October 8, 2016 - The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here

It's been awhile, no?

So, if you might be able to gather from the above, we left the high, dry southern African plateau for the sweltering rain-soaked Grain Coast, as Liberia was once called. It was not a direct move; my girlfriend had to leave Zambia on the 2nd of September, 2015; after a six-month interlude until my contract with Concern Worldwide ended, we sorted the last distribution of inputs using vouchers for the Conservation Agriculture (CA) project I ran in Western Province. In the intervening days or isolated weeks where I was back in Lusaka, a fellow American from Alabama and myself became somewhat proficient at distilling whiskey (moonshine, mountain dew, white lightening, poteen, swish, white dog, steam, kachasu, lutuku, etc., etc.). We didn't do it because of particularly wanting a drink (there is no lack in either quantity or diversity of drinkable beverages in Lusaka); it was more like why I suppose people climb mountains, e.g., to see if they can do it.

Anyway, it was a dry rainy season and by the time I was wrapping up and headed home in February, it was apparent maize yields would be poor in the south and west of the country. I flew home on the coldest weekend of the year, packing my bags and filling up the back of my old pickup in near-record time; I then looped through the Midwest, seeing some friends in northern Wisconsin, giving a talk to some relatively wide-eyed Soil Science graduate students, catching up with former classmates, seeing my sister and her family in South Bend, IN. I then drove to Washington, D.C. to move into our new apartment with my girlfriend and to begin what I thought would be a relatively easy job search in the D.C. Metro area. Of course I can get a job! I have years of development experience! Hire me before someone else does!

To zip through that in a hurry ... it doesn't work like that. To summarize:

1. Had to figure out Obamacare ... wow, no wonder people are upset. It's neither clear nor cheap, and I had a number of odd health issues, none of which I had in Zambia, but fell on me in the States. To put it mildly, not having great insurance and no job still means you get crummy health care and weird bills that you're obliged to pay for.
2. Full-time jobs in D.C. are available, but the competition is stiff and for the most part, online. Having not had to apply for a job in a number of years, I was more than a bit rusty, particularly with the online bits. I shaped up my LinkedIn profile, worked on my resume, had a number of first interviews, screwed up quite a lot, etc. Overall, I got back into fighting shape, but the job market in international development when your 39 in 2016 is far different from the job market in computer programming when your 22 in 1999. The intervening years are not kind; the market likes the young up-and-comers, and ofttimes we'd get home aching and footsore from job fairs asking ourselves what the point had been. It was almost sheer luck my girlfriend found the current job I've started with Fauna-Flora International (FFI from here out, folks), and thank God, was the timing right. We had both reached the bottom of our respective wells of patience after six months and nearly 200 applications between us, and had I not pulled through on FFI ... well, you don't think about what may or may not have happened, but again, thank God. 
3. In the meantime, D.C. is not a cheap place to live. We were lucky to have one job that though part-time, had bonus pay in the form of groceries. We both temp'ed, something which is, though not quite as bad as substitute teaching (which I did 13 years ago), was really hard on my pride. You fill printers, sort office supply closets, work as a receptionist, answer phones, smile hard (though not crazy) at everyone in the hopes they will hire you back, because at minimum wage in D.C. ($11/hr) you need a solid 20 days of work just to cover rent. In the meantime, we did whatever else we could; I refurbished cast iron cookware and resold it both on the Internet and at neighborhood flea markets over the weekend (something that was facilitated by Paypal Here, as urban America is increasingly a cashless society); I did lawn maintenance for generous friends part-time; I helped an old man in Silver Spring, MD prep his garden, etc. Getting part-time work other than temp'ing often seemed even more ephemeral than full-time work; who wants a 39-year old bartender with a heavily-salted beard and graying temples facing the customers?

Please don't take me wrong; there was a lot of good in the District (many of the old expressions the old farmer used wore off on me, such as his reference to WSHDC as "the District"). Again, we had very solid friends, everything is literally right at hand (though devastatingly expensive), we had family nearby, etc. As a recent lover of gardens and growing things, and as an old lover of American history, the District is a treasure trove. Our neighborhood of Takoma Park, was a few short blocks from Fort Stevens, a shockingly close shave of a Confederate campaign to take D.C. in 1864. Lovely place all-in-all, but just not the right place for us at the present time.

At this point, too, it serves to note that for me personally, America has grown a bit strange in the long period since I was fully ensconced in the place (my two years at Madison aside, particularly as I was so heavily invested in the study of Southern Africa in general and Zambia in particular. The ongoing national election which is front and center at all times and all newsfeeds has been in a word, shocking; the abyssal depths of crudity and mean-spirits to which one of the candidates (He-who-will-not-be-named) continues to plumb is disgusting; however, what's worse for me is the torrent of hate which his excavations have revealed. My fellow Americans have, from my relatively distant view, have developed a worrying tolerance for, and acceptance of, fear and hatred. Worse still is the absolute loss of dialogue and reasoning in a country that most of the rest of the world that I've experienced aspires towards as a better model. What happens when that model rolls in the gutter and covers itself with excreta in a near jubilant fashion? I love my country and my home deeply, but my heart aches and worries for her in this strange view from abroad. 

So ... Liberia. The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here. Well, that's a topic for a bit later.

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This post and it's content are the thoughts and opinions of the author alone, and are not condoned or endorsed in any way by his employer, Fauna and Flora International.

April 19th, 2016 - The Maize Front

It has been difficult to be away from Zambia in what is turning out to be a crucial year in the continuing saga of maize: 

• Zambia announced back on the 6th (April) that maize exports, inclusive of bran, the by products of milling off the endocarp when making white (breakfast meal);
• Maize prices in Zambia are allegedly going to be controlled by government, but the routine of cross-border smuggling (through buyers purchasing at retail and reselling in DRC and Malawi) from two years ago and last year is replaying on a much greater scale;
• Queues for maize meal have been increasing, with buyers at supermarkets (e.g., Shoprite, Pick-n-Pay, etc.) limited to one 25kg bag per person;
• Prices have gone through the roof for the commodity, particularly in southwest and western Zambia, with 25kg of mealie meal selling at K200 ($21.39USD);
• Farmers in the same region as above are selling cows ... something of a !! because only better off have cows and they are not usually sold unless they are on death's door. "Prices" are in barter; families are getting 4 or 5 bags of maize (unmilled) for a single cow. This represents a kwacha value of K280 to K350 ($30 ~ $37.4 USD) per cow, as reported on-the-ground from Mwandi, west of Livingstone.

Word from ZNFU:

CME Soya futures price for May 2016 delivery opened trading at US$354.21/MT on 18th April 2016.

Local Soya beans spot prices were still hovering around ZMW5, 900-6,400/MT ($630 - 684USD) last week according to information captured on the ZNFU market price information system.

...

Malawi is forecasting a further reduction in its maize output this year. The country’s production estimates are currently around 2.43 million tons against a national consumption requirement estimated at 3.2 million tons. Zambia has been a major source of the maize grain to Malawi over the last year through both formal and informal trade. Meanwhile the Malawian President on 12th April declared a state of national disaster as the northern part of the country experiences floods and the southern drought.

On the local scene GRZ through Ministry of Agriculture is expected to issue a Statutory Instrument (SI) to facilitate the trading of maize grain and maize products sometime this week. This follows recent announcement by the Ministry of Agriculture that the country had adequate stocks to meet the national demand for maize.

 The CME Corn futures price for March 2016 delivery opened trading at US$147.71/MT on 18th April 2016.

 The offer price on the ZNFU market information system was in the range of ZMW 1,300/MT to ZMW 1,900/MT ($139.03 - 203 USD) in the week ending 18th April 2016.

...

AVERAGE DAY OLD CHICK PRICES
... No changes were registered in the price of day old chicks during the course of the week. However, day old chick outlets/agents have indicated that there has been a significant drop in the sales of day old chicks this year mainly caused by the increased cost of production, particularly increased cost of feed which some of the small scale farmers cannot keep up with.

March 12, 2016 - The People's Republic of Takoma Park

Welcome back dear readers, and my apologies for the delay. I left the pleasant, sun-soaked environs of Zambia for the brutal cold of Upper Michigan, leaving Lusaka on the 10th and arriving as the world turned in Kinross by the afternoon of the 11th. Since then, I drove from the Eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan through Wisconsin, seeing friends, giving a seminar on Zambia to admittedly bamboozled Soil Science grad students, then through Chicago nearly killing myself and others when a brake line gave out on US-12, then off to my sister and bro-in-law's place in South Bend, Indiana. By the 22nd of last month, I turned the Ranger east and drove 622 miles to ... Washington, D.C. Yes; the center of the world, as Mongu once was, Lusaka, etc. Specifically, to Takoma Park where my partner found us what is known as an "English Basement". After our run of cold weather and a light dusting of snow, I was curious as to whether that moniker referred to either the heating system or utter lack of insulation, but I'll let that one go ... imagine this place will be an oasis when Washington's infamous muggy summer gets going. 

Being here is something of a trip; there are no Faidherbia albida, no Julbernardia, no Brachystegia; relatively few off-shaped decurrent trees whatsoever, more of the Acer, Querus, Pinus, varieties. Far more cars, though better-organized traffic than Lusaka. More Mexican restaurants (yay, but expected) and quite a number of Ethiopian (yay, unexpected). Convenience and 'right now' seem to be the order of the day; it's hard for me to hear people complain about Washington's light rail system, the Metro; to me it is a shining example of organization and efficiency. I am blown away that I can get on the red line (a five minute walk from my doorstep) and in less than an hour get anywhere in the city (and relative to Chicago's El[evated] train, without the pitching and yawing I would expect). I am learning that the District is spatially very much a small city, albeit one with both the visible trappings of power (the Romanesque buildings, the politicians, the relative cleanliness). With a bike, one might circumnavigate the District in a half-day or so; though with a car this same activity could be a lesson in frustration, as the surrounding suburbs of the greater "DC Metropolitan area" in Maryland and northern Virginia contribute a staggering amount of traffic to the region; we were on 495 on Sunday, typically considered an easy day for driving, and there was still stupendous traffic. 

I'll contribute more later, but except for a bout with a nasty head cold, I've been trying to stay busy with meetings (e.g., USAID F2F discussions, ICT4D, Africa Restoration Project, etc., etc.), applying for jobs (both part-time and full-time), and volunteering with Casey Trees. Trying to stay out in with people, meet new people, and stay fresh with agriculture, both the local urban scene and with stuff back in Africa. 

And making cornbread: 

And photographing magnolia trees:

January 16th, 2016 - Not a viable field

This blog represents the views of the author's alone, and does not represent the views of his employer, Concern Worldwide.

News from the World of Maize:

Over the past few days, I hosted a friend of mine who works in southwestern Zambia and northern Malawi. He clued me in to some of the bits of information:

1. Maize stocks in Malawi are at spectacularly low levels ... he revealed a date of March 4th as the proverbial D-Day. I did a bit of digging online and FEWSNET has the following concurrence Currently food insecure populations in 12 districts spanning parts of the southern and northern regions are receiving assistance. Response programming to these areas and an additional 13 districts have enough funding for implementation through February 2016. Assistance originally planned for the month of March 2016 is uncertain due to a remaining 25 percent funding shortfall
2. It was interesting the deadline of March, which is keyed to the availability of direct budgetary aid, something which the Malawian government relies on to a greater extant that most countries in the region, a by-product of not being blessed [cursed] with mineral or other resources of the extraction variety. Part of what R. said got me trolling through the web; it appears that Malawi's President Peter Mutharika is under pressure to accept donor aid, particularly from DFiD, with some strings attached, namely that Malawi decriminalizes homosexuality. This has caused quite a stir in what I consider a significantly more conservative country than Zambia. According to the BBC, a moratorium was enacted on the laws, but full repeal of the law is a huge issue of realpolitik for Mutharika, who risks incredible backlash on the issue against both himself and threatened recrimination against the LGBT community. 
3. This has been accompanied by a steady rise of maize prices on the market (as is the case in Zambia) that has not been helped by the suspension of sales from ADMARC, Malawi's parastatal [government-run] agriculture marketing board which is by the largest buyer and seller of maize in the country. This has been exacerbated by the theft of maize by local ADMARC officers.

This morning, four hours after we parted ways, he sent this he sent this chilling text as he drove through Southern Province:

"Country is f***ed, not one viable maize field from Maz[abuka] to Choma, brutal!"

11 January 2016 - 30 Days to Go

The views expressed on this blog are those of the author along, and do not reflect the views of his employer, Concern Worldwide.

Happy New Year's! You patient and erstwhile readers ... 

My last day of work for Concern Worldwide Zambia is 29th January, and I have a plane ticket home booked on the 10th February. Goodbye, Zambia after 12 years. As such, I made a solemn oath to myself to write a blog post and journal entry every day, if for nothing else to remember sometime in the dim and likely more brutal future what I was experiencing these last few weeks. 

It is strange; in some ways, the process of disengaging oneself from a place and a context of cultures (Lozi, Tonga, Kaonde, Lala, Indian, White African, Chinese, ex-pat, et cetera) is that you run through the process of engagement, albeit in reverse. Maybe it's the odd way my mind works ... but separating yourself from what everyday amateur sociologists refer to as a "space" brings you back up the path from where that space was normal. E.g., you start to shed your expectations / assumptions of how people behave, how the world should work, how to begin and end things, how to speak with someone, and so on. In my case, I have become far less stressed and far more forgiving because there is an end (at least here) to the crazy results-based tilt-a-whirl that you climb on in the donor-funded development world. On the 29th, I will climb off, handover the reins to my replacement, and have 12 days to blink and think, and to wonder to myself, as I do over most of my memories ... Was it all real? Did I do that? How did I do that? What happened to all those people? Did I make a difference? Will they remember me? 

Unfortunately, deep pondering is something I can little afford whilst trying to sell my worldly possessions (mainly a car, a bicycle, and a bookshelf), handing over 12 years of agroecological experience, and looking for a new job in my soon-to-be new home, Washington, D.C. Hence the necessity and the catharsis ingrained in typing these things out ... it's 20-40 minutes where part of me steps back and views the passage of this vessel through this life, and marks somewhat cohesively which course it chose and why.

Outside of my head, we traveled en-masse from Lusaka to Mongu in one of the agency's Land Cruisers yesterday, leaving at 8:20a and arriving at 5:20p (17:20hrs). Along the way, it started raining west of Kaoma, and it rained intermittently for the rest of the journey. Mongu is a lovely place when it rains; the sandy streets and shoulders of the main roads flatten out and become hard enough to walk upon easily; the air clears of its load of dust and soot, and the grass! Oh, does it grow ... especially in the semi-divinity of the floodplains and along it's margins, the matongo and shishanjo areas.

Before leaving, I took a swipe (pardon the upcoming pun) at what some friends of mine at Grassroots Trust have been promoting and to which I'm slowly signing onto ... the idea that instead of the usual digging operation that is inherent in Zambian weeding cultivation, e.g. "hoeing" or "weeding", you engage in slashing the weeds in the interrow (the space between the lines of maize). I learned this entirely from my friend Sebastian Scott, who like me keeps something of a blog on how to do agriculture in a way that is ultra-conservative of organic matter, inclusive of weed growth. To make a long story short, I intercropped orange maize with black sunnhemp, a heavy nitrogen fixer in our small plot next to our office in Kalundu. Though we've had limited rains in Lusaka, my raking the area into rough terraces and the shade from the trees in the area have helped the maize, and it is surprisingly healthy. Anyway, after watering the little office garden (more on that some other time), I had 30 minutes to slash the sunnhemp down, though  being the total idiot that I am, I neglected to take before (only after) photos.

So what you are looking at is the remnants of the weeds that were before slashing at the same height as the maize. though I am by no means experienced with the one-handed slasher common in Zambia, it was relatively quick to figure out how to slash, e.g. a short swing, standing behind one row of maize and slashing the next, etc. What's left behind is a green mulch that hopefully with contact with the wet soils add a bit of nutrients to the slightly nitrogen deprived maize. More importantly, however, is the increase in light reach the maize leaves vis-a-vi the decrease in shading by plants in the interrow. Last, but not least, I was impressed by the ease of it ... rather than being hunched over hoeing, digging and lifting a blunt piece of dumb iron, I was upright swinging the slasher in short strokes. Noticeably harder on the forearms, but I would trade that any day for the ache in the back, the sore hands, the exhaustion and the time.

Anxious to see how this turns out. 

January 1st, 2016 - A Bleak Start to the New Year

The views expressed on this blog are the author's alone and do not reflect the views of his employer, Concern Worldwide.

Lusaka remains cursed by sunshine on this dawn the New Year in Zambia. Sitting up last night with friends listening to Zambians shooting off fireworks in the revelry, we looked up a sky chock full of stars and reflected on the oddity of that; typically, this time of year is cloudy, gray, cool, rainy, etc. Instead, we've had bright, blue, hot, dry, etc. To this day, I still cannot puzzle out the workings of the ITCZ, but the best I can figure is that current ENSO (el Nino) is holding the zone in a kinked, stable position ... this means that the frontal boundary (for lack of a better word) moist air that brings rain is not moving south from a roughly in a east-west line centered on Kabwe. Though Zambia historically has a increasing rainfall gradient as you move south-to-north, this year it seems to be less of a smooth linear, and rather a sudden step from too dry to too wet; further, the dry areas are mostly in the West and South.

This has piled on to the crummy rainy season those same areas had in 2014/2015 (which I can now safely refer to as "last year's season"). Most of those areas, particularly in Western Province, were long-ago declared "disaster drought" (GRZ, inclusive of nearly every district survey other than Mongu) or "stressed" (in the terminology of FEWSNET). My friends in the southwestern arc of the Upper Zambezi (e.g., Kazangula, Mwandi, Sesheke) along the Botswana and Namibian border told me over the Holidays that there aren't many words left to describe how bad it is there; ominously, their planting rains never really started, so much of their maize is already dead before the V3 stage. Long and short, people are desperately hungry and have been for quite some time; unfortunately, this year seems to be shaping up to be a bad one in both buLozi and buTonga.

Funny enough, no one seems to notice. There's really been nothing in the papers, including the Post, which has turned its back on the "Real PF" and returned to its virulently anti-ruling party roots; nothing from the donor community; nothing from the government outside of what anecdotal evidence suggests is entirely stochastic; nothing from the Barotse Royal Establishment. It's a wall of silence that is deafening in its sheer immensity, behind which despairing people are perched on a precarious cliff of hunger; it's only so much time before the West and South face the full-blown spectre of starvation. Those same people's (at least strong and healthy enough to do so) efforts are fully in engaged in warding off that hunger with any means at hand, meaning the natural environment is taking the worst beating in years. The so-called "Fish Ban", the eponymous policy that forbids capture fishing of wild fish stocks in virtually all forms between December 1st. and March 1st, is now in its second year of being totally, even brazenly, ignored. Charcoal burning is so rampant that finding Julbernardia or Brachestygia specimens of any size within 50km of Mongu is now an impossibility. Logging has increased exponentially within the five years I have been in Western, particularly of the Guibourtia coleosperma (Zambezi rosewood, copalwood, false mopane) ... baulks measuring a meter square and at least 2.5 meters long are being hauled out of the Kalahari woodlands to the main road in at least four places that I observed last month. In that sense, the lack of capital is driving localized environmental degradation that exacerbates any potential global climate change, and kneecaps future generations ability to utilize those same resources.

And the poorer? The poorest? The single female mothers? The elderly raising a household of orphans? I see them each time I go out in the field; their eyes betray the slow panic that is the constant twinge of hunger that is never dissipated and rarely dulled. Waking up dizzy and out of sorts, wondering where to look for some daily labor to try to feed their family, hoping that they can manage the work on the one to three hours of available energy they have, leaving nothing in the tank for tilling their own land. How do you plan in that state? How do you adopt a new technology? And yet they remain, cursed with the Zambian trait of waiting on government, hoping the truck comes their way, hoping they get a food pack.

I distinctly remember the late President Michael Sata declaring early in his presidency that where there was hunger, there could be no justice. It is my fervent hope that the government will recall that statement and see fit to be just.