Coming to America Part 2

SO NOW I HAD BEEN ACCEPTED TO A COLLEGE IN AMERICA. I eventually received instructions from the AAI for planning my adventure. I had been selected as one of five students from that group of nineteen who had been interviewed a few weeks earlier and we would be traveling together, eventually to meet up in Paris with about eighty other students from across sub-Saharan, independent Africa for studies in the United States. Since the program was part of U.S. foreign aid to Africa we were under contract to return to our countries of origin after graduation to serve for at least as many years as we had been studying. Since Zambia was the only home I had known that seemed to be no problem to me.

Having never heard of Minnesota I would sometimes get it confused with Massachussetts, prompting one person to ask,"Do you know where you are going?" I had been to boarding school with a number of Americans and had studied the U.S.A. in geography at that school, learning about New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, the Great Plains, and how to pronounce Arkansas...from a British teacher, no less. But Minnesota never made it into the discussion...if it had I'm sure I would have remembered because geography was my favorite subject.

I do remember studying about Russia and how cold the winters were in Moscow. I am not sure when I realized that the climate in Minnesota was similar to Moscow (inland continental, without any moderating ocean influence). We had studied weather patterns but putting a minus in front of any tempertaure, whether fahrenheit or centigrade, seemed to me like science fiction.

One scholarship condition was that all recipients had to be citizens of the country from which they had applied. Having been born of British parents in a British colony I was obviously British. However in the early 1960's British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan's "wind of change" began to blow across Central Africa and in October 1964 the colony of Northern Rhodesia had become the Republic of Zambia, named after the Zambezi River which originates as a spring a few miles from the boarding school I attended and several hundred miles later crashes over the Victoria Falls in vast volume on the southern border. The Union Jack had come down and the new Zambian flag had been raised (see above); for a couple of weeks the new national anthem 'Stand and Sing of Zambia, Proud and Free.." had been the regimen in morning assembly at Luanshya High School to replace 'God Save Our Gracious Queen'; and several of us had represented the school in the parade past a local official on Independence Day.

On that day I received a new citizenship - by virtue of having been born in Northern Rhodesia I was now a Zambian and entitled to a Zambian passport. However I did not have to choose one or the other until I reached age 21. Up until I received the scholarship to America there really was no need for me to apply for a Zambian passport but now the Americans insisted that my student visa could not be placed in a British passport. No problem, I could lawfully have both, and so I applied and received a passport of the Republic of Zambia.

The day for my departure soon came, in early August. I was to join the other four scholarship recipients in Lusaka for a reception at the U.S. Embassy. As I recall my mother and siblings drove me from Luanshya to Lusaka in the yellow family Ford Consul. We were not used to mingling with foreign diplomats but somehow made it through the reception and speeches. On learning afterwards, I think from me, that the ambassador and his wife were of the Mormon faith my mother had wished that she had known earlier so that she could have had a little chat with them about the Gospel. I think I was relieved that she hadn't known.

Departure to America was from the brand new terminal at Lusaka Airport, opened only about a month. I recall nothing about the event except that I boarded an East African Airways Comet 4 for Nairobi. We made a stop in Ndola, only twenty miles from our home, and Dad was there to meet me and say goodbye. For a reason which I do not recall, he was not able to travel to Lusaka with us.

Despite having lived in Africa all my life I had seen very little of it. We had rarely left Zambia so even traveling to Nairobi was a great adventure. And we had not flown much so every plane trip was a charge.

(c) 2008 roy kruse