dynamic of the group is slowly changing.
The reality of living in Lusaka and being part of an ex-pat community is that people leave. By the time we ourselves depart in a year or so, I predict at least 50% of our social circle will have completely altered. When I was younger and more shallow I found no problem with this fact, meeting new people was exciting and I still believed that people who went away would email or write. Most of them don't and I know that now. Perhaps it is politically incorrect to have so many friends in the ex-pat community, but sometimes you need to be with people who understand what you are going through as a foreigner. I have become attached to my attachments, true friends are important, even more so when you're out of your comfort zone and struggling to live a full life in a strange land. And I am tired of saying goodbye.
