Treading water ...

My buddy Ger Vaughn from back home in Upper Michigan sent me some Waylon Jennings songs which I'm currently enjoying. The guy was a bard in a beard and a vest; I'm genuinely sad that I never will get to meet him. A bard who smoke and drank and womanized ... boozing, hollering, and whoring. I guess you need some pain in your life to be a poet; a singer; a writer. Or you need to make pain.

Or I suppose you could write from joy. Or insanity? I'm thinking of John of Patmos.

Me, I write out of a sea of boredom. It's not the kind of boredom that results from not being busy enough, that's for sure. We've had a couple of fairly high-level national staff take new jobs, and hiring a replacement is a arduous process; in no small part due to the fact that most qualified Zambians don't want to move to Mongu or Senanga. That says a lot about out Western; kind of a perverse pride for me ... I'll work somewhere Zambians won't.

Work. Work. Work work work. It is endless sometimes; there is really no glamour in the work. I sit in front of a small box with a window on it; in this window are documents that are endlessly revised, magically sent off to Dublin, New York, Kaoma, Lusaka and sent back for revision. Mostly these documents make my head ache; they [the headaches] are augmented by smaller, temporal documents that come through a brutal taskmaster with only one name: Outlook. This demon controls all the magic communication; you have to be careful, as he remembers all you say.

The great Demon Outlook is seconded by a careless imp named Skype. Skype is somewhat less the scrutinizing beast that is Outlook; Skype allows much more levity, encouraging you to communicate with simple pictures of a smiley face, a pukey face, a martini glass, etc. You can also talk to others, though the Imp shows his recidivist side periodically, cutting you off unexpectedly, or amplifying whatever small noise issues from the back of your throat that get interpreted as skeptical guffaws or grumbled curses.

Anyway, my work has little to do with the farmers. I mostly direct my own or partner staff who then go work at the next level down, and those people work with the farmers. When I do visit the farmers, it is usually me fielding their complaints, particularly about us not supplying with enough fertilizer or seeds, or the wrong seeds, or not giving out pesticides (things that kill weeds = herbicides or things that kill bugs = insecticides). You never leave the field feeling really good about what you do or who you work with; mostly, you struggle with a) your inner Republican straining to break free and go all Horace Alger on the beneficiaries, b) your self-doubts about what you're doing, and c) your silent relief that you don't live in the village. Kwa hai is not a forgiving place, especially when it rains; everyone looks and sounds like they just pulled a week in Andersonville; snuffling and shuffling is the rule of the day. You can understand why young men scramble for the nearest town, somewhere where you can possibly Horace-Alger-hustle your way up the social ladder and not have to sleep rough in the damp and cold.

Oh well; gotta take the good with the bad. It's rained quite a bit lately; the corn is growing; there is no crime; food's not spectacular, but there's enough of it. And maybe we'll have Ku'omboka this year.