The Post has had a couple of stories about Kanyama compound in Lusaka flooding over the past few days. We, on the other hand, have had no rain for 10 days, and given the heat of the season (it is high summer) one imagines oneself in a sandy, albeit green, waste.
I'm working from Senanga for the next few weeks (months? years?) as a replacement for the District Program Coordinator, who departed for the greener pastures of Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines Investment Holdings [following that link will give you a pretty good idea of what the parastatal (nationalized) economy was about). Being away from home creates a weird hollow in your lifestyle; without my usual routine of stretching, coffee, breakfast, and puttering around the garden before going to work, I have to come up with a surrogate routine until 8:00hrs. Therefore, I wake up, stretch, jog (ughh), exercise, shower, shave, eat breakfast, and have coffee.
It was rather shocking for me this morning while taking my first sip of coffee and looking out the window at some trees (a sesbania macrantha and two pigeon peas [Cajunus cajun]) I planted in mid-2011. Yesterday, both of the pigeon pea trees were green; this morning, most of the leaves as if by some horrid magic had turned bright yellow. I have no idea what caused this sudden necrosis ... what came to mind was the fact that it had borne so few seeds this year, and on the heels of that thought, the passages in the New Testament where Jesus cursed the fig tree and it withered.
Though I am not aware of the Messiah visiting the Senanga team house back yard in the night or yesterday, it was still disconcerting to see ... particularly as I'd like to use pigeon peas in the next iteration of the Conservation Agriculture project we're planning for the upcoming three years. Pigeon peas, as an agroforestry species, has a lot of pros ... fast growing, fixes nitrogen, helps make soil phosphorus labile (available to plants), fairly drought-resistant (in other parts of Africa not resembling a wooded desert), and most importantly, has an edible seed. Actually quite good, used for dhaal in Indian dishes, known somehow as white gram. However it portends ill to see the leaves withering so quickly. I keep underlining this fact, but it bears repeating: nothing is easy here and don't assume anything as you'll make an ass-of-u-and-me.
Brings one other, though much darker verse to mind; on his march to Golgotha, Jesus admonished a group of wailing women not to weep for Him but rather for themselves (Luke 23:31); "For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?"
What indeed?
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