Seedless Gripes

I have a great job. I get to work with fascinating people, in a fascinating place, doing work, that if successful, will leave a lasting positive impact on a community as well as myself. I make my own hours, decide what projects I’ll work on and learn something new every day—not to mention I make hundreds and hundreds of Kwacha an hour. It’s hard to complain, yet I’ve found myself this past week reflecting on some of the challenges that come along with this gig.
The vast majority of the challenges stem from the fact that I’m living thousands of miles away from everyone I’ve ever cared about. I’ve missed the death of my Granddad, something I had come to terms with as a probable reality before I left, but nonetheless hard to be the only grandkid not there to say goodbye to a man I loved and respected. Both my two brothers are growing and changing in ways that will shape their lives and it’s a bit hard to swallow that I’m missing out on my chance to help nudge them in what I see as appropriate directions. I know they are doing great on their own, yet as an older brother I like to at least pretend my “wise” advice is given some credence. Friends are forging lives for themselves in which I currently play a minor to nonexistent role and a girl I love is attempting the same. I guess the hard part is the realization that life is dynamic and back home will never be the way I remember it. This isn’t a horrible thing, but enough to cause some melancholy musing once in a while.
The job itself also comes with its own set of hurdles. I don’t speak the language. Sometimes I think I’m getting better but almost as often I feel I’ve taken a step backwards—especially having just come back to the village after a month’s hiatus. I have a lot of ideas I want to get people here excited about, but it’s difficult to get them jazzed to follow somebody who stands up in a meeting and says “I like trees. We can like trees together by having bees.” People are friendly about it, but I can tell a lot of the time we just miss each other.
While like I said, it’s nice to set my own hours, the fact is that I’m supposedly on duty 24/7 while in the village. Sometimes I’m busy, and sometimes I’m not. I know the nature of work here requires quite a bit of waiting around and that it’s important to give myself time to do nothing, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that I could/should be doing something instead of sitting on the porch finishing my third book of the week. There is so much to do here that sometimes I get frustrated working at the village level. The system in which my farmers operate limits their set of options. Part of me wants to go straight to the top and address these issues rather than teaching one at a time to make compost and burn their fields… less often. At the same time, especially when I’m feeling tired; I think it would be nice to have a place where I go to work. A place where someone has decided what it is that I need to do that day and when I finish, I’ve finished.
Anyway I hope this hasn’t come off too gloomy. I just thought it would be good to write about some of the issues that keep life here interesting and challenging so that y’all don’t think I’m spending my days frolicking with monkeys and zebras through some lion kingesque safari advendutre. Zambia is a beautiful and mysterious (to me) place. It challenges me every day and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Out and About

I haven’t felt like writing a blog post for a while which is why I haven’t. Who wants to read something forced? Anyway I have been bouncing around the continent for the past month and am preparing to bike back to my village tomorrow.

The beginning of august found me in Lusaka where I was attending a two week peace corps training session. From there I took my first vacation with friends to Malawi.

Malawi was a lot of fun. We hitched there and had some of the best rides I’ve gotten yet in Peace Corps. The first ride we caught was with the American ambassadors personal driver. He had been to defensive driving school in the states and he had working seatbelts. From there we caught a ride with a very quiet rasta man with a nice pickup and then got in the sleeping bed of a semi truck who took us almost all the way to lake Malawi.

The lake was beautiful and the fish was the best I’ve had in a long time. We stayed there for a few days and then went down to Blantyre where we stayed at the nicest hotel in southern Africa for four days . My friend adam knew the CEO of the company who owned the hotel so we got to stay for free. The breakfast buffet and shower were some of the most sublime experiences I’ve had in a long time.

I’m ready to get back to my village and settle into a more productive existence that doesn’t revolve around finding transportation and dinner. I’ll write more when I have something to say about that.

A Disjointed Effort

I put off writing these posts until I am eminently bound for a sizable population center with internet. Things usually come up and I don’t write anything, so I figured I will just write this post and then pretend it is up to date when I actually post it, which should be in a week or two. I spent this last weekend in Kasempa attending the agriculture show where I found, I think, the only man growing coffee in the district, hence it is 23:30 and I’m writing a blog post in my hut. The coffee is very good and he said he’d hook me up with some seeds if I visit his farm so hopefully I’ll get some more people around here interested in growing coffee, if only for my well being over the next two years.
I made it to Solwezi on my bike trip without much incident. Provincial meetings went well and then I came back (exciting I know). I built a solar cooker the other day out of a cardboard box, wrapping paper from ken’s girlfriend and the plastic cover off my tech manual. It works great, I’ve managed to cook beans rice and then combined the two to make a pseudo chili… it was good though. While on the issue of food, I slaughtered my first goat last week. Uncle Charlie should be proud as the knife he gave me was christened with its first kill. Slaughtering a goat is intense here in that there is no refrigeration so once you kill the thing you are in a race to eat it as fast as possible. I got my meat fix, which is a rarity these days.
This Paragraph is 3 weeks older than the above two but I think my last blog post could be inserted in between and we’d have a coherent time frame. Otherwise, it doesn’t really matter the order of things, so long as they happened.
I attended a burial for a man in my village yesterday morning which marked my first up-close experience with death and funerals in Zambia. I walked the 2k to the burial site with a couple of teacher friends, and arrived fashionably? late just as they were lowering the coffin into the ground. We weren’t the last people to arrive and we even found some leaving as we approached the cemetery. So I guess, like all other events here, attendance is constantly in flux and gatherings don’t begin so much as they begin to grow.
The sounds of the funeral were some of the most eerily beautiful I’ve heard. There was a constant drum beat and women singing accompanied disconcertedly beautifully by the unconstrained wailing of women who must have known the man well (most didn’t, but all are expected to attend a funeral in the village). Even the shovels throwing dirt over the coffin kept time and those men speaking over the grave fit themselves into the overall sound of the event such that they seemed only to be speaking a verse of the larger composition that was the funeral. The light was also intensely beautiful as cemeteries are the only places near population centers where the trees are allowed to grow to their full potential. Thus the light penetrating the canopy was filtered in such a way that everything touched emitted a muted glow. Anyway it’s hard to put into words—it was neat.
I’m in Kasempa at the moment trying to remedy Lukatazho’s (Luke) flea situation. Did I mention I have a puppy? He’s pretty cute and loves pooping under my bed. He’s impossible to take a photo of due to the fact he never stops moving but I’ll work on it cause I’m sure you all can’t wait to see adorable pictures of a puppy as they’re hard to come by.

Temporial thngs

I have a small field of sweet potatoes intercropped with tephrosia trees (an ag forestry tree that we promote) that is about 2k from my house. It was burned down the other day. I spent a while kicking the dirt but all in all am not too upset as this is the time of year that people burn the bush around here for one reason or another. It did get me thinking though about some of the challenges facing long term agricultural development in the region. There exists a limited ability to invest long term in ones land both due to the traditional land tenure system where land is simply on lease from the chief and because every year your field is likely to be burned down whether you start the fire or not. The ability to put into practice growing trees in conjunction with crops is severely limited if you are unable to protect young trees from brush fires. Next year I think I will try to do some preventative burns in order to protect my field.

Anyway, aside from minor day to day frustrations of living in a culture that is not fully my own, life has been great. I’ve recently joined the futbol club in my village and scored the most amazing goal of my life in my first game. It was a cross that got headed out to the top of the box where I chested it down to my foot and volleyed it into the upper right hand corner. The crowd went nuts.

On the work side of things, I’m managing to stay pretty busy I’ve been working with farmers making compost and manure teas as well as trying to keep up with my own garden. I’ve been meeting with some community leaders about an idea for a farmer’s resource library that I want to see built as part of a larger community agriculture shed currently underway and being built by all the co-ops in the catchment area. People have been very enthusiastic about the idea as it would provide, for motivated and interested farmers, an accessible place to gain access to the technical and innovative ideas associated with agro forestry, conservation agriculture, bee keeping, fish farming, permagardening, etc. On that note we have a bee keeping training tentatively set up for early September with one of the new co-ops in my village who is very motivated. They just bought several 100kg bundles of clothes from the Congo which they are now selling for a profit in the boma to generate some start up capital for their bee keeping, oil pressing and rice growing schemes.

I have found that my a large part of my job thus far dictates that I go around and listen to peoples money making schemes and then try to pick out which ones will work and which ones are scams or ill guided. I’m getting better and I have even started to scheme myself. I feel if it wouldn’t get me fired I could start up a couple of capital ventures here that would make me pretty wealthy.

I’m in Solwezi this weekend for the provincial agricultural show and our nation’s birthday. Nothing like being abroad to turn one into a patriot. I think we are slaughtering a goat for the occasion. Anyway I’m a bit rushed so I think I’ll leave off here but I hope to post again soon because I always am forced to leave a lot out.

Photos

So I've uploaded some photos (http://picasaweb.google.com/taylorjlarson/ZambiaThusFar#) and will upload some better ones once I find my camera cable. I'm too distracted watching a soccer game at the moment to write a quality post but I will soon. all the best

In Solwezi

It occurred to me last night as I was scooping up my mashed sweet potatoes with a lump of nshima (mashed maze) during dinner that my diet was heavy on the carbohydrates and steamed vegetables, while a bit lacking on the protein side of things. This made me feel a bit better about the severe peanut butter addiction I have noticed developing. It didn’t really occur to me that I had an addiction until I realized upon doing my dishes that I had eaten three tubs in the last week and a half. I’m not sure if there are medical consequences for eating too many peanuts but I guess I’ll find out.
In other news I’m getting ready to bike to Solwezi for a provincial Peace Corps meeting. I’m not sure how far exactly it is but I’ve heard 180k. Sufficiently far to be the furthest I’ve ridden a bike on a single trip. I’ll let you know if I actually make it, or break down and hitchhike. Either way I’ll try and post this when I get there.
Life here has been good and has settled down a bit. I was trying to explain the energy here the other day and I came up with intensely laid back. Meaning that things move at a less scheduled and frenzied pace than back in the states but that everything is new and things have a tendency for coming up all of a sudden. I don’t think I am doing a good job describing it, but Its been fun getting used to it.
I’ve been going to meetings with several of the farmers co-ops in my catchment area and there is a new one which has a lot of exciting ideas that I hope to be able to help them with. They want to start a bee keeping project as well as pool money to buy an oil press to press both sunflower and groundnut oil in order to sell. Also they want to start planting rice which I think would be a great alternative to the massive amounts of Maze currently under cultivation, both for the nutrition of the people here as well as the health of the soil. There is also a man who is interested in starting a coffin making business which is great because there is not a single coffin maker here and people always have to go to the Boma in order to get one—your market is pretty constant.
It’s harvest season here which means people, including myself, are busy. I inherited a modest sweet potato field from the former volunteer which has proved to be the bane of my existence for the past week. It occurred to me while the sun was beating down on my already sore back as I reached down to scoop up another potato from the hole I had dug, that this was perhaps the definition of toil. Not the literary definition of course but the essence of what the words themselves are striving to capture. I’ve been in a hurry to harvest these sweet potatoes due to the fact that both moles and people have been helping themselves. This is just a minor annoyance to me and in some regards saves me some work, but the issue of theft is a big deal to the farmers around here. The government has set prices for agricultural goods, especially maze, and will come in once a year and buy at that price. There is also the black market where what are called briefcase buyers will come before the government buyer and offer a lower price in hopes of then reselling to the government and thus making a profit. The problem is that most of the maze they buy has been pilfered from hard working farmers. No farmer in his/her right mind would sell at the reduced rate unless they were completely strapped for cash. Where as people who steal the maze want to sell on the sly before all the maze is sold to the government. Anyway this is a bit of a rant I guess but it’s a very big problem here and one which people and co-ops are fighting hard to combat.
The other big problem I’ve come across here is deforestation. I live in the most forested province in the country so it’s not as in your face as in other areas but it’s easy to see the strains being placed on the forest here by human populations. Zambia currently has the second highest rate of deforestation in the world behind Brazil. It used to be third but Malawi finished cutting down its major forests so they dropped off the scale. The reasons are clear, people burn either charcoal or big logs in order to cook their meals and rely heavily on the forest for building material. The idea of forest management is not very prevalent I think due to the fact that the forest has always taken care of itself. I’m excited about the bee keeping project because it will help align the interests of the population here with those of the forests and I hope to be able to start other projects along a similar line.
Anyway, if you can’t tell I’ve been typing this post very fast as I’m racing my laptop battery. It says I have 10 mins left but I think I’ll just stop here. If there are things you are interested in or want to know more about let me know. It’s weird just typing to an anonymous audience. I do appreciate the comments, they are nice to read. I apologize if I’m slow on the responses to those and emails and facebook messages, the internet is very slow here not to mention far away so reading them is much more feasible than responding. But I hope to be able to catch up in Solwezi. Until next time…

bats and such

So it’s been awhile, but hey time’s polychromic here meaning this post is coming exactly when it’s supposed to. Currently I’m sitting in my hut waiting for the invasion of the bats. I thought yesterday I had adequately bat proofed the place, but as it turns out I only succeeded in trapping the bats once they penetrated my defenses. I hope by the end of writing this I’ll have discovered where they are getting in.
Anyway, a lot has happened since I last updated this blog so I’ll give y’all the cliff notes of the last month of my life. I passed my kikaonde test with a score of intermediate mid which from what I gather means I can greet people, tell them what I want and make apparently hilarious semi-sentences— I’ve never gotten so many laughs in my life. I said goodbye to my host family which was a bit sad because I really liked them and then swore in at the American ambassador’s house which was about the swankiest event I’ve been a part of. After a bit of celebration it was off to Northwestern province where I stayed at the Peace Corps provincial house while buying everything I would need for the next two years. I was briefly a millionaire but after buying my pots, chair and mattress I managed to rectify the situation. Then after a couple days in the provincial capital I loaded up a land cruiser with all of my possessions, drove to my village, unloaded everything in front of my hut and watched to cruiser disappear.
I’ve been in my village (I guess I’m not supposed to write its name?) now 6 days. I arrived in the early evening of the district by-elections so the place was abuzz. A different district in Northwestern pulled all the Peace Corps volunteers from their sites due to a bit of violence associated with the elections but things have calmed and those volunteers are now back at their sites. I’ve been working on getting my garden up and going, building my bed and trying to meet and remember the names of every member of this and the surrounding villages. I’m having much more success with the former two. The past two days I’ve been attending an agribusiness workshop that the agricultural camp officer in my village is putting on with one of the local farmer’s co-ops. I really like my camp officer and am looking forward to getting to work with her. Yesterday was her birthday so I helped her make and eat a cake.
Tomorrow I’m riding 35k into the big city of Kasempa where I hope to buy a hoe, borrow a saw, post this blog and meet up with the only other Peace Corps volunteer in this district. He lives a lot closer to town then me and has a house about 4 times the size of mine so I think I’ll probably stay at his place and then come back the next day.
I have a new address in case you’ve been waiting to send me a letter. I’ll put it up under my address section of this blog but here it is. P.O. box 120045 Kasempa, Zambia.
Well I guess maybe the bats aren’t coming tonight but I’m too tired to wait any longer I think it’s nearly 9! So maybe I’ll add to this post tomorrow or more likely I won’t but I’ll try to get them up on a regular basis.

I wrote this post yesterday but I thought I'd add an update. I've been staying in kasempa with Ken and was in a bit of a bike accident this morning with a motercycle hitting me from behind. I'm fine but they guy on the motorbike went flying and is at the hospital. I think he will be fine I'm going to see him today. my bike is pretty busted up so I may have to try and get a new one. Anyway nobody was too seriously hurt and I'm fine, just a bruise on my leg. Nothing to worry about (mom). Ok I'm off, I hope this post finds you all well