The Empty Shed

Our faithful trustee, Mr. Kabika, passed away just before dawn on Sunday morning. It wasn't a big surprise; I had returned from Mozambique (of which I'll blog later or never) to Senanga on Tuesday evening, and on Friday afternoon, the five staff members of S.D.A.C.S.S. (our cooperative) went in to see him.

It often shocks outsiders when I describe some clinics / hospitals as okay, but again, they are without context. I worked for two years at a clinic that had been built in 1945 and looked as if it had been built in 1845, bombed in 1895, and painted in 1965. By that standard, Senanga's Hospital (1985) is relatively well-off.

However, if you are a person with a pathological fear of medical facilities, Senanga could be home to Walter Reed, Mt. Sinai, and the Mayo Clinic rolled into one and I would somehow find every reason not to enter. I don't know what it is, but I just don't care for hospitals. Maybe it's the dough I hemorrhaged when I was applying for my volunteer position (no health insurance); maybe it was the two years in the Kelongwa Clinic; maybe it's the fact that Zambian hospitals don't have private wards and you get to see 20 or 30 people who are in bad shape surrounded by two or three family members / friends in what looks slightly less organized than a Korean Army M*A*S*H unit. 

But when someone's sick in Zambia and you know them, you usually go see them. I've broken that rule and sent money, food, etc. instead (see above), but when someone's dying, I go. And I knew somehow that Kabika was on his way out; he wasn't young (62), had not had an easy life, and he had developed an ominous cough these past few months. Unfortunately, my gut was right ... his skin was drawn tight to his face, his palsied hands had gone into overdrive, and he had difficulty seeing us. Still, he managed his small smile, pulling his upper lip back over the corner of his upper teeth, clasping our hands, and murmuring "Eni sha, eni sha" [yes, sir] to each of us.

His odd little smile was still on his face when we took him from mortuary refrigerator on Tuesday afternoon and dressed him in his best clothes, a tattered old sport coat and dress pants that he wore each and every Sunday to church (Kabika was a Jehovah's Witness). We then gently placed him in the nondescript coffin that Mr. Munalula had purchased, in which we wrapped Kabika in a blanket; Munalula then nailed the lid shut. The hearse and a number of pickups carried the corpse, the bereaved, and the respectful to a beautiful spot near the Harrington's place that had a breathtaking view of the Barotse Floodplains, and we buried him.

Ever wonder over the name of this blog? Yes, it was a play on the Good Intents blog post "Whites in Shining Armor". Now, I think it means more:

1. White ... well that's a no-brainer. [I hope]
2. Tarnished ... that's easy to understand if you know me personally; I can sometimes be grumpy, irascible, tough, overly-focused on work, etc. I wish I wasn't, but as Popeye says "I yam what I yam."
3. Armor ... a symptom of the years; you shut off or internalize certain emotions as a result of insulating yourself from some of the hard things you see too often. The parade of kids who are underdressed and undernourished. The drunken man whose speech to you is punctuated by spittle. Hollow-cheeked men lying in a third world hospitals who grasp your hand in deep gratitude. The coffins that are three or four feet long outside the mortuary, waiting to be filled. 

Part of it is cultural; men rarely show grief, so I don't. Also, you worry once they start, they might not stop. So the result is tautological: you become armored. The armor ain't shiny, but it serves the purpose.

But now, who do I greet before work every morning? Who do I jokingly ask, "How'd you sleep?" in my bad siLozi, eliciting a response of "How'd you work?" I suppose that grief, like everything else here, happens bit-by-bit over a long period of time.

Jack Frost Nipping at Your Memories

Returning from the east this past Tuesday, I noticed all the cassava (manioc to we Americans) around Kaoma had withered and dried. I asked the man sitting next to me about it, and he said it had been very cold the previous night and day (about the 27th). Few Zambians are familiar with the word, but from what he said, it sounded like they had a frost. The next day, upon returning to the office, we had farmers in from the Lui Valley who said they were hit with the cold snap as well; most of their vegetables, excluding the cabbage, were dead. They looked at me for answers, which I took as an acknowledgement that I was from a colder climate and might have some solutions. Rather unhelpfully, I shrugged and suggested they replant. Maybe they were looking for some sort of recompense, but we just don't have the capacity to refund everyone or pay for they could have made.

What shocks people from outside Zambia (or Africa as a whole) is the cold. Most Westerners figure on Africa countries being hot; justifiably so, it's tropical and some days, the sun feels like it's about ten feet from the top of your skull. However, a big portion of the continent sits on a series of massive, irregular plateaux ... for example, most of Zambia, with the exception of the lower Zambezi and the Luano-Luangwa valleys, sits at or above 1,000 m.a.s.l., or 3,300 feet; some parts, such as Chama, Serenje, and Mpika District are more like 1,400 m.a.s.l., which is almost a mile above see level. The weather, which is dry and clear, lends itself to cold evenings as well; heat that accumulates during the daytime dissipates soon after sunset. I recall mornings in Serenje and Mkushi Districts when I would awake to ice covering the still waters of high dambos where I liked to camp out.

Speaking of the cold, and the past ... I was up in Serenje last weekend buying [Irish] potatoes; we've had trouble getting potatoes to grow here in the past, and much of it I chalk up to heat and lack of localized seed sources (potatoes are often procured from South Africa and planted in the summer months). I used to be the provincial coordinator for Central Province about five years ago, and I knew some of the farmers in the escarpment dominating Serenje District grow decent potatoes in the soft, fertile soils that cover the valley floors. I was successful, at least at that end ... I'm still waiting for the potatoes to arrive here so we can sort them again and distribute them to three or four trusted farmers.

It was good to go to Serenje on another level; I got a bit of closure, for lack of a better word. I saw some old friends, got quite a few hugs, and any number of Rasta salutes (Serenje, for whatever reason, has a large population of Rastafarians). During my time there (2006-07), I was all over the place, made lots of friends, etc. It was a tough job, running all over Serenje, Mpika, Mkushi, Masaiti, and Mpongwe Districts on what we half-jokingly referred to as the "Highway to Hell" (i.e., the Great North Road of Zambia, which is part of the famous Cape-to-Cairo route). It was half-joking because I drove on it 5-6 days a week, racking up something like 46,000 miles of travel in a 1HZJ six-cylinder, diesel-powered beast of a Land-Cruiser, dodging half-mad Tanzanian truck-drivers. Statistically, it was a miracle that I only killed two chickens and slightly dented the ladder to the roof rack; I was almost killed on a daily basis. Maybe that sheer excitement, combined with the nature of the work in which I prepped sites for new Peace Corps volunteers, counseled  (albeit poorly) volunteers, ran the provincial office, ferried trainees, Senate aids, PC officials, etc. Frankly, I haven't really felt that alive for such an extended period of time before or since. Coming back sort of put a coda on the experience ... I lived through it, made good friends, and it's over. You take the best from it, learn from the worst, and move on.

F.J.T.C. - M. H. S. R. I. P.

Saturday marked the passing of Zambia's second president, Frederick J.T. Chiluba (born 1943). We have been strongly advised by Peace Corps to speak no ill of the dead; to quote our Safety & Security Coordinator's (SSC's) last SMS:

ALERT-ALL PCVs
following ex-president Chiluba's death, avoid gathering &political discussion. Respect people's right to mourn. Burial: June27. Thnx.

I doubt there will be much mourning here in Western, as Chiluba is closely linked with the ruling party, and the ruling party has been out of favor since the events on January 14th up in Mongu. However, in other parts of the country, I could see the validity of our SSC's statement. Some Volunteers who have read up on their Zambian history tend to point out things in a way that we Americans don't see as problematic or even are encouraged to do so; however, this is not the U.S. and depending on who you are talking to, pointing out relative faults of someone is akin to pointing out the faults of everyone with whom they are associated (i.e. a party).

What will be really interesting is the funeral procession itself ... political figures warrant a huge number of people, most of whom attend less because of respect and more due to the fear of a conspicuous absence. Somewhat like a funeral in the village, I wot.

Senanga, Zambia = Houghton, Michigan

The morning came far too early today; the setting full moon, unencumbered by it's earlier eclipse, was bright enough to make me think daybreak had arrived. Furthermore, Concern's backup driver Franco was banging around this morning, starting the Land Cruiser, loading the foodstuffs for whatever training they are carrying out today, etc. Usually he wakes up around 6:15~6:30, so I figured I had overslept. I pulled on a pair of jeans and wandered out shirtless to put the coffee on and see what was happening. Doubtless I freaked out a couple of the partners who had come in to ride out with Franco and were dressed like it was a brisk January day in Chicago; they think my tolerance for weather in 40s is strange, to say the least.

Anyway, it turned out to be 5:05 in the morning. I helped them load the truck and saw them off; Franco looked miserable ... he really hates cold weather and dislikes driving in the dark. I don't blame him; night or twilight driving in Zambia is really scary. Not so much that it's inherently dangerous for the driver, but because people from the outside of town who are incoming to sell their vegetables, cassava, dried fish, etc. leave their villages in the middle of the night in order to get to the town market as early as possible. They tend to walk in the middle of the road (I've never gathered why, other than the road is warmer and easier to walk on than the shoulder) and they do not wear anything reflective; needless to say, you just drive over them before you can see them. Night is worse; everyone heads home, albeit many of the menfolk are in altered states from the tujillyjilly [packets of booze] and are weaving all over the place.

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I took my bicycle south along the old Senanga-Sesheke road last Saturday to scout out any potential fishing spots and to see the floodplains whole hog; despite being here seven months, I have only observed them from the sandy uplands. It is something else, and I entirely lack the ability to describe them. Even pictures (which take an abysmally long time to upload) would fail to capture their breadth. It's amazing; I've never been any place where most of the horizon appears to curve, rather than form a straight line. I can't remember the name of the phobia of vast spaces, but it flitted around the edge of my thoughts; it was like floating along in a sea of grass. Periodically, I would observe a person moving through the plains away from the road, but they seemed almost ephemeral in their distant, silent passage through the tufts of grass. If it weren't for the broad-shouldered Zambezi wending through it's midst, you could imagine becoming fully unmoored in the place, as if you had dropped off the edge of the world. It made me think of the story about how some undoubtedly bored engineering students from Michigan Tech had made and posted an exact replica of a M-DOT roadsign that read:

End of the World: 2 Miles
Houghton: 4 Miles

My lord; they could have put that same sign on that road and it would be 110% true.

----

There is a constant reminder of other aspects of the western Upper Peninsula (I hail from the E.U.P.) around Senanga in the form of two old trucks, one in the parking lot of the Mwanabinyi Motel near to where I stay, and the other over by the ZESCO warehouse lot. Both are big, four-wheel drive "sand" trucks that are blocked up and in various states of metal decomposition. It's nothing new to see blocked-up vehicles, either in Senanga or in Zambia at large; vehicles are run until they quit (likely from the lack of oil changes), then taken apart quickly or slowly depending on whether or not their parts are interchangeable with newer vehicles. Senanga, Mongu, and I'm assuming Sesheke all feature the big sand-wagons, as I like to call them, due to the deep sand that dominates the uplands. You can age them by their make ... the oldest vehicles appear to have served with the Afrika Korps; German vehicles that I can only characterize as Teutonic in their appearance; blocky, heavy, encumbered with far too many buttons, switches, levers, pedals, etc. (The few I've seen running have cabs that resemble cockpits in the sheer amount of instrumentation.) The newer hulks are, of course, Chinese in origin, mostly Dong Feng's with relatively flat noses. I always chuckle when I see them because one particularly witty Peace Corps volunteer in my past crudely referred to them as "Dick Tooth's".  

The middle-aged vehicles are varied in European origin, but the ones that stick out are for me are the aforementioned derelicts, which are both Sisu trucks. Even if you weren't from the U.P., deriving their origin wouldn't be hard; they both have "SISU OF FINLAND" emblazoned on their doors. "Sisu" is an interesting word in Finnish; it roughly translates to patience and/or perseverance in the face of difficulty. My guess is the term originated from the long winters in both Suomi and New Suomi (the western U.P.) in which 5 to 7 months of real cold is endured. Anyway, the trucks are a relic of the foundation of the agricultural cooperatives during the second republic days (President Kenneth Kaunda's one-party state era). The Finnish government figured heavily in setting up the cooperatives, sending experts, vehicles, etc. For those of you so inclined, the old "Lima" program of the late 70's and early 80's that shapes agricultural policy even today was heavily influenced by the Finns. To whit, that was when the notion of subsidizing small-scale farmers by giving them loans for inputs through cooperatives, for better or for worse, came into vogue.

Like most ideas in Zambia before or since, they were originated and were carried out through the centralized government hierarchy. Plans were made in Lusaka and were carried out accordingly ... regardless of location, distance, infrastructure, etc. Deviations from the plan (as of the present day) were neither encouraged nor tolerated; you did what the bosses at the next level up said to do, and that was that. The Sisu trucks hauled inputs to the villages in October and hauled crops (mainly maize) back out in May. Like most plans, it looked enormously good on paper; and like most plans, it fell apart in the implementation. Their was no mechanism to collect loans from the villagers; corruption in the system was rife given the lack of accountability and the nepotism inherent in hiring and distribution of inputs; the government continued to pay artificially high prices for the maize to the villagers, after which they sold it at a loss to the parastatal milling companies to keep the urban population happy; etc., etc. It was much of the foundation or reinforcement of the habits which we fight today: loan repayments are still a joke, farmers keep trying to grow maize despite it's being inappropriate for much of Zambia because the government subsidizes the crop, and it's still sold at a loss. I don't blame the Finnish government or people; it was a good plan, but the consequences keep echoing on ...

All this ran through my mind as I gazed at the nearer truck one day; I asked Franco about it, and he looked at it rather wistfully, commenting "Ahhh ... the Sisu trucks were very good; they never had breakdowns."


Guess things mean different things to different people.

Lusaka and the market of mutual dependencies

I was in Lusaka on Wednesday for a whirlwind tour of downtown to purchase connectors for our waterline that is starting to resemble the Great Wall of China in project duration.

For those of you not familiar with Lusaka, it's essentially a series of neighborhoods that straddle or parallel the main roads in and out of town. Each neighborhood has it's certain demographic, characteristics, etc. For example, Kabulonga and Woodlands are where you'll find all the wealthy, elite Zambians, ex-pats; Longacres, most of the foreign embassies; Emmasdale is where the South Asian business community resides; Mwandevu, the city's gritty northern gateway where the illicit charcoal from the forest reserves all gets dropped off; Mutendere, the shanty compound where half of everyone seems to live on top of each other; and Kalingalinga, one of the sadder places in the universe where you can see old women and little kids breaking stones with hammers for a pittance.

Downtown (or "town" as it's known in the local vernacular) is the great beating heart of Lusaka. It is essentially four streets wide by 10 long that parallel the line-of-rail and the famous Cape-to-Cairo road [Cairo Road] wherein lie endless marches of shops. There is no apparent pattern to the place to the untrained or inexperience mind, but five years of wandering in and out of the place looking for stuff leads to a semblance of geography. However, there is a very simple business concept you have to swallow before you can grasp it [or the market in Zambia] which I term "clustering".

You see, from the smallest market of the side of a dusty road all the way up to Downtown Lusaka, people sell similar items in clusters. For example, if you want tomatoes, you find the place where they sell tomatoes and you find something like 40 women sitting side-by-side with identical piles of tomatoes arrayed in front of them, selling tomatoes at nearly identical prices. It goes the same for beans, dried fish, meat, auto parts, hardware, plumbing, etc. If you (like me) are looking for polypipe connectors, there is a stretch of Freedom Way northeast of the Mumbwa / Lumumba Road junction that has a number of stores that carry plumbing supplies at nearly identical prices right next to each other. Fascinating, too, how these stores operate ... you wander in and are immediately met by a 20-something guy who figures out what you want, and knows instantly whether the store has it or not. If not, he assures you that he'll be right back and sprints off into the mass of people on the sidewalk. A few minutes after staring into the same mass, he reemerges carrying something. With some clarification, he sprints off again; more staring, and then confirmation of a part, or a sad shake of the head that means the part doesn't exist within his circle of influence / associated stores. It works surprisingly well; you might pay a slightly higher price for a particular part (sort of the finder's fee, if you will), but you save a lot of footwork and time. I didn't get exactly what I was looking for, but we were able to improvise a number of single connectors from two or three different pieces. 

The point of all this is that often, the superficial view of Zambian market views is that it is a relatively chaotic mass that lacks organization, order, rules, etc. However, there is a hidden order; many of these clusters serve as mutually beneficial entities. For example, if one of the ladies selling tomatoes needs to rush somewhere for something, another lady will look after her small child(ren) and watch her stand. If there is a good wholesale of tomatoes, that information gets shared out to others, so that a relatively small group of women can corner that sale and set a mutual price on tomatoes in a certain area. It's not a system that supports individual competition; if you set out on your own, you risk ending up a pariah, ostracized, etc. In our relatively introverted [Western] society, this is acceptable ... you can exist on your own penned up within books, Ipods, existing online through an avatar, etc. Here, it is akin to shunning; Zambian society is based on mutual dependencies that allow an individual to survive through association with a group, be it familial, tribal, locative, economic, etc. The closest parallel I can figure in our context would be deep-sea fisherman; though they are in a sense competing with each other, they look out for each other, sharing engine parts, fishing information, etc. less out of a sense of altruism rather than a sense of mutual obligation. If I don't give Captain So-and-so a hand when he's in a pinch, word might get around, and then what do I do if I end up in a tight spot? Neither a wise course in either the literal or figurative sea.

It's tough for Americans [the land-based ones] to wrap their heads around this. For us, reared in the tradition of the Puritan ethic, Horatio Alger, and so forth, it is the individual through her/his luck, skill, shrewdness, determination, perseverance,or a combination of such that get Ragged Dick into a decent life. Here, it's not that you only have to work hard ... you have to look out for your neighbors. That's sort of the reason why development projects that target individuals seem to have little success; they might get ahead for a bit, but jealousy can cause that person to suffer social ostracism, so the advancement has a limiting factor. This is particularly evident where projects seek to help a specific demographic in a "community" (i.e. female-headed households, orphans and vulnerable children, etc.) without recognizing that the remaining demographics in the "community" might be upset over the recognition, support, material goods, etc. that they cannot access.

I'll try to flesh this idea out more as I move along; it's a tough one and I lack much of the equipment to accurately characterize it, but it's worthwhile for me to explore its corners.

3 x 10m x 10m = New Conservation Agriculture

The email came back up today ... must be the satellite shifted and pointed back at us. It's nice to have it back ... there isn't much going on in Senanga (ever) and the national news channel isn't what I would call an extensive global news network; they mostly concern themselves with local issues.

We had a small workshop with the seven Field Extension Workers (FEWs) who are our agents on the ground
for promoting Conservation Agriculture (CA). They are a fun lot; I've gotten to know them over the past seven months, and have quite a bit of respect for them, as they are promoting a relatively strange form of agriculture to an audience that can be rather fixed in their ways. Their job is to get trained in CA spend their time promoting the practices and reporting the results to SDACSS / Concern; they get paid a small stipend to do so (~$75/month). Before you get to thinking "Wow, that puts them way over $2 / day!", keep in mind that they often walk six to eight miles through either floodplains or beach sand to visit both disinterested / interested farmers for the whopping sum of $2.50 / day.

Today, we spent most of the day discussing the basics of soil science, the need for increased organic matter in the soil, and how we could increase that organic matter by integrating local nutrient sources into the proscribed CA systems. These include compost, kitchen waste, animal manure, and in particular, certain tree leaves. It was kind of cool for me; we took the idea of the guy out in Wanyau who put green leaves in his planting basins (achieving a 5,000+ kg per hectare harvest) as a basal dressing and expanded it using agroforestry. Kind of a fortunate turn of events to have a method proven for us in advance; we are simply systematizing the process he tried out, though with some twists. For example, rather than gathering random leaves from the forest, we are encouraging them to alley crop certain trees (Leucaena lecocephala, Gliricidia sepium, Cajunus cajun, and Sesbania macarantha) and utilize those trees as the basal dressing in the basins.

To step back a hair ... the current prescription for CA dictates a set of procedures that appear nearly sacrosanct; no burning of residues, permanent planting basins, no conventional tillage, a specific seed planting rate, etc. It comes across (as so much does in Zambia) as canon; deviation from the script written by CFU or GART (find those for yourselves) is regarded as heresy (read all about it). Today, we were essentially asking our FEWs to move slightly outside the box and experiment with some other basal dressings. Why? Frankly, the price of fertilizer is simply staggering in Zambia, particularly to a rural farmer. For the recommended dose of basal dressing (Compound D, N-P-K: 10-20-10, 6% sulfur) and top dressing (urea, N-P-K: 46-0-0) is 200 kg of each (400 kg total, or 880 lbs.) for one hectare. If the fertilizer could be bought on the open market, it would cost K280,000/50kg, or K2,240,000 total. That's the princely sum of $470 / hectare. CA does not deviate from this recommendation, though to its credit, it targets that fertilizer much better to the crops.

What we are doing is asking the FEWs to consider other nutrient sources, particularly with an eye on boosting the soil organic matter in the sandy soils that dominate the area; this can include manure, leaves, ash mixed with kitchen waste, and so on. As such, we spend the day discussing soil organic matter (SOM), its effect on soil structure, nutrient availability, water storage, etc., and how we might increase the SOM using the above mentioned tree species in some creative ways.

As such, after a couple of planting demonstrations, visits around town  to put names-to-the-faces of tree species, we shook out a plan: the FEWS will make three small 10m x 10m plots adjacent to their 50m x 50m CA plots to try three experiments.

I went off the grid a bit, though, with my suggestion that the FEWs design the experiments themselves. The perplexed looks reflected 80 years of one-way agricultural education; we don't come up with ideas ... that's your job. I pointed out that the chap in Wanyau had gone out on a limb dumping leaves in his basins on his own volition, and it was time for the FEWs to do the same. The plots, though small, are the basic medium of experimentation, i.e. what happens when we do this one thing differently (apply ash, till differently, etc.). After some cajoling, I convinced them to put ideas on paper for next month, which we'll review. That's where I have to be really careful; if our FEWs feel as if they own their experiments, the process will work out much better for other farmers' eventual adoption. However, if it becomes our (i.e. the NGO's experiment), it will be the proverbial flash-in-the-pan.

Enough blathering for today. It was nice to see people enthused about trees on the farm, though.

Tigerfish

It was a joyous day yesterday; I landed my first through fourth tigerfish off the dock at the Senanga Safaris Lodge. None were more than 15 or 20 centimeters long, so after carefully removing the hook from their jaws [which are no joke] with a pair of hemostats, I'd put them back in the river. This was much to the dismay of the audience watching me; they kept asking me to give them the fish.

The old saying "blah-blah-blah ... Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime." wouldn't work here. First off, they are too good by half at fishing; Zambians haul up everything they can catch, because they eat just about everything they catch (or sell it to others). It's partly because fished are usually gutted, scaled, and pan-fried with the head, skin, bones, and tail still intact; this method a) saves preparation time and b) allows one to consume any size of fish, right down to those as small as my index finger. Unfortunately, the broad range of sizes is worrying; there is simply nothing done in consideration of sustaining the catch into the future. But, who am I to say anything ... look at the cod, the Atlantic halibut, and every other wild fish species we've ever happened upon seem to disappear despite being "endless".

Oh well ... at least they fight like the Dickens while they are still around. Any fish that size that can bend a rod rated for 15 lbs. test strung with 25 lb. Fireline is a shoo-in for Gamest Fish Ever.