Lessons learned [learnt]

Ugh ... time goes by like a spinning wheel while you feel like your spinning your wheels.

Neglecting a blog I guess isn't that big a deal, especially one as inspiring and as popular as mine. It's only the legacy that you used to post more often that drives you to post again, though with less frequency than before.

However, this is an agroecological blog; despite personal contexts being relative constraining to my particular holon, the universe that is Zambian agriculture stumbles along. May is roughly the beginning of autumn (if such a Westernization of the climate can be thus approximated) in terms of weather; however, the harvest started for most around the Ides of March. The above normal, but poorly distributed rainfall pattern crushed the maize crops in most cases; that three-week dry spell in the latter half of January and early February put away all chances of food security for the nonce. Most of the project farmers have called their conventional harvest a loss; the Conservation Agriculture was somewhat less so, but many of the poorest beneficiaries have already consumed whatever they grew and are already turning to other livelihood strategies, mainly basket fishing and piecework (food-for-labor). The groundnuts and bean crops were a failure as well; the groundnuts just can't find enough calcium in between the large particles of sand (not that it would matter anyway with the soil so dry that there was none in plant available form), and the beans were a magnet to every critter south of the Congo.

In the NGOs world, you never admit failure. Even if the walls are coming down around your head, you never say anything to the effect of "that was a big mistake" or "we shouldn't have done that". There is doubtless a great fear of failure, or admitting failure, because of the expectation that donor funding may   clamp down, shut off, end, etc. Instead, you refer to ongoing failures as "challenges" and confirmed failure as "lessons learned" [learnt in the Queen's Eng]). Some of our failures can be spun as follows:

Failure #1. Sugar beans should not have been selected as a third crop.
LL #1:       In future programming, sugar beans should not be utilized as a rotation crop.

Failure #2:  Selection of beneficiaries was incorrectly done and inadequately verified by staff and partners due to the high ratio of beneficiaries to officers, meaning numerous extremely poor beneficiaries were excluded from the programme.
LL #2:        Community leaders need to be sensitized in beneficiary selection criteria.

I could go on but I won't. This year logistically went the best of all three, but the heavens failed us. How do you write a lessons learned for poor rainfall distribution? Who do you blame? Where do you point the finger?

Oh well; I keep remembering what Grant said to Sherman on the evening of first day of the Battle of Shiloh (TN):

Sherman encountered Grant under a tree, sheltering himself from the pouring rain. He was smoking one of his cigars while considering his losses and planning for the next day. Sherman remarked, "Well, Grant, we've had the devil's own day, haven't we?" Grant looked up. "Yes," he replied, followed by a puff. "Yes. Lick 'em tomorrow, though."

Guess P.T.G. Beauregard didn't apply his lessons learnt. Now we just need to find our own Don Carlos Buell.