This is week two of three weeks of Conservation Agriculture (CA) training to both our own staff, partner staff, and government extension officers. It's a welcome sign that the end to the hiring freeze in the camp staff in 2012 is starting to come to fruition; the back of the conference hall is peopled with young guys who are new to the game and want to make a real change.
However, it's a blast furnace outside in more ways than one; we hit 39C today (great for striding about the room, being the "CA Preacher" as one women called me), and the Zambia mealie-meal market, off the lease since 2013, has started to follow everything else on a upward trajectory, as reported by the Post today.
I refer again, as I always do, to the Zambian Coat of Arms (downloaded from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Zambia#/media/File:Coat_of_arms_of_Zambia.svg):
Having learnt about one of the more obscure part of any coat of arms, e.g., the compartment (the landscape upon which the supporters stand) for this coat of arms is designated as: "Green earth, and an ear of maize proper".
An ear of maize proper. If you haven't grasped this by now, dear reader (hi Mom), an ear of maize proper is the common denominator in this country. It is the gantry in whose shadow all other foods and/or crops appear Lilliputian. And now that great green edifice is crumbling; cracks are shooting up the walls, the ground heaves, and mealie-meal hikes upwards.
Maize as a staple food is the foundation of Mazlow's [Zambian] Hierarchy in that physiologically, Zambians must consume maize to survive (the reach of Zea mays up to and possibly into Self-actualization are both scary and tangential). When mealie-meal climbs, a shockingly urbanized nation starts to grumble in ways that ZESCO's load shedding / tariffs hikes and climbing import prices have yet to plumb.
