A day in the life ...

Our showers on Monday afternoon are still waiting for an encore. Traveling east to Lusaka from Mongu, I noted how little maize had yet germinated in the fields along the way; the heavy rains have yet to set in, so farmers are accordingly holding off planting maize.

I reflected on that the other day as the guard and I were planting the maize in my spacious back yard ... you have no idea whether it will or won't rain in the upcoming days. There simply is no weather forecasting; ZNBC has a meteorological report that is almost laughable in their vagueness; they tend to use expressions like "it will rain in places in Western Province" or "very warm in Western province", as if sandbagging will reduce their culpability. To their credit, though, the ITCZ moves almost on a whim and the horse latitudes can end up over our heads.

The eight hours on the bus have become something of a routine. Today, the seat had a broken back, so I spent the entire ride leaning back 45 degrees. The ubiquitous kid-on-the-lap-of-a-mother spent much of those eight hours grasping at my temple or pressing his feet against the back of my seat, much to the bemusement of his mother, who refused to believe that the seat was broken. Don't really pay any mind anymore ... I read the summer edition of Lapham's Quarterly, which was themed around the sea, with the presence of mind to skip past the pictures that would appear (or are?) pornographic to a Zambian, such as The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (look that up yourself) or Ulysses straining against his bonds to join with the scantily clad Sirens.

Periodically, as is my wont, my gaze would remain fixed on the landscape out the window. In the 400 miles east to west, the forest and soils change imperceptibly on the course but notably on the extremes. You leave Mongu, a beach without an ocean, and arrive in Lusaka, islands of rock surrounded by a sea of garbage. In between, you phase agriculturally from cassava interspersed with maize (Mongu / Kaoma), to maize interspersed with tobacco (Kaoma East), to maize interspersed with cotton (Mumbwa). Cotton is deceptive ... untrained eyes mistake the scratch lines for CA basins.

At the end of the journey, I rolled aching off the bus into the melee of Lusaka's Intercity bus terminal, resembling a mobile version of Lot's wife. I went straight to the office to discuss the upcoming meetings next week with the World Bank, NEPAD, and NORAD to form a CSA alliance; my hope is we can shift the conversation from scaling-up (i.e., adding beneficiaries in a stochastic way) to adoption analysis, with a focus on graduating farmers through progressively more technical aspects of CA. Shopped a bit for food; grabbed a burger (to satisfy my Western cravings), came home and wrote up a case study for the annual report. "Watched" (via CBS.com) the sportsticker of Michigan's last-minute loss to Ohio State (why did they go for 2?). Type blog. Rest.